Of a Fire on the Moon, Page 2

  Obviously, then, if the great brain of NASA were attached to any particular sense, it was the eye. The eye was the collector of incontrovertible facts (which at MSC they called data-points). So the men who worked off NASA Highway 1 at the Manned Spacecraft Center were all clear-eyed and bullet-eyed and berry-eyed (pupils no larger than hard small acidic little berries) and they all seemed to wear dark pants, short-sleeve button-down white shirts and somber narrow ties. They all had identification badges pinned to their shirt pockets and they wore them with pride. Practically all had straight hair, and most of them cut it close. Whether they were tall or short, they were rarely overweight, and the only distinction between them which enabled Aquarius to differentiate these engineers, technicians and young executives from one another was that many wore horn-rimmed glasses with dark frames, and these fellows were usually smaller, more sallow, and with that absolute lack of surface provocation, or idiosyncrasy of personality, which characterizes physicists, engineering students, statisticians, computer technicians, and many a young man of science. By accent, appearance, and manner they could have come from any part of America, although most, Aquarius judged, were from the Midwest.

  The other category belonged in general to men who were taller, more athletic, meaner-looking, sunburned upon occasion—despite their hours of work in air-conditioned rooms—and had the contained anger and cool crisp manner of men who have domiciled their unruly and bust-out impulses: so they emit a sense of discipline, order, and unmistakably virile, if controlled, determination. Aquarius who, for all his forty-six years and wretched inability to lose weight, liked to keep a sense of his own virility—what more valuable possession had an artist?—was obliged somewhat ruefully to recognize that this second category of men were tough. They reminded him of the officers and enlisted men of the Texas outfit, the 112th Cavalry, in which he had served overseas during the war. So he took it for granted that these executives, athlete-engineers, hondos on Mission Control, aides or instructors for various astronaut training courses, and general troubleshooters were in the main from the Southwest. They had a lot of morale. They were so proud of NASA, the astronauts, the Command Module, Lem, the United States of America that their voices went husky a hint when they talked about such topics.

  Yet both categories of men were absolutely helpful in every way. But in such a way that they were no help at all to Aquarius. There was a style at NASA he had begun to divine. Every question you asked was answered and the truth so far as he knew was always told. It was as if NASA, unlike other Government bureaus, had recognized why honesty is the best policy—it is simply because no intriguer will ever believe the truth which is presented to him, but will rather interpret it as a lie which only he can transform into the buried fact. The assumption is that honest men will come to recognize your truth can make them strong. So everybody at NASA was courteous, helpful, generous of information, saintly at repeating the same information a hundred times, and subtly proud of their ability to serve interchangeably for one another, as if the real secret of their discipline and their strength and their sense of morale was that they had depersonalized themselves to the point where they were true Christians, gentle, helpful, replaceable, and serving on a messianic mission. The only flaw was that the conversation could only voyage through predetermined patterns. They would do their best to answer any technical question in the world, and voluminous mimeographings of NASA literature, often valuable enough to be classified, were available to all the Press. It was just that there was no way to suggest any philosophical meandering. Like real Americans, they always talked in code. It happened to be technological code. “The whole philosophy of power descent monitoring is that when the Pings [PGNCS] have degraded …” or “The bulk of Delta V is to kill his retrograde component.” These were notes Aquarius picked out for himself after a half hour of talking to the Chief of Flight Operations Division, who would help to bring the Lem down to the surface of the moon, a hard green-eyed crew-cut man in his thirties named Gene Kranz who looked and talked like a professional football quarterback. And in fact his problems were not dissimilar. They arrived at the same rate of speed and were as massive. “During the first five minutes of descent,” Kranz said, “the landing will be almost luxurious. But during the last three minutes, he’ll be coming like Whistling Dixie.” Behind Kranz as he spoke were the twenty-odd consoles and the forty-plus screens, the dull gray-green walls, the thirty-five square lights inset in the ceiling—the gray controlled environment of the Mission Control room. Kranz lived with phrases like Primary Guidance and Navigation Section and Abort Guidance Section (Pings and Ags), Service Modulator Controllers, Power Descent Information, Program Descent Rates, Sequential Events Control System, Time of Ephemeris Update, Transponder, he spoke of T Eff Em, and Reference Stable Member Matrix, of SMC, and PDI, SECST, the names and their related initials were used interchangeably—Kranz lived in a world of instruments and concepts which would take years for Aquarius to command well enough to make judgments on the other’s character. Yes, real Americans always spoke in code. They encapsulated themselves into technological clans. Codes were like bloodlines. So they could be friendly and helpful and polite but they quietly separated themselves when their codes did not flourish. Aquarius was obliged to recognize that if the machine seemed a functional object to the artist, an instrument whose significance was that it was there to be used—as a typewriter was used for typing a manuscript—so to the engineer it was the communication itself which was functional. The machine was the art.

