Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (38 page)

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Authors: Robert Zimmerman

Tags: #History, #United States, #20th Century, #test

BOOK: Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8
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Page 208
Note the rille in the center of the picture.
He caught himself again. ''Over the moon in daylight. You can see that the moon has been bombarded through the eons with numerous meteorites. Every square inch is pockmarked."
Slowly the spacecraft drifted over the dead landscape. As he had earlier in the day, Anders did most of the talking, speaking softly and pausing often. Often he tried to describe the geological nature of what he saw. "There's an interesting rille directly in front of the spacecraft now, running along the edge of a small mountain, rather sinuous shape, with right-angle turns." A rille was a lunar surface feature, reminiscent of earth river valleys but deeper and

 

Page 209
The television view.
much narrower, with vertical walls and no tributaries. Scientists believe that they were formed from flowing lava.
Borman added a few more of his own thoughts. "I hope that all of you back on earth can see what we mean when we say it's a rather foreboding horizon. A rather stark and unappetizing looking place."
In mission control Julian Scheer noticed how, even as the astronauts spoke, the activity around him did not cease. "The room had a kind of hum," he remembered years later. Men still hunched over their consoles, studying the spacecraft's telemetry to make sure everything was working. Others moved through the room, passing information to and from each other. And all worked quietly and incessantly to keep this delicate spacecraft and its three passengers alive for just a few more days.

 

Page 210
Now the spacecraft was moving toward lunar sunset, and the shadows were getting longer and more pronounced. Bill Anders opened the flight plan to the proper place. He glanced at the photocopy of Bourgin's letter. He began their closing comments. "We are now approaching lunar sunset and for all the people back on earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you."
Anders paused. Out the window the lifeless lunar surface drifted past. Nothing else moved. A long straight rille ran north-to-south along the sunset line. On one side was the bright harshness of lunar day; on the other was the utter darkness of lunar night.
At mission control the normal background hum of activity ceased. All movement stopped. All attention was on the TV and on Bill Anders's voice.
Anders began reading the first verse softly. "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep."
In the Anderses' home complete silence fell. Valerie felt a thrill:
Bill was reading the Bible from the moon!
"And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light.' And there was light."
At the airport bar in Houston, Si Bourgin noticed how the room had suddenly become very quiet. Even the bartender had stopped his work. All eyes were on that grainy black-and-white image on the television screen.
Bill Anders took a breath and read his last line. "And God saw the light, that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness."
In Washington, Joe and Christine Laitin lay in bed, awestruck. Joe looked at his wife in disbelief "That's the script I wrote!"
Christine looked back at him with a laugh, "You wrote?"
Now Bill Anders passed the flight plan to Jim Lovell, who began reading slowly. "And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day."
In the Lovell household no one moved. Marilyn had no idea the men would do something like this, and she was humbled.
They
must
be in God's hands
, she thought.

 

Page 211
Lovell continued. His deep voice contrasted sharply with Anders's Western twang, and he struggled to make dear the strange wording of seventeenth-century English poetry. "And God said, 'Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.' And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so."
The shadows on the lunar surface had moved across the center of the image. Dark streaks cut across the white, into which nothing could be seen. With deep feeling, Lovell continued. "And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day."
He passed the flight plan to Frank Borman, whose terse voice resonated keenly. "And God said, 'Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear.' And it was so." Borman paused, glancing for a second at the steadily approaching lunar night.
At the Elkins house Susan Borman began to cry.
What a thing to do,
she thought.
How perfect a choice
.
Borman continued, "And God called the dry land
earth
; and the gathering together of the waters called he seas; and God saw that it was good."
Borman paused again. Outside the capsule window the shadows had become very long and wide. Lunar sunset was mere seconds away. He took a final breath. "And from the crew of Apollo 8," he said with utter conviction, "We close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you all of you on the
good
earth."
At that moment Anders cut the television signal to earth, and television screens around the world suddenly turned to static.
In Washington, the phone at the Laitins' suddenly rang. It was Si Bourgin, calling from an airport pay phone. "Wasn't that great?" he said to Joe excitedly.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Not long afterward, Marilyn Lovell and her children went for a nighttime walk, strolling through the darkness to admire the beautiful Christmas

 

Page 212
decorations that graced the homes of their neighbors. That year all the families of Timber Cove had decided to line their lawns with luminaries small paper bags weighted down with sand and lit by bright candles.
While her children oohed and aahed at the pretty blinking lights, Marilyn could only think that at this moment these luminaries and Christmas lights had been blessed by the words of her husband and their father, spoken from a tiny capsule a quarter of a million miles from home.
These three men had stood on the fringes of human experience, tracing a warm line into the dark and cold emptiness of endless space, and had tried to bring more than mere life to that emptiness.
Their words were not original. They read words that had been written in the dim past by, as some believed, God Almighty.
Those words, however, expressed for these three men a heartfelt belief that the universe was more than mere energy and matter. Not only did a spirit lurk behind the veil of the terrifying black dark that surrounded them, it impelled them to live their lives a certain way, in a certain manner.
Their decision to read from the Bible also expressed, albeit indirectly, their passionate love of freedom. No one told them what to read, and in fact most of the officials at NASA and in the government were completely surprised by their message. And that was how it should be. Borman, Lovell, and Anders were free men, expressing their beliefs freely. While their government might have financed the journey, it could not tell them what to think or say once they got there. If these free men wished to pray aloud to the world's population as they circled the moon, so be it.
Their words also expressed their deep humility and abiding good will. They had been given this glorious opportunity to brag, and instead chose to pray, finding words that would include as many people as possible in the message.
Their voices, beamed across hundreds of thousands of miles by technology inconceivable ten years earlier, resonated with their country's roots as well. The Pilgrims had not merely gone to explore a new land they had emigrated as families in order to build in that new land a human society.
2
And so, like the Pilgrims, wherever the three men in Apollo 8 had gone they had brought their families, their religion, and their way of life. In

 

Page 213
Houston they had found empty fields and built a community. Their lives had echoed the words of John Winthrop, leader of the first Puritan expedition, who as he and his fellow settlers first approached Massachusetts Bay in 1630 had urged them
to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we most be knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection . . . We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.
[If we do this,] the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us. . . . He shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations . . . we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.
3
The community the three men in Apollo 8 wished to bring into the empty reaches of space was an American one, filled with a belief that given two strong arms, a willing heart, and the freedom to follow one's dreams, anything was possible. They, like the Puritans, had put their lives on the line to express this ideal.
Now the men orbited another world, farther away from home than any human had ever been, surrounded by airless space with only a week's worth of oxygen in their tanks. To put the final exclamation point on their powerful message, they had to get home, to their waiting families. And everyone knew that was not as easy a task as the astronauts and the engineers had so far made it seem.

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