The Four Fingers of Death (22 page)

Jim Rose and I sat there as the screen went blue again, and in stunned silence we pondered the meanings of this communication. Everything was so much
worse
than they knew on the ground, but maybe Dr. Anatoly Thatcher had a point. Maybe there was some kind of interplanetary
menarche
, some periodic self-slaughtering impulse, and now we were at its mercy. The question was whether we could survive the experience. If our bodies could survive, might it be our personalities, our hearts, that gave out? Did terms like
heart
and
soul
have any meaning beyond the surface of the home planet? Were these convenient metaphors dependent on a certain level of atmospheric pressure? A water-based ecosystem?

Jim said, “That certainly did not make a public servant feel confident about his job.” He had these worry lines. At the corners of the eyes. If anything, they had become worse on the Mars mission. Additionally, there was the tendency, with weightlessness, for a body to hold water above the waist. Whatever the cause, in times of great stress, worry lines broke out on Jim like a series of fermatas over the symphonic score of his personality.

“Do you notice any of it?” I asked.

“What? Disinhibitory whatever?”

“Roger that.”

“I notice that I am not sleeping,” he said, and fell into a conspiratorial whisper. “I notice that certain people here in our neighborhood do not seem trustworthy any longer to me, and I notice that I cannot shake the idea that we are just going to Mars to pick up the minerals necessary for some new kind of explosive something-or-other. And I don’t know if that’s what I signed up for, or if I want to be a part of that. I still don’t know what I want to do about it. What do you think?”

“About the disinhibitory excuses? Or about the military-industrial complex? I never believed we were up to any good. I only believed I wanted to travel. I like to see the lines of the superhighway disappear beneath me.”

“But do you notice any symptoms of
interplanetary disinhibitory disorder?
”

“I would have to have strong feelings about my character in the first place,” I said. “And I do not. Disinhibition might make me less ill-tempered. This might improve my outlook.”

The video game we played blinked away on the screen on the table in front of us. I unhooked myself from the seat where I had been perched and allowed myself to roam freely across the capsule, the better to avoid his eyes, which seemed to have some probing quality.

Despite a wish to avoid further disclosure, I went on. “I’m the perfect astronaut. I have no native qualities. I’m the guy you want to have on your team because I have no needs. I take the orders. If you want to know the truth, the only disinhibiting I’ve noticed concerns my dislike of José. It blossoms.”

Perhaps I thought I was winning Jim over with this remark.

Jim Rose unhooked himself from the table and swam toward me. Despite my blue mood, my poor conversational skills, the dark forecasts from home, his presence beside me lightened my mood. He said, “You aren’t afraid?”

“Of what’s to come?” I said.

“Well,” said Captain Jim Rose, the linebacker, the most-likely-to-succeed astronaut, the pilot, the future political candidate, the hero to the economically deprived young men of the Wild West, “I am. I am afraid.”

That was when he first took my hand.

December 26, 2025

We just celebrated the first Christmas of the Mars mission! Only one or two more to go! Before we’re back on Terran terra firma! I have to say it was good to have
ham
. I’d almost forgotten what ham was like. It had a voluptuous stink that was just unlike anything else we had here on the
Excelsior
. Oh, the little frivolities of life. They enabled you to go on. We called over to the
Pequod
, to wish them a very merry holiday. So far no response. I contacted Houston not long after to ask if everything was all right on the other ships, and then I waited. To be sure, things were hard on the
Pequod
. They were shorthanded. Arnie Gilmore wasn’t meant to be doing the first officer stuff, the management stuff, but he was trying to do it, and Laurie was brushing up on piloting, which involved some daily lessons from Mission Control. Talk about your steep learning curve. She had three days, now, to figure out how to coordinate landing the
Pequod
, which was meant to be the last ship to land. Before that, we needed to secure the location of the cargo that had been launched at Mars in the last couple years, like the liquid hydrogen, so as to avoid losing the hardware components of the Earth Return Vehicle that were in the
Pequod
cargo hold, and which would be assembled into that craft for our trip home. Maybe the stress of piloting explained why Laurie wasn’t communicating. And yet the same was true of the
Geronimo
. I gave a yell over to Steve, to see how he was holding up, how his son’s strep throat was.

Abu sent a text message later that said they had gifts for Jim and José and me, but we’d have to wait till we were camped safely at Valles Marineris before they’d give them to us. Can you guess? Some more dehydrated ham?

