Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  He was almost done with his formal remarks. Out of his big bulk and his small voice he would offer miracles. That was his knowledge of America, no mean knowledge. Prosperity satisfies those who are rich in culture. But in lands where the geography like the people is filled with empty space, then faith in miracles is the staple of the future.

  “Every man achieves his own greatness by reaching out beyond himself, and so it is with nations. When a nation believes in itself as Athenians did in their Golden Age, as Italians did in the Renaissance, that nation can perform miracles. Only when a nation means something to itself can it mean something to others. We are truly faced with the brightest prospects of any age of man. Knowing this, we can watch the launch tomorrow with a new dimension of hope. We can cheer the beginning of a new age of discovery and the new attainment that spans the space distances and brings us nearer to the heavens.”

  His speech while quietly apocalyptic was not without gloom for the audience. They were heavy with food, and a band or a jukebox was blasting in some big room next to the hexagonal room. The country club couples of Titusville and Brevard County were having a good time next door. But it seemed to Aquarius that Von Braun’s remarks had plunged the collective intelligence of these corporation men back into some of their problems.

  Yes, Aquarius was thinking, ideas were what Americans cared about, and the biggest ideas were doubtless the best, but what a price had been paid. For now manufacturers and consumers chased frantically after fashion. It did not matter how cheap and shameful the execution. The bargain stereo could not last a month, the washing machine with the plastic console would break in a week—all that had been purchased was the idea. Something was happening to Americans. They were a guilty crew, guilty of new ideas, new license, sacrilege, cynicism, bad faith. As a result, they were always in a rush to purchase a new idea. When people were not willing to die for an old idea, they would rush to a new one. Guilty to the nose, guilty to the ears, they were even apathetic about blaming the fabricators, for they were guilty themselves. Everybody had been cheated so many times; everybody had cheated others so often. It was hard to remain angry that one had been defrauded. It was even hard to get angry. So food and ruminating drink lowered the audience from the excellence of Von Braun’s achievement to the shoddy dimensions of their own.

  The question period cheered this same audience however. Then Von Braun could speak of lunar jeeps, and space costs reduced by flying stages which could be used over and over in travel from earth to manned laboratories in earth orbit. He would be eloquent a little later about nuclear rockets the size of battleships which might be assembled in earth orbit and then voyage to Mars. While he talked of other planets, the audience grew warm again. It was the moon which was cold.

  When applause subsided, the publisher cried out in his cheerful voice, “I have a question. Will you be fired if you don’t get on that helicopter and greet the senators and Cabinet members who are waiting?” Von Braun made a point of staying for two more full questions, then took his departure. The sound of helicopters rose over the room.

  Aquarius would have thought the evening concluded, but as he was learning again, he would never understand Americans. Another speaker, a representative of American business, rose and gave a humorous introduction to a man as massive and slow-speaking as Lyndon Johnson who proceeded to get up and tell jokes in an absolutely assured drawl. The audience seemed happy with them. “I was in an airport not long ago and sitting next to a woman smoking a cigar. I asked her how long she’d been smoking cigars. And she said ever since her husband had come home and found one in her ashtray in the bedroom.”

  The couple in front of Aquarius, young, stingy, ambitious, and very respectable, were laughing. The husband scowled at the wife and said with existential humor, “I wouldn’t laugh at that joke if I was you.”

  “Why not?” responded the wife with the serenity of total practicality. “I’ve never done it.”

  Yes, they were all good Americans and they would listen to jokes and be a little relieved Von Braun was gone (although they would treasure the experience), and as new jokes came along, Aquarius began to look again into his drink and brood on Von Braun’s remarks. He had declared that reaching the moon would be the greatest event in history since aquatic life had moved up onto land, and that was a remark! for it passed without pause over the birth and death of Christ. Indeed Von Braun had said even more in a newspaper interview. “Through a closer look at Creation, we ought to gain a better knowledge of the Creator.” Man was voyaging to the planets in order to look for God. Or was it to destroy Him?

