The Four Fingers of Death (14 page)

And yet, since by Terran nightfall you were meant to have footage of us, out here, attempting to work a screwdriver and other power tools with these clumsy gloves, we had to keep moving. NASA had us on
their
leashes too. It was a while before Rose and Richards, the Martian voyagers, stood at the far end of the
Excelsior
, listening to some Earth-bound engineer remind us how to effect the repairs.

It wasn’t until we were hunched down over the solar panels and fiddling with the electricals that Jim mumbled, “I’m not trusting him either; I’m not trusting José.” If Jim Rose was worried, well, there was real cause for worry.

“Last night, before you woke,” Jim said, “he got some kind of transmission from Mission Control. I just happened to see it appear in his in-box. What would have happened if I hadn’t? The substance of the transmission was this: we’re changing the landing coordinates. Does that seem sensible to you? We train for three years to land on the southern pole, we announce to the world that we’re going to land there, because we’re going to do experiments with water. Water, water pressure, water freezing and evaporating. Tests and more tests. That’s the whole purpose of landing on the poles, right? We have to have enough water to last twelve months, we hope, and most of the planet is completely barren. And suddenly there’s this plan, that José hasn’t even mentioned yet, to try to see if we can’t fly the ultralights down into the canyon.”

“The canyon?”

The canyon he referred to, in case you haven’t heard, is the biggest known canyon in the universe, the Valles Marineris, which is 3,117 miles long (as far across as North America), 75 miles from wall to wall, and, get this, over six miles deep. It makes the Grand Canyon look like a surface scratch.

“That’s what the transmission said.”

“Did you get confirmation? From Mission Control?”

We had the mission directives on pocket-sized electronic clipboards. We got them as digital downloads. Normally this stuff came in the evening, so we could talk it over while eating. The few moments when we were all awake. Also: we needed something to do at mealtime because the food was so bad.

“Why would we have such a substantial change of plans at this point? And why weren’t we warned about the possibility?”

“And how the heck are we supposed to get
out
of the canyon once we’re in it?” I asked. “Do we have enough fuel for these trips in the ultralights?”

“No details, obviously.” He kept it all to a whisper, suit to suit.

“He’s pretty good at letting us know when he doesn’t have to do his regular rotation on the laundry duty or waste reprocessing. That’s about all he’s good at. There’s some kind of parallel mission track going on here.”

Palace intrigue was much more interesting, but there was no choice, having suited up for a solid hour, but to stand out there in space and repair the solar panels, which are essential to the circulation of oxygen, redundant computer systems, the operation of our thrusters, all of which made it possible for us to fly this soda can across the solar system. And even though we have layers upon layers of solar panels, the kind that you probably have running your hot water, there is the ever present possibility of asteroids or microscopic meteors. We couldn’t let the panels deteriorate. In the next half hour or so, Jim and I were doing just what we had trained to do. And, frankly, this was the moment when I started to see what a good guy Jim Rose was. We had the years of training, the months of vomiting in the zero-gravity training, all of that stuff, we had dinner together, our families, at one of those chains near Jim’s place in Florida, but I never quite thought I knew the guy. There was always his reserve. His wife, Jessica, had that look that wives get when they’re trying their hardest to appear like the women behind the men. Chafing at the burdens the whole way. And the four kids were mute, perfectly dressed, almost starchy, obscenely well behaved. Jim strode among and around them as if he had no idea they were there. At the salad bar, I saw him get the thousand-light-year stare, and he attacked this solar panel with the same kind of intensity. He didn’t just fix a solar panel, he applied himself to a solar panel as though it were a codex from a tomb in ancient Egypt that was going to tell of the secret prehistory of man. All I did was hand him the appropriate tools. That said, there’s nothing like standing out in space with someone.

When he had finished, Jim said, reopening the com channel, “
Excelsior
, solar array is back online. Houston, repairs complete; we’re heading for the hatch door. Please confirm.”

After a long delay, one of the innumerable faceless voices from Houston came over the open frequency. “Roger, Captain Rose. We hear you. Fine work.”

He handed me the power drill and I holstered it.

“How sturdy you think these tethers are, Jed?”

I used to know the load rating, because it was in the manual somewhere, and I was good at memorizing this stuff. Supposedly, we could tow an entire extra ship on one of them if we had to, because in space nothing really weighs
anything
. But that didn’t mean I didn’t panic a little when Jim said, “Let’s live a little, Jed.” After which he
jumped
.

He was feeding out the tether, you see, and I watched as he drifted off the
Excelsior
, my bunkmate. I watched as he swam around, like a circus clown in limitless space. His breathing was in my ears, as if he were whispering innuendoes to me. And I didn’t realize how long it had been since he talked, how captivating his gymnastic demonstration was, until he said, “Come on and join me, my friend.”

