Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  Once they sat down, their manner changed. They were seated behind a walnut-brown desk on a pale blue base which displayed two painted medallions in circles—NASA and Apollo 11. Behind them at the rear of the plastic booth stood an American flag; the Press actually jeered when somebody brought it onstage in advance of the astronauts. Aquarius could not remember a press conference where Old Glory had ever been mocked before, but it had no great significance, suggesting rather a splash of derision at the thought that the show was already sufficiently American enough. In fact, between the steady reporters who worked out of Houston and the astronauts, there was that kind of easy needling humor which is the measure of professional respect to be found among teams and trainers.

  So the entrance went well. The astronauts walked with the easy saunter of athletes. They were comfortable in motion. As men being scrutinized by other men they had little to worry about. Still, they did not strut. Like all good professional athletes, they had the modesty of knowing you could be good and still lose. Therefore they looked to enjoy the snouts they were wearing, they waved at reporter friends they recognized, they grinned. A reporter called back to Collins, “Now, you look good.” It all had that characteristically American air which suggests that men who are successful in their profession do best to take their honors lightly.

  Once they sat down, however, the mood shifted. Now they were there to answer questions about a phenomenon which even ten years ago would have been considered material unfit for serious discussion. Grown men, perfectly normal-looking, were now going to talk about their trip to the moon. It made everyone uncomfortable. For the relation of everyone to each other and to the event was not quite real. It was as if a man had died and been brought back from death. What if on questioning he turned out to be an ordinary fellow? “Well, you see,” he might say, “having visited death, I come back with the following conclusions …” What if he had a droning voice? There was something of this in the polite unreality of the questioning. The century was like a youth who made love to the loveliest courtesan in Cathay. Afterward he was asked what he thought and scratched his head and said, “I don’t know. Sex is kind of overrated.” So now people were going to ask questions of three heroes about their oncoming voyage, which on its face must be in contention for the greatest adventure of man. Yet it all felt as if three young junior executives were announcing their corporation’s newest subdivision.

  Perhaps for this reason, the quiet gaiety of their entrance had deserted them as they sat behind the desk in the plastic booth. Now it was as if they did not know if they were athletes, test pilots, engineers, corporation executives, some new kind of priest, or sheepish American boys caught in a position of outlandish prominence—my God, how did they ever get into this? It was as if after months in simulators with knowing technicians geared to the same code languages, they were now debouched into the open intellectual void of this theater, obliged to look into the uncomprehending spirits of several hundred media tools (human) all perplexed and worried at their journalistic ability to grasp more than the bare narrative of what was coming up. Yaws abounded. Vacuums in the magnetism of the mood. Something close to boredom. The astronauts were going to the moon, but everybody was a little frustrated—the Press because the Press did not know how to push into nitty-gritty for the questions, the astronauts because they were not certain how to begin to explain the complexity of their technique. Worse, as if they did not really wish to explain, but were obliged out of duty to the program, even if their privacy was invaded.

  So the conference dragged on. While the focus of attention was naturally on Armstrong for commanding the flight, he seemed in the beginning to be the least at ease. He spoke with long pauses, he searched for words. When the words came out, their ordinary content made the wait seem excessive. He minted no phrases. “We are here” … a pause … “to be able to talk about this attempt” … a real pause, as if the next experience were ineffable but with patience would yet be captured … “because of the success of four previous Apollo command flights” … pause, as if to pick up something he had left out … “and a number of unmanned flights.” A shy smile. “Each of those flights”—he was more wooden than young Robert Taylor, young Don Ameche, young Randolph Scott—“contributed in a great way” … deprecatory smile … “to this flight.” As a speaker he was all but limp—still it did not leave him unremarkable. Certainly the knowledge he was an astronaut restored his stature, yet even if he had been a junior executive accepting an award, Armstrong would have presented a quality which was arresting, for he was extraordinarily remote. He was simply not like other men. He would have been more extraordinary in fact if he had been just a salesman making a modest inept dull little speech, for then one would have been forced to wonder how he had ever gotten his job, how he could sell even one item, how in fact he got out of bed in the morning. Something particularly innocent or subtly sinister was in the gentle remote air. If he had been a young boy selling subscriptions at the door, one grandmother might have warned her granddaughter never to let him in the house; another would have commented, “That boy will go very far.” He was apparently in communion with some string in the universe others did not think to play.

