Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online

passing—“in the extremely unlikely event that the Lunar Module does not come up off the lunar surface?”
    Armstrong smiled. His detestation of answering questions in public had been given its justification. Journalists would even ask a man to comment on the emotions of his oncoming death. “Well,” said Armstrong, “that’s an unpleasant thing to think about.” If, as was quite possible, he had been closer to death than anyone in the room, and more than once, more than once, that did not mean the chalice of such findings was there to be fingered by fifty. “We’ve chosen not to think about that up to the present time. We don’t think that’s at all a likely situation. It’s simply a possible one.” He had, however, not answered the question. If he put in twelve and more hours a day in simulators, if there were weeks when they worked seventy and eighty hours a week at the abrasive grind of laying in still more hierarchies of numbers and banks of ratio in their heads, well, they were accustomed to hard work. So the grind today of being interviewed in full press conference, then by the wire services, then by magazine writers and finally for the television networks, a fourteen-hour day before it would all be done,and of the worst sort of work for them—objects on display to be chipped at by some of the worst word-sculptors ever assembled in south-eastern Texas—well, that would still be work they must perform to the best of their duty. Being an astronaut was a mission. Since the political and power transactions of the age on which NASA’s future was—put no nice word on it—hung, were not in spirit religious, the astronauts did not emphasize their sense of vocation. But being an astronaut was a mission and therefore you were obliged to perform every aspect of your work as well as you could. At a press conference you answered questions. So Armstrong now finally said in answer to what they would do if the Lunar Module did not come up off the lunar surface, “At the present time we’re left without recourse should that occur.”
    When the conference was done, there was only a small pattering of applause from the Press. The atmosphere had been equal to any other dull press conference in which a company had unveiled a new and not very special product. Resentment in the Press was subtle but deep. An event of such dimensions and nothing to show for it. The American cool was becoming a narcotic. The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
    But what if you’re unable to get off the moon?
    “Unpleasant thing to think about.”
II
    It was the answer Aquarius thought about after the conference was done, for that was the nearest anyone had come to saying that a man could get killed in the pits of this venture. And yes, they did think about it. A man who was in training for six months to go to the moon would be obliged to think about his death. Yet, if to contemplate the failure of the ascent stage of the Lunar Module to rise off the moon was unpleasant for Armstrong to think about, did that derive automatically and simply because it would mean death, or was it, bottomless taint of the unpleasant, a derivation deep out of the incommensurable fact that the moon ground would bethe place where his body must rest in death? People who had nearly died from wounds spoke of the near death as offering a sensation that one was rising out of one’s body. So had spoken Hemingway long ago, writing in Paris, writing in Spain, probably writing in apartments off the Borghese Gardens near where Collins had been born. Now was there to be a future science of death, or did death (like smell and sound and time—like the theory of the dream) resist all scientists, navigators, nomenclature and charts and reside in the realm of such unanswerables as whether the cause of cancer was a malfunction of the dream?
Did
the souls of the dead choose to rise? Was the thought of expiring on