May I digress for a moment? Because I have a tale to tell along these lines. A tale I cannot avoid telling. About how much trouble I had learning to
swim
. This is another of the things that I might not have entirely confided to the NASA people, back when I was filling out the psychological profiles. This story takes place back on the Jersey Shore, kids, which is where we used to go in the summer when I myself was a stripling (my father was a night watchman, and my mother was a math teacher in an elementary school). Well, kids, there’s no easy way to tell this story, so I will tell you what I remember, because this is what I thought of out in space, I thought about how I used to attempt to go swimming with my brother, Nick, and how Nick was always the stronger swimmer, and how one day in a riptide, I just looked up to watch my brother carried out to sea. At first, it was sort of a funny thing. At first he fought a little bit against the rip, laughing and waving, and I watched him bob there, and then his laughing gave way to yelps and cries, and I looked back behind me for the lifeguard, who was far enough down the beach that I would have to run for him. Or I could try to swim for my brother, and at first I did try to get into the water, and I shrieked to the people on the beach with me,
My brother is being carried away, my brother
,
my brother
, and there were large men bellowing and there were women in bikinis running down the shore to fetch the lifeguard, and I could see Nick’s hand waving, I could see his little digits just above the waves, the five fingers of his hand. As long as I could see his hand, his palm facing me, then he was there, and if the seconds passed as I waited, the spume of the waves gathering around me, at least he was still there. We shared a small room, Nick and I, and we knew a lot about each other, like I knew that Nick hated sports, and Nick felt that he was letting my father down, all the time. Although he wasn’t doing anything of the kind. He was a swimmer, he was a strong swimmer, except on that day, on the Jersey Shore, nobody was a good swimmer, and people were shouting at him to head
parallel
to the shore,
Don’t try to swim in
, these people called,
Swim along the shore!
Nick felt that he was letting our father, the night watchman, down, but no one was letting the old man down like I was letting him down, and I ran to the snack bar, and I called my parents, because I could hear someone else calling the paramedics on another phone, a pay phone, and the two conversations were rubbing up against each other and making it impossible for me to talk to my mother, who always thought we were safe on the beach because there were lifeguards on the beach, and we had grown up beside the beach, at least in summer. I couldn’t hear the questions my mother was asking, because the other conversation was happening, and some guy with a really big belly and shorts that sagged below his belly was yelling at the 911 people, and I kept telling my mother that Nick was
out there
and couldn’t get back in, and a man on a surfboard began trying to thread his way between the waves, and another lifeguard was running up the beach, and people were gathering, and the lifeguard nearest plunged into the water, and I thought if I could still see the five fingers of Nick’s hand, I thought if I could see his hand, then things were all right. I suppose I imagined that I could still hear him laughing, I thought I could hear the laugh that I had heard before, and all the conversations I had had with him that very morning, but in fact I couldn’t see him anymore, because you know what they say happens in those circumstances, what they say happens is that you get tired, you get tired from all the swimming, and then you just can’t keep your head above water, and it doesn’t matter how strong a swimmer you are. Eventually, there is that moment when you know what is going to happen but you are no longer able to forbid it from happening. I didn’t want to think about this, that day, and I didn’t want to think that I couldn’t see Nick’s hand waving to me, and I didn’t want to think that if I had been a stronger swimmer I could have gone out there after him, and I didn’t want to think about where he had gone, because he had gone someplace where they couldn’t find him, down the fathoms, and even the men in the speedboats, and the men on the Jet Skis, they couldn’t find him, until later, much later, when he washed up. I think it was Sandy Hook, where he washed up, or maybe it’s just the poetry of that name, because if you are going to have a place of shame and self-hatred and loss, and the sense that what was good about life is all gone, then that place should have some kind of lovely name, so that you are not prone to forget it, and that’s why when I think about having been a brother and being a brother
no longer
, kids, I think about Sandy Hook. (He had to be identified by his dental records.) And they named a football stadium after him at our high school. I often dreamed that I was running into my brother’s arms. Long after. In my dream, my brother, Nick, was standing waist-deep in the water, as I had been, and my brother was standing in the water and he was so happy, and I went running into his arms.

A good question would be why I am telling you all of this. How is this relevant to the Mars mission, for which I am the official documentarian? How is a young man’s death in the 1990s relevant to the adventure of interplanetary travel? I can’t answer these questions, actually. Maybe I am just a little bit more vulnerable to these ghosts of my youth, these revenants, the way Captain Jim Rose is seeing the faces of people from the past in the stars. Maybe there
is
something about space travel that makes you vulnerable to these specters. Maybe this is why Colonel Jed Richards became an astronaut, to flee from the loss of his brother. Or maybe he became an astronaut to honor the memory of his brother, because Jed was good at so little else, despite the love and affection of his parents, who tried their hardest to help him overcome the feeling that he
should have done something
, and thus, well, he was the editor of the school paper, and then he was a fighter pilot in Central Asia, and he was
good for nothing
, and that’s why Jed Richards kept moving, and that’s why he didn’t need to be told twice, when Jim Rose went cartwheeling through the Milky Way, out at the length of his tether; Jed Richards
jumped
, and he kind of knew, in this moment, what the movie superheroes must feel when they are first able to race,
en plein air
, across the heavens. And here’s the really disturbing part, kids, and NASA can censor this all they want to censor it, I don’t give a shit, because what does it matter now, none of this matters now, the arresting part of flying in space while Captain Jim Rose was dancing around and singing bad dance music numbers in space, what matters was that I suddenly had this thought that maybe I was in love with this man.