Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (8 page)

That was hardly possible on the Cape. If the abandoned launch towers and the hot lonely ocean breeze opened vistas of the West and thoughts of how many of the most important events in America seemed to take place in all the lonely spaces—as if the Twentieth Century had become the domain of all the great and empty territories (the Saharas, the Siberias, and the Minutemen in the buried silos of the West)—that was forced to give way to a sense of huge activity and gargantuan dimensions. If MSC near Houston was a brain, then Cape Kennedy was the body, and at Launch Complex 39, up twenty miles to the north of Cocoa Beach and Canaveral, were found the bones and muscles of a Colossus. Here the big components of Saturn V came in by cargo plane, came by ship through the Panama Canal and by barge through the Gulf, came from Los Angeles and Sacramento, from Huntsville in Alabama to Michoud in Louisiana, and from Michoud to the Cape; here at Complex 39 the parts were assembled in a mammoth cube of an edifice with a smaller box attached, the Vehicle Assembly Building, 526 feet high, a building just about as large as the combined volume of the Merchandise Mart in Chicago and the Pentagon. Covering eight acres, enclosing 129 million cubic feet, the Vehicle Assembly Building was nonetheless windowless, and decorated from the outside in huge concentric rectangles of green-gray, and charcoal-gray, ivory-gray and light blue-gray; it looked
like a block of wood colored by an Op Art painter, but since it was over fifty stories high, it also looked like the walls of a gargantuan suburban department store. If by volume it was when built the largest building in the world, the Vehicle Assembly Building, as one saw it standing on the flat filled-in marshes of the Cape, had to be also a fair candidate for the ugliest building in the world. Viewed from any external approach it was the architectural fungoid of them all.

Once inside, however, it was conceivably one of the more beautiful buildings in the world. Large enough to assemble as many as four moongoing Apollo-Saturn vehicles at once, it was therefore open enough to offer interior space for four tall bays, each of these niches tall enough to house the full rocket, which was thirty-six stories high. Since the rocket in turn sat on a transporter, called a crawler, of some dimension itself, the doors to the four bays were each over forty stories and therefore high enough and wide enough to take in through their portals the UN Building or the Statue of Liberty. Yet for all its size, the VAB was without decoration inside, rather a veritable shipyard and rigging of steel girders which supported whole floors capable of being elevated and lowered, then rolled in and out like steel file drawers in order to encircle each rocket with adjustable working platforms from either side. Since some of these platforms had three complete stories contained within them, the interior of the VAB was a complexity of buildings within buildings which had been first maneuvered then suspended ten and twenty and thirty stories above the ground. Because the sides were usually open, one could look out from the platforms to other constellations of girders and buildings and could look down from whichever great height to the floor of the VAB, sometimes as much as forty stories below. Note however: one was still inside a closed space, and the light which filtered through translucent panels rising from floor to ceiling was dim, hardly brighter than the light in a church or an old railroad terminal. One lost in consequence any familiar sense of recognition—you could have been up in the rigging of a bridge built beneath the
dome of some partially constructed and enormous subterranean city, or you could have been standing on the scaffolding of an unfinished but monumental cathedral, beautiful in this dim light, this smoky concatenation of structure upon structure, of breadths and vertigos and volumes of open space beneath the ceiling, tantalizing views of immense rockets hidden by their clusters of work platforms. One did not always know whether one was on a floor, a platform, a bridge, a fixed or impermanent part of this huge shifting ironwork of girders and suspended walkways. It was like being in the back of the stage at an opera house, the view as complex, yet the ceiling was visible from the floor and the ceiling was more than fifty stories up, since above the rockets were yet some massive traveling overhead cranes. To look down from the upper stages of the rocket, or from the highest level where the crew would sit, was to open oneself to a study of the dimensions of one’s fear of heights. Down, down, a long throw of the soul down, down again, still falling was the floor of the building, forty floors below. The breath came back into the chest from an abyss. And in one corner of the floor like a stamp on the edge of a large envelope was a roped-in square of several hundred tourists gawking up at the yellow cranes and the battleship-gray girders.

