Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  Would he at least recognize that his endeavor was equal in magnitude to Columbus’ adventure?

  He disclaimed large reactions, large ideas. “Our concern has been directed mainly to doing the job.” He virtually said, “If not me, another.” If they would insist on making him a hero, he would be a hero on terms he alone would make clear. There had been only one Columbus—there were ten astronauts at least who could do the job, and hundreds of men to back them up. He was the representative of a collective will.

  Sitting in his drab gray-green suit, a suit as close to no color as possible, his shirt pale blue, his tie nondescript dark gray-blue, a blue-green wall behind him (perhaps to hint at empyreans of sky), his neck seemed subtly separated from his collar, as if—no matter how neatly he was dressed—his clothes felt like a tent to him, like a canvas drop out of which his head protruded through the hole of his collar. They were popping baseballs at him, he was dodging.

  “Will you keep a piece of the moon for yourself?” asked a questioner. It was a beautiful question. If he admitted desire, one could ask if the Armstrong house would sleep on nights of full moon when the piece of rock bayed silently to its distant mistress, and emanations wandered down the stairs. But Armstrong said stiffly, “At this time, no plans have been made” … (Would he ever have the desire to steal a rock, Aquarius asked silently.) “No,” Armstrong went on, “that’s not a prerogative we have available to us.” He could of course have said, “We can’t do it,” but in trouble he always talked computerese. The use of “we” was discouraged. “A joint exercise has demonstrated” became the substitution. “Other choices” became “peripheral secondary objectives.” “Doing our best” was “obtaining maximum advantage possible.” “Confidence” became “very high confidence level.” “Ability to move” was a “mobility study.” “Turn off” was “disable”; “turn on” became “enable.” It was as if the more natural forms of English had not been built for the computer: Latin maybe, but not simple Anglo-Saxon. That was too primitive a language—only the general sense could be conveyed by the words: the precise intent was obliged to be defined by the tone of the voice. Computerese preferred to phase out such options. The message had to be locked into a form which could be transmitted by pulse or by lack of pulse, one binary digit at a time, one bit, one bug to be installed in each box. You could not break through computerese.

  Through it all, Collins would smile, turn his sensitive presence as eyes to the questioners, ears to the answer. His smile would flicker at the plastic obsidian impenetrability of computerese. “Darn it all,” his smile would seem to say to the magazine writers, “if I had to learn how to translate this stuff, I’m sure you fellows can do as well!” Once again, Collins was being asked few questions.

  They turned after a while to Aldrin and began to draw some flecks of a true-blooded response. He was, of course, equally impenetrable in the beginning, but after a time he may have made the mistake of essaying a joke. Asked of his reactions to visiting the moon, he proceeded to build a wall of verbal brick, then abruptly with that clumsy odd sobriety, almost engaging, with which he was forever showing his willingness to serve, Aldrin made a remark about having been a boy scout. “I attained the rank of tenderfoot,” he said. He gave a discomfited smile. “I hope I don’t have a tender foot after walking around the moon.” It was so bad a joke that one had to assume it was full of interior reference for him, perhaps some natural male anxiety at the thought of evil moon rays passing into one’s private parts. A glum expression sat next to gloom—the damnedest things can happen to a good man.

  Then they queried Aldrin on personal mementos. Would he be taking any along?

  Well, yes, he admitted reluctantly, he would be taking a little family jewelry along. He stopped, he looked mulish. It was obvious he didn’t want to go on. The primitive value of the objects, their power, their retention of charms, their position in the possible hierarchy of the amulets would be vitiated by describing them. On the other hand, a high quotient of availability-for-miscellaneous-unprogrammed-situations (known in the old days as charity, spontaneity, or generosity of spirit) also ranked high in good astronaut qualifications. So Aldrin gave answers even if he didn’t want to.

  Well, he admitted, the family jewelry were … rings. He had two heavy gold rings on two fingers. Yes, he nodded distrustfully, looking for a moment like a chow forced to obey a command he cannot enjoy, yes, on the flight, he would probably still be wearing them.

