Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (37 page)

A little later:

The waste-water dump set up a cloud of spherical icicles bright as diamonds in the void, and the particles traveled like a cloud of insects around the ship and dissipated only as slowly as the speed of the dribbling velocity with which they had trickled through the vent. It would of course have been simple to have propelled the waste water out at speed, but the greater force employed would
have affected the trajectory of the ship, even as it had affected the roll this morning in PTC. In space, since there was a relative void of relations, so every little event was related to everything else. Droplets of urine could look like stars, droplets of urine could serve as projectiles to correct a rocket in trajectory.

But it was a routine day. The charge on Battery B was terminated, the parameters of Luna 15 were reported. The morning news was also reported—at 2:30 in the afternoon. An item about the world’s porridge eating championship in Corby, England, inspired some happiness among the astronauts. Hemingway was crossing Andy Hardy.

A little later:

This endless preciosity of specification was necessary. In relation to their equipment, the trip was not unique, but merely another store of information in the continuing line of missions from the past which would lead toward expeditions in the future. So everything was important—the malfunctions in the oxygen transducer, and the glare from the foil wrappings of the Lem, the time it took the waste-water cloud to disperse, and the hours they slept, the unexpected reactions of the computer. Everything was important. After a while everything began to seem equally important, even the crumpling of the food bags. Like narcissists, like children, like old people, the astronauts all exhibited a single-minded emphasis on each detail which arrived before them, large or small. Just as prostitutes or male trade give equal attention to each unwinding detail, “and then I bought ham and eggs and the ham was too rubbery and I got disgusted and crossed the street and bought a paper and a guy came along and pulled out a gun and held up this old lady right in front of me and then the cops came and there was a hassle and I skipped off and went window shopping and saw this leather suede jacket”—just as old people measuring the length of their days in the constriction of each breath cannot therefore imagine anything more important than their diet, the fluctuations of their disease, and the regularity of family visits; just as children are absorbed in the sensuous exploitation of each instant, for any new experience may turn to magic or the commencement of a new habit (and thus nothing can be ignored); just as narcissists can be indifferent to no shift in the mood, for each ripple of mood is a wave which will illumine or erode their beauty, just as a prostitute or male hustler takes each detail in full and equal measures of readiness and indifference, for each new encounter is either the law, sex, money, violence, boredom, outright rejection, or new adornment, so everything in the astronauts’ finicky man-supported and
prone-to-malfunctioning, unhealthy, plastic, odor-sealed, and odor-filtered environment was of equal news and interest because not only did their lives depend upon such constant and promiscuous concentration, but the style of their endeavor was implicit with it. Embarked on a heroic vault and subjected to a monotonous round of monitoring and mechanical housekeeping in relation to objects they could never comprehend sufficiently well, they existed in capsule like the real embodiments they were of technological man, forever engaged in activities whose controls he wields until he controls them no more, powerful, expert, philosophically naïve, jargon-ridden, and resolutely divorced from any language with grandeur to match the proportions of his endeavor. Constantly watched, every last function they performed monitored in one way or recorded in another, it was a little like working with God: every last detail of one’s moves was observed. So they had burst clear through paranoia—they could tell themselves they were collaborating with the intents and detections of the Almighty. No wonder they spoke in the mood-smashed, random-item sequences of the modern world, where the depth of the thought was not nearly so important as the ability to brook interruption, and then interruption upon interruption, to live in an environment so formless and externally directed that weightlessness was the next and logical step, to suffer shortwave radio and the life of static like deaf people communicating in a factory which produces nothing but noisemakers and celebration horns, yes, let us quit this accounting of their third day, let us dispense with their next television show, their LM Delta P, their O
₂
flow alarm, their platform realignments and further water dumps, their Delta H updates, their cryo checks, their reports on the docking latches, the disassembly and reinstallation of the probe, drogue and hatch to the Lunar Module, their entrance into the Lem, their examination, their television humor—now near to the humor at a drunken party, “Hello, there, earthlings,” let us pass over the new data for the Alternate and Contingency checklist, the switch positions on the high-gain antenna, the changes in the glycol flow for the radiators,
the small shifts in the Lunar Module mission rules, the supper and the music played, the check on the placements of the landing site obliques, the correction of typos on the APS DPS fuel card, the listing of three adjustments in the Mission Rule’s GO–NO GO card file, the check on the gyroscope drift, the discussion of abort programs above or below low gate with consequent loss of thrust axis, the status report, the Delta P again, it all comes in with lists and pieces and interrupted parts, comments on the tone in the alarm signals and the ubiquitous use of the word “great” for anything that works as well as it was designed to work, great, great, great, the television show was great, and the last waste-water dump, the Saturn performance and the Service Propulsion Motor performance, the burps and the bursts of the thrusters. It was the small-town reaction to the grim miracles of the modern world, everything was great, a bite of steak, a chocolate bar, a movie which made you laugh, a high focus on a television screen—great, great, great, great. The famine of American life was in the sound of the word.

Still up they climbed, up that narrow pass between their diminishing acceleration and the decreasing force of the earth’s gravity, and as they climbed, up from the great mass of the earth, so they came nearer to the influence of the moon. That night in sleep, third night out, they would pass over from the earth’s domain to the pull of the lunar sphere, and as if to tip a lance in recognition of the oncoming moment, the Passive Thermal Control began to act in curious fashion.

An hour later, still bothered by the memory of the inexplicable wobble, the following conversation took place: