The Four Fingers of Death (30 page)

To Jim, I said, “Are you following?”

“His memory,” Jim said. Jim’s beard was now moving toward an Old Testament type of tonsorial styling, and he stroked it meditatively when considering the larger implications. You had to try to read into the few abbreviated remarks that did get uttered.

“Are you implying that we somehow exported our own bacteria to Mars?” I asked.

“Or bacteria came from somewhere else and was exported to both Earth and Mars through some interstellar transaction,” Jim said.

“And you remembered all this?” I said to José.

“And my Social Security number, from back when I was a kid. Not that it will come in handy now.”

“Nope.”

I don’t need to go into what Social Security was. Anyway, Social Security is irrelevant to the further revelations of this conversation, because once it was established that José could remember a few things from his past, such as the condition of his financial accounts, the web code of his long-term debt-repayment plan, and the name of his pet snake from childhood, he parted with the following scrap of info from his level-five mission briefings:

“The thing about the
M. thanatobacillus
is that, like some other gram-positive types of bacteria, it causes illness. Serious illness. I guess the closest relative would be
B. anthracis
, or maybe the resistant
S. aureus
, except that
M. thanatobacillus
goes into a kind of feeding frenzy in the presence of certain carbon-based life-forms, at least when it’s heated to the right temperature. A temperature that’s rare on Mars. Basically, it causes bodies to sort of… disassemble.”

“What?” I said.

“It’s not an airborne type of infection because it doesn’t do well when it’s not really hot, and it stays dormant in the hundred-degree-below-zero-type temperature range. But in a tropical or semitropical environment, like the one you might get in a period of generalized greenhouse emissions, it thrives. It eats its way through bodies.”

Jim, tugging on his beard: “The flesh-eating germ.”

José: “Maybe a little bit worse.”

Jim said, “You’re saying that you were briefed by NASA about coming to Mars in order to harvest cultures of a bacterium that is so dangerous to human life that it causes human bodies to break down upon contact? What would we be using that for?”

“We’d be using it on our military enemies.”

“It was a rhetorical question.”

“I’m guessing,” I said, “that you weren’t informed about which enemies they were talking about.”

José said, “The critical phase doesn’t happen immediately, the disassembling part. It takes a little while. The gestation of a full-blown infection is several weeks. You have to come in bodily contact with an infected party. It’s not airborne like with
B. anthracis
, which I guess suggests it can’t be aerosolized, although I don’t really know if they tried that yet.”

“Where did they do all this research?”

“I know they let the bacteria infect a sheep farm. They had a population of sheep in a lab they were borrowing from the Kiwis, I think. South Island of New Zealand. It was closer to McMurdo that way, and they could transport the bacteria on military aircraft more easily, while it was in its BDP. They could fly it into the PST bases, Los Angeles, Phoenix, places like that. So they introduced the germ into this sheep population near Dunedin, and the results were grisly. Even though the whole project is need to know, like Brandon was saying. They were going to great lengths to impress on us the kind of precautions we needed to take while mining.”

“And this is why we’re going into the canyon.”

“This is why Brandon may be heading there already,” Jim said.

How did Jim know this? That Brandon was already there? Well, there were homing beacons on the rover, because of the danger of getting lost on Mars (no magnetic field!). It was therefore not hard to track the movement of our lost vehicle. Brandon had likely attempted to strip off the beacons without success. Or perhaps he was simply unconcerned about our tracking him. Brandon needed to drive about four hundred kilometers from our landing zone in the Chryse Planitia to get to the easternmost end of the Valles Marineris, where the evidence of water leaving the canyon was plain for all to see. In fact, he had already taken a couple of exploratory missions to the edge of the canyon, where he had no doubt beheld the 14,000-foot cliff face that I was explaining about earlier. In each of his exploratory maneuvers, Brandon had ventured farther west, according to Jim, coming back at night to his base camp to recharge the rover. He was camping near the remains of an old unmanned mission—there were almost twenty junk sites on Mars, and no shortage of them in Chryse—and he was using some of its solar panels and its old computing equipment while trying to stay warm during the Martian nights.

What to do about all of this? What to do about Brandon, and how seriously should we take the search for
M. thanatobacillus
? If he did manage to locate a sample of the bacteria, he would then be faced with the problem of returning with it to Earth. With seven of us resisting him, he was going to have a hard time. He couldn’t just walk off with the Earth Return Vehicle and leave the rest of us here.

“The risk of infection is certainly unappetizing,” Jim said.

“I think NASA, at the service of the DOD, felt a number of us could be expended in the effort to procure and incubate the bacteria. This loss would be offset by the military application back on Earth,” José said. “And the public-relations part of it would be easy to finesse. Since this is a dangerous mission.”

“That’s just what Brandon said on the
Geronimo
, according to Abu,” I said. “And I hate to break the news to you, but he specifically threatened you, José. He was already working hard to cover up the whole story of the military acquisition of the bacteria.”

José attempted to seem unperturbed.

