It was one thing to be without ego; quite another to indulge this new modesty in mean quarters. Like many men who lived comfortably for years, he had always taken it for granted that he was superior to his surroundings and could dwell anywhere. Well, maybe one could still dwell anywhere with love, but loveless this week he was obliged to recognize that his basement apartment installed in an interlocking layout of ranch-style apartments, inner patios and underground garages was no place for him to thrive. Not on this job. If he had become a little obsessed with the meanings of a trip to the moon—going on now full attraction into its first night and second day and second night while he languished in his dun coop—if he had come to recognize that the more one brooded on this trip, the more fantastic it became, there was still the thundering and most depressing fact that it was a cancer bud for a journalist to cover. There were assignments which could make a reporter happy—he sometimes thought it would be impossible for a good quick-working novelist to be unable to write a decent piece about a political convention or a well-organized anarchy of the modern young. Give Aquarius a great heavyweight championship fight, and he would give you a two-volume work. There was so much to say. One’s senses threatened to sear one’s brain with excess of perception. The people at the center of such events nourished you with the tragicomedy of the traps they entered and sometimes escaped. But in NASA-land, the only thing open was the technology—the participants were so overcome by the magnitude of their venture they seemed to consider personal motivation as somewhat obscene. He had never before encountered as many people whose modest purr of efficiency apparently derived from being cogs in a machine—was this the perspective of the century to come or was this the end of a long and insane road?
He did not know, and the fact that he did not know depressed him further. Usually when one did a journalistic piece, the events fit in advance into some part of one’s picture of the world. Most interesting about such events was the way they obliged you to make modest or delightful adjustments in the picture. Or even grim adjustments. But you did not have to contemplate throwing the picture away. Aquarius, now plucked up from the circus bonanzas and flaming cathedrals of lift-off, was in Houston dropped smack into the fact that the best way to do the rest of this damnable story was probably to go home and cover the works by television. He simply did not feel himself coming closer in Houston to the value or horror of the oncoming achievement; he did not see that there was any way to come closer. Occasionally, which is to say, five or six times a day, he would drive over to the Press Center at MSC on the other side of the highway, and skulk around the movie theater with the marcelled ceiling. When there was no press conference on—and usually there wasn’t—he would look at a blank screen and listen to talk on the squawk box go back and forth between the Capcom and the spacecraft, the astronauts’ voices wiped as clean of emotion as a corncob shucked of kernels. In the interim, distances increased. When he got back to Houston that first night, they were fourteen hours out, so their journey had already covered sixty-six thousand nautical miles! All that while he had been surfboarding, celebrating, and then flying back from Melbourne, Florida, to Intercontinental Airport at Houston. Indeed the astronauts even covered another five thousand miles in the hour it took Aquarius to drive his rented car the fifty-odd miles from the airport through Houston, to Nassau Bay on the other side of town. Next afternoon, thirty hours into their flight, they were over one hundred and twenty thousand land miles out, and their speed had reduced to thirty-five hundred miles an hour. Their voices were of course the same. It did not matter whether they spoke from three miles away or one hundred and thirty-three thousand miles away, the hard peasant facts upon which Aquarius’ education had been built, the consciousness that numbers were real units, hard as hours of work and miles one walked, now had to be discarded into some waste-nexus of the mind, some stink of the unusable like the Jersey flats. The real fact was that distance was now an abstract concept; men performing brave and heroic acts were communing over radio whatever the distance. The absence of simple human witness was the fact, not the distance. Sitting in the movie theater, he realized he would find out nothing he desired to know. Yet back of the movie theater was the Newsroom, now jammed with men, rows of desks fifty feet long, hundreds of typewriters, hundreds of phones, hundreds of soft-links in shirt-sleeves transmitting the information which came in at one end of the communication belt from all the publicity pipes in NASA and would soon go out on the other end after all the news-transmitters (human) had retyped the words. Milling through this matrix were forty or fifty men with portable tape recorders and microphones with radio call letters which looked like branding irons. They were always shoving these branding irons in your face, Australian blokes, Swiss blokes, Italian jokers, Japanese gentlemen, Norwegian asthma sufferers, French dudes, Swedish students, even Texas local radio station apprentices. They wanted to interview Aquarius. Aquarius, three weeks habituated to his new uncomfortable racket! Aquarius, Doctor of Rocketry! He said no. He who had once thought he had only to get on all the radio and television available and he would be able to change the world, now wished only to flee this room with its hundreds of journalists, some so bored and aimless they even wished to interview him, he who now had nothing to say. The latest in the quintessential ironies of his life is that he had become a celebrity at precisely the hour when he ceased to desire it. Oh, what a depression!
