Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  ALDRIN: Your back is up against the (garbled). All right, now it’s on top of the DSKY. Forward and up, now you’ve got them, over toward me, straight down, relax a little bit.

  ARMSTRONG: (Garbled)

  ALDRIN: Neil, you’re lined up nicely. Toward me a little bit, okay down, okay, made it clear.

  ARMSTRONG: To what edge?

  ALDRIN: Move. Here roll to the left. Okay, now you’re clear. You’re lined up on the platform. Put your left foot to the right a little bit. Okay that’s good. Roll left.

  The Press was giggling. Sanctimony at NASA was a tight seal. A new church, it had been born as a high church. No one took liberties. Now, two of the heroes of NASA were engaged in an inevitably comic dialogue—one big man giving minute adjustments of position to another. The Press giggled.

  Armstrong spoke out suddenly. “Okay, Houston, I’m on the porch.”

  The audience broke into applause. There was mockery, as if the cavalry had just come galloping down the ridge.

  A few minutes went by. Impatience hung in the air. Then a loud bright cheer as a picture came on the screen. It was a picture upside-down, blinding in contrast, and incomprehensible, perhaps just such a kaleidoscope of shadow and light as a baby might see in the first instants before silver nitrate goes into its eyes. Then, twists and turns of image followed, a huge black cloud resolved itself into the bulk of Armstrong descending the ladder, a view of confusions of objects, some roughhewn vision of a troglodyte with a huge hump on his back and voices—Armstrong, Aldrin and Capcom—details were being offered of the descent down the ladder. Armstrong stepped off the pad. No one quite heard him say, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” nor did anyone quite see him take the step—the TV image on the movie screen was beautiful, but still as marvelously abstract as the branches of a tree, or a painting by Franz Kline of black beams on a white background. Nonetheless, a cheer went up, and a ripple of extraordinary awareness. It was as if the audience felt an unexpected empathy with the sepulchral, as if a man were descending step by step, heartbeat by diminishing heartbeat into the reign of the kingdom of death itself and he was reporting, inch by inch, what his senses disclosed. Everybody listened in profound silence. Irritation was now gone as Armstrong described the fine and powdery substance of the surface: “I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine sandy particles.” Every disclosure for these first few minutes would be a wonder. If it would have been more extraordinary to hear that the moon had taken no imprint in soft powder, or the powder was phosphorescent, still it was also a wonder that the powder of the moon reacted like powder on earth. A question was at least being answered. If the answer was ordinary, still there was one less question in the lonely spaces of the human mind. Aquarius had an instant when he glimpsed space expanding like the widening pool of an unanswered question. Was that the power behind the force which made technology triumphant in this century?—that technology was at least a force which attempted to bring back answers from questions which had been considered to be without answers?

  The image was becoming more decipherable. As Armstrong moved away from the ladder in a hesitant loping gait, not unlike the first staggering steps of a just-born calf, he called back to Mission Control, “No trouble to walk around,” but as if that were too great a liberty to take with the feelings of the moon, he came loping back to the ladder.

  Activities went on. There were photographs to take, descriptions of the appearance of the rocks, of the character of the sun glare. One of Armstrong’s first jobs was to pick up a sample of rock and put it in his pocket. Thus if something unforeseen were to occur, if the unmentionable yak or the Abominable Snowman were to emerge from a crater, if the ground began to rumble, if for any reason they had to reenter the Lem and take off abruptly, they would then have the chance to return to earth with at least one rock. This first scoop of moon stone and moon dust was called the contingency sample, and it was one of Armstrong’s first tasks, but he seemed to have forgotten it. The Capcom reminded him subtly, so did Aldrin. The Capcom came back again: “Neil, this is Houston. Did you copy about the contingency sample? Over?”

  “Rog,” said Armstrong, “I’m going to get to that just as soon as I finish this picture series.”

  Aldrin had probably not heard. “Okay,” he asked, “going to get the contingency sample now, Neil?”

