Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (10 page)

Yet since this launch vehicle in all its three stages did not have fuel to burn for even eighteen minutes, all six million pounds of fuel consumed in bursts of two and a half minutes and six and a half minutes, then two minutes and six minutes, near to five million pounds of fuel being burned in the first 150 seconds, whereas, in contrast, the Command Module would be in flight for eight days; since Saturn V in relation to the complexity of the electronic vitals and conceptions on the Command Module was relatively simple in design, Saturn V hardly more by the severest measure than a mighty mortar of a firework to blast an electric brain into space, why then was Von Braun so worshiped, why, if the true technology, the vertiginous complexity of the engineering feat of putting a man on the moon and back belonged rather in sum of work and intimate invention to echelons of electronic engineers out at MSC, North American and Grumman and too many other places to name? Well, the brute but inescapable answer if one studies the morphology of rockets is that man worships his phallus in
preference to a drop of his seed. Yeah and yea. Saturn V was guts and grease, plumbing and superpipes, Lucifer or the Archangel grinding the valves. Saturn V was a furnace, a chariot of fire. One could witness some incandescent entrance to the heavens. But Apollo 11 was Command Module and therefore not to be seen. It spoke out of a crackling of static, or rolled like a soup can, a commercial in a sea of television, a cootie in a zoo of oscillating dots.

We may, then, absorb the lesson: Electricity is an avatar of hate which gives pain to the senses, emits static, electronic hum, neon flicker, light glare, shock, heat radiation. Whereas thoughts of the sun and royal spectacle are in the mystery of a flame. So Von Braun was the heat in rocketry, the animal in the program. By public estimate he had been a Nazi—that was glamor enough. Who could begin to measure the secret appeal of the Nazis by now? It was a fit subject for Aquarius to begin to brood upon: America was this day mighty but headless, America was torn by the specter of civil war, and many a patriot and many a big industrialist—they were so often the same!—saw the cities and the universities as a collective pit of Black heathen, Jewish revolutionaries, a minority polyglot hirsute scum of nihilists, hippies, sex maniacs, drug addicts, liberal apologists and freaks. Crime pushed the American public to give birth to dreams of order. Fantasies of order had to give way to lusts for new order. Order was restraint, but new order would call for a mighty vault, an exceptional effort, a unifying dream. Was the conquest of space then a potential chariot of Satan, the unique and grand avenue for the new totalitarian? Aquarius was not certain. It was possible that neo-Nazism and technology were finally inimical to each other, but it was all to be considered again and again. It was complex. At this instant, he would not have minded the return of his ego.

Meanwhile, here was Von Braun for study. Yes, he had come in by helicopter to the Royal Oak Country Club in Titusville. The roads were crowded and it was incontestable that on this night, this night above all, hours before the mightiest launching of his life, Von Braun’s hours were of value to him and to others. Still, the
impression had to arise that he would have arrived by helicopter in any case. The helicopter had become the vehicle of status of that Praetorian Guard now forming of generals, state troopers, admirals, Republican congressmen with wives-on-junket, governors from he-man states, he-man senators, law-and-order mayors, traffic-crisis monitors, and VIPs on state visits to troublesome cities. The helicopter was there to signify: a man engaged in
flag
activity was dropping in on the
spot
. So the helicopter was a status symbol as special as a Junior League Ball. Not everybody who was moderately rich and powerful in American life would necessarily want to go to the ball or ride in the bubble, but for that matter not everybody who was thus rich and powerful was welcome at either.

Under whose auspices then had Von Braun descended? We can pretend to investigate. A large publishing corporation long associated with the Space Program had invited corporation presidents of important firms to voyage out for a few days on a trip to Houston to meet astronauts, then on to Kennedy to see the launching. A private speech by Von Braun was one of the features of the junket, and they waited for him now in a hexagonal banquet room finished in varieties of walnut-colored wood, a fit meeting place for American gods and cousins of the gods, since the shape of the chamber gave an echo of clans meeting in a wooded glen. Talismans in the form of intricate hex signs were inlaid in the wood of the walls around the room below the ceiling. Yet the walls, as though aware the gods were American, their powers corporate, were finished pale in stain, and therefore not excitative to the bottled emotions of business leaders. In any case, the golf course abutted the premises, and some of the guests left the bar and waited for the helicopter outside, standing in the steamy air of evening on that stiff rubbery thick-bladed Florida grass so much an overnight product of hyperfertilizer, turf-planting, and the tropics that it felt like plastic underfoot.

