Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (3 page)

There were exceptions to these uniform varieties of experience. He spent a night talking to Pete Conrad—Charles Conrad, Jr., the astronaut who would command Apollo 12 on the flight to the moon after Apollo 11—and it was not a bad night. Conrad was wiry, he was feisty, he could rap without too much of a look over his shoulder for the proprieties, and his wife Jane was sensationally attractive in a quiet way. They had four young and handsome sons, one of whom, Tommy, aged twelve, became famous forever in Aquarius’ mind because he obliged a photographer by riding his bicycle off the slope of the garage roof right into the swimming pool. Norman was invited back to a party the Conrads gave for their neighbors, and he had a good time—it was a party like a night
in Westchester, except that it was Texas, so he finally got into a bathing suit in order not to wrestle up and down the edge of the pool when enthusiasts were ready to throw him in. Agreeably drunk, he stood under the hot Texas night in the hot Texas pool, laughing with two Texas ladies—it was at least an approach to the sensate experience of the East. And the next day he remembered Conrad saying to him over the outdoor steak grill—“For six years I’ve been dreaming of going to the moon,” and the moon—as a real and tangible companion of the mind—was suddenly there before him.

He saw Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins through much of a long day they spent in press conferences with the newspapers, magazines, and the television networks, and he learned much. (In the absence of a sense of smell, the hairs in his nostrils began to quiver at clues.) He thought about astronauts often. He would probably be able to produce an interesting thought or two on the psychology of astronauts. He felt as if he had begun the study of a new world so mysterious to his detective’s heart (all imaginative novelists, by this logic, are detectives) that he could only repeat what he had said on the day the assignment was first offered to him: it was that he hardly knew whether the Space Program was the noblest expression of the Twentieth Century or the quintessential statement of our fundamental insanity. It was after all the mark of insanity that its mode of operation was distinguished by its logic—insanity was often more logical than sanity when it came to attacking a problem.

Something of this question was in his mind when he talked to Dr. Gilruth, Robert R. Gilruth, Director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, but of course he did not pose the question directly and if he had, would not have gotten an answer. Speculation was on nobody’s program at NASA. In any case, Gilruth was hardly one of the new technicians. A man in his late fifties, he had worked as a student under Piccard, the old balloonist, and had discovered the jet stream when a balloon built by his wife and himself was sent up in Minnesota and came down in Mississippi. This was the sort
of story Gilruth had obviously told before to make an item in many a feature story, it was a way of keeping the interviewer away, and Aquarius recognized after a while that Dr. Gilruth was a man who had probably developed his official style in the Eisenhower period, in fact he looked like a mild version of Eisenhower in the mid-Fifties, he was half bald in about the same way, and had deep gentle sympathetic eyes which gave him almost a saintly appearance; he talked in a quiet voice in his large office high up in the Administration Building and therefore facing down on the rectilinear play of the campus walks and buildings. Aquarius looked for something charitable to say about the view, but that proved too hard to produce, so he tried to win Gilruth’s confidence in other ways. But the good doctor was not particularly responsive to questions, which is to emphasize that he would take an ordinary question and go on at such length in his reply, rambling through such hesitancies—as if the act of speech were painful to him—that the next question was hardly spurred to appear. He was remarkably gentle and determinedly undistinguished, as if his deepest private view suggested that good administration and public communication were best kept apart. In this sense, he was certainly no proper representative of the NASA style, much rather like a Chinese mandarin—completely pleasant, altogether remote—it occurred that Eisenhower had also been a mandarin.

Just once did Aquarius reach him. He asked: “Are you ever worried, Dr. Gilruth, that landing on the moon may result in all sorts of psychic disturbances for us here on earth?” At the look of pain in Gilruth’s eyes at the thought of mustering NASA-type answers for this sort of question, Aquarius went on quickly, “I mean, many people seem to react to the full moon, and there are tides of course.”

