Moondust (11 page)

It strikes me that these are the types of things I used to hear clubbers and drug evangelists like Timothy Leary saying after taking ecstasy and DMT in the early 1990s at the time of the Acid House craze, and again I wonder whether the epiphany could have been a chemical thing, originating within the brain rather than the Universe. Later, I will e-mail Mitchell this thought, and ask whether he has ever experimented with meditation or hallucinogens – because to me the precise nature of his epiphany is important to everything that follows from here. He tells me:

“I think it has something to do with chemical reactions, [but] it appears to me – and this is going beyond what I describe in
The Way of the Explorer
– that these transcendent experiences have to do with a resonance of the brain and body with the external world. And it appears that the more the brain and body get in resonance with their environment, the more likely one is to have this type of experience. That is what – in my opinion – the transcendent experience is really all about.”

Addressing the question directly, he further explains:

“And, yes, Andrew, I have been a longtime meditator – since the spaceflight. It helps reproduce the samadhi state experienced on the spaceflight and more. I have tried a bit of psychedelics experimentally, not extensively.”

Then he adds, drolly:

“I recommend the path of meditation.”

I've also wondered whether this urge to reconcile science and religion might be as much about closing the gap between two sides of himself, the educated über-rationalist and the reeling mystic his mother sought to raise. He once admitted to still
harbouring “a secret fear of God,” thanks to being brought up with a strong sense that “the potential for damnation lay in the spoken word, even perhaps in thought.” Could this have been what drew him to both of those things in adult life: danger? Were they his sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll? He cocks his head to one side. This is a new idea, to which he seems unable to find a response, so I change tack. Does he still harbour a secret fear of God, even though his rational mind doesn't “Believe” anymore? This time the answer is firm.

“No.”

It's gone now?

“Yeah. It took years, though. When I came back to doing the work I do now, there was only one assumption: that we live in a natural Universe, not a supernatural Universe. Therefore it's knowable. And if it's knowable, science ought to be able to figure it out. That has been my credo for thirty years, and the more we dig, the more it appears to be correct.”

Mitchell casts his eyes to the sky and absentmindedly pushes his dentures forward with his tongue, then pulls them out and contemplates them for a moment. I stifle a smile, but find something moving in the tableau. His mind is so young that it's easy to forget his roots in a time when all Americans didn't have perfect teeth. He suddenly wakes up to what he's doing and crams the dentures back into his mouth, just in time to see a woman who claims to run a “holographic consciousness cruise” business barreling toward him with some ethereal “machine” she wants him to try. I watch him try and fail to wriggle out of this: in his time Edgar Mitchell has defied gravity, death and ridicule, but a determined New Age matron is something else entirely. I just have time to note that some of his former colleagues, most specifically Buzz Aldrin and John Young, actively campaign for a return to the Moon, with all the expense and energy that would require, and to ask what he thinks.

“Well. We started, so I think we probably should go back to the Moon in order to gain more extraterrestrial experience, before we start the long voyages to Mars and the outer planets – which we're gonna do eventually. So there's something to be gained by going back to the Moon. Experience and additional
knowledge, making it more routine to go into space than it is now. This is still not like flying an airliner across the country.”

As I hear it right now, Aldrin's argument is that it can be commercially exploited, while Young seems to consider it necessary for our survival as a species. Something along the lines of “We've screwed up this planet, so we'd better get some others.” At this, Mitchell's brow knits and his expression becomes uncharacteristically stern.

“That's not the answer. No. We've got to solve the problems on this planet; then we're more ready to go. We can take something good with us instead of our brand of insanity. When I go to Mars and look back at this tiny little dot, it's utterly stupid to say, ‘I came from the United States. Or France. Or the Republic of China.' And we're not ready to do that yet.”

I'll see Edgar a little later at the fund-raiser advertised on that leaflet, where a short introductory video detailing his exploits with
Apollo 14
will be accompanied by –
sigh
–
Also Sprach Zarathustra
and he will give a talk, then move through the room looking a little lost, until the outgoing Anna arrives to hold his hand. She clearly adores him. I inquire after the efficacy of the “machine” he was presented with at the end of our interview, but he just smiles. Later still at the grand finale, a big plenary meeting, Mitchell speaks urgently and with passion as he addresses the question, “What is the global crisis teaching us?” while I try to take notes but struggle to keep up.

