We may, then, absorb the lesson: Electricity is an avatar of hate which gives pain to the senses, emits static, electronic hum, neon flicker, light glare, shock, heat radiation. Whereas thoughts of the sun and royal spectacle are in the mystery of a flame. So Von Braun was the heat in rocketry, the animal in the program. By public estimate he had been a Nazi—that was glamor enough. Who could begin to measure the secret appeal of the Nazis by now? It was a fit subject for Aquarius to begin to brood upon: America was this day mighty but headless, America was torn by the specter of civil war, and many a patriot and many a big industrialist—they were so often the same!—saw the cities and the universities as a collective pit of Black heathen, Jewish revolutionaries, a minority polyglot hirsute scum of nihilists, hippies, sex maniacs, drug addicts, liberal apologists and freaks. Crime pushed the American public to give birth to dreams of order. Fantasies of order had to give way to lusts for new order. Order was restraint, but new order would call for a mighty vault, an exceptional effort, a unifying dream. Was the conquest of space then a potential chariot of Satan, the unique and grand avenue for the new totalitarian? Aquarius was not certain. It was possible that neo-Nazism and technology were finally inimical to each other, but it was all to be considered again and again. It was complex. At this instant, he would not have minded the return of his ego.
Meanwhile, here was Von Braun for study. Yes, he had come in by helicopter to the Royal Oak Country Club in Titusville. The roads were crowded and it was incontestable that on this night, this night above all, hours before the mightiest launching of his life, Von Braun’s hours were of value to him and to others. Still, the impression had to arise that he would have arrived by helicopter in any case. The helicopter had become the vehicle of status of that Praetorian Guard now forming of generals, state troopers, admirals, Republican congressmen with wives-on-junket, governors from he-man states, he-man senators, law-and-order mayors, traffic-crisis monitors, and VIPs on state visits to troublesome cities. The helicopter was there to signify: a man engaged in flag activity was dropping in on the spot. So the helicopter was a status symbol as special as a Junior League Ball. Not everybody who was moderately rich and powerful in American life would necessarily want to go to the ball or ride in the bubble, but for that matter not everybody who was thus rich and powerful was welcome at either.
Under whose auspices then had Von Braun descended? We can pretend to investigate. A large publishing corporation long associated with the Space Program had invited corporation presidents of important firms to voyage out for a few days on a trip to Houston to meet astronauts, then on to Kennedy to see the launching. A private speech by Von Braun was one of the features of the junket, and they waited for him now in a hexagonal banquet room finished in varieties of walnut-colored wood, a fit meeting place for American gods and cousins of the gods, since the shape of the chamber gave an echo of clans meeting in a wooded glen. Talismans in the form of intricate hex signs were inlaid in the wood of the walls around the room below the ceiling. Yet the walls, as though aware the gods were American, their powers corporate, were finished pale in stain, and therefore not excitative to the bottled emotions of business leaders. In any case, the golf course abutted the premises, and some of the guests left the bar and waited for the helicopter outside, standing in the steamy air of evening on that stiff rubbery thick-bladed Florida grass so much an overnight product of hyperfertilizer, turf-planting, and the tropics that it felt like plastic underfoot.
It was a not untypical American gathering. Doubtless, equivalent Soviet meetings were similar. It did not matter how high or prominent these people had become, how far some of them had traveled from their beginnings. There was still the same awkward, embarrassed, well-scrubbed air of a church social. Americans might yet run the world, they were certainly first on the way to the stars, and yet they had never filled the spaces between. Americans were still as raw as an unboiled potato. It hardly mattered if Americans were rich or poor. When they got together, they did not know what to say to each other. It is part of the double life of Americans, the unequal development of the lobes in the national schizophrenia. Men whose minds worked with an admirable depth of reference and experience in their business or occupation were less interesting in a social gathering, at least in this social gathering where they were plucked up from a more familiar core of small talk and deposited on the rubber-mat turf of the Royal Oak. It was almost a reflection of the national belief that a man who worked thoroughly at his job was given dispensation from the obligation to have a good time. So conversation took overloaded steps over successive hills, and that was all right, the point of the evening was that they would hear Von Braun and be able to refer to it afterward. The American family travels to strange states and places in order to take their photographs and bring them back, as if the photographs will serve in future years as data-points, crystals of memory to give emotional resonance to experience which was originally without any. The data-point will give warmth in old age. So Von Braun would be a data-point tonight. It would not matter if a good time was not otherwise had. Aquarius’ mind, brooding through these familiar thoughts, was brought up short with the radically new idea that perhaps some instinct in American life had been working all these decades to keep the country innocent, keep it raw, keep it crude as a lout, have it indeed ready to govern the universe without an agreeable culture to call its own—for then, virgin ore, steadfastly undeveloped in all the hinterworld of the national psyche, a single idea could still electrify the land. Culture was insulation against a single idea, and America was like a rawboned lover gangling into middle age, still looking for his mission.
