The Four Fingers of Death (20 page)

“You didn’t get the Department of Defense briefings,” Debbie said. “I did. You think I don’t know? I know. But I also know what was in those reports, and what they’re looking for on the surface of the planet. The equatorial conditions are sterile, the surface is sterile down to four or more meters, but the place is crawling, literally, with bugs, tiny little microscopic bacteria. They’re there at the poles, and they’re there, even more plentifully, in the canyons, and the Hellas Basin. And you know why there’s DOD interest? I’ll tell you why.”

“Debbie,” Steve said, “
enough
. We don’t have clearance for that stuff. Houston, I don’t need to remind you, is probably listening right now. I’m taking orders from Mission Control, and the mission is on a need-to-know basis, and I don’t need to know.”

“If that’s how you want it,” Debbie said, and her eyes brimmed with tears. The three of them were drifting in the center of the cargo hold, and Steve could see it, could see that she was emotional. Something in her had given out in the course of the two months that we’d all been on this journey, and the funny, implacable Debbie he’d first met outside of a convenience store in Orlando four years ago, when they were both cadets, was gone. Part of her had been shuffled off and had been replaced by this ghostly, troubled woman. He missed the old Debbie.

“Let’s get into the gear. Laurie’s looking forward to seeing you.”

In the silence of suiting up on the
Geronimo
, they considered the ballet of men and machines, and how inspiring it was, this technical accomplishment, and when these meditations on technology and the future of the species were complete, they locked on their helmets.

“Do we have enough fuel to be doing all this?” Debbie asked.

Abu grunted noncommittally. The three of them closed the hatch behind them in the cargo bay. Steve pointed to the intercom, and then his voice crackled in their helmets. “Debbie, here’s how it goes. We head out, we watch the
Pequod
come in, we secure her with the hydraulic clasps, and when we get the okay from them that Brandon’s in their air lock, then I come back to get you, got it?”

Debbie gave the thumbs-up. Abu gave the thumbs-up, and once again the astronauts of the Mars mission were out in space.

It’s the soundlessness that’s so hard to describe. This was what Steve was noticing on his first space walk. Even in the capsule there’s always something to listen to. There’s the music that gets piped in from Earth, downloaded classics, popular music, the ragas that Abu was trying to teach Steve about; the bleeping of various machines, life-support systems, the crackling of the communications array; the chorus of voices from Houston, Lorna, DeWayne, Fielding, Kathy Fales, Amin, who had become their friends in the time aloft, checking in, as if from out of nowhere, as if from the radio station of nowhere. The ominous
ping
of microscopic asteroids hitting the hull, which only made a sound
inside
. The hiss of oxygen inflow. It was all about sound, until you set foot outside.

And as soon as they did, as soon as the two men set foot outside, they saw the
Pequod
, the ghost ship, it seemed, summoned from out of a perpetual night sky. Steve wasn’t sure that anyone else really existed out here, besides himself and Abu and Debbie. He didn’t realize how much he missed the rest of the unruly, malodorous company of humans until the only humans around were waving to him through an air lock.

He and Abu got tethered, and they watched the right flank of the
Pequod
, the nearest face of the craft, dead in the water, it seemed, slower than it took a mechanical pencil to drift across the capsule. All the ignition that would be required had long since taken place, and now it was inert, until, right on schedule, the gaffer’s hook on the side of the
Geronimo
allowed them to reel in the other ship and secure it with some cables and some electromagnetic cleats. The two crafts sat like this, as close to motionless as you can be and still be moving, ever so slightly, because of the drift from the
Pequod’
s thrusters. Steve said to Abu, “Okay, can you take it from here?” He heard the crackle of Abu’s microphone, “Let’s get the rapist onboard.”

And now the first unalloyed disaster of the Mars mission. Steve, according to what Houston had exhaustively detailed for him, was meant to turn back and fetch Debbie, and bring her out onto the surface of the capsule, and then the four of them, nearly half of the entire crew of the Mars mission, would meet between the two ships, like on a section of No-Man’s-Land between the two Koreas, or at the Wailing Wall checkpoint. At that stage, there would be no tethering of Debbie and Brandon, because they were only going as far as the hatch on the other ship, and if they were flush against their handlers, it should have been okay; it
should have been
. Steve turned his posterior on the
Pequod
and headed back for Debbie. He ought to have known there was something wrong when she wouldn’t say anything to him, when she assumed the space equivalent of passive resistance, until he wasn’t even sure, at first, if there was someone still
in
the space suit.