Then my daughter called to wish me a merry Christmas, and while I would like to say that this was a joyous thing, and that I was very happy to be contacted by my daughter, Ginger, whose partially shaved head and cranial subdermal implants were clearly visible in the little postage-stamp-sized video feed, this was not exactly true. My daughter had achieved the time-honored goal of adolescents: she’d got rid of one of her parents. She had shipped one of her parents about 40 million miles away. While she did not cause this relocation, she could at least reap the benefits. She could feel abandoned, she could detest my personal grooming habits, she could do whatever the hell she liked at least 50 percent of the time. When I looked at her, in the little postage-stamp-sized video feed, I saw a mirror image of myself. I saw the me who attempted to keep himself apart from his crewmates. And that person, that person who was not appearing in NASA-related promotional material, was socially uncomfortable, not a gifted small-talker; that person was a mumbler; that person tried to avoid talking to people when they came to the door; that person spent inordinately long periods of time in the bathroom (even on the
Excelsior
) because he was assured of being undisturbed there; that person wanted the acclaim of the world and disliked the world in equal measure. It was while I was watching this replica of myself, with shaved head and subdermal cranial implants and lots of piercings, that Ginger began to weep, remarking how hollow Christmas seemed to her now,
I don’t see what all of this is for; it’s just some big lie, especially now they have this ad online saying how it’s your duty as a patriot to buy more at Christmas, or some horseshit, Dad
, and she said this with her bitter adolescent irony, the tears glistening on her cheeks.
I bet the reindeer can’t stand temperatures near absolute zero, Dad, and they need oxygen, and they don’t like cosmic radiation or solar winds, and there’s no company store for the elves
. And then my daughter produced a ukulele (her ability to play this instrument was news to me), and she began singing a little song, to ukulele accompaniment. It sounded faintly Hawaiian, if you ask me; I mean, that’s how you’d describe it. She’d written this out-of-tune melody, which she then sang in a husky, throaty voice:
Daddy, merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, Daddy. The Earth misses you. The chimney misses you, Daddy. The stockings miss you. The mouse needs his cheese. Merry Christmas, Daddy. You’re lucky you didn’t see my report card. I got nothing good for Christmas, Daddy. Come home soon
, and then, before she could finish, she started crying so hard that there was a little balloon of watery snot coming out of the nostril that had the nose ring in it. Soon my ex-wife appeared in the shot and whispered something to Ginger, who then allowed herself to be lured away to plum pudding with trans fats, after which my daughter’s wobbly voice was audible off-camera,
We miss you!

A reasonable question might be: Does this kind of message really help? Does it build character? Or does it just make a guy like me feel worse? As far as I was concerned, human civilization at this moment consisted of nine persons. Well, make that eight persons, since one had floated away. Eight persons on a flotilla of ships. And this flotilla had nothing to do with Christmas, as far as I could tell. Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t crucified on Mars. That’s the big lesson of Christmas: Peace on
Earth
.

Meanwhile, Steve and Abu had Brandon Lepper under round-the-clock surveillance. They wouldn’t leave him alone on any shift. In the brief opportunities I had to talk to Steve, he wouldn’t tell me what had happened, because, I think, he was worried about what Brandon was doing or would do with the information. Then there was José here, who had begun practicing strange breathing exercises that he said were part of the Chinese national religion known as Falun Dafa. José assumed these praying mantis positions before and after he used the exercise bicycle. And he agitated from one leg to another, caroming off the capsule walls. We could hear him down in the cargo bay, singing Mandarin-language pop music. His beard seemed very, very long. I don’t know if Falun Dafa had recruited him to begin spreading a message of truthfulness, benevolence, and forbearance to the planet Mars, but it was not impossible. They were, after all, one of the most popular religions on Earth, if by popular you meant having the greatest number of adherents, not to mention basilicas in Mongolia
and
Cape Verde. I kept expecting a dinner at which José explained to me, using acronyms, how “Millions and millions of EPs, in the most prosperous nation on Earth, the PRC, are mobilizing every day in government-sponsored RAs to learn how to channel these simple APMs into abundance and well-being, especially when they’re guided by members of the party; however, ROTP insures that I cannot pass on to you the five basic principles, because you are a WC.”

Lately, he’d also been turning in kind of early. Maybe this was an indication of my TMCT, my
total Mars conspiracy theory
, in which everyone on the mission was on the payroll of some foreign intelligence service. Or everyone had allegiance to some governmental agency, and no one was talking or sharing information, and when we got to the surface of the planet, we’d all head off in different directions to contact our disparate patrons. Maybe that’s what Debbie was doing right now, from out in space somewhere, radioing out to aliens about the malevolent humans.

Kids, I had just a couple of days left to perfect my delivery of the line I was supposed to proclaim when I got out of the ship, commencing in this way the important “flags and footprints” portion of the Mars mission. You know what I mean, right? If something went wrong, if the mobile factory that had already landed on the surface (to mill the liquid hydrogen and to make propellant-grade methane) wasn’t working properly, and we had to turn right around, it was nonetheless important to get the human footprint in the sand as quickly as possible and to get the flagpole erected. I had to have my sentence ready to utter during the Mars landing sequence. The proclamation needed to be effected quickly, confidently, safely.

I’m not supposed to give it away early, the history-making sentence, so you can bet that this diary entry is going to be heavily censored by NASA. But I don’t have any secrets from you! Tomorrow I could be crushed during orbit insertion! So let me be the first to tell you that this piece of oratory was obviously written by a committee of speechwriters, many of them from the NASA public-relations office. I mean, what do you expect from a government agency? You get stiff, middle-American prose. So here it is, kids, the line you will never hear ahead of the big day: “This planet was named for the god of war, but with our small settlement, may our neighbor planet now be colonized in peace.” Feel free to comment among yourselves. Send responses to the Mars mission home page.

You know the big controversy about the Apollo missions, right? The moon landings? Neil Armstrong and the famous sentence that he botched? He was supposed to say: “One small step for
a
man, one giant leap for mankind.” Neil got a lot of credit for that sentence, but the fact of the matter is, he mangled it good by leaving out the article. For these reasons, NASA is very insistent that I practice my line, so as to avoid making any similar mistake. Moreover, you’ll notice that the sentence doesn’t have the article
a
in it. Maybe NASA became concerned about the article. They have never quite recovered from its loss. They have further warned about adding in unnecessary verbiage, as though an
a
, left over from the Apollo missions, floating around in space, might have drifted out to the fourth planet, where we are about to go into orbit, and this
a
will attach itself to me somehow, standing for
aphasia
, or
atom bomb
, or
adultery
, or I don’t know what, and I will mangle the sentence that they have so carefully constructed after months and months of meetings and consultants’ fees paid to advertising executives and public-relations experts.