  Of course, in the interview, Von Braun had been careful to add, “It could very well be that the Lord would … send His Son to the other worlds to bring the gospel to them—I believe the good Lord is full of such tremendous compassion that He will take whatever steps are necessary to bring the truth to His Creation.” While Aquarius had always assumed that compassion did not move by steps but seemed rather to bathe the wounded with its grace, this was after all no ordinary piety. It was possible Von Braun was sincere. Still what a grip he had on the jugular of the closet missionary in every Wasp. If he had dumped his private finds on American religious opinion into a computer and cranked it up for response, the words could not have come back better. On the other hand, Aquarius had believed for years in ideas not altogether dissimilar. Once, tentatively, he too had undertaken the doubtful liberty to state in an interview what he thought of God. God, he had presumed to suggest, was an embattled vision: God had created man in order that man might fulfill God’s vision, but His vision of the future was at war with other visions of existence in the universe. Some of those other visions were not only out in the stars, and in the galaxies, but were right here, intimate, on earth. God was, for instance, at war with the Devil. Certainly the Devil had a most detailed vision of existence very much opposed to His own. In any case the war had gone on for so long that nearly everything human was inextricably tangled. Heroism cohabited with technology. Was the Space Program admirable or abominable? Did God voyage out for NASA, or was the Devil our line of sight to the stars?

  NASA. The word had derived from NACA—National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. It was an unhappy sound. Just think of NASA-ism. NASA would have no deliberate relation whatsoever to Nazi. But we are not a schizophrenic land for nothing. Deep in the unconscious where each sound leaves first its murmur and then its roar at a combustion of hitherto unconnected meanings, NASA had to stand for something. You bet.

  Listening to the jokes, Aquarius was still brooding about Nazism. For the philosophy of the Folk, detesting civilization, claiming to be in love with the primitive, had nonetheless killed millions of men in the most orderly technological fashion yet devised. Nazism had been not one philosophy, but two—and each philosophy was utterly opposed to the other. It was primitive, it was vertiginously advanced. It gave brave men a sense of nobility in their hearts—it had been utterly heartless. It spoke of clean futures and buried Germany (for a time!) in vomit and slime and swill. Now its ghosts were pacing on every battlement of every surviving palace, now its ghosts were bubbling in the tubes of every laboratory, burning in the wires. Nazism had been an assault upon the cosmos—why think of it as less? That is why it moved as the specter behind every civilized transaction. For it had said: civilization will stifle man unless man is delivered onto a new plane. Was space its amputated limb, its philosophy in orbit?

  Now the speaker was telling a joke about a Texan in Alaska who had mixed up his respective missions with a woman and a bear. Big was the laugh from the audience. And out on the beaches and the causeways and riverbanks, another audience was waiting for the launch. America like a lazy beast in the hot dark was waiting for a hint in the ringing of the night. Questions drowned Aquarius. In bed by two in the morning, he would be up by four. An early start was necessary, for traffic on the road to the Press Site would be heavy.

 
; IV

  The two hours of sleep were more worthy of Atlas than Aquarius, for in his dreams he held up a portion of the State of Florida. Aquarius had been covering the moon shot from July first to this morning of the sixteenth. The mildest form of purgatory was to spend two weeks in a motel.

  Everybody complained that the tension accompanying the preparations for Apollo 11 had been less than launchings in the past. Cocoa Beach itself had altered. The old days of honky-tonks on the strip of highway and rockets threatening to carve a furrow down the beach were now gone. Money had come in and industry, space technicians and their families, supermarkets, motels, churches, and real estate developments had been put up. In the restaurants, public address systems broke into the mood of a meal to call patrons to the phone. The paper doilies under the plate carried legends: America’s Space Program Benefits All Mankind—Your Souvenir of Apollo 11 Lunar Landing. Better Color Television. Water Purification at Less Cost. New Paints and Plastics. Lunar Walker for the Handicapped. Laser Surgery. Solar Power. So forth. Cocoa Beach had been one of the five places on the Atlantic Seaboard which deserved the title “Wild West of the East,” but Cocoa Beach deserved it no longer. As the doily revealed, it was part of the Brevard Economic Development Council. Until the last few days when the Press arrived in hundreds then thousands, there had been monotonous hours when it was necessary to remind oneself that three men were leaving for the moon in less than a week.

  But in the dark morning before dawn on the sixteenth, in the black hour of 4 A.M., the night air a wet and lightless forest in the nose, one was finally scared. It was not unlike awakening in a convoy with invasion of a foreign beach scheduled for the hours ahead, an awakening in the dark of the sort one will always remember, for such nights live only on a few mornings of one’s life. Somewhere not so far from here, the astronauts were getting up as well. And the ghosts of old Indians.

  In that long-ago of prairie spaces when the wind was the message of America, Indians had lived beneath the moon, stared at the moon, lived in greater intimacy with the moon than any European. Who could say the ride of the Indian with whisky in his veins was not some conflagration of messages derived from the silences of the moon? Now tonight were the ghosts of old Indians awakening in the prairies and the swamps? Did the echo of the wind through the abandoned launch towers of the Cape strike a resonance across two thousand miles to the grain elevators by the side of railroad tracks in the mournful empty windings of the West? The country had been virgin once, an all but empty continent with lavender and orange in the rocks, pink in the sky, an aura of blue in the deep green of the forest—now, not four centuries even spent, the buffalo were gone, and the Indians; the swamps were filled; the air stank with every exhaust from man and machine. All the while we had been composing our songs to the moon and driving the Indian onto the reservation, had we also been getting ready to go to the moon out of some deep recognition that we had already killed the nerve which gave life to the earth? Yet the moon by every appearance knew more about disease and the emanations of disease than the oldest leper on earth. “Of what can you dream?” said the moon. “I am battered beyond belief and you think to violate me now?”

