Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  The detonator cartridges exploded on time to separate the thorax of the Lem from the sac; the ascent stage rose, the descent stage remained. Just before that separation, all signal and electrical power between the two was sundered. Then the nuts and bolts joining the stages were also exploded. In the same fraction of a second, an explosive guillotine severed the connecting spine of wires, cables, and water lines between the two stages. The ascent motor flamed up to 90 percent of full thrust in three-tenths of a second, and with hardly more than a big jerk and a blast! and a Proceed! they rose off the moon in a wobbling climb, oscillating from side to side as their fuel sloshed in the tanks.

  ALDRIN: That was beautiful. 26 feet, 36 feet per second up. Be advised of the pitchover. Very smooth … very quiet ride. There’s that one crater down there.

  PAO: 1000 feet high, 80 feet per second vertical rise.

  Later Armstrong would say, “a beautiful fleeting final view of Tranquility Base as we lifted up and away from it.” Did they have the recognition at this instant that on another day there might be lunar cities under domes, and moondromes with their names? On climbed the ascent, up half a mile in the first minute, its direction no longer vertical, but tipping out, then pitching over toward the eventual curve of its orbit. Behind them was the memory of the blast-off, the Kapton and all the other loose-wrapped plastic insulations of the descent stage being blown in all directions, far out in the bulletlike trajectories of the moon, all that plastic, silver and gold debris, and behind them—first refuse of the first moon city—was already the handle of the rock contingency sample, the TV camera and its tripod, the staff for the solar wind experiment, the passive seismometer, the closeup camera, the Laser Ranging Retro-Reflector and its packing materials and brackets—there had been over a hundred brackets and they were now strewn on the moon ground—and there were two backpacks of the PLSS also left behind and overshoes, and tramped ground for a hundred feet around the descent stage, ten thousand prints of the marks of their boots on top of other marks of their boots, messy as a bivouac where troops have been milling in the rain. If men never came back, those marks might remain for millions of years. And the motionless waving of the flag.

  But that was behind them, and their little wobbling ascent stage climbed up through its oscillations and out into the sea of space.

  ALDRIN: We’re at 3000, 170 up, beautiful … 1500. 185.

  CAPCOM: You are GO at 3 minutes.

  ARMSTRONG: We’re going right down U.S. 1.

  Rising right out of their dread; they were leaving the loneliest death in the world. If that ascent engine had not worked—there were no suicide capsules on the Eagle. They would not have needed them. When the frustration of being trapped on the moon proved too great, they would only have had to open the hatch, and remove their helmets. That could not have felt much worse than being a drowning man. But now they slung themselves down that track, pouches of fuel tanks carried like chaws of tobacco, one for each cheek of the ascent stage. On they came up into orbit.

  CAPCOM: Eagle, Houston, 4 minutes … everything’s great.

  PAO: Horizontal velocity approaching 2500 feet per second.

  ALDRIN: Now we got—got Sabine off to the right now.… There’s Ritter out there. There it is right there. Man, that’s impressive-looking, isn’t it?

  CAPCOM: Eagle, Houston, you’re looking good.

  PAO: One minute to go in the burn. 4,482 feet per second horizontal velocity.

  ALDRIN: About 800 to go. 700 to go. Okay I’m opening up on the main shutoffs. Ascent feed closed. Pressure’s holding good. Crossfeed on. 350 to go. Stand by on this engine arm. 90. Okay, off. 50, Shutdown …

  PAO: Showing a perilune of 9.4 nautical miles, apolune of 46.7 nautical miles on the PNGCS. Shutoff velocity showing about 5,537 feet per second.

  In seven minutes and eighteen seconds after fires had been lit, they had consumed their fuel, turned off their ascent engine, and were coasting over a mile a second in an eccentric orbit around the moon, something like forty-seven miles from the surface at farthest point and nine and a half miles up at the nearest or perilune, at which point they had just arrived.

  CAPCOM: Eagle, Houston.… The whole world is proud of you.

  ARMSTRONG: We had a lot of help down there.

  PAO: Flight Operations Director Chris Kraft commented that he felt like some five hundred million people around the world are helping push Eagle off the moon and back into orbit.

