The Four Fingers of Death (13 page)

I said: “I’m with you there, Laurie. If we can get enough fuel for one of the ultralights, maybe we can make it over there. For recon, if nothing else.” There had been a time when the Mission Control decision makers were thinking about landing there, because the caldera is so far across that you might not be able to see the other side from the rim, because it’s three times as tall as Mount Everest, because it’s still active, because it could be releasing water vapor into the thin Martian atmosphere, because it’s there!

“There’s the risk of eruption, 15,000-foot cliff walls, and the increased threat of radiation, but I don’t intend to let that stop me.”

I know that she didn’t want to go to Olympus Mons. But I know she had an obligation to the audience back home. What did she really want to talk about? If she was anything like me, she was worrying about whether or not we were going to land on the Red Planet without getting squashed, and whether we were going to be able to grow anything in the greenhouse, whether we would be able to generate sufficient oxygen, and so forth. Come on, who gave a shit where we landed?

Laurie looked behind her, and for a second, I saw a look of unmitigated horror flicker across her face, as Brandon basically pushed past her to edge into the shot. “You’ve got to admit we’d have excellent bragging privileges if we were to see the largest volcano in the entire solar system.” Laurie tried to finish the thought with dignity. But it turned out Brandon had a few things to say.

“Jed,” he offered, “did I tell you about the time I was fighting welterweight back in the city, against a bunch of gangster kids from the—”

“You did,” I said. Because he had. It seems that Brandon felt he had nothing going for him but that he was
not
a hurricane transplant, like the waves of the disenfranchised who populated Houston, TX, his hometown, because of the mismanagement of successive generations of politicians. “As I recall, you had already been knocked down when—”

He said, “When I pulled out a technical knockout in the last—”

“Brandon, my shift’s almost over,” I said.

“What’s the word from the
Geronimo
?”

“They’re playing a lot of cards.”

“Have you talked to Debbie?”

I punched the disengage button, and his face went black. I would let the other ship go till the next day. After all, they could call over here at any time. The ominous thing I’d heard, however, was that Debbie, on the
Geronimo
, very likely had Planetary Exile Syndrome. This unpleasantness, kids, has been described in the NASA literature, though widely hushed up during the space station period, as well as during the Apollo missions. Once the crowded, polluted, warlike planet on which you live is far enough from the spacecraft, certain astronauts, no matter how sturdy they seemed in the training phase of the expedition, will begin to exhibit symptoms of intense homesickness, verging on the completely unstable, falling victim to convulsive weeping, fits of rage, and so forth. You have to watch them very closely, lest they injure themselves or the mission. Even though Debbie had been trying to focus on experiments she was going to conduct on Martian water purification with some fast, cheap, and dirty tools given to us by corporations back home, she had instead been talking about how the trip wasn’t worth it, and how it had crossed her mind to turn around and head back for Earth. In fact, NASA provided instructions on this. The first part of the instructions involved immobilizing any member of the crew who exhibited long-term symptoms of PES, with shackles and/or rubberized restraints. If that was insufficient, Plan B was that you loaded them up with a synthetic opiate for a couple of weeks. The last option was to eject the astronaut. If they became a serious danger to the mission.

After mission communications, I watched Jim sleeping for a while. He had strawberry-blond hair and strawberry-blond eyebrows, and if he weren’t so by the book, I would probably have thought he was kind of attractive. For example, when he was sleeping on his wall cot, with his favorite music on the headphones (choral music, and country and western), he held his hands in a certain way, as if they were flippers, not hands. He pursed his lips as though he were dreaming of citrus wedges. His features were masculine and decisive, but the sleeping Jim Rose was, well, a lot like a rose.

How frail was humankind, kids, out in this little soda can, just a thin skin of some alloy keeping us from the absolute zero of all creation. Asteroids could carve a hole in any of us, and then there was radiation from the Van Allen belt. Cosmic rays, you name it. How frail, how desperate, and yet how resilient. We had come so far, and we had so much farther to go. Jim got a warm blast on his seat warmer, which was the way they elected to wake us, and he rubbed his eyes and said, “Still here?”

It was unlikely I’d be anywhere else.

October 21, 2025

“What’s your biggest regret in life?” Jim asked. On the cusp of our first space walk of the mission.

I was going through the prep list. We had to don the inner layer of the space suit, which took about half an hour, and then we had to start on the outer layer, which got
really
bulky. It weighed eighty pounds on Earth, and we had trained for eighty pounds, but we were weightless here. I helped him with the second glove, screwing it onto the wrist coupling, and then he did the same for me, and then there was the double layer of sun visors. Easy to go blind out there if you didn’t take precautions, you know. Once he had the visor and helmet on, I heard his voice through the static of the intercom—through the override that enabled a low-intensity transmission, or, as we called it, suit to suit. He locked my helmet onto me.

“Look,” I said, “we’re going to go out there and repair the couplings on the solar panels, and we are going to tether ourselves, and then we’re coming right back in. I don’t accept that we need to address ourselves to the big questions.”

“I’m cool as a cucumber,” Jim said, deflecting my deflection, and I think I know now the expression that he would have been wearing on his face when he asked what he asked, the expression of inscrutable distraction and expedience. “But the extremes of space lend… well, a little poetry to things.”

