Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  Yet, all of this—this kaleidoscope of impressions, this happiness of the heart, sore and tender and merry in the very pumping of its walls, these thrifty ducts of aviator’s love for family, children and mate open now if ever open, the patriotic incandescence of a dialogue with the President, the delivery of a job promised to the team—these tributaries of happiness carrying the uprooted tree of the ego and the mysterious house of the moon downstream in full flood are still only half of their inability to sleep. Few men could sleep with such happiness flowing unaccustomed in them, but now add a fear which has been kept in the vaults, a firm well-regulated natural concern of the executive mind, yet a fear not even primitive, but primeval in its uncharted depths: are they going to be able to ascend from the moon? It is one thing to shatter a taboo, it is another to escape the retribution which follows the sacrilege—where is the savage society whose folklore is not crowded with tales of the subtlety of every outraged curse? It is a fear which still lives in many an athlete and celebrity, in many an excessive modesty in any poor man who has found at last some luck, it is in the groveling of a dog at what comes next after he has won a fierce fight. The danger is always greatest just beyond victory—in some men that is a deeper belief than any other, for not yet at climax they can see themselves as deserving; once triumphant their balance has shifted, they know guilt, they are now not deserving. Well, whether the astronauts were deeply superstitious in this fashion or barely superstitious at all, we can be certain that any residual of this prime and hallowed fear would be awake in them tonight, for they were not by any measure yet free of the moon. In the morning, after all preparations were taken, a moment would still come when they would have to fire up their engines and lift off in the upper half of the Lem from the descent stage left behind. The ascent stage would rise if the ascent motor functioned—they were doomed if it did not, for all the redundancies of the equipment passed here through the bottleneck of one and only one piece of mechanism. There was no substitute for the ascent engine. Double tanks of fuel, and double tanks of oxidizer; double containers of helium to put pressure on fuel and oxygen; valves and cutoff valves in a plenitude of substitutions and alternate paths; but, finally, there was only one motor with only one throat and one bell, and that motor would have to flame up to 90 percent of its full thrust in the first three-tenths of a second after it ignited so that the ascent stage would lift and not settle back—no refinements to blast-off here!

  There had been tests beyond measure on that motor, tests in vacuums and tests in fast-descending elevators to simulate lunar gravity; there had been refinements inserted within refinements to make certain that when a fuel spray of hydrazine and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine came through the injectors to meet a spray of nitrogen tetroxide the combustion would take place.

  Since it had been designed for ignition in a lunar vacuum, so there was no air to feed the fires of the fuel. The equivalent of air was supplied by the nitrogen tetroxide, whose oxygen would sustain the burning hydrogen, whose oxygen would indeed ignite the hydrogen by merely meeting it. The very elements of water were here the elements of a fire so contagious it needed no match, merely the mating of the gases, a fire so explosive that a motor with a nozzle only two and a half feet across could lift the ascent stage and the men inside, lift them and fling them into orbit, all ten thousand pounds and more.

  Still, this motor had never been fired before on the moon. It had been fired in vacuums, yes, but they were artificial vacuums on earth and not the pure vacuum of the moon where who knew what subtleties atomic particles, subparticles, and cosmic rays could present upon ignition? Nothing in any theory or working hypothesis of physics even began to suggest there was any reason why a moon vacuum should not prove the practical equal of an earth vacuum, but nobody could be certain, nobody could swear there were not unforeseen conditions which could inhibit the flame or cause it to flame out. Who knew the dispositions of fire on the moon when the air we breathed was also the stuff of fire, and hydrogen and oxygen could make water or electricity or fire? Yes, the real explanation of the flames remains as much a mystery as man’s first hour in a forest after lightning struck a tree.

  Primeval fears inspire primeval thoughts. There in the Lem, one body on a floor, the other with his heroic posterior carefully spotted on the very cover of that ascent engine which would lift them off in the morning, how they must have drifted on runs of happiness and rills of deep-veined fear. How easily they must have passed into large sleep-deprived inchoate thoughts of a world of men and women back on earth secretly wishing them well or ill, intervening in the long connected night of the world’s sleep with whatever gods or powers were sitting upon the ignition of the engine in the morning. So scourged and exalted, hovering on that ultimate edge of moral balance where one wonders if the sum of one’s life has been for good or ill and if the morning will return a fair and just verdict, fingers crossed, ready fair enough to laugh or cry, dopey, exhausted, chilled, feverish no doubt with desire for morning to come, alert, high on the empty holes of the numbers they would punch into the computer in the morning, ears alert to the quiet pumps of the nocturnal Lem whose skin was baking in the moon morning heat, there in a cave of chilly isolation, happy, numb, and full of a fear of dreams, not knowing if their glory was to be doubled by the next night or if they would be at one among the martyred dead yes, how were they to sleep and dare to dream when the future must look either to a transformation of the psyche, or a trip down the underground river of them all? Yet, if they were to die on the moon—was there an underground river there? or would they be forced, full strangers, to wander together, a queer last place for the mortal bones. Who, indeed, could sleep?