  During the ascent, they had monitored the heart rates. Armstrong had been hardly above normal, pegged at 90, a low figure for him. Aldrin had been up at 120. It was the only time in the flight that his heartbeat had been higher than Armstrong’s. Is it possible that Aldrin was feeling a new sense of dread at the oncoming rendezvous? It would be a curious state to find oneself in after the worst technological moment has just been passed in a flying test.

  XIII

  To hold a gyroscope in the hand is to obtain an inkling of orbit. There is a sense of energy revolving in a powerful pattern, of rapid movement in some alliance with rest, for a gyroscope offers to the palm a sensation of high speed and high stability, as if all its activity is devoted to being precisely where it is.

  So, now at high speed and yet in no more than a fast-moving corollary of the state of rest, the Lem is in orbit and the Command Module is in orbit, each traveling in elliptical rings around the moon, Columbia in the outer ring, which is close to a circle of sixty nautical miles in diameter, while Eagle is in the ellipse we have described of 46.7 by 9.4 nautical miles. It has taken a burn of 438 seconds in its ascent motor to reach this stage and it has consumed two thousand pounds of fuel and three thousand pounds of oxidizer in four tanks whose volume was each thirty-six cubic feet. Now it would go the rest of the way to joining the Command Module on small increments of velocity or small braking burns offered it by its four quadrants of thrusters and they are fed by two tanks of fuel and two tanks of oxidizer whose volume is no more than two cubic feet each, or taken all together, the four thruster tanks could fit into a cube with two-foot sides. The amount of energy capable of being released under fire by that much hydrogen and oxygen will be sufficient to close the gap which remains between Eagle and Columbia.

  In a sense, the critical part of rendezvous has been finished already. The Eagle was only obliged to get into some kind of orbit. If its ascent motor had failed any time in the last sixty seconds of ascent, its thrusters would have been able to drive it the rest of the way into that first planned ellipse, and then the Command Module could have descended for rescue. Indeed, once Eagle succeeded in getting into any kind of orbit at all, the Command Module would be able to come down for it, but all orbits below six miles of altitude were dangerous indeed, for then Eagle would have no ability to clear mountains. Rendezvous maneuvers might have had to be speeded up. One could even conceive of a cinematic rescue with Columbia accelerating down toward the moon, slowing just long enough only for Armstrong and Aldrin to open the hatch, crawl outside, get a handhold on a quadrant of Columbia’s thrusters and Sput! Sput! Columbia would be on her way up again as the Lem coasted into a lunar peak.

  That was hardly the operation today. It proceeded smoothly. A little while after Eagle coasted up to her apolune of 46.7 miles above the moon, she fired her thrusters for a little more speed and was inserted into Concentric Sequence Initiation, a rough circle forty-five miles in diameter which was situated within the rough sixty-mile circle of the Command Module. Almost an hour later, halfway around from that position, came another burn, called the Constant Differential Height, whose purpose was to make certain that if both ships were traveling in concentric ellipses, the distances between them did not vary. (All this, well planned in advance, was readjusted in flight by measurements taken from the Inertial Measurement Unit, then calculated by the guidance computer, as well as by checks obtained from rendezvous radar.)

  About thirty-eight minutes later, Eagle was ready to begin Terminal Phase Initiation. That was at a point where
Columbia was thirty miles in front of her and seventeen miles overhead. Driving forward at a small increase of velocity, which closed distance at about a nautical mile a minute, on an angle 27 degrees above her local horizontal, Eagle swallowed the last gap in something less than forty-five minutes. The two ships came within view of each other in less than four hours and less than two revolutions from the time lift-off had occurred. Collins reported a great feeling of relief at seeing them come up toward him. “I really got excited then because for the first time, it was clear they had done it. They had landed on the moon and got off again.” They had in fact come up all the way on their own power, with Columbia—power available not only in her thrusters but in her main propulsion motor—maintaining all the tools and options in reserve. It was more elegant to solve the problem with the lesser means. Besides, it left Columbia in possession of more fuel for the trip back.

