The Four Fingers of Death (29 page)

“With that said,” he went on, “I think it would be useful to try to come up with some ideas about how to use what we have here in the coming days. We have the ultralight aircraft, and we are here at the edge of the largest known canyon in the universe. Leaving aside, if we are able, NASA’s expectations, the canyon is worth a look from a scientific perspective. It’s also for us to wonder at. I’d like to entertain suggestions about how we might proceed.”

There was silence for a moment. The clank of metal flatware on military mess kits. José’s head came up from his chow long enough to add to the conversation. His was a non sequitur that I almost immediately wished had gone unreported.

“Hey, Arnie, I’m really feeling like some of my memory is starting to come back.”

“That’s great, José,” Arnie said. “I’m sure you can count on more improvement. And what are you remembering so far? Short-term memories? Are you able to recall distant events from your childhood?”

“I remember the Ownership Projects in Las Vegas,” José said. “I remember when there was the Compulsive Gamblers and Games of Chance Act—that’s what it was called, right? For a while after, the city government constructed those buildings for people who had lost everything. Anyone remember all this?” The other seven astronauts were all but silenced at the wincing nostalgia of José’s reverie. Perhaps he had, once upon a time, sought to conceal the modesty of his origins beneath a haze of acronyms, but not any longer, kids. “You know, my dad was a naturalized citizen, and once he got his papers, he went into the casinos and he didn’t come out. Not for many, many years. I remember when the authorities seized the house that we’d bought. My mother bought it with the money she made working at the Pompeii. There was a foreclosure date, and an eviction date, and then we just had to leave. Anyhow, once we were bounced out, as I’m recalling it, we got a small apartment in the Ownership Projects, which we shared with my uncle and his family. It should have been stifling, and maybe it really was, but the thing I remember is how the electricity was so bad out there that you really could see the stars, from right outside the projects. My cousin, the one who later was shot, we used to lie out on the lawn at night—it was just a patch of loose rock—and look at the stars. And I used to say to him, ‘Not a day past eighteen.’ That was our pact, that we wouldn’t stay in those Ownership Projects a day past our eighteenth birthdays. The place I aimed to go, and this is what I told him, was to those stars.”

“That’s a beautiful story,” Arnie said, patient and gentle. “Do you have any more-recent memories?”

This was a leading question. It probed at the mystery of NASA’s plans. The government’s plans. There were, and had always been, things we didn’t know, and this leading question intimated as much.

“In fact, I had this whole long memory yesterday,” José said. “But I’m not sure if it was a genuine memory. It might have been a daydream or something. It was while I was still in bed. Anyone else here found that their dreams on Mars are a whole heck of a lot more vivid? Anyway, I remember that there was some kind of asteroid or something, before I was born, and this asteroid had plunged onto the Antarctic shelf, and the guys back at NASA were always obsessed with it. In fact, at one point someone let me look at this microscope and see what they had found in the asteroid, and what they had found was this frozen extraterrestrial bacteria. They were really sure that the asteroid was from Mars, was maybe even a part of Mars that had been blasted from the planet somehow. From some asteroid strike. This stuff, the NASA scientists said, was liable to still be on Mars, this bacteria. They were sure about this, in my daydream, and they were beginning to do some experiments to see what kind of properties the bacteria had.”

Now, I know that I personally had set down my flatware and was waiting expectantly, hoping that José’s faulty memory would not, for example, reconstruct that he had once refused to tell me anything about the fateful bacteria, the bacteria that he had so kept to himself for the first part of the mission. Perhaps predictably, this was the moment when Brandon Lepper, sullen and uncommunicative throughout the course of the meal, chose to interrupt José. There was an almost palpable sense of dread as this miscreant, over whom a cloud of suspicion hovered, spoke.

“Listen, buddy,” he said with a wheedling familiarity, “I don’t know if you are alert to what you’re saying, and I’m guessing you’re not, but this is classified-type stuff. Most of the people at this table don’t need to know.”

José looked up with a naive astonishment. Yes, it was evident that the bacteria, whatever else it was, was one of the mnemonic keys to his recovery from concussion. And it was evident who would wish to stanch the flow of José as he was now expressing himself. Arnie leaped into the awkward silence that followed, to defend José.

“Maybe it’s a reasonable treatment plan for José to try to think through all the memories, through every precious one of them, Brandon, if you don’t mind.”

“I do mind,” he said. “And you can stay the hell out of it.”

“I have no intention of staying out of it, and I’m not threatened by your tone, if that’s what you’re after. You may have threatened some other people around here, but you will not do so again. Not while I’m around.”

“Lepper,” Jim Rose said, throwing down his own flatware, rising up from the meager folding chair so that it toppled behind him, “you’re way out of line.”

“I am? Says who exactly? I don’t know about the rest of you,” Brandon said, “but I was recruited to carry out a mission. Hundreds if not thousands of global citizens would have given everything they had in order to fly this mission. I gave everything I had. Therefore, I’m still intending to do the job that I was hired to do. Because I believe in duty.”

“And what,” I tried to break in, “is the nature of your—”

“I don’t have to listen to this,” Brandon continued. “I don’t have to have my character called into question by a bunch of edenic nitwits who want to drink wine and watch the plants grow. A couple of weeks, you’ll all be dead from exposure, and then you’ll all get your memorial broadcasts back home, where they interview your neighbors and talk about how poignant it was that you saved coyotes from the brink of extinction. Well, fuck yourselves, I say. I came to open the mystery of this place, this world, to take it back home where something can be done with it, something practical, for our national economy.”

His plate, when he flung it, with its rehydrated chipped beef, clattered across the greenhouse, colliding at last with the lightweight petrochemical sheeting that sealed off the place. This in itself was dangerous, because had he managed to puncture the sealant or the construction material, we were all going to start choking pronto, not to mention it was going to get pretty cold. Before any of us could take note of the situation, however, he was gone, having commandeered the helmet nearest, from the row of dusty gray globes. In the embarrassed gulp that followed, it was Steve who said:

“Uh, the rover!”

By the time we understood the perfidy of Brandon’s intentions, we could hear the grinding of its ignition. Jim and I raced out, into the howling Martian wastes, and watched as the rover bounced off in the direction of nothing that we knew.

January 28, 2026

Let me tell you a few things about the canyon. The Valles Marineris. The great dark place. The planetary bifurcation. Named after the unmanned orbiter that first discovered it more than fifty years ago now, and composed not just of the one fissure, four thousand kilometers long, but also of a whole system of parallel striations and offshoots. So deep that you could stack that famous canyon from Arizona in it a couple of times over. Cliff walls that exceed 14,000 feet running hundreds of miles. Imagine walking up to the edge of a 14,000-foot cliff wall and looking down! And then seeing that the wall extends as far along as you are able to see. Meanwhile, the Valles Marineris is so far across that if you accidentally landed in it, somehow, you could make the mistake of thinking you were on the legitimate surface of the planet, at least until you attempted to hike out of your position and saw, on the horizon, that immensity, that other towering basaltic wall, overlaid with the silent and magisterial geological ages.

Basaltic, you see, because the Valles Marineris is located in the same general vicinity as a great number of volcanoes. This being just east of the Martian region known as Tharsis. Although the original force that created the canyon was tectonic plate shifting of some kind, it’s also true that something flowed through here, kids, some portion of which was volcanic lava from nearby eruptions. Later, however, there was probably water here too, otherwise how to explain all the collapses. There have been a lot of collapses. They are not infrequent. There are parts of the canyon that, according to the unmanned missions, look like ancient Roman amphitheaters, or those graduated stadia that they use for X-treme lacrosse tourneys, from where portions of the walls, all 14,000 feet of them, came tumbling down.

Why is the Valles Marineris so important? you ask. This is the question we have been asking ourselves, ever since the advent of the mysterious bacteria became so vital to the Mars colony, if only because of its recurrence as poetical figure in all our conversations. Originally, as you know, we were scheduled to put down at the South Pole, where, mixed with the liquid dry ice, there would have been plentiful water by Martian standards. Or that, at any rate, is the theory. Instead, we have been attempting the impossible, using makeshift drilling mechanisms to search beneath the topsoil for ice that we can then heat with the by-products of nuclear fission at our reactor. So far it makes for nonpotable water, and there’s not a lot of it, and there’s a little bit of a worry that we’re going to plunder what’s nearby and then we’ll be back to reusing, relentlessly, the water given us for the capsules, which we’ve been heating and reheating, and which is now admixed with all kinds of additives that I for one don’t want to know about. Uremic acid crystals, e.g.

Why Valles Marineris, indeed. There have been many papers written about the canyon, about the importance of it. I am in a position to spill the beans on certain still-classified documents along these lines, and as you probably suspect, the fact is that the canyon, because of its substantial air pressure, by comparison, and because of its access to a much earlier period of Martian geological history, is likely to harbor frozen water of an early Martian vintage, and, just perhaps, some of this water, in turn, is home to the early Martian life-forms that undoubtedly once lived in it.

The meteorite that José was alluding to, as I have mentioned earlier, is called by the rather unpoetical name of ALH 84001, kids, and it’s 4.5 million years old, and the deepest layers of the Valles Marineris are, apparently, almost precisely its coeval, and perhaps this is how it came to be that scientists wanted to look in the canyon for sister bacteria, and thus, apparently, the reason for our change of venue.

The morning after Brandon stole the rover (and we had to drive back to the
Excelsior
in one of the open Martian cargo transport vehicles, on our ventilators, in not a little bit of danger of freezing solid, since the sun was going over the horizon), I was shaken awake, on my modest bed, by José. He had a kind of mad look in his eye. He was chewing on a piece of chocolate that I had been saving for weeks. Which was irritating. I could hardly complain about the chocolate, when he was so excited about whatever he was to tell me.

“M. thanatobacillus. M. thanatobacillus!”

“It’d be less of a mouthful if you weren’t eating my chocolate bar. Those chocolate bars have a three-year shelf life.”

“The bacteria. That’s the name of the bacteria.”

“The bacteria from the meteorite?”

Jim followed him in, carrying a mug of battery acid coffee, and soon the three of us were sitting there, like a Martian coffee klatch. The sun shone in the salmon-fishery sky. All was quiet, except for the hum of capsule life support.

“It’s a gram-positive bacteria, it has flagella, it has an S-layer, and it can consume phenols, so it’s good for industrial accidents. And it has characteristics almost exactly like Earth bacteria.”