Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (2 page)

But calculate for yourself the small ails and woes which came upon Aquarius when he went to visit the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston two weeks after the conclusion of his Mayoralty campaign. The first and most unhappy truth was that there were no smells coming out of NASA. It was hardly the terrain for Aquarius.

He had grown up in New York. He understood cities, particularly big cities, he had looked forward to getting to know a little of
Houston—now, draw near to his vast pleasure in discovering that the Manned Spacecraft Center was not in Houston at all, but located about twenty-five miles south in the middle of that flat anonymous and near to tree-impoverished plain which runs in one undistinguished and not very green stretch from Houston to Galveston. Farther east as he would soon discover was Seabrook, Kemah, and Texas City south of that, then Galveston on the Gulf. Raunchy, sexy, hot and brooding, houses on stilts and old shacks—that was the Gulf of Mexico. He liked it. If he lived there, he too would write like Tennessee Williams. Tennessee, he discovered by this visit, was a natural and simple recorder of the elements.

All that, however, was miles away. MSC (the Manned Spacecraft Center) was located on a tract of many acres, flat and dry as a parking lot, and at the moment of entering the gate past the guard, there was no way to determine whether one was approaching an industrial complex in which computers and electronic equipment were fashioned, or traveling into a marvelously up-to-date minimum-security prison, not a clue to whether one was visiting the largest insurance and financing corporation which had ever decided to relocate itself in the flatlands behind a fence, or if this geometrically ordered arrangement of white modern buildings, severe, ascetic, without ornament, nearly all of two or three stories but for an Administration Building of eight stories, was indeed the newest and finest kind of hospital for radiological research. But, perhaps it was a college campus, one of those miserable brand-new college campuses with buildings white as toothpaste, windows set in aluminum casements, paths drawn by right angle or in carefully calculated zigzag to break the right angle, and a general air of studies in business administration, a college campus in short to replace the one which burned in the last revolution of the students.

In fact, it was the Manned Spacecraft Center, MSC, the home of the astronauts, the place where they were given the bulk of their training in Mission Simulators and Docking Simulators, the Center from which Mission Control would direct and collaborate
on their flights, the astronauts’ brain on earth, to nail it thus crudely, when they were up in space. And if this assembly of buildings looked as we have said like the worst of future college campuses, all-but-treeless, milk-of-magnesia white, and composed of many windowless buildings and laboratories which seemed to house computers, and did! why the error was in fact natural. For when Lyndon Johnson, then Vice President, succeeded in getting the unmistakable plum of the new Manned Spacecraft Center located in Texas on land he just happened to know about south of Houston owned by some nice fellows named Humble (Humble Oil & Refining) and ready for the Federal Government to purchase reasonable—reasonable a word capable of being reasoned and expanded with upon occasion—why this purchase might even have a clause inserted that the buildings to be constructed must be capable, in the event of the demise of NASA and the Space Program, of being converted without difficulty into an adjunct of Rice University in Houston. Could it be a crypto-campus after all! Let no one say that Lyndon Johnson was not a super local patriot always working for TALC (Texas Association for the Advancement of Local Culture).

Recognize then how much this Manned Spacecraft Center would honor Aquarius’ sense of smell. Outside the Spacecraft Center, he could not say that his situation was improved. The immediate suburb, Nassau Bay, which housed many of the technicians, engineers, and executives in NASA, was situated on the other side of NASA Highway 1 from MSC, and was built around a body of water called Clear Lake. Nassau Bay and adjoining suburbs like it were all new, their roads laid out in winding turns so absent of surprise that you could recognize they came off the French curve of the draftsman. If these homes were architecturally reasonable, built in sedate earth colors for the most part, charcoal browns, subdued clay-orange, stone-colored tans, houses which were modern but restrained adaptations for the most part of Swiss chalets, Tudor and Elizabethan, with hints of hacienda and ranch corral, they were nonetheless without flavor or odor. Aquarius was
discovering that we cherish the sense of smell because it gives us our relation to time. We know how old something is by its odor; its youth, its becoming and its decay are subtly compounded to tell us at once—if we dare to contemplate mortality—how much time has been appropriated by such a life.