  Perhaps for that reason, relations with these engineers reminded Aquarius of how he felt when he looked at the windowless walls of new buildings now sprouting all over the mean dry fields of the Space Center and the corporation developments outside the fence. These windowless buildings were as sinister to him as the arbitrary growth of ugly species of mushrooms in the middle of nowhere. These architectural fungoids were there to say: “Lo, we work in the electronics computeroid complex, and need no windows, for we are the architectural skull case for a new kind of brain.”

  Windowless, they also lack ears, so he cannot tell them, “My eyes are my windows.”

  “Recognize,” the windowless walls say, “that something is taking over from you, kid.”

  He stayed in a motel surprising in its luxury on this Texas plain. He had two rooms, and one room had a private indoor pool four feet deep, seven feet long, and five feet wide, with a green light overhead. The other room had a full king-sized circular bed with a red velvet cover. He discovered on inquiry that the motel had been decorated by a new owner who hoped to attract honeymoon couples to memories of the deluxe in the middle of the flatlands. But the clientele continued to consist of engineers visiting MSC from corporations which did business with NASA. Aquarius had a picture of some of the engineers he had met, the ones with the lunar pallor, sleeping in the round red velvet-covered king-sized bed. As if to emphasize this conjunction of the two centuries, the red velvet of the Nineteenth and the gray transistors of the Twentieth, there was a club in the motel with two go-go girls and one of them walked off abruptly one night and went to the bar. When the bartender whispered to her, she went back to the platform, turned on the jukebox again, giggled and said to the technology-ridden air of her audience, “Shucks, I plumb forgot to take off my clothes.”

  She was a round sullen country girl. Aquarius saw her dance another night when she was full of relish for her work, slinging her breasts, undulating her belly on a river of cogitating promise—the voracity of her hip-sock suggested she was one real alligator, but then six of her friends were in from Houston and sitting in the center seats, and they looked to have just gotten off their motorcycles. They were hardly from NASA.

  There were exceptions to these uniform varieties of experience. He spent a night talking to Pete Conrad—Charles Conrad, Jr., the astronaut who would command Apollo 12 on the flight to the moon after Apollo 11—and it was not a bad night. Conrad was wiry, he was feisty, he could rap without too much of a l
ook over his shoulder for the proprieties, and his wife Jane was sensationally attractive in a quiet way. They had four young and handsome sons, one of whom, Tommy, aged twelve, became famous forever in Aquarius’ mind because he obliged a photographer by riding his bicycle off the slope of the garage roof right into the swimming pool. Norman was invited back to a party the Conrads gave for their neighbors, and he had a good time—it was a party like a night in Westchester, except that it was Texas, so he finally got into a bathing suit in order not to wrestle up and down the edge of the pool when enthusiasts were ready to throw him in. Agreeably drunk, he stood under the hot Texas night in the hot Texas pool, laughing with two Texas ladies—it was at least an approach to the sensate experience of the East. And the next day he remembered Conrad saying to him over the outdoor steak grill—“For six years I’ve been dreaming of going to the moon,” and the moon—as a real and tangible companion of the mind—was suddenly there before him.