He was not mistaken. As he stammered into silence, there was the breath of dread in the room. Just a hint, but his nostril quivered. Gilruth was feeling the same silence; he could swear to that. And Gilruth, when he answered, spoke gratefully of the tides and yes, they had an effect on geography and men’s industry by the
sea—no answer could have been more Eisenhooverian—but then as if the question held him also in its grip, Gilruth came out of this long divagation to say that—
yes
, he had looked at some figures on the subject, and there seemed to be a higher incidence of hospital commission reports of admission to mental institutions during the full moon. Dread in the room again, and a silence between the two men which was exactly opposite to the silence of expectation when sex is near, no, now it was the opposite, how rather to move off this point, this continuing mounting silence. Who would be most implicated by breaking it? Now silence became the palpable appearance of the present, that breath of the present which holds all ultimates in its grip. Gilruth took responsibility by saying at last, “I expect the moon is many things to many men. From Frank Borman’s description on Apollo 8 we thought of it as rather a forbidding place”—he looked gloomy in recollection—“whereas Stafford and Cernan and Young give us the idea from Apollo 10 that the moon is agreeable, so to speak, and not at all unpleasant but perhaps kind of a nice place to be,” and he smiled gently, hopefully, but perhaps a little regretfully for filling his share of the silence. They nodded at one another.

Well, let us make an approach to the astronauts. Aquarius sees them for the first time on the fifth of July, eleven days before the launch. They are in a modern movie theater with orange seats and a dark furrowed ceiling overhead, much like marcelled waves in a head of hair, a plastic ceiling built doubtless to the plans of one of the best sound engineers in the country. Sound is considerably ahead of smell as a fit province for scientific work, but since the excellence of acoustics in large and small concert chambers seems to bear more relation to old wood and the blessings of monarchs and bishops than to the latest development of the technical art, the sound system in this movie theater (seats 600) is dependably intolerable most of the time. The public address system squeals and squeaks (it is apparently easier to have communication with men one quarter of a million miles away) and one never gets a fair test of the aural accommodations. The walls and overhead are of plastic composition, and so far as one can tell, the tone is a hint sepulchral, then brightened electronically, finally harsh and punishing to that unnamed fine nerve which runs from the anus to the eardrum.
As the sound engineers became more developed, the plastic materials provided for their practice by corporations grew acoustically more precise and spiritually more flattening—it was the law of the century. One was forever adjusting to public voices through the subtlest vale of pain.

Still this movie theater was the nearest approach to a diadem in the Manned Spacecraft Center. The theater was part of the visitors’ center, where tourists could go through the space museum, a relatively modest affair of satellites, capsules, dioramas, posters and relics, now closed and given over to the installation of monitors and cables for the television networks, even as the gallery to the rear of the theater was now being converted into the Apollo News Center and would consist finally of endless aisles of desks, telephones and typewriters, plus one giant Buddha of a coffee urn. (Coffee is the closest the press ever comes to
satori
.)

In the theater, perhaps eight rows back of the front seats, was a raised platform on which television cameras and crews were mounted. From the stage they must have looked not unrelated to artillery pieces on the battlement of a fort—in the front row were fifty photographers, which is to say fifty sets of torsos and limbs each squeezed around its own large round glass eye. Little flares of lightning flashed out of bulbs near their heads. The astronauts did not really have to travel to the moon—life from another planet was before them already. In the middle ranks, between the front row and the barricade of television cameras, were seated several hundred newspaper men and women come to Houston for the conference this morning. They were a curious mixture of high competence and near imbecility; some assigned to Space for years seemed to know as much as NASA engineers; others, innocents in for the big play on the moon shot, still were not just certain where laxatives ended and physics began. It was as if research students from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton had been put in with a group of fine young fellows from an Army class in remedial reading. Out of such a bag would questions come to the astronauts. Wait! There will be samples.

