Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (12 page)

Now the speaker was telling a joke about a Texan in Alaska who had mixed up his respective missions with a woman and a bear. Big was the laugh from the audience. And out on the beaches and the causeways and riverbanks, another audience was waiting for the launch. America like a lazy beast in the hot dark was waiting for a hint in the ringing of the night. Questions drowned Aquarius. In bed by two in the morning, he would be up by four. An early start was necessary, for traffic on the road to the Press Site would be heavy.

The two hours of sleep were more worthy of Atlas than Aquarius, for in his dreams he held up a portion of the State of Florida. Aquarius had been covering the moon shot from July first to this morning of the sixteenth. The mildest form of purgatory was to spend two weeks in a motel.

Everybody complained that the tension accompanying the preparations for Apollo 11 had been less than launchings in the past. Cocoa Beach itself had altered. The old days of honky-tonks on the strip of highway and rockets threatening to carve a furrow down the beach were now gone. Money had come in and industry,
space technicians and their families, supermarkets, motels, churches, and real estate developments had been put up. In the restaurants, public address systems broke into the mood of a meal to call patrons to the phone. The paper doilies under the plate carried legends: America’s Space Program Benefits All Mankind—
Your Souvenir of Apollo 11 Lunar Landing
. Better Color Television. Water Purification at Less Cost. New Paints and Plastics. Lunar Walker for the Handicapped. Laser Surgery. Solar Power. So forth. Cocoa Beach had been one of the five places on the Atlantic Seaboard which deserved the title “Wild West of the East,” but Cocoa Beach deserved it no longer. As the doily revealed, it was part of the Brevard Economic Development Council. Until the last few days when the Press arrived in hundreds then thousands, there had been monotonous hours when it was necessary to remind oneself that three men were leaving for the moon in less than a week.

But in the dark morning before dawn on the sixteenth, in the black hour of 4
A.M.
, the night air a wet and lightless forest in the nose, one was finally scared. It was not unlike awakening in a convoy with invasion of a foreign beach scheduled for the hours ahead, an awakening in the dark of the sort one will always remember, for such nights live only on a few mornings of one’s life. Somewhere not so far from here, the astronauts were getting up as well. And the ghosts of old Indians.

In that long-ago of prairie spaces when the wind was the message of America, Indians had lived beneath the moon, stared at the moon, lived in greater intimacy with the moon than any European. Who could say the ride of the Indian with whisky in his veins was not some conflagration of messages derived from the silences of the moon? Now tonight were the ghosts of old Indians awakening in the prairies and the swamps? Did the echo of the wind through the abandoned launch towers of the Cape strike a resonance across two thousand miles to the grain elevators by the side of railroad tracks in the mournful empty windings of the West? The country had been virgin once, an all but empty continent with lavender and orange in the rocks, pink in the sky, an aura
of blue in the deep green of the forest—now, not four centuries even spent, the buffalo were gone, and the Indians; the swamps were filled; the air stank with every exhaust from man and machine. All the while we had been composing our songs to the moon and driving the Indian onto the reservation, had we also been getting ready to go to the moon out of some deep recognition that we had already killed the nerve which gave life to the earth? Yet the moon by every appearance knew more about disease and the emanations of disease than the oldest leper on earth. “Of what can you dream?” said the moon. “I am battered beyond belief and you think to violate me now?”

Driving through the night, passing again the families and tourists who were waiting for morning on the banks of the causeway, showing a Press Pass to the guard at the gate, and being waved on in silence, yes near to conspiratorial silence, there was the tangible sense of time running in parallel, the million-headed witness now traveling to a point where the place would cross the time and the conscious eye of the nation would be there to witness this event. By television would they witness it. That would be an experience like getting conceived in a test tube.

