Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  Yes, one could look for the villain everywhere, even in the White House, one could chase the death of those three men down all the lobbying corridors of the Capitol, one could make a political case, yet no engineer could be certain it would not have happened just as well if Martin had made the machine, for a wrench left behind by a workman was found near wires whose insulation may have been bruised by the opening and closing of the hatch. It needed only one minor short circuit in that capsule full of oxygen, one evil spark.

  Besides, Grissom had a reputation as well. He was—bear the word!—a sport, and sports were known to attract witches late at night, and witches might have a curse. Grissom had almost died once in the Liberty Bell, and White, his crewmate, now also dead, had been the first to walk in space on Gemini 4, and John Glenn, first American to orbit in space, had fallen in his bathtub and been harshly incapacitated. Was a curse building like the curse of the Pharaohs on the explorers who would open their tomb? Onto such Sunday feature stories may the dread of engineers be attached.

  Whatever the reason for the fire, it was certain that everyone at NASA and every corporation attached to the project of Apollo 11 had worked in a different way since. Space was no longer on corporate effort so much as on a coordinated effort to produce the finest achievement in every detail. A massive holy wedding of the entrepreneur and the engineer had produced a massive vehicle tested and retested, checked and rechecked, triumphant in the four mighty flights of Apollo 7, 8, 9, and 10, and now ready to demonstrate before the world that the psychology of the machine did not exist and man could land on the moon. What an enormous subterranean fear that indeed it did.

  V

  In the Project Engineering Facility Building at MSC in Houston, a white building with neutral cream walls, red tile floor in the lobby, and a plastic ceiling with inset lights and metal baffles for the air conditioning, there was a room just off the entrance furnished with nothing but soft-drink machines and automatic food vendors. A man could buy his lunch off those walls. A choice was presented of preheated cans of Vienna sausage, corned beef, beef and macaroni, Dagwood sandwiches, pastry, chili, chiliburgers. One could have been back at the food trailer at Cape Kennedy still waiting angrily for a cold drink and the launch, but there was a difference. In this NASA building for space engineers, the automatic food vendors were a natural feature of the interior landscape: here men walked around with gnawing technical problems on their brain, that very brain they must accelerate each day with coffee and cigarettes in order to pull up from the gut a little more juice than had been allotted to the head by the body’s requisitions on the energy pool. NASA technicians were men obsessed with the vertiginous interface between physics and engineering, and so they were likely to stay locked in their heads for hours, working and worrying at their small piece of the continent of techniques and inched-up improvements which lay over their work. So they did not want to go to lunch and talk. It was sometimes important not to have to meet people while taking on food, important not to have to go through the barrage of interpersonal relations and random Brownian collisions of personality in the company cafeteria—that was the worst interface of all—saying hello to a mixed set of friends, acquaintances and strangers. So they slouched in alone into the automatic vending machine room, deposited their dimes and quarters with all the small libidinal benefits which accrue from small insertions, and rose thoughtfully in the elevator back to their office and the hot can of lamb stew. Yes, people at NASA tended to have what Aquarius had come to call a lunar air. If there was a human aura that surrounded the body, an invisible spiritual envelope which if large enough, spiritual enough, dense enough, menacing enough or glamorous enough could be felt as a presence, an emanation, a—God save the mystique!—a charisma, then of all the people who had it and some had it like Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali and Bobby Kennedy and Teddy Kennedy and Pearl Bailey and Jimmy Breslin and Brigitte Bardot and Charles Laughton, there were others who did not have it at all, hordes of hippies, for example, livers and aura consumed in forgotten vertigos of LSD. One had the impression it was possible to go up to such people and lay a finger on their skin. No notice of presence or unseen halo, no sense of a forced passage through some invisible envelope about the person, no welcome, no hostility would cause the finger to hesitate, not even for an instant, not even a quarter of an inch from the skin. Such hippies were moonmen; like the moon they had no atmosphere surrounding them. So they possessed not an aura but a lunar air—their envelope was gone. As FBI men used to be able to detect Communists anywhere (by a gift of the nose, by a gift of the nose!) so Aquarius always thought he had a sense of anyone who had ever taken too much LSD. Some salt of the libido was washed out; the aura was gone.

  Now he felt that same absence, that same bemusement, same lunar air in all so many of the NASA technicians. It was not that they took LSD—he was confident most of them had not even gone near marijuana—it was rather a reflection of that same intoxication which thinned the blood and sucked the life from the complexion of the hippies: it was that rush of thoughts extorted by the iron of the will, that liege paid by the body to provide the brain with intellectual ecstasies.

  Now, just as hippies might owe their lunar air to the consumption of the soul (and worse! the soul of futures unborn) in the fires of mystical states they had not earned but seized by a flight of drugs, so could the technicians derive their lunar air from an accumulation through the days of the little dread which never left, that particular dread which inhabited their insomnia like an incubus until the query over coffee in the morning break on how well did you sleep was no longer equal to a remark on the weather. There was a psychology to machines or there was not. Who could forget that eighty minutes after Apollo 7 had lifted off there had been a power failure in the Mission Control Center at Houston. In the Mission Control Center! One could not get nearer to the center of the technical brain. If the mission computer was kept operating by emergency power, by special backup power, still forty or fifty mission controllers stood before dark consoles for two minutes, unable to follow the flight, nothing to see in the room but the dull nightmarish red of emergency lamps. How their faces must have looked in that deep boudoir light! Then the power came back. The rest of the flight went more or less on schedule, except for fifty specified mishaps and the counterbalance of an announcement by good General Phillips, “… a perfect mission … we have accomplished 101 percent of our intended objectives.”