  Collins and Aldrin followed with their opening remarks, and they had personalities which were more comfortable to grasp. Aldrin, all meat and stone, was a man of solid presentation, dependable as a tractor, but suggesting the strength of a tank, dull, almost ponderous, yet with the hint of unpredictability, as if, eighteen drinks in him, his eyes would turn red, he would arm-wrestle a gorilla or invite you to join him in jumping out a third-story window in order to see who could do the better somersault on the follow-through out of the landing. This streak was radium and encased within fifty psychical and institutional caskings of lead, but it was there, Aquarius thought, perhaps a clue in the way he dressed—very dressy for an astronaut—a green luminous silk suit, a white shirt, a green luminous tie. It clashed with the stolid presentation of his language. Aldrin spoke in a deep slow comfortingly nasal tone—a mighty voice box—his face was strong and grim. The movie director in Aquarius would have cast him on the spot for Major in Tank Cavalry. He had big features and light brown hair, almost gold. His eyes took a turn down like samurai eyes, the corners of his lips took a right-angle turn down—it gave him the expression of a serious man at home on a field of carnage, as if he were forever saying, “This is serious stuff, fellows, there’s lots of blood around.” So Aldrin also looked like the kind of jock who could be headmaster of a prep school. He had all the locker-room heartiness and solemnity of a team man. Although he had been a pole-vaulter at West Point, it would have been easy to mistake him for a shot-putter, a lacrosse player, or a baseball catcher. In football he would have probably been a linebacker. For this last, he was actually not big enough (since the astronauts were required to be no more than five feet eleven inches tall and could hardly be overweight), but he was one of those men who looked larger than his size for his condition was excellent—every discipline of his moves spoke of grim devoted unrelenting support given to all his body-world of muscle. From the back of the neck to the joints of the toes, from the pectorals to the hamstrings, the deltoids to the abdominals, he was a life given over to good physical condition, a form of grace, since the agony of the lungs when straining is not alien to the agony of the soul. Leave it that Aldrin was so strong he had a physical presence which was bigger than his bulk.

  He talked like a hardworking drill. He had the reputation of being the best physicist and engineer among the astronauts—he had written a valuable thesis on Orbital Rendezvous Techniques at MIT, but he put no humor into his presentation, he was selling no soap. If you did not read technologese, you might as well forget every last remark for his words did not translate, not unless you were ready to jog along with him on technology road. Here is the way he gave himself to the Press: “We do have a few items on the Lem side of the house on this particular mission. We’ll be picking up where Apollo 10 left off when the
y did their phasing maneuver. And at this point after departing the Command Module, coming down in the descent orbit, we’ll be igniting the descent engine for the first time under a long burn condition when it is not docked with the Command Module. And executing this burn under control of a computer, being directed towards the various targets that are fed into the computer will be new on this flight. Also we’ll be making use of the landing radar and its inputs into the computer. Inputs in terms of altitude and velocity updates which will bring us down in the prescribed conditions as we approach the surface of the moon. Of course, the actual control of the touchdown itself will be a rather new item in that it will be testing this man-machine interface to a very sophisticated degree. The touchdown itself will be the ultimate test on the landing gear and the various systems that are in the spacecraft. The environment of one-sixth G will be seen for the first time by crews and spacecraft. We’ll also be exposed to thermal conditions that have not been experienced before. The two-man EVA is something that is a first in our program. Sleeping in the Lem on the lunar surface, which we hope to be able to do, will be another new item in that flight.”

  He went on to talk of star sightings and the powered ascent from the moon—that moment when, having landed successfully and reconnoitered the moon ground, they would be back in the Lem and ready to ascend—would the motor ignite or did the moon have a curse? Aldrin spoke of this as a “new item,” then of rendezvous with the Command Module, which would return them to earth, of “various contingencies that can develop,” of “a wider variety of trajectory conditions”—he was talking about not being able to join up, wandering through space, lost forever to life in that short eternity before they expired of hunger and thirst. Small hint of that in these verbal formulations. Even as the Nazis and the Communists had used to speak of mass murder as liquidation, so the astronauts spoke of possible personal disasters as “contingency.” The heart of astronaut talk, like the heart of all bureaucratic talk, was a jargon which could be easily converted to computer programming, a language like Fortran or Cobol or Algol. Anti-dread formulations were the center of it, as if words like pills were there to suppress emotional symptoms. Yet Aldrin, powerful as a small bull, deep as his grasp of Celestial Mechanics, gave off in his air of unassailable solemnity some incommunicable speech about the depth of men’s souls and that razor’s edge between the hero’s endeavor and vainglory. Vainglory looked real to him, one might assume, real as true peril—he had the deep gloomy clumsy dignity of a man who had been face to face in some stricken hour with the depths of his own nature, more complex than he had hitherto known.

