in the room, as much a spirit as a man. One hardly knew if he were the spirit of the high thermal currents, or that spirit of neutrality which rises to the top in bureaucratic situations, or both, both of course—why should Armstrong have a soul less divided than the unruly world of some billions of men? Indeed contradictions lay subtly upon him—itwas not unlike looking at a bewildering nest of leaves: some are autumn fallings, some the green of early spring. So Armstrong seemed of all the astronauts the man nearest to being saintly, yet there was something as hard, small-town and used in his face as the look of a cashier over pennies. When he stopped to think, six tired parallel lines stood out on his forehead, and his hair was very straight, small-town hair-colored humorless straight, his pupils were very small, hardly larger than buckshot, you could believe he flew seventy-eight combat missions off the
Essex
near Korea. He was very thin-mouthed, almost as thin and wide a mouth as Joe E. Brown, yet with no comic spirit, or better, or worse, the spirit of comedy gave orders to the mouth most of the time. Much like President Nixon or Wernher von Braun (whom we are yet to meet) he would smile on command. Then a very useful smile appeared—the smile of an enterprising small-town boy. He could be an angel, he could be the town’s devil. Who knew? You could not penetrate the flash of the smile—all of America’s bounty was in it. Readiness to serve, innocence, competence, modesty, sly humor, and then a lopsided yawing slide of a dumb smile at the gulfs of one’s own ignorance, like oops am I small-town dumb!—that was also in it. Aquarius decided it was not easy to trust him then—the smile was a vehicle to remove Armstrong from the scene. But when he spoke, all ambition was muzzled. He spoke with the unendurably slow and triple caution of a responsibility-laden politician who was being desperately careful to make no error of fact, give no needless offense to enemies, and cross no conflicting zones of loyalty among friends. Add the static, and he was no happy public speaker. At communicating he was as tight as a cramped muscle.
Perversely, it became his most impressive quality, as if what was best in the man was most removed from the surface, so valuable that it must be protected by a hundred reservations, a thousand cautions, as if finally he had such huge respect for words that they were like tangible omens and portents, zephyrs and beasts of psychic presence, as if finally something deep, delicate and primitive would restrain him from uttering a single word of fear for fear ofmaterializing his dread. So, once, men had been afraid to utter the name of the Lord, or even to write it in such a way as to suggest the sound, for that might be enough to summon some genie of God’s displeasure at so disrupting the heavens. Armstrong of course did not brandish an ego one could perceive on meeting; where Aldrin gave off the stolid confidence of the man who knows that problems can be solved if properly formulated and appropriately attacked (which is to say attacked in good condition!) and where Collins offered the wiry graceful tension of a man who will quietly die to maintain his style, Armstrong could seem more like a modest animal than a man—trace hints of every forest apprehension from the puma to the deer to the miseries of the hyena seemed to stalk at the edge of that small-town clearing he had cut into his psyche so that he might offer the world a person. But his thoughts seemed to be looking for a way to drift clear of any room like this where he was trapped with psyche-eaters, psyche-gorgers, and the duty of responding to questions heard some hundreds of times.
On the other hand, he was a professional and had learned how to contend in a practical way with the necessary language. Indeed, how his choice of language protected him!
“Mr. Armstrong, at the time you are down on the moon, what will be your overriding