II
Events kept passing him by. A number of feature stories had been written in anticipation of the moment when the astronauts would pass behind the moon. Having turned the spacecraft around to go tailfirst, they would then fire the propulsion motor on the Service Module. That would brake the speed of the flight, and put them in orbit. Since they would be out of radio communication when it happened, no one would know for the next half hour if the burn had been successful, not until they came around the invisible side of the lunar sphere and their antennae were in unobstructed line with the earth again. It promised to offer excitement. Would the motor start? Or were there lunar emanations no physicist had ever conceived?
Actually, Aquarius was bored. Sitting in the Manned Spacecraft Center movie theater, he noticed that the Press was also bored, for few were listening to the squawk box. They all knew the burn would succeed and Apollo 11 would go into proper orbit. There seemed no question of failure, and indeed the burn and the reacquisition of radio communication went on schedule. Aquarius could detect surly traces in himself, as if he were annoyed with the moon—it should not be so simple to trespass her zones. He was, of course, no longer thinking in any real way—what passed for thought were the dull whirrings of his depression, about as functional to real intellectual motion as the turning over of a starter when the battery is almost dead. In fact he could not forgive the astronauts their resolute avoidance of a heroic posture. It was somehow improper for a hero to be without flamboyance as if such modesty deprived his supporters of any large pleasure in his victories. What joy might be found in a world which would have no hope of a Hemingway? Or nearest matters first, of a Joe Namath, or Cassius Clay, Jimmy Dean, Dominguin?—it was as if the astronauts were there to demonstrate that heroism’s previous relation to romance had been highly improper—it was technology and the absence of emotion which were the only fit mates for the brave. Yesterday, or one of the days which had already become interleaved in the passage of time at Dun Cove, he had read a newspaper story where Armstrong’s wife, Jan, had been quoted: “What we can’t understand, we fear.” Even the ladies of brave men spoke like corporation executives on this job. His heart went dull at the thought of the total take-over implicit in the remark, so neat, so ambitious, so world-vaulting in its assumption that sooner or later everything would be understood—“I paid a trip to death, and death is a pleasant place and ready for us to come in and renovate it.” Abruptly Aquarius realized that for years he had thought of death as located in the milieu of the moon, as if our souls, those of us who died with one, might lift and rise, be free of the law of gr
avity and on trajectory to the satellite of the craters. Yes, wouldn’t it be in the purview of the Wasp, damn corporate Wasp, to disturb the purlieus of the dead? He did not know. His thoughts were always furthest out when he was most depressed, as though like a bird half drowned, the only way to lift was by the wildest beating of wings.
The real heroism, he thought, was to understand, and because one understood, be even more full of fear at the enormity of what one understood, yet at that moment continue to be ready for the feat one had decided it was essential to perform. So Julien Sorel had been brave when he kissed Madame de Rênal, and Jimmy Dean been brave in Rebel Without a Cause, and Namath when he mocked the Baltimore Colts knowing the only visions he would arouse in his enemy were visions of murder. So had Cassius Clay been brave—to dare to be rude to Liston—and Floyd Patterson brave to come back to boxing after terrible humiliation, and Hemingway conceivably brave to continue to write in short sentences after being exposed to the lividities of the literary world.
