Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (39 page)

No, they would not dwell overlong on descriptions of the moon. It lived outside the hatch window, it filled almost all the view, its roughed-up hide paraded below—that skin of craters set upon craters which would inspire every simile from the pop-holes in pancakes cooking to barnacles upon a rock. One could say it looked like molten metal or blistered paint, one could speak of the erosions of bacteria culture in a Petri dish, or leukemia cells in an electron micrograph—one could also be looking at the heavens on a hazy night for the rays from the crater Tycho and the crater Copernicus spread out in such profusion that the moon also looked like a photograph taken across space of the streams of the Milky Way, even its dark
maria
—those dark seas of moon plain—Imbrium, and Tranquillitatis, Nectaris, Fecunditatus, Nubium, Humorum, Serenitatis, especially the vast dark plain of the Oceanus Procellarum looked like the dark and empty spaces of the sky where one saw no stars. And the multitude of craters were like a multitude of dots and rings of light, were like the overlapping luminescence
of stars, as if the moon, properly read, could betray as much of the real character of the heavens as the lines on a man’s hand could enrich an eye which understood a world where histories might be written in the hieroglyphics of some universal form neatly concealed in the crack of the palm.

The moon traveled around the earth and both traveled around the sun; the moon moved therefore in a path, which if drawn, would have been not unreminiscent of the outline of an old gear with rounded teeth. The moon had a period of twenty-seven days seven hours forty-three minutes, and eleven-plus seconds—one could be tempted to predict that the interval of normal period of all the women in the world if taken for average would come to the same eleven-plus seconds, forty-three minutes, seven hours and twenty-seven days—there was a hieroglyphic from the deep!

There were others hidden no doubt on the far side of the moon. As she turned about the earth, the moon kept herself like a subject before the king—her face was always presented, her back always hidden—so from earth one saw only her face. The far side had remained a mystery until the first unmanned Soviet spaceships passed around the satellite and sent back photographs by television. Since then Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 had taken scores of pictures. Now, the far side of the moon was no longer a complete mystery. But it was different from the face seen on earth, it was powerfully different, and the astronauts would soon see the far side—they were indeed approaching toward rendezvous with the leading edge of the moon. Before too long, their trajectory, caught by the accelerating pull of the moon’s gravity, would begin to bend about the moon—at the appropriate moment they would be drawn into orbit around the back, they would see the far side, they would be the seventh, eighth and ninth men ever to see the far side of the moon, and then flying motors first, they would fire their main engine to brake their speed. When they came around the moon again they would not go whipping back to earth—rather they would be in lunar orbit, there to circle the moon ten times and more while preparing for the descent. So they would be in orbit about a moon
which was in orbit about an earth, and if moon and earth were both in orbit about the sun, well the moon would soon have its satellite as well, a tiny satellite with three men.

Different, however, were the orbits. If the moon took twenty-seven days and some hours to go around the earth, that period was its lunar year just as it took the earth a year to go around the sun. Yet this lunar year of twenty-seven days plus seven hours was also the moon’s lunar day. Since the moon kept its face always to the earth, then as it went around the earth, the sun would shine on our visible side of the moon when the earth was between the sun and the moon, but then the sun would shine on the far side of the moon when the moon was between the earth and the sun. So daylight on any area of the moon lasted for fourteen days, a long fourteen days of sun beating on the desert and the craters and the plains of the dead seas, shining on the pinnacles and turrets of the mountains, and the temperature went up as the fourteen days went by, those fourteen earth days which were but one day of sunlight to the cloudless moon. Each terrestrial day here on earth was then by lunar measure of time no more than the rough equivalent of an hour, and the heat increased each lunar hour, each part of the fourteen continuous days of sunlight. At any given point on the moon, the temperature went up to as high as 243 degrees Fahrenheit when the sun was at zenith. Then the moon, always wheeling with her face to the earth, would pass that face out of the sun and into the dark of earthshine and the long fourteen-day night of the lunar night would begin and the temperature would drop. Down to 279 degrees Fahrenheit below zero it would drop in the depth of the long night, cold as the liquid oxygen in the tanks of Apollo-Saturn before lift-off, and the cold of that one night would last for the equivalent of two weeks of days and nights on earth. And there was no air and no wind.

