The Four Fingers of Death (26 page)

“She jettisoned herself into space.”

It occurred to me to wonder if he could be falsifying the severity of his amnesiac symptoms. Perhaps in concert with military subcontractors who were paying him additional sums. The only thing I could think to do was to probe around the limits of his awareness.

“She did say
something
, you know, before her accident, about a bacteria on the surface that she thought might be a little dangerous,” I said. “It might have had a military application. This was probably something she was just making up, don’t you think?”

“Bacteria?”

“You were briefed by subcommittees of the agency I know nothing about.”

“What are you asking?”

“I’m saying that if there’s something on the surface that I don’t know anything about, you would now be in a position to tell me.”

“I remember something about a bacteria, but it’s not very clear.”

“When you do remember, feel free. Don’t forget that we’re in this together. We’re not on Earth anymore, José. We’re Martians, or very soon we will be.”

At this point, just a few hours from our purported landing, Jim Rose finally appeared in the cargo bay. Jim was sweaty, worried, and he had trouble sticking with the conversation for more than a couple of sentences. He kept inspecting unimportant bits of machinery.

“How’s the patient?” he inquired.

“It’s only an issue when I move.”

“Well, look,” Jim said. “I have some instructions from Arnie, and these instructions involve retrofitting the reactor core here in the engineering subroutine so that we can essentially do a bit of an ad hoc X-ray on you, José, using films from some of the botanical experiments. But there’s a more important question than that, at least it’s more important to me, and that concerns our ability to set the craft down tomorrow. That’s what I want to know, José. I want to know if you’re going to be able to help land this ship, because that’s what we’re supposed to do, and we’re landing on the plains not far from the deepest canyon in the entire universe, José, because that’s where you’re supposed to direct us in a series of experiments. I need to know if you’re ready.”

The pressure was enormous, and a man with a broken leg and concussive memory loss was likely to feel ill-equipped to deal with it. Still, José rose to the occasion.

“If I came here to do a job, then I’m going to do that job.”

December 30, 2025

I’m going to leave out the part where we splinted José’s leg, because that’s just blood and guts. I mean, you know what it’s probably like, right? You yank on a guy’s leg, a broken leg, he screams endlessly, and then you watch as he relieves himself inadvertently because of the excruciating pain, and then you try to clean him up a little bit, and you put the inflatable splint on his leg, all the while getting directions from Houston about what to do if for some reason you have to
take the leg off
. Gangrene is less likely in the space capsule, because we just didn’t bring that many bugs with us out here, and this will also be the case on the surface of the planet, where the ground is mostly sterile. The topsoil is sterile as far down as the unmanned missions have drilled, except at the poles. And so José’s leg was not going to rot on him, and we were not going to take it off.

And this didn’t mean a delayed touchdown. We weren’t going to have to cede the front position to the
Geronimo
, which we didn’t want to do at all. But I was a little concerned that a delay didn’t even occur to Houston. Maybe the
Geronimo
was having worse problems than we were. Maybe all three ships were now afflicted with the condition known as Space Panic. If a craft in which the pilot and the first officer were having sex and the science officer had a broken leg (and a spotty memory) was optimal, things must have really been bad elsewhere. We were going down first, that was the plan, and that was that.

And so at 0800, we were set to go.

I recorded another announcement for my family, which is to say for Ginger and Havoc, and then one for my parents, who were in their rest home out in the Southwest, and who kept writing to me asking about the food onboard the
Excelsior
. Then Jim read a poem he had written for his family, a poem that did rhyme
wife
with
life
, and José we sort of left where he was, strapped in down in the cargo bay, declaiming lamentations in Spanglish.

In order to drop out of orbit, all we needed to do was slow ourselves beyond the stable orbiting velocity, which, as you can imagine, is not hard to do. What’s hard to do is to avoid going so fast, upon entry, that you incinerate. Well, there’s also the possibility of careening into a crater somewhere. We had parachutes that were supposed to enable us to slow adequately, after which we were to use thrusters for a smooth touchdown. We’d been trained. We’d done it in simulations. We’d landed similar crafts on Earth.

Did I ever tell you, kids, about Jim Rose’s first wife? I’m guessing at this moment that you don’t know that much about Jim Rose at all. You don’t know how he came to be the captain of the
Excelsior;
you don’t know much about his early life, beyond his rank and his military record, to which I have alluded. And so: as we prepare to land the
Excelsior
forty kilometers from the Valles Marineris, assuming we don’t blow it, let me take this opportunity to tell you what I know.

Jim Rose’s first wife, Barbara, was a regular military wife back on a base in Central Asia. This was during the years when Uzbekistan was the focus of our military and our foreign-policy objectives. Barbara, as I understand it, didn’t know exactly what her husband did, which was to pilot into spots where we were not meant to be flying, in order to extract intelligence agents who were not meant to be there in the first place, and bring them back to safety. Barbara was trying to raise youngsters in this harsh and inhospitable environment, in which women were not meant to appear in pants, or without the
hijab
. These were the kinds of difficulties that a wife undertook for her husband, when he was in covert operations.

