Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (55 page)

And on earth, a handful of young scientists were screaming, “Stop wasting time with flags and presidents—collect some rocks!”

There were as many as one hundred and fifty laboratories waiting for rocks. Five hundred of the world’s best selenologists and geologists were preparing experiments to measure the age of the moon, its trace elements, stable isotopes, rare gases and particle tracks. The mineralogy of the satellite would be studied and its magnetic and electrical properties; the thermoluminescence, compressibility and elastic wave of lunar material would be examined as well; the soil mechanics, the solar radiation, the analysis of organic compounds, even the simple search for paleontological traces of once-living material were all going to be explored in the products of the two boxes of rocks the astronauts would bring back. There was a time-line on the EVA—they had hardly more than two hours on the moon, and a string of chores to complete, duties sufficiently numerous for them to keep plastic cards with a list of reminders taped to the wrist of their suits. Now, after almost an hour of Armstrong’s oxygen supply had already been used up, now sensing that they have once again fallen behind in their sense of time, Armstrong began to work at filling the first rock box. Using a scoop, he picked up those rocks and fragments he thought most unusual or most significant, a gross collection selected as quickly as possible and inserted and packed in the rock box, which was immediately
sealed with a vacuum-type seal. Later, they hoped to have time to fill the other box. There were plans to document the second collection of rocks, photograph them with a stereoscopic camera as they were picked up, for the position of rocks could offer significant clues to a trained geological eye. But they were already half an hour behind, and the Lem had still to be given a thorough photographic examination, the seismometer and the LRQ had yet to be deployed, and the core samples of moon dirt were still waiting to be obtained. The careful documentation of the rock gathering finally suffered. We might assume there was finally too much stimulation, too much near-familiar and subtly unfamiliar phenomena to be absorbed. The rocks themselves were full of unexpected variation. Some were as ordinary as cinders in an ash dump, others seen in the spectroscopic photographs are without dimension. One does not know if it is a photograph of a three-inch fold of rock or the full study of a ledge and a cave.

So they hopped around, prodigies of discipline, soldiers of caution. Standing on the edge of craters even six feet deep, the shadow was so dark they could have been looking down an air shaft to the cellar of the moon. Such phenomena must have teased the powerful fortifications of their common sense. Armstrong was to repeat over and over that the moon was friendly, the moon was hospitable. They were to say it again and again. It was presumably to the advantage of NASA that the moon be friendly to justify the outlay of those billions of bucks; never spend money on an ingrate! although in fact, the assumption was about as deep in real knowledge of public opinion as any thought the colored races of the world would be soothed by Muzak. How much more the world might have honored the exploit if the moon aroused anguish, awe and terror. No matter! It was friendly, it was beguiling. Afterward, Armstrong found himself describing again and again the mysterious properties of color on the moon. The terrain, by his description, was tan if one looked along it in the direction of the sun; it was the same tan if one turned completely around and stared at the
land beyond one’s shadow. But to right and left, at either side, the colors were darker, not tan but brown. Directly beneath one’s feet, or looking at soil in one’s hand, the color was dark gray, sometimes even black.

Then there were other phenomena. One is mentioned by Armstrong only once. He looks at his shadow on the ground and … “Down-sun through a very, very light gray, light gray color, a halo around my own shadow, around the shadow of my helmet.” Yes, immediately after they had landed, they had spoken of how interesting were the colors. Twenty minutes later, immersed in routine, the colors were matter-of-factly described as tan and gray. Yet later there are halos, and color has become a function of the vector along which one looks. Aldrin, in turn, was having his troubles with soil mechanics. Aldrin, familiar with shovel and pick, was driving core tubes into the ground, but the resistance was a phenomenon. To drive the tube down even six inches, he had to use his hammer with such force that the top of the core tube was dented. The soil may have been loose to the touch of his foot, but it was almost as firm as rock just a few inches down. Still, it supported nothing. Difficult as it was to drive a tube into the ground, yet the tube would not stand. “It was a unique, almost mystical environment.” Yes, soil mechanics like light, altered its properties with a change in direction. Perhaps the friendliness of the moon was also a matter of the direction in which one faced. A turn of the body in a dream can drop us into the long slide of a nightmare.