Taken originally on a tour by a guide, Aquarius had spent the good part of a day in this building, and was back again twice to be given a more intimate trip and a peek into the three stages and the Command and Service Module of Apollo 12, which was then being prepared for its flight in November. Looking into any portion of the interior of a rocket was like looking into the abdominal cavity of a submarine or a whale. Green metal walls, green and blue tanks, pipes and proliferations of pipes, black blocks of electrical boxes and gray blocks of such boxes gave an offering of those zones of silence which reside at the center of machines, a hint of that ancient dark beneath the hatch in the hold of the bow—such zones of silence came over him. He could not even be amused at the curtained walls of white and the in-sucking wind of the dust collectors and the electrical shoe polishers, the white smocks and
the interns’ caps they were obliged to put on before they could peer through the hatch of the Command Module, and see the habitation of the astronauts. A gray conical innerland of hundreds of buttons and switches looked back at him, and three reclining seats vaguely reminiscent of instruments of torture. Three dentists’ chairs side by side! Yes, he could have found the white outfits they were wearing a touch comic—if dust they were to protect the machine against, then garments they could wear, but why white, why the white hospital walls? And thought that of course they would keep it like the sterile room in a delivery ward, for indeed there was something about space which spoke of men preparing to deliver the babies they would themselves bear. The aim of technique was to parallel nature, and the interior of the VAB was the antechamber of a new Creation.

So, it was probably the Vehicle Assembly Building which encouraged Aquarius to release the string of the balloon and let his ego float off to whatever would receive it. It was not that he suddenly decided to adopt the Space Program, or even approve it in part, it was just that he came to recognize that whatever was in store, a Leviathan was most certainly ready to ascend the heavens—whether for good or ill he might never know—but he was standing at least in the first cathedral of the age of technology, and he might as well recognize that the world would change, that the world
had
changed, even as he had thought to be pushing and shoving on it with
his
mighty ego. And it had changed in ways he did not recognize, had never anticipated, and could possibly not comprehend now. The change was mightier than he had counted on. The full brawn of the rocket came over him in this cavernous womb of an immensity, this giant cathedral of a machine designed to put together another machine which would voyage through space. Yes, this emergence of a ship to travel the ether was no event he could measure by any philosophy he had been able to put together in his brain.

Yet all the signs leading to the Vehicle Assembly Building said VAB. VAB—it could be the name of a drink or a deodorant, or it
could be suds for the washer. But it was not a name for this warehouse of the gods. The great churches of a religious age had names: the Alhambra, Santa Sophia, Mont-Saint-Michel, Chartres, Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame. Now: VAB. Nothing fit anything any longer. The art of communication had become the mechanical function, and the machine was the work of art. What a fall for the ego of the artist. What a climb to capture the language again! It occurred to him on the instant that one’s fear of height must be at least a partial function of the importance of one’s ego. Or was it a direct function of that part of one’s ego which was useless? A man was presumably ready to take any drop when the ego was finally congruent to the soul and all the signs said go. Yes, one would have to create a psychology to comprehend the astronaut. For a beginning, however, it would be good to recognize how simple he must become. Do not dominate this experience with your mind was the lesson—look instead to receive its most secret voice. He would be, perforce, an acolyte to technology. What a gruel. By whatever measure, he was now forced to recognize the ruddy good cheer and sense of extraordinary morale of the workers in the VAB. As they passed him in the elevators, or as he went by them in the halls and the aisles, a sense of cooperative effort, of absorption in the work at hand, and anticipation of the launch was in the pleasure of their faces. He had never seen an army of factory workers who looked so happy. It was like the week before Christmas. As at the Manned Spacecraft Center they seemed to be ranked by the number of admission badges they wore. The smiles of the ones who wore the most seemed to thrive the most, as if they were not identification tags which reduced them to parts of a machine, but rather were combat ribbons, theater-of-war ribbons. Trade-union geezers, age of fifty, with round faces and silver-rimmed spectacles strutted like first sergeants at the gate for a three-day pass.

So Aquarius began to live without his ego, a modest quiet observer who went on trips through the Space Center and took in interviews, and read pieces of literature connected to the subject, and spent lonely nights not drinking in his air-conditioned motel
room, and thought—not of himself but of the size of the feat and the project before him, and by the night before the launch, he was already in orbit himself, a simple fellow with a mind which idled agreeably, his mind indeed out in some weightless trip through the vacuum of a psychic space, for a mind without ego he was discovering is kin to a body without gravity. He was there now merely to observe, to witness. And the days went quietly by. We would pick him up on the night before the launch, but we may not be able to. He is beginning to observe as if he were invisible. A danger sign. Only the very best and worst novelists can write as if they are invisible.