  Now came the last maneuvers. Little braking burns to put their velocity equal to one another were done in an operation called stationkeeping: now they could wheel through lunar space close enough to take photographs of one another. Let us listen to the transcript as they approach. It is very calm. What has happened to Aldrin’s anxiety of a few hours ago?

  ARMSTRONG: Okay, Mike. I’ll get—I’ll try to get in position here, then you got it … I’m not going to do a thing, Mike. I’m just letting her hold in attitude HOLD.

  COLUMBIA: Okay.

  ARMSTRONG: Okay, we’re all yours.

  COLUMBIA: Okay. Okay, I have thrusters D3 and D4 safetied.

  ARMSTRONG: Okay.

  COLUMBIA: I’m pumping up cabin pressures.

  The docking took place with a light touch. Collins never even felt the two ships meet. The probe of the Command Module slid into the Eagle’s drogue. “They’re held together then,” Collins said, “by three tiny capture latches, and it’s almost like tiny little paper clips holding together two vehicles, one of which weighs thirty thousand pounds, the other five thousand. It’s a tenuous grasp. To make the combination rigid you fire a little gas bottle that activates a plunger which literally sucks the two vehicles together. At this point the twelve capture latches fire mechanically and you are held together very strongly. That’s the hard dock.”

  Just before that moment “all hell broke loose.” It was Collins’ remark, there on the transcript, but he has no recollection of saying it. As he fired the charges, there was an abrupt, shocking and “abnormal” oscillation. The ships began to yaw from side to side at a rapid rate. What an instant for Armstrong—did the memory of the sun flashing through the window of Gemini 8 come back to him? What a thunder for Aldrin after the mishaps with the computer on the day before, what a stroke of doubt for Collins at where the mistake could be. “All hell broke loose.” Hell was when the unforeseen insisted on emerging. Shivering and quivering, the ships slapped from side to side.

  Well, it lasted for “eight or ten rather dubious seconds,” while Collins and Armstrong worked to get back in line with one another, and all the while the automatic retract was working and they finally came together with a big bang and were docked “and it was all over.”

  It was essentially all over. The chores were done, the suits were vacuumed of moon dust, the tunnel was opened, and they met and shook hands, no comment recorded for posterity, and then passed the rock boxes through to Collins who handled them “as if they were absolutely jam-packed with rare jewels which” he adds, “in a sense they are.” Now the hours were spent on the details of final housekeeping aboard the Lem, in the final transfer to the Command Module, the repositioning of the probe and the drogue. Soon the Lem would be jettisoned. The two ships would separate and Eagle would ebb away at a few feet a second. Once it was out of sight, it would never be seen again. Still, an essential part of it would certainly expire in full view of their recording instruments for the primary cooling system, which kept the computer from overheating, was disconnected before they left. As the hours passed, the computer on the Eagle kept sending data, but the signal became weaker and weaker. Finally it died. Pings with her sneak circuits, Executive Overflows, and DSKY was dead. Long before that, they had fired up their Service Propulsion Motor on the back of the moon, and the Command and Service Module had come over the hill with velocity sufficient to throw her out of lunar gravity and out on her long way home. Pings on the Lem was not in fact to die until after midnight when thousands of miles away the crew was settling in for a real sleep.

  The trip back had begun. They had sixty hours to spend in modest work, in a repetition of chores, and in a great deal of thought. It is doubtful if they brooded too long on the wild gyrations before the hard dock. Possibly there had been more concern at Houston. For the Lem was a machine of machines, a beauty of a beast which had never seen work on earth. She had habits like a horse who was crazy once a year. She had taken off on Cernan for a rampant little trip, she had dipped this crew toward the moon, then, as if magnetized by magnetisms never quite measured before, charged with some sense of person from the remarkable components of her crew, or by her contact with the moon, charged perhaps by some sensitivity to the difference between the men in herself, and the man in the Command Module she soon would meet, she had quivered, or the Command Module had quivered, or both had quivered, space machine to moon machine, quivered like magnets which approach and gyrate when suspended on a string. Something happened up there which no one could explain, something once again had stirred the hairs in the secret cave. The psychology of machines was a whisper in the dark and sultry Houston night.