But the astronauts, brave men, proceeded on the paradoxical principle that fear once deposed by knowledge would make bravery redundant. It was in the complacent assumption that the universe was no majestic mansion of architectonics out there between evil and nobility, or strife on a darkling plain, but rather an ultimately benign field of investigation which left Aquarius in the worst of his temper.
Next morning came the news of Teddy Kennedy’s accident at Chappaquiddick. Dead was the young lady who had been driving with him. How subtle was the voice of the moon. Aquarius remembered a speech Kennedy had given two months earlier at Clark University in Worcester. Mrs. Robert H. Goddard, widow of the father of American rocketry, had been there, and Buzz Aldrin as well. Kennedy had urged that future space funds be moved over to such problems as poverty, hunger, pollution and housing. The chill which came back from NASA was as cold as the architecture at the Manned Spacecraft Center. “We won’t be including this item in the daily news reports we send up to the Apollo 10 astronauts on their voyage to the moon,” Thomas O. Paine, administrator of NASA had said. Now the reverberations of this accident at Chappaquiddick went off in Aquarius’ brain. As happens so often when a motive is buried, Aquarius felt excitement around the hollows of his depression. For if the blow to the fortunes of the Kennedys was also a blow to one hundred interesting possibilities in American life, if the accident was of such benefit to Richard Nixon that the Devil himself if he had designed the mishap (which is what every liberal Democrat must secretly believe) could have awarded himself a medal for the artistry, yet there was at least a suggestion that the moon had thought to speak. Perhaps that was why there was still a trace of stimulation in the gloom—magic might not be altogether dead.
The day went by, a cloudy day in southeastern Texas. From time to time, Aquarius checked in at the Press Center. Excitement was now divided between Kennedy and the moon. Or was Kennedy even more interesting? The separate phases of the preparation for landing were certainly without high tension. Indeed the Lem even undocked from the Command Module while both were behind the moon. When they came around and signal was picked up again, the voice of Armstrong came over the squawk box. “The Eagle has wings,” he said, or was it Aldrin who said it?—there was discussion on this for the remark was universally quotable. Yet the happy buzz of conversation among the reporters at the thought of an oncoming climax was dampened considerably by the dialogue which followed:
CAPCOM: … Coming at you with a DOI pad. 101361407981 minus 00758 plus all balls plus 00098 plus corrections 00572 perigee plus 00085 00764 030000293 986 minus 00759 plus all balls plus 00090 rest of the pad is NA. Stand by on your read-back. If you are ready to copy the PDI data, I have it for you. Over.
ALDRIN: … Go ahead with the PDI.
CAPCOM: Roger. PDI pad, PIG 102330436 0950 minus 00021 182287000 plus 56919—
So one got ready for the climax of the greatest week since Christ was born. An hour and twenty minutes later, the Lem having flown around the moon and gone behind it again, the braking burn for the Descent Orbit Initiation would be begun in radio silence. An hour later the final ignition for the final descent would commence. Aquarius, bereft of personal radar or gyroscope, bereft even of the sniff-sensors of his poor journalistic nose, wandered from point to point in the Press Center, rushed back to Dun Cove to look at color television—there were no color sets in the Press Room—then, bored with listening to commentators, and finally incapable of witnessing the event alone, went back to the movie theater and settled in with about a hundred other reporters for the last half hour.
Phrases came through the general static of the public address system. “Eagle looking great. You’re go,” came through, and statements of altitude. “You’re go for landing, over!” “Roger, understand. Go for landing. 3000 feet.” “We’re go, hang tight, we’re go. 2000 feet.” So the voices came out of the box. Somewhere a quarter of a million miles away, ten years of engineering and training, a thousand processes and a million parts, a huge swatch out of twenty-five billion dollars and a hovering of machinery were preparing to go through the funnel of a historical event whose significance might yet be next to death itself, and the reporters who would interpret this information for the newsprint readers of the world were now stirring in polite if mounting absorption with the calm cryptic technological voices which came droning out of the box. Was it like that as one was waiting to be born? Did one wait in a modern room with strangers while numbers were announced—“Soul 77-48-16—you are on call. Proceed to Staging Area CX—at 16:04 you will be conceived.”