In fact, in these first three weeks in the capsule, because of how little stimulation there was beyond the bland seductions of a radio-transmitted Internet signal, I too had occasion to wonder about these matters of the heart, the sentimentalities. Instead of thinking about making it to the Red Planet, which had finally become unmistakable off one side of the capsule, or wondering if we would ever make it back to Earth, I thought about what I might have done. Interpersonally. Despite the hackneyed qualities of these sentiments, I was helpless before them. I might, for example, have told my parents more about how grateful I was; I might have explained to my wife that the thing for me
was
the work, that the work had to come first. I regretted, I might have told her, that I ever made it seem otherwise. I regretted that I barely knew my daughter. I regretted any time I was ever timid, when I might have been more forthright and more direct. I regretted instances of simulation and deceit. I regretted sunsets and flowers unobserved, children unhugged, all times when I didn’t pull over and admire the view. I regretted the astronauts I had stomped on, in making my way onto the roster of the Mars mission. I regretted the times I lived in, and my inability to live in them completely and willfully. Not that I was going to come clean about any of this.

“There are some obvious choices,” I told Rose. “I’m darned upset that I didn’t keep up with my Arabic lessons, which I took all the way through first year in college. I couldn’t understand those long sections of the Qur’an. And anyhow, that course of study wasn’t considered patriotic by the guys in the fraternity. They were primarily interested in automobile racing. Mostly I regret failures in the sack. What about you?”

Jim thought carefully, and then he said, suit to suit, “There are the men I killed.”

“Look, Jim, you don’t want to be talking about that.” Jim flipped up the visor again. He had a sort of glazed look. “Get yourself together, because we’re about to open that hatch. You need to be completely ready.”

“I trained for this. I have traveled millions of miles from my home just to do this.”

“Good.”

He gave the lever on the hatch a turn and called down through the open frequency. “Preliminary hatch, and that’s a Code One.” Which meant that José was obliged to stay where he was and monitor us. Once the air lock was open, the hatch was exposed to the vacuum of space, and it was a protocol of the mission that under those circumstances someone always had to stay with the ship. I hoisted myself into the air lock behind Jim Rose and closed the hatch that led back into the cabin. Then Jim reached the second door. The B hatch. His voice crackled from the intercom, “Feel like you’re seeing the faces of the people you lost? In the stars?”

I said: “I calculate my pay every day. I think about how much money I’m saving by being up in a capsule. I haven’t eaten out, I haven’t bought a new jet pack, I haven’t gone on any expensive vacations.” And yet in my heart, I knew what Jim was saying. There was a raw, inconsolable quality about the void of these expanses. Take the case of Jim Rose: I knew that his four kids were the most important thing in his life, and that his unquenchable need to explore the universe amounted to a contradiction. He was a family man, and he’d never read a novel in his life. But up here he was one hundred percent daydreamer. He went careening from one strangely grandiose non sequitur to another.

The analogy NASA made about our journey was that it was like trying to get a basketball to go through a hoop from 36 million miles away. If so, the mission navigators must have been exceptionally good hoops players. As the hatch opened, the enormity of our journey was manifest to those of us on board the
Excelsior
. We had already seen, and would continue to see, things that had been seen only by robots and satellites. The novelty of limitlessness was our daily bread. As the hatch opened, there was an emptying out of words like
here
and
there
, and
down
and
up
, and
here
and
back
, and
before
and
after
. Jim Rose stuck his leg out into the soup of stars and nebulae, of Monaco 37 and like-minded relatives, of dark matter, of black holes, of creation’s indifference. I could hear his breathing, and his breathing was fast. He was gasping. He attached the tether from his space suit onto the buckles on the surface of the
Excelsior
, and he arced outward gently, slowly, centimeters at a time. I watched him drift. He was a citizen of
Earth
, a man nowhere near where he belonged but who was here in this place nonetheless. After his brief but interminable drift, his metallic boots clunked soundlessly against the surface of the hull.

“
Excelsior
, I’ve exited the craft, and I’m heading for the solar array, as requested.”

“That’s a roger,” José said from indoors. “Houston, you receiving?”

“I’ve seen some pretty night skies in my day,” Jim remarked, “but this beats them all. Jed, you’re clear to proceed.”

There was a moment when I didn’t know if I wanted to proceed, when I thought that maybe the human conception of space travel was just so much froth, like elves and dragons but more expensive. An intoxicant meant to distract the miserable inhabitants of
Earth
from their circumstances. Why go? Why go out there? There was no such place as space, because a location couldn’t be an absence of locations, and the vacuum wasn’t a true vacuum, lest it should subsume into it even the notion of vacuum. These latitudes just couldn’t be as mysterious and ancient as they plainly were. The night sky was a fresco that one of the old masters painted on the ceiling of the world, back in the quattrocento! I didn’t want to go wading in the real thing. But before I gave in to my adolescent anxiety, I was
out
, and here is how slow things go in space, kids—in the time it takes you to read this sentence, I had drifted only a foot or so. It’s not like there were tailwinds! In a minute or so I could see my foot approaching the surface of the craft. You could do several flips, out there, and it would be nothing, but then you would be well out of control and could go spinning off, on the tethers. And who knew, really, how tethers behaved at temperatures approaching absolute zero.