  But give all power to the psychology of machines, there was as much to worry about in the very real interface between physics and engineering. Interface! Perhaps it was the biggest word at NASA. Interface was that no-man’s-land where you joined the mouth of one bag to the mouth of a very different bag. Kissing, for example, was an interface. Indeed all primitive, which is to say, unclarified relations, were interface. The place where the first stage of a Saturn V was joined to the second stage was an interface because they would be first together then apart, and when they sundered there had to be a way to separate them, blow them apart, cut all the communicating wires at the same time. If the human leg could be used and immediately detached in such a way that no bones would groan and no blood flow we might speak of an interface at the groin. Interpersonal relations were interface—you bought your food in the automatic vending machine room to avoid interface, the waitress coming up to your dinner table for the first time was interface, the taxicab driver to the new passenger, the cop to the kid he has just arrested, the boy making love to his girl—interface was at every joint in Apollo-Saturn, the joint where the Command Module holding the astronauts met the Service Module holding the motor and the fuel to reach to the moon. Interface was where the Service Module met the SLA which held the Lem. Where the SLA met the Instrument Unit which directed the three stages of Saturn V. Interface was between each of those three stages. Think of the engineering which had gone into the ability to separate objects weighing hundreds of thousands of pounds and traveling as fast as twenty or twenty-five thousand miles an hour, ye
s, interface was the step from physics to engineering, from the statement that such a separation was possible by the laws of physics into the mechanical arrangements which made it work, and work 100 percent of the time (unless there was a psychology of machines to assert itself on the thousandth or ten thousandth time). Physics was a study of the order and courtliness and splendor and bewildering mystery of the rules of action in nature, a contemplation of its forces; engineering was immersion into the slippage coefficient of the adhesive applied to the nut which held the bolt of one ten-millionth of the total conception fleshed into a machine, that conception which first was drawn by a physicist on a blackboard. At a stroke! “Here, we will have the interface. The stages will separate.” So physics was love and engineering was marriage. Physics was sex, conception and the communion of the family—engineering was getting the eggs out on time. Physics was the quiet remark, “Give an object an escape velocity of 36,000 feet per second and it will be able to leave the gravitational field of the earth.” Engineering was the fifty years of rockets digging furrows in cornfields and catching fire on the pad from leaky valves. Engineering was the five hundred thousand men who burned up libido and slaved for years in the effort to put together enough collective effort to get a spaceship weighing six and a half million pounds to lift itself and acquire velocity sufficient to escape the six and a half million pounds of attraction the gravitational field of the earth would put on that ship.

  Then, of course, not all questions could be solved by physics. Sometimes engineering was obliged to work on its side of the interface with no certainties whatsoever. Think of a marriage created by computer, a couple found instrumentally suitable to one another: the computer, having studied the questionnaires they filled out, had joined them. But the computer, being new at this variety of human engineering, did not necessarily conceive of every requisite detail and property. Some characteristics are buried. So the couple were perfectly suited except that the husband had a body odor which was repugnant to the wife. Across the interface, physics was immediately consulted.

  “Unfortunately,” said Physics, “there is no acceptable science of smell.”

  “Shouldn’t a simultaneity of all other compatible attributes tend to suggest a compatible odor?” asks Engineering.

  “That is the diabolical aspect of all these stinks,” confesses the doctor of Physics. “Sometimes a smell is in concert with the collective attribute, sometimes it is out of phase. You will have to solve your dilemma with no help from viable theory.”

  Engineering has its means. A deodorant is used. Should the problem be immediately solved, engineering has staked out another habitable territory free of physics. But wait. The solution proves temporary. The deodorant inspires a genital rash in the man. Solution B: other deodorants. Answer B: other eczemas. Solution C: inhibit the wife’s olfactory nerve by surgery. Solution C is temporarily satisfactory. Wife, however, loses a portion of her ability to cook as well as she did before, and the marriage rolls down a slump vector in another direction. That is engineering without help from physics. For every flaw there is a compensatory move which can kick off new malfunctions which in turn will request other solutions with still other difficulties. Occasionally an elegant move arises—a male perfume is concocted to alter the husband’s armpit: it blends, alters, nay diverts his natural odor over to one end of the wife’s spectrum of acceptance. Now the function is relatively normal. That’s engineering when it’s happy. When it is miserable, the tests go on and on, and across the interface, physics turns out its pockets, speaks of the unplumbable depths of its mysteries, and the tests themselves drip with breakdown and malfunction—the machines to test the machines are even exhibiting a psychology of machines. Leave dread alone—out of the sheer exhaustion of the intellectual search is enough libido burned to give the average engineer his lunar air. No wonder there were feature stories now and again in local papers about the high rate of divorce in NASA circles. “He has no time left over from his work to give to me,” was the cry of the wives across the interface. They could as well have screamed: “The machines have sucked up his libido.”

