Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (11 page)

“Who are you kidding?” said Aquarius, the good American. “You’re going to get everything you want.”

Whether the intimacy was too abrupt, or Von Braun’s reaction disclosed too much—his eyes gleamed with sudden funds of pleasure at the remark—he quickly looked discomposed, and as quickly left the conversation by failing to forward a remark in return. Then he waved some ambiguous good-by and moved quickly across the room. If his sense of friend and foe was good—a reasonable assumption to make about a man like Von Braun—it was obvious he did not think Aquarius would make such a good friend.

The banquet was roast beef. Ice creams and sauces for dessert. Coffee. The spoon on the glass. The publisher of the publishing corporation was talking. “We are signally honored tonight to have with us,” he began, “one of the true fathers of space, Dr. Hermann Oberth, who, with Dr. Goddard and a Russian named Tsiolkovsky, is really and truly one of the originators of the whole concept of the exploration of space.” An old man, seventy-five at least, with
white hair and a white bushy mustache stood up. He had the birdlike self-sufficiency of the old, a vain sly white old bird, as if he were not only cousin to an old condor but had bought the nest as well. There was a smattering of applause. His name meant little outside of rocketry circles, but the speaker had used his presence for a joke. “I heard earlier tonight that at least two men in this room, one of whom you’ll hear from later, are students of his. They said in response to his comment that he was a very good teacher, that at least they weren’t dropouts; one of them is Dr. von Braun.” The laugh came on that. Of all the nations in the world, America had possessed the firmest patriotic firmament; the common culture had never been rich enough to corrode it. Not till recently. Now, dropouts were pits in the shining surface. This then offered the suggestion that Von Braun was a regenerator of the shining surface. Therefore, the audience was not to be at ease during his introduction, for the new speaker, who described himself as a “backup publisher,” went into a little too much historical detail. “During the Thirties he was employed by the Ordnance Department of the German government developing liquid fuel rockets. During World War II he made very significant developments in rocketry for his government.”

A tension spread in this audience of corporation presidents and high executives, of astronauts, a few at any rate, and their families. There was an uneasy silence, an embarrassed pall at the unmentioned word of Nazi—it was the shoe which did not drop to the floor. So no more than a pitter-patter of clapping was aroused when the speaker went quickly on to say: “In 1955 he became an American citizen himself.” It was only when Von Braun stood up at the end that the mood felt secure enough to shift. A particularly hearty and enthusiastic hand of applause swelled into a standing ovation. Nearly everybody stood up. Aquarius, who finally cast his vote by remaining seated, felt pressure not unrelated to refusing to stand for
The Star-Spangled Banner
. It was as if the crowd with true American enthusiasm had finally declared, “Ah don’ care if he is some kind of ex-Nazi, he’s a good loyal patriotic American.”

Von Braun was. If patriotism is the ability to improve a nation’s morale, then Von Braun was a patriot. It was plain that some of these corporation executives loved him. In fact, they revered him. He was the high priest of their precise art—manufacture. If many too many an American product was accelerating into shoddy these years since the war, if planned obsolescence had often become a euphemism for sloppy workmanship, cynical cost-cutting, swollen advertising budgets, inefficiency and general indifference, then in one place at least, and for certain, America could be proud of a product. It was high as a castle and tooled more finely than an exquisite watch.

