Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  SPACECRAFT: (Spacecraft signal very weak—inaudible)

  CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston. Are you in the process of acquiring high-gain antenna? Over.

  CAPCOM: Apollo 11, Apollo 11, this is Houston. How do you read?

  COLLINS: Read you loud and clear, Houston.

  CAPCOM: Roger. Reading you the same now. Could you repeat your burn status report? We copied the residuals burn time and that was about it. Send the whole thing again, please.

  ARMSTRONG: It was like—like perfect. DELTA T O, burn time 557, ten values on the angles, BGX minus .1, BGY minus .1, BGZ plus .1, no trim, minus 6.8 on DELTA VC, fuel was 38.8, OX 39.0, plus 50 on balance, we ran an increase on the PUGS, NOUN 44, show us in a 60.9 by 169.9.

  CAPCOM: Roger, we copy your burn status report, and the spacecraft is looking good to us on telemetry.

  PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICER: Burn report was by Neil Armstrong.

  V

  If tension had been palpable in the Public Affairs Officer’s voice, one can easily imagine the forty-seven minutes of dread experienced in the MOCR when the flight of Apollo 8 took Borman, Lovell and Anders over the hill, and men saw the far side for the first time. There had of course been photographs received from unmanned spacecraft, but those photos had been transmitted back to earth by television data and were blurred. They had hardly been a full preparation for the sight turned up to the eyes of the crew of Apollo 8, and Apollo 10, and now repeated for Apollo 11.

  The side of the moon which faced the earth had features, it had oceans and seas and mountain chains and straits. If there was no water in the seas, and they were in fact dark and desert plains, still they possessed features. One could speak of the man in the moon for his face could be found in the contrasts between the highlands and the seas. But the far side, on superficial view, was nearly without distinguishing marks, an endless waste of craters laid upon craters. If the moon had kept her face looking toward earth, the back side of the moon was as undistinguished as a head of hair. Later, out of better photographs would come maps, and subtle features might begin to emerge, but for the present only a few huge craters stood out in all that near hemisphere of hitherto unplotted terrain—a great crater with a great peak in the center and a very dark moon floor had first been seen by Lunik 2, first Russian unmanned spacecraft to circle the satellite, and had been as quickly named the Crater Tsiolkovsky after the father of Russian rocketry. Other craters of real dimension appeared here and there, Mare Moscoviense for one, another was even named Jules Verne, but the mass of terrain appeared to be little but a mire of endless holes, a barnyard trod by countless hooves, a beach with hollows and mounds from thousands of feet. Borman was to describe it as like a battlefield and since this hidden moon land was obliterated of variety, an apparent dump and blasting ground of all the angers of the heavens, the meteoric hypothesis regained force here where the ground of the moon seemed subjected to every size and variety of meteor. The ground humped and holed, it writhed and twisted like a spill of sand thrown over nests of snakes, it seemed to boil, it was as trackless as the rough bark of a tree, as filled with the holes of craters of every size as a molten slag boiling in a pot. Yet the longer one looked, the less was the impression of meteors, the stronger a sense of volcanic forces which had once boiled beneath and emerged in poppings and blowholes of crust. Search the lip of every large crater and there in the center of the circumference of each round ridge was a little crater so perfectly placed it must have boiled up out of the lip, and indeed nothing for hundreds of miles before the eye but swellings and distensions of the terrain like a skin beneath which furies must have wrung themselves, a bewildering endlessly worked-over expanse almost without rays, a stretch of bumpy knobby pockmarked upthrown churnings equal to the view from a low boat—without horizon one could never sight a level, and direction was hopeless, a windtwisted choppy sea had been frozen on the instant to stone. So one had no sense of scale. Staring down on a photograph of the far side it was not possible to tell without text whether the picture was of a square mile or of a square five hundred. Craters the size of New York were indistinguishable from craters the size of a house. All orders of magnitude were gone. Giving oneself to these studies of the moon, there followed that hypnotic sense of falling out of human magnitude into other magnitudes. It came upon the senses that in the hour of death, consciousness might separate into other dimensions, dissipate into other orders of the immense and the minuscule, consciousness might at last be off on terminal voyages to microbes, molecules, or the stars. Aquarius had been devoted to painting for close to thirty years; an amateur of the mysteries of form, it took him close to thirty years to comprehend why Cézanne was the father of modern art and godfather to photographs of the far side of the moon.

  But it had come to him at last in one fair burst of appreciation, and he had a glimpse of why Cézanne’s work had been obsessive to so many painters. For hundreds of years, they had worked to capture the sheen and texture, the hairs, the dust, the flickering motes of light on the surface of a drape. Miseries and glories of apprenticeship had gone into painting a velvet sleeve, a pearl, a drop of dew on a grape. Western civilization arrived at a materiality of forms where every surface was recognizable in its own right. Did a painter work a canvas properly? Then one could cut out a square inch of canvas, show it to an unfamiliar eye, and the response would be that it was a piece of lace, or a square of velvet, for the canvas had been painted to look exactly like lace or velvet.

