Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (20 page)

In the society of the irrational would be found the weather of the whirlpool. Accelerations and torpor would ride over one another with eyes burned out by visions no longer recalled, motorcycles would climb the trees, a night of freakings when all the hair would be burned for the bonfire of the goat, and bald as the moon would be the skins of the scalp. Hare Krishna! A part of the American world, gassed by the smog of computer logic, would live like gurus, babas and yogas in the smallest towns, the small towns of America would be repopulated with the poets of the city, and mysticism would live next to murder, for murder was love in freak newspeak, and the orgy was the family. Because the computer was the essence of narcissism (the computer could not conceive of its inability to correct its own mistakes) a view of the Seventies suggested a technological narcissism so great that freak newspeak was its only cure—only the threat of a murderous society without could keep computer society from withering within. How those societies would mingle! Acid and pot had opened the way.

Yet even this model of the future was too simple. For the society of the rational and the world of the irrational would be without boundaries. Computersville had no cure for skin disease but filth in the wound, and the guru had no remedy for insomnia but a
trip to the moon, so people would be forever migrating between the societies. Sex would be a new form of currency in both worlds—on that you could count. The planner and the swinger were the necessary extremes of the computer city, and both would meet in the orgies of the suburbs. But was this a vision of the future or the vertigo of the early hours?

Aquarius got out of bed. He was a disciplinarian about insomnia. Having suffered from it years before, he had learned how to live with an occasional bad night. He took no pill, he took no drink, he looked to ride it out. Sometimes he indulged in a game of formal optimism, carrying over from artillery training the injunction to bracket a target. So now if his sense of the future was too pessimistic—he could only hope it was too dark!—he would look for the formal opposite: try to regard science as reasonable, religion as rewarding. He could see—sitting in a kitchen chair, reading by a lamp—how new religions might crystallize in the Seventies, they could give life, for their view of God might be new. And science … But he could not regard science apart from technology. Aquarius began to think of Dr. George Mueller.

III

He had had an interview with the head of the Manned Space Program when he was back at Kennedy. Once a professor of electronics, Mueller had become the second highest man in NASA, indeed nobody was higher than him but Dr. Thomas O. Paine, yet Mueller was in appearance a very modest man, an archetype to Aquarius of the technician. Mueller—whose name was pronounced Miller—was not tall, certainly he was not short, he was slim in weight, in fact without excess weight, he looked forty-five although he had to be older, and he had a long thin face, a high forehead, straight black hair which he combed straight back—so his black horn-rimmed glasses jutted forth, so did the blade of his nose, the blade of his jaw. He spoke with mild icky-dicky Midwest expletives like “Golly gee, gee whiz, gosh!” that modest but central sense of presence one might find in a YMCA secretary on the night desk—the
manner friendly, impersonal, and on an astral plane, a manner to indicate that of course one is used to talking to all sorts of people—golly gee, you ought to see some of the characters who come in here.

Mueller had the reputation of being tremendously determined when he wanted to get something done, and one could believe it, for he emitted the gentle but total impersonality of a man for whom obstacles if irrational were unforgivable. Perhaps for this reason he was curiously reminiscent of Hugh Hefner. The publisher of
Playboy
was a little in relation to ordinary men like a guy who had been to the moon and back and Dr. Mueller could have been his older brother.

Aquarius met him in Mueller’s motel at Cocoa Beach, a room as modest as his pretensions. There had been a photographer taking pictures. Mueller apologized, explaining that he had been so busy for so many years that he had hardly had a picture taken—now they had discovered there weren’t enough pictures of him for the NASA files. So he posed for a few more, in some degree as pleased and flustered as a man walking into a room, and crack! flashbulbs! they are giving him a birthday party.

Yet once the interview began, Mueller was sensitive to every change about him. Did Aquarius, searching for his next question, feel some intensity of motive or charge of energy, then Mueller was there to respond as quickly as the needle on any of the measuring instruments he had used in all the electrical labs of his youth and academic career. Dart! would go his head; up! would fly a finger; sway! would swing his torso. How alert he must have been to signs of overload or impedance in all the human circuits about his field position in the room. Yes, Dr. George Mueller was certainly one full academic counterpart to the Black professor. Having seen Apollo-Saturn rise from the drawing board to an orbit of the moon, it was as natural for him to live with comfort in the future as it was flesh and drink for the Black to brood upon the past. So Mueller was looking beyond this landing to the uses of space in the future. He talked of rocket shuttles which could be fired up to rendezvous
with space stations in orbit and yet be able to return through the heats of reentry to land at spaceports in order to be used again; he spoke of lowering the cost of transport in space from $100,000 a pound to $200 a pound; he outlined future projects for nuclear power plants on the moon whose heats would melt the permafrost and so make available a supply of water. The electrical output of the power plant could then separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen—some of that product would be used to make Lox and LH2 for rocket fuels; the rest would be mixed with nitrogen extracted from the rocks so they would have the elements necessary to create a livable atmosphere within an enclosed space. Perhaps they would even grow plants. Would it be Aristotle Onassis or Richard Burton who would be first to spring for a bouquet of moon roses?

The space station orbiting the earth could go in for a “total earth sensing program,” doubtless as comprehensive for the earth, Aquarius decided, as a thorough physical examination conducted daily for a man. The space station would also set up a high-energy physics laboratory. It would certainly accelerate every technique in the manufacture of cameras, telescopes, radars, lasers, and that was just the beginning. Mueller went on in full sentences. He had spoken of these matters a hundred times, but like all high bureaucrats he was equal to a professional actor in his ability to repeat the same dialogue with verve another hundred times. If any reporter had brought a tape recorder, he could by transcribing Mueller’s remarks directly have had a printable feature story for a Sunday section. As though unwinding a scroll, Mueller indicated the possibility of a new wonder with each paragraph. Since the space stations would have a weightless environment at their command, it would be possible to grow crystals which would be molecularly perfect. As a corollary, one would be able to build up flawless diamonds of any size. Before Aquarius could ask if the diamond would be as big as the Ritz, Mueller assured him in his cheerful small-town voice that the diamond could be as big as a basketball anyhow—such a cargo might be worth much more than two hundred
dollars a pound. Thus the perspective of space factories returning the new imperialists of space a profit was now near to the reach of technology. Forget about diamonds! The value of crystals grown in space was incalculable: gravity would not be pulling on the crystal structure as it grew, so the molecules would line up in lattices free of shift or shear. Such a perfect latticework could serve to carry messages for a perfect computer. Computers the size of a package of cigarettes would then be able to do the work of present computers the size of a trunk. So the mind could race ahead to see computers programming go-to-school routes in the nose of every kiddie car—the paranoid mind could see crystal transmitters sewn into the rump of every juvenile delinquent—doubtless, everybody would be easier to monitor. In the Systematized Detection Systems of the future, Big Brother could get superseded by Moon Brother—the major monitor of them all might yet be sunk in a shaft on the back face of the lunar sphere.

The possibilities of the new technology glowed in the enthusiasms of Mueller’s voice. “Ball bearings,” he said holding up a finger like an antenna to focus all scattered waves of random thought, “it’s fascinating to consider what possibilities are opened in the manufacture of ball bearings.” He went on to explain in his careful considerate feature-story paragraphs that ball bearings which were cast in a weightless environment would come out as perfect spheres; the deviation on their skin need be no greater than the thickness of a molecule. Earth ball bearings were of course imprecise. In the instant it took the shot to cool, gravity was pulling on the molten ball. So to obtain precision they must be polished, a relatively imprecise technique.

Aquarius was to think again of the ball bearings after he said good-by to Dr. Mueller. Such creations of a weightless environment could yet prove monumental for the manufacturer, since ball bearings were as crucial to every load-bearing or load-transporting machine as the valves of the human heart to the flow of blood. Out of the imperfections of ball bearings (which were located after all around the center of every high-speed moving part) came the multiplication
of all the other imperfections, since each moving part added the scope of its imprecision to the next moving part. Once perfect ball bearings could be installed, the action of the machines might become a whole order of efficiency closer to the laws of physics, rather than to the adjustments and counterbalances of engineering. That meant a world of future machines whose view of present-day machines might be equal to nothing less than our view of Piltdown man. Or would it merely mean that plastic could now be employed for the ball bearings in order to maintain the built-in obsolescence of machines? Indeed the center of the problem of capitalism’s morale was in the perfect ball bearing. Machines built on perfect ball bearings would have a life duration so much greater than present machines that modern capitalism living with the vice of built-in obsolescence as the poison-stimulant to its blood, would be face to face with problems greater and more inescapable than automation. For once space explorers, seeking economic justification, would be forced to develop perfect ball bearings, their use would be bound to explode the sustaining fevers and indulgences of the economy. What then would they all do? Then, capitalism would be as much at war with itself over the continuing nature of the economy as world communism was at war with itself over the direction of its ideology.

So the mood of space which remained with Aquarius after talking to Mueller, that mood elegant and austere as the perfect laws of physical principle, was still a force for disruption. Sitting in the spaced-out colors of Dun Cove, inhabiting the shank end of ruminations like this, was the thought that the moon shot was conceivably the first voyage of the very cancer of the world, for indeed the first journeys of the cancer cell in a body, taken from the point of view of the cancer cell, were certainly bold and dangerous. Not by little effort did a cell leave its own organ and learn how to survive in another. Cancer cells, seen in relation to ordinary cells, were often extraordinary in the variety of their form, as different as a view of Las Vegas at night is different from a village in the Bluegrass, or as different as the internal works of Apollo were in comparison
to the works of the family car. Did that account for the curious depression, the sobriety mixed in so many faces with the pride of the achievement? Aquarius did not know.

That was still another reason why he did not perceive the decade to come with any clear picture of events. A dull sense of disaster pushed at the compass of the picture. He was not so certain the decade would have a life like other decades. If space was benign, then on we would continue into space, and the artists would yet be voyaging with the astronauts—think of that happy day when he would nominate himself to be first writer to visit the moon. (Not a chance! NASA would opt for Updike!)

But what if space were not so benign? What if we did not act upon space, explore into space, but space rather acted upon us, drew us toward her dispositions, her plans for us, her intent upon human life, what if we thought we moved up but were drawn up, what if the moon was as quiet as the fisherman when he lays the fly on the water …

Having journeyed to the center of his gloom, Aquarius went to sleep. In his dreams a country doctor he had known for years murmured, “I don’t know about all of this. Recognize that the moon could be some kind of catchall simple as the tonsils to protect us here on earth. Maybe those craters come from catching all the cess.” In his dream Aquarius answered back, “It depends on your idea of God, that’s what it must depend on.” Out into sleep he went again, ringings of ether in his ear.

In the morning after breakfast, he found himself rereading a transcript of the postlaunch briefing, a curious activity, but he was like a man on the cusp of a clue. To fall asleep in pursuit of the answer to a mystery was to awaken with the fire in a new place. It had burned beneath the ground while he was sleeping. So he dallied over the substance of the transcript as if some hint of smoke could linger here in the words of men taken down for posterity four hours after the launch.