The Four Fingers of Death (17 page)

Yes, as I mentioned earlier, we were obliged to make phosphorus and other fertilizer products out of our solid wastes, for the cultivation of genetically modified soybeans and other vegetables. That is one of our most important experiments on the planet Mars, genetically modified wheat, soybeans, and other vegetables that could exist in very low temperatures, with boosted levels of carbon dioxide, and in ridiculously low atmospheric pressure. Not to mention solar radiation. These soybean seedlings were provided by the licensed agricultural supplier to the Mars mission.

José was also liable to refer humbly to his occasional bouts of masturbation, or FSAs (fits of self-abuse), which he regarded as a mission-related obligation, in order to maintain good health through “reproductive-fluid release,” and I’m betting you know what the acronym for that is, as well as the acronym for “bagging and disposal” of the relevant ejaculate.

I’m only exaggerating a little bit. What happens after a while, in a tiny little soda can halfway between two planets, is that you stop talking to one another entirely, in order that you might begin talking primarily to yourself. My mother, the schoolteacher, who was used to lecturing in front of audiences, was the person in my family most opposed to talking to oneself, viewing this as a sign of mental illness. And yet this was the communication modality most
perfect
for the
eavesdropper
. On the
Excelsior
, I began to grow quite weak, listening, despite my misery, to José’s nasal whine, “… because the MMEs are suggesting that the shipboard
calcs
are giving bad results on the SRBs that boosted us into EPT, and since we aren’t an ELV, we have high levels of
sig error
, which means that in terms of landing trajectory, we will be wanting to make sure we have an SSM.” Was he saying these things
to
me? Or was he saying them to whatever sleep-deprived kid, fresh out of MIT, whose job it was to listen to José by radio this night? Was he trying to impress this young astrophysicist, as well as whoever else might be listening on the radio transmissions that NASA organized each day? Or was he actually saying something substantive? Jim didn’t talk to himself—he would have regarded it as unwise from a security perspective—but he had a strange snorting thing that he performed. For example, he snorted when he was about to say something that he knew was not entirely true. These snorts had gotten more pronounced in recent days. I knew, therefore, that Jim felt that José was up to no good, as I have already said, and so there was some kind of all-purpose cognitive dissonance that created this
need to know
. What he was saying was out of phase with what he was actually thinking, and so he was always snorting, before almost every sentence. And the snorts, which sounded a little bit like what a pachyderm might do in extreme cold, were achingly vulnerable, human, especially since they implied that the three astronauts on the
Excelsior
were now in a state where all privacy and dignity were vanishing away.

So what did I surmise, you might wonder, when I heard José saying to himself, “… as far as the
Geronimo
goes, the SO is probably an
eject
, if you want to know what I think, she’s EVWE.” What did I surmise? When he was describing a fellow astronaut in terms of “extra-vehicular waste ejection”? Did I mark this moment as the moment when I was alerted from checking supermarket prices back on Earth to hearing the origins of conspiracy? There are times in a man’s life when ordinary complacency and a basic good-guy, can-do attitude simply have to give way to greater concerns—moral concerns—and this was one such moment.

“Do you mean you’re suggesting they eject Debbie Quartz from the
Geronimo
?” I called past Jim’s sleeping body.

“I have to have close contact with the other SOs because we’re coordinating missions. I have a duty to coordinate with them, and one of the SOs, as you are aware, is so loaded on narcotics that she probably can’t operate heavy machinery. I’m supposed to go to the surface of the planet and work with her on terraforming, mining, and industrial projects?”

“What kind of industrial projects?”

“You will know when it’s NTN for your clearance level. As of 1900 on 18 November, that’s a negative. The mission is a matter of national security. Some of us around here are actually worried about maintaining appropriate security protocols, policing our IODs and our blog posts, and if others were as conscientious, things would go smoother all around. An unconscious malcontent is a problem, sure, which is why, yes, Jed, I think they ought to make like she’s EVWE.”

“She has PES,” I said, employing the acronym with a hint of irony. José had finished putting away the last of the kitchen gear. He drifted over to where I was strapped down, and his unshaven face broke into a grin. I got a good look at his gold-capped incisors. This smile was impressively malevolent.

“She was a high-risk assignment right from the beginning. She’s weak. If you ask me, the public-relations people wanted more women. They already took one fella who wasn’t stable in the first place, Brandon, and now they got a bad apple in Debbie. What are we supposed to do? You know how long we’re out here. You know how long the mission is. There’s a likelihood we’re going to lose people, Jed, or we’re going to start to have problems with the Martian environment. The weak are going to go. You think I’m being hard, Jed? I’m not being hard. I just care about the rest of us. If you ditch her body from the
Geronimo
, then you use up that much less oxygen, which means more for the bubble when we touch down, more for the ship on the way back, and it also means less weight, which means less thrust. It just makes good practical sense.”

“There’s only one problem,” I said. “Even though she doesn’t have immediate family, she is nonetheless a person with a life, a social existence. There are friends and distant relatives who all care about her. The problem becomes, from their point of view, that they would like for her to stay alive.”

