Free Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) by Norman Mailer Page B

walls? And thought that of course they would keep it like the sterile room in a delivery ward, for indeed there was something about space which spoke of men preparing to deliver the babies they would themselves bear. The aim of technique was to parallel nature, and the interior of the VAB was the antechamber of a new Creation.
    So, it was probably the Vehicle Assembly Building which encouraged Aquarius to release the string of the balloon and let his ego float off to whatever would receive it. It was not that he suddenly decided to adopt the Space Program, or even approve it in part, it was just that he came to recognize that whatever was in store, a Leviathan was most certainly ready to ascend the heavens—whether for good or ill he might never know—but he was standing at least in the first cathedral of the age of technology, and he might as well recognize that the world would change, that the world
had
changed, even as he had thought to be pushing and shoving on it with
his
mighty ego. And it had changed in ways he did not recognize, had never anticipated, and could possibly not comprehend now. The change was mightier than he had counted on. The full brawn of the rocket came over him in this cavernous womb of an immensity, this giant cathedral of a machine designed to put together another machine which would voyage through space. Yes, this emergence of a ship to travel the ether was no event he could measure by any philosophy he had been able to put together in his brain.
    Yet all the signs leading to the Vehicle Assembly Building said VAB. VAB—it could be the name of a drink or a deodorant, or itcould be suds for the washer. But it was not a name for this warehouse of the gods. The great churches of a religious age had names: the Alhambra, Santa Sophia, Mont-Saint-Michel, Chartres, Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame. Now: VAB. Nothing fit anything any longer. The art of communication had become the mechanical function, and the machine was the work of art. What a fall for the ego of the artist. What a climb to capture the language again! It occurred to him on the instant that one’s fear of height must be at least a partial function of the importance of one’s ego. Or was it a direct function of that part of one’s ego which was useless? A man was presumably ready to take any drop when the ego was finally congruent to the soul and all the signs said go. Yes, one would have to create a psychology to comprehend the astronaut. For a beginning, however, it would be good to recognize how simple he must become. Do not dominate this experience with your mind was the lesson—look instead to receive its most secret voice. He would be, perforce, an acolyte to technology. What a gruel. By whatever measure, he was now forced to recognize the ruddy good cheer and sense of extraordinary morale of the workers in the VAB. As they passed him in the elevators, or as he went by them in the halls and the aisles, a sense of cooperative effort, of absorption in the work at hand, and anticipation of the launch was in the pleasure of their faces. He had never seen an army of factory workers who looked so happy. It was like the week before Christmas. As at the Manned Spacecraft Center they seemed to be ranked by the number of admission badges they wore. The smiles of the ones who wore the most seemed to thrive the most, as if they were not identification tags which reduced them to parts of a machine, but rather were combat ribbons, theater-of-war ribbons. Trade-union geezers, age of fifty, with round faces and silver-rimmed spectacles strutted like first sergeants at the gate for a three-day pass.
    So Aquarius began to live without his ego, a modest quiet observer who went on trips through the Space Center and took in interviews, and read pieces of literature connected to the subject, and spent lonely nights not drinking in his air-conditioned motelroom, and thought—not of himself but of the size of the feat and the project before him, and by