“I’m sure I did,” my grandfather said, standing up. “Castellated is the perfect word.”
Father Nickel grunted. They lit two more cigarettes from the ends of the first and smoked them. They looked at the Moon with their unaided eyes. My grandfather shivered and worked himself more deeply into Gatto’s overcoat. The snoring was faintly audible from the house. In a coop at the far corner of the farmyard, the remaining chicken, a rooster, muttered to itself, their comrade in insomnia. My grandfather heard a sound like a breeze through treetops, but there was no breeze, and after a moment he decided it must be the river he had glimpsed earlier from the back of the car. The war, a thud of gunnery, was something he felt rather than heard, a pulse at the hinges of his jaw. My grandfather, taking Father Nickel’s long silence for hurt feelings, regretted his failure to see Mount Gallienus and was about to apologize, but it turned out that Father Nickel’s thoughts were elsewhere.
“In the twenties there was a kind of rocket mania here,” the old priest said. “In Germany. The newspapers and magazines were filled with rockets. Rockets to deliver mail. Rockets to the Moon. Fritz Opel built a rocket car. Every tinkerer and charlatan was going to the Moon.”
My grandfather mentioned Hermann Oberth, whose Die Rakete zu den Planetenr?umen, published in 1923 and discovered in the OSS library during the months he worked for Lovell, had comforted him when, on the hooks of his restlessness, being safe and comfortable and well out of the fight was the worst fate he could imagine.
“His book was the start of it, I believe,” Father Nickel said. “All the rocket madness. Hermann Oberth, yes, a remarkable man, a very advanced thinker.” And then, as if the next words followed logically: “No doubt he is now dead.”* He tap-tapped his cigarette as he pronounced the words todt ist. Glowing orange threads of tobacco scattered from the end of his cigarette. “Oberth worked with Fritz Lang, yes? To make a film, Frau im Mond. A silly film in many ways but technically impressive. The particulars of a rocket voyage to the Moon were presented in a way that made the business seem credible. Not at all far-fetched. After the film, oh, well.” He shook his head. “For a moment, Germans, to the left, to the right, it didn’t matter. Everyone lifted his gaze, just for a little moment, to the heavens.” The old priest squinted up at the brilliance of the Moon. “There was earnest discussion about the imminence of lunar travel. One felt that it might come very soon, in a matter of a few decades at most. Certainly I felt this way.”
My grandfather had seen the Lang film in the early thirties, under its American title of By Rocket to the Moon, at the Model Theater on South Street. In the film the lunar journey had been effected by the means of a multistage rocket, just as described by Hermann Oberth (with what turned out to be remarkable prescience) in Die Rakete zu den Planetenr?umen. Problems of payload, the earth’s gravitation, and the weightlessness of space were presented and solved by ingenious and plausible means. If my grandfather had heard someone predict, as he walked out of the theater on that winter afternoon at the bottom of the Great Depression, that it would require as many as “a few decades” to conquer the Moon, it would have struck him, then eighteen or nineteen, as absurdly pessimistic.
“It was very well done,” he agreed.
“At that time, I prepared a memorandum,” the old priest said. “I wrote to the Curia, proposing that the Mother Church ought to prepare itself for the eventuality of a human presence on Luna. I suggested that, at every level from the liturgical to the eschatological, profound questions must arise from mankind’s attainment of that neighboring world. Does the papal doctrine of discovery, for example, apply to the Moon as it did to the Indies in the time of Columbus? What will be the fate of the souls of the first Catholic lunar colonists—almost certainly no more than a handful, to begin with—if the sacraments, Holy Communion, Confession, and so forth are not available? When we speak of Rex mundi or Salvator mundi, is it to be made explicit, or is it already implied, that we intend to say Salvator mundorum? If we should encounter Selenites—though, given the Moon’s apparent barrenness, that seems unlikely, but very well—let us say that having made use of the Moon as a way station, humanity proceeds outward to the planet Mars, where it encounters sentient, civilized creatures. Let us say, furthermore—I am quoting myself, you understand. The words of my memorandum.”
My grandfather said that he has assumed as much.
“Let us say, then, that in outward form, and even in the internal construction of their organs, these Martians are not so very different from us. Indisputably, they are part of God’s creation. Presumably, they are in possession of immortal souls. Can their salvation be assured or even conceived on a world whose feet have never been trod by the feet of Christ? And if it can be conceived, and if we might assure it, then is it not our urgent and solemn duty to carry the word of the Lord across the black gulf of ignorance and damnation as soon as possible? And so on and so forth.”
“Interesting,” my grandfather said.
“Oh? Do you really think so?”
“Well, that sort of speculation, it’s not something I ordinarily go in for, but—”
“It was all rubbish.”
“Ah.”
“Pretext, I should say. Any nonsense I could dream up, any sophistry that might persuade the Curia to put its considerable resources into sending a holy mission to Luna. At that moment, as I said, such a voyage seemed far from impossible or impractical. It seemed to be only a matter of time. Naturally, I proposed myself as the prelate of this mission, despite my age. I was strong and healthy. I still am, considering. And to fly in a rocket through the void of space to the Moon, like a hero out of Verne or Wells? To stand there, gazing up at the fat turquoise globe in the heavens? My calling to the priesthood came only in my twenties. A trip to the Moon is something I have longed for all my life!”
For the first time in what felt like years but could have been no more than five weeks—since two or three minutes before Alvin Aughenbaugh caught the bullet that killed him—my grandfather laughed.
“Please, laugh,” Father Nickel said with a show of generosity. “Laugh at your foolish old enemy.”
My grandfather saw moonlight welling in the old priest’s eyes. He put a hand on Father Nickel’s shoulder. “The only difference between you and me, Father,” my grandfather said, “is that I never wrote it all down.”
15
Somewhere out there, beyond the tempered glass visor of his helmet, a fire bell clanged. This did not concern my grandfather. There was no oxygen here to feed a fire or to carry the vibration from the tongue of a bell. Here the enemies were cold and silence. He was warm in his moon suit, however, and he could hear his own heart beating. Bounding along the lunar surface in long arcs, half a million miles from the earth and its fires and alarms. Let it burn. Let it melt, let its rafters give way, let the whole thing collapse under the weight of its own sad gravity. The only thing spoiling his lunar idyll was the infernal itching at the back of his neck where the helmet attached, impossible to scratch in his suit and gloves of rubberized silk. And that rich smell of compressed air from the tanks on his back, so oddly reminiscent of warm dung. . . .
“Herr Lieutenant.”
My grandfather opened his eyes in the dark. A recent disturbance among the cows below reverberated in the clanging of their bells. A straw from the bale he had been using for a pillow was jabbing him in the neck. He discerned Father Nickel’s head and neck peeping over the edge of the loft, hands gripping the ladder. My grandfather scratched the back of his neck. He was glad to have been wakened, contemptuous as ever of the happiness to be found in dreams, displeased with himself for having fallen prey to it once again.