A Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

When he got back to Houston that first night, they were fourteen hours out, so their journey had already covered sixty-six thousand nautical miles! All that while he had been surf-boarding, celebrating, and then flying back from Melbourne, Florida, to Intercontinental Airport at Houston. Indeed the astronauts even covered another five thousand miles in the hour it took Aquarius to drive his rented car the fifty-odd miles from the airport through Houston, to Nassau Bay on the other side of town. Next afternoon, thirty hours into their flight, they were over one hundred and twenty thousand land miles out, and their speed had reduced to thirty-five hundred miles an hour. Their voices were of course the same. It did not matter whether they spoke from three miles away or one hundred and thirty-three thousand miles away, the hard peasant facts upon which Aquarius’ education had been built, the consciousness that numbers were real units, hard as hours of work and miles one walked, now had to be discarded into some waste-nexus of the mind, some stink of the unusable like the Jersey flats. The real fact was that distance was now an abstract concept; men performing brave and heroic acts were communing over radio whatever the distance.