Now the real and true tasty beef of capitalism got up to speak, the grease and guts of it, the veritable brawn, and spoke with fulsome language in his small and well-considered voice. He was with friends this occasion, and so a savory, a gravy of redolence came into his tone, his voice was not unmusical, it had overtones which hinted of angelic superpossibilities one could not otherwise lay on the line. He was when all was said like the head waiter of the largest hofbrau house in Heaven. “Honored guests, ladies and gentlemen,” Von Braun began, “it is with a great deal of respect tonight that I meet you, the leaders and the captains of the mainstream of American industry and life. Without your success in building and maintaining the economic foundations of this nation, the resources for mounting tomorrow’s expedition to the moon would never have been committed.… Tomorrow’s historic launch belongs to you and to the men and women who sit behind the desks and administer your companies’ activities, to the men who sweep the floors in your office buildings and to every American who walks the street of this productive land. It is an American triumph. Many times I have thanked God for allowing me to be a part of the history that will be made here today and tomorrow and in the next few days. Tonight I want to offer my gratitude to you and all Americans who have created the most fantastically progressive nation yet conceived and developed.” He went on to talk of space as “the key to our future on earth,” and echoes of his vision drifted
through the stale tropical air of a banquet room after coffee—perhaps he was hinting at the discords and nihilism traveling in bands of brigands across the earth. “The key to our future on earth. I think we should see clearly from this statement that the Apollo 11 moon trip even from its inception was not intended as a one-time trip that would rest alone on the merits of a single journey. If our intention had been merely to bring back a handful of soil and rocks from the lunar gravel pit and then forget the whole thing”—he spoke almost with contempt of the meager resources of the moon—“we would certainly be history’s biggest fools. But that is not our intention now—it never will be. What we are seeking in tomorrow’s trip is indeed that key to our future on earth. We are expanding the mind of man. We are extending this God-given brain and these God-given hands to their outermost limits and in so doing all mankind will benefit. All mankind will reap the harvest.… What we will have attained when Neil Armstrong steps down upon the moon is a completely new step in the evolution of man.” (Which would lead Aquarius days later to wonder at the origin of Armstrong’s first speech on the moon.) “It will cause a new element to sweep across the face of this good earth and to invade the thoughts of all men.”

He was almost done with his formal remarks. Out of his big bulk and his small voice he would offer miracles. That was his knowledge of America, no mean knowledge. Prosperity satisfies those who are rich in culture. But in lands where the geography like the people is filled with empty space, then faith in miracles is the staple of the future.

“Every man achieves his own greatness by reaching out beyond himself, and so it is with nations. When a nation believes in itself as Athenians did in their Golden Age, as Italians did in the Renaissance, that nation can perform miracles. Only when a nation means something to itself can it mean something to others. We are truly faced with the brightest prospects of any age of man. Knowing this, we can watch the launch tomorrow with a new dimension of hope. We can cheer the beginning of a new age of discovery and
the new attainment that spans the space distances and brings us nearer to the heavens.”

His speech while quietly apocalyptic was not without gloom for the audience. They were heavy with food, and a band or a jukebox was blasting in some big room next to the hexagonal room. The country club couples of Titusville and Brevard County were having a good time next door. But it seemed to Aquarius that Von Braun’s remarks had plunged the collective intelligence of these corporation men back into some of their problems.

Yes, Aquarius was thinking, ideas were what Americans cared about, and the biggest ideas were doubtless the best, but what a price had been paid. For now manufacturers and consumers chased frantically after fashion. It did not matter how cheap and shameful the execution. The bargain stereo could not last a month, the washing machine with the plastic console would break in a week—all that had been purchased was the idea. Something was happening to Americans. They were a guilty crew, guilty of new ideas, new license, sacrilege, cynicism, bad faith. As a result, they were always in a rush to purchase a new idea. When people were not willing to die for an old idea, they would rush to a new one. Guilty to the nose, guilty to the ears, they were even apathetic about blaming the fabricators, for they were guilty themselves. Everybody had been cheated so many times; everybody had cheated others so often. It was hard to remain angry that one had been defrauded. It was even hard to get angry. So food and ruminating drink lowered the audience from the excellence of Von Braun’s achievement to the shoddy dimensions of their own.

The question period cheered this same audience however. Then Von Braun could speak of lunar jeeps, and space costs reduced by flying stages which could be used over and over in travel from earth to manned laboratories in earth orbit. He would be eloquent a little later about nuclear rockets the size of battleships which might be assembled in earth orbit and then voyage to Mars. While he talked of other planets, the audience grew warm again. It was the moon which was cold.

