Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (16 page)

The day went by, a cloudy day in southeastern Texas. From time to time, Aquarius checked in at the Press Center. Excitement was now divided between Kennedy and the moon. Or was Kennedy even more interesting? The separate phases of the preparation for landing were certainly without high tension. Indeed the Lem even undocked from the Command Module while both were behind the moon. When they came around and signal was picked up again, the voice of Armstrong came over the squawk box. “The Eagle has wings,” he said, or was it Aldrin who said it?—there was discussion on this for the remark was universally quotable. Yet the happy buzz of conversation among the reporters at the thought of an oncoming climax was dampened considerably by the dialogue which followed:

So one got ready for the climax of the greatest week since Christ was born. An hour and twenty minutes later, the Lem having flown around the moon and gone behind it again, the braking burn for the Descent Orbit Initiation would be begun in radio silence. An hour later the final ignition for the final descent would commence. Aquarius, bereft of personal radar or gyroscope, bereft even of the sniff-sensors of his poor journalistic nose, wandered from point to point in the Press Center, rushed back to Dun Cove to look at color television—there were no color sets in the Press Room—then, bored with listening to commentators, and finally incapable of witnessing the event alone, went back to the movie theater and settled in with about a hundred other reporters for the last half hour.

Phrases came through the general static of the public address system. “Eagle looking great. You’re go,” came through, and statements of altitude. “You’re go for landing, over!” “Roger, understand. Go for landing. 3000 feet.” “We’re go, hang tight, we’re go. 2000 feet.” So the voices came out of the box. Somewhere a quarter of a million miles away, ten years of engineering and training, a thousand processes and a million parts, a huge swatch out of twenty-five billion dollars and a hovering of machinery were preparing to go through the funnel of a historical event whose significance might yet be next to death itself, and the reporters who would interpret this information for the newsprint readers of the world were now stirring in polite if mounting absorption with the calm cryptic technological voices which came droning out of the box. Was it like that as one was waiting to be born? Did one wait in a modern room with strangers while numbers were
announced—“Soul 77-48-16—you are on call. Proceed to Staging Area CX—at 16:04 you will be conceived.”

So the words came. And the moon came nearer. “3½ down, 220 feet, 13 forward, 11 forward, coming down nicely. 200 feet, 4½ down. 5½ down. 160, 6½ down. 5½ down. 9 forward. 5 percent. Quantity light. 75 feet. Things looking good. Down a half. 6 forward.”

“Sixty seconds,” said another voice.

Was that a reference to fuel? Had that been the Capcom? Or was it Aldrin or Armstrong? Who was speaking now? The static was a presence. The voice was almost dreamy. Only the thinnest reed of excitement quivered in the voice.

“Lights on. Down 2½. Forward. Forward. Good. 40 feet. Down 2½. Picking up some dust. 30 feet, 2½ down. Faint shadow. 4 forward. 4 forward. Drifting to the right a little. 6 … down a half.”

Another voice said, “Thirty seconds.” Was that thirty seconds of fuel? A modest stirring of anticipation came up from the audience.

“Drifting right. Contact light. Okay,” said the voice as even as before, “engine stop. ACA out of detente. Modes control both auto, descent engine command override, off. Engine arm, off. 413 is in.”

A cry went up, half jubilant, half confused. Had they actually landed?

The Capcom spoke: “We copy you down, Eagle.” But it was a question.

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” It was Armstrong’s voice, the quiet voice of the best boy in town, the one who pulls you drowning from the sea and walks off before you can offer a reward. The Eagle has landed—it reached the Press. They burst into applause. It was the kind of applause you used to hear in the packed film houses of the Thirties when the movie came over the hill of the last reel, and you heard the doctor say the star would live after the operation. Now, a small bedlam of actions began, some of the Press sprinting from the room—could they pretend it
was necessary to phone the City Desk?—others talking to each other in babble, others still listening to the squawk box as technology took up again. A few minutes later: “Eagle. Houston. You loaded R2 wrong. We want 10254.”

“Roger—that is V horizontal 5515.2.”

“That’s affirmative.”

Aquarius discovered he was happy. There was a man on the moon. There were two men on the moon. It was a new feeling, absolutely without focus for him. If he felt a faint graveling on the surface of this sentiment, a curdle of emotional skin which formed from his effort to advance heroes he could not find altogether admirable, still he knew he had been dislocated as profoundly by the experience as the moment he learned in the fathers’ waiting room at the hospital that his first child had indeed and actually just been born. “Well, think of that,” he had said. What a new fact! Real as the presence of immanence and yet not located at all, not yet, not in the comfortable quarters one afforded for the true and real facts of the life of the brain.

