“My secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the moon and returning to Earth alone… If they fail to rise from the surface, or crash back into it, I am not going to commit suicide; I am coming home, forthwith, but I will be a marked man for life and I know it.” –Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire
It had been considered that man was the one component of the system that would not fail. Collins’s list of emergency contingencies was two hundred pages thick. He had kept a pre-launch notebook, inking all his questions about rendezvous systems, crossing out the question once he was satisfied with an answer.
Nevertheless.
Here in cislunar space there was nothing but the thumbprints in either direction, the Earth blue and green and growing larger, the moon gray and empty and receding. Two men left by the moon though, on that side of the division. Three billion plus one here.
Collins heard nothing but oxygen hissing and intermittent crackling in his empty spacecraft. There were three seats on the spacecraft, unoccupied by two.
It had been a simple error. They had reached the moon’s orbit, Collins and Aldrin and Armstrong, and it was time for their craft to split in two—Aldrin and Armstrong descending while Collins waited in orbit for their return. We’re go on all systems, Collins said, travel safe you knuckleheads. He flipped the switches to detach the Eagle. Then the fire. 1201, 1201, shouted Armstrong. Attitude up, Houston warned Collins. Spinning. Red. Then gray. Breathe. He was alone in higher orbit and stabilized when he realized—in undocking, he had missed the final connection. Now Aldrin and Collins were immobile, floating, engineless, below.
There were conferences, conversations. Calculations, contingency-probing. The counting of meager tons of remaining fuel. But in the end there was only one option. Armstrong and Aldrin were unrescuable. The explosion took all the surplus propellant beyond what Collins himself would need to get home.
He argued. He railed. He yelled. He tried to overrule Deke, the flight operations lead on the ground, and go look for his crewmates anyway. But Deke threatened to turn all systems off remotely. He did not use the word “failure,” only “next step.” Failure is not the worst scenario for a test pilot, embarrassment is. Deke, former-astronaut himself and grounded years ago with an irregular heartbeat, knew this, must know this. His voice over the speaker had the texture of a potholed landing strip.
Burn for trans-Earth injection in 10, Deke’s voice said.
There was nothing else. Collins was leaving, heading home.
He had 14 hours before the initiation of first entry proceedings. All was Clear and Visibility Unlimited. There is only daylight between Earth and the moon. He had already set the spacecraft in its gentle spin to keep instruments operational, not that it mattered now with such limited cargo. It only mattered to him. Therefore Collins had time to make his last remaining, anguished request.
He controlled his voice.
Houston, this is Columbia, he began. Permission for communication between Columbia and Eagle.
He stared at the intercom, not that his staring could change it. Deke’s voice from thousands of miles away.
Negative Columbia, Deke said. That’s a negative.
He had duties while homeward bound, Collins was told. Fuel cells to purge, batteries to charge. Wastewater to dump. He would have to make it home, it would be the ultimate embarrassment to not even manage that. There was no utility in speaking to dead men.
Nevertheless.
It would not be accurate to call them friends. They had spent enough time together, of course, to be more than colleagues. They knew each others’ smells, or Collins did, Collins felt that he did. Aldrin was the more fastidious, pocket handkerchiefs in suit jackets, a West Point ring, but the long arms of a gorilla during scuba training. Once, Collins had seen him pummel a broken oxygen tank with bare fists until the tank bent, the ring became bloody. Armstrong was the only civilian, tan slacks, Midwestern, liable to answer complex questions with the phrase “that is so.” Both of them were better engineers. For a command module pilot even Collins knew he may have been the worst stick and rudder man of the three.
One training day, months before launch, after hour 12 of simulation, it had been Armstrong who misfired on the rendezvous. It was unlike him. The gray buttons and switches of the simulator so typically sang under his elegant fingers. But on that one occasion he had failed. The lights went dead. Deke appearing in the hatch hands on hips, saying to get a drink, take a break. Collins, Deke said under his breath, be a good teammate and loosen them up. The three of them retreated alone to the astronauts’ office. Once the door was closed Aldrin started, scratching his neck. I like the skin here, he said.
Armstrong half paying attention, examining a thick paper booklet on pressure suit tests. Is that so?
Yeah, Aldrin said. I like keeping it intact. Us alive.
His teeth were bared.
Alright babe, Collins said.
No he needs to listen, the spoiled son of a bitch.
Control yourself Buzz, Armstrong said, still examining the booklet.
