Read Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) for Free Online Page B

consideration and what will be your main concern?”
    “Well,” said Armstrong, “immediately upon touchdown our concern is the integrity of the Lunar Module itself” … nnnnnnnhr went the sound of the static.… “For the first two hours after touchdown we have a very busy time verifying the integrity of the Lunar Module and all of its systems” … nnnnhr.… “A great deal of technical discussion … between spacecraft and ground during a time period when most people will be wondering, well what does it look like out there? … We will be eager to comment” … nnnnhr … “but reluctant to do so in the face of these more important considerations on which … the entire rest of the lunar mission depends.”
    Aldrin, the formalist, had said just previously, “I think the mostcritical portion of the EVA will be our ability to anticipate and to interpret things that appear not to be as we expected them to be, because if we don’t interpret them correctly then they will become difficult.” It was the credo of the rationalist. Phenomena are only possessed of menace when they do not accommodate themselves to language-controls. Or, better, to initial-controls. EVA stood for Extravehicular Activity, that is for action taken outside their vehicle, the Lem. EVA therefore referred to their walk on the moon; but the sound of the letters E, V, A might inspire less perturbation than the frank admission that men would now dare to walk on an ancient and alien terrain where no life breathed and beneath the ground no bodies were dead.
    It was, of course, a style of language all the astronauts had learned. There were speeches where you could not tell who was putting the words together—the phrases were impersonal, interlocking. One man could have finished a sentence for another. “Our order of priorities was carefully integrated into the flight plan … there is no requirement on the specific objectives that we’re meeting on the surface to go great distances from the spacecraft, and to do so would only utilize time that we now have programmed doing things in the specific mission objectives.” Sell newspapers with that kind of stuff! The quote could belong to any one of a dozen astronauts. In this case it happened to be not Aldrin but Armstrong.
    Only on occasion did the language reveal its inability to blanket all situations. Mainly on personal matters. There came a question from one of the remedial readers. “Tell us very briefly how your families have reacted to the fact that you’re taking this historic mission.”
    “Well,” Aldrin deliberated, “I think in my particular case, my family has had five years now to become accustomed to this eventuality, and over six months to face it very closely. I think they look on this as a tremendous challenge for me. They look upon it also as an invasion somewhat of their privacy and removing of my presence away from the family for a considerable period of time.”
    He spoke glumly, probably thinking at this moment neither of his family nor himself—rather whether his ability to anticipate and interpret had been correctly employed in the cathexis-loaded dynamic shift vector area of changed field domestic situations (which translates as: attractive wife and kids playing second fiddle to boss astronaut number two sometimes blow group stack). Aldrin was a man of such powerful potentialities and iron disciplines that the dull weight of appropriately massed jargon was no mean gift to him. He obviously liked it to work. It kept explosives in their package. When his laboriously acquired speech failed to mop up the discharge of a question, he got as glum as a fastidious housewife who cannot keep the shine on her floor.
    They could not, of course, restrain the questions which looked for ultimate blood. “James Gunn, BBC. You had mentioned that your flight, like all others, contains very many risks. What, in view of that, will your plans be”—a British courtesy in