The Four Fingers of Death (21 page)

Oh, and when Steve did get back, Abu had a knife to Brandon’s throat and was saying, “What did you say to her, you piece of shit? I can kill you right now and say that it was the tear in your space suit. I can throw your worthless body out of the ship. No one will give it a second thought. No one will mourn for you, not your own family. You’ll just be drifting out toward Planet X, for nine hours, when your O
₂
runs out and you suffocate on your own frigging carbon dioxide, and we’ll be eating dinner and forgetting you were ever here. Is that what you want?”

Out of the air lock, Steve drifted by them like nothing was happening at all. He took off his suit and paused to watch as dollops of blood floated past, blood that must have come from fisticuffs between Abu and Brandon. Normally, we clean up blood and fluids if they’re floating around, crumbs, any of that kind of thing. Sometimes you’ll see a spilled teaspoon of orange juice or water, rolling around in little liquidy balls, and you’ll chase after it and try to swallow it or herd it into a plastic bag, just so that it doesn’t get into a computer motherboard somewhere. Anyway, Steve didn’t pay much attention to Abu and Brandon as they pounded on each other, cartwheeling down the hatch to the cargo bay,
Did you tear my suit on purpose? You dog! You trying to
—, colliding with the handles on the containment closets. Instead, Steve took a syringe from the first aid closet, and then he tied off his arm, and he loaded himself up with enough lights-out for days. Which meant that Abu and Brandon, though they didn’t trust each other at all, though they were trying to beat the shit out of each other at that very moment, would end up having to negotiate restarting the engines, as Arnie and Laurie had just done, with coaching from Houston. We were all finding out: on the Mars mission you did some things because there was just no one else available.

That night, the head of NASA, Dr. Anatoly Thatcher, came on-screen, all three ships, to give us the pep talk. Now, this was a laugh riot. The conference took place when José was meant to be asleep, but like every other NASA communication, it would get saved for him. Jim and I were at the kitchen table, attempting to play a strategy game, Martian Invasion. Jim had brought the cartridge himself from home. We were up to level eight, where the tripod creatures from the South Pole manage to slingshot themselves around Phobos. They were heading back to Earth: for Vancouver. It’s a full-scale Martian invasion!

The screen on the instrument panel went blue, as it did before all messages from Houston, and there was the NASA seal, and then Thatcher came on, with his tortoiseshell glasses, and his shaved head, and big white eyebrows. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said he, “I know it’s been a rough day, perhaps one of the roughest days in the history of the American space program. I know some of you would rather take time to recover from your labors before watching this communication, and that’s fine with all of us. Here on Earth we’d like to talk about what we think has been happening there. We’d like to try to remember Debbie Quartz, a valued member of the Mars mission team. We’ll be reporting on all of this for the media on Earth, as you know, and these thoughts will therefore be excerpted in the press….”

Everyone had a good story about Debbie Quartz. My story is simple, and I haven’t told it so far because I didn’t want to embarrass Debbie in this web diary—especially given how much trouble she was having from the moment we broke free of Earth’s gravitational pull. The story is this. In the last six or eight weeks before launch, it was becoming abundantly clear that there was trouble in my marriage. I’m not telling you anything that you haven’t been informed of here already. But somehow I was among the last to know. My daughter was spending most of her time at school, and listening to music I really didn’t care for, like that noise that is referred to as
dead girlfriend
. She had the piercings, the skull implants, you name it. Like any junior high kid, full of attitude and busy with extracurriculars. Impatient with parentally imposed anything. This was compounded by the times when my daughter didn’t really have enough to occupy her. She didn’t play field hockey or soccer. She was not an athlete. Some days, therefore, she came over to the mission campus near Cape Canaveral. My wife and I took advantage of the supervision opportunities that were available to us there. Older kids killed some time there now and then because the family center offered wireless digital networking and a small library of uploads, study aids, and games. Sometimes the kids were even allowed to watch satellite launches live.