Since Aquarius on evenings like this would look for the nutrient in liquor the way a hound needles out marrow from a bone, he was nose-deep into his second drink, and hardly saw the helicopter come in. A sense of presence overhead, fore and aft lights whirruping like crickets in the dusk, a beating of rotors in a wheat-flattened gust, and it was down, a creature. Nothing inspired so fine a patriotic cocktail of mild awe, mild respect, and uncorrupted envy as the sight of Praetorians emerging from an insect the size of an elephant which they commanded.
The guests immediately made their way inside. Von Braun, dressed in a silver-gray suit, white shirt, and black tie looked more impressive tonight than the day before at a press conference. That had taken place in front of several hundred correspondents with movie cameras, television, and ushers in the audience holding portable microphones to amplify and record all questions the Press might ask for posterity. Von Braun had been on a panel with Dr. Mueller, Dr. Debus, Dr. Gilruth, and a director from Langley, but half the questions had gone to Von Braun. He seemed sensitive to the fact that the Press made jokes about his past. There was one tale every reporter had heard—“Tell me, Dr. von Braun,” a correspondent said, “what is there to keep Saturn V from landing on London?” Von Braun walked out of the room. But the story was doubtless apocryphal; it smacked of reporters’ bile. Journalists were often vicious in their prior comments about VIPs they were going to interview, as if to compensate for the uxorious tone of the restrained questions they would finally ask. Aquarius had been with a small pack who had gone to talk to Dr. Debus, director of all launching operations at Kennedy and a former colleague of Von Braun’s. “Just give the Nazi salute and he’ll holler ‘Heil Hitler!’ ” they all promised each other, but Debus to their consternation proved out a pleasant Junker gentleman with dueling scars on his mouth and bags under his eyes—the sort of aristocratic face and gracious if saturnine manner which belongs to an unhappy German prince from a small principality. The questions of the Press were predictably unctuous, and trading notes afterward, they quoted Debus respectfully. He had given them the best of lines; when asked if he were planning a celebration while the astronauts were on the moon surface he had smiled and cleared his throat with a cultivated sound. “No,” he had said, “no champagne in the refrigerator.” Debus was not afraid of the Press.
But Von Braun was too prominent
, and had—although his official position was nominally no more elevated than his countryman’s—much too much to lose. A press conference, no matter how many he had had, was a putative den of menace. So his eyes flew left and right as he answered a question, flicking back and forth in their attention with the speed of eyes watching a Ping-Pong game, and his mouth moved from a straight line to a smile, but the smile was no more than a significator, a tooth-filled rectangle. Words were being mouthed like signal flags.
Since he had, in contrast to his delivery, a big burly squared-off bulk of a body which gave hint of the methodical ruthlessness of more than one Russian bureaucrat, Von Braun’s relatively small voice, darting eyes, and semaphoric presentations of lip made it obvious he was a man of opposites. He revealed a confusing aura of strength and vulnerability, of calm and agitation, cruelty and concern, phlegm and sensitivity, which would have given fine play to the talents of so virtuoso an actor as Mr. Rod Steiger. Von Braun had in fact something of Steiger’s soft voice, that play of force and weakness which speaks of consecration and vanity, dedication and indulgence, steel and fat.
Still he did not do badly at his press conference. If he had started nervously, there was an exchange where he encountered his opposition. A correspondent from East Berlin asked him in German to answer a question. There had been a silence. For an instant Von Braun had not known exactly what to do, had in fact stolen a look at Mueller. NASA was sensitive about origins. Two of the three directors in the center of the Manned Spacecraft Program were, after all, German. And there was no joy in emphasizing this, since those few liberal congressmen who were sympathetic to the needs of the space budget would only find their way harder if Von Braun and Debus were too prominent.
