Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  If there was a psychology of machines, and a machine could actually be (even in one part of ten million) a creature, then the Lem was a creature. But whether it was attractive was another matter. It had been designed from the inside, and so was about as ugly as a human body which had shaped itself around the excessive development of a few special organs. Conceive of a man whose only function in life was to win pie-eating contests—what a stomach would he develop, large as a steamer trunk! So the Lem was a craft to carry two men in a minimum of space with the maximum of fuel. It would have guiding systems and communication systems and engines, and since it would come to land first by hovering, then settling, it had four long spiderlike legs rather than wheels. It even came in two connected parts. There was a lower portion containing the motor and fuel for its descent. The upper half or ascent stage, which the astronauts inhabited, would later blast off from the lower or descent stage, and go back to the Command Module, where its drogue would meet the other’s probe in rendezvous. The descent stage, which would be left behind on the moon, was more or less symmetrical in appearance since its function was to nest tanks of gas about an engine, allow space for storage and serve as a base for its four extended legs. If one ignored the extended legs its height was ten and a half feet, its diameter fourteen feet. The ascent stage was also fourteen feet wide, and twelve feet high, but it was irregular from every angle, as knotted and bumped and pouched and protruded as a comic-strip drawing of Popeye or Palooka after a fight. There were protrusions everywhere. Four banks of rocket thrusters stuck out like pin cushions on outriggers at four corners except they were not so much corners as prisms or pouches. A cluster of spires and swiveling dishes and elaborate stiff-wired prongs and probes were there as well—VHF, EVA and S-band In-Flight and Steerable Antennae. They projected at all angles like a rooftop view of leaning television aerials, and there was a docking target and a docking window, and a hatch, and headlights, and two triangular windows set on a slant with the top further forward than the bottom. That gave the Lem the look of a demented cat, a spider on LSD, or some new species of king crab.

  Indeed the Lunar Module was designed so completely from within that the outside could not really be seen; it was covered with plastic foil tied loosely around its legs and part of its body; it could have passed for some derelict of a machine with a cape drooped over the body and wrappings attached to the feet in lieu of shoes. Conceive that the Lem not only had no streamlining, but its wrappings did not have to be smooth, for it had no atmosphere to pass through, so it only required a thin skin strong enough to keep pressure in and occasional micrometeoroids out. Since the heat of the sun would sizzle it during the moon landing and other periods when Passive Thermal Control would be impossible, the Lem was wrapped with insulation, with black, orange, silver, aluminum, yellow, red, and gold coverings which allowed it to gleam like a scarab in red reflected light, gleam like an old harridan in a Halloween of rags and scraps and every tinsel.

  That was its appearance. In function it was as complex as the Command Module with virtually as many systems and subsystems, a plumbers’ warehouse of miniaturized equipment for environment control, a communications system with redundancy in S-band and VHF, a Reaction Control System, propulsion systems for the descent engine and ascent engine. There were caution and warning systems, tracking and docking lights, there was radar. But that brings us to Guidance, Navigation, and Control—it brings us to the computer, and the computer was to give a turn or two on the descent to the moon.

  III

  The astronauts had not had a full night. In bed by midnight after the long chores of the day before, they were awakened at six in the morning before Loss of Signal on the ninth revolution. When they came around on the tenth, they were busy with breakfast. It was less than six hours to the separation of the Lem from the Command Module, less than eight hours from the beginning of powered descent, but the day had begun as all the others. The Biomeds were read, and data was given on the contingency burn of Trans-Earth Insertion 30. The consumables in the quads were read, the sleep report was given as CDR 5.5, CMP 6.0, LMP 5.0. The morning news was read. It was Sunday on earth and there would be church services around the world.

  President Nixon’s worship service at the White House is also dedicated to the mission, and our fellow astronaut, Frank Borman, is still in there pitching and will read the passage from Genesis which was read on Apollo 8 last Christmas.