  IX

  Collins was listening to the pumps. He had been alone in space for fifteen hours, more than enough to go around the moon seven times, and for seven times he had been alone on the far side, which was seven more times than any other man had ever been alone there. Even the Public Affairs Officer was ready to use superlatives for the occasion. “Not since Adam has any human known such solitude as Mike Collins is experiencing during this forty-one minutes of each lunar revolution when he’s behind the moon with no one to talk to except his tape recorder aboard Columbia.” Shades of Krapp’s Last Tape, one had another facet of Beckett’s vision of the apocalyptic loneliness of the end; why, even the near side of the moon was civilization in comparison to the far side. There, out of contact with any voice on radio, alone in his Command Module, rattling around in his new commodious dimensions with the center couch removed and no other astronauts to break into his peace, Collins and his machine were like a coin on edge in the universe, the acme of technology, the acme of uprooted existence. Yet later Collins spoke warmly of what he had come to call his “mini-cathedral.” The tunnel which connected up to the Lem was now like a bell tower; with the couch removed, he had a center aisle; the instrument panel could serve as nave and transept. Later he would protest that he was not lonely in Columbia. “I’ve been flying airplanes by myself for about seventeen years, and the idea of being in a flying vehicle alone was in no way alarming. In fact sometimes I prefer to be by myself.” Still, it is a protest. He was obviously filled with uneasiness much of the time; his later comments give more than one evidence of it. “I figured that any chain as long and tenuous as this had to have a weak link. Believe me, I spent a lot of time worrying about that link. Could I be it? Could my training have neglected some vital bit of information? Or had I been properly exposed but simply forgetful?” A phrase later, he is stating that by launch day he had convinced himself he had taken all the steps to prepare himself, at least within reason, but it is a remark without logical substance against the larger fear of something loose and unknown in the material, or something treacherous in himself. He had a curious job in the morning. If the Lem lifted without difficulty and came into its proper orbit, the rendezvous would be simple. The Lem in fact would fire all the moves and do all the work to join him. He need merely stay in his orbit. If somet
hing went wrong with the Lem’s ascent, however, and it went into odd orbit or low orbit or if it had to fire off prematurely and therefore might be half the circumference of the moon away from him, why then he would have to make the maneuvers. Some might be difficult. Rendezvous could always prove deceptive, for one was able to approach another spaceship by accelerating one’s speed but also by braking it. A reduction of speed reduced one’s orbit and so reduced the time it took to circumnavigate a planet—one could thereby catch another spaceship. It was also possible, however, to catch up with the other spaceship by accelerating, provided one was certain of the rendezvous. If you missed the other ship, however, the price was to go rocketing off into a long and wasteful orbit; the amount of fuel they could spend in such maneuvers was limited. Moreover, rendezvous, if the circumstances were unusual enough, might have to be independent of Mission Control. Suppose immediate maneuvers were necessary on the far side of the moon. Then there would not be time to come around from Loss of Signal and get detailed programs from the ground—Collins might have to work out the computations on his own computer, or in a deteriorating situation make rough estimates without a computer and hope he could sight the Lem. It was an uneasy situation, reminiscent of the favorable odds on the ascent engine. By any logical or practical measure those odds had to be 100 to 1 or 1000 to 1 in favor of a good ascent; yet in those unspoken fears where wonder resides about the real nature of the universe, the unspoken odds were nearer to even.

  So, too, with rendezvous was nothing likely to go wrong, yet Collins was obliged to live in the readiness for everything to go wrong. But if any disaster occurred to the others, how could he be certain afterward that some envy in himself had not triggered the result? It was not a happy position to be in, and Collins was the chief worrier of the three astronauts. Over and over the transcript is filled with his finicky insertions on the difficulties and small discrepancies of the equipment. Less of an engineer than Aldrin, less of a pilot than Armstrong, and in a flicker of doubt about his own body after an operation had been necessary to remove a growth from his spine (which if uncorrected could have left him paralyzed) Collins was one of those men who nibbled on the details of routine programs and data loads the way people who are bored at a party nibble peanuts. Rare was the astronaut who could be happy as the pilot of the Command Module; Collins with his quiet but wholly intent competitiveness was not going to be the first. Besides Collins had suffered an added tension in the day which had just passed. The Lem, during the excitement of the 1202 alarms, had failed to land in any place Mission Control could locate precisely on the map. Collins had spent the day searching the moon ground from sixty miles up for some glint of the Lunar Module, but in five passes had had no luck, not even in a painful eye-screwing search over one grid square after another. While that was not great cause for anxiety since the Lem could orient itself quickly enough once up in orbit, it was like a bad augury. He was out of touch with the men he must meet tomorrow in rendezvous.

  Besides, there had been hordes of proper deportment required of him throughout the day, bountiful copious congratulations to offer the other astronauts for their glory. Oversweet may have been the recollection of his voice.