Can you do your fucking job, Aldrin asked, or do you agree that I could do it better?
Collins was between them, he had one hand up stopping Aldrin from advancing. Armstrong did not look afraid. He made a notation in pencil. Aldrin’s neck bulging like an overheated turret gun.
Armstrong softly smiling.
What Buzz, he said, worried you won’t get your hometown ticker tape parade?
Aldrin laughed then, perhaps despite himself, it released the moment. It was absurd enough for mirth. They were test pilots, the only thing they cared about was being chosen ahead of their fellows. They were as competitive about their understanding of orbital physics as they were about training runs on T-38s. Hometown parade. Yet it reminded Collins that he had no hometown, he was already an oddball and half a no-one, born to a two-star-general diplomat father in Rome and an itinerant upbringing, flew his first plane, a Grumman Widgeon, over the ancient fort in San Juan Harbor at 14, even that was slow behind his father who went up in a Wright plane. Collins had always floated along. Married in Chamblay, school in St. Albans and then DC. Was he American? Not like these others. That had put him at ease once, he had felt he had a wider perspective, seen the world. It softened him. He was not ruined when word came down that he would pilot while Armstrong and Aldrin walked the moon. Or he had not thought he was ruined. He had expected everything but this.
Here he was in his spacecraft. The lighting, he felt, was always a problem. It was dimmer than he anticipated, or perhaps he was blinking tears. It takes two hands to fly a spacecraft, the left grasps the translational hand controller, the right handles the attitude, yet he removed his right hand to flip the intercom, to reach back to Earth.
Houston, this is Columbia, he said. Requesting contact with Eagle. Columbia is on target.
There was just the usual static. A light flickered next to Collins. It did not matter. Finally Deke and his irregular heartbeat piped through.
Negative Columbia, Deke said. The Eagle is… otherwise engaged.
This stunned Collins. He had not formed a picture of them, his crewmates in their damaged module, sentenced to orbit around that rock as their oxygen leaked and leaked. What they might be doing.
Engaged in what, Collins said. It was possible he was shouting. You have them working?
They have—preparations, Deke said. There are experiments, in the time remaining.
Requesting establishment of contact, Collins pleaded. What kind of preparations? Let me speak to them.
Negative, Deke said.
This time Deke’s voice had the pitch of an F104 completing a roll.
Armstrong and Aldrin have other callers, Deke said. The president, their wives.
It came upon him then, the bad feeling, the one Collins had suffered too often—too often—during zero gravity training, in a cargo plane that made parabolas to simulate weightlessness. There were a few precious seconds of floating, but the rest was grinding G-forces, the kinds in the back of your eye. And every time, as Collins gritted his teeth and checked his thick pressure suit for another climb and fall, he felt the sense of being stuck in a deep trap and not being able to get out, tunnel vision.
Claustrophobia is bad for a pilot let alone an astronaut. There was only so much room in this tin can here. He had considered scratching himself from the mission, he had considered talking to somebody. His nerves—what were they? On the parabola runs he sometimes had not been able to finish simple tasks, writing on a knee pad. It was fear.
And yes, he had felt that fear when the fire started and everything went wrong. His tunnel vision. He could not breathe. Perhaps if he had done something different, been alert, acted quicker, he could have saved, he could have prevented. This Deke did not suggest, or confirm.
But Collins knew there was a failure. There had been failure and he had been responsible. He must live with that reality. The claustrophobia came back now even though he had no further real responsibilities and the module was empty, large enough for three. He had to go to the bathroom, there was no bathroom. His breath stank, he could smell it himself, it had been 7 days of swallowable toothpaste, uncivilized, grim, urine particles floating around the capsule and he had the wild idea all at once that he was suffocating on them.
Deke on the communication system.
This is a private call, Deke said. Your blood pressure levels are jumping, Collins. Collins, are you alright?
He was not alright. The tunnel vision limited him to just his chest. He looked down there, the suction cup biomedical devices between his arms. In a great tear he pulled them off, not one by one, but a bouquet. The rip of hair and skin stunned him, but he deserved it, it woke him.
Attachments seem to be popping loose, Collins said.
He breathed.
He had previously been concerned about his conditioning, before the launch. He thought that would enable him to stay at top performance. Aldrin had encouraged this, goaded him, had been a champion West Point pole vaulter, agreed that a man should be physical even surrounded by machinery. He had dragged Collins on a run along the beach off Cape Canaveral, in the thick dry sand, not the shoreline, Collins could hardly gasp and stagger, only at the end did Aldrin spit it out, his anger, “I was going first. I was going first Collins. Armstrong changed the schedules himself, the bastard. Commander’s prerogative. But it was supposed to be me.”