  He saw Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins through much of a long day they spent in press conferences with the newspapers, magazines, and the television networks, and he learned much. (In the absence of a sense of smell, the hairs in his nostrils began to quiver at clues.) He thought about astronauts often. He would probably be able to produce an interesting thought or two on the psychology of astronauts. He felt as if he had begun the study of a new world so mysterious to his detective’s heart (all imaginative novelists, by this logic, are detectives) that he could only repeat what he had said on the day the assignment was first offered to him: it was that he hardly knew whether the Space Program was the noblest expression of the Twentieth Century or the quintessential statement of our fundamental insanity. It was after all the mark of insanity that its mode of operation was distinguished by its logic—insanity was often more logical than sanity when it came to attacking a problem.

  Something of this question was in his mind when he talked to Dr. Gilruth, Robert R. Gilruth, Director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, but of course he did not pose the question directly and if he had, would not have gotten an answer. Speculation was on nobody’s program at NASA. In any case, Gilruth was hardly one of the new technicians. A man in his late fifties, he had worked as a student under Piccard, the old balloonist, and had discovered the jet stream when a balloon built by his wife and himself was sent up in Minnesota and came down in Mississippi. This was the sort of story Gilruth had obviously told before to make an item in many a feature story, it was a way of keeping the interviewer away, and Aquarius recognized after a while that Dr. Gilruth was a man who had probably developed his official style in the Eisenhower period, in fact he looked like a mild version of Eisenhower in the mid-Fifties, he was half bald in about the same way, and had deep gentle sympathetic eyes which gave him almost a saintly appearance; he talked in a quiet voice in his large office high up in the Administration Building and therefore facing down on the rectilinear play of the campus walks and buildings. Aquarius looked for something charitable to say about the view, but that proved too hard to produce, so he tried to win Gilruth’s confidence in other ways. But the good doctor was not particularly responsive to questions, which is to emphasize that he would take an ordinary question and go on at such length in his reply, rambling through such hesitancies—as if the act of speech were painful to him—that the next question was hardly spurred to appear. He was remarkably gentle and determinedly undistinguished, as if his deepest private view suggested that good administration and public communication were best kept apart. In this sense, he was certainly no proper representative of the NASA style, much rather like a Chinese mandarin—completely pleasant, altogether remote—it occurred that Eisenhower had also been a mandarin.

  Just once did Aquarius reach him. He asked: “Are you ever worried, Dr. Gilruth, that landing on the moon may result in all sorts of psychic disturbances for us here on earth?” At the look of pain in Gilruth’s eyes at the thought of mustering NASA-type answers for this sort of question, Aquarius went on quickly, “I mean, many people seem to react to the full moon, and there are tides of course.”

  He was not mistaken. As he stammered into silence, there was the breath of dread in the room. Just a hint, but his nostril quivered. Gilruth was feeling the same silence; he could swear to that. And Gilruth, when he answered, spoke gratefully of the tides and yes, they had an effect on geography and men’s industry by the sea—no answer could have been more Eisenhooverian—but then as if the question held him also in its grip, Gilruth came out of this long divagation to say that—yes, he had looked at some figures on the subject, and there seemed to be a higher incidence of hospital commission reports of admission to mental institutions during the full moon. Dread in the room again, and a silence between the two men which was exactly opposite to the silence of expectation when sex is near, no, now it was the opposite, how rather to move off this point, this continuing mounting silence. Who would be most implicated by breaking it? Now silence became the palpable appearance of the present, that breath of the present which holds all ultimates in its grip. Gilruth took responsibility by saying at last, “I expect the moon is many things to many men. From Frank Borman’s description on Apollo 8 we thought of it as rather a forbidding place”—he looked gloomy in recollection—“whereas Stafford and Cernan and Young give us the idea from Apollo 10 that the moon is agreeable, so to speak, and not at all unpleasant but perhaps kind of a nice place to be,” and he smiled gently, hopefully, but perhaps a little regretfully for filling his share of the silence. They nodded at one another.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Psychology of Astronauts

