Moondust (15 page)

The socially relaxed Collins remembers his crewmate growing more and more distant, retreating at times into “stony-faced silence,” just as Aldrin had earlier remembered reading a sci-fi story as a kid, where some voyagers go to the Moon but return home insane: it had given him nightmares, and the nightmares left a shadow which followed him on the real-life voyage he eventually took, so that when “flicker-flashes” of light began to appear in the corner of his vision, his first, barely conscious thought was that the Universe was coming for him. Was there fear in his voice when he first mentioned them on the flight? Is that what irritated Armstrong so much? Come to that, was Armstrong afraid of them, too? Either way, the Universe did get to
him. Aldrin came back and blew like a supernova.

The Air Force made him commandant of the aerospace school at Edwards and he left his family for Marianne, the woman he'd been having an affair with for some years, but both situations collapsed in a fog of despondency.
Return to Earth
ends on a hopeful note, with him boldly submitting to treatment in a psychiatric hospital – so spelling the ruination of any future Air Force career, despite his father's continued efforts to get him promoted to general – and trying to start over again with Joan and the family. Heartbreakingly, this rapprochement with life didn't last. Aldrin eventually returned to the other woman, but the union was brief.

In fact, he'd been suffering from severe depression and alcoholism. He was forty-two and had no idea where he was going or what to do with the very different void, the
existential
void, that now yawned before him. It must have felt terrifying, as though the Earth were punishing him for his impudence in leaving it.

Ed Mitchell was equipped to face this. Buzz Aldrin wasn't. There was no safe place to stand, let alone fly. He worked on an innovative design for the space shuttle, but it was abandoned; then as a director of an insurance company and a cable TV firm. He criticized other astronauts for their business dealings, which endeared him to no one, and launched an idealistic youth forum aimed at bridging the generation gap, but it never quite caught fire. After the breakdown that precipitated his departure from Edwards, he developed a fear of sleeping in darkness. Joan said he judged himself too harshly. It's strange that photos from this period show him smiling, with a fashionable beard, looking every inch a matinee idol. The Space Age had found its Marilyn.

The assistant's e-mail said 10 AM and it's 10 AM now. I've mistimed my entry into the swank heart of Wilshire –
how long is this bloody road anyway?
– and am angry with myself by the time I spot the marble and gold block where Aldrin lives with his redoubtable third wife, Lois. I locate a barely sufficient parking
space around the corner, almost spark a fight by ramming the back of a mobile java van while trying to squeeze into it, then apologize profusely and break like a thief beneath a paranoid 9/11 sky full of circling helicopters.

First the slightly bad news. Years of propaganda from those post-hippy Californian grade school teachers have left me with a residual mistrust of ties and collars, those flashy trappings of The Man, but they say Buzz is a snappy dresser, a disciple of precision, so today I will be, too. A trip to the Beverly Center netted a grey Agnès B suit as worn by Harvey Keitel in
Reservoir Dogs,
a brown Burro shirt – chosen after several carefully considered changes – and some proper Patrick Cox shoes. A bronze silk tie purchased last-dash from the hotel boutique this morning and knotted with the help of the concierge is the prime cause of my lateness. Now I present myself to a liveried receptionist after sprinting three hundred yards in a funk, looking for all my efforts like a sales rep ejected from a strip joint for panting too hard.

So to the worse news.

“Hello. I've come to see Dr. Aldrin,” I announce.

The receptionist looks at me blankly.

“Who?”

“Er, Dr. Aldrin. Am I in the wrong place?”

My head swims. I don't believe it. I
am
in the wrong place. But wait: the receptionist's lips begin to curl upward, until he is grinning broadly.

“Oh, hold on – you mean
Buzz
?”

Good news, until he calls upstairs to be told that Aldrin's assistant has been trying to reach me in order to postpone our meeting in light of yesterday's unfortunate events. Bad news … except that, seeing as I'm here, we might as well carry on as planned. Good news!