“Let’s go interview the wives,” someone suggested. And Aquarius, grateful for an opportunity to try a few journalistic tools, was happily off and away from the reign of the Capcom, the squawk box, and the abstract incubated existence of brand-new Tranquility Base.

The Armstrong house was modest, with a high-pitched roof of brown shingles. It was a house like half a million other houses in suburbs combining modern and brand-new traditional style. It had hints of an English country inn, for it was a dark-colored warren with small windows and long eaves. Yet the house was situated on a street whose curve had come from no meandering cow but from favorable indices on graphs which showed the relation of income to cost for planned curved-development streets as opposed to planned straight-development streets. El Lago—the name of this suburb—like those others named Kingston and Timber Cove and
Nassau Bay—was a soft checkerboard of carefully bent little avenues which ran at reasonable approximations of right angles into other paved prospects, a street occasionally dead-ending, a street just as occasionally completing a full circle. The realty layoutcomputer in its wisdom for random play in home-road curvature had designed the layout logic so comprehensively, so ready to take into account the variety of desire-factors expressed by consumer dweller-groups oriented in at these precise income-purchase levels, that the effect—what a blow to the goodwill of the progressive designer who had doubtless opted for just once let’s have something better!—was as agreeable and sterile to the eye as a model department store living room for brides on a medium-high budget layaway.

What a curious scene then! This moderately undulated street of angled plots and recently constructed private homes, this curved asphalt bordered by trees of the same year of growth, with vista of cars parked in garages, air conditioners, lawn mowers, sprinklers and bicycles, a street in which five children and two adults on foot might be seen on any average hour of the day, what a shock down the block to the habituated eye to see that gaggle of Press all straining at a rope, TV men and still photographers in their customary war for position with word-men—the crush now fortified by the more curious neighbors, Texas grandmothers in the main with gray-greenish eyes, tight not unintelligent mouths, small-town grits in the anticipation, and a real Texas bone-and-leather use of elbows to fight their leading toe in for position against this invasion of hippie journalist gogglers and foreigners with cameras, beards, sideburns, Nehru jackets, turtlenecks, love beads, medallions, shades, tape recorders and foreign tongues, Japs talking to Japs, Germans to Germans, an Italian to other Italians and all the Scandinavians come to NASA-land in El Lago. “I’m an American!” cried out one full vigor of a gray-haired Texas female being pushed off the frontier by one ham-hock and handlebar of an English ruddy.

There would have been small mayhem, but Jan Armstrong came
out then, escorted by an official who treated her with the kind of gravity reserved for the Pope’s sister. She was laughing and smiling, she was obviously very happy as she stepped on a raised platform behind the rope. The platform was about a yard square and a foot high, set out for her probably by the television men, and it may have been the color of its candy-pink carpet reflecting pink and violet and delicate rose hues to her healthy skin, but she was an attractive sight on this overcast Sunday afternoon. She was a woman one would not normally have thought of as beautiful, her hair was almost gray and close-cropped, her mouth while full and strong was without coquetry or that hint of duplicity so attractive in a woman for the implicit suggestion that only a real man could ever set her straight. No, her mouth spoke of the stubborn and the steadfast, and she was dressed in no remarkable fashion, she had on a white blouse buttoned at the neck and an orange-red skirt. She had a Scotch nose, strong, not small, not delicate in nostril, the wings cut with determination, the tip showing a hint of two lobes, she had in all the sort of face one sees in the best of small-town schoolteachers or librarians, that complete statement in the features of deep and dedicated strength, so she possessed in this hour a beautiful face, it was radiant—the word could finally be employed—the face was utterly separated from the planned street and the media men surrounding her with their microphones, the face lifted up to that moment in the past when she had directed her strength and her will to one goal, and the goal was now fulfilled—few faces are more beautiful than the dedicated when their deepest hour is in, when the plan utters its first word aloud, and the word is “yes.” So no question could bother her at this instant. If she had a reputation for being shy, grim, a swimming instructor, a phys ed teacher, a churchgoer, a conformist, a humorless embodiment of the space frontier in female form, she was now on top of it all, she was in rollicking good humor from the release of that safe landing.

