Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (21 page)

Every detail of the launch, Aquarius recollected, had been Petrone’s responsibility. Four hours after lift-off, matters now comfortably out of his hands, he was by the evidence of the transcript as tired as a boxer in his dressing room after a fifteen-round fight.

At NASA, the elegance was in the design of the engineering systems rather than in the manners of the men. Which future student of language, unfamiliar with Saturn V, Apollo 11 or lift-off, would have any idea, encountering this scrap of Petrone’s transcript, that the man was describing the emotions he felt after having led thousands of men in Launch Control through the nine hundred hours, the ninety and the nine hours of the preparations and countdowns which put his ship into the air. Who was to know by such a speech—thought Aquarius sipping his breakfast tea—that
Petrone had been midwife to the most momentous week, and the mightiest hour. Yes, and that was not so ridiculous if one recognized that to believe in progress and believe in God as well might make it necessary to conceive of our Lord as a vision of existence who conceivably was obliged to compete with other visions of existence in the universe, other conceptions of how life should be. But this had brought him to the heart of the question. It was as if his mind, knowing the style of his thoughts, had directed him to the transcript in the confidence that his sense of irony once aroused, his sense of apocalypse could never be far behind. He was, after all, quick to hunt for reason in absurdity. So to read the language of men who were not devoid of mechanical genius and yet spoke in language not even fit for a computer, of events which might yet dislocate eternity, was a fine irony—the banality of the verbal reaction was an indication of the disease of our time, so advanced in one lobe, so underdeveloped in the other, a fine irony! Unless one was encountering the very desperation of the Lord—there might not be time to develop men to speak like Shakespeare as they departed on heavenly ships.

To believe in God and to believe in progress—what could that mean but that the desire for progress existed in the very creation of man, as if man were designed from the outset to labor as God’s agent, to carry God’s vision of existence across the stars. If this were true then the intent of the Lord could hardly be to reveal His goodness to us; rather He must employ us to reveal His vision of existence
out there
, somewhere out there where His hegemony came to an end and other divine conceptions began to exist, or indeed were opposed to us. If God finally was the embodiment of a vision which might cease to exist in the hostilities of the larger universe, a vision which indeed might be
obliged
to prevail or would certainly cease to exist, then it was legitimate to see all of human history as a cradle which had nurtured a baby which had now taken its first step. Intended by divine will to travel across the heavens, we were now at least on our way to the moon, and who could know if we were ahead or behind of some schedule the Lord had
presented us, a schedule which presumably each man and woman alive would keep in the depths of their unconscious along with everything else most vital for the preservation of life. A large and uncomfortable thought, for if it were so, then the flight of Apollo 11 was a first revelation of the real intent of History. So this much, anyway, had been revealed: one could not make a judgment on the value or absurdity of devoting such effort to go to the moon unless one was ready to recognize that eschatology had conceivably been turned on its head. For if eschatology, that science of “the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell,” was now to be considered in the light of God’s need for supermen to negotiate His passage quickly through the heavens, then how much more value might He give to courage than to charity, how much harsh judgment to justice itself if the act to be considered was not expeditious but merely just, yes if speed were of the essence then Hell’s Angels were possibly nearer to God than the war against poverty.

This last suggested a step Aquarius was not prepared to take: the idea was as disruptive to a liberal philosophical system as tartar emetic and mustard to a glutton. For it offered a reason why the heroes of the time were technologists, not poets, and the art was obliged to be in the exceptional engineering, while human communication had become the routine function. It was because the Power guiding us had desired nothing less. He was looking to the day when all of mankind would yet be part of one machine, with mechanical circuits, social flesh circuits, and combined electromagnetic and thought-transponder circuits, an instrument of divine endeavor put together by a Father to whom one might no longer be able to pray since the ardors of His embattled voyage could have driven Him mad.

Sweet thoughts for Aquarius to have as a sequel to the ascent, but the questions were grand at least, they could occupy the consciousness of the century. It was somehow superior to see the astronauts and the flight of Apollo 11 as the instrument of such celestial or satanic endeavors, than as a species of sublimation for
the profoundly unmanageable violence of man, a meaningless journey to a dead arena in order that men could engage in the irrational activity of designing machines which would give birth to other machines which would travel to meaningless places as if they were engaged in these collective acts of hugely organized but ultimately pointless activity because they had not the wit, goodness, or charity to solve their real problems, and so would certainly destroy themselves if they did not have a game of gargantuan dimensions for diversion, a devilish entertainment, a spend-spree of resources, a sublimation, yes, the very word, a sublimation of aggressive and intolerably inhuman desires, as if like a beast enraged with the passion of gorging nature, we looked now to make incisions into the platinum satellite of our lunacy, our love, and our dreams.

Aquarius would have given much to find a truly revealing face at NASA, for that could have given a clue to these questions, but it was in the logic of such endeavor that no answers be apparent on the surface. If it would take the rest of the century to begin to disclose the real intent of the act, no lightning raid on the evidence, no single happy disclosure, could possibly offer a reply.

Still, Aquarius preferred the first assumption, that we were the indispensable instruments of a monumental vision with whom we had begun a trip. On that conclusion he would rest his thoughts. Having come back at last to earth from the orbits of the dream with such a hypothesis in his pocket, Aquarius was a little more ready to head for home, the writing of a book and conceivably the pouring of a drink. The study of more than one technical manual awaited him.