  Cézanne, however, had looked to destroy the surface. A tablecloth in any one of his still lifes, taken inch by square inch, resembled the snowfields of mountains; his apples could be the paint-stained walls of a barn, or the clay roundings of a rock; the trunks of his trees were stems, or pillars, or hairs beneath a microscope. His skies, patch by patch, could be taken for a sea as easily as a light-blue throw cloth; the skin which ran from a man’s eye to the corner of his mouth was like the sun-beaten terrain of his hills. In one lifetime of work, Cézanne disqualified the virtuosity of the craft and brought painting away from the capture of light on material. He showed instead a panorama of rises and depressions on every surface, the similarities between surfaces now more profound than the differences. As he succeeded, so the orders of magnitude vanished in his painting, and one could not know, looking at a detail, whether he was representing the inside of a flower or the inside of a tent. Something in that vision spoke like the voice of the century to come, something in his work turned other painters out of their own directions and into a search for the logic of the abstract. Art had embarked on an entrance into the long tunnel where aesthetics met technology. Picasso and Cubism would pour through that hole in the old love of surface until one could not tell which wall was near and what floor had begun to recede. It was as if the century to come was already anticipated in the veins of its artists, as if the century to come would go out to explore the dissolution of all orders of magnitude and so begin a search into the secrets and unwindings of death. Little surprise that before the century had finished its seventh decade, the artist had crossed from the brush to the wind machine and blew up walls of plastic through which the patron all blindfolded would creep. Art and theater were ready to view the dimensionless dimensions of the moon on its far side.

  VI

  If we have been about to assume that objects are shaped in a way which offers meaning, not only scientific meaning, but existential meaning; if we even press on to the notion that a firm sense of magnitudes is characteristic of human life as much as the loss of such a sense will take us through the arcade from sleep to death, we can at least be certain that whatever the astronauts are thinking about, they are not close at this instant to Cézanne. Fair enough. They have more than a little work to do. As they come about and acquire signal again, they are having the pleasure of all soldiers, athletes, young surgeons and novitiates—they are at last working upon the material they have studied for so long, and using the tools for which they were trained. So animation is in their comment
s. As they go around the moon in this first orbit, and then again in a second orbit, Armstrong particularly is lively. He has not been volatile the first three days, usually restricting himself to remarks about the look of weather on earth, and dutifully taking down each series of numbers in the data pads. Aldrin has talked a little more—his specialty is celestial navigation and his comments have been frequent on the availability of star checks—listen to him long enough and you might hear him name Fomalhaut and Arcturus and Vega, Polaris, Canopis and Capella, Rasalhague, Regor, and Diphda, Dnoles, Nunki, Sirius, and Peacock. Still it is Collins who has done three-quarters of the communicating with earth. The Command Module has been his. If he were not to land on the moon, he was still the Command Pilot. While Armstrong was Commander and ranked him technically, still Armstrong had exercised a most quiet authority. It was Collins who had been in contact with the Capcom, Collins who made the jokes, traded quip for quip, proved concerned about the equipment, inquired about minor deviations from any expected result, offered metaphors for Apollo 11’s housekeeping, commented on the quality of the food, and worried each detail until time to worry the next detail. He was like an actor who has every early scene in the play and yet is doomed in his role, for he is not in the big scenes to come and they will be so big that his own scenes must be drowned in the wake—an ambitious actor in such circumstances works harder, as if the cumulative emoting of his presence may intrude itself into the results.

  But Armstrong had been near to silent. Well described by the press for his silences, his air of loneliness, his desire for privacy, one had the impression of Armstrong drawing silence about him even in the Command Module, staring through his window for hours, or for the minutes which would make up the hours in the pauses between chores on the long trip up. He was a pilot, he was a pilot first and last, and so he studied the weather all the way—that we must assume—for the love of flying demands the attention of a lover to the moods of weather. A rich lover, connoisseur of love, might give an hour to the choice of flowers for a new love and another hour on falling asleep to the nuances of her reaction at hue of mother-of-pearl in the orchid; so, aviators would be drawn to that deep sense of balance they could feel between themselves, their machines, and intimations of the universe come upon in the winding and unwinding of the clouds, even as the lover found his universe in the rose gardens and hailstorms of the new lady’s emotion. That was one of the reasons they were aviators first—something incommunicable, therefore to be talked about lightly, was to be found in the experience of searching the weather. For at such moments they could as well have been oracles envisioning futures in the entrails of a goat, or palmists reading a life in the lines of the hand, then they were interpreting the mood, the whim, and the shifting temper of a presence which must have seemed at times on the edge of revealing itself to them. Consider a moment in the life of a flyer when he is high in the air alone and on that peak of focus to his reverie where emotion and logic come together—how could it fail to affect him if the weather were to shift mysteriously at the same instant he had a bold thought.

