The Four Fingers of Death (39 page)

As I’ve mentioned, Steve has a son who had come down with an antibiotic-resistant infection just before we lifted off, and he spent quite a bit of the early portion of the trip very preoccupied with the health of this youngster. There must have been an afternoon before liftoff when Steve and his wife, Danielle, perhaps with the blessing of this eleven-year-old boy, thought through whether it would be a good thing for Steve to make his fateful journey, in a fateful black limo, to Cape Canaveral, before the final intake for liftoff. There must have been an afternoon when he and his wife tearfully arrived at a decision, with Steve,
Department of Quantitative Analysis
, drawing up some list of debits and credits. Worldwide fame, check. A lifetime of guilt, debit. Fantastic, unfathomable voyage, check. Shell-shocked, inconsolable wife, debit. The son, who Steve no doubt believed would improve, had been in and out of the hospital in the months since that day. Steve had been remarkably stoic, as far as I could tell, but it did seem that it wasn’t until he touched down on Mars that the enormity of the mission, the cost of it to him personally, hit home.

He was on the short side, with longish dark hair that even before the Mars adventure flirted with regulation. And he had an odd white patch in the front that he liked to claim was owing to his having seen an incarnation of the Buddha in his attic as a boy. This delusional anecdote was a rare departure from Steve’s military humorlessness otherwise. Steve and Danielle lived in a ranch-style house just outside Tampa, not far from the Gulf of Mexico. Steve’s hobbies (everyone who filled out a personnel form at NASA had to list a hobby) included the construction of model planes and paint-by-numbers velvet paintings, which he bought at tag sales and painted all “wrong,” with “hilarious” results. These velvet pieces were really quite stunning, but as Steve himself had pointed out,
it had been years
. Simply watching output monitors on a nuclear reactor, occasionally using a forklift to take spent fuel assemblies out into a gully, and filling out reports for Houston, these things had stamped out any vestige of the velvet painter in Steve Watanabe.

It must have made it that much harder to bunk with Abu Jmil, whose enthusiasm, and whose adaptive qualities, were the envy of the rest of the crew. Steve, in his quiet, understated way, and without ever seeming to do much but look like a public-relations brochure, was incredibly competitive and would stay up nights memorizing facts and figures that would make him the premier Mars mission astronaut, at least ahead of launch. Back during the selection process, he worked hard at besting a Mormon triathlete from Provo, UT, Norman Backus, who believed himself to be Steve’s close personal friend. On the other hand, they could test and retest the astronauts of the Mars mission until the proverbial cows came home. Not one of the testers, with their little three-dimensional computer interfaces with their multiple-choice questions about how we would deal with the ethics of biological warfare or hand-to-hand combat with alien life-forms,
had ever been to Mars
. They had not spent six or eight months with nine (or eight, or six) people, in cramped quarters, dealing with the imponderables that cannot be included in a manual. The testers had opinions. They would tell you that they were once trapped in the back of a shipping container on a pier in a port city in Lebanon, where they had been sequestered by thugs bent on using them for ransom. These kinds of stories were everywhere in the chain of command at NASA. But the testers didn’t understand Mars, and they didn’t understand the effects of planetary exile.

“I think you have something to tell me,” I said to Steve, bearing in mind what I knew. “I don’t know what it is, but if you’re worried about having kept something from me, from us, you should unburden yourself, because we’re together in all of this, no matter what it is you’ve done. We’re inhabitants of Mars. You and I. We can solve our disagreements according to our own evolved legal standards.”

Probably, it was a big deal for Steve Watanabe to decompensate in front of me. It must have been a betrayal of his most cherished values. Consider the facts. I wasn’t close to him particularly. I was quite a bit older. I was balding, skinny, missing some teeth, and I had come to take a dim view of the chain of command. I suppose I never expected the
Department of Quantitative Analysis
to be crying in front of me, nor did I expect him to tip ever so slightly forward, with his stifled, hiccupy sobs, bubbles of mucus ballooning from his squat, flattened nose, muttering that he didn’t know what had come over him, leaning toward me almost as if he intended to put his head on my shoulder; I felt in myself a strange compound of rectitude and sympathy and disgust, but before he could do it,
touch me
, some vestigial training lecture on the subject of military bearing surfaced in him, and he snapped himself into a more dignified posture. Then he invited me to follow him to the command console in the
Geronimo
.

What he showed me next was a personal video from Vance Gibraltar, budgetary director of the Mars mission, from back in D.C. My feeling upon encountering Vance Gibraltar, on the occasions when I did—which was whenever there was a phalanx of photographers from lackluster tabloid web addresses in the area—was that I had just been irradiated, or that he had somehow managed to conduct an identity-theft-style assault on my perineum, from which region he had extracted medical records, the drug history of my parents, and my tax forms going back beyond the statute of limitations.

Vance Gibraltar was the person you didn’t want contacting you on Mars. He called when NASA began to feel that the mission was slipping beyond their control. Too much was riding on the Mars mission. Of course, they were already disappointed with me, since I had long ago stopped sugarcoating my web posts, nor was I reading your replies, nor remembering to post responses to them. Having given up on me, and probably on most of the rest of us, Vance Gibraltar, it turned out, had sent a highly unusual
for your eyes only
message to Steve Watanabe, a scrambled, encrypted communication, and this, I came to learn, was one of a series of such communications, the culmination.

