Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (60 page)

There in the fever of summer, his children restive at his side, Aquarius watched Nixon chat through a microphone while the astronauts smiled at him from the rear window of their new trailer (called the Mobile Quarantine Facility) on board the
Hornet
. Dressed in dark-green biological isolation garments, they looked rested and pleased. Nixon was fair in mood and genial indeed.

The anthem was played. The astronauts stood at attention. It had ended. It was done. Armstrong’s face looked remarkable. Never as at this hour on television had it had so much of the shriven and scourged look of that breakfast food face which smiles in innocence at us from every billboard. A truly American saint. Of course, the Devil has power to assume a pleasing shape. Aquarius thought of that moment eight days before when Armstrong, carrying his Portable Life Support System, had passed through the fenced-off throng of passionately adoring photographers and journalists at Cape Kennedy and entered a van to drive off to the launch. Then, his head in his helmet, he had had the hard flat-eyed egocentric look of a kitten, eyes hardly cracked, who will be someday a cat. It had been a moment to suggest that in the mysteries of Armstrong’s makeup, there might be a bona-fide devil in one soul if a saint in the other—assume he was twin-souled, yes—and if Aquarius had a glimpse of him as a mystic, he could see him now
again as a cat-technician who would tamper with the rain. “Haven’t been able to control the weather yet, but … tomorrow’s challenge.”

He did not know if he learned any more when word came back to him of the splashdown parties. Like a true journalist he was on the phone for full sessions with his informants, and the accounts had that essential wonder which speaks of the exaggeration of the journalist overcome by the exaggeration of events. In deference to the mission it had been a quiet week in Nassau Bay until splashdown—night after night it was as if no one connected with NASA dared to get too drunk for fear of fudged responses in the morning. A few hours after splashdown, however, the parties began; they had begun in effect from the moment technicians from the Staff Support rooms began to fill the Mission Operations Control Room, and people wet cigars and waited for the astronauts to come in on the helicopter and land on the carrier, and when they did, little flags came out and were waved in everyone’s hand. The aisles jammed between the consoles with scores of personnel who now were crowding in the door.

From there, parties spread in all directions. Out through the computer-designed suburbs around the Manned Spacecraft Center spread the celebrations, and up the highway to Houston. There was a large and formal ball in Houston that night at the Marriott Hotel from seven to nine, put together by the twenty-five main contractors in the Apollo Program, North American, Grumman and General Electric to lead the rest, a huge orchestration and libation with paté de foie gras, pigs in blankets, shrimp and eggs and olives, and ice carvings on the tables of antelope, pumpkin and dolphin tails, plus two thousand guests, the cream (selected by the twenty-five corporations) of nabobs from NASA, king contractors, and bona-fide River Oaks Houston. It was a proper party, and the bar closed at nine-thirty. There were even ladies wearing red-white-and-blue Ed White scarves (autographed by every astronaut)
which were sold by astronauts’ wives to make money for the “Ed White Memorial Fund.”

Word was out, however, of another party which had begun in the Nassau Bay Motor Inn, the motel off NASA Highway Number 1 with the round red velvet beds where Aquarius had stayed weeks before. There everybody was welcome—$1.50 bought barbecue beef and drinks were $1.15 if you did not bring your own. Three thousand people came not in beards and not with sideburns, rather in short-sleeve shirts with neckties, the ladies in cocktail dresses, scarce were the ladies in décolletage and miniskirts and pants suits—it was a regiment of office workers, engineers, technicians, secretaries, and people wandering in off the highway, the sun burning the pool until nightfall, then the night itself with all of young NASA-land driving into the great trough of all-out recreation, rebel yells finally tearing the Texas air. At seven-thirty in the evening two men threw a blond into the pool. A man followed immediately. The heats of the party were on. A go-go dancer got up on the diving board and worked to the gut rhythm of a band called the Astronauts—six Blacks. The Blacks were finally at NASA. Men climbed up the diving board, went flying past the go-go girls and into the pool, beer cans followed, and broken whisky bottles, chairs and shoes and pieces of clothing, bodies thumped in with the splat of mortars, and toilet paper was slung over the bushes and the lawn. A bouncer with a fire extinguisher went prowling the corridors in the main body of the inn looking for teeny boppers who had jammed the elevator. It went on until four in the morning.

Listening to his informants, Aquarius had a pang for not being there, as if some knowledge more revelatory than the rest might have come his way, some better sense of what resided in the computer men of the windowless walls, but he did not really know that it would have mattered any more than being on the
Hornet
. What did it matter finally if one were anywhere but on the moon for this story? God or Devil at the helm—that was the question behind the trip, and any vulgarities or fine shows of spirit on the
good carrier
Hornet
, any verdict decided by the detritus in the pool on the morning after, would hardly reveal the core of the event. That core was buried in the nerve ends of everyone’s life. One might as well judge the event from an armchair, for a species of apocalypse was upon us. This was, after all, repeat, the year in which a couple had fornicated on the stage and we had landed on the moon, this was the decade in which we had probed through space, and who knew which belts of protection had been voided and what precisely they had protected. A revolution was in the air which could overthrow every living establishment, an organization of society was also building which might march men daily through aisles monitored by computer probes, there to measure the individual deviations and developments of the night. That was equally on its way. We had contracted for a lunar program in 1961 and what a decade had followed! The times were loose, and no scientist alive could prove that the moon was wholly a dead body any more than they could show that death was a state of being totally dead. Teddy Kennedy’s car went off the bridge at Chappaquiddick with Mary Jo Kopechne and the hopes of the Democratic Party went with them as a proper end to a period which had begun with the suicides of Ernest Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe; the younger brother of Martin Luther King was found dead in his swimming pool the day after men walked the moon. And Provincetown was like a province of the moon in these days of a moon-crazy summer through which he was obliged to work, marriage with Pisces foundering around him, Provincetown, where Eugene O’Neill had lived in the dunes and Anna Christie’s father cursed “that ole debbil sea.” Did the seagulls call these bronze mornings of August dawn with a special fright across the long flats? He could not rid himself altogether of the thought that the moon might be a resting place for more than the hounds of the tide. Perhaps the mysterious magnetosphere had been designed to hold back all those streams of ignoble dead who did not deserve the trip, perhaps the belts of protection were now being voided in all of afterlife, and so anomalies were rising from hell—he was obliged to
wonder if man had finally become a cancer in the forms of the Lord. Yet, equally, the fullness of the moon in Provincetown these nights after the landing was more radiant with lunacy than ever. What if the moon had been drawing us to her for years, what if the plastic amphitheaters of NASA were nothing less than the intimations of her call? It was obvious that if he were without compass to the designs of the Father, then of course he had no clue to the nature of the moon: she could be a disguise of Heaven or as easily the Infernal Shades. For another man, such thoughts might have been dangerous, as dangerous as for Aquarius to drive a sports car with a loose wheel down a mountain road, but it was his profession to live alone with thoughts at the very edge of his mental reach. If brooding over unanswered questions was the root of the mad, however, and sanity was the settling of dilemmas, then with how many questions could one live? He would answer that it was better to live with too many than too few. Rave on, he would. He would rave on.