Out at the Press Site, Saturn V was visible across the near distance of three and a half miles. It was the nearest Aquarius had approached on this long night, and it was indeed the nearest anyone would come but the launching crew and the three astronauts. As Apollo-Saturn stood on its concrete pad six thousand yards away across a lagoon from the small grandstand built for the Press, its details now visible, it looked less like a shrine, but all the more a presence. A squad of floodlights played upon it, and their beams reflecting from the thin night haze displayed a fan of separate lights across the sky on down into the surface of the lagoon, a bending and glancing of rays worthy of a diamond upon a mirror. In the black wet night, back of the floodlamps, lightning flickered, so regularly that one might have been looking at a lighthouse rotating its flare—somewhere down the horizon, a potency of storm was speaking up in the response of the Caribbean. Long far-off rolls of thunder.

Staring across the water, Aquarius took a long study. His binoculars appeared to lock him into collaboration with Saturn V, as if the rocket had the power to keep those binoculars pressed to his nose, as if finally Aquarius and Saturn V were now linked into some concupiscence of mission like a one-night stand which might leave its unexpected consequence upon him. What a vehicle was the spaceship! A planet-traveler massive as a destroyer, delicate as a silver arrow. At the moment it lifted off from the earth it would be burning as much oxygen as is consumed by half a billion people taking their breath—that was twice, no, more than twice the population of America. What a deep breath must then have been concentrated into the liquid oxygen they were passing into its tanks right now, a liquid oxygen cooled to 297 degrees below zero and thereby turning air to cloud at every hint of contact with the pipes which were in turn contained within other pipes two feet thick to insulate the fuel. Model of an ogress, umbilical cords of every thickness and sinuosity, snakes and cables and ropes and constrictors thick as tree trunks passed in cluster from swing-arms and the walkways of the launching tower into the thin-skinned walls of the rocket; a Medusa’s head of umbilicals loading fuel, charging batteries, testing circuits; a complexity of interrelation between the launching tower and the rocket so simplified by the swing-arms that Apollo-Saturn resting on her pad did not look distraught but calm, like a silver-white ship standing erect by an iron tree with nine horizontal branches. There were clouds about both, strings of small firm well-puffed little clouds drifting off at right angles from the rocket at each place where an umbilical from an oxygen pipe had been disconnected; the clouds gave Saturn V the brow of a philosopher in contemplation above his thought, yes, the cloud belonged to Saturn V, it nuzzled at it, a new cloud not many hours old. And the light from the floodlamps reflected from the white icy skin of the wall. Sainted Leviathan, ship of space, she was a planetary traveler.

But now the Press was loading onto buses to have one last look at the astronauts, who had been invisible for the last eleven days. It
was idiotic to leave the Press Site now, leave the unique pleasure of communing in the dark across the water with that technological gem on the horizon; it was idiotic to pack into buses and sweat in the dark night heat and crawl up photographers’ backs for a glimpse of an astronaut’s face, but he got into the bus along with the others and ground five miles along Space Center highways through the dark, a full load of observers transported on an irritating underpowered whine, and then debouched at the front entrance of the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building, MSOB, a cold white structure, impersonal as the offices of a factory complex hundreds of feet long and several stories high, as impersonal and architecturally undistinguished as the spirit of its design (which derived from the implicit architecture contained in the cost-apportionments of a multimillion-dollar bill).

The journalistic cargo of the bus was now ushered through long narrow corridors painted in institutional green to take turnings by water coolers and vending machines, passed down other corridors, filed past empty rooms and galleries and were loosed finally into a courtyard. Just over their heads, a story above, was a covered bridge which ran from the building they had just been in to the building from which the astronauts would exit.

Beneath this bridge a white van was parked, ready to receive the astronauts. They would pass for twenty steps down an aisle protected by policemen and by a fence from the hydraulic pressure of these excited journalists, and would then enter the van to be transported the nine miles to Apollo 11, mounting by elevator in the mobile launch structure to the ninth swing-arm where they would cross an iron gangplank to their seats. There they would wait while the countdown proceeded. There they would be when the lift-off occurred.

