Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (45 page)

By pressing the abort button, Armstrong saved them. Reentry control began a set of operations programmed for landing. That stabilized the craft. Afterward, Armstrong was considered to have made a brilliant move, for a thruster had been stuck in firing position and there had been no other way to turn it off.

We cannot speculate on the dreams which followed, but the wipe-out of all feeling from his description can hardly drive us away from the point that a man who has been through such an experience will not soon cease living with it in his sleep. Worse. Engineers were never able to explain the malfunction of the thruster. The psychology of machines is trial enough, but nothing next to the suspicion that one might have an unnatural influence on insensate instruments. What a suspicion for a man to hold of himself. Afterward, it would not be so automatic to remain an astronaut: one might need some of the monomania of Captain Ahab. There is never a hint Armstrong ever thought of trying another profession. If Slayton was looking for a commander with motivation, Armstrong had been offering his credentials. There is either something close to schizophrenia in his lack of reaction to the dangers about him, or we must go right past the competence of any psychologist to use the word for a man like Armstrong and
recognize that some of the brave have a lover’s sense of death as a partner whose nearness is comfortable, as if on those occasions a quiet voice declares, “You, sir, have nothing to fear if your ship passes over the bar,” no, Armstrong must have been brave about flying and wise about the nearness of dying ever since he had learned to solo on his sixteenth birthday, for he was not much older when he saw one of his friends crash a plane into a power line and be killed. No wonder Armstrong’s nerves were occasionally thus taut that a Houston journalist who inadvertently broke the news to an astronaut’s wife about her husband’s death was never to have any luck with Armstrong. “Keep that man away,” was the comment. “He’s a ghoul.”

One wonders at last at the selection. The Director of Flight Crew Operations is obviously a man with his own nerve. For what avalanche of criticism would come on Slayton if the end of Apollo 11 was tragic. What a hint of the curse of the ages would feature writers find in details about Armstrong. Why, he had even crashed the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle—a species of steam calliope and helicopter on stilts which gave a simulation of what it might be like to land with one-sixth of gravity on the moon—yes, the LLRV had gone out of control on Armstrong, and he had been forced to use his ejection seat and be landed by parachute. He was the only astronaut who had crashed in the LLRV. Still, Slayton picked him. Living in the privation of sending other men on a job he wished to do himself, Slayton’s sense of the abilities of particular astronauts to perform particular expeditions into the extraordinary must have taken on levels of acuteness one does not easily conceive. Almost any man other than Slayton was bound to classify Armstrong as accident-prone and a bad risk. Slayton, however, may have been working on the thesis that only a man who had been in and out of death as many times as Armstrong could be entrusted to pass through the unpredictable minutes of a descent to the moon, down to that untenanted and eventless ground, that dead body whose light, when full, inhabited the switches of human sanity on the living earth, yes, perhaps only a man familiar with
that twilight of the sleeping sky which may be known in the soul when death lays near and the psyche begins to hover, only a man who has become familiar with how soon the psyche will lift and begin to depart, yes, only a man who has lived with death since a boy with a recurrent dream (“I could, by holding my breath, hover over the ground. Nothing much happened; I neither flew nor fell in those dreams. I just hovered.”), only such a man, hovering for all one knew next to dying without a struggle in his sleep on many a long night of his childhood, could be the man to enter the sanctums and veils of the moon. For he had inhabited them since he was a child. He was familiar with the awe of his task. He could be capable of calm where other brave men, feeling the terror of emotions never felt before, could spin into a vertigo of the will at that dread which comes not from dying but from stepping into death and feeling no immediate urge to retreat.

