Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  Beneath this bridge a white van was parked, ready to receive the astronauts. They would pass for twenty steps down an aisle protected by policemen and by a fence from the hydraulic pressure of these excited journalists, and would then enter the van to be transported the nine miles to Apollo 11, mounting by elevator in the mobile launch structure to the ninth swing-arm where they would cross an iron gangplank to their seats. There they would wait while the countdown proceeded. There they would be when the lift-off occurred.

  This gathering of the Press, this congestion of the Press—for taking the sum of the TV personnel, still cameras and movie men, there must have been several hundred people standing on tiptoe at every bad angle and hopeless vantage point for a good look—would remain more than an hour on this chance of the briefest glimpse, hardly more than a wave of the arm as it finally turned out. The magic of the long night would leave them as they waited. The gray of a new morning would diminish the high theater of their mood before finally a single astronaut was seen. Yet no one left. Men and women stood on every ledge and railing and stone and fence they could climb in the courtyard, and dozens periodically clambered onto the flat roof of a special TV truck only to be chased down by special police. Photographers wrestled themselves up wire fences, kept themselves in position by wedging their bodies into angles, waited out cramped positions like mountain climbers in a chimney for twenty minutes, thirty minutes, finally an hour. It was imperative for everyone there to have a look at the men who would come through the door as if that were equal in value to a piece of the moon. There seemed some mysterious booty residing in the literal aura of the astronauts, yes, the Press crowded forward, were ready to claw one another for a crack of the concrete, for one data-point, one photograph when the time came, as if the value of these astronauts revealed the illimitable value of condemned men. They were men who would walk past their eyes to a conceivable execution in space, and so like all condemned were close to some state of more valuable existence, as if men who were about to enter death or at the least to chance its dimensions were men of inestimable refinement. Clues to the richest profit lived somehow next to death—so the moments of their life as they passed by were like the passing of a new current. The moon. Their persons would touch the moon! That was why the atmosphere in the courtyard was like a prison on the night of an execution.

  And from time to time, with the washing out of the night, and the oncoming of dawn to this dark courtyard with its waiting mob, a crack of lightning would be seen again in the distance, a crack which to Aquarius’ nerve-heightened eyes looked like a literal crack in the sky, as if electricity were now revealed as the absence of some material of the firmament.

  The mob cheered when the astronauts came through the door. Since guards and directors and technicians were periodically looking down the hall, or signaling, or making an abrupt move, the Press had been on the alert for the astronauts a dozen times. Now, they really came, and people throughout the crowd had experiences. “Fenomenal, fenomenal, fenomenal!” an Italian girl with a camera kept repeating, almost as if helpless to stop, and a worker from MSOB yelled, “Go get ’em”—the target was at last revealed—the moon like every other foreign body was an enemy, an intimate competitor. Armstrong, plastic helmet on, carrying his life-support system connected by a hose to his white space suit, white and luminous as Saturn V out on the pad, stopped just long enough to give a wave, his face within the space helmet as lashless in appearance as a newborn cat in a caul. He had never looked better. He stepped into the van, and the others, waving, stepped into the van, the doors were shut, the police keyed as always into a state of ultraresponsibility—what rumors of plots had they exchanged this morning over breakfast?—pushed everyone back as if the very departure of the van were in danger, and the vehicle of the astronauts drove down the last nine miles.

  That was all the Press saw, and to add to this frustration, they had a bad ride back. It was after six-thirty now, the launch was not three hours off, and the heavy traffic they had escaped by getting up early now engorged the road for the last mile to the Press Site. If the night had been hot, the morning heat was fierce. It took the caravans an hour to travel the five and a half miles.

  They were riding in school buses rented by the Space Center for the occasion. Like all old machines, their vehicle had developed a personality. It was hardworking, all but crippled, yet spoiled. Accustomed to carrying children, its load this morning was excessive.

  Tall thin Swedish journalists were packed in with short stubby London and South American reporters, the seats were occupied, the aisles were loaded with writers and cameramen who would stagger every time the bus stopped or started, which was every twenty feet, and the differential clanged and slapped in its case as if would break out at any moment. The bus was simply not used to being made to work so hard. Everybody was sweating. There had never been a hint of air conditioning in this vehicle.

  It was the first and only discomfort the Press had been obliged to suffer on the job. They had been treated with courtesy at the Press Center, conducted on tours, taken in small groups for interviews with nearly every prominent executive and director at Kennedy, they had even been furnished with transcripts of each large press conference so there was no need to take notes on what was said unless they were filing a story that day, and in such event they usually had their own tape recorder. Yet with every vocational aid handed to them, they had still been in a depressed state, for the relation of their news stories to the complex truth of this moon shot might be analogous to a comparison between the school bus and Saturn V.