  What else in the way of family jewelry?

  But now Aldrin had had enough. “Personal category,” he grunted.

  A Viennese or German correspondent asked in a heavy accent of Armstrong, “Have you had any der-reams?”

  Dreams. Armstrong smiled. He couldn’t say he did. The smile was as quick to protect him as the quick tail flick of a long-suffering cow standing among horseflies in a summer meadow’s heat, yes, smile-and-flick went Armstrong, “I guess after twenty hours in a simulator, I guess I sometimes have dreams of computers.”

  Yet as the questions went on, the game was turning. The German might have asked his question about dreams with the happy anticipation that any material provided would offer a feast—the symbols of the dream were pot roast after all and gravied potatoes to the intellectual maw of a nice German head, but the answer, frustrating as nearly all the answers had been, now succeeded in working up a counterpressure. Slowly, unmistakably, the intellectuals and writers on the dark side of the glass were becoming a little weary of the astronauts. Collins’ implacable cheerful cool, Aldrin’s doughty monk’s cloth of squaredom, Armstrong’s near-to-facetious smile began to pique their respect. The questions began to have a new tone, an edge, the subtlest quivering suggestion that intellectual contempt was finally a weapon not to be ignored. Were these astronauts not much more than brain-programmed dolts? The contempt was a true pressure. For give an athlete brains, give an aviator brains, give an engineer a small concealed existence as presumptive poet, and whatever is not finished in the work of their ego, whatever is soft in their vanity, will then be exercised by the contempt of an intellectual. The writers were pushing Armstrong now.

  Why, why ultimately, they were asking, is it so important to go to the moon? Man to man, they were asking, brain to brain, their leverage derived from the additional position of asking as writer to small-town boy: why is it important?

  Armstrong tried to be general. He made a speech in fair computerese about the nation’s resources, and the fact that NASA’s efforts were now tapped into this root. Well, then, asked a dry voice, are we going to the moon only for economic reasons, only to get out of an expensive hole? No, said Armstrong.

  Do you see any philosophical reason why we might be going? the voice went on, as if to imply: are you aware there is philosophy to existence as well?

  Armstrong had now been maneuvered to the point where there was no alternative to offer but a credo, or claim that he was spiritually neuter. That would have violated too much in him. Yes, he blurted now, as if, damn them and damn their skills, they had wanted everything else of him this day, they had had everything else of him, including his full cooperation, now damn them good, they could have his philosophy too if they could comprehend it. “I think we’re going,” he said, and paused, static burning in the yaws of his pause, “I think we’re going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges.” He looked a little defiant, as if probably they might not know, some critical number of them might never know what he was talking about, “It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul.” The last three words came out as if they had seared his throat by their extortion. How his privacy had been invaded this day. “Yes,” he nodded, as if noting what he had had to give up to writers, “we’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.”

  IV

  That was a fair haul for a working day—Aquarius now had a catch to fry. Yet the day was hardly over for our astronauts. They still had to have their conversations with the televi
sion networks. Since each man would have his own half hour before the camera, that meant there would be three interviews for each man, or nine altogether. With breaks and dinner, their day would continue for another six hours.

  Aquarius was invited to audit a filming and chose Armstrong’s session with NBC. He had an idea Armstrong would be more comfortable in a TV interview and he was not wrong. But then Armstrong had indicated his concern for good television earlier at the full press conference when he had apologized for the program they would send from the moon. “I don’t mean to sound discouraging but I don’t have high hopes that the picture that we will be able to send back from the surface will be nearly so good as those you have been looking at from the recent flights from the Command Module. The camera is somewhat different and is somewhat more restricted in the kinds of lenses that we can use, and the kinds of lighting we have available to us.… And I suspect that you will be somewhat disappointed at those pictures. I hope that you’ll recognize that it’s just one of the problems that you face in an environment like the lunar surface and it’ll be some time before we really get high quality in our lunar surface pictures back on TV link.”