  Loss of Signal came again. On the eleventh revolution, Aldrin opened the tunnel and passed into the Lem for the final check-out. When they came back over the hill, the pace of their Lem activities was quick. In the next hour, they adjusted the radio, began to use the call name Eagle, took landmark updates and Digital Auto Pilot data, tested the steerable antenna and the glycol pumps, cycled the Optics off and on, received a time signal or Mark on when the switch to Lem power would occur, tested communications with Columbia, and more. Reference material, instructions, and new data were being dispatched up to the computers on Columbia and Eagle, and performance data was being telemetered down to the ground—the computers were now comparably as busy as the flow of transactions in a bank on the busiest day of the year. Up to Eagle came the gyro torquing angles for copy, up came Verb 42—the fine alignment for the Inertial Measurement Unit—down went the battery report. The capture latch was checked, and minimum deadband attitudes given, antenna position instructions were forwarded. Now Columbia and Eagle, still connected, but called separately by radio, went over the hill. Loss of Signal. Beginning of the twelfth revolution.

  Armstrong was in the Lunar Module now, his pressure garment on. Aldrin was back in Columbia putting on his own space suit. It was only in these stiff and massive white pressure garment assemblies that they would fly down to the moon, equipped for the vacuums of space with the exception of helmet and gloves. The suits were necessary even in the breathable atmosphere of Eagle’s cabin, for the thin skin of the Lem was vulnerable to micrometeoroids, and air might blow out any such hole as fast as a leak in a balloon. The helmet and gloves would require but a minute to put on, but the suit took a quarter of an hour at least. In that time they could be dead, dead from one vacuum caused by one random bullet of a micrometeoroid.

  Close to four hours of the busiest day they might ever spend in space had already gone by. Pushing every item on their checklist, ticking off each detail of the hundred and then the thousand details they must pass between their fingers or through their minds in the constant mounting adrenalin of these hours, the pages of the transcript become dense with communications back and forth. Humor is at a minimum, impatience growing. Functions are colliding. An overlong exchange between Columbia and Mission Control about a conflict between flight plan and cue card is followed by:

  CAPCOM: Eagle, Houston, could you give us an idea where you are in the activation?

  ALDRIN: Roger. We’re just sitting around waiting for something to do.

  The Reaction Control System was pressurized in the Eagle; the landing gear, stowed all the way in a semiretracted position, now fired its detonator cartridges. The landing gear was deployed. Columbia completed taking marks. Noun 49 passed downlink. Abort Guidance Section figures came up. High-gain antenna was reinstalled. A flood of data pads and computer addresses, state vector loads, minimum deadbands, holds and fire checks. The Lem was ready to undock. Its thrusters had been blooded, its electrical systems tested, its environmental controls, its communications, its data. As it went behind the moon on the thirteenth revolution, it was GO for undocking. The drogue was reinstalled in the tunnel of the Lem, the probe in the Command Module. Eagle closed her hatch. Umbilical connections between Lunar Module and Command Module were disconnected. The twelve ring latches were manually cocked. Hatch on Columbia was closed.

  Now by remote electrical release, Collins throws open an extend latch on the probe assembly. The vehicles undock. The tiniest toot on the thrusters pushes them apart. Slowly they drift out from each other, at about the speed of a leaf moving downstream.
The Eagle has wings. They will announce it as they come around the moon.

  Yet there has been an error in all this work. They have performed the checklist to perfection, they have made no mistakes. Still, a mistake is now buried in the bowels of the computer. It is waiting to be discovered that the checklist, finest product of some of the finest engineers in the land, has an undetectable error which like a disease will come roaring up out of the computer in the next couple of hours as they fire their motor to descend to the moon. The Eagle has a computer pregnant with alarm.

  There is no way to avoid the difficulty. We must dip into a disquisition on the property of computers, or we will comprehend nothing of the melodrama which follows.

  IV

  Consider a list which includes the discovery of the wheel, the extraction of iron from earth, the invention of gunpowder and the printing press, the steam engine, the power loom, the electric generator and the internal combustion engine. The names of Christ, Mohammed and Buddha; of Augustine and Luther; Darwin, Marx and Freud.

  We may as well recognize what is common; it is the power of the man or of the invention to create other inventions, other styles of life, not even conceived in the origin. So a history of cultural revolutions could also include paper money, tobacco, and the manufacture of an inexpensive mirror since each of these was also a vehicle to enable man to become the instrument of his own will.

  Now, the digital computer had become one more revolution in the history of culture. Unlike the automobile or the airplane, however, the digital computer was not a machine which would force men to think in new ways about the environment, it was rather an electronic mode of calculating which might yet change the nature of thought itself: the digital computer had the power to run man’s mind through an accelerator which could catapult him out to the universe or explode the remains of his mind on earth; perhaps for this reason, Aquarius could never pass through a room containing a bank of computers without a moment of woe, as if he had just walked through an amphitheater where some species of higher tapeworm was quietly ingesting the vitals of God.