“I say let’s fly in there and be ready when he comes. We can take the ultralight, launch it off the cliff wall, which may be why we carried it all this way anyhow. I mean, I don’t have any FAA certification or anything. You guys will have to do the flying. But, come on, I smashed my skull on the fuselage of the damn thing! I feel like I want to get every bit of value out of the ultralight before we leave it sticking out of a dune somewhere.”

“What do we do with him when we find him?” I asked.

“We leave him,” Jim said.

We didn’t give the implications of it a second thought, I’m ashamed to say. The three of us agreed. The Mars colony would do what human beings had done for the entirety of their species on the home planet, sacrifice one another in the pursuit of public safety, that lofty goal. We obviously felt we had no choice. But this is what the human animal and his primate forebears have always done. Beat on chest! Thump the forest floor with stick! Grunt threateningly, and if the interloper does not desist from his attempts to seize your local tree canopy, tear the interloper limb from limb and leave the body parts, and especially the entrails, in obvious places as a lesson. All wars are territorial wars; remember this, no matter what anyone tells you.

When we had conceived of our deadly purpose, we returned to our various
Excelsior
responsibilities in silence.

This all reminds me that I forgot to give you the really delightful news here on the Mars colony, or at least the news that is potentially delightful, and that is that we have our first pregnancy! Don’t you think that’s amazing! Apparently, if you count backward on your fingers, you will find that once Brandon was evacuated from the
Pequod
, Laurie and Arnie, during the period when Laurie was recovering from the unwarranted assault, must have found time to take comfort in each other’s loving arms.

It was mission protocol that the astronauts were to avoid having relations with one another, and for this reason NASA specifically refused to stock the mission with birth control pills, condoms, et cetera. This also sat well with the religiously minded congressional legislators who had signed off on the Mars mission annually, for about ten years, until NASA had amassed enough funds ($400 billion) to send us astronauts into flight. Some of these congressional lifers didn’t even believe that Mars existed. The fact that we were chaste, spiritually fit, and abstinent from vice made the financing more palatable.

Laurie told me, when we talked about it later, that they tried to practice the rhythm method for a few weeks. But after a point they realized there had been
mistakes
. Here were the questions I wanted to ask. I wanted to ask Laurie what she thought about the fact that Arnie was married, and that his wife was actually a NASA employee (his wife was in public relations), and he had the two kids, and she had the autistic son, the teenager, the one to whom she wanted to send photos of the Olympus Mons, and I wanted to ask if she thought twice before doing it, or if she just went ahead and did what she did, fell into his arms, and you know the two of them seemed so well-adjusted, so levelheaded, so able to adapt, but then they did what they did, and you never heard Arnie talk about his kids, and what were those kids thinking now, and when he posted things on the web (always routing the request through my office, at least in the early days of the Mars colony), they were always about geological stuff, and these posts had a lot of Latin names in them, and then maybe there would be one stray remark about the poetry of our new home, “Harvesting rock samples on the plain called Chryse Planitia, I stopped one morning to admire the graceful transit of the planet’s two moons,” and it didn’t say “and that night I had wild kinky sex with my pregnant colleague among the plants of the greenhouse,” but the scientific method in Arnie’s case was always a screen for whatever else was going on; he used the scientific method as if it were some kind of lead shield, as if it were an ideological lead shield, a religion, a holier-than-thou religion, and Laurie was no better; she sent notes back to her son, but they got more and more infrequent, and they spoke of the all-consuming nature of her job, and she never once mentioned
interplanetary disinhibitory disorder
. What kind of remorse did she have afterward, if any? Was she a person who felt remorse? And in her opinion, was remorse possible with
interplanetary disinhibitory disorder?
Was it all glorious and moist and proto-human for them? And what did she think about having a baby on the Red Planet? Was it a convenience that her obstetrician was also the father of the child? And was she worried about delivery? Did she believe we had sufficient anesthetic to make delivery pain free? And if what they had done they had done in an inhuman way, in a way that was careless about human things and that papered over this inhumanity with professionalism and the scientific method, can anyone really be surprised?

Laurie wanted to have the child naturally, she told me, before I even had a chance to ask her any of the questions I’ve just posed. The first child she’d had in the hospital, and it was a long, complicated labor, occiput posterior, with a C-section at the end, and she was a little angry about the hospital treatment she had received. In this case, despite the hurdles involved, she was thinking
bathtub
. It was better, you know, for the child to be expelled into water. Everyone felt great for Laurie, or they tried to, because it was good for Mars, and Steve drew a digital image of flowers, which he sent to her via what we referred to as the Martian Pony Express: radio messages that went back to Earth, to our NASA e-mail accounts, which we then accessed later with the usual delay. Not the best way to get in touch, the Martian equivalent of snail mail, but polite and effective in this case. Steve was happy for her; Abu was happy for her. José was happy for her. We could only hope, in the unlikely event that we were
never
going to get off the planet, that she was going to have a daughter, just to keep the genetic stock heterogenous. Wouldn’t want the early Martians to be noteworthy for insufficient genetic diversity.