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These and other questions were to bubble up through the book as savory tautologies. But deep down, Aquarius and Scorpio knew they would never turn to gold. In the end, there would he only the ancient gray moon rocks talking their number language to spectroscopes and computers—the machines Aquarius saw as "some species of higher tapeworm was quietly ingesting the vitals of God."
It was, indeed, nothing less than the total defeat of all that had been central to Aauarius' besieged romanticism. Yet Scorpio could not avoid the conclusion that there was a touch of the put-on and package-deal about the whole enterprise of covering the moon shoot. The flimsy mask of Aquarius itself seemed to have less to do with its wearer's famous ego than with the self-kidding that well-established products sometimes employ in their advertisements. There was, after all, a fortune involved. The gross from the serialization in LIFE, the book version and all world-wide rights would be more than $1 million. Aquarius had long since shed the intellectual's frequent ambiguity toward money. He needed it too much. There were obligations to former wives and his six children. His fourth marriage was breaking up. He had taken a couple of debt-defying leaps at moviemaking. He needed to buy time to try and write the big novel that his admirers knew was dormant in him.
Prelaunch Putdown. Beyond such necessities. Scorpio felt that Aquarius went for the big money because it was an unambiguous way of keeping score—of measuring himself against the competition. There was the possibility that his market value would never be higher. The past two years had brought him to a pinnacle of praise and publicity. He was one of the best. But the fact was that he had never made Jacqueline Susann or Erich Segal-style profits for his publishers.
Nevertheless, Aquarius was a professional who would always try to give the customers their money's worth and then some. If many of the metaphors in Of a Fire on the Moon seemed familiar, if Aquarius often strained for effect and struck false resonances until he reminded one of Dimitri Tiomkin's movie music, there was still much to admire and enjoy. The description of the prelaunch press conference was perfection. There was Von Braun, completely at ease with his Hitler past, translating the question of a German reporter and then bringing the house down by apologizing to the Japanese correspondents that he couldn't do the same for them. Although not the ranking NASA official present, he stole the show. Aquarius respected him for it, even though he described him as looking like "the head waiter of the largest hofbrau house in Heaven." Aquarius was famous for that kind of putdown, although he himself offered the observer a variety of choices. In his steel-rim glasses and vested pinstripe suit, he was not unlike a Mafia accountant. Casually attired at his Brooklyn Heights brownstone amid the boarding nets, ropes and trapezes that decorated the living room, he could resemble a high school gym teacher who had a piece of a profitable summer camp.