  The digital computer was a diabolical machine, or the greatest instrument ever handed to man, but it could hardly be both for it was constructed on the implicit premise that all phenomena might yet be capable of capture by statistics. The digital computer was based upon millions of switches, all primed individually to say one or nothing, yes or no. If the switch allowed a current to pass, the answer was one, or yes; absence of current was zero. 1 and 0 became the simple building blocks upon which numbers could be recreated. The entire decimal system was replaced by two numbers, 1 and 0, rather than 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Thus the figure of 111 in this new system stood for 7 because it was a way of writing 22 + 21 + 20 or 4 + 2 + 1. And 8 in turn was 1000 or 23 + 0 + 0 + 0. The binary system was then obviously more unwieldy than the decimal system, much more unwieldy—a number like 437 could only be written as 110110101—but since every number, no matter how large, became some combination of 1 and 0 and since one or zero could always be indicated by a pulse of current or its absence, numbers could therefore be transmitted in a stream of irregular electrical pulses like Morse Code. Since electricity traveled at the speed of light, so an extraordinary number of arithmetical computations could be manipulated at just that speed of light through millions of switches. And a world of wonders opened to that speed. Those long combinations of 1 and 0 were extraordinarily adaptable to operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division—huge amounts of such work could be performed in the giant computers.

  Where once these switches had been vacuum tubes, much like the tubes in radios, then had become solid-state transistors, and would eventually be molecules in a crystal lattice, the computers in which they were installed had reduced in size from buildings the size of barns to units the size of a refrigerator and then a cosmetic box, and would yet be the size of a cigarette lighter. If the functions of the digital computer were limited to solving only those problems which could be set in numerical form or which could be laid out in steps of logical analysis built upon Yes, No, And or Or, it was nonetheless amazing how many problems of the most extraordinary variety could be converted to the point where one was no longer certain whether the extremities of the problem were or were not amenable to solution, for as the employment of the digital computer became pervasive in business, industry, government, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the universities and in the mass media, and as profits and efficiency came to some industries by using computers and irritating losses to others who thereby sought more computers to solve the problems the first computers had created, as hundreds of thousands of computer operators formed a new profession, as computers themselves proliferated into a race for more and more exceptional properties of operation and powers of dominion over activities formerly virgin to the computer, so a breakthrough occurred. The computer became the new frontier, a frontier of air-conditioned windowless rooms with fluorescent panels in the ceiling and electronic whirrings and gurglings. The men who rode the limits of this range were computer programmers who wore horn-rimmed glasses and shirts of synthetic fabric; the horses were computers with a natural tendency to convert the nature of all human problems. If a problem could be programmed, that is, if it could be broken down into a form which could be inserted into the computer, then the problem could be solved. Sometimes it could only be solved to a degree. Translations from foreign languages were lamentable, computers which played chess were only average players and the poem which follows—well, it was written by a computer.

  CHILDREN

  Sob suddenly, the bongos are moving.

  Or could we find that tall child?

  And dividing honestly was like praying badly,

  And while the boy is obese, all blast could climb.

  First you become oblong.

  To weep is unctuous, to move is poor.

  Perfect plastic poem, for it left the same aesthetic satisfaction in the heart as the smell of vinyl.

  The subtle imbalance in the computer was that it had all the power to push man out of a reasonable relation to his environment and into an accelerated relation. It had created plastic brainpower ready to flow in the direction of every problem even as plastic sometimes gives signs of pushing toward every manifestation of flesh and form. The digital computer was crude in comparison to the brain. The mind had ten billion neurons each equal to a switch in a computer. The mind could store two hundred billion billion bits of information, the largest computers could hold but a ten-thousandth of that. The mind worked on a tenth of a volt of electricity—its economy of power was ten million times less wasteful than the computer.