“Will you let the children stay up and watch the moon walk tonight?” asked a journalist.

A devil came into her eye. “I don’t care for what they do,” she
said with happy idiom, a grammar from the universal interior of the nation, not Midwestern, not Texan, by now from anywhere in there.

The questions went on. She laughed happily at their absurdity. She could not make a mistake. “Is this the greatest moment of your life?” asked one of the voices.

“No, sir,” said her shining face, “when I was married, it was the greatest moment of my life.”

They had known each other for three years before they had their first date, they had lived soon after their marriage in a cabin in the mountains with no plumbing, he would wave the wings of the test planes he flew as he burned through the sky over their house. It was a marriage of piano duets and long solo flights in gliders; the death of their only daughter, age three, came from a tumor of the brain. Aquarius hated to comprehend marriages by such contradictory details picked up on the fly, but these details promised to fit, they spoke of the serious physician’s daughter from Illinois, and the dream-absorbed boy with the lonely face of early photographs, the boy whose family moved a dozen times when he was young in Ohio. He had worked for a pharmacy at forty cents an hour to earn the nine dollars an hour for flying lessons. Would the relation of husband and wife to each other be so very different from Armstrong’s relation to the sky? Everything about Armstrong suggested that he would be happiest in the sky, that surf of space where intimations of a language few could speak might hover on the changing of a cloud.

“Are you pleased with the Sea of Tranquility as a place to land?” asked a questioner.

She liked Tranquility Base. It was obvious the word was agreeable. For those who have been living in dread, tranquility is grace, the very decency of ecstasy.

“What are you having for dinner tonight? Space food?”

She threw back her head like a mare so happy with the day she can support any rider, “No, sir,” she said and left it there, proper for NASA and the team, but the glint in her eye had its own look,
“We ain’t quite so square as you think us, Mister Reporter,” said the unvoiced look.

Another few questions and the NASA representative at her elbow returned her to the house. The Press was off to cars and TV vans, the ride was on to find the Collins home and the Aldrin house, each a block from the other, but back in Nassau Bay itself, back in another soft checkerboard of curves at right angles to the intersection of other curves, a suburb built even closer to men’s occupations in buildings with windowless walls.

Pat Collins was another woman in another state. She was conventionally good-looking with the sort of attractive and competent features one finds in secretaries to important executives or in the woman who is supervisor of hostesses for an airline. She had black hair pinned up high and green-blue eyes bright as the lights in a valuable stone. Her arms and legs were very slim, and she smiled a lot as she talked to the Press. She seemed flustered, and not unravaged by the tension of the last few days. Her remarks were polite, enthusiastic, hardworking. She said that by the time they touched down on the moon, she was cheering, but in fact she had the glitter of an actress who is loyal to the company and loyal to the production, and so will mouth the lines clearly even if the theater is half-empty, the play is falling apart, and the cast will be given their notice in another night. She was loyal to what was demanded of her, but the strain was showing—of the three wives she had had the most difficult relation to the event. She was obliged to suffer with the other wives as an equal among equals, share the agonies and the jubilation of the landing with them, yet in fact her husband was not landing, he was up in the air all alone, he would be alone for another day or more, sometimes alone on the back side of the moon while the others explored ground no living man had stepped upon. She had a face which was obviously not without ambition, one of those faces which exhibit no outrageous vice but nonetheless want the best for themselves, not ruthless so much as ready to commit oneself to the partner and work all the way to go all the way. Now her husband had gone 99.9 percent of the way. If
it was secretly hard on him, it would have to be twice as hard on her. What a role to play! The interviewers asked her again and again, “Do you mind that your husband is not landing with the others?” And again and again in a voice which was using the reserves of her good looks she kept replying in a tone determinedly bright (and so bumped over to the edge of the haggard) that she didn’t mind a bit and knew Mike didn’t either. The laws of propriety at NASA went as deep as the regulations at a hospital—woe to any astronaut or wife who uttered in public any sentiment which would fail to bore the expectations of fifty million viewers. There was a true and proper standard of behavior for every public situation in which they might find themselves. A clear rule of measure: do not under any circumstance say anything more interesting than Richard Nixon would say in the same situation. That was the clubhouse rule; Pat Collins was obeying it. Since she also had the look of a woman who must have real flashes of Irish beauty when relaxed, the expostulations of complete happiness made her remarks so ordinary that Aquarius discovered afterward he had not worked to take a note.