  “Right!” Armstrong snapped. The irritability was so evident that the audience roared with laughter—don’t we laugh when we glimpse a fine truth and immediately conceal it? What a truth! Nagging was nagging, even on the moon.

  The television image was improving. It was never clear, never did it look any better in quality than a print of the earliest silent movies, but it was eloquent. Ghosts beckoned to ghosts, and the surface of the moon looked like a ski slope at night. Fields of a dazzling pale ran into caverns of black, and through this field moved the ghost of Armstrong. There were moments when one had the impression it was possible to see through him. His image was transparent.

  Aldrin descended the ladder, then jumped back on the lowest rung to test his ability to return to the Lem. The abruptness of the action broke the audience into guffaws again, the superior guffaw a sophisticate gives to a chair creaking too crudely in a horror movie. Now two ghosts paraded about, jogging forward and back, exchanging happy comments on the new nature of hopping and walking, moving faster than a walk but like much-padded toddlers, or overswathed beginners on skis. Sometimes they looked like heavy elderly gentlemen dancing with verve, sometimes the sight of their boots or their gloves, the bend of their backs setting up equipment or reaching for more rocks gave them the look of beasts on hindquarters learning to think, sometimes the image went over into negative so that they looked black in their suits on a black moon with white hollows, sometimes the image was solarized and became positive and negative at once, images yawing in and out of focus, so the figures seemed to squirt about like one-celled animals beneath a slide—all the while, images of the Lem would appear in the background, an odd battered object like some Tartar cooking pot left on a trivet in a Siberian field. It all had the look of the oldest photographs of expeditions to the North Pole—there was something bizarre, touching, splendid, and ridiculous all at once, for the feat was immense, but the astronauts looked silly, and their functional conversations seemed farcical in the circumstances.

  “What did you say, Buzz?”

  “I say the rocks are rather slippery.”

  Huge guffaws from the audience. When the flag was set up on the moon, the Press applauded. The applause continued, grew larger—soon they would be giving the image of the flag a standing ovation. It was perhaps a way of apologizing for the laughter before, and the laughter they knew would come again, but the experience was still out of register. A reductive society was witnessing the irreducible. But the irreducible was being presented with faulty technique. At that they could laugh. And did again and again. There were moments when Armstrong and Aldrin might just as well have been Laurel and Hardy in space suits.

  The voice of Collins came into the public address system. He had been out of radio contact for almost an hour during his trip around the back of the moon, so he did not know how the Extra Vehicular Activity was proceeding. He had left communication before Armstrong had reached the lunar surface. Now he asked, “How’s it going?”

  CAPCOM: Roger. The EVA is progressing beautifully. I believe they are setting up the flag now.

  COLLINS: Great.

  The audience laughed at this hard pea of envy beneath twenty mattresses of NASA manners.

  CAPCOM: I guess you’re about the only person around that doesn’t have TV coverage of the scene.

  COLLINS: That’s right. That’s all right. I don’t mind a bit.

  Now, the Press roared.

  COLLINS: How is the quality of the TV?

  CAPCOM: Oh, it’s beautiful, Mike. Really is.

  COLLINS: Oh, gee, that’s great.

  The video conti
nued, the astronauts worked on styles of gait, ordinary walking, half-run, kangaroo hops. There was a sense of the astronauts’ happiness as they loped about, and now a delicate envy, almost tender in its sensibility, went to them from the crowd. There was finally something marvelous. This old-fashioned indistinct movie of comedians in old-fashioned suits was in fact but a cover upon the curious happiness everyone was feeling. It was the happiness which comes from a wound. For with the pain, and there was pain in the thought of the moon—so private a body to the poet buried in every poke of a head—the moon being now invaded, there was also the happiness that accompanies the pain, for the landing was a straight-out wound to every stable disposition of the mind. Yet a wound in that period when we do not know which flesh is severed forever and what is recuperable is an hour of curious happiness. Change may give life. So the world was watching the loping bumbling skittering low-gravity movements of these men with the kind of concentration we offer to the study of our own wound. Something in the firmament was being operated upon.

