Read Online Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) by Norman Mailer - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Norman Mailer
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could take their departure from here, from this
fact
. And as this evening went on, and he continued to the party at Pete Conrad’s house and talked to the future commander of Apollo 12 over the steaks at charcoal grill, and Conrad made his confession of dreaming for years of going to the moon, and now concluded somberly, manfully—one had to be manful when contemplating the cost of desire—“now the moon is nothing but facts to me,” Aquarius felt confirmation building in his mood, his happiness and his senses, that this grim tough job of writing for enough money to pay his debts and buy his little plot of time, was going to be possibly, all passions directed, all disciplines flexed, a work whose size might relieve the chore. And as he thought of the little details he had picked up in the biographies of Collins, of Aldrin, of Armstrong, he thought that yes, the invasion of the moon was signal direct to commence his new psychology—he would call it, yes, beneath this Texas moon, full near the Fourth of July, he would call it The Psychology of Astronauts, for they were either the end of the old or the first of the new men, and one would have nothing to measure them by until the lines of the new psychology had begun to be drawn.
CHAPTER 3
Some Origins of the Fire
We move on to Florida and the launch. If Aquarius had spent a week in Houston, he was to put in ten days on Cape Canaveral. He was loose in some real tropics at last with swamp and coconut palms. It was encouraging. Technology and the tropics were not built to hide everything from each other.
Let us take the tour. On Merritt Island and old Cape Canaveral, now Cape Kennedy, the Space Center has been installed, a twenty-mile stretch between the Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic, a terrain of marshland and scrub where raccoon, bobcat and alligator are still reported, and moors and truncated dunes lie low before the sea. It is country beaten by the wind and water, not dissimilar to Hatteras, Chincoteague and the National Seashore on Cape Cod, unspectacular country, uninhabited by men in normal times and normal occupations, for there are few trees and only occasional palms as ravaged and scabby as the matted backside of a monkey, a flat land of heat and water and birds, indeed birds no less impressive to Aquarius than ibis, curlew, plover and tern, hawks and vultures gliding fine as squadrons in formation, even bald eagles,ospreys and owls. In the brackish water are saltwater trout, redfish, largemouth bass, and bream. It is country for hunting, for fishing, and for men who seek mosquitoes; it was next to uninhabited before the war. Now, first spaceport—think on it! first spaceport—of an industry which pays salaries to perhaps so much as half a million men and some women before it is through, and has spent more than four billion dollars a year for average the last few years, a spaceport which is focus to the aerospace industries, a congeries of the richest corporations supplying NASA. Yet this port to the moon, Mars, Venus, solar system and the beyond is a first clue to space, for it is surprisingly empty, mournful beyond belief for the tropics, and its roads through the Air Force Base and the Space Center pass by empty marshes, deserted dune grass, and lonely signs. Every quarter-mile or so along that low grassy ridge toward the side of the sea is a road sign pointing to an old launch complex which on exploration turns out to consist of an unoccupied road and a launching tower for rockets no longer fired, and so left to commune by itself on a modest field of concrete, a tall, rust-red vertical structure of iron girders surrounded by abandoned blockhouses and utility sheds. To Aquarius the early history of the Space Program is contained in these empty launch towers, now as isolated and private as grain elevators by the side of railroad tracks in the flat prairies of Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas, the town low before them, the quiet whine of the wind
fact
. And as this evening went on, and he continued to the party at Pete Conrad’s house and talked to the future commander of Apollo 12 over the steaks at charcoal grill, and Conrad made his confession of dreaming for years of going to the moon, and now concluded somberly, manfully—one had to be manful when contemplating the cost of desire—“now the moon is nothing but facts to me,” Aquarius felt confirmation building in his mood, his happiness and his senses, that this grim tough job of writing for enough money to pay his debts and buy his little plot of time, was going to be possibly, all passions directed, all disciplines flexed, a work whose size might relieve the chore. And as he thought of the little details he had picked up in the biographies of Collins, of Aldrin, of Armstrong, he thought that yes, the invasion of the moon was signal direct to commence his new psychology—he would call it, yes, beneath this Texas moon, full near the Fourth of July, he would call it The Psychology of Astronauts, for they were either the end of the old or the first of the new men, and one would have nothing to measure them by until the lines of the new psychology had begun to be drawn.
CHAPTER 3
Some Origins of the Fire
We move on to Florida and the launch. If Aquarius had spent a week in Houston, he was to put in ten days on Cape Canaveral. He was loose in some real tropics at last with swamp and coconut palms. It was encouraging. Technology and the tropics were not built to hide everything from each other.
Let us take the tour. On Merritt Island and old Cape Canaveral, now Cape Kennedy, the Space Center has been installed, a twenty-mile stretch between the Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic, a terrain of marshland and scrub where raccoon, bobcat and alligator are still reported, and moors and truncated dunes lie low before the sea. It is country beaten by the wind and water, not dissimilar to Hatteras, Chincoteague and the National Seashore on Cape Cod, unspectacular country, uninhabited by men in normal times and normal occupations, for there are few trees and only occasional palms as ravaged and scabby as the matted backside of a monkey, a flat land of heat and water and birds, indeed birds no less impressive to Aquarius than ibis, curlew, plover and tern, hawks and vultures gliding fine as squadrons in formation, even bald eagles,ospreys and owls. In the brackish water are saltwater trout, redfish, largemouth bass, and bream. It is country for hunting, for fishing, and for men who seek mosquitoes; it was next to uninhabited before the war. Now, first spaceport—think on it! first spaceport—of an industry which pays salaries to perhaps so much as half a million men and some women before it is through, and has spent more than four billion dollars a year for average the last few years, a spaceport which is focus to the aerospace industries, a congeries of the richest corporations supplying NASA. Yet this port to the moon, Mars, Venus, solar system and the beyond is a first clue to space, for it is surprisingly empty, mournful beyond belief for the tropics, and its roads through the Air Force Base and the Space Center pass by empty marshes, deserted dune grass, and lonely signs. Every quarter-mile or so along that low grassy ridge toward the side of the sea is a road sign pointing to an old launch complex which on exploration turns out to consist of an unoccupied road and a launching tower for rockets no longer fired, and so left to commune by itself on a modest field of concrete, a tall, rust-red vertical structure of iron girders surrounded by abandoned blockhouses and utility sheds. To Aquarius the early history of the Space Program is contained in these empty launch towers, now as isolated and private as grain elevators by the side of railroad tracks in the flat prairies of Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas, the town low before them, the quiet whine of the wind
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