Saturn V would take off from a plain of gray-green moor and marsh, no factory or habitation within three and a half miles. Saturn V had almost six million pounds of fuel. So it would take the equivalent of thirty thousand strong men to raise it an inch. It would take liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen and a very high grade of kerosene called RP-1. It had hydrazine, unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine, and nitrogen tetroxide in the Service Module. It was in effect a bomb, thirty-three feet wide—the length of a long living room. Corporation executives earning $50,000 a year just begin to think of a thirty-three-foot living room for themselves. And it was the height of a football field set on end. Sometimes they described it as a thirty-six-story building (ten feet to a floor) but a football field was a clear measure of size, and this bomb, 363 feet high, 33 feet wide at the base, would blow if it blew with a force kin to one million pounds of TNT. That was like an old-fashioned bombing raid in World War II—one thousand planes each carrying one thousand pounds of bombs. So Saturn V would devastate an area if ever it went. Flight Control, the Press Site and the VIP stands were located therefore three and a half empty miles away across barren moors which, having been built by dredging fill into marshland, looked as if a bomb had gone off on them already.

On the night before the launch of Apollo 11, in the heart of
Brevard County, in that stretch which runs from Melbourne through Eau Gallie, and Cocoa, to Titusville, on the coastal strip from Patrick Air Force Base through Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral to the Cape Kennedy Air Force Station and above to the Space Center and Launch Pad 39, through all that several hundred square miles of town and water and flat swampy waste of wilderness, through cultivated tropical gardens, and back roads by rivers lined with palms, through all the evening din of crickets, cicadas, beetles, bees, mosquitoes, grasshoppers and wasps some portion of a million people began to foregather on all the beaches and available islands and causeways and bridges and promontories which would give clear view of the flight from six miles and ten miles and fifteen miles away. Tomorrow most of them would need field glasses to follow the flight up from the pad and out of sight over the sea down a chain of Caribbean isles, but they would have a view—they knew tonight that if the skies were clear they would have their view because they were encamped only where the line of sight was unimpeded to Launch Pad 39 on the horizon. There one could certainly see Apollo 11 on her Saturn V, see her for seven, nine, eleven miles away; she was lit up. A play of giant arc lights, as voluminous in candlepower as the lights for an old-fashioned Hollywood premiere, was directed on the spaceship from every side. On U.S. 1 in Titusville, eleven miles from Cape Kennedy across Merritt Island and the Banana and Indian rivers, all that clear shot across the evening waters, at an artillery range of twenty thousand yards, two hundred football fields away, by an encampment of tourists up from southern Florida, Everglades, Miami, and the Keys; in from Tampa, and Orlando; down from Daytona, St. Augustine, Gainesville, and Jacksonville; come from Fort Myers and Fort Lauderdale, from Sarasota, St. Petersburg, Lakeland, Ocala and Tallahassee, come from all the towns of Georgia and points farther north and west as well as every itinerant camper in the area from all of the ambulatory camping-out families of the fifty states, and tourists down on economy flights for a week in cheap hot summer Florida and now slung out in the back
seats of rented cars, on U.S. 1 in Titusville, in an encampment of every variety of camper, was a view of the spaceship across flat land and waters, and she looked like a shrine with the lights upon her. In the distance she glowed for all the world like some white stone Madonna in the mountains, welcoming footsore travelers at dusk. Perhaps it was an unforeseen game of the lighting, but America had not had its movie premieres for nothing, nor its Rockettes in Radio City and fifty million squares tooling the tourist miles over the years to Big Town to buy a ticket to spectacle and back home again. If you were going to have a Hollywood premiere and arc lights, a million out to watch and a spaceship which looked across the evening flutter like the light on the Shrine of Our Lady outside any church in South Brooklyn or Bay Ridge, then by God you might just as well have this spectacle on the premiere trip to the moon. That deserved a searchlight or two! And the campers stared across the waters in their bivouac off Route 1 in Titusville, campers sat on the banks of the Indian River at twilight and waited for the tropical night to pass its hold on the hours.