  Driving through the night, passing again the families and tourists who were waiting for morning on the banks of the causeway, showing a Press Pass to the guard at the gate, and being waved on in silence, yes near to conspiratorial silence, there was the tangible sense of time running in parallel, the million-headed witness now traveling to a point where the place would cross the time and the conscious eye of the nation would be there to witness this event. By television would they witness it. That would be an experience like getting conceived in a test tube.

  Out at the Press Site, Saturn V was visible across the near distance of three and a half miles. It was the nearest Aquarius had approached on this long night, and it was indeed the nearest anyone would come but the launching crew and the three astronauts. As Apollo-Saturn stood on its concrete pad six thousand yards away across a lagoon from the small grandstand built for the Press, its details now visible, it looked less like a shrine, but all the more a presence. A squad of floodlights played upon it, and their beams reflecting from the thin night haze displayed a fan of separate lights across the sky on down into the surface of the lagoon, a bending and glancing of rays worthy of a diamond upon a mirror. In the black wet night, back of the floodlamps, lightning flickered, so regularly that one might have been looking at a lighthouse rotating its flare—somewhere down the horizon, a potency of storm was speaking up in the response of the Caribbean. Long far-off rolls of thunder.

  Staring across the water, Aquarius took a long study. His binoculars appeared to lock him into collaboration with Saturn V, as if the rocket had the power to keep those binoculars pressed to his nose, as if finally Aquarius and Saturn V were now linked into some concupiscence of mission like a one-night stand which might leave its unexpected consequence upon him. What a vehicle was the spaceship! A planet-traveler massive as a destroyer, delicate as a silver arrow. At the moment it lifted off from the earth it would be burning as much oxygen as is consumed by half a billion people taking their breath—that was twice, no, more than twice the population of America. What a deep breath must then have been concentrated into the liquid oxygen they were passing into its tanks right now, a liquid oxygen cooled to 297 degrees below zero and thereby turning air to cloud at every hint of contact with the pipes which were in turn contained within other pipes two feet thick to insulate the fuel. Model of an ogress, umbilical cords of every thickness and sinuosity, snakes and cables and ropes and constrictors thick as tree trunks passed in cluster from swing-arms and the walkways of the launching tower into the thin-skinned walls of the rocket; a Medusa’s head of umbilicals loading fuel, charging batteries, testing circuits; a complexity of interrelation between the launching tower and the rocket so simplified by the swing-arms that Apollo-Saturn resting on her pad did not look distraught but calm, like a silver-white ship standing erect by an iron tree with nine horizontal branches. There were clouds about both, strings of small firm well-puffed little clouds drifting off at right angles from the rocket at each place where an umbilical from an oxygen pipe had been disconnected; the clouds gave Saturn V the brow of a philosopher in contemplation above his thought, yes, the cloud belonged to Saturn V, it nuzzled at it, a new cloud not many hours old. And the light from the floodlamps reflected from the white icy skin of the wall. Sainted Leviathan, ship of space, she was a planetary traveler.

  But now the Press was loading onto buses to have one last look at the astronauts, who had been invisible for the last eleven days. It was idiotic to leave the Press Site now, leave the unique pleasure of communing in the dark across the water with that technological gem on the horizon; it was idiotic to pack into buses and sweat in the dark night heat and crawl up photographers’ backs for a glimpse of an astronaut’s face, but he got into the bus along with the others and ground five miles along Space Center highways through the dark, a full load of observers transported on an irritating underpowered whine, and then debouched at the front entrance of the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building, MSOB, a cold white structure, impersonal as the offices of a factory complex hundreds of feet long and several stories high, as impersonal and architecturally undistinguished as the spirit of its design (which derived from the implicit architecture contained in the cost-apportionments of a multimillion-dollar bill).

  The journalistic cargo of the bus was now ushered through long narrow corridors painted in institutional green to take turnings by water coolers and vending machines, passed down other corridors, filed past empty rooms and galleries and were loosed finally into a courtyard. Just over their heads, a story above, was a covered bridge which ran from the building they had just been in to the building from which the astronauts would exit.