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seconds the amount of fuel they had left, and to start counting down. Out loud.
    Aldrin did as he was asked. Seventy … sixty … fifty …
    As he counted, Armstrong scrutinized the moon’s unyielding topography.
    Forty … thirty … twenty …
    Still the landscape refused to give an inch.
    Then, with just ten seconds remaining, Armstrong spotted his chance: a silver oasis of nothingness just below the horizon. Suddenly, imperceptibly, like a predator closing in on its prey, his brain narrowed its focus. As if he were on a practice run, he maneuvered the craft deftly toward the drop zone and performed, in the only clearing for miles, the perfect textbook touchdown. One giant leap for mankind. But almost, very nearly, one giant cosmological screw-up.
Bomb-Disposal Experts—What Makes Them Tick?
    This extraordinary account of incredible interplanetary insouciance epitomizes life on the horizons of possibility, where triumph and disaster share a fraught and fragile frontier and cross-border traffic flows freely. This time, however, the road to disaster was closed. And Neil Armstrong’s coolness under fire rescued from cosmologicalcalamity one of the greatest feats ever in the history of human achievement. But there’s more. His heart rate, reports revealed later, barely broke a sweat. He might as well have been landing a job in a gas station as a spaceship on the moon. Some freakish strain of cardiovascular genius? The science suggests not.
    Back in the 1980s, Harvard researcher Stanley Rachman found something similar with bomb-disposal operatives. What, Rachman wanted to know, separated the men from the boys in this high-risk, high-wire profession? All bomb-disposal operatives are good. Otherwise they’d be dead. But what did the stars have that the lesser luminaries didn’t?
    To find out, he took a bunch of experienced bomb-disposal operatives—those with ten years or more in the business—and split them into two groups: those who’d been decorated for their work, and those who hadn’t. Then he compared their heart rates in the field on jobs that demanded particularly high levels of concentration.
    What he turned up was astonishing. Whereas the heart rates of all the operatives remained stable, something quite incredible happened with the ones who’d been decorated. Their heart rates actually went down. As soon as they entered the danger zone (or the “launch pad,” as one guy I spoke with put it), they assumed a state of cold, meditative focus: a mezzanine level of consciousness in which they became one with the device they were working on.
    Follow-up analysis probed deeper, and revealed the cause of the disparity: confidence. The operatives who’d been decorated scored higher on tests of core self-belief than their non-decorated colleagues.
    It was conviction that made them tick.
    Stanley Rachman knows all about the fearless arctic neurology of the psychopath. And his findings were certainly explosive. So much so that he raised the question himself: Should we be keeping a closer eye on our bomb-disposal operatives? His conclusion seems pretty clear: “The operators who received awards for courageous/fearless behavior,” he reports, “were free of psychological abnormalities or antisocial behavior.” In contrast, he points out, “most descriptions of psychopathy include adjectives such as ‘irresponsible’ and ‘impulsive’ ”—adjectivesthat, in his experience, did not befit any of his case studies.
    In the light of Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon’s 2005 survey, however—which, if you will recall, demonstrated that a number of psychopathic traits were more prevalent among business leaders than among diagnosed criminal psychopaths—Rachman’s comments beg the question of what, precisely, we mean when we use the word “psychopath.” Not all psychopaths are as wholly undomesticated, as socially feral, as he might have us believe. In fact, the standout implication of Board and