“Goddamnit, Debbie,” he said. “I can understand you’re upset, and I can understand how scared you are, but please don’t make this more dangerous for me. I have a kid at home, and he’s sick right now, and the last thing he needs today is for something to happen to all of us. I’m begging you, just do what they want us to do and let’s get the hell back in the spaceship and go see the new planet. Can we do that, please?”

At some point that rag doll in the space suit shook off his hand and stepped beside him out onto the surface of the
Geronimo
. Steve looked out across the hull of the ship, which seemed rare and proud in the starlight, and he saw Abu and Brandon coming in the other direction. Which meant, yes, that the
Geronimo
was now entirely emptied, with all of them out in the great beyond of interplanetary space, and the two little constellations of astronauts neared the halfway mark in the march of prisoner exchange. It seemed, like everything else in space, an impossible distance to traverse, and yet, considering the 33 or so million miles they had come, it wasn’t much. Eventually, they were all there, and the four of them hovered at the midpoint of their little journey, at least as we all reconstructed it, and there was a moment when Debbie and Brandon were standing there facing each other, and that’s when Steve thought he heard something in his intercom, something he was later uncertain about, the moment when Brandon grabbed Debbie by the shoulders and shouted. The exact words, unfortunately, are lost to history, though there has been much conjecture since. Abu reached out to stop him, and then there was some kind of
explosion
.…

… What
kind
of explosion? What kind could there have been? It wasn’t an explosion you could have heard, because what you heard out there was
nothing
, because that was all there was to hear, nothing. So what was the explosion? How to be startled in space, when
nothing
exactly is what seems to be happening most of the time, when
nothing
is what time looks like. Well, there was a special provision in the space suits for ignition, if needed, some minor propulsion, in case an astronaut needed to drift, and this was intended only for use out of range of other astronauts, but Debbie had nonetheless ignited some of the oxygen propellant, and had used it to
lift off
. Because she wasn’t attached. She wasn’t tethered. When Steve looked up, he saw that Abu had tried to get out of the way and was now rotating wildly at the end of his tether, and Brandon was laid out flat against the side of the ship, clinging on to the spot where Abu’s tether was attached to the hull, and Steve’s first thought was,
Well, everything is okay
. But then he looked out into space. He looked into space, and what he saw was Debbie heading
off
from the ship, heading
out
, heading for the Van Allen belt, heading for Jupiter, and his heart plugged in his throat, at the significance of it, of what he had to do, which was to
jump
, because he had a generous length of cable and he could still go after her, at least part of the way.

“Debbie, what the hell are you doing?” he called.

Abu’s voice erupted too. “Debbie, for godsakes!”

Steve drifted out on the cable, reaching for her, but when he thought he was getting close, there was a second burst from her oxygen pack, and she accelerated, farther out. “Abu,” he called, “what do I do? What do I do?”

Abu was trying to haul himself in from the end of his cable. He was out of breath; he was at the limit of what he could do. Nevertheless, he said, “I’ll go after her.”

“No, no. I’ll do it. Get Brandon into the capsule. Can you get Laurie and Arnie on the horn? It’s my problem; it’s my fault. I’ll go.”

And Steve took hold of the cable from where it was fastened to his space suit, and he unhitched it. Kids, the space walk may be the freest you ever feel, but that doesn’t mean you are in any rush to relinquish that tether. Especially for such a grim purpose. Steve blasted a little bit of propellant out of the tank and headed after Debbie Quartz, who had about nine hours of oxygen left and all of space-time in which to use it. Unless, that is, she blasted the vast majority of oxygen out of the tank, which you could do if you were of a mind and knew how the suits were constructed. You could do it if you were very close to an alternate oxygen source or would be in the next two or three minutes.

