Moondust (2 page)

When you've shared a moment with the whole world, it can be hard to know precisely where your memories end and everyone else's begin.

I see a blindingly bright California day. I am cruising on my bike, a metallic green Schwinn with swept-back handle-bars and a long chopper seat, which I've only just stopped parking in my bedroom at night so I can fall asleep looking at it. I want to be Evel Knievel and have spent the unending American school holiday building ramps with bricks and bits of wood lifted from local building sites. And no one can out-jump me,
no one,
especially not David, who rides by my side … mad, weird David, who's twice everyone else's size and has a penis like a man's and spends all his time trying to make hang gliders out of 2×4's and sheets of plastic. This morning, I found him begging my brother to jump off his garage harnessed to one of these contraptions and when I
pointed out that if the thing plummeted like a stone without anyone attached to it, it would probably do the same with my brother aboard, he insisted that, if you looked – like really, really looked – you would find that it had moved forward from the vertical by at least eight inches. It had, in other words, flown. David's parents sunbathe nude in his backyard sometimes. I can't imagine mine doing that.

No one's in the backyard today. We've just come from his place and his mom and dad are hunched in armchairs, squinting at the TV. We've been riding around for hours, and it's the same everywhere. Cars bake in drives. Dads are home. It's as though the grown-up world is frozen and the Universe holding its breath while these spectral black-and-white images float across the screen, the same pictures in every single house, like the ghosts of ghosts of ghosts.

They're going to the Moon. My dad took me into the garden to look at it last night. I saw him frown as it reflected watery gold on his upturned face, as if someone had stepped over his grave or shone a bright light in his eyes. It was one thing to land a man on the Moon, quite another to bring him back afterwards. But to have stood there in the first place … the thought alone made you tingle. Perhaps coming back wouldn't be such a big deal after that. No wonder David and I, and everyone we know, have spent this summer trying to reach the sky in one way or another.

We're in Orinda, California, a quiet suburb on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay. It's Sunday, July 20, 1969, and the good things in my life are as follows: my bike; the chattering creek that runs through a ravine at the end of the garden; the fact that my teacher next term is going to be Mrs. Lipkin, the foxy twenty-six-year-old hippy chick who's already been married and divorced twice and plays Jefferson Airplane songs to her class on guitar. And there's my friend Scott McGraw, who's older than me, wears lank long hair and bell-bottom jeans, goes everywhere barefoot and is the first person to tell me that Santa Claus is a lie
but if you think that's bad, check out what “fuck” really means.
Scott's brother plays in a band called Love Is Satisfaction.
Love Is Satisfaction:
I
love
that.

All the streets in our neighbourhood are named after characters
from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” This is the kind of thing people do when they're building from scratch, out of nothing, with no past to constrain them. My street's called Van Ripper Lane and it slopes in a long arc from top to bottom. At the top end are the sun-soaked hills of Orinda Downs, where we pretend to ride motocross and find fossils and catch lizards in the rocky outcrops perfumed by wild thyme. When there's a breeze, ripples drift across the tall, golden grass and the hills seem to shimmer and I love to lie in it and let it tickle my face as I stare into the cloudless sky. Sometimes, if you stay there long enough, the smaller creatures forget that you're not part of the hill and they'll scuttle around you without fear. Then you do feel part of the hill and the infinitely receding worlds within it. Within a few years, this will be an estate, full of mock-Georgian houses and fences everywhere. The world is changing.

We coast down the hill and into my drive. David throws his bike on the lawn. I park mine on its stand, issuing a warning to my brother and his tiny, blind-as-a-bat friend Ernie that if they knock it over, I will kill them. Without the wind in our faces, it's hot outside, so we trot through the screen door and into the kitchen, from where a trail of sound and excited voices draws us toward the living room. It's 1:15 PM. My parents' friends the Reuhls and the sweet and elderly Fishes from across the road are leaning forward on couch and chairs, forward over the gold-and-orange shag carpet, clutching beers or cups of coffee tightly with varying mixtures of anxiety and disbelief on their faces. A familiar singsong southern drawl is floating from the TV, decorated with static and peculiar little squeaks and pings which sound like someone flicking the lip of a giant wineglass with their finger. We know this as the voice of Mission Control. His name is Charles Duke, but the astronauts just call him “Houston.” There are other voices, too, but they all sound distant and intermingled and it's hard to get hold of what they're saying. An air of expectancy hangs in the room.

Now we hear:

“Thirty seconds.”

Silence.

“Contact light.”

“Shutdown.”

“Descent engine command override. Engine arm, off, 413 is in.”

A pause.

Silence.

More silence.

“Houston, Tranquillity Base here … the
Eagle
has landed.”

No one in the room seems to get it straightaway. The adults look at each other. Then cheering in the background somewhere and the drawl, like a sigh, the first hint of emotion from inside the box.

“Roger, Tranquillity, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot.”

The room erupts. We erupt, too. My dad ruffles my hair and slaps David on the back. All the little kids run in.

“Boys – they're on the Moon!”

Dad has tears in his eyes. It's the first time I've ever seen him with tears in his eyes, and it will only happen once more.

None of us have any idea what has been going on behind the scenes during those final moments, although the evidence was there in the coded monotone exchanges if you knew how to read them.