  But the computer worked in nanoseconds and picoseconds, billionths and trillionths of a second, the computer was one hundred thousand times faster switch for switch than the brain. So the computer could perform calculations in a minute which would occupy the brain for ten weeks, or indeed for almost a year if one assumed the brain was to work no more than forty hours a week. A minute to a year. There was the strength of the computer, even greater than the horsepower of Saturn V compared to a single man, yes, the digital computer was one hundred thousand times more powerful than the mind, even if it achieved that power at ten million times the expenditure of electrical energy. Such costs meant nothing yet for they were still insignificant in relation to all the demands for electrical power, but then so were the rates of pollution low when industry began.

  Yet the problem was probably not here, for the computers would become more efficient. As they grew smaller so, relatively, would their speed increase and their ability to store information. The problem was that the new brainpower was plastic, it would push to fill vacuums, press on to simulate what had hitherto been out of the range of simulation, occupy problems whose outer margins would be lost as the center was sucked into the binary system. All this excess brainpower! It could end by having as little to do with the real needs or natural balance of the earth as the delivery of ten automobiles to ever
y citizen of the earth. Once delivered, people might of course use them, if only to crash them, but it would make for a most peculiar world—everybody living with ten cars—the structures of homes and streets would turn inside out, and the enterprising would look into the possibilities of twenty cars. If there had been a period in the history of culture when all human effort gave promise of being translated ultimately into money, now the time was conceivably approaching when the money of moneys would be here, the quintessence of number, the world reclassified by combinations of 1 and 0, nothing more. So had Leibnitz once attempted—in his lust to create a symbolic logic—to show that God was 1 and had created the world out of 0. Now another accounting was near. For if one could eventually define all existence by variations of 1 and 0, how easy would become the next step—to dissolve the world. Down all the steps of entropy we would flow.

  If one were, however, to condemn the computer for this nightmare of a future, condemn it today for its automation, its new methods in banking, condemn its use by the Bar Association and the Stock Exchange and Boeing and the Bureau of Mines, the Cancer Society for research, condemn Control Data Corporation and General Dynamics, General Motors and General Electric, condemn computer analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls, condemn its employment in the Department of Commerce and the Department of Defense, condemn Douglas Aircraft and Dow Chemical, du Pont and the election forecasts, condemn the FAA and freight trains shunted by program in and out of freight yards, condemn General Precision and Goodrich, Goodyear and Charles Goren, Hoffman Electronics and Hughes Aircraft, IBM 704 and IBM 1401, condemn the Industrial Advertising Research Institute and the Internal Revenue, International Air Transport and Johnson’s Wax, Kresge Eye Institute and Lincoln Laboratory, the Public Library and Lockheed Aircraft, McGraw Hill and Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner and Smith, Minneapolis Honeywell, Monsanto, NATO and the National Cash Register—the names go by like sounds in a coffee-house poem—the U.S. Navy and the National Bureau of Standards, Ohio State, Patent Office, Philco, Phillips Petroleum, Radcliffe, the Rand Corporation, Rockefeller Institute and the Sara Lee Bakeries, the Signal Corps and Social Security, Southern Methodist and Sun Oil, TWA and UNESCO, Union Carbide, USC, the Upjohn Company, Wall Street, Westinghouse—does one condemn them for using ADAM and BINAC and BRAINIAC, CALCULO and CLASS, ENIAC, ERMA, ILLIAC, JOHNNIAC, LARC and MANIAC? Does one forbid MIPS, MOBIDIC and MUSE, RAMAC, RAYDAC, RECOMP and SAGE, or not permit STRETCH, UNIVAC or VIDIAC, wait there is still DIDAC and EURATOM, FIELDATA, FINER and HIPO, HAYSTAQ and IRE, MEDLARS, BIAX and MIND, NADGE, NANWEP and NORAD, PLATO, TASCON and ARTOC. There is AUTOPROMPT, AUTOTAG, APT, AID and AIEE but maybe the point has been made. It will come as no surprise that without that detumescence of development in computers which saturated the electronics of the Fifties and the Sixties, without the five IBM 360/75 computers and the IBM 1460’s on the floor of the Real-Time Computer Complex at Mission Control Center there would have been no trip to the moon, and indeed no Instrument Unit on Apollo-Saturn. Rockets would still be punching holes in clouds, for without a digital computer no trajectories could be calculated. The simple work of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division to calculate a trip to Venus would take one man eight hundred years. Yet now there were supercomputers to calculate the journey in thirty seconds. That plastic brainpower could turn over every straw in the haystack to find the needle. The rush to extermination or apocalypse was being accelerated by every computer on earth.