Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  Now came a question from a reporter who was new on the job: “From your previous experience in the two and a half hours or so that you’re atop the rocket before actual blast-off, is this a period of maximum tension, rather like being in a dentist’s waiting room?”

  A temporary inability to understand the question was finally replaced by this speech. “It’s one of the phases that we have a very high confidence in,” Armstrong answered with his characteristic mixture of modesty and technical arrogance, of apology and tight-lipped superiority. “It’s nothing new. It’s the thing that’s been done before,” now static while he searched for the appropriate addition, “and done very well on a number of occasions, and we’re quite sure this girl will go,” he said solemnly, pleasantly, lightly, carefully, sadly, sweetly. He was a presence in the room, as much a spirit as a man. One hardly knew if he were the spirit of the high thermal currents, or that spirit of neutrality which rises to the top in bureaucratic situations, or both, both of course—why should Armstrong have a soul less divided than the unruly world of some billions of men? Indeed contradictions lay subtly upon him—it was not unlike looking at a bewildering nest of leaves: some are autumn fallings, some the green of early spring. So Armstrong seemed of all the astronauts the man nearest to being saintly, yet there was something as hard, small-town and used in his face as the look of a cashier over pennies. When he stopped to think, six tired parallel lines stood out on his forehead, and his hair was very straight, small-town hair-colored humorless straight, his pupils were very small, hardly larger than buckshot, you could believe he flew seventy-eight combat missions off the Essex near Korea. He was very thin-mouthed, almost as thin and wide a mouth as Joe E. Brown, yet with no comic spirit, or better, or worse, the spirit of comedy gave orders to the mouth most of the time. Much like President Nixon or Wernher von Braun (whom we are yet to meet) he would smile on command. Then a very useful smile appeared—the smile of an enterprising small-town boy. He could be an angel, he could be the town’s devil. Who knew? You could not penetrate the flash of the smile—all of America’s bounty was in it. Readiness to serve, innocence, competence, modesty, sly humor, and then a lopsided yawing slide of a dumb smile at the gulfs of one’s own ignorance, like oops am I small-town dumb!—that was also in it. Aquarius decided it was not easy to trust him then—the smile was a vehicle to remove Armstrong from the scene. But when he spoke, all ambition was muzzled. He spoke with the unendurably slow and triple caution of a responsibility-laden politician who was being desperately careful to make no error of fact, give no needless offense to enemies, and cross no conflicting zones of loyalty among friends. Add the static, and he was no happy public speaker. At communicating he was as tight as a cramped muscle.

  Perversely, it became his most impressive quality, as if what was best in the man was most removed from the surface, so valuable that it must be protected by a hundred reservations, a thousand cautions, as if finally he had such huge respect for words that they were like tangible omens and portents, zephyrs and beasts of psychic presence, as if finally something deep, delicate and primitive would restrain him from uttering a single word of fear for fear of materializing his dread. So, once, men had been afraid to utter the name of the Lord, or even to write it in such a way as to suggest the sound, for that might be enough to summon some genie of God’s displeasure at so disrupting the heavens. Armstrong of course did not brandish an ego one could perceive on meeting; where Aldrin gave off the stolid confidence of the man who knows that problems can be solved if properly formulated and appropriately attacked (which is to say attacked in good condition!) and where Collins offered the wiry graceful tension of a man who will quietly die to maintain his style, Armstrong could seem more like a modest animal than a man—trace hints of every forest apprehension from the puma to the deer to the miseries of the hyena seemed to stalk at the edge of that small-town clearing he had cut into his psyche so that he might offer the world a person. But his thoughts seemed to be looking for a way to drift clear of any room like this where he was trapped with psyche-eaters, psyche-gorgers, and the duty of responding to questions heard some hundreds of times.

  On the other hand, he was a professional and had learned how to contend in a practical way with the necessary language. Indeed, how his choice of language protected him!

  “Mr. Armstrong, at the time you are down on the moon, what will be your overriding consideration and what will be your main concern?”

  “Well,” said Armstrong, “immediately upon touchdown our concern is the integrity of the Lunar Module itself” … nnnnnnnhr went the sound of the static.… “For the first two hours after touchdown we have a very busy time verifying the integrity of the Lunar Module and all of its systems” … nnnnhr.… “A great deal of technical discussion … between spacecraft and ground during a time period when most people will be wondering, well what does it look like out there? … We will be eager to comment” … nnnnhr … “but reluctant to do so in the face of these more important considerations on which … the entire rest of the lunar mission depends.”

  Aldrin, the formalist, had said just previously, “I think the most critical portion of the EVA will be our ability to anticipate and to interpret things that appear not to be as we expected them to be, because if we don’t interpret them correctly then they will become difficult.” It was the credo of the rationalist. Phenomena are only possessed of menace when they do not accommodate themselves to language-controls. Or, better, to initial-controls. EVA stood for Extravehicular Activity, that is for action taken outside their vehicle, the Lem. EVA therefore referred to their walk on the moon; but the sound of the letters E, V, A might inspire less perturbation than the frank admission that men would now dare to walk on an ancient and alien terrain where no life breathed and beneath the ground no bodies were dead.