The crew NASA chose for this landmark mission consists of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, and they're a peculiar trio. The flight plan called for Collins to orbit the Moon in exalted frustration, tending to the ship that would provide their ride home, the Command Module
Columbia,
while his colleagues dropped to the surface in the
Eagle
lander. He is a communicative character; enjoys fine wines and good books; paints and grows roses. But Armstrong is remote and self-reliant – Collins likes him, but can't find a way through the defences – while the live-wire Aldrin just strikes him as dangerous.

The buildup to the mission was insane. On one occasion the astronauts went on a geology trip to the mountains, but couldn't hear a word their instructors were saying for the sound of media
choppers jostling and whirring overhead like ravenous giant mosquitoes. No one knows for sure what's up there, so the newspapers and TV current-affairs programmes have been full of catastrophic predictions. One academic has been assuring audiences that Moondust on the astronauts' abominable-snowman suits will ignite the moment it comes into contact with oxygen back in
Eagle
's cabin, if it doesn't simply explode underfoot. Another warns that the surface may be composed entirely of dust, into which the craft will sink embarrassingly the moment it touches down, never to be seen again. Still more experts worry over the prospect of inadvertently bringing back an alien bacterium that will destroy all life on Earth, as in the sci-fi movies
The Quatermass Experiment
or
The Andromeda Strain.
Magazines contain drawings of what strange, subterranean creatures may lurk below the surface, hungry for roly-poly white snowmen from Earth.

So it's hardly surprising that there's been tension in the cabin of the
Columbia
Command Module. In the early part of the flight, Aldrin kept describing these “flashes” he would see in the corner of his eyes as the Moon loomed before swallowing them into orbit, and Armstrong was irritated by this suggestion of something unknown and mysterious, just as he is when the other man drops to his knees and says Communion after touching down safely. In the lander, or Lunar Module – a bizarre and spindly construction which looks as though it was assembled from toothpicks and egg cartons by a class of five-year-olds, then roughly covered in foil by their moms – he has constantly felt “behind the airplane.” Not quite in control, and Armstrong doesn't like that, either.

But the real drama happened as they were coming down, nearing the surface. As David and I sped unsuspecting down the road; as Mum was pulling some beers from the fridge; as my father and Mr. Reuhl and Mr. Fish, who used to pay me a princely two dollars to mow his minuscule lawn and would have paid more if Dad hadn't instructed him not to, were discussing the implications of all this and the probability that they would get to visit the Moon as tourists in their own lifetimes. Mike Collins had released the
Eagle
from
Columbia
's grip just after 10 AM our
time. They'd flown in formation for a short while so that the Command Module pilot could inspect the other craft from his porthole. Satisfied that it was in good repair, he masked his anxiety with a joke.

“I think you've got a fine-looking flying machine, there,
Eagle,
despite the fact that you're upside down.”

In zero gravity there is no upside down. Armstrong played along. “Somebody's upside down,” he said.

Then a burst of thrusters took
Columbia
away until the
Eagle
was a little sparkly point of light, like a tiny diamond floating between Collins and the cratered surface. He had considered the chances of success and privately rated them at about 50 per cent, unaware that his commander had come up with the same odds. These were generous according to some of their colleagues' calculations.

With ten minutes remaining to touchdown,
Eagle
was 50,000 feet above the lunar surface. Armstrong and Aldrin stood side by side, spacesuited, anchored to the floor by harnesses. Everything had gone according to plan so far and preparations were on schedule. They had pressurized
Eagle
's fuel tanks, primed the computer and checked their trajectory by training their navigation telescope on the sun. They activated the camera and armed the descent engine. Then Aldrin pressed the ignition button and the rocket engine came to life. Thirty seconds later, the cabin shuddered as they roared to full thrust.

And now there was a problem.

Eagle
was facing the Moon, and Armstrong noticed that the landmarks he navigated by were coming up two seconds ahead of expectation: they were set to overshoot the landing area, but the computer hadn't picked up the error. At 46,000 feet, he flipped the craft over, so that the landing radar faced down and he and Aldrin found themselves looking up at the shimmering, miragelike Earth. The ride was noticeably jerkier than in simulation as Aldrin compared data from the radar and computer and found a discrepancy of several thousand feet. Knowing the radar to be more reliable, he decided to instruct the computer to accept its information and act on it, but as he hit the necessary buttons, the piercing buzz of the Master Alarm filled
Eagle
's
cabin. They looked down and saw the “PROG” light glowing sulphuric amber on the computer display.

“Program alarm,” said Armstrong.

His voice stayed even, but the words were clipped, urgent. Aldrin instructed the computer to supply the alarm code and “1202” flashed onto the screen. He didn't know what this meant, but suspected that it was something to do with the computer being overloaded. This had failed to happen in any of the simulation he'd been a part of. Now wasn't the time for it.

The focus turned to Earth and the thirty-five-year-old flight director, Gene Kranz. He knew the alarm was serious, because he'd seen something like it back in the first week of July and he'd aborted the virtual mission as a result. The truth was that he and his staff had been having problems for the last hour, with communications cutting out – sending Mission Control screens blank and filling headsets with static – then resuming for barely long enough to justify continuing the descent. There was a 2.6-second delay in communications with the Moon and so no time for elaboration. In simulations, controllers had discovered a
dead-man's box
which was defined by this delay, in which the LM would always hit the surface before they could react to a problem and order an abort, and about which nothing could be done. Now the exchanges were breathless and suspended, like the
Eagle
itself.