  One of the cess-filled horrors of the Twentieth Century slowly seeping in on the journalists was that they were becoming obsolete. Events were developing a style and structure which made them almost impossible to write about. If a reporter did his homework for space, which is to say went figuratively back to school and got himself up again on forgotten physics and learned near-unpronounceable engineering terms, he could still hardly use this language in stories for popular consumption. Yet if he tried to do features on the people in the Space Project, he encountered the familiar difficulty that engineers who worked for NASA seemed to pride themselves on presenting personalities which were subtly faceless and interchangeable. A process was taking place that was too complex to be reported for daily news stories by passing observers, and so the process itself began to produce the news for the reporters. Their work had come down to rewriting publicity handouts. When they interviewed a personality in the Space Program, the eminent figure gave them quotes which sounded exactly like the handouts, except the handouts, being freed of the vicissitudes of communication between brain and tongue, were more detailed and more quotable. Computers could have written their pieces.

  This was of course happening everywhere. It was the signature of the century. Soon newspapers would be qualified to write only about fashion, theater, murder, movies, marriage and divorce. What a humiliation for these tall Swedes and stocky Britons, these hardworking Japanese, to travel so far and be able to tell so little. No wonder they had taken those unhealthy reporters’ bodies, long sacked by bad food, bad hours, much whisky and not much sex, and had jolted and jammed into one another to get a peek at the astronauts. To write about men without ever seeing them was like covering an assignment by watching television—you could do it, but your liver would have to pipe up the warmth your lack of confrontation had lost. Yet Aquarius had come to the conclusion that in this case it hardly mattered. In dealing with men who were enormously complex or with men whose passions were buried in the depths of their work, an interview could be misleading. He told himself that when the time came, he would have material enough—what kind of detective was he, if he could not divine the depths of their character by the depths of his own experience and the few clues the astronauts had already provided in their shielded public interviews? Nonetheless, he had been as eager as the rest to get a glimpse of their faces, and had been more than pleased with the sight of Armstrong looking lashless and lik
e a newborn cat in its caul. That was compensation for the endless creeping annoyance of taking an hour to go a mile in a bus. Yes, now when the time came to write about Armstrong, he would be better able from these few clues to reconstruct him, like the dinosaur from the fossil bone.

  They got back to the Press Site at seven-thirty. The sun was clearly up and burning through a haze. In the distance, through binoculars, Saturn V now looked gray, a near-white gray, a gray palpability among other grays. Everything was gray, the Launch Pad, the tower, the vehicle, the sky. The rocket looked as if it were already on the moon. Only the sun gave a platinum edge to the outline of Saturn and the cryogenic cloud.

  Aquarius, still brooding over the astronauts, came to the gloomy conclusion that even if you comprehended them (came to some whole notion that they were finally good and noble men, or men who were brave but not without malignity), you would still be inhibited from saying in confidence that the Space Program was for good or ill since History often used the best of men for the worst of purposes and discarded them when the machines of new intent were ready. As often History had used the worst of men to convert an unhealthy era to a new clime. But like a dive into a dream, explorations of these questions would only open into deeper questions. Standing in the early morning heat he had an instinct that before all was done the questions would travel through the unmapped continent of America’s undetermined heart.

  V

  On this morning, with two hours to spend before the launch, he chooses not to get into another bus—not another bus this day!—to travel to the other side of the Vehicle Assembly Building where the VIPs will be sitting in bleachers. He knows there is a good haul there—all of two hundred congressmen, Sargent Shriver, Mr. and Mrs. James E. Webb, William W. Scranton, Jack Benny, Cardinal Cooke, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Johnny Carson, Gianni Agnelli, Senator Javits, Leon Schacter of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workers, Prince Napoleon of Paris, four hundred foreign ministers, attachés and military aviation officials, two hundred and seventy-five leaders of commerce and industry, Vice President Agnew, Lady Bird and former President Lyndon B. Johnson, plus Barry Goldwater in slacks and a red golfing shirt. The last two will shake hands for the cameras before this is all over—space will prove bigger than both of them. The voice of duty has suggested to Aquarius that he should be there to study them, record their expressions, comment on the part of history they command and their relation to the part of history now being born, but his liver will simply not permit it. He is here to see the rocket go up, not to stand and look at Very Important People and take notes in a notebook while he sweats in the heat. No, some sense of his own desire to dwell near the rocket, to contemplate its existence as it ascends, and certainly some sense of his own privacy, some demand of his vanity—aware of how grubby he looks and feels—now bids him to stay with his own sweaty grubs, the Press and photographers gathered in the grandstand bleachers and out on the small field before the lagoon which separates them from the blast-off of Apollo 11. Besides he dislikes the VIPs, dislikes most of them taken one by one, and certainly dislikes them as a gang, a Mafia of celebrity, a hierarchical hive. He is still sufficiently a Manichean to believe that if Saturn V goes up in perfect launch, it will not be the fault of the guests. No, some of the world’s clowns, handmaidens, and sycophants and some of the most ambitious and some of the very worst people in the world had gotten together at the dignitaries’ stand. If this display of greed, guilt, wickedness, and hoarded psychic gold could not keep Saturn V off its course, then wickedness was weak today. Or did wickedness crowd to the witness stand to cheer evil on its flight? It did not matter how the reporter’s mind turned, it was filled with nothing but the most fruitless questions today. He discovered he was thirsty.