Even though Debbie didn’t have any close family, or maybe because of it, she always took time to go down to day care to look in on other people’s kids. She seemed to know everybody’s kids. She knew all the birthdays. She gave Steve’s son a home rocketry kit for his birthday one year, and she went out with Arnie and his twin girls to one of those animatronic restaurants, where, she later said, she’d accelerated a case of upper-frequency hearing loss. Of course, Debbie Quartz also knew my daughter, Ginger. In fact, my daughter, Debbie said, was her favorite kid of all the children of the mission. My daughter, according to Debbie, had that mixture of brilliance and melancholy and realism that makes for the most fabulous adults. Debbie volunteered to get me a GPS lapel pin for my daughter, so that I’d quit losing track of her and so that I could take a more active role.

I laughed this off, because maybe I just didn’t want to hear it. Until the one night I was supposed to go pick Ginger up. It was during the first trial separation. I drove all the way to my wife’s brother’s place, where she and my daughter were staying, I knocked on the door, and my wife appeared in some kind of slutty outfit that had definitely not been donned in order to impress me. She said, “Where’s Ginger?” To which I said, “What do you mean, where’s Ginger? I’m here to pick her up!” Probably you could write some of the scene yourself. Almost immediately, there was a lot of shouting back and forth, or at least a lot of shouting on my wife’s end of things. This despite the fact that we were supposedly parting amicably, which means with tremendous feelings of failure. But no bloodshed. No! It’s your turn to pick her up! No, it’s
your
turn! How could you be so
callous!

If you start thinking about space-time, and living in space-time, which you do when you’re about to get into an Orion-class rocket and blast out there into the blue, you inevitably start feeling philosophical about how human beings can have their own little wormhole-type moments, moments when, for example, the mistakes of your marriage come clear before you. Such a time might be when your kid goes missing. It is true that what I have mostly done is put
everything
ahead of my marriage, put my work ahead of my marriage, put my country ahead of my marriage, put my hobbies ahead of my marriage, put my individual retirement account ahead of my marriage, you name it. If I needed to go back for another round of hyperbaric-chamber training, I did it right then; I didn’t care if my wife was nursing the baby. If there was another soirée where attendance was optional, I went first and stayed last, and let my wife bail out whenever she needed to. I was a mixed blessing as a human being, and I knew I was a mixed blessing, but I allowed the space mission to be the one thing I could do. A long stint in emptiness between planets, where I am alone in my thoughts for weeks at a time? I can do this. Other people join the space program because they like military protocol, or the fraternity, or they want an adventure, or because they want to be famous. I wanted none of these things. I just thought I’d be good at the loneliness.

Anyway, so my wife and I got into my car, and between bursts of yelling at each other, we tried to reconstruct where Ginger might have been. Ginger was just at that age when she was wearing those fashionable short shorts, through which you could practically see her labia, and there were the piercings I already mentioned, and the subcutaneous, cranially implanted jewelry, which went with the partially shaved head, and she hadn’t yet realized that she was no longer the innocently unsexed girl, but was now becoming the sex machine of puberty, the desiring machine. I had to avoid looking at Ginger sometimes, because I was embarrassed about how proud I was of her very adult body. This all made it that much more terrifying not to know her whereabouts. My wife was on the wrist assistant, dialing up Ginger’s friends and their mothers, and that horrible walkie-talkie bleep those things make was driving me insane, and then it hit me! It was obvious: Ginger was back at the campus, not at oboe lessons, not at ballet. And we drove all the way back to the family center at Cape Canaveral in silence, scarcely a family in our sub-mini coupe that was just big enough to fit two people whose marriage was falling apart.

