The Four Fingers of Death (15 page)

November 11, 2025

Okay, this is definitely going to be a really unsettling entry, because I am going to tell you about the week when the situation on the
Geronimo
deteriorated quite badly. You know there were only nine astronauts going to Mars, kids, and you know that one of them was Brandon Lepper, who was most interested in trying to get some kind of interstellar tan by going down into the propulsion bay and lying beside the reactor. There was a window there, too, one that didn’t quite have the UV protection it ought to have had, and Lepper had figured out exactly how to get the leathery and faux-healthy veneer that he might have had were he a seventy-five-year-old Florida retiree who’d had himself enhanced with steroids and genetic engineering at a curbside drop-in cosmetic-enhancement salon. If you didn’t count Lepper, you’d have eight astronauts. But now it’s even fewer.

The story, as told by the others on the
Geronimo
, well, not the others, but specifically by Steve Watanabe, the pilot, is that Steve and Abu Jmil, the first officer of the
Geronimo
, were getting increasingly worried about Debbie Quartz. Debbie had been one of the bright spots during training, and I’ve often wished that I had her bunking on my ship. She was short, blond, and had kind of a hatchet nose, a very severe nose. Her eyes had raccoon rings under them all the time, and she often complained of a lack of sleep. Still, she told really awful jokes in an appealing way—a termite walks into the bar, that kind of thing—and she was fiercely protective about her fellow astronauts. If Debbie was on your side, you were in good shape.

The
Geronimo
, a couple weeks back, got the same strange announcement from Mission Control that José got, the one indicating that though they had been training for the Martian South Pole, the mission destination had been moved to the Valles Marineris. As with the
Excelsior
, the
Geronimo
navigational systems had been readjusted by the computers in Houston without so much as a consultation. These were the moments when you had to think, why the hell was it a
manned
mission? What did the men and women actually do on the mission? Not all that much. We were going to get our boot prints on the planet’s surface, all right, but they could have just taken an imprint from one of our space suits and sent a boot facsimile up, for all we did. We could have been in suspended animation for the vast majority of the flight, like they are planning to do for the Centauri flights. These days, computers did everything. We were their house pets. Anyway, I guess Jim and I were not the only ones to think that the change of landing sites was ominous. Because as Steve on the
Geronimo
told me, Debbie Quartz took this information unusually hard. She’d never gotten over her Planetary Exile Syndrome. She hadn’t been sleeping at all, for example, to such a degree that she’d started hitting the sleeping medication kind of hard. On one occasion, they had trouble waking her, and when she did finally get out of bed, she was disoriented. What constitutes disoriented? The part that was significant to Steve was that she said something about wanting to
eject herself
from one of the hatch doors. That was the end point of a long monologue about political conspiracies back home, religious conflicts, habitat destruction, environmental degradation, polar melt, you name it.

Because monologues of this kind weren’t entirely out of character, Steve and Abu didn’t pay attention at first. Debbie indicated that it was
certain
that North America would be wiped out by a high-yield nuclear warhead while we were away on the trip. She insisted on this point. Was this a joke? No, it was no joke. She wouldn’t shut up.

And then she said she might as well just blow herself out the hatch.

Steve and Abu became worried about sleeping themselves. They became worried about what would happen if they slept. They didn’t know what kind of trouble Debbie would get into, especially down there in the cargo hold, where they couldn’t keep an eye on her.

“Debbie, why don’t you swap beds with me tonight?” Abu said to Quartz one night. “You’ll get a better view of the nebulae, and I have some wiring and stuff that I need to repair anyhow.”

This had been the suggestion from Houston, in fact, because, like I’ve said, they were monitoring most of this stuff. Back then, we sort of listened when they gave us advice on various things. There were
some
provisions for privacy, like when I was using that nozzle that I needed to use during my highly classified episodes of gastrointestinal distress. Jim called it the
cough button
, using the temporary shutoff button on the teleconferencing cameras that shot us day and night (during these temporary reboots the cameras showed an image of a waterfall instead). Now and then we used the cough button when we wanted to have an hour without constant observation. Remember when NASA sold the rights to some of the
Tecumseh
footage to the network? Where you could watch the guys on the capsule all day and night? It was kind of must-see programming, at least until the
Beneficence
exploded on the return launch and they caught the entire thing,
inside the launch module
, on tape. I knew a couple of those guys. They were mentors to me in my early days. NASA had budget reductions for the next three years, and a lot of it had to do with the decision to broadcast that mission. That’s when they engineered in the cough button. And Debbie Quartz knew very well where the cough button was.

There was silence in the cargo hold after Abu volunteered to swap cots with Debbie. And then before Steve and Abu knew what was happening, she was up in the front of the capsule, in the display window. While she was not refusing the offer to sleep up top, there was an uneasiness about the whole exchange. Steve could tell there was something wrong, and he had the clipboard with the directive from Houston, indicating that this was the plan they suggested back on Earth. She was going to sleep up top where Steve could keep an eye on her. There were many months to go on the Mars mission, and the administration was not going to allow this to get in the way.

A couple of nights passed in this fashion, and Debbie got more and more mute, and preparations that she was supposed to be making for desalinization of the planet’s surface, and tests for the various kinds of bacteria we were hoping we might find, and meteorological studies of the dust storms, none of her work was getting done. Debbie had a hunted look, one of the classic features of Planetary Exile Syndrome, and she stared out at the nebulae, sure, through the telescope, and she stared out in the direction of that supposed black hole, the nearby one they were predicting. She did some crossword puzzles. Steve, or so he told me, was thinking, okay, is this sustainable? Is this how it’s going to go
for months?
She’s going to be worthless for the rest of the trip?