The astronauts entered from the wings wearing gas masks, gray snout-nosed covers which projected out from their mouths and gave their profiles the intent tusk-ready slouch of razorback hogs. They were aware of this—it was apparent in the good humor with which they came in. In fact, a joke of some dimensions had been flickering for a few days—the Press had talked of greeting them with white hospital masks. In the attempt to protect the astronauts as much as possible from preflight infection they were being kept in a species of limited quarantine—their contacts with nonessential personnel were restricted. Since journalists fit this category, today’s press conference had installed Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins up on the stage in a plastic box about twelve feet wide, ten feet deep and ten feet high. Blowers within this three-walled plastic room blew air from behind them out into the audience: thereby, the breath of the astronauts could enter the theater, but the airborne germs of journalists would not blow back. It made a kind of sense. Of course the cause of the common cold was still unknown, but gross studies of infection would surmise a partial quarantine might be effective partially. However, the instrumentation of this premise was not happy. The astronauts looked a bit absurd in their plastic box, and the few journalists who had actually fleshed their joke by putting on masks caused the astronauts to grin broadly as though to dissociate themselves from the pyramids of precaution they were in fact obeying.

Once they sat down, their manner changed. They were seated behind a walnut-brown desk on a pale blue base which displayed two painted medallions in circles—NASA and Apollo 11. Behind them at the rear of the plastic booth stood an American flag; the Press actually jeered when somebody brought it onstage in advance of the astronauts. Aquarius could not remember a press conference where Old Glory had ever been mocked before, but it had no great significance, suggesting rather a splash of derision at the thought that the show was already sufficiently American enough. In fact, between the steady reporters who worked out of Houston
and the astronauts, there was that kind of easy needling humor which is the measure of professional respect to be found among teams and trainers.

So the entrance went well. The astronauts walked with the easy saunter of athletes. They were comfortable in motion. As men being scrutinized by other men they had little to worry about. Still, they did not strut. Like all good professional athletes, they had the modesty of knowing you could be good and still lose. Therefore they looked to enjoy the snouts they were wearing, they waved at reporter friends they recognized, they grinned. A reporter called back to Collins, “Now, you look good.” It all had that characteristically American air which suggests that men who are successful in their profession do best to take their honors lightly.

Once they sat down, however, the mood shifted. Now they were there to answer questions about a phenomenon which even ten years ago would have been considered material unfit for serious discussion. Grown men, perfectly normal-looking, were now going to talk about their trip to the moon. It made everyone uncomfortable. For the relation of everyone to each other and to the event was not quite real. It was as if a man had died and been brought back from death. What if on questioning he turned out to be an ordinary fellow? “Well, you see,” he might say, “having visited death, I come back with the following conclusions …” What if he had a droning voice? There was something of this in the polite unreality of the questioning. The century was like a youth who made love to the loveliest courtesan in Cathay. Afterward he was asked what he thought and scratched his head and said, “I don’t know. Sex is kind of overrated.” So now people were going to ask questions of three heroes about their oncoming voyage, which on its face must be in contention for the greatest adventure of man. Yet it all felt as if three young junior executives were announcing their corporation’s newest subdivision.

Perhaps for this reason, the quiet gaiety of their entrance had
deserted them as they sat behind the desk in the plastic booth. Now it was as if they did not know if they were athletes, test pilots, engineers, corporation executives, some new kind of priest, or sheepish American boys caught in a position of outlandish prominence—my God, how did they ever get into this? It was as if after months in simulators with knowing technicians geared to the same code languages, they were now debouched into the open intellectual void of this theater, obliged to look into the uncomprehending spirits of several hundred media tools (human) all perplexed and worried at their journalistic ability to grasp more than the bare narrative of what was coming up. Yaws abounded. Vacuums in the magnetism of the mood. Something close to boredom. The astronauts were going to the moon, but everybody was a little frustrated—the Press because the Press did not know how to push into nitty-gritty for the questions, the astronauts because they were not certain how to begin to explain the complexity of their technique. Worse, as if they did not really wish to explain, but were obliged out of duty to the program, even if their privacy was invaded.