  Well, the flag was up. The Capcom spoke. He asked the astronauts to stand in view of the camera, then announced that the President of the United States wanted to say a few words.

  ARMSTRONG: That would be an honor.

  CAPCOM: Go ahead, Mr. President, this is Houston. Out.

  It had been announced in advance that the President would speak to the astronauts, but the liberal portion of the Press groaned, to be answered by a pattering of stiff hands from the patriots in the room.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: Neil and Buzz, I am talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House. And this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made.

  Large jeers from the audience. The most expensive telephone call ever made! Stentorian hand clapping.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: I just can’t tell you how proud we all are of you. For every American this has to be the proudest day of our lives. And for people all over the world, I am sure they too join with Americans in recognizing what a feat this is. Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man’s world. And as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility, it inspires us to double our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to earth. For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this earth are truly one. One in their pride in what you have done. And one in our prayers that you will return safely to earth.

  Every word had its function. It could be said that the psychology of machines begins where humans are more machinelike in their actions than the machines they employ.

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” answered Armstrong in a voice not altogether in control. What a moment for Richard Nixon if the first tears shed on the moon flowed on the consequence of his words! “It’s a great honor and a privilege,” Armstrong went on, “to be representing not only the United States, but men of peace of all nations.” When he finished, he saluted.

  Some of the crowd jeered again. The image of Nixon faded on home TV screens, his voice was gone from the theater. The moon walk continued. In fact, it was not half done, but the early excitement had ebbed in this last play of rhetoric—the minds of the Press had gone on to the question of whether Nixon was considering it politically advantageous to support a future program of space. As the astronauts continued to walk, to hop, to flit and to skip from one vale of moon ground to another, as the experiments were set out and the rocks picked up, so the temper of the audience shifted. It was a Twentieth Century audience when all was said, and quick in its sense of fashion. By an hour and a half of the moon walk they were bored—some were actually slipping out. All over the room was felt the ubiquitous desire of journalists for the rescue of a drink. Boredom deepened. Now the mood was equal to the fourth quarter of a much anticipated football game whose result had proved lopsided. Now it looked as if rookies were out on the chill field running fumbles back and forth. More and more reporters departed. Even Aquarius left before the end.

  V

  It was the event of his lifetime, and yet it had been a dull event. The language which now would sing of this extraordinary vault promised to be as flat as an unstrung harp. The century had unstrung any melody of words. Besides—the event was obdurate on the surface and a mystery beneath. It was not at all easy to comprehend. Like an adolescent married before he could vote, the congratulation, “You’re a married man,” had no reality to the brand-new groom. So America and the world would be in a round of congratulations—we had landed a man on the moon. The event was so removed, however, so unreal, that no objective correlative existed to prove it had not conceivably been an event staged in a television studio—the greatest con of the century—and indeed a good mind, product of the iniquities, treacheries, gold, passion, invention, deception, and rich worldly stink of the Renaissance could hardly deny that the event if bogus was as great a creation in mass hoodwinking, deception, and legerdemain as the true ascent was in discipline and technology. Indeed, conceive of the genius of such a conspiracy. It would take criminals and confidence men mightier, more trustworthy and more resourceful than anything in this century or the ones before. Merely to conceive of such men was the surest way to know the event was not staged. Yes, the century was a giant and a cretin. Man had become a Herculean embodiment of the Vision, but the brain on top of the head was as small as a transistorized fist, and the chambers of the heart had shrunk to the dry hard seeds of some hybrid future.

  To make sense of Apollo 11 on the moon, to rise above the verbiage (like extinguishers of foam) which covered the event, was to embark on a project which could not satisfy his own eye unless it could reduce a conceptual city of technologese to one simplicity—was the venture worthwhile or unappeased in its evil?