When applause subsided, the publisher cried out in his cheerful voice, “I have a question. Will you be fired if you don’t get on that helicopter and greet the senators and Cabinet members who are waiting?” Von Braun made a point of staying for two more full questions, then took his departure. The sound of helicopters rose over the room.

Aquarius would have thought the evening concluded, but as he was learning again, he would never understand Americans. Another speaker, a representative of American business, rose and gave a humorous introduction to a man as massive and slow-speaking as Lyndon Johnson who proceeded to get up and tell jokes in an absolutely assured drawl. The audience seemed happy with them. “I was in an airport not long ago and sitting next to a woman smoking a cigar. I asked her how long she’d been smoking cigars. And she said ever since her husband had come home and found one in her ashtray in the bedroom.”

The couple in front of Aquarius, young, stingy, ambitious, and very respectable, were laughing. The husband scowled at the wife and said with existential humor, “I wouldn’t laugh at that joke if I was you.”

“Why not?” responded the wife with the serenity of total practicality. “I’ve never done it.”

Yes, they were all good Americans and they would listen to jokes and be a little relieved Von Braun was gone (although they would treasure the experience), and as new jokes came along, Aquarius began to look again into his drink and brood on Von Braun’s remarks. He had declared that reaching the moon would be the greatest event in history since aquatic life had moved up onto land, and that was a remark! for it passed without pause over the birth and death of Christ. Indeed Von Braun had said even more in a newspaper interview. “Through a closer look at Creation, we ought to gain a better knowledge of the Creator.” Man was voyaging to the planets in order to look for God. Or was it to destroy Him?

Of course, in the interview, Von Braun had been careful to add,
“It could very well be that the Lord would … send His Son to the other worlds to bring the gospel to them—I believe the good Lord is full of such tremendous compassion that He will take whatever steps are necessary to bring the truth to His Creation.” While Aquarius had always assumed that compassion did not move by steps but seemed rather to bathe the wounded with its grace, this was after all no ordinary piety. It was possible Von Braun was sincere. Still what a grip he had on the jugular of the closet missionary in every Wasp. If he had dumped his private finds on American religious opinion into a computer and cranked it up for response, the words could not have come back better. On the other hand, Aquarius had believed for years in ideas not altogether dissimilar. Once, tentatively, he too had undertaken the doubtful liberty to state in an interview what he thought of God. God, he had presumed to suggest, was an embattled vision: God had created man in order that man might fulfill God’s vision, but His vision of the future was at war with other visions of existence in the universe. Some of those other visions were not only out in the stars, and in the galaxies, but were right here, intimate, on earth. God was, for instance, at war with the Devil. Certainly the Devil had a most detailed vision of existence very much opposed to His own. In any case the war had gone on for so long that nearly everything human was inextricably tangled. Heroism cohabited with technology. Was the Space Program admirable or abominable? Did God voyage out for NASA, or was the Devil our line of sight to the stars?

NASA. The word had derived from NACA—National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. It was an unhappy sound. Just think of NASA-ism. NASA would have no deliberate relation whatsoever to Nazi. But we are not a schizophrenic land for nothing. Deep in the unconscious where each sound leaves first its murmur and then its roar at a combustion of hitherto unconnected meanings, NASA had to stand for something. You bet.

Listening to the jokes, Aquarius was still brooding about Nazism. For the philosophy of the Folk, detesting civilization,
claiming to be in love with the primitive, had nonetheless killed millions of men in the most orderly technological fashion yet devised. Nazism had been not one philosophy, but two—and each philosophy was utterly opposed to the other. It was primitive, it was vertiginously advanced. It gave brave men a sense of nobility in their hearts—it had been utterly heartless. It spoke of clean futures and buried Germany (for a time!) in vomit and slime and swill. Now its ghosts were pacing on every battlement of every surviving palace, now its ghosts were bubbling in the tubes of every laboratory, burning in the wires. Nazism had been an assault upon the cosmos—why think of it as less? That is why it moved as the specter behind every civilized transaction. For it had said: civilization will stifle man unless man is delivered onto a new plane. Was space its amputated limb, its philosophy in orbit?