The inquiry has obviously pushed too far. It is not likely Armstrong went about talking of an old recurring dream to Slayton, but then it was hardly necessary. Slayton was a man who took off on hunting trips when he could—his decision would come from the presence of qualities he would not even bother to name. So Aquarius would report, and he had no more for evidence than a night at dinner with the Director of Flight Crew Operations and his wife, and it was a night in which Slayton with long practice had not made a single remark which could be quoted in the morning. Yet, in the resonance of his silences, the weight of his smile, in the sense of his gravity, yes, even in his maintenance of a pause at the depth of man’s adventure to the moon, was all that fiction of unspoken evidence upon which novelists throw themselves and journalists snarl. After this dinner, Aquarius was always certain Slayton had picked Armstrong with care, picked him out of some equivalent of the reasons Aquarius would give, yet they never mentioned his name once, nor the name of Aldrin either, and Aquarius was equally certain Slayton had picked Aldrin with much the same measure of care.

“Neil and I are both fairly reticent people and we don’t go in for free exchanges of sentiment,” Aldrin was to say. “Even during long training we didn’t have many free exchanges.”

One may be certain of that. They were a curious mating of opposites, a team picked most probably for their complementary abilities and aptitudes. Temperamentally they suggested the equivalent of one of those dour Vermont marriages where the bride dies after sixty years and the husband sits rocking on the farmhouse porch. “Guess you feel pretty bad, Zeb, that Abigail is gone.” The chair keeps rocking, there is a long puff on the pipe. “Nope,” says Zeb, “never did get to like her much.”

It was not a case of Armstrong and Aldrin disliking each other. How would one ever know? It is almost as if the question never occurred to them. They had each, after all, been married for years and their wives did not pretend to know them easily. They were men who liked to be alone in their thoughts so much that once teamed up with each other, there may have been no need to speak for more than functional purposes. It is possible they never had to decide whether they liked one another or not. Those who wish to live within their own minds ask for nothing more perfect than a companion whose presence is not felt.

Yet how remarkable if their personalities did not impinge upon one another, for they were profoundly different men. Armstrong, as we have seen, was a virtuoso of a flyer; Aldrin was a powerful personification of organized human intelligence. Of course, he could fly a plane well, just as he could give a superior performance at any number of activities from pole vaulting to celestial mechanics, but in relation to other astronauts, he was not among the most accomplished of aviators, he had not in fact even been a test pilot. Yet of all these men he was the one whose command of mathematics and complex statistical operations was so tuned to the logic of information systems that he was doubtless the nearest human equivalent to a computer at NASA, and had a Doctor of Science degree in Astronautics from MIT, the only one in the first three
groups of astronauts to have earned his doctorate. Back in April 1966, the Director of Flight Operations, Chris Kraft, had spoken of Aldrin in these encomiums:

A well-known geologist spoke of Aldrin as “the best scientific mind we have sent into space.” Ted Guillory, an engineer engaged in designing the detailed trajectories and orbits of a flight plan, said, “He carried a slide rule for his Gemini flight on the rendezvous, and I sometimes think he could correct a computer. I can remember hearing him say things like, ‘If the computer says I’m twenty feet out of plane, I’ll believe ten of that, but not all twenty.’ He’s one of the few people who can figure out all those rendezvous things in his head.” The accolade from his wife was one straight statement, “If Buzz were a trash man and collected trash, he would be the best
trash
collector in the United States.” And Aldrin speaking of himself remarked, “At West Point the name of the game is, ‘Do what people tell you to do, keep your nose clean, and work out your academic progress.’ I fitted into that pretty well. I’m a sort of mechanical man,” and then added, “or I was.” We can return to his exception later. It is enough for now to say that if his personality suggests the loneliness of the computer in a man of enormous will, he is yet a complex figure. It is not easy to recognize, however, for he is so prominently a man who has become the instrument of his own will. All his biographical details emphasize loneliness, self-sufficiency, eccentricity. He was the son of a strong father, a man who had been an intimate of Lindbergh and Robert Goddard, a species of minor-league Rickenbacker; for his aid in handling Italo Balbo’s flight from Italy to the Chicago
World’s Fair in 1933, Aldrin Sr. was made Commendatore in Mussolini’s Air Force. We can picture a father full of force and full of guidance, but usually away on business trips to tend his interests in commercial aviation, so that his only son grew up among maids and sisters, a boy prodigy in his powers of digestion, for the son could consume cans of tuna fish, packages of Jell-O powder dry, and sandwiches of peanut butter and sliced banana sprinkled with powdered chocolate, a mystery until one assumes he was already processing carloads of hitherto undigested information on the parameters of elemental nutrients in abdominal rendezvous. His activities in school offer similar sidelights on his will. Barely able to read one year, he could dominate a class the next. Yet once interested in football, his marks deteriorated. Warned he would not be accepted at West Point or Annapolis if they did not improve, he gave up sports for a year and moved from C’s and D’s to A’s and B’s. Halfback and quarterback originally, he also moved to center. At West Point he was first in his class at the end of plebe year but on advice from his father, “in my experience number-one graduates become more or less freaks,” he determined to slow down. He succeeded. He graduated third. The irony is unavoidably present—change for Aldrin was never grace but challenge. If challenge is usually the imperative to do more in an unfamiliar situation, it is also—given the momentum of much human mass applied to a problem—a challenge to reduce such momentum once it is begun. It is apparent in everything he comments upon. For example:

The only challenge which ever seemed to bring him close to malfunction were the first years of his marriage. His wife was also in part a stranger at their wedding—they had corresponded, but they had seen each other only five times, and the early years were not happy. “In my whole life,” Joan Aldrin said, “I had never been alone, and all of a sudden I found myself in Montgomery, Alabama, with a husband who was off flying all the time and leaving me home. I was very naïve, an only child, and spoiled. He was so terribly inarticulate during the first several years of our marriage, and I was just the opposite. He complained because I was so direct, and I did have this tendency to bull my way through everything, even after we were sent to Bitburg, Germany. I look back at those years as the period in which I was always pregnant and always mad at Buzz for being away.”

They finally were struck down with yellow jaundice in 1959. It came “from drinking dirty wine in Italy,” diagnosed Joan Aldrin, but jaundice is that infectious disease beyond all other which comes to strong people when they live too long in an environment alien to their will, work with all their power to solve the complexities of that environment, and fail. Nothing in the organizational and logical powers of Aldrin’s brain was equipped to comprehend the subtler abdications from reason of a woman’s brain. No unfulfilled powerhouse of an actress with a half-career frustrated behind her would be able to sympathize with the emotional indestructability of a man able to perform any task he set himself. They went down into jaundice together. It was conceivably a sign of love—a mating of devils is more likely to result in but one wound.

They are both religious men, yet Armstrong suggests the mystic, whereas Aldrin, with his prodigious will and senses oriented to technological rather than sensuous perception, is nonetheless an elder and trustee of the Webster Presbyterian Church, a formerly “mechanical man” who will go so far as to smuggle consecrated bread and wine aboard the Lem in order to celebrate Communion on the moon, and so is not only a technologue but a high priest, indeed is the pure spiritual ancestor of that line which runs from Calvin, Luther, Knox and Wesley to Edison, Ford, and IBM’s own Watson. So he illumines something in the mystery of the Wasp, gives us purchase on that dichotomy between technology and dogma which inhabits their lives. It is as if ceremony, formal repetitive somber ceremony, has become the communicant between technology and the dream, as if the road back from the machine to the primeval can be accomplished only by transporting the machine-oriented senses into the machine of ceremony. So Aldrin was a traditionalist with a faith that never seemed to alter. Perhaps he did not often use his faith to explore any inner space, but rather to restore emotional depletions. Serving a powerful heart, faith was as predictable as a flow-chart he had designed himself, faith was a perfect proposition. “I wouldn’t,” stated Aldrin, “classify myself as a fatalist or anything like that. I just think when I’m engaged in one of these things, I’m in no danger at all. It may be a question of faith, a belief that I wasn’t brought here to meet with some untimely occurrence.… I would feel worse about not doing the right thing than I would about any danger that is involved.… But why do you do anything? Maybe because you were selected to do it.” And his mother’s maiden name, when all was said, had been Marion Moon.