But now the time had come for them to pick up the rock boxes, pick up the foil of the solar wind, pick themselves up and the tendrils of their attention and reenter the Lem. Their EVA—it is now just after midnight—is done. They climb up the ladder, they close the hatch, bring up the pressure in the cabin. Now they take off their PLSS and their overshoes, and remove their helmets. They sniff. There is a pronounced odor in the cabin. The moon dust they have brought back on their suits now smells like gunpowder to Aldrin, and like wet ashes to Armstrong. The moon has a smell.

Still, the EVA has been a gross disappointment. With every effort by Aquarius to find an edge of the sinister in this first expedition to the peculiar soil of the moon, the astronauts are obviously as equally determined—they must certainly be employed by NASA!—to make the moon a playground of the future. Tranquility Base! “The moon was a very natural and very pleasant environment in which to work,” Aldrin reports after what excessive expenditure of BTU’s it has taken a strong man like himself to drive a narrow pipe all of six or eight inches into the ground when the flight plan had called for twelve. Then the dented hard-smacked stick wouldn’t even stand up. “I was sure,” said Armstrong, “it would be a hospitable host. It had been awaiting its first visitors for a long time.” The logic was impeccable. “Come into my house, Joey Namath,” said the eighty-year-old spinster, “We got a welcome for you, my sister and I.” No, sentiments conceived in buildings with windowless walls were pushing upon the very perceptions of the explorers. They could not help but like the moon—cold curse of their employers if they did not. Still, they were now back in the Lem; their EVA was done. They had only to open the hatch one more time, throw out some pieces of equipment, lock up again, go to sleep, and in the morning they would be ready to depart, perhaps never to return again. Can they conceivably have felt cheated? They would be a mirror to the sentiments of the world. If the moon was not sinister, then NASA was heir to a chilling disease, for they had succeeded in making the moon dull, the moon, that planet of lunacy and harvest lovers, satellite unlike any other moon in the solar system, the plane of its orbit even canted at an angle to the plane of the earth and the sun—no other moon could make such a claim—and besides the moon had properties of light so mysterious as to suggest that a shift of direction might be its equivalent for a passage of time, since a turn of the head could alter the mood of its colors from the look of a morning on earth to the mood of a late afternoon. A step into shadow was a visit to night.

They were, however, not near to contemplation for this hour, nor for the next. Duties pressed to check over the systems on Eagle and prepare for the jettisoning of extra equipment. There was film still left in the magazines and additional pictures to take through the windows. It was the middle of the night in Houston but still young in the two-week-long day of the moon. The sun glared on the ground like the sun of the Southwest on desert wastes. Programs 8 to 13, relating to the ascent from the moon, were sent up from earth, and the Environmental Control Canister was changed. Their heart rates during the EVA were reported. Aldrin had reached a peak of 125, Armstrong had gone as high as 160 at the end, a very high rate, even higher than the rate at which his heart was beating during the descent.

But languor, or disorientation, or some intoxication of the moon kept delaying progress. The time-line in the flight plan called for them to jettison the Portable Life Support System packs an hour and fifteen minutes after they first closed the hatch, but now two and a half hours had gone by and still they were not ready to depress cabin pressure and open the hatch, get rid of the packs. Fatigue or some indifference to time had slowed them up again. Capcom asked, “Do you have a time estimate for us until you’re ready to start cabin depress? Over.”

“Fifteen minutes maybe?”

That would put them seriously back of the latest revision on schedule. They had been almost two hours late starting the EVA, they had lost an additional half hour during the EVA. Altogether, it was astonishing. Men who were never late had somehow consumed four extra hours in the last nine.

Deke Slayton was on the mike at Mission Control, “I guess you guys know that since you’re an hour and a half over the time-line, and we’re all taking a day off tomorrow, we’re going to leave you. See you later.”

Now they sped up. It took them seven minutes instead of the estimated fifteen to begin depressurization of the cabin, and almost immediately the PLSS, the lithium hydroxide canisters, and the armrests from the Lem were thrown out. Fatigue, bemusement, and the rest, they must still have watched in fascination as the objects sailed away on a long lazy throw to the ground. Even the PLSS, which on earth would have dropped like a loaded barrel, floated off as far as a diver arching out from the high board.