In the study of literature, much usually depends on direct confrontation with a work. Who would dare to approach
A Farewell to Arms
by a synopsis? It is only natural to distrust a literary experience if we have been guided too carefully through it, for the act of reading must provide by itself that literary experience upon which our senses will later work.

But the study of science is different. Much like the study of history, it begins with legends and oversimplifications. Then the same ground is revisited, details are added, complexities are engaged, unanswerable questions begin to be posed. A scientific account is a story which can always be retold, for the line of the narrative in scientific writing is to be found in the deepening of the concept.

So if we embark once again on the trip of Apollo 11, if once again we proceed to ascend from the launching tower and fire the astronauts into orbit, even take them again to the moon, if in fact we will launch them again and then yet still again, let us recognize that we are enlisted in scientific methods of instruction where our pleasure can be found only by returning over the same ground in
order to discover that the story steeped in further detail has become something like another account even as a day recaptured in a dream has acquired the reality of a more extraordinary day. It seems we are off on a journey with mysterious routes, for the implication is unmistakable that a study of the trip technology took to the moon may as well commence in the inner space of the dream.

To speak of the unconscious is to call up the set designer of one’s imagination. He bows. Caverns and grottos appear, underwater palaces, the circles and amphitheaters of hell, the rites of barbarians in all the dark forest; we think of witches, and sniff the communions of mood in a church. Yes, the wealth of the theater is here, but it is not all that is here. Something also suggests a domain as closed from light and spectacle as the somber shelves of a library at night—it must be that part of the unconscious which serves as the servant of everyday life. From the depth of its files will it produce on demand, at a rate daily established, the varieties of practical information the conscious mind has requested. It will solve problems, offer analysis of new situations presented by the difficulties of life without, even provide working estimates of how equipped we are to encounter some contingency or meet a crisis and, if the matter is novel enough or dangerous enough, or involves preparation for the most artful kind of work, this instrument of the psyche may even send appeals for information to the mansions, theaters, and dungeons of the deepest unconscious where knowledge of a more poetic and dread-filled nature may reside. So this dark room, this functioning appendage of consciousness, is obviously the living organic embodiment of a computer: one cannot even begin to contemplate the function of the dream until one recognizes what complexity such a computer must possess in its nightly dialogue with the deep.

For years, Aquarius had had the concept of just such a guide somewhere in the human head who—on the basis of what information
was available—was usually capable of piloting a man’s life through everything from the small decisions of a day to the critical dilemmas of the age. He had given to this pilot a name: the Navigator. The Navigator had varieties of conscious and unconscious information available on request. He was, if one were to think on him crudely, a memory bank of reference to everything which had been learned and was still available to recall, as well as a cerebral library of the opinions and judgments of respected authorities outside oneself. On the basis of one’s acquired experience and those worldly guidelines one was ready to accept from without, a future course of action could be estimated, and large and little decisions could be taken. The Navigator was thus the agent of the ego in the unconscious, the dispatcher at the switch.

Over the years, it proved to be too simple a model, and Aquarius was obliged to add some conceptual accessories. To cope with that large variety of daily experiences which were not easy to anticipate or to comprehend, yet were not terrifying so much as confusing, Aquarius now added to the Navigator the services of a Novelist. It seemed to him that everybody, literate and illiterate alike, had in the privacy of their unconscious worked out a vast social novel by which they could make sense of society. Obviously, each novel was different. Obviously, some were better than others. But whether each unwritten novel was a comprehensive work of art, or an unhappy one, the psychic fact was that as life presented new evidence, the book was altered in its details. When such large events as births, deaths, marriages, divorces, successes, failures, social cataclysms and social revelations were sufficiently unexpected to indicate the conception one had of society—that conception so often forged by inferior art and entertainment—was faulty, then the outlines of the novel would be drastically revised; in effect the Novelist was forever drawing up new social charts upon which the Navigator could make his calculations.

In its turn, the dream provided another sort of information for the Navigator. It ran simulations. Perhaps they were not unlike the simulations put into the computers in Mission Control at the
Manned Spacecraft Center. Indeed Aquarius began to think the dream might be some psychic equivalent of those equations of celestial mechanics which find it impossible to plot the trajectory of a moving rocket precisely because there are too many unknowns. The earth is in movement, and the moon. Their gravitational effect upon the rocket is forever shifting. Besides earth and moon have special eccentricities in their motion which forbid precise prediction of position at any instant. In turn, the spaceship is not a precise object either. While it is built within narrowly defined specifications, still within such limits, it will always prove to be a minuscule bit smaller or larger than the specified size of the rocket. These variations, while minor, still have effects on the trajectory. In such a field of imprecisions (where everything is known approximately but nothing exactly) the problem is best attacked by inserting thousands of imaginary or simulated trajectories into the computer, each with slight variations in position and velocity assumed for the earth, sun, moon, and rocket. From these thousands of simulated trajectories come a series of imaginary but definitely plotted routes from earth to moon. By such calculation, and by the aid of data which track the path the rocket is actually taking, it is possible to estimate the direction in which it will next be moving, and so determine whether it is likely to stray out of the limits of those many thousands of arbitrarily calculated trajectories. It is as if an artist drawing the curve of the arm had chosen in preference to one line, a thousand light strokes none in itself the outline, but taken all together a clear picture of an arm was present.