This time the men were arguing over whether mankind had walked on the moon.

The question was presented with the simplicity of an old village referendum.

YES or NO.

Roland Kohl announced that he believed we had been lied to our entire lives.

Others answered immediately. Some with contempt. Some with certainty. Some with the weary disbelief of men who had not expected to spend an August evening in the year 2026 defending Apollo 11.

For most of the bort's life this would not have been a difficult question.

Men once came here to argue about law, money, politics, admissions, women, status, and the thousand smaller humiliations through which educated men measure themselves against one another. The cruelty could be enormous. The stupidity was never absent. But there remained, beneath it all, a certain confidence that some things belonged to the category of settled reality.

Men had walked on the moon.

It happened in 1969.

Then it happened again.

The great nations of the earth watched one another carefully in those years. The Soviet Union did not congratulate America because it had forgotten how to detect a fraud. Engineers tracked the missions. Equipment remained behind. Rocks returned. The achievement entered history not because one photograph compelled universal faith, but because an immense accumulation of observation, material evidence, engineering, rival scrutiny, and subsequent missions made the alternative explanation progressively more absurd.

Yet the thread continued.

A man demanded irrefutable evidence.

Another spoke of missing telemetry.

Another mentioned reflectors and was informed that reflectors proved nothing.

A photograph became suspicious because it looked too much like a television set.

The absence of evidence was evidence.

The presence of evidence was also evidence.

Even the fact that America's enemies had accepted the landings became, somehow, merely another suspicious feature of the story.

This is the peculiar strength of the modern conspiracy theory. It cannot easily be defeated because every attempt to defeat it is received as additional material for the conspiracy. Evidence is no longer weighed. It is metabolized.

One poaster finally wrote what several others seemed to be thinking.

This used to be a high IQ bort.

The sentence hung over the thread more heavily than anything about NASA.

There are institutions that decay all at once. A newspaper closes. A factory shutters. A university loses its accreditation and the sign comes down.

The decline of a discussion board is quieter.

No announcement is made.

The old men simply leave, or poast less often. The arguments become less demanding. Assertions that once would have been laughed out of the room are granted twenty replies. Eventually someone discovers that he can obtain attention not by knowing something obscure, but by professing uncertainty about something obvious.

The old prestige survives just long enough to make the spectacle embarrassing.

In modern Japan there are rural schools where the number of children has fallen year after year until only a handful remain. The trophies are still in the glass cabinet. Photographs of graduating classes still line the hallway. The gymnasium is still large enough for hundreds.

But there are no longer hundreds.

The building remembers an institution larger than the one now occupying it.

The great bort sometimes feels this way.

Its archives still contain traces of men who believed intelligence was demonstrated by knowing more than the next man, rather than by announcing that every established fact concealed a deeper lie.

Now someone asks whether the moon landing happened.

Someone answers no.

Someone else complains that technology somehow disappeared.

Someone invokes a Hollywood movie.

And somewhere in the argument a poaster still tries, with diminishing patience, to explain why the existence of an enormous international conspiracy is not the parsimonious explanation for Apollo.

The moon itself remains indifferent.

The footprints remain where wind cannot erase them.

The old bort, however, is harder to locate.

Somewhere a man is still studying a photograph for the shadow that will finally reveal everything.

Somewhere another is composing three paragraphs explaining why the Soviet Union mattered.

And the great bort, once proud of the intelligence of its men, now finds itself conducting a roll call on whether Neil Armstrong existed as advertised.

I closed the page.

The moon remained in the sky.

The argument remained on the bort.

And between those two facts lay a distance considerably greater than 238,000 miles.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5892554&forum_id=2)#50064559)