The elevator won't stop at the correct floor, because security concerns dictate that you need special dispensation to get out there, and a member of the staff has to come up and arrange it for me. Once out, there's a private hallway leading to a broad, glossy white door with gold fittings. It opens, and there, backlit through its frame, glowing like an eclipse through the halo of
light – the man carries his own corona, for Christ's sake – stands Dr. Buzz Aldrin, tanned and smiling and wearing nothing more than a NASA T-shirt that must once have been white, and the smallest pair of small blue satin running shorts that I have ever seen. His feet, unlike mine, are bare. On the way in, I ask if he'd like me to follow his example and remove my shoes in deference to his spotless natural fibre carpet, but he chuckles and soothes:

“Naw, don't worry. We're just not as traditional as maybe you guys are.”

Lord, save me from myself.

Aldrin has good legs for a seventy-two-year-old and looks astonishingly fit. He's been sober for many years now and spends his time agitating for a resumption of “manned” space exploration, struggling to scare up investment for his futuristic projects, making lucrative public appearances and, of late, writing novels. He walks me through the living room and seats me on one of two cloudy cream sofas, then offers coffee and stalks off to the adjoining kitchen to fix it. In his absence, I gaze around the large, high-ceilinged room in what must be a very spacious apartment, neatly adorned with Moon-themed awards and paintings and expensive-looking furniture, and my mind reaches back to Dick Gordon signing autographs for ten bucks a pop in Vegas – which is perhaps why the Chaplinesque commotion coming from the kitchen takes a while to register. After a brief interval, punctuated by more clatter, Aldrin calls through to ask whether I'd like milk or creamer, but the question seems to be rhetorical, because he clearly has no idea where to find either. In the end, he's forced to swallow pride and call Lois, who sweeps in, petite but crackling electric with her gold-rimmed specs and bonnet of tightly curled grey hair. She calls him “Buzzy” and hugs him like a naughty five-year-old and he seems to melt in her embrace, appearing natural and at ease for the only time. Someone close to Apollo tells me that when Lois arrived after the debacle with Marianne, they all thought she was an airhead, but they soon changed their minds. She scolds him playfully:

“He can go to the Moon, but he can't make a cup of coffee …”

Which, on the face of it, would make a fantastic epitaph
one day.

The ex-astronaut sits down and leans forward, cradling his coffee. We chat for a few minutes about this place, their old one in Laguna Beach, the horsey community in the San Fernando Valley where he tried so hard to piece together his life with Joan after retiring from the Air Force.

“… and my daughter had a horse, so I moved there and got that out of my system, sorta …”

Then he pulls up abruptly.

“Now, review if you would how this started and, ah, for some reason someone said, ‘He wants to talk about F-86s' – is that right? That isn't really what this says.” He fingers the printout of an e-mail I sent to give him an idea of what I wanted to talk about. “But that's fine.”

He has a deep voice and enunciates his words with extraordinary care, though the order in which they appear can be less decisive. His syntax can be disorientating when you're with him and takes a while to tune in to, but once on the page you see that he speaks a private creole of tiny sentences with no predicate. They capture the essence of a thought and are often very direct in themselves, yet circle like moons around something that Buzz can't quite bring himself to say, like the speech of a small child, or haiku. There is also the impression that, even when idly discussing the weather, a portion of his psyche still believes itself to be apprising Mission Control of its current status – then, just when you might feel that he's sounding self-important, he'll surprise you with an example of startling self-awareness or a self-deflating confession. At the height of her preflight fear, Joan Aldrin confided to her diary that “He is such a curious mixture of magnificent confidence bordering on conceit and humility, this man I married,” and it doesn't take long to see what she meant. Sometimes when he speaks, you feel that what you're actually hearing is the grunts and groans of two wrestling teams doing battle inside his skull.