  CAPCOM: Columbia, this is Houston. Say something. They should be able to hear something. Over.

  COLUMBIA: Roger. Tranquility Base, it sure sounded great from up here. You guys did a fantastic job.

  ARMSTRONG: Thank you. Just keep that orbiting base ready for us up there now.

  What formal relations! It is as if the winning captain is patronizing the losing captain. Collins’ loyalties were certainly not tenuous—no man could remain an astronaut without a strong sense of responsibility—but Collins was being tried in a court of highest pressure. If there was any joy to be alone in the Command Module, alone with himself in the incommunicable regions of the far side of the moon, nearer then to the messages of the outer galaxies than ever before, if Collins was free to bathe in the pleasure of lonely thoughts like no man ever had before, if Collins could even indulge the legitimate narcissism of the pilot who lives in a machine which is an exquisite extension of his will, well, Collins also had all the anxiety of listening to every tick in the murmur of the pipes, every slip and minuscule clutch of sound in that machine which transported him, and if ever a man felt the anxiety to think cheerful rather than evil thoughts for fear he would spring a glitch in the labyrinthine conjunctions of his machine, Collins had to be that man. There were unhappy precedents for being too long alone in space. Collins had to be aware, as all the astronauts were, of what had happened to Bonny, the monkey who had gone up in orbit around the earth on Biosatellite 3 and had come down nine days later, three weeks ahead of schedule, in an emergency splashdown. Bonny had been ill and died twelve hours later from causes which could not be determined. An unpleasant business. Bonny’s death had been but a week before their own launch. Now, as much alone as Bonny, did Collins think for an instant of that trained fourteen-pound space animal who had become sluggish in weightlessness and ceased to perform his tasks? Did Collins wonder if the animal had sickened out of boredom, or out of the misery of its pure animal heart being unable to pick up a clue to where it might now be located in its weightless cage, or did Bonny begin to sicken and die because of some drear but most recognizable message its animal senses had received from space, some message too fine for the insulated nerves of man to receive? Yes, did Collins brood on Bonny? It was a long seven revolutions and then some more.

  Yet Collins, at least, was able to sleep. Did he dream of Ags and Pings, of REFSMMAT, IMU and EMU? Did he descend to the first disorder of the dream with DSKY in hand and DAP and POO? To bore with one’s brain into the hard-stuffed methods and modes of technology did one not also go back to those chaos-holds, those ledges of meaning that meaningless words provided in infancy as a set of arbitrary stations of sound which were somehow better and less chaotic than no sound? Acronyms! Collins slept.

  X

  And in Mission Control down on earth in the black reaches of the night, the Black team would normally have been clowning around. They were the Blacks, they were the lonely, they were the youngest engineers with the lowest seniority, who invariably worked the consoles while the astronauts were asleep. Theirs was the job with the least to do. Whether called Black because they worked through the night, or Black out of some brimming class humor at NASA, their job had the pleasure of frequent breaks for coffee and wild technological discussions about how much it would cost to build an actual and real superhighway U.S. Moon 1—how many thousands or millions of Apollo-Saturns to send up to do it brute and direct, as opposed to how many if factories were built over lunar ground. On quiet nights they could put the question into an unoccupied computer and get back answers which opened other games. The computer on such nights was their farm animal washed and ready for picnic.

  But the coffee was chilly coffee tonight, as cold and dank with anxiety as the plastic of their consoles. There were dungeons in the liberty of this moon-conquered night. The vault of silence in the Mission Operations Control Room (display for Eagle at rest; display for Columbia slowly crossing the screen) was there to offer a rebuke to any levity. In fact, the Black team was not even on. They would do work for the rendezvous later, on assignment out of turn—it was the plum which had been given them, even if the astronauts were to do most of the work.

  XI

  Two hours of sleep. One hour to sleep. And no real sleep for Armstrong and Aldrin. They are heroes, they are first among their peers, the knights of the silent majority, but they are suffering from insomnia. They have finally emerged onto the landscape of the modern novel. They emerge incidentally as promotion men as well.

  PAO: This is Apollo Control. Let’s join the call to Tranquility Base.

  CAPCOM: How is the resting, standing up there? Or did you get a chance to curl up on the engine can?

  ALDRIN: Roger. Neil has rigged himself a really good hammock with a waist tether, and he’s been lying on the hatch and
engine cover, and I curled up on the floor.

  XII

  At 12:53 on Monday morning, July 21, not twenty-two hours after they landed, with rendezvous radar put most carefully in Off position to avoid new program alarms, with hearts beating, fair to assume, and with minds wondering for the last occasion whether fire might not lose a vital property or two in the immediate domain of the moon—time, after all, was known to alter at the speed of light; with Pings loaded with every bit of data for Program 12, the Powered Ascent Guidance; with the simple ascent motor incapable of being run at anything other than full throttle they now put the master arm on, gave a last count to Mission Control, “Forward 8, 7, 6, 5, Abort Stage! Engine Arm Ascent! Proceed!” and fired off from the moon.