Von Braun fielded the difficulty as follows: He translated the question into English. Then he gave a long detailed answer in English (which succeeded in boring the Press). Then, taking an equally long time, he translated his answer back to German. Finally, he took a nimble step away from this now somnolent situation by remarking, “I must warn the hundred and thirty-four Japanese correspondents here at Cape Kennedy that I cannot do the same in Japanese.” The remark drew the largest laugh of the afternoon, and thereby enabled him to prosper. The contest in press conferences is to utter the remark which will be used as the lead quotation in wire-service stories, and Dr. George Mueller, anxious to establish his centrality on this panel, and his eminence over his directors, answered every question helpfully, giving facts, figures, prognostications of future activity. He was a one-man mine of pieces of one-line information with follow-up suitable for heads, leads, paragraph leads, and bottom-of-the-page slugs, but Von Braun picked up the marbles. In fact he had the subtle look of a fat boy who has gathered the shooters in many a game.
When asked how he evaluated the importance of the act of putting a man on the moon, Von Braun answered, “I think it is equal in importance to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling up on the land.” It drew a hand of applause. It would get the headline. Some of the Press literally stood up.
Thus, he was sound, sensible, and quick as mercury. Yet his appearance had been not as impressive then as now tonight at the Royal Oak. Then he had been somehow not forceful enough for the public image, small-voiced, almost squeaky for a man with so massive a frame. Whereas, here at the Country Club, shaking hands, he had obvious funds of charisma. “You must help us give a shove to the program,” he said to Aquarius on greeting. (This was virtually what Debus had said on parting.)
Yes, Von Braun most definitely was not like other men. Curiously shifty, as if to show his eyes in full would give away much too much, he offered the impression of a man who wheeled whole complexes of caution into every gesture—he was after all an engineer who put massive explosives into adjoining tanks and then was obliged to worry about leaks. Indeed, what is plumbing but the prevention of treachery in closed systems? So he would never give anything away he did not have to, but the secrets he held, the tensions he held, the very philosophical explosives he contained under such supercompression gave him an air of magic. He was a rocketeer. He had lived his life with the obsession of reaching other planets. It is no small impulse. Immediate reflection must tell you that a man who wishes to reach heavenly bodies is an agent of the Lord or Mephisto. In fact, Von Braun, with his handsome spoiled face, massive chin, and long and highly articulated nose, had a fair resemblance to Goethe. (Albeit none of the fine weatherings of the Old Master’s head.) But brood on it: the impulse to explore the universe seems all but to suppose a divine will or a divine displeasure, or—our impurities matched only by our corruptions—some mixture of the two. What went on in Von Braun’s mind during a dream? “Yes,” he said with a smile, “we are in trouble. You must help us.”
“Who are you kidding?” said Aquarius, the good American. “You’re going to get everything you want.”
Whether the intimacy was too abrupt, or Von Braun’s reaction disclosed too much—his eyes gleamed with sudden funds of pleasure at the remark—he quickly looked discomposed, and as quickly left the conversation by failing to forward a remark in return. Then he waved some ambiguous good-by and moved quickly across the room. If his sense of friend and foe was good—a reasonable assumption to make about a man like Von Braun—it was obvious he did not think Aquarius would make such a good friend.
The banquet was roast beef. Ice creams and sauces for dessert. Coffee. The spoon on the glass. The publisher of the publishing corporation was talking. “We are signally honored tonight to have with us,” he began, “one of the true fathers of space, Dr. Hermann Oberth, who, with Dr. Goddard and a Russian named Tsiolkovsky, is really and truly one of the originators of the whole concept of the exploration of space.” An old man, seventy-five at least, with white hair and a white bushy mustache stood up. He had the birdlike self-sufficiency of the old, a vain sly white old bird, as if he were not only cousin to an old condor but had bought the nest as well. There was a smattering of applause. His name meant little outside of rocketry circles, but the speaker had used his presence for a joke. “I heard earlier tonight that at least two men in this room, one of whom you’ll hear from later, are students of his. They said in response to his comment that he was a very good teacher, that at least they weren’t dropouts; one of them is Dr. von Braun.” The laugh came on that. Of all the nations in the world, America had possessed the firmest patriotic firmament; the common culture had never been rich enough to corrode it. Not till recently. Now, dropouts were pits in the shining surface. This then offered the suggestion that Von Braun was a regenerator of the shining surface. Therefore, the audience was not to be at ease during his introduction, for the new speaker, who described himself as a “backup publisher,” went into a little too much historical detail. “During the Thirties he was employed by the Ordnance Department of the German government developing liquid fuel rockets. During World War II he made very significant developments in rocketry for his government.”