So the words came. And the moon came nearer. “3½ down, 220 feet, 13 forward, 11 forward, coming down nicely. 200 feet, 4½ down. 5½ down. 160, 6½ down. 5½ down. 9 forward. 5 percent. Quantity light. 75 feet. Things looking good. Down a half. 6 forward.”
“Sixty seconds,” said another voice.
Was that a reference to fuel? Had that been the Capcom? Or was it Aldrin or Armstrong? Who was speaking now? The static was a presence. The voice was almost dreamy. Only the thinnest reed of excitement quivered in the voice.
“Lights on. Down 2½. Forward. Forward. Good. 40 feet. Down 2½. Picking up some dust. 30 feet, 2½ down. Faint shadow. 4 forward. 4 forward. Drifting to the right a little. 6 … down a half.”
Another voice said, “Thirty seconds.” Was that thirty seconds of fuel? A modest stirring of anticipation came up from the audience.
“Drifting right. Contact light. Okay,” said the voice as even as before, “engine stop. ACA out of detente. Modes control both auto, descent engine command override, off. Engine arm, off. 413 is in.”
A cry went up, half jubilant, half confused. Had they actually landed?
The Capcom spoke: “We copy you down, Eagle.” But it was a question.
“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” It was Armstrong’s voice, the quiet voice of the best boy in town, the one who pulls you drowning from the sea and walks off before you can offer a reward. The Eagle has landed—it reached the Press. They burst into applause. It was the kind of applause you used to hear in the packed film houses of the Thirties when the movie came over the hill of the last reel, and you heard the doctor say the star would live after the operation. Now, a small bedlam of actions began, some of the Press sprinting from the room—could they pretend it was necessary to phone the City Desk?—others talking to each other in babble, others still listening to the squawk box as technology took up again. A few minutes later: “Eagle. Houston. You loaded R2 wrong. We want 10254.”
“Roger—that is V horizontal 5515.2.”
“That’s affirmative.”
Aquarius discovered he was happy. There was a man on the moon. There were two men on the moon. It was a new feeling, absolutely without focus for him. If he felt a faint graveling on the surface of this sentiment, a curdle of emotional skin which formed from his effort to advance heroes he could not find altogether admirable, still he knew he had been dislocated as profoundly by the experience as the m
oment he learned in the fathers’ waiting room at the hospital that his first child had indeed and actually just been born. “Well, think of that,” he had said. What a new fact! Real as the presence of immanence and yet not located at all, not yet, not in the comfortable quarters one afforded for the true and real facts of the life of the brain.
“Let’s go interview the wives,” someone suggested. And Aquarius, grateful for an opportunity to try a few journalistic tools, was happily off and away from the reign of the Capcom, the squawk box, and the abstract incubated existence of brand-new Tranquility Base.
III
The Armstrong house was modest, with a high-pitched roof of brown shingles. It was a house like half a million other houses in suburbs combining modern and brand-new traditional style. It had hints of an English country inn, for it was a dark-colored warren with small windows and long eaves. Yet the house was situated on a street whose curve had come from no meandering cow but from favorable indices on graphs which showed the relation of income to cost for planned curved-development streets as opposed to planned straight-development streets. El Lago—the name of this suburb—like those others named Kingston and Timber Cove and Nassau Bay—was a soft checkerboard of carefully bent little avenues which ran at reasonable approximations of right angles into other paved prospects, a street occasionally dead-ending, a street just as occasionally completing a full circle. The realty layoutcomputer in its wisdom for random play in home-road curvature had designed the layout logic so comprehensively, so ready to take into account the variety of desire-factors expressed by consumer dweller-groups oriented in at these precise income-purchase levels, that the effect—what a blow to the goodwill of the progressive designer who had doubtless opted for just once let’s have something better!—was as agreeable and sterile to the eye as a model department store living room for brides on a medium-high budget layaway.
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