  Collins, in contrast, moved easily; Collins was cool. Collins was the man nearly everybody was glad to see at a party, for he was the living spirit of good and graceful manners. Where Armstrong referred to Wapakoneta, Ohio, as his hometown, and showed a faint but ineradicable suspicion of anyone from a burg larger than his own, where Aldrin protected himself from conversation with the insulations of a suburban boyhood and encapsulement among his incommunicable fields of competency, Collins had been born in a well-set-up apartment off the Borghese Gardens in Rome. His father, General James L. Collins, was military attaché (and could conceivably have been having a drink around the corner in the bar at the Hassler to celebrate the birth of his son). Since the year was 1930, Dick Diver could have been getting his going-over from the Fascisti police in the basement of Tender Is the Night. No surprise then if Collins had a manner. It was in part the manner of Irish elegance—a man must be caught dead before he takes himself seriously. It was as if Collins were playing a fine woodwind which had the merriment and the sadness (now that the madness was gone) of those American expatriates for whom culture began in the Year One of The Sun Also Rises. Indeed, if Collins was later to grow a mustache on the trip back, an act which increased his slight but definite resemblance to the young Hemingway, he had a personal style which owed more to Fitzgerald. It was Fitzgerald, after all, who first suggested that you could become the nicest man in the world. So Collins had that friendliness which promises it would be sacrilege to give offense in a social situation. It was apparently as unnatural for him not to make a small joke as it would have been offensive to Aldrin not to take on a matter in its full seriousness. Yet Collins had little opportunity to show his humor. It existed mainly in the fine light smiling presence he bestowed on the interview while the others were asked all the questions. Collins was the only one of the three not landing on the moon. So he would obviously be the one whose remarks would go into the last paragraph, where the layout man would probably lop them off. Therefore nobody had bothered to direct a question to him through all the interview.

  Toward the end of the press conference, somebody asked of the astronauts at large, “Two questions. Firstly, what precautions have been taken at your own homes to prevent you from catching germs from your own family? And secondly, is this the last period that you will spend at home here with your families?” The Public Affairs Officer, Brian Duff, was quick to say, “Take a crack at that, Mike.”

  It could not have been easy to have waited so long for so little. But Collins came up smiling, and said, “My wife and children have signed a statement that they have no germs and—and yes this will be the last weekend that we will be home with our families.” It was not much of a joke but the press conference had not been much of a joke either, and the Press brightened, they laughed. Collins, quick not to offend the man who had asked the question, now added, “Seriously, there are no special precautions being taken.”

  His conversational manner was easy. It was apparent that of the three, he was the only one you could drink with comfortably. Since the ability to drink with your material is as important to a journalist as the heft of his hammer to a carpenter, a sense of dismay passed through the press corps—why hadn’t NASA had the simple sense of press relations to put Collins in command? What a joy it could have been to cover this moon landing with a man who gave neat quotes, instead of having to contend with Armstrong, who surrendered words about as happily as a hound allowed meat to be pulled out of his teeth. Collins would have been perfect. In combination with his manner, so obviously at ease with a martini, he had the trim build, the bald forehead, and economical features of a college boxer, or a shortstop, or a quarterback. (In fact he was the best handball player among the astronauts and had been captain of his wrestling team at St. Albans.) He looked like copy, he talked like copy, and Armstrong had the sad lonely mien of a cross-country runner. Of course, since he also had the sly privacy of a man whose thoughts may never be read—what a vast boon was this to the Press!—one could, if picturing Armstrong as an athlete, see him playing end. He might, thus sly and private, be difficult to keep up with on pass patterns.

  The story resided, however, with the two men who would land on the moon—it could reside nowhere else—but since Collins with a few smiles and a remark or two had become the favorite, a question and then another came his way at the end of the interview. Finally, the real question came.

  “Colonel Collins, to people who are not astronauts, you would appear to have the most frustrating job on the mission, not going all the way. How do you feel about that?” The contradiction implicit in being an astronaut was here on this point—it was skewered right here. If they were astronauts, they were men who worked for the team, but no man became an astronaut who was not sufficiently exceptional to suspect at times that he might be the best of all. Nobody wins at handball who is not determined to win.

  He answered quickly. “I don’t feel in the slightest bit frustrated. I’m going 99.9 percent of the way there, and that suits me just fine.” Growing up in Rome, Puerto Rico, Baltimore and Washington, Texas and Oklahoma, son of one of the more cultivated purlieus of the military grace, the code would be to keep your cool. The only real guide to aristocracy in American life was to see who could keep his cool under the most searing conditions of unrest, envy, ambition, jealousy and heat. So not a quiver showed. “I couldn’t be happier right where I am,�
�� he concluded and the voice was not hollow, it did not offer a cousin to a squeak. Still nobody believed him. Somewhere in the room was the leached-out air of a passion submitted to a discipline. For a moment Collins was damnably like an actor who plays a good guy.

  Armstrong came in quickly. “I’d like to say in that regard that the man in the Command Module” … pause … “of course by himself” … another pause … “has a giant-sized job.” When Armstrong paused and looked for the next phrase he sometimes made a sound like the open crackling of static on a pilot’s voice band with the control tower. One did not have the impression that the static came from him so much as that he had listened to so much static in his life, suffered so much of it, that his flesh, his cells, like it or not, were impregnated with the very cracklings of static. “He has to run Buzz’s job and my job” … static … “along with his own job simultaneously” … static … “in addition act as relay to the ground” … pause and static … “It’s at least a three-man job and”—he murmured a few words—“Michael is certainly not lacking for something to do while he’s circling around.” Then Armstrong flashed a smile. One of his own jokes came. His humor was pleasant and small-town, not without a taste of the tart. “And if he can’t think of anything else, he can always look out the window and admire the view.”