  It was, of course, a style of language all the astronauts had learned. There were speeches where you could not tell who was putting the words together—the phrases were impersonal, interlocking. One man could have finished a sentence for another. “Our order of priorities was carefully integrated into the flight plan … there is no requirement on the specific objectives that we’re meeting on the surface to go great distances from the spacecraft, and to do so would only utilize time that we now have programmed doing things in the specific mission objectives.” Sell newspapers with that kind of stuff! The quote could belong to any one of a dozen astronauts. In this case it happened to be not Aldrin but Armstrong.

  Only on occasion did the language reveal its inability to blanket all situations. Mainly on personal matters. There came a question from one of the remedial readers. “Tell us very briefly how your families have reacted to the fact that you’re taking this historic mission.”

  “Well,” Aldrin deliberated, “I think in my particular case, my family has had five years now to become accustomed to this eventuality, and over six months to face it very closely. I think they look on this as a tremendous challenge for me. They look upon it also as an invasion somewhat of their privacy and removing of my presence away from the family for a considerable period of time.”

  He spoke glumly, probably thinking at this moment neither of his family nor himself—rather whether his ability to anticipate and interpret had been correctly employed in the cathexis-loaded dynamic shift vector area of changed field domestic situations (which translates as: attractive wife and kids playing second fiddle to boss astronaut number two sometimes blow group stack). Aldrin was a man of such powerful potentialities and iron disciplines that the dull weight of appropriately massed jargon was no mean gift to him. He obviously liked it to work. It kept explosives in their package. When his laboriously acquired speech failed to mop up the discharge of a question, he got as glum as a fastidious housewife who cannot keep the shine on her floor.

  They could not, of course, restrain the questions which looked for ultimate blood. “James Gunn, BBC. You had mentioned that your flight, like all others, contains very many risks. What, in
view of that, will your plans be”—a British courtesy in passing—“in the extremely unlikely event that the Lunar Module does not come up off the lunar surface?”

  Armstrong smiled. His detestation of answering questions in public had been given its justification. Journalists would even ask a man to comment on the emotions of his oncoming death. “Well,” said Armstrong, “that’s an unpleasant thing to think about.” If, as was quite possible, he had been closer to death than anyone in the room, and more than once, more than once, that did not mean the chalice of such findings was there to be fingered by fifty. “We’ve chosen not to think about that up to the present time. We don’t think that’s at all a likely situation. It’s simply a possible one.” He had, however, not answered the question. If he put in twelve and more hours a day in simulators, if there were weeks when they worked seventy and eighty hours a week at the abrasive grind of laying in still more hierarchies of numbers and banks of ratio in their heads, well, they were accustomed to hard work. So the grind today of being interviewed in full press conference, then by the wire services, then by magazine writers and finally for the television networks, a fourteen-hour day before it would all be done, and of the worst sort of work for them—objects on display to be chipped at by some of the worst word-sculptors ever assembled in south-eastern Texas—well, that would still be work they must perform to the best of their duty. Being an astronaut was a mission. Since the political and power transactions of the age on which NASA’s future was—put no nice word on it—hung, were not in spirit religious, the astronauts did not emphasize their sense of vocation. But being an astronaut was a mission and therefore you were obliged to perform every aspect of your work as well as you could. At a press conference you answered questions. So Armstrong now finally said in answer to what they would do if the Lunar Module did not come up off the lunar surface, “At the present time we’re left without recourse should that occur.”

  When the conference was done, there was only a small pattering of applause from the Press. The atmosphere had been equal to any other dull press conference in which a company had unveiled a new and not very special product. Resentment in the Press was subtle but deep. An event of such dimensions and nothing to show for it. The American cool was becoming a narcotic. The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

  But what if you’re unable to get off the moon?

  “Unpleasant thing to think about.”

  II

  It was the answer Aquarius thought about after the conference was done, for that was the nearest anyone had come to saying that a man could get killed in the pits of this venture. And yes, they did think about it. A man who was in training for six months to go to the moon would be obliged to think about his death. Yet, if to contemplate the failure of the ascent stage of the Lunar Module to rise off the moon was unpleasant for Armstrong to think about, did that derive automatically and simply because it would mean death, or was it, bottomless taint of the unpleasant, a derivation deep out of the incommensurable fact that the moon ground would be the place where his body must rest in death? People who had nearly died from wounds spoke of the near death as offering a sensation that one was rising out of one’s body. So had spoken Hemingway long ago, writing in Paris, writing in Spain, probably writing in apartments off the Borghese Gardens near where Collins had been born. Now was there to be a future science of death, or did death (like smell and sound and time—like the theory of the dream) resist all scientists, navigators, nomenclature and charts and reside in the realm of such unanswerables as whether the cause of cancer was a malfunction of the dream? Did the souls of the dead choose to rise? Was the thought of expiring on the moon an abyss of unpleasantness because the soul must rest in the tombless vacuums of a torso dead on the moon and therefore not able to voyage toward its star? A vertigo of impressions, but Aquarius had been living at the edge of such thoughts for years. It was possible there was nothing more important in a man’s life than the hour and the route and the power of his death, yes, certainly if his death were to launch him into another kind of life. And the astronauts—of this he was convinced—would think this way, or at least would have that vein of imagination in some inviolate and noncommunicatory circuit of their brain; somewhere, far below the language of their communication, they must suspect that the gamble of a trip to the moon and back again, if carried off in all success, might give thrust for some transpostmortal insertion to the stars. Varoom! Last of all over the years had Aquarius learned how to control the rapid acceleration of his brain. Perhaps as a result, he was almost—in these first few days of covering the astronauts in Houston—fond of the banality of their speech and the anodyne of technologese.

