Part 23 (1/2)

”Mrs. Collins,” asked a reporter, ”do you mind that your husband is not landing with the others?”

Mike was remaining in the mother s.h.i.+p Columbia while the other boys were on the Moon. Like her husband, Pat insisted that she didn't care. But Aquarius didn't believe her. How could she and Mike not care that he had traveled all the way to the Moon and couldn't even go down and take a stroll on its beachy surface? Mailer waited for Pat to crack, but it was not to be.

So he was off to Joan Aldrin's, whose glistening pool surrounded by a fence seemed to be an oasis of tranquility. What darker things lurked beneath the placid surface? Aquarius wondered. It started to rain, a summer thunderstorm beating down on the roofs of Na.s.sau Bay, and the reporters had to put on their red and yellow ponchos.

”Mrs. Aldrin,” one of them asked, ”what were you doing when they landed?”

”I was holding on to the wall,” said Joan, emotionally exhausted. ”I was praying.”

Aquarius could almost smell that something was amiss here at the Aldrins'. A strange bird, this Joan, but what kind of beast was her Buzz? Mailer sensed, even from this brief glimpse, that Joan was trapped in a marriage full of raw agony. (With four marriages already under his belt, three to aspiring actresses, Aquarius knew of what he spoke.)

”Listen,” Joan asked. ”Aren't you all excited? They did it! They did it!”

But the crowd of wet reporters seemed bored and ready to go home. They'd grown jaded after a decade of covering the wives. After Joan returned inside, with no more wives to cover that day and the Moon landing that the country had been antic.i.p.ating for a decade now behind him, Aquarius suddenly regretted that he hadn't paid Joan, whose husband had just landed on the Moon, the attention she deserved.

At just before 10 p.m., on that same day, July 20, 1969, six and a half hours after they'd landed on the Moon, Neil Armstrong stepped off of Eagle's footpad onto the Moon.

”That's one small step for man,” declared Neil, ”one giant leap for mankind.”

Only after Neil had planted his foot on the Moon, which reminded him of the American high desert, was Buzz allowed to join him. ”It's like making an entrance onstage,” said Joan. The second man on the Moon described his view as ”magnificent desolation.”

Joan threw kisses toward the TV screen, laughing, her whole body shuddering on the verge of tears as Buzz bounced across the lunar surface, doing what the wives named the Kangaroo Hop.

”How can you be serious about what you're doing when you're doing that?” asked Joan. ”He's gotten more TV time in the last two days than I ever did in a year of trying!” Still, she couldn't shake how devastated her husband was that he had to be second. The glory would forever be Neil's, who would always be first.

After the astronauts completed a two-and-a-half-hour moonwalk and spending twenty-one hours on the Moon, the Eagle prepared to lift off to rendezvous with Mike in orbit. As Buzz got closer and closer to Earth, Joan felt sweeter than ever toward her big cosmic baby, coming home to Mama. ”Bless him. Bless the baby! They're on their way back to Mother. That's a good boy. Just think, tonight we'll have that beautiful big burn and then-look out, world, here we come! I don't have any more tears. I think I've just cried for the past two weeks.”

”I called three of, in my view,” said President Nixon, ”three of the greatest ladies and most courageous ladies in the whole world today-your wives.”

The man who had once schooled Khrushchev on the virtues of America's greatest cold warriors-the true-blue housewives of the U.S. of A.-was now speaking in person to the Apollo 11 astronauts upon their safe return to Earth, and brought a message from their wives.

”I bring their love and their congratulations. And also, I've got to let you in on a little secret. I made a date with them.”

The astronauts couldn't do much about that one, seeing as they were speaking to the president from behind gla.s.s, quarantined in the MQF, the Mobile Quarantine Facility, a tricked-out silver Airstream parked aboard the USS Hornet. Scientists thought there was a possibility, no matter how remote, that the astronauts might have picked up some alien Moon germs that could produce a lethal global epidemic. Flying off shelves in bookstores, Michael Crichton's bestselling novel The Andromeda Strain dramatized such a consequence of an extraterrestrial plague.

”I invited them to dinner on the thirteenth of August,” continued Nixon, ”right after you come out of quarantine. It will be a state dinner held in Los Angeles. The governors of all the fifty states will be there, the amba.s.sadors, others from around the world and in America. And all I want to know-will you come? We want to honor you then.”

Neil Armstrong smiled. ”We'll do anything you say, Mr. President.”

”This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation, because as a result of what happened, in this week, the world is bigger, infinitely, and also, as I'm going to find on this trip around the world...as a result of what you've done, the world's never been closer together before,” said the beaming president. ”Incidentally, the speeches that you have to make at this dinner can be very short. And if you want to say fantastic or beautiful, that's all right with us. Don't try to think of any new adjectives. They've all been said.”

The headlines were thrilling:

MEN WALK ON MOON. ASTRONAUTS LAND ON PLAIN. COLLECT ROCKS, PLANT FLAG

A POWDERY SURFACE IS CLOSELY EXPLORED

ANCIENT DREAM FULFILLED

Twenty-one days later, the biomedically swabbed astronauts were deemed free of any Moon plague by the time they waltzed into the Apollo 11 Moon Ball, a grand, extravagant, star-studded affair. The guest list was a veritable who's who of the entire country, including practically every American official in the chain of succession as well as the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and every member of the cabinet. And of course, there was NASA's own German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun; Charles Lindbergh; World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker; Mrs. Robert G.o.ddard, the widow of the rocket pioneer; Howard Hughes; and Jackie and Aristotle Ona.s.sis. There was also ”a delegation from the entertainment world”: Fred Astaire, singing cowboy Gene Autry, and Joan Crawford. LBJ and Lady Bird had sent their regrets.