William Pickering—Zach Herney

William Pickering and Zach Herney are bound by a shared concern for NASA’s survival yet separated by their ideas of what that purpose permits. Pickering repeatedly tries to aid Herney’s reelection and protect the space agency, but his covert interventions outrun the President’s consent: Herney rejects the use of scandal and, ultimately, knows nothing of the fabricated meteorite that Pickering considers a desperate rescue. Their alliance is therefore both real and compromised, defined by political necessity, conflicting principles, and a widening breach between intention and authorization.

Institutional Conflict

The relationship is first framed through a dispute over NASA’s place in government. At a National Security Council meeting, Pickering supports restructuring the agency within the intelligence community, arguing that NASA’s inadequate congressional funding leaves it vulnerable and that access to the black budget could provide more money and better security. Herney’s NASA administrator, Lawrence Ekstrom, objects that the proposal threatens the agency’s nonmilitary scientific purpose. Pickering tries to reassure him that NASA’s mission would remain intact, then turns to Herney and argues that the agency could keep doing its work with greater resources and discretion.

Herney tests that assurance against a concrete future: NASA hopes to send a mission to Mars within the next decade, and he asks whether the intelligence community would spend a large share of classified funding on a mission without immediate security benefits. Pickering says NASA would be free to proceed. Herney answers with blunt disbelief. The exchange exposes the distance between Pickering’s promise of institutional continuity and Herney’s suspicion that military funding would bring control over NASA’s priorities. Their disagreement is not simply about budgets; it concerns whether scientific independence can survive incorporation into a security apparatus.

Political Assistance and Its Limits

Pickering’s support for Herney’s campaign is an act of strategic choice rather than personal loyalty. Herney does not appeal to him as an ideal political partner; Pickering regards him as the lesser of two evils because Senator Sedgewick Sexton’s rising anti-NASA campaign threatens the agency’s future. To weaken Sexton, Pickering uses National Reconnaissance Office assets to obtain sexual photographs linking the senator to his aide Gabrielle Ashe and financial records indicating that Sexton accepted bribes from private space companies. He sends the material anonymously to Marjorie Tench, expecting the White House to use it.

Herney refuses. He believes that exposing the scandal would deepen public cynicism and damage the dignity of the Senate, and he insists that he will defeat Sexton on the issues rather than through negative campaigning. Pickering, angered by the decision, tries to revive the story by leaking a rumor about Sexton and Gabrielle. Sexton denies it with convincing indignation, and Herney is forced to apologize personally for the leak. The attempted assistance has become an unauthorized liability: Pickering’s intervention harms the campaign instead of helping it.

Herney responds by warning Pickering that further interference in the campaign will bring indictment. The threat makes the boundary between their roles explicit. Pickering may believe that he is defending NASA and helping the President, but Herney regards his use of intelligence resources in electoral politics as an unacceptable overreach. The relationship contains a persistent mismatch between motive and accountability: Pickering acts on his assessment of the national interest, while Herney must answer publicly for consequences he did not choose.

The Meteorite Deception

Pickering’s largest intervention grows from the same fear for NASA, but abandons the limits Herney has tried to impose. After efforts to secure NASA’s future through incorporation into the intelligence community fail, Pickering and military power brokers conclude that the agency needs a public triumph dramatic enough to stir taxpayers and Congress. Their plan is to make an apparent discovery of extraterrestrial fossils: a spectacle that could restore NASA’s standing and help Herney withstand Sexton’s attacks.

The operation draws on classified NRO capabilities and discoveries Pickering’s team had already concealed. The team had used a durable ceramic submarine to extend deep-water hydrophones to the Mariana Trench, where it encountered unfamiliar geological structures, including chondrules and fossils of unknown species. Because the operation was classified, the findings could not be openly presented as scientific evidence. Pickering’s advisers instead transformed a Mariana rock into a convincing meteorite: an ECE slush-hydrogen engine scorched it with a fusion crust, and a small payload submarine inserted it beneath the Milne Ice Shelf. Once the insertion shaft refroze, the object appeared to have been embedded in the ice for centuries.

The deception was designed to save the agency and improve Herney’s political position, but Pickering did not bring the President into the plan. When he later explains the danger of exposing the faxed evidence, he stresses that Herney and NASA are innocent: they believe the meteorite is genuine. He had judged Herney too idealistic to agree to the fraud, just as he had expected the President to reject scandal. That judgment preserves Herney’s ignorance while also making the President vulnerable to the consequences of Pickering’s decision. The planned public triumph begins to collapse after bioluminescent plankton undermines the staged discovery.

Trust, Secrecy, and Consequence

The relation’s defining contradiction is that Pickering’s protective purpose produces a betrayal of the person he means to help. He acts to preserve NASA and to give Herney a chance against Sexton, yet conceals the operation precisely because he expects Herney’s principles to prevent approval. Herney’s clean-campaign stance and resistance to subordinating NASA to military intelligence make him, in Pickering’s calculation, an obstacle to the methods Pickering believes necessity demands. The President’s integrity thus becomes a reason for secrecy rather than a check that governs the plan.

That secrecy separates formal responsibility from practical control. Herney is the political beneficiary Pickering hopes to assist, but he neither authorizes nor knows about the forged meteorite. Pickering, meanwhile, commands the resources and makes the consequential decisions while presenting his actions as service to a larger public purpose. The earlier campaign leak already showed how such self-directed intervention could rebound on Herney; the meteorite hoax magnifies the same pattern from a damaging rumor into a deception with consequences for NASA, the White House, and the people drawn into the investigation. Their alliance survives in the story as a bond of shared stakes, but not as shared knowledge or consent.