  It was the one time he had spoken without many pauses, almost as if he were talking already to the TV audience rather than to reporters, almost as if he just simply believed that Americans were entitled to good television—one of their inalienable rights. And now, up before the TV cameras, Armstrong looked not at all uncomfortable at the thought of being presented to some forty or fifty million viewers.

  Indeed, Aquarius was to see cool pieces and parts of the half hour in thirty-second segments, minute segments and two-minute segments over the next few weeks, particularly during the days of the flight. During many a pause on the trip to the moon, the TV screen would cut to the face of Armstrong, Aldrin or Collins standing or sitting with the blue-green wall of the Lunar Receiving Laboratory behind him. Whether the filmed insertion was to elucidate some remark of the commentators, or merely to fill some frayed space in the ongoing hours of exposition and recapitulation, the effect after having seen ten concrete bits from this interview was to recognize that a new species of commercial was being evolved. NASA was vending space. Armstrong was working directly for his corporate mill. Despite the fact that this future audience of forty million would be listening and studying him, he spoke without long pauses, and seemed oddly enough to be at ease, a salesman with a clear modest mild soft sell. But, then, Aquarius decided, it was not really so very odd. If Armstrong’s most recognizable passion was to safeguard his privacy, a desire which approached the force of sanctuary to him, then there was nothing on television he would be likely to reveal or betray. He came, after all, from that heartland of American life which had first induced the particular public personality now bequeathed to all TV viewers as the most viable decorum—that intolerable mixture of bland agreeability and dissolved salt which characterized all performers who appeared in public each day for years and prospered. That view of the world, if designing a face, would have snubbed the nose, faded out the color of the eyes, snugged the lips, slicked the hair and dispensed with the ears for they were protuberances with obscene interior curves—first cousins to the navel.

  Armstrong was being interviewed by Frank McGee who turned in a good workmanlike job. McGee, a friendly fellow with a bony face and eyeglasses (whose frames whether tortoiseshell, plastic or pale gold would be remembered afterward as silver wire), had a personality all reminiscent of a country parson, a coach of a rifle team or the friendly investigator from a long-established high-minded insurance company. He was obviously the very ring-tailed hawk of Waspitude.

  Their collaboration on the questions and responses had the familiar comfort of piety. Armstrong came near to chatting with him. It was implicit to Network Nugatory that a chatty tone went hand in hand with the pious. So the dullest but most functional, which is to say the most impermeable side of Armstrong was naturally presented. He responded soberly, even chastely to questions about whether he had been elated when chosen—“I have to say that I was”—but quickly added that there could have been many pitfalls during the waiting period (such as intervening flights, which might not succeed) and so he had not indulged any large excitement at any particular period.

  He was determinedly modest, going clear out of his way to specify that he was certain the Apollo 12 crew was as competent as his own to make this first trip to the moon, and went on once again to give credit for success to all the Americans who had been working to back them up. “It’s their success more than ours,” said Armstrong, as if the trip had been completed already, or perhaps this was intended to be the commercial to be employed after touchdown, or lunar ascent, or splashdown. Queried about his private life and the fact that he would lose it after the achievement, he said diffidently, in a voice which would win him twenty million small-town cheers, “I think a private life is possible within the context of such an achievement.” Aquarius’ mind began to wander—he failed to make notes. Recovering attention at some shift in the mood he realized that Armstrong had finished this interview for he was saying “… to take man to another heavenly body … we thank all of you for your help and prayers.”

  There was a hand from the TV crew when the cameras stopped. The trade unions once again were backing patriotic and muscular American effort. “Godspeed and good luck, Neil” one of them actually cried out into the wall of the glass, and Armstrong smiled and waved, and there was more good feeling here than ever at the other conference with Press and magazine. It was apparent the television interview had added little to the store of Aquarius.

  But by one detail it had. McGee, referring to a story in Life by Dora Jane Hamblin about Armstrong, spoke of a recurring dream the astronaut had had when a boy. In this dream, he was able to hover over the ground if he held his breath.