He begins with George W. Bush and the reaction to 9/11, declaiming:

“We have fundamentalists inside and outside our system, who are equally dogmatic and certain that they are right. I understand that terrorists need to be stopped, but I, for one, am appalled that we have to resort to killing to do it. That's not where the solution lies. It doesn't advance us or our problems and it's being used as a screen for other measures, like drilling in wildernesses and eroding civil rights.”

At the root of terrorism and much global conflict is the grossly unequal distribution of income throughout the world – and this is increasing, he contends, rising to a climax.

“So if we want to understand about corporate greed, we must first look in the mirror. The sane lesson appears to be that the solution has to start here.”

He taps his head.

“How can we correct all this? Our approach begins with high-mindedness, with finding a deeper mind, realizing that we are one, that we are children of nature. I urge you to take these thoughts away with you.”

A deafening ovation follows, which I join in with, still unsure of how seriously to take Mitchell's ideas, knowing that I'll be leaving here with more questions than I brought. Within months, however, the cyber journal
Wired
will be dedicating a whole issue to the theme of God versus Science, in which eminent scientists and thinkers note that the more we learn, the less contradictory these previously warring faiths appear to be – that indeed they may turn out to be one and the same … just as Ed's been saying for three decades. Not long after that,
Scientific American
magazine will be devoting its first cover to Quantum Holography.

Even then, I will have no clear idea of whether Mitchell is right or wrong, but that assessment doesn't much concern me as I pack my bags for the drive north to Orlando. The lesson I'll take from my IONS experience is that the Moonwalkers aren't going to be the straitlaced military men I'd expected – and by extension, I already see my own journey spinning off the imagined tracks. How typical or atypical Mitchell's feelings about his lunar sojourn are, I don't yet know, but he has provided a benchmark against which to set the experiences of the others. The weekend has felt like a bridge to another time and place. Now I'm ready to cross it.

What was it like, spinning into that inky night, answerable only to the stars and silhouettes of hills crouching in a near distance that might as well have been infinity? And on the journey home, how the night must have sparkled and the spirit flown. Intoxication. No cares. Peace … joy …

Trouble is, today I can hardly remember any of it and I feel – not to put too fine a point on this – like shit. Come to that, the place looks no better than I do this morning. Everything they say about Las Vegas is true. Already, I've had $350 stolen from my room, almost walked into some mini drug-gang turf war and stayed up drinking ten-dollar margaritas with a gaggle of friendly hookers at Bellagio, where I'd actually gone to sit and read a book about space suits: by the end of the evening the barman, who was a ski instructor in winter and thus looked to have stumbled upon a way of life that could only be improved upon if it included an annual fortnight standing in for George
Clooney, was my
hermano.
But now it's morning and from my $29.95-a-night thirteenth-floor room at The Sahara, all I can see is building sites and crematorium-grade dust covering a world that has turned greyer and more nondescript than it would have been possible to imagine twelve hours ago. They say that in the Fifties you could see A-bomb-test mushroom clouds from the Strip. Was the Moon a little like Vegas in the morning? You wouldn't bet against it.

Through the sore head, a question that is being asked all over town as the veil lifts on this scrabby Saturday: how did I get here? It's no surprise to find that lunar astronauts pass this way, because back in the glamour days, when the boys were still test pilots and stationed in the desert and life was all about – as Tom Wolfe had it – “Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving,” this throbbing oasis was their playground. Yet I've come in search of one astronaut in particular and when I heard where he could be found, my first reaction was surprise, closely followed by amusement, bemusement, curiosity. This afternoon, I'll make my way to a hotel a few blocks back from the Strip, where I expect to find Richard Gordon, the Command Module pilot from everybody's favourite mission –
Apollo 12,
the second to land and most joyous of them all – signing autographs at a
Star Trek
convention.

Unlike Edgar Mitchell, Dick Gordon is one of the boys. You won't find a person in the programme with a bad word to say about him. He was a record-setting pilot, a selfless astronaut and a nice guy. He was the second man, after Mike Collins, to
not
land on the Moon, and they say that he's never once complained about that, at least not in public, but I do wonder how it feels to have gone so tantalizingly close and been denied the one small step.