  Well, let us make an approach to the astronauts. Aquarius sees them for the first time on the fifth of July, eleven days before the launch. They are in a modern movie theater with orange seats and a dark furrowed ceiling overhead, much like marcelled waves in a head of hair, a plastic ceiling built doubtless to the plans of one of the best sound engineers in the country. Sound is considerably ahead of smell as a fit province for scientific work, but since the excellence of acoustics in large and small concert chambers seems to bear more relation to old wood and the blessings of monarchs and bishops than to the latest development of the technical art, the sound system in this movie theater (seats 600) is dependably intolerable most of the time. The public address system squeals and squeaks (it is apparently easier to have communication with men one quarter of a million miles away) and one never gets a fair test of the aural accommodations. The walls and overhead are of plastic composition, and so far as one can tell, the tone is a hint sepulchral, then brightened electronically, finally harsh and punishing to that unnamed fine nerve which runs from the anus to the eardrum. As the sound engineers became more developed, the plastic materials provided for their practice by corporations grew acoustically more precise and spiritually more flattening—it was the law of the century. One was forever adjusting to public voices through the subtlest vale of pain.

  Still this movie theater was the nearest approach to a diadem in the Manned Spacecraft Center. The theater was part of the visitors’ center, where tourists could go through the space museum, a relatively modest affair of satellites, capsules, dioramas, posters and relics, now closed and given over to the installation of monitors and cables for the television networks, even as the gallery to the rear of the theater was now being converted into the Apollo News Center and would consist finally of endless aisles of desks, telephones and typewriters, plus one giant Buddha of a coffee urn. (Coffee is the closest the press ever comes to satori.)

  In the theater, perhaps eight rows back of the front seats, was a raised platform on which television cameras and crews were mounted. From the stage they must have looked not unrelated to artillery pieces on the battlement of a fort—in the front row were fifty photographers, which is to say fifty sets of torsos and limbs each squeezed around its own large round glass eye. Little flares of lightning flashed out of bulbs near their heads. The astronauts did not really have to travel to the moon—life from another planet w
as before them already. In the middle ranks, between the front row and the barricade of television cameras, were seated several hundred newspaper men and women come to Houston for the conference this morning. They were a curious mixture of high competence and near imbecility; some assigned to Space for years seemed to know as much as NASA engineers; others, innocents in for the big play on the moon shot, still were not just certain where laxatives ended and physics began. It was as if research students from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton had been put in with a group of fine young fellows from an Army class in remedial reading. Out of such a bag would questions come to the astronauts. Wait! There will be samples.

  The astronauts entered from the wings wearing gas masks, gray snout-nosed covers which projected out from their mouths and gave their profiles the intent tusk-ready slouch of razorback hogs. They were aware of this—it was apparent in the good humor with which they came in. In fact, a joke of some dimensions had been flickering for a few days—the Press had talked of greeting them with white hospital masks. In the attempt to protect the astronauts as much as possible from preflight infection they were being kept in a species of limited quarantine—their contacts with nonessential personnel were restricted. Since journalists fit this category, today’s press conference had installed Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins up on the stage in a plastic box about twelve feet wide, ten feet deep and ten feet high. Blowers within this three-walled plastic room blew air from behind them out into the audience: thereby, the breath of the astronauts could enter the theater, but the airborne germs of journalists would not blow back. It made a kind of sense. Of course the cause of the common cold was still unknown, but gross studies of infection would surmise a partial quarantine might be effective partially. However, the instrumentation of this premise was not happy. The astronauts looked a bit absurd in their plastic box, and the few journalists who had actually fleshed their joke by putting on masks caused the astronauts to grin broadly as though to dissociate themselves from the pyramids of precaution they were in fact obeying.