A Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

Now by remote electrical release, Collins throws open an extend latch on the probe assembly. The vehicles undock. The tiniest toot on the thrusters pushes them apart. Slowly they drift out from each other, at about the speed of a leaf moving downstream. The Eagle has wings. They will announce it as they come around the moon. Yet there has been an error in all this work. They have performed the checklist to perfection, they have made no mistakes. Still, a mistake is now buried in the bowels of the computer. It is waiting to be discovered that the checklist, finest product of some of the finest engineers in the land, has an undetectable error which like a disease will come roaring up out of the computer in the next couple of hours as they fire their motor to descend to the moon. The Eagle has a computer pregnant with alarm.