Flying four months after
Apollo 11,
in November 1969, the
Apollo 12
crew of Gordon, commander Pete Conrad and Lunar Module pilot Alan Bean loved each other, really loved each other, like brothers. They drove matching gold Corvettes, which Conrad had got them a deal on, and they always gave the impression that while what they were doing was important and dangerous, it was also fabulous. And fun. Even thirty years after,
an acquaintance who spent time with them just before Conrad's freak death on that motorcycle describes the closeness of soul mates. Some had expected that
Apollo 12
would be the first mission to land on the Moon and there must be a little part of everyone involved that wishes gap-toothed, wiseass, supersmart Pete Conrad could have been the first human to set foot on it and that his modest and engaging crew, who carried none of the darkness we'll find in
Apollo 11,
could have been our eyes and ears there. Still, where Armstrong got to be the first one to stand on another celestial body, Conrad has the more loveable distinction of being the first to fall over on one. By all accounts, he was one of a kind.

Gordon and Conrad had roomed together when they were flying carriers in the Navy. They'd also been in space before, aboard
Gemini 11
in September 1966, during which Gordon became the fourth American to walk in space, an experience which, under favourable circumstances, seems as moving as any an astronaut can have, like being born a second time. That wasn't Gordon's experience, though. During his walk (Extra Vehicular Activity, or EVA, in NASA-speak), he had some tasks to perform, one of which was to attach a tether to an Agena rocket with which he and Conrad had rendezvoused and docked. Unfortunately, no one had foreseen that in the weightless conditions, he would have no way of clinging to the Agena in order to accomplish this and by the time he had done it, he was blinded by sweat and close to incoherent with exhaustion. Conrad feared that Gordon hadn't strength left to make it back and the unwritten rule was that in such an event, he would have to cut his friend adrift and come home bitterly, wretchedly, alone. Through an immense act of will, Gordon got close enough to the
Gemini
for the other man to haul him in, but it was a close-run thing. Conrad later said that of all the situations he faced in space, this was the one that scared him most.

Then there was the lightning incident during the launch of
Apollo 12,
in which the Saturn rocket was hit twice, turning the cockpit into a casino of warning lights and alarms, as the electrical system went off-line. Many people think that the craft launched into an angry sky because President Richard Nixon,
feeling confident after the success of
11
that
12
wouldn't blow up and embarrass him, had flown to the Cape to watch. But the crew kept their cool (Conrad's pulse rate didn't even rise) and Bean found an obscure switch that reset the power supply. Disaster had been averted – perhaps: Houston would remain concerned that the Command Module parachute-release mechanism had been damaged. After much discussion, it was decided to continue to the Moon anyway. If the parachutes didn't open before splashdown on the way back, the crew were mince-meat wherever they'd been or not been in the meantime. Let the lunar landing be a last cigarette before the cosmic firing squad.

The chutes worked, obviously, but there's no sign of Dick Gordon yet.

I've just entered the autograph area, which reminds me of a particularly austere primary school Christmas fair. Formica tables hug the walls and corral in the centre of the rectangular room, all festooned with 8×10-inch photos of actors playing space cowboys and Indians. I stand and take in the scene and – as so often around actors – gradually begin to feel a kind of terror. Some of these roles were going to be big breaks, but what I see here are bad breaks, squandered opportunities, illusion, delusion … failed expectation. And I'm not sure whether the fear is theirs or mine, but for a moment it feels like the precise negative expression of that peace Edgar Mitchell claims to have found on his journey, and I feel plugged into it, much as he did.

A hand thrusts toward me. I look into a confident smile that I don't recognize, then down at snaps of a swarthy man in a Reynolds Wrap space suit. Major Don West, the curly-haired mate from
Lost in Space.
Real name Mark Goddard. He was on TV every day through my childhood.

“Hi – how're you doing?”

Unable to find an honest answer, I nod and move on to a bad guy from
Babylon 5,
who reeks of alcohol and hits on the woman standing next to me, prompting us both to move on to the next table, where another serial sci-fi villain starts to tell us about his painful divorce from his actress wife and the difficulty of paying child support since 9/11 knocked the bottom out of the WASP malefactor market. After that, the small queue in front of
Denise Crosby (Lt. Tasha Yar in
The Next Generation
and granddaughter of Bing) is not without attraction, but I keep moving until finally there is a white table tucked away on its own, reflecting the white wall and white ceiling, on which sits a small piece of card, folded into a V and bearing the Magic Marker legend: “Dick Gordon.”

But he's not there.