Gibraltar’s fat, self-satisfied face appeared on the screen with the NASA seal behind him. He had his hands folded on a desk in front of him, as if addressing the nation as a whole—instead of one nervous young man in a poorly insulated tin shack on the edge of the wastes. “Lieutenant Watanabe,” began the bureaucrat, “I know I don’t need to tell you how sensitive this communication is, and how unfortunate it would be if its contents became known to some of your colleagues there. Let me begin again where we left off in our previous communication, by telling you that the Mars mission, from the perspective of the cabinet-level administration that created and financed it, is not an unqualified success. It is not a success from the point of view of science, nor from the point of view of our national objectives.

“The communications we get from your people, when we get them at all, are largely unintelligible. The footage we are getting from our few cameras, the ones that your people have not disabled, is of inconsequential landscapes. Rock and dust. We have photographed better landscapes ourselves, and created better composites, with the unmanned explorers in the last thirty years. The only person we feel is still acting in the interest of this administration, namely Captain Lepper, has been so isolated and set upon by the rest of our employees that he has had no choice but to take drastic measures to defend his person.

“Lieutenant Watanabe, in contacting you we believe that the time has come to insure some of our mission objectives. You do know, do you not, that among the principal objectives of the Mars mission is the testing of silicon dioxide for improved microprocessor design. We have already made clear the specifics of this hybrid microprocessor design, but to reiterate, it involves, essentially, a live information-carrying colony of bacteria, where the organisms will be able to amass into self-replicating and self-programming computing systems. It is these samples that Captain Lepper now possesses at the Valles Marineris site. While the microbial samples are willing to interact with the silicon dioxide to make microprocessors, according to principles of nanotechnology and QED, thus far the microprocessors are resistant to being used as designed. We urgently require the completion of these experiments, as the research is likely being duplicated by Sino-Indian industrialists, if in the limited theater of Earth. Because of our unqualified lead in the interplanetary space race, Lieutenant Watanabe, we are in a position to lap our competitors, if only these experiments can be completed. This, Lieutenant Watanabe, is the one area as regards twenty-first-century economics, where your home, the nation that brought you into prominence as an astronaut, still manages to hold a significant edge on its enemies.

“It is our opinion that Captain Lepper requires your aid, and we have directed him to contact you. We believe he is not making the kind of progress with decanting the silicates that he was expected to make. Can we be any clearer on these matters? Can we persuade you of the seriousness of these experiments? We can tell you, meanwhile, in order to assure that you are attentive to this part of the present communication, Lieutenant Watanabe, that your son, despite the best efforts of exotic-disease specialists in the state of Florida, has been suffering with a relapsing and remitting version of one of the families of streptococcus that have been circulating equatorially, here on Earth. We understand, Lieutenant Watanabe, that your wife has brought your son into the quarantine facility at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Florida for treatment. Your wife is unwilling to have her son treated at any of the public hospitals. We have a videotaped message from her on the subject, which will be available to you at the successful conclusion of the projects just mentioned.

“What we would like to express to you, Lieutenant Watanabe, is how honored we were to be trusted in this way by your wife and son, and how honored we are to tell you that we believe your son’s recovery will be complete. We would also like to remind you that you serve on the Mars mission as a representative of the government of this country, and by special appointment to the executive branch. For these reasons, we believe you are likely to find, when looking into your heart, when evaluating your moral chemistry, that you have a
debt
to us, as regards your mission, a debt that comes into sharper focus when you consider how we were able to help your son and your family as a whole.

“Therefore, Lieutenant Watanabe, we would ask that by 0500 hours, Martian time, tomorrow morning, you relocate to the Valles Marineris site, where you will find Captain Lepper, and we would ask you to begin harvesting the silicon dioxide with Captain Lepper, according to directives made clear to the science officers on the Mars mission, at which point you will be given directions on how to procure bacterial samples from the Chryse region. This information as regards the bacterial samples, we would like to add, is completely secure and should not even be discussed with Captain Lepper in any detail. You are tasked with different objectives. I should stress, however, that at no time will you need to be performing the complicated experimental hybridization of the microprocessors with the bacteria. This very dangerous task—essentially the creation of a new cybernetic life-form—will be accomplished back here on Earth. At the conclusion of this mining and harvesting operation, we would offer you a trip home on an accelerated schedule. With fewer colleagues, the two of you will find your trip back will be faster and smoother, and we will make the needed propellant available to you.

“Let us know your feelings and your plans, Lieutenant Watanabe. Please make them known to me personally through secure channels. I will, naturally, be conveying the information to the appropriate parties. Over.”

When the transmission was complete, I looked back at Steve Watanabe, and he was, again, drying off some non-cybernetic tear duct effluent. It seemed, in fact, that he was in some human torment that I could scarcely understand, especially since I was part of the herd of intractable Martians, those who had fallen away from the economics and the space race dimensions of the mission.

“What does this have to do with Abu?” I said, when I had recovered enough.

Steve said, hotly, “I can’t believe you can even ask me that.”

“When did this arrive?”

“Yesterday.”

“Let me see if I understand the nuances. You’re saying that you tried to eliminate Abu because he knew about the pressure that was being exerted on you by the higher-ups at NASA? And because he might have seen the video and might be aware of the
M. thanatobacillus
microbe, and this alleged silicon dioxide mining? You needed to silence him?”