Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (38 page)

Beyond the psychology of machines was the unformed psychology of space—was there some equivalent of haunted houses and creaking doors which now laid odd changes of attitude into Apollo 11? Consider your psychological state when you are weightless and therefore as disposable to floating as a particle of dust, conceive of an environment where your shoes are covered with a hooked-fiber plastic in order to keep them stuck to the floor, an environment where the easiest way to look through a telescope is to float toward the eyepiece like a swimmer, head down, eye raised to peer through at contact, yes the astronauts’ idea of space was obliged to be more filled than the layman’s with a sense of the domains of space.

A space which consists of domains—it is like thinking of a house with no walls and no ceiling. How can we call it a house? Yet if we conceive of heat so constantly generated that it keeps a particular volume of air at the same temperature, if we think of a field of force about the roofless house which keeps off rain and snow and repels all wind, if we conceive of this house as a sanctuary in open air protected by invisible zones of demarcation quite the equal of any wall or roof, then we can begin to think of the real nature of space. For there are redoubts and radiation-free harbors in the seas of space and the earth resides in one of them. The astronauts knew there were belts of radiation around the earth, and a field of magnetic force generated out of the depths of molten iron in the core of the earth itself. Beyond the atmosphere, out, forty thousand miles out, was the magnetosphere, a kingdom of subatomic particles thought to have originated from the sun but now charged by the earth—the earth had thus formed an electrical cavity about itself, an enclave of space wherein to protect itself against the gales of cosmic rays. But then all of the solar system could be
said to inhabit still a larger vessel in greater space, for there was the indisputable phenomenon of solar flares which swept out on special occasions from the sun in storms of electrical activity which collapsed the magnetosphere, brightened the aurora, extinguished all long-distance radio communications, and acted like a great cloth or broom to sweep out the solar system, yes the sun swept the great spaces between the planets from sudden onslaughts of galactic cosmic rays which had originated in the explosion of stars far out beyond the sun, stars conceivably malignant, as if the sun were not only the source of life, but the lion at the gates of life defending the bastions of its planets with a fierce tongue to lick the infected space between. And in all of this, three men, and a spacecraft which proceeds for reasons they cannot yet discover, to have tipped that once in PTC, then wobbled just a little with the intimations of a drunken top—it had been nothing, but now, sleep period upon them, it would have been legitimate if the faintest sense of terror had come to visit the long curving aisle of their trajectory.

At any rate, less than an hour later, the crew still not able to sleep, the spacecraft passed over into the sphere of influence of the moon, and all imperceptibly, light as the breath of a bird, an acceleration began. The gravity of the moon pulled upon the ship, and the force of lunar gravity, whatever was that force, drew upon the ship, pulled gently, perhaps as gently as that first almost inaudible ripple which pulls along a shore when the tide shifts and begins to go out. Baleful or benign, palpable or utterly without influence, the moon beckoned with the weight of its matter, the computers on earth changed over to the parameters of the moon, passed over into the divide of lunar sleep and began to live in her domain.

Enough of engineering! Enough of reading dials and setting knobs. Let us rather take a good look at the moon. She is now a presence outside the drawn shade of the capsule’s window, she is … she is not thirty-four thousand miles away and every instant nearer, and her pull upon the craft comes greater. Yes, let us look at the moon.

On the fourth morning, a half hour after the usual routine of awakening on consumable updates, sleep reports, drift checks, REFSMMATs, fuel cell purges, PTC maneuvers, and radiator-flow checks, there was finally a conversation about their port of call. They had traveled through the night, their speed accelerating as they came nearer to the pull of their destination, and at 71 hours, 31 minutes out, a half hour less than three days from the time of lift-off, on seven-thirty of this fourth morning, they were now no more than 11,000 nautical miles away and traveling at a velocity of 4,141 feet per second.

When there was no answer, the spacecraft spoke again.

It’s quite an eerie sight
. What an absence of technology in the remark! We need not even guess at what a panorama they had. Armstrong was later to report: “Of all the spectacular views … the most impressive to me was on the way toward the moon when we flew through its shadow.” The moon was three times nearer than it had been at the hour of sleep nine hours ago when the shades were drawn. Three times nearer, it was three times larger, and filled their circular window—the sun was behind and so throwing a halo several times the size of the satellite.

They had had glimpses of the moon before, of course, there had been occasions to study it all the way up, but the occasions were imperfect and full of glare. In the flaring lights of sun and black space, every reflection from the spacecraft dazzling in their eyes, as hard on visibility as driving into the sun, there were no stars to see (except with every difficulty we have noted) and the moon was often no more than an area of darkness in the brilliant haze.

But now the sun was back of the moon and the halo, like a nineteenth-century painting of heaven, was three-dimensional to their eyes, a borealis of golden light with shafts and vales and mansions of light and gardens of light back of the moon. And in the center of the celestial corona was the land of their visit, visible at last, the moon now as clear to the eye as earth on the night of the
fullest moon, no, far more bright than that, brighter far, for the moon was now in earthshine. The light of the earth reflected on the blue-gray face of moon highlands and deserts and craters, the earth reflected back a light eighty times more intense than the brightest light of the full moon. It was like the light at early evening.…

Yes, there was the moon before them, as visible finally as lands of the horizon in the endless twilight nights of a northern summer, the satellite of the earth, a body mysterious beyond measure, unique in the solar system, a moon whose properties and dimensions resisted all categories of classification between planet and satellite, that moon whose origins remained a mystery, whose lunar features were shaped—no one could prove quite how they had been shaped—the moon lay revealed beneath them in its multiplicity of design. Whether dead record of the forces at work in the heavens, or something else not altogether so dead, there beneath them turned some darkened world of blue and silver-gray with color of a subtlety in its corners, and craters luminous to the eye. It was an eerie sight, eerie as a presence, eerie as a strange and desert shore emerged across a dream of sky and glassed-up surface of waters. How to row? How to breathe? The blue and desert shore approached across the impalpable space, cathedrals of light bent around the rim of its edge.

