Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (17 page)

Down the block was the Aldrin house, a structure of pale orange brick with another steep roof. There was a wait for Mrs. Aldrin. It had begun to rain out of an uneven lead-colored hesitant sky—a few drops would tattoo on the big Texas leaves of the modest suburban trees and then halt, then rain a little harder, stop again. It was thought at first that the delay was due to uncertainty whether to begin the interview under such conditions—after a while a rumor circulated that Mrs. Aldrin was primping for the Press. It made sense to Aquarius. She had wanted to be an actress—she had worked at having a career for a period, had made the rounds against the objections of her father. Having been married to three women who were actresses at one time or another, one of them even a modest movie star who had her career much interrupted for such marrying, Aquarius was able to make brokenhearted jokes about the woes of any man so foolish as to smash into
the devotions of an acting career by an act of marriage. As a consequence he was naturally interested in Mrs. Aldrin. She, like Jan Armstrong, had had a long courtship. He was obliged to recognize on looking at a newspaper photo that she looked much like her husband, as indeed Jan Armstrong looked like her mate, and Pat Collins like Mike Collins. He did not understand these marriages of people who looked alike and courted each other for years—he did not know if the delay of proper people who looked alike came from deep respect for marriage, or was rather excessive caution to make certain one’s narcissism would find the cleanest mirror. He did not know. It seemed to him he had always gotten married in a hurry to women who were remarkably different, except for his final inability to get along with them. Gloomy as the weather was Aquarius. From time to time, like the memory of a telegram whose news was so awful one kept circling the fact of it, came back the simple unalterable fact that Teddy Kennedy had been in a bad accident and a girl had drowned and he had not reported it until morning.

Joan Aldrin had blond hair, she was a big woman with generous features, nose, teeth, mouth, there, all there, but finally she was all eyes. They were the large expressive soulful instruments of a woman who had a real and intense awareness of her stage, which is to say a sense of the air she offered, the way it was received, the space between. She made a good entrance beneath an umbrella thoughtfully held over her by the man who served as guide from the house to a roped-off space between the trees, she was a lady who transmitted palpable gratitudes for courtesies rendered, she had the ability to exercise the air, but not as a flirt or a sexual provocation, rather as a tragedienne one instant, a comedienne the next, she had the quick-changing vital bounce of a woman who might have made a reasonable career in musical comedy—she had as she spoke the slightly slow withheld timing, the meaningless but tasty syncopation that women who belt out a song give to a dull line. So, as she spoke, it was fun to listen.

“What were you doing when they landed?”

“Well, I was holding onto the wall. I was praying,” she said in a loud and syncopated whisper.

She was at once utterly serious, and camping it up. A part of her had been in agonies of suspense which went right into the agonies and deepest attachments of her marriage—another part of her, droll as the humor of her full nose had been obliged to see herself—“Here you are, big girl, holding onto the wall at a time like this!”

The interview went on. Aquarius monitored it with a mild part of his brain. There was talk about one activity, then another—what the plans were for watching the moon walk—would the children stay up, so forth. The mood was sluggish. The Press had interviewed two wives already.

She was too much of a performer to come in third in a three-horse race. “Listen,” she cried out suddenly in a big voice, waking up the Press. “Aren’t you all excited?” She looked around coquettishly, carefully, as if to measure what employment could be made of an audience as supersophisticated and sodden as this. Then it came over her, as it had come over everyone else from time to time. There were men on the moon.

“They did it!” she shrieked happily. “They did it!”

After she had gone back inside, there was a vacuum. Her vitality was gone. One wouldn’t have minded more of her.

Aquarius was left with his gloom. It was finally a dubious male occupation to interview the wives of men who were heroes for the day. He was depressed as he walked away thinking of his own wife, and his own marriage, now deteriorating—what work to be obliged to look in on other marriages in their hour of triumph!

That night, the walk on the moon had been scheduled to begin long after midnight, so plans had been laid for late moon-watching parties. But the astronauts, to no one’s surprise, were in no mood to sleep, and the moon walk was rescheduled for eight in the evening. Yet, this once, the astronauts were not on time.

Waiting in the movie theater, the Press was in a curious state of mingled celebration and irritation. It was hard not to feel like a fool. They were journalists, not movie critics, and tonight they would be taking notes on the events which transpired upon a video screen. Of course, the climax of days of the most difficult kind of reporting was finally at hand, but it was a little as if one’s nervous system had been appropriated and the final shake would take place in somebody else’s room.

The psychology of journalists is not easy to comprehend—they scurry around like peons, they have the confidence of God. Over the years they develop an extraordinary sense of where the next victory is located. If a man gives a press conference and is not surrounded by reporters when it is over, he need not wonder how his fortunes are moving—the reporters have already told him. It is for this reason journalists pick up the confidence that they shape events—in fact they are only sensors in the currents of the churn, Venturi tubes to give you the speed of the history which passes. Nonetheless, there is no psychological reality like a man’s idea of himself. Even if a writer has lost the best reaches of his talent by putting out facts for years which have been stripped of their nuance—writing newspaper stories in short—still he retains an idea of himself: it is that his eye on an event may be critical to correct reportage of it. Now put five hundred reporters in a room to report on the climax of an event “equal in importance to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling up on the land,” and put a movie screen in front of them, and a television transmission on that screen which is not only a pioneer effort in communication from a satellite one good quarter of a million miles away, but is also, you may be sure, wildly out of focus. Reporters wear eyeglasses in order not to miss the small print—bad focus on the screen puts a new injury right inside the wound of the previous injury. Something in them reverted. Watching the mooncast, they were like college kids on Friday night in the town movie house—one never knew what would make their laughter stir next, but their sense of the absurd was quick and furious. Like college students
who roar with disgust because by God they were being trained to run a supposedly reasonable world with highly reasonable skills, and yet the fools who made this movie had the real power, so the press took the mooncast on its own literal terms of spectacle—where it was good as spectacle they loved it, where it was poor they mocked.

But let us take it from the start. The screen was dark when the voices began, and since it stayed without image for many minutes while one heard the voices of the astronauts working to get ready, a strain developed in the audience. Would the picture ever come on tonight, or had something gone wrong?

Then one learned from the Public Affairs Officer that the Portable Life Support Systems were working—the astronauts were now connected by umbilical tubes to the big white box on their back, that box which could cool them, clear the fog from their helmets, give them oxygen to breathe, and absorb the wastes of their exhalation. But the minutes went by. There was no image on the screen. Oxygen was being used. They had only a few hours of Life Support in the system—would they be obliged to use it overcoming the difficulties of opening the hatch? Hoots and a hum of restlessness worked through the theater. The journalists were nervous. That rare hysteria which is generated by an inability to distinguish between the apocalyptic and the absurd was generating. What if—assuming they could actually see something—what if Armstrong were to take a step on the moon and simply disappear? Whatever would one do in this theater? The event would be a horror to watch if tragedy occurred; yet it would be a humiliation if it all went on schedule.

A cheer not unmixed with mockery came at the announcement at 9:40 in the evening that the hatch was open. Still no image on the screen. Now followed long incomprehensible instructions back and forth, talk of window clanks and water valves, high-gain antenna and glycol pumps. Out of all this, quiet exhortations from Aldrin to Armstrong. Through the words emerged the realization that Armstrong, made twice bulky by his space suit and the Portable
Life Support System on his back, was trying to push through the open hatch of the Lem out onto the small metal porch which led to the ladder which in turn he could descend to the moon ground. It was obviously a very tight fit to get through the hatch. As Aldrin gave instructions there was an inevitable suggestion of the kind of dialogue one hears between an obstetrician and a patient in the last minutes before birth.

The Press was giggling. Sanctimony at NASA was a tight seal. A new church, it had been born as a high church. No one took liberties. Now, two of the heroes of NASA were engaged in an inevitably comic dialogue—one big man giving minute adjustments of position to another. The Press giggled.

Armstrong spoke out suddenly. “Okay, Houston, I’m on the porch.”

The audience broke into applause. There was mockery, as if the cavalry had just come galloping down the ridge.

A few minutes went by. Impatience hung in the air. Then a loud bright cheer as a picture came on the screen. It was a picture upside-down, blinding in contrast, and incomprehensible, perhaps just such a kaleidoscope of shadow and light as a baby might see in the first instants before silver nitrate goes into its eyes. Then, twists and turns of image followed, a huge black cloud resolved itself into the bulk of Armstrong descending the ladder, a view of confusions
of objects, some roughhewn vision of a troglodyte with a huge hump on his back and voices—Armstrong, Aldrin and Capcom—details were being offered of the descent down the ladder. Armstrong stepped off the pad. No one quite heard him say, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” nor did anyone quite see him take the step—the TV image on the movie screen was beautiful, but still as marvelously abstract as the branches of a tree, or a painting by Franz Kline of black beams on a white background. Nonetheless, a cheer went up, and a ripple of extraordinary awareness. It was as if the audience felt an unexpected empathy with the sepulchral, as if a man were descending step by step, heartbeat by diminishing heartbeat into the reign of the kingdom of death itself and he was reporting, inch by inch, what his senses disclosed. Everybody listened in profound silence. Irritation was now gone as Armstrong described the fine and powdery substance of the surface: “I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine sandy particles.” Every disclosure for these first few minutes would be a wonder. If it would have been more extraordinary to hear that the moon had taken no imprint in soft powder, or the powder was phosphorescent, still it was also a wonder that the powder of the moon reacted like powder on earth. A question was at least being answered. If the answer was ordinary, still there was one less question in the lonely spaces of the human mind. Aquarius had an instant when he glimpsed space expanding like the widening pool of an unanswered question. Was that the power behind the force which made technology triumphant in this century?—that technology was at least a force which attempted to bring back answers from questions which had been considered to be without answers?

The image was becoming more decipherable. As Armstrong moved away from the ladder in a hesitant loping gait, not unlike the first staggering steps of a just-born calf, he called back to Mission Control, “No trouble to walk around,” but as if that were too great a liberty to take with the feelings of the moon, he came loping back to the ladder.

Activities went on. There were photographs to take, descriptions of the appearance of the rocks, of the character of the sun glare. One of Armstrong’s first jobs was to pick up a sample of rock and put it in his pocket. Thus if something unforeseen were to occur, if the unmentionable yak or the Abominable Snowman were to emerge from a crater, if the ground began to rumble, if for any reason they had to reenter the Lem and take off abruptly, they would then have the chance to return to earth with at least one rock. This first scoop of moon stone and moon dust was called the contingency sample, and it was one of Armstrong’s first tasks, but he seemed to have forgotten it. The Capcom reminded him subtly, so did Aldrin. The Capcom came back again: “Neil, this is Houston. Did you copy about the contingency sample? Over?”

“Rog,” said Armstrong, “I’m going to get to that just as soon as I finish this picture series.”

Aldrin had probably not heard. “Okay,” he asked, “going to get the contingency sample now, Neil?”