The Kamikosmonaut

GARDEN ON THE MOON by Pierre Boulle. 315 pages. Vanguard. $4.95.

The year is 1970, and the first human being has just set foot on the moon. But what's this he's carrying? A paintbox, some drawing paper, a few garden tools, three kimonos and two bottles of Scotch. He shouts a soundless "Banzai!" into the wastes of the Sea of Serenity, dashes off a haiku or two, and quickly builds himself a Zen rock garden. The inscrutable Nipponese have beaten Russia and the U.S. to the moon.

That's about the only surprise in the new novel by Pierre Boulle (Bridge Over the River Kwai). A shallow attempt at fictionalizing the space age, it traces a handful of Axis rocket engineers from Peenemuende, where they "romantically" built Hitler's V-2s, into the diaspora of the postwar world, where they end up glumly competing with one another in the U.S.-Soviet space race. There is Stern, a faint carbon copy of Wernher von Braun who talks like a cross between Tom Swift and Astroboy. There is Nadia, his luscious White Russian assistant who ends up married to Khrushchev's top rocket man. And there is Dr. Kanashima, a Japanese physicist who happened to be at Peenemuende to observe Nazi rocket techniques.

Kanashima returns to Japan and, as the space race develops over the years, figures out that the U.S. and Russia are bogged down by the problem of how to get the lunarnaut back to earth. Dr. Kanashima surmounts this technological scruple through superior moral force. With the fervor of a kamikaze, he flings himself into the wild blue yonder knowing it will be only a one-way trip.

He has six days of lunar life until his supplies of Scotch and oxygen dwindle. Then he walks into his Zen garden in the rays of the waning earth and commits hara-kiri by slitting his space suit. Since there is no atmosphere on the moon, the results are spectacular: with a sodden poof, Dr. Kanashima dissolves into "clouds of elementary particles hurled into space at a mile a second."

"It is a fine end for an astronaut," writes Boulle. But a sad one for so capable a Bridge builder.

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