Anyway, the story goes that Jim was once out on a mission that involved springing some journalists who’d been taken hostage. These journalists, who’d also abandoned the army detachment with which they were embedded, were considered expendable by the military, but if the enemy was in turn going to use them as bargaining chips, the hostages would then appear in the papers, and that wasn’t good for anyone. Jim’s operation involved storming the village in the mountains where the journalists were held, to free as many as feasible.

There must have been a mole of some kind in the embassy. There must have been a highly placed mole. Because Jim’s first wife, Barbara, was abducted the very day he set off to free the “embeds.” She was out on the street, and she was swiped, in front of the kids, and driven away. It was hours before the State Department knew what had happened. No one had ever heard of the cell that claimed responsibility. It was Jim’s belief, as he later told me, that these groups acted first and came up with their position papers later on. When they had milked a Western hostage for all he or she could provide, the militants would fade into the countryside, retreating into agrarian subculture in the way that the enemy has done for many decades now.

The intelligence operatives who counted Jim among their number worked hard over the next few days to locate Jim’s wife. They overturned every rock around the military base, threatened untold reprisals through contacts, and they firebombed a couple of mosques as a lesson to those who would provoke the American military. Still there was no sign of Barbara Rose. Jim, like the professional that he was, finished his mission, freeing two of the three journalists he’d set out to free, with few civilian casualties. It was not long after that his wife’s body was found in a ditch by a road, not three or four miles from the base. She’d
not
been violated by her captors, Jim told me, nor tortured, she’d simply been held as long as was feasible—and then murdered.

To this day, Jim blames the murder of Barbara on the kind of work that his colleagues were doing in Central Asia—surgical strikes and tactical disappearances outside of the normal rules of engagement. Jim was a search-and-rescue guy, and he didn’t, or so he said, subject foreign nationals to any kind of extreme interrogation techniques. He was not an interrogator. Yet he came to feel that these kinds of techniques were routine in and around the base. In the time after Asia, he felt that the conduct of the war put him and others in intelligence at risk.

He left the military. With two motherless boys. They’d lost one parent, and he wouldn’t be responsible, he said, for their losing another. He’d had to tell his boys what happened to their mother, while they were still recovering from the trauma of watching her abduction, and he had to, as he put it, restore his credibility with them by finding a line of work that was more honorable. When he got back from Asia, he spent a good long time unable to do much. He sat on his parents’ porch in Biloxi and collected combat pay. He couldn’t talk openly about what he’d been doing abroad, and he couldn’t talk about his feelings of remorse. Then, one afternoon, his two sons, his older boys (as distinct from the little ones whelped in the second marriage), came home from school having seen a program about the dawning of the Mars mission. The way Jim tells it, he already knew how lucky he was, when his boys came to him on the porch. “Dad, they are looking for astronauts to go to Mars. The NASA folks are looking. And the two of us have been talking it over. We think you ought to go on down there and volunteer.”

Child is father to the man! Jim Rose, stern, secret operative, wept the tears of the mostly unworthy. “You do? You think I ought to?” There was no stepmother on the scene, not at that time. Not for several years. There was no one to look after those boys if something should happen to him. And yet the boys were more concerned about their father than themselves. Or that’s how the story goes.

Do you see it now? Do you see why I felt like this was a man I too would put ahead of myself? Do you see why I loved this man, in my own ill-defined and Space Panicky way? This was a man of ideals, a man who believed in something, a man whose gentleness was most evident in the tiny little creases at the corners of his eyes, which in my private moments I referred to as the Eye Crinkles, and whose military severity was belied by his strong desire and his occasional outbursts of sentimentality. I think you can see, and I need not say more.

At 0815, the chutes opened, and we went hurtling toward the surface, as we had been instructed to do, swan-diving through cumulus clouds. We had the ventilators on, and Jim was calling out altimeter readings when he had a chance, and we were strapped down, and the sound was a deep, unrepentant roar, as of creation, and we were either going to stop in the way that we were supposed to stop, or it would be the last thing we ever knew, the throbbing of puny man-made aluminum alloy casings when faced with the enigmas of other worlds. Was I scared? You bet I was scared, and you bet I was excited too, because, as I have said, the best astronaut is the one with the least to lose. When the parachutes flowered to slow us, I felt the drag, and there was a grave heaviness to the capsule suddenly, and I didn’t know if the chutes could possibly contain it, the colonialist menace of us. And then the clear skies of a Martian spring opened up before me, and I could see, on the monitors, the canyon, which was one of the topographic features most notable on Mars, even from space, and we hurtled down toward it as though the canyon intended to swallow us, and just when it seemed that the landing could go on no longer (nor be any more dangerous), it did; it went on, and the thrusters fired, and when they did, I allowed myself the first clear thought:
We are really going to land on this planet
.

All my training said I was never meant to doubt, but I did, and I accepted my doubts. And yet when we felt the thrusters, both Jim and I laughed, because we were about to become legends, whether we wanted to be or not, legends for the good of an idea. The idea that if you use up one planet, there’s another one out there somewhere that you can fuck up.