Yes, this was the year in which for the first time a naked couple had fornicated on the New York stage in a play called
Che!
and man had landed on the moon. If hippies had fantasies of being measured and taped during extraordinary experiences, it was in fact the astronauts whom it was done to.

The faintest trace of the Elizabethan had at last entered the language of the event. “Have at it tomorrow.” It was almost three in the morning, but Aldrin responded, “Did you-all come up with any other solution that we might try to the mission-timer problem?”

That was worked out in the next ten minutes, then there was a consumables update, then a list of ten questions relating to observations they had made on the moon that day. “We can either discuss
it,” said the Capcom, “a little later on this evening, or sometime later in the mission. It’s your option. How do you feel?”

“I guess we can pick them up now.”

So for the next fifteen minutes, at the end of this twenty-one-hour day in which they had entered the Lem, prepared it, separated from the Command Module, gone into a separate orbit, landed, and done a first walk on the moon, they were still in harness, still looking for more work. The ten detailed questions they chose to answer at three in the morning were on the position of their Lem, the depth of their digging, the rays beneath the descent-engine bell, the driving of the core tubes, the stroke of the landing struts and the possible existence of hills on the horizon which might block the solar rays during sunset, those questions and others. It was almost three-thirty in the morning when the astronauts finally prepared for sleep. They pulled down the shades and Aldrin stretched out on the floor, his nose near the moon dust. Armstrong sat on the cover of the ascent engine, his back leaning against one of the walls, his legs supported in a strap he had tied around a vertical bar. In front of his face was the eyepiece of the telescope. The earth was in its field of view, and the earth “like a big blue eyeball” stared back at him. They could not sleep. Like the eye of a victim just murdered, the earth stared back at him.

It used to be said that men in the hour of their triumph knew the sleep of the just, but a modern view might argue that men sleep in order to dream, sleep in order to invoke that mysterious theater where regions of the unconscious reach into communication with one another, and charts and portraits of the soul and the world outside are subtly retouched from the experience of the day. If this is so, what a gargantuan job of ingestion had fallen upon the unconscious mind of the two astronauts, for the experience of their world would not include the moon. Deep in a state of exaltation and exhaustion, tonight—it is now four in the morning—was hardly the time to embark upon the huge work of a dream which
could begin to feed into the wisdom of the unconscious those huge productions of the day behind. If their senses had been witness to sights and sensations never experienced before, their egos were also in total perturbation, for on the previous day their names had been transported to the eternal moonlight of the ego—they were now immortal. It is not so easy for men to sleep on such a night, for they know their lives have been altered forever—what a dislocation of the character’s firm sense of itself; in fact it is precisely in the character of strong egos that they are firmly rooted. Now, they are uprooted and in a state of glory. What confusion! A disorientation of the senses and coronation of the ego are the problems to be approached this night by the dream, and that while lying in the most uncomfortable positions possible in the foreign skin of a pressure garment while the temperature grew chilly inside that stiff sack, for even with water circulation down to a minimum, the suits insisted on cooling their tired heat-depleted bodies. How indeed to go past the threshold and enter the great chamber where the kingdoms of sleep will greet them with a revel equal to the hour, no, no man in a state of exhaustion would dare to chance the rigors of a powerful night of dreams, for important decisions which may shape the future can be decided on bad nights by the poor artwork of dreams not sufficiently energetic or well enough conceived to offer the unconscious a real depth of answer—which is why perhaps insomnia is self-cycling, for, too tired or fearful to engage in serious dreams one night, we are even more exhausted for the next, and do not dare to sleep. Who will be the first to swear that deep contracts of the soul are never sworn to in the darkest exchanges of slumber, or failure too quickly accepted in the once ambitious hearts of exhausted men? No, the astronauts were in no shape to sleep. Just so quickly ask a computer to work when its power supply is erratic, its mechanical parts need oiling, and it has just been instructed to compute all further trajectories as if earth gravity did not exist and the moon were motionless before the sun!