After Vespers and collation, NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies or ABC’s Movie of the Week plays on the wide color console in the priests’ lounge. Officially the children aren’t allowed in the priests’ quarters except on Movie Night, which is usually on Thursday when there are no Holy Days of Obligation, but Julie, Billy, and Duncan often find a way to sneak behind the large settee that crowds the room before the priests have made their way from chapel or the dining hall, and this is where they’ll be when Saturday Night at the Movies begins playing.
But this night is different. Instead of a recent release, the television is playing a special on the Apollo lunar landing. They peer from behind the feather-down pillows thick with cat hair at the edge of the settee, and Duncan is struck by the sharp, melancholy black-and-white images on the screen. There is the young President Kennedy before a crowd of students at Rice University, his mouth working without sound. Brother Wilhelm fiddles with the cantankerous, loose knob, and Duncan hears John F. Kennedy’s voice:
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard …
Billy nudges Duncan. What is he saying?
Shhhhh. I’m trying to hear.
We shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced …
Duncan, Billy says, tugging at his sleeve.
It’s the moon, Billy. They’re sending a man to the moon.
… on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body.
I know, Duncan, Billy says, exasperated. They did this before we were born.
He doesn’t remember, Billy, Julie says. He doesn’t remember any of this.
But Duncan, they didn’t—
Hush, Billy, Julie hisses, and shakes her head at him.
And, therefore, as we set sail, we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
The program cuts to footage of the Apollo 11 moon voyage and the launch from Cape Canaveral. Duncan watches transfixed as the Saturn Vignites and flame surrounds the base of the rocket’s hull. For long moments the rocket seems to hover there, trembling slightly, ponderously upon its pillar of flame, as if it might simply keel over and hurtle, cartwheeling, into the earth, but then slowly, slowly the great rocket begins to move upward, vibrating with the effort of defying gravity, its plating shimmering with shattering ice cascading down the length of its super-cooled hull.
Duncan can feel the thundering vibrations of the rocket’s blast as it presses its way against gravity toward the moon. And, at the top of that colossal rocket, the Apollo command module, Columbia, with its three astronauts sitting as if upon the head of a combustible needle. Farther and farther the rocket presses, an eight-hundred-foot blazing orange tail arcing northeast across the late autumn sky above the Florida Keys.
And then, the first blurry images from Buzz Aldrin’s camera of the lunar surface: desolate, cratured plains strewn with rocks and glinting regolith and the black foreshortened horizon beyond and, farther, the curving plane of the planet suggesting only a greater, absolute darkness. Duncan imagines the moon’s coldness and the silence and the absence of color or sound.
Magnificent desolation, Aldrin says, and Duncan murmurs in agreement as his words hang in the vacuum between sensation and thought and as the moon’s panorama curves out into blackness. Magnificent desolation.
Duncan, Billy begins again, whispering conspiratorially. They never made it. They never made it off the moon. The moon jumper failed to blast off and they were left stuck there. The other astronaut just kept going around the moon waiting for them.
Billy makes a looping motion with his finger and says, Around and around until he died. They all died. What they showed on TV after that, it was all a lie. They’d filmed it before they left.
Hush, Julie hisses. Duncan, don’t listen to a word he says. He’s making it all up. He’s just being silly and spiteful.
The astronauts’ ghostly images flit and tremble on the screen as they move back and forth in surreal motion, bounding across the gray, pockmarked surface and stirring silver star dust, which no wind ever moves, imprinting their footsteps forever upon a surface last touched by God.
Brother Wilhelm reaches a palsied and withered hand forward and turns the knob to the left, and with an audible click and hum of transponders cooling, the image of the astronauts and the moon fades slowly from the four corners of the television screen to one single, glowing dot at its center, and then It is gone entirely as if it had never been, and only the shimmering white spark that momentarily impresses itself upon Duncan’s sensitive iris, and remains shaking on the inside of his eyelids long after he closes his eyes, convinces him it was real.
Brother Wilhelm is asleep in his armchair, and before they leave, Duncan tenderly touches his hand, which lies trembling upon the armrest. For a moment Duncan stands and listens to Brother Wilhelm’s apnea and the long seconds of silence between his shunting and staggered breaths.
When he takes the stairs to bed, one of the boys has already dimmed the lamps. With Brother Wilhelm sleeping, they know they will have an extra hour or two of heat; the hallway is warm with the sound of water bubbling in the radiators and of boys’ snoring contently in their sleep. Dressed in his pajamas and wrapped in a blanket, with Brother Canice’s radio glowing from his bedside table and crackling and hissing with static, Duncan sits on his bed and stares out at the night sky. High over the prairie shines a full moon encircled by a ring of bluish-white phosphorescence. The ghostly haze of ice and moisture casts its shape in magnified projection: its great maria, those shadowy plains known as seas, and its cratured scars—the illusion of cheek, nose bridge, and brow—creating the sense of some benevolent, slightly curious or confused face, peering down upon and illuminating the snow-covered plains of Thule. From the radio comes a sudden high peak of static and then the disembodied and fractured sound of voices carried by radio waves across the vast distance of space over a decade before:
102:44:45 ALDRIN: 100 feet, 3½ down, 9 forward. Five percent. Quantity light.
102:44:54 ALDRIN: Okay. 75 feet. And it’s looking good. Down a half, 6 forward.
102:45:02 DUKE: 60 seconds.
102:45:04 ALDRIN: Light’s on.
102:45:08 ALDRIN: 60 feet, down 2½. [Pause] 2 forward. 2 forward. That’s good.
102:45:17 ALDRIN: 40 feet, down 2½. Picking up some dust.
102:45:21 ALDRIN: 30 feet, 2½ down. [Garbled] shadow.
102:45:25 ALDRIN: 4 forward. 4 forward. Drifting to the right a little. 20 feet, down a half.
102:45:31 DUKE: 30 seconds.
102:45:32 ALDRIN: Drifting forward just a little bit; that’s good. [Garbled] [Pause]
102:45:40 ALDRIN: Contact Light.
102:45:43 ARMSTRONG: Shutdown
102:45:44 ALDRIN: Okay. Engine Stop.
102:45:45 ALDRIN: ACA out of Detent.
102:45:46 ARMSTRONG: Out of Detent. Auto.
102:45:47 ALDRIN: Mode Control, both Auto. Descent Engine Command Override, Off. Engine Arm, Off. 413 is in.
102:45:57 DUKE: We copy you down, Eagle.
102:45:58 ARMSTRONG: Engine arm is off. [Pause] Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.
102:46:06 DUKE: Roger, Twan … Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.
102:46:16 ALDRIN: Thank you.
And when Duncan whispers JFK’s words, he might have been praying: Dear Lord, as we set sail, we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked. Amen.
He hears Billy’s words clamoring in his head again: They never made it. They never made it off the moon. The moon jumper failed to blast off and they were left stuck there. They all died. He cannot possibly believe it is true even as he stares up into the night sky and imagines that he sees the small dark shapes of the two men splayed and bent aslant the surface of the moon. But they came home, didn’t they? They must have. Mustn’t they?