Collins remembered that he had not had breath enough to form an answer. He fumed that Aldrin saw him as so far out of the competition that he could only be an ally or neutral, not a rival. It was Aldrin or Armstrong who were up for first moonwalk. He tried to speak but couldn’t, and Aldrin took it for hesitation.
I know, Aldrin said. I’m getting over it. I will. But if I could leave the bastard on the moon I would do it.
He never would, Collins knew that. Aldrin was dangerous but incredibly reliable. And they needed Armstrong, his steadiness, the way he even-keeled Aldrin’s anger, and Collins’s nerves. Commander Armstrong, he was absurdly mathematical. He told them once he did not exercise because he felt that a man had only a certain number of heartbeats in life and shouldn’t speed them up. He always remained slender and controlled. You know, he said once, in his folksy way coming out of the dive tank in snorkel gear, you have to let out the biggest breath to be able to take one in.
Control. Collins looked around him now. To those in Houston, his heartbeat readouts would be flatlined, the suction cups dangling. But it was true too that his blood pressure was controlled again. Time had done it, and thought. Man can be master over his own body, just as Aldrin intuited. And if you let out everything you have you can take a big one in.
Deke, he said. Deke.
It was a breach of protocol to use his first name. Yet he did it.
Let me speak to them. I have an idea.
It was only half formed in his brain. His crewmates had some oxygen remaining. If he could turn back, use all his own fuel to find them and get them out of orbit, could a rescue flight be launched to catch them all in time? Aldrin was the orbital whiz, he’d written a Ph.D. in it for Christ sakes. And Collins could do right this time. They had underestimated him before, he could do better.
Just for a moment, he said.
Deke’s voice was kind now, an embarrassing memory of Collins’s father when Collins failed an exam in elementary mathematics. Many, many years ago.
What could you tell them, Deke asked?
I thought of something. Use all my propellant except enough to get us out of orbit. If you launch in six hours—
Deke’s voice was already interrupting him, from so far away.
We’ve thought of everything, Deke said. We had 550 personnel behind you working on alternate circumstances. Boy I wish we had a different outcome. I’m in pain too Collins. But you’re travelling away from them at 16,000 feet per second and there’s no one else coming. There’s no solution.
Collins turned away from the console. There were so many ways he could kill himself here in space. There were attractive ones. He could put on the emergency space suit in Bin 15 for extravehicular activity. He could push through the hatch, launch forward, into the black. Smash his fish bowl helmet. You would not believe how black the sky is or can be. You would not believe what emptiness, how far. The Columbia would continue Earthwards, Houston would control it manually, try to slot the perfect angle, so it neither bounced off the atmosphere nor came in too steep and burned up. What would it matter. Perhaps they would burn it up on purpose. Despite it all he was curious about the reentry. He did not have it in him to die.
Collins peered out the small window. It was always too small. He had said that to Armstrong days earlier, moonbound. The crew was supposed to be sleeping—Aldrin was, like a baby—but Collins was antsy and Armstrong had his hands folded and eyes open. Collins unbuckled and floated to the commander’s side window. Next flight they should make it a whole wall of this, hey babe, he mused?
There was the brownish fist of the moon approaching. In this light, at this time, it looked like soil or deer skin, lifelike, possible.
But Armstrong looked over blankly. To what end, he said? It’d be leaky, that’s no good.
It had surged up within Collins then, finally, his anger. This the man humanity was sending. This the automaton going first. What would he bring back, this emotional simpleton, what experience would he impart? And it should not have been Aldrin either, that warrior, that brawler, an ace in Korea. They were supposed to be coming in peace. Collins could feel it then, the sensation he’d buried, he’d been cheated, he’d been thrown off, so many hours preparing with these two, supporting, the time away from his wife, her concerns, he’d blocked them (he always blocked them, too much, it was true). It should have been him who took the first step. He was prepared for it, for the celebratory aftermath. He was half a diplomat already. He had his first words written, all the Apollo astronauts did, much as they would lie and tell you otherwise. His were: An era of bounty begins. He who had seen the world would return to it and tell of multitudes, he was cognizant of beauty and an admirer of it, the soft shush of sand on Padre Island, his favorite escape, the howl of the Antelope Valley wind tunnel, the way an ice cap looks blue and almost black over Greenland, the rumble a rocket makes in your chest even three miles from Cape Canaveral, during a launch that you were not on. He would have appreciated the moon, interpreted it, brought it back. He had promised his wife—promised her—that this would be his last flight.