  So in preference to taking the bus and taking notes on the guests, he stood in line for another large part of an hour waiting for a cold drink. In back of the Press Site, more than a hundred radio and TV trailers were now arrayed behind one another in ranks and rows of huge white ruminants, the very sacred cows of American technology. Yet there was only one trailer reserved for food. It was next to heartwarming to discover another piece of poor planning in the icy efficiencies of the Space Program—small surprise that it had to do with a creature comfort like food. The trailer was inadequate to the needs of the Press—over a hundred waited in line, more than a hundred walked away in disgust. The line drifted forward about as fast as a tide works up a beach. The trailer interior consisted of a set of vending machines for chiliburgers, hamburgers, pastries—all people wanted were cold drinks. So the line crawled, while everyone waited for the same machine. Nobody was about to have machine-vended chiliburgers at half-past eight in the morning. But so many demands on the iced-drink machine caused malfunctions. Soon, two vending machine workers were helping to service the machine. Still it took forever. Coins had to go into their slot, change be made, cups filled, tot of cracked ice dropped, syrup poured, then soda. Just one machine. It was pure American lunacy. Shoddy technology, the worst kind of American shoddy, was replacing men with machines which did not do the work as well as the men. This crowd of a hundred thirsty reporters could have been handled in three minutes by a couple of countermen at a refreshment stand in a ball park. But there was an insidious desire to replace men everywhere with absurd machines poorly designed and abominably put together; yes, this abominable food vending trailer was the proper opposite number to those smug and complacent VIPs in their stands a half mile away; this was the world they had created, not the spaceship. They knew nothing about the spaceship but its value in the eyes of the world—that was all they had to know. The food vending trailer was their true product. When they mouthed their portions of rhetoric, when they spoke, lo! their mouths poured forth cement—when they talked about poverty and how poverty could be solved by the same methods and discipline and effort devoted to space, he would have liked to say to them: Solve your food vendors first! Solve your shoddy appliances first! your planned obsolescences!—then you may begin to think of how to attack the poverty of others. He was in a fury at the complacency of their assumption that they could solve the problems of the poor. His favorite man, Lyndon Johnson, was telling Walter Cronkite on television, “There’s so much that we have yet to do—the hunger in the world, the sickness in the world. We must apply some of the great talent that we’ve applied to space to these problems.” Yes, his mouth poured forth cement.

  Once Aquarius had gone—in payment for a professional debt and so against his will—to a show at the Jewish Museum in New York. Over the years, a photographer named Clayton had taken photographs of the poor, of the very poor, of Southern Black faces so poor they were tortured by hunger. Remarkable faces looked back at him, the faces of saints and ogres, of emaciated angels and black demons, martyrs, philosophers, mummies and misers, children with the eyes of old vaudeville stars, children with faces like midgets and witches, children with eyes which held the suffering of the lamb. But they were all faces which had gone through some rite of passage, some purification of their good, some definition of their remaining evil—how loyal could evil be to people so poor? Aquarius retreated from these photographs with no unhappy sense of shock—these poor to whom he like every other middle-class mother of a professional gave money from time to time (or to their charities at least) were a people on a plane of subsistence which had tortured their flesh, but delivered some essence of their nature, some delineation which never arrived to the face of men and women who were comfortable. They had survived, they looked indeed as if they had passed under one of the four corners of the winding-sheet of the dead, and so knew more than he would ever know. Yes, remarkable faces looked back at him, more beautiful by far than his face would ever be, or Lyndon Johnson’s face, or the long uncorrugated snoot of Barry Goldwater. “Well,” said Aquarius softly of these faces of the poor, “they look better than most of my friends.”

  Yes, the poor were not a gaggle to be collected by a bulldozer, shoved, mashed, annealed, and poured into
plastic suits they could wear in New NASA Subsidiary Poverty Suburbs. No, they were rather part of the remaining resource of a spiritually anemic land, and so their economic deliverance was a mystery which would yet defy the first and the last of the social engineers. The truth was that their faces were better than the three perfectly pleasant and even honorable faces of the three astronauts.

  But the voice of the Public Affairs Officer came out of the loudspeaker mounted on a speaker’s platform on the grass in front of the grandstand.

  This is Apollo-Saturn Launch Control. T minus 61 minutes and counting—T minus 61 minutes on the Apollo 11 countdown, and all elements are GO at this time. Astronaut Neil Armstrong has just completed a series of checks on that big Service Propulsion System engine that sits below him in the stack. We want to assure ourselves before lift-off that that engine can respond to commands from inside the spacecraft. As Neil Armstrong moved his rotational hand controller we assured ourselves that the engine did respond by swiveling or gimbaling.

  Aquarius felt chopped into fragments. The combination of waiting in line at the mechanical vendor, of undergoing Lyndon B. Johnson homiletics, batting his eyes against the heat, subduing his rage, passing through the disembodied experience of recall!—those Black faces in the photographs had been a sure planet apart from the faces of his fellow grubs in the Press Site at the white-painted grandstand—and now the voice on the public address system, bringing to the journalists of the world some of the intimate details of the countdown. Somewhere—not very far away in fact—some giant conception was being delivered, and the doctors were careful to provide many a detail.