  Aquarius always felt a sense of woe when he found himself subscribing to a new legend. Glut and the incapacity to absorb waste were the evils of the century—the pearls of one’s legends were not often founded on real grains of sand. The moment he read the story in Life, Aquarius had become infatuated with Armstrong’s recurrent dream. It was a beautiful dream—to hold one’s breath and to levitate; not to fly and not to fall, but to hover. It was beautiful because it might soon prove to be prophetic, beautiful because it was profound and it was mysterious, beautiful because it was appropriate to a man who would land on the moon. It was therefore a dream on which one might found a new theory of the dream, for any theory incapable of explaining this visitor of the night would have to be inadequate, unless it were ready to declare that levitation, breath, and the moon were not proper provinces of the dream.

  Because it was, however, awesome, prophetic, profound, mysterious and appropriate, Aquarius hated to loose the vigors of his imagination onto the meaning of this dream unless he could believe it had actually happened. It was too perfect to his needs to accept it when he read it. But after studying Armstrong this day, listening to his near-humorous admission that yes, he had had that dream when he was a boy, there was a quietness at the center of his reply which gave balm to the sore of Aquarius’ doubt. He knew he had now chosen to believe the dream had occurred.

  And this conviction was not without the most direct kind of intellectual intoxication, for it dramatized how much at odds might be the extremes of Armstrong’s personality or for that matter the personality of astronauts. From their conscious mind to their unconscious depth, what a spectrum could be covered! Yes, Aquarius thought, astronauts have learned not only to live with opposites, but it was conceivable that the contradictions in their nature were so located in the very impetus of the age that their personality might begin to speak, for better or worse, of some new psychological constitution to man. For it was true—astronauts had come to live with adventures in space so vast one thought of the infinities of a dream, yet their time on the ground was conventional, practical, technical, hardworking, and in the center of the suburban middle class. If they engaged the de
epest primitive taboos, they all but parodied the conventional in public manner; they embarked on odysseys whose success or failure was so far from being entirely in their own control that they must be therefore fatalistic, yet the effort was enterprising beyond the limits of the imagination. They were patriots, but they were moonmen. They lived with absolute lack of privacy, their obvious pleasure was to be alone in the sky. They were sufficiently selfless to be prepared to die for their mission, their team, their corporate NASA, their nation; yet they were willy-nilly narcissistic as movie stars. “Sugar, I tried and couldn’t make doo-doo,” says Lulu Meyers in The Deer Park. The heart pressure, the brain waves, the bowel movements of astronauts were of national interest. They were virile men, but they were prodded, probed, tapped into, poked, flexed, tested, subjected to a pharmacology of stimulants, depressants, diuretics, laxatives, retentives, tranquilizers, motion sickness pills, antibiotics, vitamins and food which was designed to control the character of their feces. They were virile, but they were done to, they were done to like no healthy man alive. So again their activity was hazardous, far-flung, bold, demanding of considerable physical strength, yet the work and physical condition called for the ability to live in cramped conditions with passive bodies, the patience to remain mentally alert and physically inactive for days. They lived, it was evident, with no ordinary opposites in their mind and brain. On the one hand to dwell in the very center of technological reality (which is to say that world where every question must have answers and procedures, or technique cannot itself progress) yet to inhabit—if only in one’s dreams—that other world where death, metaphysics and the unanswerable questions of eternity must reside, was to suggest natures so divided that they could have been the most miserable and unbalanced of men if they did not contain in their huge contradictions some of the profound and accelerating opposites of the century itself. The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars. It was the most soul-destroying and apocalyptic of centuries. So in their turn the astronauts had personalities of unequaled banality and apocalyptic dignity. So they suggested in their contradictions the power of the century to live with its own incredible contradictions and yet release some of the untold energies of the earth. A century devoted to the rationality of technique was also a century so irrational as to open in every mind the real possibility of global destruction. It was the first century in history which presented to sane and sober minds the fair chance that the century might not reach the end of its span. It was a world half convinced of the future death of our species yet half aroused by the apocalyptic notion that an exceptional future still lay before us. So it was a century which moved with the most magnificent display of power into directions it could not comprehend. The itch was to accelerate—the metaphysical direction unknown.