This gathering of the Press, this congestion of the Press—for taking the sum of the TV personnel, still cameras and movie men, there must have been several hundred people standing on tiptoe at every bad angle and hopeless vantage point for a good look—would remain more than an hour on this chance of the briefest
glimpse, hardly more than a wave of the arm as it finally turned out. The magic of the long night would leave them as they waited. The gray of a new morning would diminish the high theater of their mood before finally a single astronaut was seen. Yet no one left. Men and women stood on every ledge and railing and stone and fence they could climb in the courtyard, and dozens periodically clambered onto the flat roof of a special TV truck only to be chased down by special police. Photographers wrestled themselves up wire fences, kept themselves in position by wedging their bodies into angles, waited out cramped positions like mountain climbers in a chimney for twenty minutes, thirty minutes, finally an hour. It was imperative for everyone there to have a look at the men who would come through the door as if that were equal in value to a piece of the moon. There seemed some mysterious booty residing in the literal aura of the astronauts, yes, the Press crowded forward, were ready to claw one another for a crack of the concrete, for one data-point, one photograph when the time came, as if the value of these astronauts revealed the illimitable value of condemned men. They were men who would walk past their eyes to a conceivable execution in space, and so like all condemned were close to some state of more valuable existence, as if men who were about to enter death or at the least to chance its dimensions were men of inestimable refinement. Clues to the richest profit lived somehow next to death—so the moments of their life as they passed by were like the passing of a new current. The moon. Their persons would touch the moon! That was why the atmosphere in the courtyard was like a prison on the night of an execution.

And from time to time, with the washing out of the night, and the oncoming of dawn to this dark courtyard with its waiting mob, a crack of lightning would be seen again in the distance, a crack which to Aquarius’ nerve-heightened eyes looked like a literal crack in the sky, as if electricity were now revealed as the absence of some material of the firmament.

The mob cheered when the astronauts came through the door. Since guards and directors and technicians were periodically looking
down the hall, or signaling, or making an abrupt move, the Press had been on the alert for the astronauts a dozen times. Now, they really came, and people throughout the crowd had experiences.
“Fenomenal, fenomenal, fenomenal!”
an Italian girl with a camera kept repeating, almost as if helpless to stop, and a worker from MSOB yelled, “Go get ’em”—the target was at last revealed—the moon like every other foreign body was an enemy, an intimate competitor. Armstrong, plastic helmet on, carrying his life-support system connected by a hose to his white space suit, white and luminous as Saturn V out on the pad, stopped just long enough to give a wave, his face within the space helmet as lashless in appearance as a newborn cat in a caul. He had never looked better. He stepped into the van, and the others, waving, stepped into the van, the doors were shut, the police keyed as always into a state of ultraresponsibility—what rumors of plots had they exchanged this morning over breakfast?—pushed everyone back as if the very departure of the van were in danger, and the vehicle of the astronauts drove down the last nine miles.

That was all the Press saw, and to add to this frustration, they had a bad ride back. It was after six-thirty now, the launch was not three hours off, and the heavy traffic they had escaped by getting up early now engorged the road for the last mile to the Press Site. If the night had been hot, the morning heat was fierce. It took the caravans an hour to travel the five and a half miles.

They were riding in school buses rented by the Space Center for the occasion. Like all old machines, their vehicle had developed a personality. It was hardworking, all but crippled, yet spoiled. Accustomed to carrying children, its load this morning was excessive.

Tall thin Swedish journalists were packed in with short stubby London and South American reporters, the seats were occupied, the aisles were loaded with writers and cameramen who would stagger every time the bus stopped or started, which was every twenty feet, and the differential clanged and slapped in its case as if would break out at any moment. The bus was simply not used to
being made to work so hard. Everybody was sweating. There had never been a hint of air conditioning in this vehicle.

It was the first and only discomfort the Press had been obliged to suffer on the job. They had been treated with courtesy at the Press Center, conducted on tours, taken in small groups for interviews with nearly every prominent executive and director at Kennedy, they had even been furnished with transcripts of each large press conference so there was no need to take notes on what was said unless they were filing a story that day, and in such event they usually had their own tape recorder. Yet with every vocational aid handed to them, they had still been in a depressed state, for the relation of their news stories to the complex truth of this moon shot might be analogous to a comparison between the school bus and Saturn V.