Disquieted, I retreat to the main hall, where
Star Trek
celebrities are facing the fans. The promoters of this event, Slanted Fedora Entertainment, are one of two main organizations who take these shows on the road, like a travelling circus. Their rivals staged a spectacular convention in Vegas recently, which hit ticket sales for this one. As a result, Fedora decided to throw open the doors of the exquisitely anonymous Alexis Park Hotel and treat the event as a party, to which the world is invited. Needless to say, the world as such hasn't come: there are a lot of young people who look like merchandise sellers on a Marilyn Manson tour; others are dressed as characters from the perplexing array of
Star Trek
spin-offs. Some carry clipboards and notebooks, moving between the “dealer room” and the autograph chamber with a pious gleam in their eyes.

Four actors stand onstage, holding microphones. Two I don't recognize, but Walter Koenig is instantly familiar as Chekov from the original series, and the drunk bad-guy lech from next door is unforgettable. He looks a little like Bruce Willis and has a beer in his hand.

A question from the floor:

“Who's the most famous person you've ever met?”

“Marlon Brando,” someone says to great enthusiasm.

“Cary Grant,” offers Chekov.

More clapping. Almost Bruce tells a story about meeting Charlton Heston, “fucking
Moses,
” at a urinal, which ends “then he left and I could piss again,” and Chekov suddenly pipes: “Betty Grable!” to thunderous applause. A very large man with a beard asks a question about favourite drinks, which Almost Bruce is still kicking around when the MC announces that Denise Crosby is now due onstage and a ripple of anticipation passes through the hall as she arrives, smiling a little tensely, I
think. She talks about her career for some time, focussing on her understanding of Lt. Yar, but when she's finished, nobody can think of any questions to ask.

“Aw c'mon, you gotta have some questions,” the actress scolds.

Okay. The bearded man raises his hand.

“Uh. You're not in the new movie, are you?”

A long speech ensues, which is hard to follow beyond the fact that she thinks she should be.

“…'Cos it has
Romulans
in it, like, you know –
duh!
So I called the producer, Hal, and I said, ‘Hal, you should pop me in the movie …'”

Another question, “Why did you leave
Star Trek
?” is like one of those tiny Japanese pellets that you drop in a bath and watch grow into great paper jungles.

“I've never regretted leaving
Star Trek.
I was at an impasse. And I was beginning to feel like a glorified extra. And had I stayed, I wouldn't have done
Pet Sematary.
I wouldn't have done
Key West,
or … a number of other things! Then, I came back for
Yesterday's Enterprise.
”

From the floor: “That was a beautiful performance!”

Applause. She beams.

“Thank you
so
much.”

Someone else from the floor: “Will you ever do
Playboy
again?”

A tense pause.

“Wow, that
is
off the subject of
Star Trek.
That was in 1980.”

“I know – I have the issue!”

I go back to the autograph chamber and the Dick Gordon table is still empty. Then, just as despair is about to take hold, a small, elderly man in thick, black-rimmed spectacles crosses the threshold and heads in the right direction. I realize again that the man I've been looking for is an athletic thirty-nine-year-old beaming from an Apollo romper suit. He walks upright and slowly, so as not to upset the mustard-smothered hot dog and fries he balances on a paper plate with his left hand, nor to spill coffee from the Styrofoam cup in his right. Blue slacks and a green check shirt strain to tame a lordly paunch. Reaching the
table, he puts the coffee down and, suspending the hot dog plate in the air above it, rotates on its axis until he is behind the table, where he sits down. He glances up and grins broadly at someone who walks past. When he smiles, he reminds me enormously of Roy Orbison.

I watch for a while. Dick Gordon eats. No one notices. The room has filled up and queues have formed in front of some of the other tables. One of them is getting long and there's enough of a jam that I can't even see who it's for. A roomful of people who are famous to one degree or another for pretending to be death-mocking space adventurers and here, tucked away in a corner, is a real one, and no one knows who he is. Or wants to know. The fakes look more convincing.

I buy two Gordon photos from a table in the middle of the room and take them over, introduce myself. He invites me to sit down and help collect the “widgets” which are used as currency here. He's relaxed and affable, with a pilot's eye for the deflecting wisecrack. He talks about space the way your neighbour might discuss aphids over the garden fence. Flight controller Chris Kraft once observed that, while Deke Slayton put together crews that he hoped would complement each other, “it was a real feat because he was dealing with a group that included world-class prima donnas.” It seems unlikely that he had Dick Gordon in mind when he said it.