Listen, I know that I am putting words in Steve’s mouth here, but let’s say he thought something like this, the third night when Abu was asleep down in the cargo hold, and Steve and Debbie were meant to be on the same shift. Despite direct orders from management back on Earth, Debbie didn’t take her powerful antipsychotic sleep medication. Couldn’t the guys in Houston have monitored her with some of the life-support diagnostic tools they had going? Didn’t they know when her pulse was depressed, when her breathing was shallow? You’d think they could monitor this, and you’d be right. Except that they didn’t. Except that Debbie hadn’t taken her medication and wasn’t asleep. She was waiting. And then Steve, believing that she was going to be damn near catatonic for hours, kind of went off shift a little earlier than scheduled. It wasn’t infrequent, see, that the mindless repetition, in a tiny enclosed space, made us careless.

Debbie unstrapped herself from that standing position that was really a stretched-out sleeping position, and in total silence she drifted across the capsule, and then she rappelled down the ladder into the cargo hold, and, because there just really weren’t many sharp objects in the capsule that she could use if she were going to try to puncture-wound Abu Jmil, she settled on a weapon that would have required a fair amount of preparation, preparation we had all done in training, and the weapon was the soldering gun that Abu was using for his not-entirely-necessary reengineering in the cargo hold. While he slept, she got this soldering gun right up next to his face, and need I remind you that he was strapped down, and she could easily just have soldered him to death right there. But she elected to say something first, kids, which was “You think I don’t know what you’re trying to do? You’re waiting until we get to the planet, and then you’re going to use me as some kind of lab rat for whatever we find down there. In that canyon. You know the air pressure is a lot more conducive to water down there, and there’s water that won’t evaporate, right? It’s
swimming
with microorganisms, I know, and you want me to serve as the guinea pig for the microorganisms. Well, you can
forget about it
.” There was some more stuff about this, more bacteria and single-celled organisms, internecine plots of various kinds. There was enough paranoid verbiage that Abu awoke.

Let me describe him for you. Abu was a kindly and burly Asian American kid from Kansas City whose parents were both astrophysicists. He was the youngest guy on the mission, and yet he wouldn’t squash a mosquito if it were sitting on his nose. He was olive skinned and rather aquiline. He had a close-cropped beard and black hair that was kind of curly. At this moment I’m describing, reconstructing it from what I was told, he had a soldering gun about an inch from his eye, and he’d just been accused of plotting to leave Debbie Quartz on the surface of Mars. And he was strapped down so he wouldn’t float around in his sleep, and the only way for him to save himself was to persuade her that her entire imaginary conspiracy was erroneous, hysterical, and part of a bad, bad case of Planetary Exile Syndrome. (Though as with so many other biochemical mental illnesses, it just didn’t do to tell someone with Planetary Exile Syndrome that it was all in her head.)

Abu, recognizing the necessary diplomacy, became as gentle and unassuming as a guy can get: “Debbie, talk to me. Tell me what’s going on. Tell me what you think is happening. Debbie, think about it. Think about those years of training together. Let’s talk about you and me, and our time of training. Remember when I wasn’t sure about the underwater stuff? I had that phobia about sharks? The atoll wasn’t really shark infested; that’s what you said. That NASA wasn’t going to make us train in a spot that was shark infested, because it was highly unlikely that Mars was going to have sharks on it. And they didn’t want to lose one of us to a shark after all the expense they had gone to, to train us. Do you remember how I wept when you told me that I wasn’t the only one who’d thought about giving up? You said that I wasn’t any less important to the mission because Denny had to give up when his son was diagnosed with whatever that was. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, right? Do you think that I would jeopardize a friendship that had all of those good memories as part of it? Those heartfelt exchanges? Think about it, Debbie, before you put my eye out with that thing.”

This was the kind of stuff Abu said. And he said something about how he was the one who suggested that we use Debbie, because of how plucky she was, as our
mission mascot
on the night of the big dinner when the personnel had been announced for the various rockets. We went to that Italian joint by the water. We hoisted Debbie Quartz up above our heads, Abu reminded her, and we passed her around like she was a medicine ball, and we all chanted “Olympus Mons, Olympus Mons!” And we told her it wasn’t because she was just lighter than anyone else, it was because she was sweeter than anyone else, and this was why we loved her, because she was sweet, and she was incredibly competent, and for this reason, we did
not
throw her into the alligator-infested canal after dinner. We honored her request, or this is how I remember it anyhow, and instead I, Colonel Jed Richards, got thrown in, and I think this is because there were people who would have been happy enough if I had been attacked by Floridian wildlife. We knew that throwing Debbie Quartz into the canal was conduct unbecoming, and so I offered myself up, because I know I am an interpersonal challenge, and said that I would be much more a regulation example of horseplay, and sure enough Lepper, that lunkhead, grabbed one of my arms, and before I even got to strip down to my skivvies, I found myself looking up at the lights of the dock from down in the murky depths.

Abu recounted these and other stories to Debbie, while Steve slept. The cough button was depressed. No one in all the infinite expanse of space knew what was happening down in the cargo hold, how two good and reliable officers of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration were poised to wreak bloody havoc on each other. No one knew how long this scene played out. Debbie breaking into angry and convulsive sobs, saying, “How can I trust you? How can I trust anyone?” Still, Abu didn’t panic, keeping one eye, wherever possible, on the intercom button that was on the side of the bed. Awaiting the moment when he might free up an arm enough to get at it.