Perhaps the moon had been once in rotation, and had had a day and a night not unlike the earth. But there were signs to indicate that the moon on approaching the gravitational grasp of the earth had had its cooling skin seized and twisted by the ferocious tides of
the earth’s pull. Lines of mountain had been pulled up and the moon’s rotation had slowed. The moon staggered away into space, went out nearer to Mars, then caromed back and was captured again. One history of the moon conceived of it entering relations with the earth three times in much such a way before its final capture; what spirit of earth and lunar forces must have been released, exchanged, and conceivably not lost forever? It was a theory among others, but it was not without relation to the difference between the near side of the moon and the far, and it offered an explanation for the moon’s craters, since the molten lavas and boiling waters of the young moon’s interior would have been profoundly disturbed in such a courtship of the spheres, and volcanic eruptions would have been the predominant order of events. That was one of the major theories, but in fact there were two fundamental and antagonistic hypotheses to account for the terrain of the moon: each was in difficulties before the critics of the other. There were men who believed the craters of the moon had come in their entirety, or almost entirely, from the impact of meteors in those remote ages when meteors abounded as planets formed. Such theorists were termed lunar impact men, and their thesis had to live with objections so thoroughgoing as the fact that craters sometimes presented themselves in a clean row like strings of artillery shells; worse! impact men were obliged to explain how craters could be spaced like pearls around the rim of a larger crater: how indeed could the meteors have landed in such order? But the largest of the objections was to be found in the size of the dead seas. The Oceanus Procellarum was better than a thousand miles across—a meteor comparable in size to a moon for our moon might have had to collide for such a scar to be left.

The masters of the meteoric hypothesis had other difficult answers to give. Most craters were not a simple bowl, rather a bowl with an umbilical at its core—a separate mountain peak at the center of the bowl surrounded by a ring of plain. Even the smaller craters were rarely without a pit, a core, a vertical elevation at the center, or a root like the pintle on an old bottle. Such centers suggested
a now extinct fountain of lava. So theories of impact were not comfortable, no more than the scientists who believed the craters of the moon were the product of volcanoes could explain with ease why even the largest volcanoes on earth were small in comparison to moon craters, and why the floor of a terrestrial volcano was elevated clear above the surrounding countryside, was often indeed a steep cone with no more than a modest vent for crater, and so most unlike the terrain of the moon. On the other hand the largest meteoric crater seen on earth was only two miles across. Models drawn from the earth simply did not suffice for either vulcanists or impact men. How to explain that the moon was either the subject of vast meteoric bombardments from ages past which the earth had somehow escaped, bombardments with an occasional perfection of aim equal to shooting pearls onto the circular points of a crown; or equally how to convince others that the moon was the product of its wanderings between the earth and Mars, child of regimens of boiling and cooling, geysers of water, mud and lava, a world of subterranean seas and trapped gases, a cauldron of upheavals and subsidences in some romantic, even catalytic relation to the earth, a theory therefore in furious conflict with the ideas of all meteoric theories, for the impact men were attached to the idea that the moon was ancient and unchanging, and the major bombardments had occurred eons ago, billions of years ago. It was the best explanation why such bombardments were not to be found on earth—the earth, equally pitted then, had had its face subsequently altered by geological upheavals went the hypothesis. It allowed one to induce that the impact men were classicists, positivists, traditionalists, upholders of the public common sense (since the moon by all common sense
looked
as if it had been bombarded). The vulcanists were romantics, Dionysiacs, existentialists, animists—at their most adventurous they would even search for some faint hope of life on the moon.