Nor were the people who worked for NASA bound to help him, since they were also by every evidence part of that vast convocation of Americans, probably a majority, whom one saw in New York only on television. They were, in short, Wasps, and it was part of the folklore of New York that Wasps were without odor. From the vantage point of New York, Wasps were already halfway to the moon, and devoted their efficiency to earning enough money to purchase large amounts of deodorant, depilatory, mouthwash, hair spray, and if they were ladies—Arrid. But these jokes are not very good. It would be tasteless to dwell on anybody’s insulation from odor but for the fact that if this thesis is correct, if we honor or fear the presence of odors because they are a root to the past and an indication of the future, are indeed our very marriage to time and mortality, why then it is no accident that the Wasps were, in the view of Aquarius, the most Faustian, barbaric, draconian, progress-oriented, and root-destroying people on earth. They had divorced themselves from odor in order to dominate time, and thereby see if they were able to deliver themselves from death! No less! It is fiendish to get into such exaggeration so early, but think where Dr. Christiaan Barnard would be today if on the threshold of his first heart transplant, he had declared, “Nope, this organ ain’t funky enough to make its new home happy!”

Obviously, then, if the great brain of NASA were attached to any particular sense, it was the eye. The eye was the collector of incontrovertible facts (which at MSC they called data-points). So the men who worked off NASA Highway 1 at the Manned Spacecraft Center were all clear-eyed and bullet-eyed and berry-eyed (pupils no larger than hard small acidic little berries) and they all seemed to wear dark pants, short-sleeve button-down white shirts
and somber narrow ties. They all had identification badges pinned to their shirt pockets and they wore them with pride. Practically all had straight hair, and most of them cut it close. Whether they were tall or short, they were rarely overweight, and the only distinction between them which enabled Aquarius to differentiate these engineers, technicians and young executives from one another was that many wore horn-rimmed glasses with dark frames, and these fellows were usually smaller, more sallow, and with that absolute lack of surface provocation, or idiosyncrasy of personality, which characterizes physicists, engineering students, statisticians, computer technicians, and many a young man of science. By accent, appearance, and manner they could have come from any part of America, although most, Aquarius judged, were from the Midwest.

The other category belonged in general to men who were taller, more athletic, meaner-looking, sunburned upon occasion—despite their hours of work in air-conditioned rooms—and had the contained anger and cool crisp manner of men who have domiciled their unruly and bust-out impulses: so they emit a sense of discipline, order, and unmistakably virile, if controlled, determination. Aquarius who, for all his forty-six years and wretched inability to lose weight, liked to keep a sense of his own virility—what more valuable possession had an artist?—was obliged somewhat ruefully to recognize that this second category of men were tough. They reminded him of the officers and enlisted men of the Texas outfit, the 112th Cavalry, in which he had served overseas during the war. So he took it for granted that these executives, athlete-engineers, hondos on Mission Control, aides or instructors for various astronaut training courses, and general troubleshooters were in the main from the Southwest. They had a lot of morale. They were so proud of NASA, the astronauts, the Command Module, Lem, the United States of America that their voices went husky a hint when they talked about such topics.

