The Four Fingers of Death (19 page)

December 3, 2025

On the twenty-eighth of November (for those of you who just joined, I’m finishing up an earlier story), the other two ships were to dock together and switch captives, while we of the
Excelsior
were far, far away, gliding through the vacuum between the third and fourth planets, toward a projected touchdown almost four weeks off. What I’m about to report comes from what I’ve learned since. It’s reconstructed. You can subject these spontaneous musings to the enthusiastic skepticism that you bring to everything else I write. Maybe I’m composing these lines in Lahore or Mumbai, at one of those subcontinental computer-processing facilities, faking the prose style of an American astronaut, so that the heartbroken and fiscally challenged young of the heartland will believe in something.

The problem was that the best pilot on the
Pequod
, the aforementioned Brandon Lepper, was strapped down during the jury-rigged docking maneuver. We had learned how to dock ships during our years of Mars mission training, in case of a difficulty like the one you are reading about right now. But that didn’t mean that docking was routine or without danger. It was all meant to be done with thrusters, minutely controlled bursts of the thrusters, and these were to be operated remotely by computers from the home planet. At least, this was how Mission Control framed its agenda when describing what was going to take place. Brandon was not of particular importance to the docking event, they said. Computer piloting, they said, was a fail-safe method.

Maybe they were saying these things in order to try to keep Laurie Corelli calm, because Laurie Corelli was no great pilot. Arnie Gilmore, meanwhile, was the mission doctor. Any damage to the
Pequod
would adversely impact the mission. Since the
Geronimo
had launched an hour and a half before the
Pequod
, and from halfway across the continent, Mission Control actually needed to dramatically slow the former capsule, which was a demanding proposition, in terms of fuel use. Because once the
Geronimo
was slowed, assuming it didn’t collide with the oncoming
Pequod
, and once the docking mission was accomplished, the
Geronimo
would have to be restarted. That’s a lot of fuel right there. If I was reading the projections correctly, when they came through from Mission Control, there was enough fuel to do all of this, but just. Not a lot more. There was no room for any further mistakes. Did Brandon Lepper know what he had done? In feeling like he wanted to prove that he was the
big man
over on the
Pequod
, the man in control, he had nearly crippled humankind’s first trip out of Earth’s backyard, to the tune of billions and billions of dollars.

In fact, as 0500 hours approached on the twenty-eighth, Brandon Lepper, who had, it was believed, used various performance enhancers during his training days, and who may have been suffering from a steroid-related mood disorder, in lockstep with Planetary Exile Syndrome, awoke from his narcotic slumber and began screaming at Laurie and Arnie through the intercom, “What the fuck is going on here? How come I’m strapped down? You all better get me the hell off this table. You think you can leave a man for a month in a capsule with a beautiful woman who dresses provocatively? You think a man can withstand that kind of treatment? You’re crazy, that’s what I’m telling you, you people aren’t
human
. It’s just a natural thing, to have
inclinations
, and if a woman is not able to deal with it, then a woman shouldn’t be on this mission in the first place. Women always think they’re tough, but then when it boils down to it, they go running to Daddy, because they can’t actually take it. I’ve
been
in battle; I was in Uzbekistan when the tacticals were raining down from both sides. I was in Malaysia. You think I don’t know what tough is? You women think you’re tough, but the only weapon you know how to operate is a
manual
. I was there where bodies were scorched, where all the flesh was burned right off; I saw all of that. I saw it! Depleted uranium in the water supply. Radiation sickness. I went and rescued women and children. I treated their burns. So don’t say that I don’t know anything about compassion and about gratitude; don’t say I haven’t done anything for women. Women
need
me; they need a man to help them through this world….”

It was all just a misunderstanding, a joke, a good laugh, according to Brandon, but at this point Laurie and Arnie disabled the intercom, and they busied themselves about the directions from Mission Control. There was the surge of the reverse thrusters slowing their great haste. It wouldn’t be long now before they would be able to see the other ship.

Meanwhile, in the
Geronimo
, Steve Watanabe and Abu Jmil had slowed their own craft, and they were now sitting ducks, to use the old phrase, in the middle of the superhighway between Mars and Earth. Thirty-two or -three million miles from Earth, and if there was any miscalculation by Mission Control, they would be crushed like interstellar ice, vaporized, spread into some belt of man-made debris. Steve and Abu, while waiting as the
Pequod
appeared on their instruments, spent some of the time reaching out to their families. Steve’s wife, Danielle, a mediation specialist, was home that day looking after their son, who had antibiotic-resistant strep throat. She answered the fuzzy, distorted signal on her digital wrist assistant. She knew just where this kind of message came from. Houston was patching her husband through. She also knew how long it would take to reply.

“Sweetheart,” Steve said, “we have this complicated maneuver we’re going to try to bring off today, because of some problems they’re having over on the
Pequod
. Some personnel problems.”

