The Four Fingers of Death (33 page)

A commotion awoke me. A scuffle of some kind. I didn’t know the hour. What difference do particular times make to a Martian colonist? Clocks are for the pointy heads back on Earth. Anyway, it was night and I heard something, and it was kind of quiet at first, but then it seemed a lot louder, a struggle nearly, an altercation. Astronauts pitted against others. Soon I was awake, and I was running, somewhat disoriented, down to the cargo bay, carrying a penlight. Of course I bodily fell down the ladder and landed in a heap on the lower floor. No bones broken. Banged up horribly. I gathered myself up on the way to the light switch.

I noticed the cargo hatch door was open, obviously. There was dust and wind howling into the open hatch. The sand was blowing into the capsule, likewise the frigidness, that affrontery, which was bound to freeze up a lot of the electronics in the cargo bay if I didn’t work quickly, which naturally I did, without taking the time to see what had caused the breach of protocol. But at this point I did notice the two men struggling, those men whose identities you have now surmised. They danced into view. One of them was as dark as the night, or at least a dark mahogany, perhaps from coming this way in the storm. His space suit, which had once been polar bear white, was Egyptian henna, and his beard was longish and ragged. Brandon Lepper. I don’t know what had brought him to this, if this was
interplanetary disinhibitory disorder
or some bizarre conception of duty to the nation, but whatever the cause, he was now indisputably here.

“Brandon, what the hell are you doing?”

It took him a moment to register that he had now two assailants he was going to have to deal with, and in that interval, José, still in his blue capsule pajamas, managed to wrench himself free.

José said to me, “Jed, get out of here. I’ll deal with it.”

“No, you will not!”

“Go get Jim. Go, go!”

Brandon intended to employ a weapon, a homemade blade of his own devising. He’d sharpened up some industrial aluminum, no doubt harvested from one of the piles of space junk that he now called home, and he brandished it as if it were a twenty-first-century machete. Kids, I have had hand-to-hand-combat training. So have many of the astronauts on the Mars colony, since many of us came from branches of the military. Men had fallen before me on the fields of battle, dispatched by my hand. Brandon, meanwhile, was a welterweight boxer, and in this case he was a pugilist with a long, shiny blade. I called for Jim. I ran to the bank of monitors in the cargo bay, hit the intercom, and called for Jim again, cursing his medicaments. When I returned, Brandon had José pinioned beside the ultralight, and had the machete perilously close to his face. All of this took place in a curious silence. With the kind of progress that you can make in a lower-gravity environment, I was on him in a couple of bounding steps.

I swear I could hear Jim snoring upstairs as Brandon flung me off his back. Brandon, in a bulky space suit minus the helmet, was having trouble maneuvering. José gave him a good smack in the jaw, a roundhouse, I suppose, and then winced with the pain of it, instantly clutching his right hand. In some kind of low-gravity thrall, I watched Brandon then raise up the machete, with a vigorous backswing that I associated with the best tennis players, and it was almost as if I saw my own heroics before they happened, the juncture in which I flung myself into the line of the backswing and held up my left hand—and thank heavens this was not my dominant hand. Just as José himself pivoted out of reach of his attacker, Brandon’s blade sliced clear through the thumb and first two fingers of my left hand. My fourth finger, with my bittersweet wedding band, likewise my pinkie, remained. In a silence marked only by the grunt of my own stunned shock, and by Brandon’s hiss of murderous intention, we all watched the fingers fly free. I then turned my gaze to the stumps, which had begun to fountain with blood, after which I collapsed onto the floor, clutching the mangled hand with the remaining good one.

It could not have been long, the period in which I was immediately considering: (1) the availability of antibacterial cleaning solution in the nearby first aid area, (2) the possibility of a tourniquet so I wouldn’t bleed to death, (3) how to get the hell out of the way before Brandon cut off some fingers from the other hand. It could not have been long, this reverie, during which I was crouching underneath the ultralight aircraft, looking up at its fuselage, but this was plenty long enough to make José’s predicament even more dire. When I came to understand this point, I sat up, covered in a tie-dyed smear of gore, and watched as Brandon held tight to José’s head, and, with his mighty scimitar, sliced through all the veins and arteries in his throat. There was a desperate gurgling from the victim, from the man I had come to think of as my friend, and then an awful river of José flowed out onto the cabin floor, toward the drain where I coincidentally sat. I wish I could say that I did more. I wish I could say a lot of things now. I wish I could say that with my own hand bleeding profusely, I had been able to throw caution to the wind and wrestle that madman, Brandon Lepper, to the ground. But in the crucial moment, I writhed in the anguish of my own wound. José flapped wildly for a couple of seconds, holding his throat, as if he could dam up the gash, and then his body went still.

Brandon turned to me again, and I cowered. Holding close the hand with the bloody stumps.

Then he spoke to me. It was as if no such sound had ever before been uttered. Brandon said: “I’m wherever you don’t look. I’m around you. I’m in the air. I’m in the dust and the wind. I’m in the craters and crevices. Not one of you is safe until I lift off from the surface for home. Not one of you. Pass the word. Stay out of my business; stay out of the valley. Get it? Death came with the earthlings to Mars.”

He raised the machete up again, but it was just some kind of lasting memory, some kind of emblem, one that I will not forget, one that has lingered in my imagination, one that I expect will linger there for a long time. He brandished the thing, and then he spared me.