Yet both categories of men were absolutely helpful in every way. But in such a way that they were no help at all to Aquarius.
There was a style at NASA he had begun to divine. Every question you asked was answered and the truth so far as he knew was always told. It was as if NASA, unlike other Government bureaus, had recognized why honesty is the best policy—it is simply because no intriguer will ever believe the truth which is presented to him, but will rather interpret it as a lie which only he can transform into the buried fact. The assumption is that honest men will come to recognize your truth can make them strong. So everybody at NASA was courteous, helpful, generous of information, saintly at repeating the same information a hundred times, and subtly proud of their ability to serve interchangeably for one another, as if the real secret of their discipline and their strength and their sense of morale was that they had depersonalized themselves to the point where they were true Christians, gentle, helpful, replaceable, and serving on a messianic mission. The only flaw was that the conversation could only voyage through predetermined patterns. They would do their best to answer any technical question in the world, and voluminous mimeographings of NASA literature, often valuable enough to be classified, were available to all the Press. It was just that there was no way to suggest any philosophical meandering. Like real Americans, they always talked in code. It happened to be technological code. “The whole philosophy of power descent monitoring is that when the Pings [PGNCS] have degraded …” or “The bulk of Delta V is to kill his retrograde component.” These were notes Aquarius picked out for himself after a half hour of talking to the Chief of Flight Operations Division, who would help to bring the Lem down to the surface of the moon, a hard green-eyed crew-cut man in his thirties named Gene Kranz who looked and talked like a professional football quarterback. And in fact his problems were not dissimilar. They arrived at the same rate of speed and were as massive. “During the first five minutes of descent,” Kranz said, “the landing will be almost luxurious. But during the last three minutes, he’ll be coming like Whistling Dixie.” Behind Kranz as he spoke were the twenty-odd consoles and the forty-plus screens, the dull gray-green walls, the thirty-five
square lights inset in the ceiling—the gray controlled environment of the Mission Control room. Kranz lived with phrases like Primary Guidance and Navigation Section and Abort Guidance Section (Pings and Ags), Service Modulator Controllers, Power Descent Information, Program Descent Rates, Sequential Events Control System, Time of Ephemeris Update, Transponder, he spoke of T Eff Em, and Reference Stable Member Matrix, of SMC, and PDI, SECST, the names and their related initials were used interchangeably—Kranz lived in a world of instruments and concepts which would take years for Aquarius to command well enough to make judgments on the other’s character. Yes, real Americans always spoke in code. They encapsulated themselves into technological clans. Codes were like bloodlines. So they could be friendly and helpful and polite but they quietly separated themselves when their codes did not flourish. Aquarius was obliged to recognize that if the machine seemed a functional object to the artist, an instrument whose significance was that it was there to be used—as a typewriter was used for typing a manuscript—so to the engineer it was the communication itself which was functional. The machine was the art.

Perhaps for that reason, relations with these engineers reminded Aquarius of how he felt when he looked at the windowless walls of new buildings now sprouting all over the mean dry fields of the Space Center and the corporation developments outside the fence. These windowless buildings were as sinister to him as the arbitrary growth of ugly species of mushrooms in the middle of nowhere. These architectural fungoids were there to say: “Lo, we work in the electronics computeroid complex, and need no windows, for we are the architectural skull case for a new kind of brain.”

Windowless, they also lack ears, so he cannot tell them, “My eyes are my windows.”

“Recognize,” the windowless walls say, “that something is taking over from you, kid.”

He stayed in a motel surprising in its luxury on this Texas plain. He had two rooms, and one room had a private indoor pool four
feet deep, seven feet long, and five feet wide, with a green light overhead. The other room had a full king-sized circular bed with a red velvet cover. He discovered on inquiry that the motel had been decorated by a new owner who hoped to attract honeymoon couples to memories of the deluxe in the middle of the flatlands. But the clientele continued to consist of engineers visiting MSC from corporations which did business with NASA. Aquarius had a picture of some of the engineers he had met, the ones with the lunar pallor, sleeping in the round red velvet-covered king-sized bed. As if to emphasize this conjunction of the two centuries, the red velvet of the Nineteenth and the gray transistors of the Twentieth, there was a club in the motel with two go-go girls and one of them walked off abruptly one night and went to the bar. When the bartender whispered to her, she went back to the platform, turned on the jukebox again, giggled and said to the technology-ridden air of her audience, “Shucks, I plumb forgot to take off my clothes.”

She was a round sullen country girl. Aquarius saw her dance another night when she was full of relish for her work, slinging her breasts, undulating her belly on a river of cogitating promise—the voracity of her hip-sock suggested she was one real alligator, but then six of her friends were in from Houston and sitting in the center seats, and they looked to have just gotten off their motorcycles. They were hardly from NASA.