Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (58 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

It hardly mattered in Provincetown. That was the land of the free. At the very tip of Cape Cod, a fishing town curled around a spiral of land whose sand dunes separated the bay and the sea, it was a town of Portuguese and Yankees in winter, of artists, faggots, hippies, bikers, debs, dikes, off-course jets, groupies, and beefed-up beer-drinking tourists from Jersey in summer, not to mention hordes of middle-class professionals with progressive views and artistic liens. An isthmus of quiet in the calm months, it was no island of the mind in July, no, it was the Wild West of the East, and it took forty-five minutes in the middle of August to drive a car half a mile down the one-lane main street. Marijuana was as available in Provincetown in the hideous hocks of summer as popcorn is plentiful in a drive-in movie in Iowa. Aquarius, of course, had none of it, not these years, not when working. He could not afford it. His brain was always lost for the following day. But now he had to work in its presence. There was hardly a dentist, a psychoanalyst, a townie, or a narco agent who was not turned on half the time, and the drinking parties among the most sedate began at five and ended at five with the dawn coming up his window on the bay, the gulls croaking their readjustments to all the twisted vertebrae of sand and sea. Stoned out of the very head of sensation, the summer populace was still groping and brooding and pondering its way down the gray and lavender beach in the red-ball dawn, sun coming over the water in one long shot of fire—Provincetown was the only place in the East he knew where the land spiraled so far around that you could see the sun rise out of the dunes in the east and set in water to the west. What a town! There was not one of his wrong and ill-conceived books he had not written in part here, and all of his good books as well, all of his books. He had learned how to work in summer if he had to, but
one needed the skill of a contemplative who pitched his tent by a hot dog stand. So he hated his beloved Provincetown this summer above all.

It had been bad from the moment he was back. One of the early nights after his return, perhaps two or three days after splashdown, he had taken his wife and one of his best friends to a restaurant for dinner. The friend was Eddie Bonetti, a battered knob-nosed working writer out of South Boston, handsome as an old truck to those who knew him well, a small rugged prodigy of talent who had boxed a few fights professionally and been given working lessons in the gym by Willie Pep. Bonetti wrote poetry, perhaps he was the best working poet in Provincetown, certainly the best Aquarius had heard, and he had written a very good short novel about an old Italian making wine, a manuscript which was always on the edge of getting published by editors who were almost ready to put up with its brevity and its chastity—like many an Italian before him, Eddie Bonetti did not swear in print.

“Norman, I’m so fucking glad you’re back,” he declared for the fourth time in his loudest voice five minutes after they sat down in the restaurant.

Bonetti stored his talent in many places. He had acted in two of Aquarius’ movies, memorable in a small part in one, unforgettable in another. He had played an axe murderer who killed his wife after fifteen years of marriage; Aquarius was fond of saying that Bonetti was as good an actor as Emil Jannings for one night in his life. But that had been in passing. Bonetti also grew the best tomatoes in town, and had been known to play his flute to them in the middle of the night. Eddie was also capable while riding a bicycle down the main street (if he saw a friend driving behind him) of jumping his bike off the street across the sidewalk and into the bushes, where he would take a wild dive over the handlebars into the grass, just to give his friends the craziest laugh of the week. Bonetti could say, “I’m worried about my heart,” and fall immediately on his back, there to wink at you. Bonetti was a prodigy of talent.

But he was drunk this night. He was drunk before the evening began. Because he had a big punchy sepulchral voice even in the quietest of times, it was booming everywhere tonight on his drinks. “Fuck, Norman, I didn’t know whenna fuck you were gonna get back,” he bellowed again in his best Savin Hill South Boston tones and the carnal communicant quavered like an organ pipe with a crazy nonstop overtone in the clean white tablecloth Wasp spa to which they had gone, an error of incomparable dimension, for Eddie in his dungarees and blue sweat shirt was as funky as the upholstery in the last used car on the lot. His clothes were in line for nine out of ten restaurants in town, but not where they were now—indeed Aquarius had picked it to obtain some afterthoughts on the moon shot. But Bonetti had a good century-old stiffening of his drunken proletarian senses when they walked in. No restaurant was going to put
him
down. So Aquarius, proud Aquarius, iconoclast of the last two decades, was obliged to act as a middle-class silencer, “Will you keep your voice down,” he blasted in a hopeless murmur.