He went out through the hatch, leaving it ajar, carrying a twenty-gallon drum of fuel, a packet of maps, and a laptop workstation, and as before, the howling wind was his calling card. I thought:
Who will help me find my fingers?

February 25, 2026

We informed NASA the next day of José’s death, of the circumstances in which it took place. Was I alone in feeling that the response of the authorities was oddly cool? It was as though they had foreknowledge. Was it only me who thought that they had divided their loyalties, that some of them worked toward another dark objective, of which it seemed we would learn soon enough? Perhaps at Mission Control it was impossible not to find this division between the regular employees—with their adolescent dreams of interstellar travel—and those who thought only of that other mission, the Dark Objective, which had as part of its trajectory the desire to put a halt to Sino-Indian economic hegemony back on Earth, in the process claiming all the natural resources in the universe, wherever they may lie, and however this might be accomplished, for NAFTA interests.

Maybe there were political appointees or moles at Mission Control who fed Brandon our itineraries and described to him our plans, just as there were others, on the other side of the ideological divide, our side, who seemed to accept the Mars First! ideological formulations of our chief theoretician and philosopher, Jim Rose. These fellow travelers understood that our political machinations, our consensus-gathering dinners, were crucial to the emerging history of this soon-to-be-developed world. Our decision-making process was impractical, slow, awkward, true, but then life on Mars was all of these things too.

We buried José the next day. (It required blowtorches.) I don’t think I remembered to tell you that he’d spent a little while trying to find a way to introduce Icelandic moss onto Mars. He figured that Iceland’s ecosystem was most like what we had on the surface here. He figured that moss could perhaps adapt to the barrenness of Mars. It was just a hunch. He’d attempted to do some transplanting
outdoors
. He’d designed the experimental protocols himself. Unlike the greenhouse, where we were trying to terraform Mars a couple square inches at a time according to instructions from the home planet, José had brought a bag of carefully mixed soil and fertilizer to a deep crater near the
Geronimo
, where there were outcroppings of bedrock, and he had attempted to propagate this Icelandic moss. After all, he’d argued, there was a lot of nitrogen in the atmosphere, as well as in the soil, and this was much to the benefit of Icelandic moss. He was completely hopeful about it, all by himself, going out there an hour or two every other day, with a tiny measuring cup full of recirculated water. He didn’t really care how long it took. Or so he told me.

We buried him there.

I had a Bible with me on Mars. I understand that many of you think of Bibles as tools for propaganda. Yet I am the kind of person who likes the sweep, the grandeur, and the reverence that I find in the Bible. However, at José’s funeral, I was outvoted. We decided that a reading from the Bible was not a proper Mars First! tradition. We needed, Jim argued (and Arnie and Laurie agreed, especially now that she was beginning to show), to start imagining different and more Mars-centered epics of spiritual literature. We needed myths of origins that began on
this
place, that bound together this small community of wayfarers. Accordingly, we decided that there would be no reading at all at José’s funeral. Instead, Jim simply asked if anyone had anything they wanted to say. A tradition was born, if out of misfortune.

By now the dust storm had passed us, heading off in a southeasterly direction, so it was a clear day. Warm for Mars. We stood and waited for inspiration.

Finally, Jim said, via walkie-talkie, “José, you were one of the really good people on the mission, because you were one of the people who grew here on Mars. You were a different person, when you died, you were not the man who set out to conquer this unforgiving place, and I have to think that this planet brought that out in you. And while I don’t want to be hopeless at a time like this, my friend, I think I failed you. I think I failed you by not seeing that you had the potential to rise to this occasion. I will miss you therefore, and I will use what you have taught me as I go forward from here. I will not fail the remainder of us. Meanwhile, we’re hoping that you can rest quietly here, and that no one disturbs you for a good million years or so. It’ll be a while before mankind uses up this place, so sleep well, buddy. It should be peaceful.”

I wasn’t the only one looking over my shoulder the whole time, wondering what was next. I turned away during Jim’s remarks, but at the same time I was checking to see if we were being watched. I was wondering when Brandon would turn up next. I was wondering when the rover was going to come over the lip of the crater, when Brandon was going to try to take out the whole bunch of us, spraying us with Taser fire. We stood in the great waste of the planet Mars, uncertain and fearful, and the easiest thing would have been to load back into the
Excelsior
, assemble the Earth Return Vehicle, and declare an emergency. And yet I just wasn’t ready to give up.

When Arnie and Laurie headed back to the greenhouse, the four of us who remained had a bit of a chat. To try to decide a course of action. The Mars mission, you see, had begun to acquire a certain inalienable organizational structure. According to its own interests. Arnie and Laurie controlled the food. Abu and Steve were in charge of the energy. Jim and I were in charge of infrastructure and the delivery of services. (That meant construction, education, political confederation, and policing.)

The four of us, from power and infrastructure, stood for a minute in the dusk until the sun dipped away and we walked back toward our rovers. It was Abu who opened the subject, the subject we all knew we would have to address. I suppose we were putting it off.

“How should we go about dealing with him?”

“I think we ought to talk to NASA about it, even if we can’t trust them. Let’s see if they give away anything we need to know,” I said.

“And when they don’t give us anything?”

“We fabricate some unlikely plan of attack, leak it to them, see if it gets back to him.”