It was a not untypical American gathering. Doubtless, equivalent Soviet meetings were similar. It did not matter how high or prominent these people had become, how far some of them had
traveled from their beginnings. There was still the same awkward, embarrassed, well-scrubbed air of a church social. Americans might yet run the world, they were certainly first on the way to the stars, and yet they had never filled the spaces between. Americans were still as raw as an unboiled potato. It hardly mattered if Americans were rich or poor. When they got together, they did not know what to say to each other. It is part of the double life of Americans, the unequal development of the lobes in the national schizophrenia. Men whose minds worked with an admirable depth of reference and experience in their business or occupation were less interesting in a social gathering, at least in this social gathering where they were plucked up from a more familiar core of small talk and deposited on the rubber-mat turf of the Royal Oak. It was almost a reflection of the national belief that a man who worked thoroughly at his job was given dispensation from the obligation to have a good time. So conversation took overloaded steps over successive hills, and that was all right, the point of the evening was that they would hear Von Braun and be able to refer to it afterward. The American family travels to strange states and places in order to take their photographs and bring them back, as if the photographs will serve in future years as data-points, crystals of memory to give emotional resonance to experience which was originally without any. The data-point will give warmth in old age. So Von Braun would be a data-point tonight. It would not matter if a good time was not otherwise had. Aquarius’ mind, brooding through these familiar thoughts, was brought up short with the radically new idea that perhaps some instinct in American life had been working all these decades to keep the country innocent, keep it raw, keep it crude as a lout, have it indeed ready to govern the universe without an agreeable culture to call its own—for then, virgin ore, steadfastly undeveloped in all the hinterworld of the national psyche, a single idea could still electrify the land. Culture was insulation against a single idea, and America was like a rawboned lover gangling into middle age, still looking for his mission.

Since Aquarius on evenings like this would look for the nutrient
in liquor the way a hound needles out marrow from a bone, he was nose-deep into his second drink, and hardly saw the helicopter come in. A sense of presence overhead, fore and aft lights whirruping like crickets in the dusk, a beating of rotors in a wheat-flattened gust, and it was down, a creature. Nothing inspired so fine a patriotic cocktail of mild awe, mild respect, and uncorrupted envy as the sight of Praetorians emerging from an insect the size of an elephant which
they
commanded.

The guests immediately made their way inside. Von Braun, dressed in a silver-gray suit, white shirt, and black tie looked more impressive tonight than the day before at a press conference. That had taken place in front of several hundred correspondents with movie cameras, television, and ushers in the audience holding portable microphones to amplify and record all questions the Press might ask for posterity. Von Braun had been on a panel with Dr. Mueller, Dr. Debus, Dr. Gilruth, and a director from Langley, but half the questions had gone to Von Braun. He seemed sensitive to the fact that the Press made jokes about his past. There was one tale every reporter had heard—“Tell me, Dr. von Braun,” a correspondent said, “what is there to keep Saturn V from landing on London?” Von Braun walked out of the room. But the story was doubtless apocryphal; it smacked of reporters’ bile. Journalists were often vicious in their prior comments about VIPs they were going to interview, as if to compensate for the uxorious tone of the restrained questions they would finally ask. Aquarius had been with a small pack who had gone to talk to Dr. Debus, director of all launching operations at Kennedy and a former colleague of Von Braun’s. “Just give the Nazi salute and he’ll holler ‘Heil Hitler!’ ” they all promised each other, but Debus to their consternation proved out a pleasant Junker gentleman with dueling scars on his mouth and bags under his eyes—the sort of aristocratic face and gracious if saturnine manner which belongs to an unhappy German prince from a small principality. The questions of the Press were predictably unctuous, and trading notes afterward, they quoted Debus respectfully. He had given them the best of lines;
when asked if he were planning a celebration while the astronauts were on the moon surface he had smiled and cleared his throat with a cultivated sound. “No,” he had said, “no champagne in the refrigerator.” Debus was not afraid of the Press.