What had he said to Armstrong there at the window? He regretted it now, he had regretted it immediately.
You’re halfway one of these machines now babe, Collins said.
It was the only way he could tamp down the anger.
Armstrong’s eyes jutted in his direction. He was focused now, and shrewd. You’ll get your chance, he said. Apollo 12 through 19 is wide open.
Then he put his hand on Collins’s arm, gripped it tight.
You just have to get us home first, he said.
A grip is different in zero gravity, Collins had not felt weight on him in days. It was like a g-force, just on a particular part of the body. The human heart.
You got it chief, Collins had said then. He shrugged.
But he had failed. He had not brought them home. He had not been good enough. It was clear now. He had always just skimmed the surface, a forever dilettante. He was choking. He had never weathered embarrassment of this kind alone before—no man in history had ever been so alone. There was no one here to see him make an external sign of it. Yet there is something social in the human condition, the responses are conditioned to group settings. As his embarrassment became overwhelming he lowered his eyes, his head, his shoulders hunched. The involuntary position of apology, of prayer.
He keyed the communications switch.
Deke, he said again, please, just a moment. Imagine you failed us. Think about if you were me.
There was an uncustomary stint of open air. Nothing but static came back, but he knew the static meant Deke was considering. Every second Collins travelled closer, earth adjacent. Alpha Centauri behind him was light years away. Was he waiting 30 seconds? Ten minutes? Time was too collapsible here in this part of the universe. It was not meant for human minds.
Stand by, Deke said.
There were no pleasantries. Collins gripped the bar below the instrument panel. He would not drift away.
Semi-labored breathing. A strange whine.
Hey there Collins.
This was Aldrin.
How’s the view over there?
You there Aldrin? Armstrong? You together?
Armstrong’s breath was more haggard than Collins would have imagined. Perhaps they were preserving oxygen. Just us here now babe, Armstrong said.
There was silence and only Aldrin interrupted it.
That undocking process was a real piece of shit. I knew it would be. I told Deke that in May, you remember?
It was wasn’t it—Armstrong’s faint voice.
You better chew out the pencil pushers when you get home, Aldrin said. I’m serious. I don’t want Lovell and Swigert looking around for their own shadows when they make it here.
If they make it here, said Armstrong.
They better.
Collins had both hands on the stabilizing bar. He wished he’d asked Deke if they were on a closed channel.
Is there something I can do for you two, he asked. To bring back, to give to your kids?
A whine came from the landing module.
Some alarm, Aldrin said.
Armstrong’s voice was steady. They took care of us already, he said. It was one of the situations. We left paperwork and everything about what we wanted sent. My spare uniform…
Collins was blind then. NASA had prepared for it all, except for what would fix this.
I want you to know that I’ll be there for Joan and Janet always, he said. Whatever help I can be, my family too. And the pencil pushers, I’ll tell them we can’t do this anymore, no more Apollos. We’re not ready. Humans I mean. Of course we were going to fail.
Fail, asked Armstrong?
But Collins continued.
I hated that you were going, he said, you landing first. I hated that. I guess you know. Maybe that was the problem from the beginning. We were pitted against each other, we all were. We all are, down there. It’s too much pressure. We should never have tried this. We should be curing cancer. We should be giving every orphan a father. We—
Fail how, Aldrin asked?
Collins could hear Aldrin’s grim chuckle.
Collins, Armstrong said faintly, we’re still doing it. We’re crashing but that’s a form of landing. We have the flag folded up between us already.
A space glove had come loose from its Velcro over Collins’s head. He batted it away. It flew, it disappeared.
My buddy here doesn’t know this, said Aldrin, but I’m planning to tilt us over sideways right before I black out so that I’ll hit first. Don’t forget that.
It won’t work, the rotation calculations… Armstrong almost whispered.
Only one way to find out, Aldrin said.
They were quiet then and Collins heard nothing. Every second, the entirety of human history grew closer to him, the little dot that birthed queens and astronomers and warriors, and children. There was nowhere else for him to go.
Goodbye Collins, they said.
Wait, he said.
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Mark Chiusano writes for Newsday and is the author of “Marine Park,” a PEN/Hemingway Award honorable mention.