Neither could secure an explanation for the contradictory facts, and before the phenomenon of the rays, no meteorite man nor apostle of the geyser-volcano could offer an embattled theory. The
rays had no explanation which could explain all the facts attached to them. The rays emanated from the craters, but before one could even speak of a stream of white powder flying out, it was necessary to note that the rays were sometimes tangential to the ring of the crater and sometimes radiated out from the center. Sometimes a crater had but a single ray which led to a particular place, often to another crater. Yet if the rays were some physical embodiment of an idea or a communication, they were yet singularly sensitive to obstacles—even a low ridge across their path could stop them short—yet in other places they would extend across a thousand-mile sea. They were even described like “snow thinly drifted by a strong wind across a black frozen lake.”

Imperfect, unhappy, unsatisfactory theories abounded within the two schools of theory. And other theories abounded, even the theory that the moon was a dead civilization, its endless rings the record of a last atomic war—it was said the earth would look like the moon after a nuclear holocaust had destroyed us.

Yet it was with the partial hope that their projected experiments on the moon and the rocks they brought back would begin to apply answers to these questions that the astronauts doubtless now reviewed for the thousandth time the order of their assignments on the moon ground and the probabilities of vulcanism, formation by meteor, or some other theory altogether. Revolving below them, coming each minute nearer was the dead beast of the moon ground, the mute mysteries locked in the formation of form itself. Would the moon yet answer the fundamental question of form—that all forms which looked alike were in some yet undiscovered logic thereby alike?—which is to say that if the skin of the moon was reminiscent of boiled milk and cancer cells and acne, so then—would a theory yet emerge which could revolve at some ease through the metaphors of the moon and find the link of metaphysical reason between cancer, acne, blisterings of paint and the wrinkled ridges of a boiled and skin-thick milk?

One can dismiss the enigma of form too quickly. Let us propose an artist who draws a face, and assume that the man in the portrait is bald, and the artist on a whim draws a wen on the back of the head, then the scar of an old boil. Finally he puts in a mean wrinkle high on the neck. Abruptly, a second face emerges on the back of the bald head. There with the wen and the old boil for eyes, the wrinkle has become a mouth. But the artist has lived with form for so long that he is far from surprised the back of this bald dome has revealed a face: he is already concerned with what that embryonic expression has to say—he would indeed go so far as to assume that the wen, the boil and the wrinkle are exactly where they are because the flesh has desired to become a draftsman, because the back of the head secretly wished to draw a particular face on its own skin, as though to say, “If I must suffer a boil, let it at least do some work for me, let it establish that I have not one head, but two; one biological, and one somewhat less tangible—perhaps a second spirit to be discerned only on the back of my skull.”

Painters are not invariably articulate. They can live quietly with such thoughts rather than look to express them. An argument ready to claim that the vulcanism of the skin is designed not only to draw attention to the imbalance of boils, eczema, and acne, but to the secret urges of the man to display a few items he cannot otherwise display—a hint of buried horrors if he is timid, or of humor if he is sufficiently pompous—is an argument beyond the average artist’s desire. For the discussion would have to confront the apostle of common sense, and the apostle, an impact man, would be quick to point out that the boil is where it is because of where the dirt was in the collar. Not every painter would have the wit to answer, “Dirty collars are many, boils are few,” or be ready to suggest that the site of the boil, while important, is not necessarily as significant as the visual statement offered by the form of the boil as the crater dried to a scar. There might lie the right to assume the flesh drew its own design.

The painter is probably suggesting that form is a language
which seeks to express itself by every means. If man has his voice, nature has wind, it has thunder, the sound of running waters, it has its variety of cataracts and Krakatoas. If we agree that the urge to create a language is basic to man, so basic that one can begin to define his nature by saying he is an animal with the irrepressible desire to develop formal speech, why must it be altogether uncomfortable to assume other categories of nature would not attempt to shape forms that could delineate their inner meaning, why indeed is it not as natural for nature to shape itself as for man to speak? On that assumption could commence a metaphysics of form. If common sense would ask immediately why nature would not also wish to conceal itself, in fact elaborate a labyrinth of false and misleading form to protect itself, it can be agreed that not all form reveals, form may also be designed to betray meaning. Still there is an economy to nature one might as well assume, for that is easier to comprehend than lack of economy—a prevalence of wasteful and misleading communication might prove a luxury the cosmos could not necessarily afford.