What a land was now there for study! If dead, the death was with dimension. It was a heavenly body which gave every evidence of having perished in some anguish of the cosmos, some agony of apocalypse—a face so cruelly pitted with an acne would have showed a man whose skin had died to keep his heart alive. What a burble of lavas and crusts, of boils on the pop and buds in frozen blight; what a scale of extinguishments; what a mystery of lines
and rays and rills which ran from the coil of one burned-out crater to another; the moon was like a crazy old-fashioned computering machine with a tangle of wires all burned, a mute battleground of blows and hits and concussions and impacts from every flying or voyaging body or particle or radiation of the solar system and beyond. The moon spoke of holes and torture pots and scars and weals and welds of molten magma.

Punched-out, eviscerated, quartered, twisted, shucked, a land of deserts shaped in circles fifty and eighty miles across, a land of mountain rings higher some than the Himalayas, a land of empty windings and endless craters, craters within craters which resided within other craters which lived on the mountainous rim of very large craters, craters the size of an inch and craters to the depth of a mile, craters so vast Grand Canyon could have resided as a crater within the crater: There is a crater known as Newton and it is eighty-five miles wide and almost thirty thousand feet deep—the rim lifts up thirteen thousand feet above all surrounding mountains, and there are chains of mountains so high and vast they are called the Alps and the Apennines or the Caucasus and the Carpathians. There were also clefts, flattened rounds, ghost craters on the plain whose existence was distinguished only by a ring of lighter colorings as if the moon, every other death already available to her, was also a photographic plate of explosions, impacts and holocausts from other places. Scoops out of the lunar soil were to be seen, and pocks and cracks and scums of wrinklings on the plains, domes and bowls and hollow cones, blackheads and whiteheads, walled terraces and cataracts of random rock, hundred-mile spews of boulder, eggcups, table mountains and rims, mudholes, clamholes, spouts, gashes, splinterings of formation faults and extrusions, chains of craters, long mysterious slashes, long as endless roads from one vast crater to another, dark craters and bright craters, craters bright as phosphorescence in a moonlit sea, and long mysterious inexplicable networks of rays—there was no better word nor way to comprehend why lines flew out across the surface, thousands of lines from certain craters, lines straight, and
lines which wobbled, lines which stopped short and lines which seemed to skim from peak to peak like a pencil drawn across the grain of a rough plank, lines which continued as a hundred separate little flutterings, and thick lines, thick as brush strokes scumbled across the ridges of an old oil canvas, then lines which wove in and out of valleys—these lines, these rays, hundreds of miles long, even thousands of miles long, were without vertical dimension, they were not ridges or grooves, it was merely that they possessed some special property on the moon soil—they reflected light in a different way, as if they were a different kind of moon dirt and dust, an overlay or powder of some species of mind or order which had visited the moon after the early mind of the moon was gone, some species of hieroglyphic to record the history of relation between the moon and the earth, yes, studying the moon was enough to encourage curious thought, for the moon was a phenomenon, the moon was a voice which did not speak, a history whose record all revealed could still reveal no answers: Every property of the moon proved to confuse a previous assumption about its property. Yes, the moon was a centrifuge of the dream, accelerating every new idea to incandescent states. One takes a breath when one looks at the moon.

It was large for a moon; relatively, it was the largest moon of any planet—its mass was one-hundredth of the earth. Ganymede, the major moon of Jupiter, had a mass only one-twelve-thousandth of its planet, and Titan, the greatest of Saturn’s satellites, weighed in at the ratio of 1 to 4,700. Even Triton, heaviest of all moons, was only one-two-hundred-and-ninetieth of the mass of Neptune. For further comparison our moon had a diameter larger than a quarter of the earth’s whereas other moons in the solar system varied from one-ninth to one-thirtieth. So it was easy to think of moon and earth as a double planet. Indeed, there was no clear evidence the moon had been torn from the womb of the earth—it could as easily
have begun as a separate body and wandered through space until that apocalyptic hour when it was captured.

The astronauts had lived with the moon: for years in increasing tempo they had studied lunar atlases, worked through geology, read the theories of the vulcanists and the impact men—in their privacy and their sleep they brooded upon it, we may assume, more perhaps than they knew, for the meanings of the moon were arrayed in all the caverns of sleep—was the moon a dead body or the dwarfed equal of earth? The nearer one came to a full contemplation of such mysteries, the greater was the temptation to think not at all. Perhaps in consequence, the astronauts were back immediately into talk of high-gain antennas and secondary loop checks, pericynthion burns and the morning news.
Pravda
had called Armstrong the “Czar of the Ship.” Capcom had added, “I think maybe they got the wrong mission,” and there would be jokes about this later in the day—Collins would remark that the Czar was brushing his teeth.