The Four Fingers of Death (27 page)

“Affirmative on ignition,” Jim said.

And we slowed. And we waited. And then we were a thousand meters up, and then those numbers diminished, and I was mindful of the fact that unlike the Earth launch, which was noteworthy for the fact that I had felt like my bowels were going to betray me at any point, I felt nothing but a giddy, thrilling excitement on this end of the mission, as the numbers went down, and the thrumming of combustion slowed us still further, and then, before we knew it, there was a violent report, and the capsule struck something, struck ground, struck dust, volcanic rock, struck something cosmic, ancient, untouched.

We were on Mars. We were on Mars!

On schedule, the engines idled down, and the aerobrake assembly retracted, and a number of solar panels began unfolding themselves on the outside of the
Excelsior
. It was quiet. It was quiet except for Jim telling Houston, telling America, telling the world what it would not know for a good long while. “Landing as scheduled, Houston, and we didn’t strike any boulders. We seem to be on very sturdy ground. Thanks very much for the coordinates.”

We were on Mars.

“Everyone okay?” Jim called.

“First officer able and accounted for,” I said.

Then there was an enfeebled but no less enthusiastic voice that called from down in the cargo bay, “Science officer okay, but he recommends against Mars landings with broken limbs. Not the most comfortable thing.”

“José,” Jim said, “you’re a champ.”

Protocol required a number of systems tests to certify that the capsule was not, for example, on fire, and also that the hull was intact, especially as the
Excelsior
was about to begin serving as our Mars base, at least until Steve and Abu, from the
Geronimo
, began erecting the additional base facility over by the reactor that, fully automated, had begun processing fuel on the surface about six months ago. Additionally, the
Pequod
was going to be in charge of the greenhouse-construction operation, another two or three kilometers distant. The
Geronimo
would be landing in the next six hours, and we accepted their congratulations on the new ham radio frequencies that were going to be our most reliable Mars-based communications system from now on, excepting the satellite above us that would make satellite phone communication possible once or twice a day.

We were on Mars! We had done the hard part! And the only thing left to do was go outside and investigate!

Jim and I got busy with the space suits down in the cargo bay. According to the thermometers we had on board, the outdoor temperature (at about 9:30 A.M., Martian time) was about −20 centigrade, though the sun was bright and the air a luminous pink. Everything that you have seen from all the rover missions and the flybys of the past thirty years is true. The soil is bright orange, and the rocks around which it blows are a deep gray. There’s a lot of sulfur around, and some methane in the atmosphere, so the prediction is that Mars actually smells really horrible. We were glad to have helmets and respirators, because even if we were able to take off our gear (which we would be able to do for very brief spells in low elevation as the mission moved toward summer, and even then in danger of frostbite and hypothermia), it would probably smell a lot like the industrial parts of Omaha or Shanghai.

I haven’t even mentioned the exhaustion of suddenly having weight again, right? After three months of weightlessness? It was a good thing that I weighed less than a famine victim here on Mars, because I don’t know if my muscles could have taken much more than the forty or fifty pounds, roughly speaking, that I weighed on the Red Planet. I was wobbly, and I was hallucinating that every heavy piece of equipment that Jim and I had to put on would float, as it had for three months. José was probably the most likely to want weightlessness, to help with his leg. But at least he was still, with his new amnesiac personality, encouraging.

“This gear is like lead,” I said to Jim.

Jim gave me the first sheepish smile of the Martian period of our friendship. “I guess this is how we get back in shape.”

Still, we couldn’t get the outerwear on fast enough. What is it that man loves about a wasteland, kids? What is it about a desolate and empty place that always looks to him like some large-scale merchandising operation? Why is it that nature so abhors a vacuum? My face was glued to the window, to every dune and declivity in the featureless track. As far as the eye could see was only about fifty or sixty kilometers on Mars, but in those sixty kilometers there was a lot of empty mileage. I couldn’t wait to get out there; I couldn’t wait to see it, to walk in it, to kneel in the emptiness, in the mystery, in the millennia of silence and howling gales that was Mars.

It was while José was helping us get the helmets on that Houston appealed to us by radio. It was unclear what was happening on the other end, because the transmission included no voices at all. The transmission resembled the interstellar background radio signals that I sometimes listened to on the journey here, as if I might be the first to hear the dots and dashes of beings signaling to us from the next galaxy over. But this wasn’t static, this communication from the home planet. It was applause. It was some kind of sustained ovation for us, kids. It was only after a couple minutes of this applause that we finally heard a monotone voice, “
Excelsior
, you have realized our hopes and our dreams. Over.”

Since training, that particular line was the signal for a fully scripted exchange, one that ended with my footsteps outside the capsule. Jim was meant to say something clever, along the lines of “Roger, Houston. We’ll bring a little of Mars back for you, if you’ll let us through customs,” and Jim looked at the intercom for a long time. José too. The three of us stood there in silence, and I’d like to believe that our purpose was sort of unanimous, if not agreed upon expressly. We were about to go off the reservation. We were about to go native. In the short run, this meant only that Jim began to ignore the script, on which we had both been drilled back in the Everglades. He shut off the intercom. In the Everglades, it was our life, the script. But it wasn’t anymore. Even José knew that something had changed. The trip had changed us. But he didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything, and neither did Jim. He gestured at the air lock.

“We’re going to go out for a bit. You okay for an hour or so?”

“I’ve got drill bits to inspect,” José said.

“Maybe you want to check the ramps for the rover. See if all that stuff is working properly. We’ll see you in a little while.”

And then Jim reached for the air lock. The air lock swung back on its hydraulic hinges. And we walked through it, and he closed it behind us. Leaving just the one last hatch. Which I then opened myself.

I guess it is unlikely that you can experience a place you’ve never been as a
homecoming
. I guess that would be a sentimentality of some kind, and we are not fond of sentimentalities in the space program, only in its marketing. I never thought about Mars as a kid. Growing up, I thought about the things any kid would think about: sports, girls, gangster rap, video games, keeping out undocumented workers, E. coli in the food supply, violent uprisings in faraway places, the color wheel issued by the Department of Homeland Security. Mars was just not part of my landscape. I never dreamed of Mars. Who would?

So how then could I feel, as my first foot hit the first rung of the ladder from which I would descend onto the surface of that other planet, that I had somehow come home? What did it mean to come home, if home were a place with subzero temperatures year-round, very little water, very little oxygen, and in all likelihood, no significant life of any kind?

Nevertheless, this is what I felt, that this place, this wasteland, was the place that I was coming back to. My one genuine home. I suppose, as I climbed down yet another of the five rungs it would take me to get to the “flags and footprints” portion of the mission, that I did have a revelatory moment, and that the nature of this revelation was along the following lines: there is no
natural order
, if the
natural order
means the way things go on the home planet. The home planet is where things started. I’ll grant this. But that does not necessarily constitute a natural order. The natural order is the wild, violent, unpredictable world of space, with its wormholes, dark matter, black holes, space-time curvature, and in this
natural order
, human ethics, puny human ethics, mean nothing. Human morality, confined to a minute portion of the universe, is statistically insignificant. I felt more comfortable in a landscape devoid of such niceties. Accordingly, I hopped down the last rung of the ladder and landed on a barren patch, with rocks surrounding me on all sides. I unfurled the flag, which, unlike on the moon, had no trouble blowing in the Martian breeze.

“Houston?” I said, opening the channel on the intercom, onto billions upon billions of desperate, squinting, diarrhetic, miserable, disenfranchised people clamoring for a better way of life. “Houston, it is a beautiful day in the neighborhood.”

January 14, 2026

Ever since the landing, NASA has tried to impose order on the Martian base. The Martian base has resisted at every turn. The Martian base represents a truly new and truly different way of thinking about the inevitable human diaspora. As a result of this, kids, they have put an end to my diary, after the escalating complaints, and you are no longer receiving anything from me, not even the heavily edited posts that I had come to appreciate so, where my every negative thought (and I have a lot of negative thoughts) had been sanitized and replaced with bright, sparkly bulletins that did everything but shill for our myriad official corporate suppliers. Well, that diary is a thing of the past. And so I write these lines for history, kids, and for the idea that one day the truth will be known. I believe my writings will be read a thousand years from now, when human populations, with wildly varying customs and languages and belief systems, are spread far and wide, as the first theoretical writings to advocate for interplanetary philosophical positions, and so I am patient. If by the time you read these lines you are grandparents, so be it.

The
Geronimo
landed on schedule, only about fifteen kilometers from the reactor that they were intended to use as their base. And the
Pequod
landed six hours after that, finding a spot in the base of a crater where the air pressure was slightly higher and where they would be shielded from the worst of the local storms. We all got our ham radio sets working properly and were able to get in contact with one another quickly. Here we were!

The first project involved our driving all the plant life over to the greenhouse and beginning the process of vegetating the Mars colony. The guys from the
Geronimo
had fewer plants, because they were carrying a lot of liquid hydrogen for the reactor, but they brought what they had. As did we. We were to meet in the crater that afternoon. The
Excelsior
had been outfitted with a deluxe rover that was pressurized, so that this vehicle could serve as an additional cabin if others failed. Accordingly, it wasn’t a problem for us to get to the greenhouse quickly. We had some fuel, and there were solar panels—the rover was designed to be able to travel a thousand kilometers or more on one tank of fuel. When we went over a hilltop, we marked this topographical wonder by bestowing upon it a solar-powered radio beacon. As though we could map every feature in this tiny triangle of the Mars colony.

It was about seven days in, therefore, before the entire Mars mission was in one spot, together. We had our portional moments of confraternity, and we engaged in our appointed tasks, of which much more below. But on the seventh day the Mars colony experienced itself as a community. This meeting was not to the liking of everyone. As you’ll recall, Brandon Lepper had charges proffered against him by Laurie Corelli, leading to the daring midair prisoner exchange, when Debbie Quartz was lost. Still unanswered was the question of whether Debbie had somehow been forced into the heavens by Brandon. Meanwhile, none of the astronauts from the
Pequod
knew the entire story about José Rodrigues and his injuries, except what they may have heard from Houston. And yet, as I have already implied, once the Mars colony began to experience itself as the future of humankind, rather than as some military-industrial corporate stunt, it became less and less important to us what Houston thought.