December 15, 2025

Things have been a little heartbroken here, gang. We are not a contented crew; we are a worried and downhearted crew. For example, Laurie and Arnie were
watching
the whole thing with Debbie. They were watching and unable to intervene. They were watching and screaming into various intercoms and communicators. Like everything in the register of the space walk, the altercation between Debbie and Brandon took place in a nearly eternal slow motion. Laurie and Arnie were able to see it, to anticipate its outcome, to cry out, to punch into their texting keyboards,
Code 14, Code 14
, which must be the code that Houston is really tired of getting from us. I’ve heard recordings of Laurie sobbing to Houston (from some unauthorized site of Mars mission feeds), while Arnie tried to comfort her. Laurie and Debbie had been really close before liftoff.

Meanwhile, after Debbie jumped, Abu was trying to get Brandon in the door to the
Geronimo
, trying to keep him out of the way. As I’ve said before, Brandon was a former boxer, and there was a lot of space suit wrestling going on just inside the air lock, which was worse than two-year-olds in snow pants going after each other, until Abu noticed that Brandon had a tear in his suit, which probably had to do with standing too close to Debbie when she lifted off. His suit must have partially ignited, even though they are meant to be heat resistant and flame-retardant. Abu was thinking that Brandon was just being unruly, when in fact the guy was probably suffocating, or maybe he was about to freeze to death, which you could do with even the tiniest rip, even though there are twenty-four redundant layers of Mylar. Once they got inside the hatch, well, wait—

Did I mention the monologue that someone recorded of Steve going after Debbie, which also got broadcast on the Net? It must have been recorded by the
Geronimo
itself, in the black box, where almost everything is preserved, unless you’re really smart with the application of the cough button. And no one is that smart during an emergency. Effectively, nothing happens on the Mars mission without Houston knowing. Which means that eventually you will know, all of you. So in case you haven’t heard it yet, here’s what Steve said, according to the official record, while sailing out into the vacuum after the retreating figure of Debbie Quartz: “Debbie, listen to me, listen, please, don’t do this, Debbie. Debbie, what are you doing? It’s not worth it. Debbie. Come on! Debbie, we came into this together, and we’re going out together.… Listen, please! We dreamed the same dream, think about it, and if that dream isn’t going to happen, if it isn’t going to come to pass, it’s going to be because we all bungled it together! We’re family, Debbie, we all care about you.… One team, Debbie, one family… your problems, Debbie, my problems.… Listen to me, Debbie… whatever your bad feeling is, we can help. Your doubt and uncertainty about the mission, I have it too, Debbie.… Don’t leave us here worrying about what’s become of you. Don’t leave us thinking about you drifting out here.… Let us take care of you, for godsakes, let us love you back into shape, Debbie.… Please, please,
please
, don’t do this, Debbie. You’ve got the eight hours of oxygen, that’s it. Come on back, please. You don’t need to take it all so seriously, Debbie… just answer me, get on the intercom and answer me.… Please! Nothing is worth this. Think about your friends back on Earth, the people who care about you. Think about us, think about Abu and me, and the rest of the crew.… Think it over.… Debbie, Mars was supposed to be how we showed everyone back home that it
wasn’t
just about the petty infighting, the religious conflicts, the relentless war and hemorrhagic fevers and all of that, Debbie.… Mars was supposed to be when we thought big and acted big.… Debbie, please… you can use the left-hand thruster, make a big slow arc, Debbie, and I’ll meet you.… Nothing is worth this. I don’t care what you did, Abu doesn’t care, it’s nothing so bad that you aren’t always my teammate and my friend, please, Debbie!” At which point Steve got as far as he felt he could safely go, about a thousand yards. Up ahead of him was a white speck drifting off, a white silent speck, a stilled voice. Then Steve turned back to face the ship, gulped down a big throat full of bile when he saw how far out he was, how far a thousand yards is when you have gone from everything that
was
, the little tin can of night sky dreams, into everything that is nothing. Nothing at a degree or two above absolute zero. It took Steve another twenty minutes to get back onboard the
Geronimo
, and if you think Planetary Exile Syndrome is bad, kids, wait till you get a look at the disorder they refer to as Space Panic, which the psychiatrists think is related to earthbound agoraphobia, but worse. When an astronaut gets a good look at the infinite space of space and the size of himself in relation to it,
that’s
Space Panic. The void looks back into the astronaut; that’s what happens. And it happened to Steve. He just couldn’t really talk for a long spell.