“If you call that alive,” he said. “But I guess you don’t get bedsores at zero g. If it were me I’d press the ejection button myself.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” At which he rappelled down the ladder into the cargo hold. And to think we let him look after the seedlings down there. Who knows what’s going on with those seedlings? They could be totally poisonous.

What did we do when José was off shift? Well, I wrote in my diary, and then I scanned the heavens for radio wave emissions that were otherwise unexplainable, by virtue of repetition—the indications of so-called intelligent life in the great nothingness, the nothingness that I know better than you, because every day, though days mean nothing to me now, in this expanse that is the general-relativity equivalent of forty days and forty nights, I experienced the
nothingness
, and I watched as the little red star in the distant sky got closer, until now you could almost see the polar caps on it, and you could see its dust storms, which were going to blind us every time we went out in them, perhaps asphyxiating us; you could see all of this, especially if you used the telescopic apparatus that we had to enhance the picture for you. And so I knew that I came from nowhere, that I was heading nowhere, that my life was no more, in the scheme of things, than the life of a match light snuffed out in a big wind. I was an insignificance between the orbit of the planet Mars, that elliptical orbit, and the orbit of the planet
Earth
. I was nothing, and soon I would be gone.

December 2, 2025

Belated Thanksgiving, all you readers! I know you understand the symbolism of that national holiday to us here on the Mars mission, where our three crafts are almost exactly like the
Niña
, the
Pinta
, and the
Santa Maria
. It may interest you to know that at least two of those primitive ships were named after prostitutes, or so I am told by one interested reader in Bayonne, NJ. Meanwhile, what did we have to eat for Thanksgiving, here on the
Excelsior
? Well, we had turkey! The National Aeronautics and Space Administration knew how to pull out the stops, even two months in advance, for nine beleaguered astronauts, 25 or so million miles from home. The turkey was in little vacuum-packed containers, and there was some gravy that we were able to heat up in the microwave oven. We were even given authorization to have some of the hothouse lettuces from downstairs in José’s agribusiness lair. We could just cut a couple of pieces each from the lettuces, because they were doing pretty well, beneath the artificial grow lamp, and anyhow you don’t want lettuces to go to seed.

And there was a bottle of hard cider that I’d been given the okay to bring on the mission, and I’d been waiting these many weeks to drink that bottle of hard cider. You know, cider was one of
the
political issues of early American history. American farmers began growing their own apple trees; this symbolized a resistance to tyranny. We mean to effect a similar revolution on the Mars mission, and so this was another of the carefully crafted symbols in our little Thanksgiving dinner. There wasn’t a lot of talking at our dinner, and the astronauts on the
Excelsior
gulped their cider as quickly as possible, because in a slightly oxygen-depleted environment, you can experience a maximization of effects, especially if you force the drink, or chugalug, or whatever you young people call it these days. I did all the dishes, because the other guys had things on their minds. These events constitute an explanation of my silence since the Thanksgiving dinner. So let me re-create the drama of that day.

Long about dinnertime, or the time we agreed would be dinnertime, I get a communication from Laurie Corelli on the
Pequod
. I mean, literally, we are sitting down to eat, and I have served each of the guys a glass of hard cider, brought by me into interplanetary space at enormous personal expense. All of a sudden, there’s a light on the dash, as we like to say, indicating that Laurie’s trying to communicate. In fact, she’s trying to communicate with everyone—us, Houston, the
Geronimo
—all at the same time, having availed herself of the communication protocol that we refer to as the panic button—an intercom that automatically contacts all the relevant parties. Her face shows on the video screen, because the panic button automatically engages the video feed, and Laurie says, “Anyone out there? Please confirm when you get this message. We have a Code 14. Code 14 on the
Pequod
. Repeat, Code 14.”

Now, you will recognize, if you are astute readers of this forum, and if you have been reading the posts from various experts at NASA, that even in these technologically advanced times, it takes NASA a while to reach us when there’s information they want to send our way, and you know that this time lag increases as we near the Red Planet. At present, for every question Laurie wants to send back to the home planet, it’s seven minutes out, and then seven minutes for the answer to arrive. Therefore, it stands to reason that we on the
Excelsior
, and likewise the
Geronimo
, would get the transmission before the home planet, since we’re only ten or twenty thousand miles ahead of our colleagues on the other ships.

I get on the radio immediately and hail the
Pequod
.

“What’s up, Laurie? How can we help?”

Wait, did I explain what a Code 14 is? A Code 14 is when an astronaut has become dangerous to himself or others. This was the code Watanabe or Abu would have used to alert Mission Control to the Debbie Quartz situation, if they’d had time to transmit the news while the crisis was taking place. In case you were wondering about the specific numerical designation, I don’t know
why
it’s a Code 14, exactly. There are not thirteen other codes, although there is a Code 5, which is a dangerously low oxygen level, a Code 6, which is a hull breach, and a Code 7, which is fire of some kind. There is, for those who are curious about such things, a Code 22, which is designated for “ship under attack.” So far, no one has ever used a Code 22, in all the space missions of the past twenty-five years, since the codes were instituted. But there have been five occasions in which there was a Code 7, and seven examples of a Code 5. I’ll leave it to you to connect these codes to the various well-known mishaps.