Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) Read Online Free PDF Page A

pauses, he searched for words. When the words came out, their ordinary content made the wait seem excessive. He minted no phrases. “We are here” … a pause … “to be able to talk about this attempt” … a real pause, as if the next experience were ineffable but with patience would yet be captured … “because of the success of four previous Apollo command flights” … pause, as if to pick up something he had left out … “and a number of unmanned flights.” A shy smile. “Each of those flights”—he was more wooden than young Robert Taylor, young Don Ameche, young Randolph Scott—“contributed in a great way” … deprecatory smile … “to this flight.” As a speaker he was all but limp—still it did not leave him unremarkable. Certainly the knowledge he was an astronaut restored his stature, yet even if he had been a junior executiveaccepting an award, Armstrong would have presented a quality which was arresting, for he was extraordinarily remote. He was simply not like other men. He would have been more extraordinary in fact if he had been just a salesman making a modest inept dull little speech, for then one would have been forced to wonder how he had ever gotten his job, how he could sell even one item, how in fact he got out of bed in the morning. Something particularly innocent or subtly sinister was in the gentle remote air. If he had been a young boy selling subscriptions at the door, one grandmother might have warned her granddaughter never to let him in the house; another would have commented, “That boy will go very far.” He was apparently in communion with some string in the universe others did not think to play.
    Collins and Aldrin followed with their opening remarks, and they had personalities which were more comfortable to grasp. Aldrin, all meat and stone, was a man of solid presentation, dependable as a tractor, but suggesting the strength of a tank, dull, almost ponderous, yet with the hint of unpredictability, as if, eighteen drinks in him, his eyes would turn red, he would arm-wrestle a gorilla or invite you to join him in jumping out a third-story window in order to see who could do the better somersault on the follow-through out of the landing. This streak was radium and encased within fifty psychical and institutional caskings of lead, but it was there, Aquarius thought, perhaps a clue in the way he dressed—very dressy for an astronaut—a green luminous silk suit, a white shirt, a green luminous tie. It clashed with the stolid presentation of his language. Aldrin spoke in a deep slow comfortingly nasal tone—a mighty voice box—his face was strong and grim. The movie director in Aquarius would have cast him on the spot for Major in Tank Cavalry. He had big features and light brown hair, almost gold. His eyes took a turn down like samurai eyes, the corners of his lips took a right-angle turn down—it gave him the expression of a serious man at home on a field of carnage, as if he were forever saying, “This is serious stuff, fellows, there’s lots of blood around.” So Aldrin also looked like the kind of jockwho could be headmaster of a prep school. He had all the locker-room heartiness and solemnity of a team man. Although he had been a pole-vaulter at West Point, it would have been easy to mistake him for a shot-putter, a lacrosse player, or a baseball catcher. In football he would have probably been a linebacker. For this last, he was actually not big enough (since the astronauts were required to be no more than five feet eleven inches tall and could hardly be overweight), but he was one of those men who looked larger than his size for his condition was excellent—every discipline of his moves spoke of grim devoted unrelenting support given to all his body-world of muscle. From the back of the neck to the joints of the toes, from the pectorals to the hamstrings, the deltoids to the abdominals, he was a life given over to good physical condition, a form of