  XIV

  It is almost sixty hours before reentry for the astronauts, and their return will be without events of the largest scope. Collins will grow a mustache, and Mission Control will report that the crime rate in Italy was at a low for the year on the night they walked the moon. A girl will be born in Memphis who is christened Module McGhee, and a boy named Greg Force will fix a bearing on the huge antenna in Guam because he is the only one whose arm is small enough to reach into the hole. The Capcom on duty the following night will mistake the moon for the earth on a murky television screen and the astronauts will have the experience of seeing the earth and moon looking equal in size out opposite windows. Slowly the earth will grow in the window. Blue she will gleam and brown and gray and silver and rose and red. Her clouds will cover her like curls of white hair, her clouds will turn dark as smoky pearls and the lavender of orchid, her clouds will be brown and green like marsh grass wet by the sea, and the sea will appear beneath like pools of water in the marsh grass. The earth will look like a precious stone, blue as sapphire, blue as a diamond, the earth will be an eye to look at them in curious welcome as they return. They have been as far as Achilles and Odysseus, as far as Jason who sailed to meet the argonauts, far as Magellan and Columbus, they have been far. And their fingertips are smooth from plastic, their lungs are leather from days of bottled gas. What does an astronaut give up of the ultimate tastes to travel so far? We are back to Aquarius moldering on flatlands not far from the sea.

  PART III

  The Age of Aquarius

  CHAPTER 1

  The Hanging of the Highwayman

  There was a melancholy to the end of a century. The French, who were the first to specify a state for every emotion, would speak of the fin de siècle. It was the only name to give his own mood, for Aquarius was in a depression which would not lift for the rest of the summer, a curious depression full of fevers, forebodings, and a general sense that the century was done—it had ended in the summer of 1969.

  If he had had his extraordinary night of insomnia in Houston, and had thought his way out, well, that was just for one night. The woes of these hot weeks sat upon him as he slept and as he worked. He was used to writing in moods so bad he could assume he was passing through a swamp at midnight—some of his best work had come out of periods worse than this, and some of his worst efforts had emerged from hours which had been too pleasant. It was almost as if he had to suffer while working in order to come closer
to exercising some more ultimate faculty of judgment. It was a terror to write if one wished to speak of important matters and did not know if one was qualified—sometimes the depressions helped to give sanction to the verdicts taken. It was not so unreasonable. The question is whether it is better to trust a judge who travels through his own desolations before passing sentence, or a jurist who has a good meal, a romp with his mistress, a fine night of sleep, and a penalty of death in the morning for the highwayman.

  To write was to judge, and Aquarius may never have tried a subject which tormented him so.

  II

  He had come home the day before the astronauts came back to earth. There were splashdown parties promised all over Houston, and he was tempted to remain, for there would be portraits in plenty to paint of Texas drinking and poolside brawls, but he was also in a panic to get back and start work—his first deadline was not three weeks off. Each extra day at this end could be a reprieve at the other. Still much in the middle of the event, mental digestions churning, he returned to the bosom of his family.

  The house was sour; the milk gave every intimation that it had curdled. His wife and he were getting along abominably. They had had hideous phone calls these last few weeks while he was away. Several times, one or the other had hung up in the middle of a quarrel. It was impossible to believe, but they each knew—they were coming to an end. They could not believe it for they loved their two sons as once they had loved each other, but now everything was wrong. It was sad. They had met on a night of full moon, and would end in the summer of the moon. Sometimes his wife seemed as if deranged by Apollo’s usurpation of the moon. She was extraordinarily sensitive to its effects; she was at best uneasy and at worst unreachable when the moon was full. Through the years of their marriage Aquarius had felt the fullness of the moon in his own dread, his intimations of what full criminality he might possess, had felt the moon in the cowardice not to go out on certain nights, felt the moon when it was high and full and he was occasionally on the side of the brave. And she was worse. Call her Pisces for the neatness of the scheme. Beverly, born sign of Pisces. She was an actress who now did not work. An actress who does not work is a maddened beast. His lovely Pisces, subtle at her loveliest as silver, would scream on nights of the full moon with a voice so loud she sounded like an animal in torment. They were far and away the noisiest house on the street.