We begin by talking about the pair of novels he's cowritten, which I read in Vegas and Barstow. The first,
Encounter with Tiber,
was published in 1996 and is an unwieldy space mystery about a message left by an alien civilization on the Moon. The
second, a sci-fi whodunit called
The Return,
is tighter and lighter of touch. In both, the villains are visionless bureaucrats in the post–Apollo NASA mould, and politicians who won't pony up the dough for essential stuff like Mars Cyclers (more of this in a moment). It plays against the backdrop of a new Space Race with China, which three years later is beginning to look remarkably prescient, because a Chinese space programme is on the launchpad. I ask him how he'd foreseen this and he begins by talking about his writerly ambitions, which surfaced in 1975 or 1976, but took twenty years to focus.

“I kind of challenged myself, ‘What can I do with what I've experienced?' ” he says. “The idea was to talk about what people didn't know about space travel, or what they erroneously thought about it …”

Eventually, he gets to China and its purported lunar ambitions, which have been exciting the European press for several months without gaining much attention here. Aldrin tells me that he first heard mutterings on “the underground.”

“What,” I splutter, “the
space
underground?” I can't imagine what such a thing would be for.

Yeah, he tells me. There are rumours that the Chinese, for whom the Moon has special cultural significance, are also looking at Mars – just as we were in 1969, when von Braun tried to use the success of Apollo as a springboard for his big play, which he presented to Congress that autumn: nuclear rockets assembled in Moon bases, to reach the red planet in the early 1980s. Inevitably, the politicians balked. With Apollo struggling for cash and Vietnam in full swing, they could never support an extension of the programme into Deep Space, and for the next decade and a half, the adventure seemed over, done, an arcane relic of a more affluent and optimistic time. Yet a change came with the
Challenger
shuttle disaster in 1986, after which a shadowy cadre, formed out of a few enthusiasts, organizations and maverick billionaires, began to agitate for a return to the stars, questioning for the first time NASA's custodianship of “The Dream.” Now Aldrin had something to believe in and apply his mind to and ideas tumbled from his head, including a Moon Cycler, which would travel perpetually between the Earth and the
Moon, moving people and materials between the two bodies. When others convinced him that this idea would be better applied to Mars, lots of experts doubted whether it could be done, whether the necessary orbits could be traced –
whether they exist in physics
– but Aldrin found them. By his elegant conception, the cycler would sweep around the Sun and swing past Earth and Mars forever, using only the force of the heavens, gravity, for fuel. It was around this time that he kicked the drugs and booze. To him, the books are about giving context to some of his ideas. They're trying to be realist rather than futurist. Buzz rehearses the arguments about whether to go back to the Moon or Mars first, managing to find a typically maverick case for going to the moons
of
Mars. Then he stops and says:

“So that's two very different philosophies, neither of which are going to be really implemented.”

What? But he devotes his life to this, I say, and he explains some of the background politics of the situation, describing a web of vested interests, woven around established contractors, government agencies, the armed forces and NASA. I recognize all of this from
The Return
and it sounds intractable. Isn't there something quixotic about spending time on all these ideas when he knows they stand no chance of becoming real?

“Well, it looks as though the cards are playing out and someone will swoop in there and snatch victory from … whatever. And we might lose out, but …”

Aldrin shrugs and trails off, while I try to work out what the devil he's saying.

Keen to move on, I note that the decision to try his hand at writing is interesting, because – and even before I've finished the sentence, he's muttering “I don't” – because writing sounds like such hard work for him – “I
don't
” – as he describes it in
Return to Earth
and …

Sorry, Buzz, what did you say?

“It is. Hard work. And I
don't write.
I can take a piece of paper and outline a few things, but I much prefer drawing a graph, where things move from left to right in time periods and I see what's moving, or maybe I'll look at orbits and try and work out progressions of orbits. Not just one mission, but what are the
progressions, what are the buildups.”

Once again, I'm not quite sure what is being said.

“Right now, the basic scheme of things in my mind is different than NASA's. NASA has been sitting there kind of doing nothing and now they've got a little bit of new leadership and it looks to me as though they're going to say, ‘We, NASA, are tired of being in low Earth orbit – we're going to go beyond!' ”