A tension spread in this audience of corporation presidents and high executives, of astronauts, a few at any rate, and their families. There was an uneasy silence, an embarrassed pall at the unmentioned word of Nazi—it was the shoe which did not drop to the floor. So no more than a pitter-patter of clapping was aroused when the speaker went quickly on to say: “In 1955 he became an American citizen himself.” It was only when Von Braun stood up at the end that the mood felt secure enough to shift. A particularly hearty and enthusiastic hand of applause swelled into a standing ovation. Nearly everybody stood up. Aquarius, who finally cast his vote by remaining seated, felt pressure not unrelated to refusing to stand for The Star-Spangled Banner. It was as if the crowd with true American enthusiasm had finally declared, “Ah don’ care if he is some kind of ex-Nazi, he’s a good loyal patriotic American.”
Von Braun was. If patriotism is the ability to improve a nation’s morale, then Von Braun was a patriot. It was plain that some of these corporation executives loved him. In fact, they revered him. He was th
e high priest of their precise art—manufacture. If many too many an American product was accelerating into shoddy these years since the war, if planned obsolescence had often become a euphemism for sloppy workmanship, cynical cost-cutting, swollen advertising budgets, inefficiency and general indifference, then in one place at least, and for certain, America could be proud of a product. It was high as a castle and tooled more finely than an exquisite watch.
Now the real and true tasty beef of capitalism got up to speak, the grease and guts of it, the veritable brawn, and spoke with fulsome language in his small and well-considered voice. He was with friends this occasion, and so a savory, a gravy of redolence came into his tone, his voice was not unmusical, it had overtones which hinted of angelic superpossibilities one could not otherwise lay on the line. He was when all was said like the head waiter of the largest hofbrau house in Heaven. “Honored guests, ladies and gentlemen,” Von Braun began, “it is with a great deal of respect tonight that I meet you, the leaders and the captains of the mainstream of American industry and life. Without your success in building and maintaining the economic foundations of this nation, the resources for mounting tomorrow’s expedition to the moon would never have been committed.… Tomorrow’s historic launch belongs to you and to the men and women who sit behind the desks and administer your companies’ activities, to the men who sweep the floors in your office buildings and to every American who walks the street of this productive land. It is an American triumph. Many times I have thanked God for allowing me to be a part of the history that will be made here today and tomorrow and in the next few days. Tonight I want to offer my gratitude to you and all Americans who have created the most fantastically progressive nation yet conceived and developed.” He went on to talk of space as “the key to our future on earth,” and echoes of his vision drifted through the stale tropical air of a banquet room after coffee—perhaps he was hinting at the discords and nihilism traveling in bands of brigands across the earth. “The key to our future on earth. I think we should see clearly from this statement that the Apollo 11 moon trip even from its inception was not intended as a one-time trip that would rest alone on the merits of a single journey. If our intention had been merely to bring back a handful of soil and rocks from the lunar gravel pit and then forget the whole thing”—he spoke almost with contempt of the meager resources of the moon—“we would certainly be history’s biggest fools. But that is not our intention now—it never will be. What we are seeking in tomorrow’s trip is indeed that key to our future on earth. We are expanding the mind of man. We are extending this God-given brain and these God-given hands to their outermost limits and in so doing all mankind will benefit. All mankind will reap the harvest.… What we will have attained when Neil Armstrong steps down upon the moon is a completely new step in the evolution of man.” (Which would lead Aquarius days later to wonder at the origin of Armstrong’s first speech on the moon.) “It will cause a new element to sweep across the face of this good earth and to invade the thoughts of all men.”