But Von Braun was too prominent, and had—although his official position was nominally no more elevated than his countryman’s—much too much to lose. A press conference, no matter how many he had had, was a putative den of menace. So his eyes flew left and right as he answered a question, flicking back and forth in their attention with the speed of eyes watching a Ping-Pong game, and his mouth moved from a straight line to a smile, but the smile was no more than a significator, a tooth-filled rectangle. Words were being mouthed like signal flags.

Since he had, in contrast to his delivery, a big burly squared-off bulk of a body which gave hint of the methodical ruthlessness of more than one Russian bureaucrat, Von Braun’s relatively small voice, darting eyes, and semaphoric presentations of lip made it obvious he was a man of opposites. He revealed a confusing aura of strength and vulnerability, of calm and agitation, cruelty and concern, phlegm and sensitivity, which would have given fine play to the talents of so virtuoso an actor as Mr. Rod Steiger. Von Braun had in fact something of Steiger’s soft voice, that play of force and weakness which speaks of consecration and vanity, dedication and indulgence, steel and fat.

Still he did not do badly at his press conference. If he had started nervously, there was an exchange where he encountered his opposition. A correspondent from East Berlin asked him in German to answer a question. There had been a silence. For an instant Von Braun had not known exactly what to do, had in fact stolen a look at Mueller. NASA was sensitive about origins. Two of the three directors in the center of the Manned Spacecraft Program were, after all, German. And there was no joy in emphasizing this, since those few liberal congressmen who were sympathetic to the needs of the space budget would only find their way harder if Von Braun and Debus were too prominent.

Von Braun fielded the difficulty as follows: He translated the question into English. Then he gave a long detailed answer in English (which succeeded in boring the Press). Then, taking an equally long time, he translated his answer back to German. Finally, he took a nimble step away from this now somnolent situation by remarking, “I must warn the hundred and thirty-four Japanese correspondents here at Cape Kennedy that I cannot do the same in Japanese.” The remark drew the largest laugh of the afternoon, and thereby enabled him to prosper. The contest in press conferences is to utter the remark which will be used as the lead quotation in wire-service stories, and Dr. George Mueller, anxious to establish his centrality on this panel, and his eminence over his directors, answered every question helpfully, giving facts, figures, prognostications of future activity. He was a one-man mine of pieces of one-line information with follow-up suitable for heads, leads, paragraph leads, and bottom-of-the-page slugs, but Von Braun picked up the marbles. In fact he had the subtle look of a fat boy who has gathered the shooters in many a game.

When asked how he evaluated the importance of the act of putting a man on the moon, Von Braun answered, “I think it is equal in importance to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling up on the land.” It drew a hand of applause. It would get the headline. Some of the Press literally stood up.

Thus, he was sound, sensible, and quick as mercury. Yet his appearance had been not as impressive then as now tonight at the Royal Oak. Then he had been somehow not forceful enough for the public image, small-voiced, almost squeaky for a man with so massive a frame. Whereas, here at the Country Club, shaking hands, he had obvious funds of charisma. “You must help us give a
shove
to the program,” he said to Aquarius on greeting. (This was virtually what Debus had said on parting.)

Yes, Von Braun most definitely was not like other men. Curiously shifty, as if to show his eyes in full would give away much too much, he offered the impression of a man who wheeled whole complexes of caution into every gesture—he was after all an engineer
who put massive explosives into adjoining tanks and then was obliged to worry about leaks. Indeed, what is plumbing but the prevention of treachery in closed systems? So he would never give anything away he did not have to, but the secrets he held, the tensions he held, the very philosophical explosives he contained under such supercompression gave him an air of magic. He was a rocketeer. He had lived his life with the obsession of reaching other planets. It is no small impulse. Immediate reflection must tell you that a man who wishes to reach heavenly bodies is an agent of the Lord or Mephisto. In fact, Von Braun, with his handsome spoiled face, massive chin, and long and highly articulated nose, had a fair resemblance to Goethe. (Albeit none of the fine weatherings of the Old Master’s head.) But brood on it: the impulse to explore the universe seems all but to suppose a divine will or a divine displeasure, or—our impurities matched only by our corruptions—some mixture of the two. What went on in Von Braun’s mind during a dream? “Yes,” he said with a smile, “we are in trouble. You must help us.”