  If Marx had done his best to gut the past of every attachment to the primitive, the sacramental, and the magical, if the Marxian formula that history was a reflection of the state of productive relations had thereby elevated reason to that vertiginous even insane eminence out of which technology had been born, then the task now appeared in reverse: one was obliged to make a first reconnaissance into the possibility of restoring magic, psyche, and the spirits of the underworld to the spookiest venture in history, a landing on the moon, an event whose technologese had been so complete that the word “spook” probably did not appear in twenty million words of NASA prose.

  CHAPTER 5

  A Dream of the Future’s Face

  Early on the afternoon of July 21, the Lunar Module fired its ascent motor, lifted off Tranquility Base, and in a few hours docked with Columbia. Shortly after, the astronauts passed back into the Command Module and Eagle was jettisoned. It would drift off on a trajectory to the sun. A little before midnight, out of communication for the last time with Mission Control, traveling for the final orbit around the back of the moon, Apollo 11 ignited the Service Module engine and accelerated its speed from 3,600 miles to 5,900 miles per hour. Its momentum was now great enough to lift it out of the moon’s pull of gravity and back into the attractions of the earth—the spacecraft was therefore on its way home. Since the trip would take sixty hours, a quiet two and a half days were in store and Aquarius decided to get out of Nassau Bay and visit some friends.

  His host and hostess were wealthy Europeans with activities which kept them very much of the time in Texas. Since they were art collectors of distinction, invariably served a good meal, and had always been kind to him, the invitation was welcome. To go from the arid tablelands of NASA Highway 1 to these forested grounds now damp after the rain of a summer evening was like encountering a taste of French ice in the flats of the desert. Even the trees about the house were very high, taller than the tallest elms he had seen in New England—“Wild pigs used to forage in this part of Houston,” said his host, as if in explanation, and on the lawn, now twice-green in the luminous golden green of a murky twilight, smaller tropical trees with rubbery trunks twisted about a large sculpture by Jean Tinguely which waved metal scarecrow arms when a switch was thrown and blew spinning faucets of water
through wild stuttering sweeps, a piece of sculpture reminiscent of the flying machines of La Belle Epoque, a hybrid of dragon and hornet which offered a shade of the time when technology had been belts and clanking gears, and culture was a fruit to be picked from a favored tree.

  The mansion was modern, it had been one of the first modern homes in Houston and was designed by one of the more ascetic modern architects. With the best will, how could Aquarius like it? But the severity of the design was concealed by the variety of the furniture, the intensity of the art, the presence of the sculpture, and the happy design in fact of a portion of the house: the living room shared a wall with a glassed-in atrium of exotics in bloom. So the surgical intent of the architect was partially overcome by the wealth of the art and by the tropical pressure of the garden whose plants and interior tree, illumined with spotlights, possessed something of that same silence which comes over audience and cast when there is a moment of theater and everything ceases, everything depends on—one cannot say—it is just that no one thinks to cough.

  There had been another such moment when he entered the house. In the foyer was a painting by Magritte, a startling image of a room with an immense rock situated in the center of the floor. The instant of time suggested by the canvas was comparable to the mood of a landscape in the instant just before something awful is about to happen, or just after, one could not tell. The silences of the canvas spoke of Apollo 11 still circling the moon: the painting could have been photographed for the front page—it hung from the wall like a severed head. As Aquarius met the other guests, gave greetings, took a drink, his thoughts were not free of the painting. He did not know when it had been done—he assumed it was finished many years ago—he was certain without even thinking about it that there had been no intention by the artist to talk of the moon or projects in space, no, Aquarius would assume the painter had awakened with a vision of the canvas and that vision had he delineated. Something in the acrid breath of the city he inhabited, some avidity emitted by a passing machine, some tar in the residue of a nightmare, some ash from the memory of a cremation had gone into the painting of that gray stone—it was as if Magritte had listened to the ending of one world with its comfortable chairs in the parlor, and heard the intrusion of a new world, silent as the windowless stone which grew in the room, and knowing not quite what he had painted, had painted his warning nonetheless. Now the world of the future was a dead rock, and the rock was in the room.