Danielle was a wise and seasoned mediation specialist, short, with red ringlets of hair, freckles, and never without a dark, sublime lipstick, nearly Victorian in its perfect elegance. Nothing surprised her, and she smiled when she really meant it. During this time-consuming video uplink, intermittent and fuzzy, her face, through the white noise of video transmission, was impassive as she waited. “What’s the maneuver? Will it be safe? Are you worried?” And then the delay.

“It’s sort of a prisoner exchange. Believe it or not. We’re going to swap out Debbie for Brandon Lepper. Where they get these notions, I don’t know. They feel like there’s a danger with Brandon staying in the capsule with the others over there. I’ll tell you later. There are mission objectives that are uppermost in their plans here, what with so much time left on the journey, and they don’t want to lose anyone. Or that’s what they’re saying. But who knows? So he’s going to come on over here, and we’re going to have a fraternity-type environment on the
Geronimo
, like they have on the
Excelsior
. We’ll do some Jell-O shots. Or bench presses. Anyway, the docking is more time-consuming than dangerous. So if I don’t reach you for a little while, you’ll know that I was busy with this, up here in the night sky, okay?”

“Are you sure it’s safe?”

“No. But they wouldn’t do anything that was a real risk, what with so few people on the mission. That’s why we have to make the swap. I’ll get back to you as soon as we’re done. I’ll let you and Brian know that it came off. Is he feeling any better?”

“They’re hopeful about one of the synthetic antibiotics in the pipeline, and so far, yeah, he’s not so bad. He just wants to sit and watch the real-time footage of the mission.”

“You might have reruns today. Don’t believe everything you see.” Steve told her he loved her and signed off.

Abu contacted his family in Kansas City, and his parents, who were initially perturbed about the docking, since it seemed dangerous, quickly regained their composure and asked that their son contact them as soon as he was finished with the procedure. They were serious, brilliant astrophysicists, scientists of few words, and they didn’t want to clutter up the bandwidth with sentimentalities.

Then these two brave astronauts on the
Geronimo
sat and watched as the
Pequod
appeared, first on the instruments, then as a speck in the windows, and then as an ominous space hazard, with an inexorable forward progress. Off to one side was the lollipop Red Planet, which had lately become the constant companion of the mission. In the greater distance was the Earth, no bigger than any other luminous object in the soup of galaxies, nebulae, and dwarfs. And then, like some unaccountable blast from history, comes the unaccountable man-made
Pequod
, so close now that they could nearly wave to their colleagues, though it would be another several hours before the docking took place. And all of this because one astronaut couldn’t control himself! There wasn’t much time to complain now, however, because there was a lot of preparation and suiting up that needed to take place. Abu said he was going to unbuckle and get down and face east. Though there was no east here. But there was still the ritual.

Special coupling clasps on the outside of each of the ships had been engineered into the design of the capsules, and it was these clasps that made it possible to come alongside, but according to the training, at least two astronauts needed to be outside the ship to hand-engineer the hydraulics. Steve and Abu had already radioed to Laurie and Arnie that they intended to volunteer. But before they could even try to suit up and attach the cable that would link the two ships together, the crew of the
Geronimo
needed to prepare the slumbering Debbie Quartz, who was soon to bask in the warm, maternal glow of Laurie Corelli.

Now Abu and Steve headed down the ladder into the cargo hold, and they fetched out the suits from the hatch where they were stored. They had no reason to believe that Debbie, like Brandon, would be awake and alert. But when they got over to her bed, her eyes were wide open. Her expression was placid, forgiving, and oddly distant.

“What’s happening?”

Steve said, “We’re going for a little walk.”

“Where to?”

“Into the night sky.”

“Out of the ship?”

“We’re going to secure the
Pequod
. She’s coming alongside,” Steve said. “Then I’m coming back in, and I’m going to help you over to their craft.”

“You’re what?” She said it with a gentle amazement. It seemed that Debbie Quartz’s Planetary Exile Syndrome had begun to yield to the combination of heavy narcotics and SSRIs, and there was nothing left in the heavens, not black holes, not hulking expanses of dark matter, that could surprise her.

“We’re taking you over to the
Pequod
. Houston’s orders.”

“Steve,” she said, “you really don’t want to do that. That’s a big mistake. Are you… Is someone coming onboard to replace me here?”

“Lepper. He’s kind of…”

“Steve,” she said.

“Look, if you hadn’t tried to poke a hole in Abu with the soldering gun, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

Abu was already unstrapping her, and he did it with a sympathetic demeanor, as best he could, as if his tenderness would be enough to keep her from raging around the cargo hold again.

“I’m sorry, Abu,” she said.

“No apology necessary,” Abu replied, “really…”

“It’s time that I told you guys something. Before you do this. You know what’s waiting for us when we get there?” Debbie said. “You know what’s waiting for us on the surface of the planet?”

“Debbie, don’t start,” Steve said. “You won’t give it a rest with this paranoid shit. You’re scaring everyone. You’re jeopardizing the mission.”