  Armstrong, who had spent a life studying weather from five miles up, from ten miles up, would then hardly have ignored the earth from 100,000 miles up, nor a quarter of a million miles away, not that view of the earth as a planet! He had been quiet wherever he could, a silence within the silence, a man composing his mind to give quick recall to a hundred plans, ten thousand names, a multitude of alphabets and numbers he might yet have to consult and so must order one more time in his brain. But now it was the moon before him, a globe without atmosphere, a cloudless sphere with a ground so humped and wrinkled that its horizons were never round but forever uneven, a compressed presence of a planet no more sibling to the earth than a head shrunken by aborigines is near a normal head.

  Yet they had come up over the hill, they had come around the far side of the moon, over the last of the trackless craters, and now like pioneers coming out of the hills they had the equivalent of daylight again, their radio was working, and the terrain was there to be recognized. There on the moon ground, one hundred twenty miles below, were plains as well as craters, chains of mountains and ravines beginning to emerge from the endless pitting of promiscuous craters. Their maps were coming together, their training, the films they had studied, the charts, and the advice of the astronauts from previous flights. What a pleasure to recognize the full measure of a piece of topography with a name, a full landmark twelve miles across. A happy voice spoke “… going over the Taruntius crater and the pictures and maps brought back by Apollos 8 and 10 give us a very good preview of what to look at here. It looks very much like the pictures, but like the difference between watching a real football game and watching it on TV—no substitute for actually being here.”

  CAPCOM: Roger. We concur and we surely wish we could see it firsthand also.

  PAO: That was Neil Armstrong.

  They passed over the Messier series of craters and a crater called Secchi. Next was Mt. Marilyn, named for the wife of the astronaut Jim Lovell from the flight of Apollo 8, Marilyn Lovell, tall, big, dimpled, cuddly, happy in social manner as a Texas cheerleader, the proud possessor of a mountain on the moon. From Mission Control came word that her husband was smiling—it is clever to name a part of the moon after one’s wife. Much will be easier later.*

  They came to the Sea of Tranquility, near whose western edge they would land, passed over some flat plains with occasional craters now predominant, a flat dull expanse glaring like desert in the sun beneath, an area as indistinguishable mark by mark as the quietly rusting plates on an old freighter. Here a blister of paint, there a pock—nothing like the barnacles on the back side of the moon. They named landmarks, Boot Hill, Duke Island, Sidewinder—a long twisting ravine. It was an area honored by no outstanding feature but the fact that they would approach along this way on their landing tomorrow. They were coming into the terminator now, the line of evening between day and night on the moon and the glare of the desert diminished—at the terminator the moon had a color of ash and gray, the landing site was on ahead to the west and well into the dark. From that height, looking down on the plain, little could be discerned—they would need to be nearer than sixty miles up to be certain of the intimate character of the land they would approach.

  They passed Triesnecker Crater and Rima Hyginus, a dog-legged ravine one hundred miles long. They passed Eratosthenes and Copernicus to the north, passed Copernicus without comment, Copernicus! the most outstanding crater of all maria, mighty crater in the Mare Imbrium! From Copernicus extended mountain chains, Carpathians to the left, Apennines and the Caucasus to the right, the crater Archimedes was among them and the rays of craters Kepler and Encke. More visible, the view would have been remarkable, some of the most individual features of the moon were in the Mare Imbrium, the Mare Cognitum and the vast Oceanus Procellarum. There, great craters emerged from the plain of the sea like the ruins of ancient cities, with runs of highland thick with combs and cores of small craters, then sea again. It was the part of the moon most like earth. Toward the horizon, the lines of craters looked like gunboats and battleships steaming in formation, clouds of stippled smoke hanging over the armada, or so at least you could try by a trick of vision to transform the churn of the highlands which ran from Kepler to Encke to Kunowsky.

  They were now on the search for Aristarchus. Far in the distance, four hundred miles north, and next to invisible in the earthshine, still they thought they could see it. Excitement showed. Aristarchus was the most mysterious of the observed craters. Its reflected light seemed brighter than any other crater, and it had given evidence over the years of possessing some kind of local atmosphere, some hint of clouds or emission of gases. Areas of the crater would glow bright or grow dim in unaccountable fashion, as studied through the telescope, and its most luminous period would tend to come at the beginning of the lunar day when the change from cold to heat was greatest, rather than at midday when the sun was overhead. The astronomer V. A. Firs
off, who had studied Aristarchus most closely, would state: “A suspicion is aroused that at least some of these white features are atmospheric veils or jets of finely divided white matter emitted by the crater or some parts of it.”

  Armstrong: “Hey Houston I’m looking north up toward Aristarchus now, and I can’t really tell at that distance whether I’m really looking at Aristarchus but there’s an area that is considerably more illuminated than the surrounding area. It seems to have a slight amount of fluorescence to it … one wall of the crater seems to be more illuminated than the others.”

  Some minutes later the spacecraft went over the hill and loss of signal occurred while Apollo 11 traveled back of the moon on the beginning of its second orbit. When the astronauts, forty-seven minutes later, came around the corner again, they began to offer details of what they viewed.