  But that press conference reserved exclusively for the magazine writers was about to begin—the writers would be working at least half as hard as the astronauts this day—and Aquarius on his way over to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, where the interview was to be staged (for reasons soon explained) was wondering if the glints and notes of these cosmic, if barely sketched, hypotheses about earth, moon, life, death, the dream and the psychology of astronauts would be offered the ghost of a correlative. Aquarius was contemplating again the little fact that man had not done so very much with Freud’s theory of the dream—had the theory of wish fulfillment shown a poor ability “to anticipate and interpret things that appear to be not as we expected them to be”? Did that old Freudian theory of the dream bear the same relation to the veritable dimensions of the dream that a Fourth of July rocket could present to Saturn V?

  III

  Since the astronauts were being guarded against infection, they were seen next behind the protection of a glass wall in the visitors’ room at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. An entire building had been constructed to quarantine them on their return, a species of hospital dormitory, galley and laboratory for the moon rocks. Since for twenty-one days after their return they would not be able to be in the same room with their families, or with the NASA technicians and officials who would debrief them, a chamber like the visitors’ room in a prison had been built with a plate-glass partition hermetically sealed from floor to ceiling running down the middle. Dialogue through the glass wall proceeded through microphones.

  Now, for the rest of the day, the astronauts would receive the other media layers here: TV, radio, wire service, magazines, etc. Now the magazine writers could sit within a few feet of their subjects, and yet—as if suggesting some undiscovered metaphysical properties of glass—they were obliged at the same time to feel a considerable distance away. Perhaps the full lighting on the astronauts and the relative gloom on the writers’ side of the enclosure may have suggested the separation of stage and audience, but probably the effect was due most to the fact that laying-on of hands through that glass, so certainly shatterproof, could never occur, and so there was a dislocation of the sense of space. The astronauts were near enough to sit for a portrait, but—through the glass—they were as far away as history.

  There was a new intimacy to the questions however. The setting was of aid, and besides, the magazine writers were in need of more. One of them took up immediately on the question which had bothered Aquarius, but the approach was practical now. How indeed would the astronauts spend their time if they found they could not get off the moon? Would they pray, would they leave messages for their family, or would they send back information on the moon? Such were the alternatives seen by the questioner.

  Aldrin had the happy look of a linebacker who is standing right in the center of a hole in the line as the runner tries to come through. “I’d probably spend it working on the availability of the ascent engine.”

  That brought a laugh, and there would be others to follow, but the twenty or so magazine writers had the leisure to ask their questions out of a small group, and so there was not the itch of the newspaperman to look for a quick lead and therefore ask brutal or leading or tendentious questions. Indeed there was no need to ask any quest
ion whatever just so that the journalist and his newspaper could be identified as present at the conference. (Such identifications give smaller newspapers and their reporters a cumulative status over the years with public relations men.) No, here the magazine writers could take their time, they could pursue a question, even keep after the astronaut. Covertly, the mood of a hunt was on. Since they would have more time to write their pieces, by severer standards would they be judged. So they had to make the astronauts come to life whether the astronauts wished to exhibit themselves or not.

  Will you take personal mementos? Armstrong was asked.

  “If I had a choice, I guess I’d take more fuel,” he said with a smile for the frustration this might cause the questioner.

  The magazine writers kept pushing for personal admission, disclosure of emotion, admission of unruly fear—the astronauts looked to give replies as proper and well-insulated as the plate glass which separated them. So Armstrong replied to a question about his intuition by making a short disclaimer, which concluded, “Interpret the problem properly, then attack it.” Logical positivism all the way was what he would purvey. Don’t make predictions without properly weighted and adequate inventories of knowledge. Surely he trusted his intuitions, the questioner persisted. “It has never been a strong suit,” said Armstrong in a mild and honest voice. Obviously, the natural aim of technology was to make intuition obsolescent, and Armstrong was a shining knight of technology. But, in fact, he had to be lying. A man who had never had strong intuitions would never have known enough about the sensation to disclaim its presence in himself.