  VI

  Now it is the product of all this anxiety, all this hard work, dread, political lobbying, corporate corruption, and messianic teamwork, this overburn of libido, and sense of mission in a new monastery of men, a sense of mission indeed unique in the moral junkyards of the century, that, yes, as a product finally of the twenty-four billion dollars spent, and ten years of concerted effort, and mishaps beyond number, and the tragedy of a fire in which no high executive associated with NASA could be certain he was without guilt, yes, as that product, Apollo 11 stood at last on its Launch Pad on top of Saturn V, and was ready on the morning of July 16 to blast-off for the moon. And as the astronauts lay on their backs, at the top of that enormous stack, eyes pointed up to Heaven (except that they could not see the sky for the nose cone of Apollo 11 was covered by a heat shield), as the astronauts lay waiting, Neil Armstrong in the left seat, Buzz Aldrin in the center, and Mike Collins on the right, the view above them was a bank of instruments within reach of their hands, and from that short distance near as numerous in appearance as the stars, some six hundred and fifty switches, dials, meters, circuit breakers, controls and displays in formation after formation of instruments overhead and to their sides, black buttons, gray buttons, striped yellow and black latches with hooded covers for controls so critical they must not be touched by accident, squares of glass for warning lights, computer windows, abort lights, master alarms, velocity indicators, flight controls, controls for stabilization, propulsion, attitude indicators, altitude indicators, just some of the banks of buttons and switches set on the gray panel overhead for the commander, a mounted variety of toggle switches, rotary switches with click stops, thumbwheels and push buttons, even controls with locks which must be released before they could be operated. Now, add the controls of the pilot in the center seat with his commands over reaction control propellant management, over environment control, over fuel storage subsystems, and the pilot on the right now in charge of his two-hundred-odd pieces of selection and monitoring over communications, electrical control, data storage and fuel cell components, service propulsion subsystems, the three pilots all capable of performing each others’ jobs in emergency, all of them aware, indeed immersed for months in the practice and malpractice, the meaning and occasional ultrameaning of the six-hundred-odd varieties of warning and choice personified in these controls, these switches, these breakers, these buttons, these instrumented schools of technological fish so ready to detect every portrayal of emergency, and watch over the sequences of their mission, the changes of their velocity, the measure of their fuels, the control of their environment in that gray conical home and chamber and ship, not twelve feet wide inside, not ten feet high, the Command Module with its several systems of radio, its tanks and batteries and fuel cells, its caution and entry systems, and below these overhead dials, there out in front of their extended feet another host of cabinets and spigots and new dials for food, for medical monitoring instruments, for film and sanitation equipment, hot water, navigation instruments, guidance-system optics, rendezvous radar transponders, sextant and telescope, waste-water tank, oxygen regulators, pressure regulators, suit test valves, temperature controls, cabin-pressure controls, mission timer, fan motors, purge valves, radiators, exterior lights, interior lights, the Ordeal panel (Orbit-rate-drive-earth-and-lunar panel) and two hand controls on the armrests of the commander’s seat, the Thrust-Translater Controller, which enabled him to accelerate on any one of three axes, forward or back, up or down, right or left, and holding the same handle to be able to begin the abort sequence, which could cut the mission short merely by turning the T-shaped handle in a counterclockwise direction, as well as the Attitude Controller Assembly on the right armrest, which was used to maneuver the spaceship via its small rocket thruster engines into any combination of pitching nose-up or nose-down, pointing the craft into a yaw left or right, or rolling
to either side—yes this whole constellation of systems and subsystems of control over power, and control over the beaming out of thought translated into electromagnetic waves, and control even over the disposal of simple human waste sits over, above, around, beneath, yes and even behind the three astronauts in whole congeries of Twentieth Century concepts and forces which have come to focus that this effort may fly to the moon. And so Armstrong, sitting in the commander’s seat, space suit on, helmet on, plugged into electrical and environmental umbilicals, is a man who is not only a machine himself in the links of these networks, but is also a man sitting in (what Collins is later to call) a “mini-cathedral,” a man somewhat more than a pilot, somewhat more indeed than a superpilot, is in fact a veritable high priest of the forces of society and scientific history concentrated in that mini-cathedral, a general of the church of the forces of technology, for think not of the fifteen miles of wire in that small capsule, but of the vast multi-billion dollar technological bands which belted the very economy of the nation, bands which gathered together the technological solutions to problems intricate, explosive, and sometimes not comprehended by physics (merely manipulated by engineering) and ran them up and down and in and out of every dial, switch and circuit breaker in the plastic interior of that capsule, and even belted the plastic surface of that gray Armalon fireproof fiber-glass cloth which made the bed of the couch on which the astronaut in his space suit sat, no, lay under the roof of the rocket, flat on his back as a baby in his crib, and talked into the plastic band of black microphone at his lip, yes, Armstrong was a general of the church of all these forces holy or most uncomfortably unholy and now soon to be on the loose.