Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (14 page)

To the right of the photographers was a small grove of pure jungle. Recollections of his platoon on a jungle trail, hacking with machetes entered his head. A hash of recollections. He had thought he would be concentrating on the activities at the Launch Pad, the Control Center, in the Command Module, he had expected to be picturing the vitals of the rocket, and the entrance of the fuels into it, but he was merely out of sorts and with a headache, and waiting for the time to pass. He felt somehow deprived that he could feel
so little. People had told him over and over that the sight of a large rocket going up was unforgettable and the sound would be remarkable, the ground would shake. It had begun to sound like an experience as mysterious and thoroughgoing as those first reverberations which had come to him in his early teens that there was a world of sexual intercourse out there, and it was unlike anything you and I had ever done. So, ridiculous as this, just as an adolescent would want his first real sexual hour to be at least approximately equal to his imagined pageant, so now Aquarius was cranky that nothing in his mood was remotely ready for the experience he had been promised. The damn astronauts weren’t even real to him. He had no sense at all of three psyches full of awareness on the edge of the horizon. Just that gray stick out there.

He remembered the questions he had asked in the VAB. How would they destroy the rocket if something went wrong? Why a longitudinal set of explosives lined up, as if in the seam of a tin can, would burst the stages. The belly of the rocket would open like a Caesarian. A flood of burning fuel would burst into the sky.

He began to look for a place from which to watch. The grandstand had a roof which would obstruct the view once the rocket
was high in the air. But, standing on the field, he felt a hint too low. Finally he took up a careful position a few steps from the ground in a wing of additional bleachers. He was still not properly ready for the spectacle. Yes, the future spoke of a human species which would live on diets and occasional feasts, and would travel to spectacles to feel extraordinary sensations. They might even look at photographs of starving Black faces in order to generate some of their deepest thoughts.

But he knew now why he was so irritated with everything and why he could not feel a thing. It was simple masculine envy. He too wanted to go up in the bird.

Nobody was talking a great deal. If something went wrong, they would all be implicated. Who would know which evil had entered the ripe oven of space technology? Aquarius took note of himself. Yes, his throat was dry.

He had his binoculars to his eyes. A tiny part of him was like a penitent who had prayed in the wilderness for sixteen days and was now expecting a sign. Would the sign reveal much or little?

But nobody watching the launch from the Press Site ever listened to the last few words. For at 8.9 seconds before lift-off, the motors of Apollo-Saturn leaped into ignition, and two horns of orange fire burst like genies from the base of the rocket. Aquarius never had to worry again about whether the experience would be appropriate to his measure. Because of the distance, no one at the Press Site was to hear the sound of the motors until fifteen seconds after they had started. Although the rocket was restrained on its pad for nine seconds in order for the motors to multiply up to full thrust, the result was still that the rocket began to rise a full six seconds before its motors could be heard. Therefore the lift-off itself seemed to partake more of a miracle than a mechanical phenomenon, as if all of huge Saturn itself had begun silently to levitate, and was then pursued by flames.

No, it was more dramatic than that. For the flames were enormous. No one could be prepared for that. Flames flew in cataract against the cusp of the flame shield, and then sluiced along the
paved ground down two opposite channels in the concrete, two underground rivers of flame which poured into the air on either side a hundred feet away, then flew a hundred feet further. Two mighty torches of flame like the wings of a yellow bird of fire flew over a field, covered a field with brilliant yellow bloomings of flame, and in the midst of it, white as a ghost, white as the white of Melville’s Moby Dick, white as the shrine of the Madonna in half the churches of the world, this slim angelic mysterious ship of stages rose without sound out of its incarnation of flame and began to ascend slowly into the sky, slow as Melville’s Leviathan might swim, slowly as we might swim upward in a dream looking for the air. And still no sound.

Then it came, like a crackling of wood twigs over the ridge, came with the sharp and furious bark of a million drops of oil crackling suddenly into combustion, a cacophony of barks louder and louder as Apollo-Saturn fifteen seconds ahead of its own sound cleared the lift tower to a cheer which could have been a cry of anguish from that near-audience watching; then came the earsplitting bark of a thousand machine guns firing at once, and Aquarius shook through his feet at the fury of this combat assault, and heard the thunderous murmur of Niagaras of flame roaring conceivably louder than the loudest thunders he had ever heard and the earth began to shake and would not stop, it quivered through his feet standing on the wood of the bleachers, an apocalyptic fury of sound equal to some conception of the sound of your death in the roar of a drowning hour, a nightmare of sound, and he heard himself saying, “Oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God!” but not his voice, almost like the Italian girl saying
“fenomenal,”
and the sound of the rocket beat with the true blood of fear in his ears, hot in all the intimacy of a forming of heat, as if one’s ear were in the caldron of a vast burning of air, heavens of oxygen being born and consumed in this ascension of the rocket, and a poor moment of vertigo at the thought that man now had something with which to speak to God—the fire
was white as a torch and long as the rocket itself, a tail of fire, a face, yes now the rocket looked like a thin and pointed witch’s hat, and the flames from its base were the blazing eyes of the witch. Forked like saw teeth was the base of the flame which quivered through the lens of the binoculars. Upwards. As the rocket keened over and went up and out to sea, one could no longer watch its stage, only the flame from its base. Now it seemed to rise like a ball of fire, like a new sun mounting the sky, a flame elevating itself.

Many thousands of feet up it went through haze and the fire feathered the haze in a long trailing caress, intimate as the wake which follows the path of a fingerling in inches of water. Trailings of cloud parted like lips. Then a heavier cloud was punched through with sudden cruelty. Then two long spumes of wake, like two large fish following our first fish—one’s heart took little falls at the changes. “Ahhh,” the crowd went, “Ahhh,” as at the most beautiful of fireworks, for the sky was alive, one instant a pond and at the next a womb of new turns: “Ahhh,” went the crowd, “Ahhh!”

Now, through the public address system, came the sound of Armstrong talking to Launch Control. He was quieter than anyone else. “Inboard cutoff” he said with calm in his voice.

Far in the distance, almost out of sight, like an all-but-transparent fish suddenly breaking into head and tail, the first stage at the rear of the rocket fell off from the rest, fell off and was now like a man, like a sky diver suddenly small. A new burst of motors started up, some far-off glimpse of newborn fires which looked pale as streams of water, pale were the flames in the far distance. Then the abandoned empty stage of the booster began to fall away, a relay runner, baton just passed, who slips back, slips back. Then it began to tumble, but with the slow tender dignity of a thin slice of soap slicing and wavering, dipping and gliding on its way to the floor of the tub. Then mighty Saturn of the first stage, empty, fuel-voided, burned out, gave a puff, a whiff and was lost to sight behind a cloud. And the rocket with Apollo 11 and the last two
stages of Saturn V was finally out of sight and on its way to an orbit about the earth. Like the others he stayed and listened to the voices of the astronauts and the Capcom through the P.A. system.

On the way back to Cocoa Beach there was a monumental traffic jam, and Aquarius had time to look at objects by the road. There was a parked trailer with a twelve-foot inflated rubber rocket—it looked like a condom with a painted tip. Down its length ran a legend.

The radio was playing in the car. Fred Something-or-other from the Titusville Chamber of Commerce was talking fast. “And when the folks who were visiting this launch here go home, I want them to tell everybody how beautiful it was from Titusville.”