We found Ginger with Debbie Quartz. In fact, the two of them were in stellar engineering, which is a simulation program that Debbie helped to design. You gather up a certain amount of liquid hydrogen, and a certain amount of stellar dust, add some gravitation, a little bit of galactic convection, and so forth, and you make up a star and a star name. You watch to see how your star will affect the gravitational fields of the stars around it. Maybe you try to spin off some planets; maybe you attempt to terraform. It’s a helluva game. Debbie was in on the ground floor with this one, had a percentage on it, which was why she had a waterfront house and a palm grove. She had a friend trying to market the product to the big game behemoths from China and India. But that’s not the part I’m remembering. The part I’m remembering is that I found my daughter, Ginger Stark-Richards, with Debbie Quartz, sitting by a console, designing a solar system, and when I started in on Ginger, like a dad will do sometimes, asking her why she hadn’t called either of us (even though it was probably all my fault), Debbie said, “Jed, Ginger and I had this appointment on the books for a couple weeks, and I just forgot to tell you. I’m awfully sorry about that.”

Some people just have that smile, the one with the many constituent hues. The rainbow coalition of smiles. Not
only
a smile because there’s no longer a problem, but also a smile because the person smiling somehow knows more about the situation than you do; it makes her happy not to require recognition of her kindness, because she actually cares about you and doesn’t care about her own glory; it’s a generous smile, a confident smile, a happy smile, but also a smile with a gradient that indicates
there’s not much left to smile about these days; we do the best we can
. Only a sad person can smile so memorably. That was Debbie Quartz’s smile, especially when she took my wife’s hand, and said, “Pogey, I should’ve called. I’m really very sorry. I have just been
so excited
about this stellar modeling, and Ginger was the very first young person I wanted to try it out on.”

Ginger didn’t say anything. No one was going to let on about where the fib started and ended. That was how Debbie Quartz was. Generous, but also impenetrable. Wasn’t a couple of weeks later, when I leased out the Stark-Richards house to cover mortgage payments and child support, that I started sleeping on her couch.

It was in this vein that Dr. Anatoly Thatcher went on about how great Debbie was, saying, “She was an absolutely committed astronaut.” And then he started in with the guff that was designed to indemnify the agency against legal action. This line of reasoning had to do with Space Panic: “Ladies and gentlemen, you all know how unpredictable a deep-space voyage is, and how uncertain we are about the long-term effects of weightlessness, exposure to gamma rays, and so forth. In addition to these risks, there is another subject about which we previously knew very little, and that is the psychological effects of increasing distance from the home planet. Since the first sign of trouble with Deborah Quartz, which occurred soon after launch at t-zero, the psychology team here at Mission Control began profiling Debbie and the rest of the crew and have begun projecting our revised mission expectations. What we want to present to you is the possibility that there may, in fact, be a sort of
disinhibiting disorder
that comes from interplanetary travel. We don’t know how this is going to play out over the course of a very long mission, but we do know that none of you, according to our evaluations so far, has been free of affective overreaction to mission stimuli. We solicit your opinions on this subject, naturally, but this is our sense of things. Earlier missions have suggested this possibility to us, and we are not surprised to find that the symptoms are exaggerated the longer and more distant the flight. Remember the mutiny on Spacelab, for example, or the incident of interspecies violence on the Mir. You will recall that these events were summarized in some of your prelaunch reading. All we want to say about this is that under the circumstances, you are the ones who are going to have to adapt and facilitate treatment and remediation of these mental-health complaints. You are the ones who can make your interpersonal experiences more agreeable, more harmonious. If you are unable to remember that your own motivation may be somewhat clouded by Space Panic, or
interplanetary disinhibitory disorder
, as we are now calling it here, perhaps you can nonetheless extend your sympathy and understanding to your fellow crew members, and in this way we can prevent further difficulty. The mission has lost one of its best, finest, and most trusted astronauts, and we cannot afford to lose anyone else. We are willing to sacrifice the odd satellite; we are willing to lose an unmanned rocket here and there. Hardware is expensive, but there is always something learned from the reversals. We are not, however, willing to lose manpower. NASA is about humankind’s aspirations. Not about technology. We protect our people. You should do the same. I urge you all to be mindful of what I’ve brought up tonight. Over and out.”