The Four Fingers of Death (44 page)

That was the moment in which the halting and uncertain tongue of the now afflicted Jim Rose rambled back through his adventures, much of it concerning the absolutely statistically improbable encounter with the explorer called the
Saratoga
. He kept coming back to the explorer. It was a thought that he couldn’t relinquish. He wanted to know if NASA could possibly have got in touch with the
Saratoga
, in order to send it against us, in order to scuttle our colonial ambitions. Except that, as he said, there was nothing misleading about the
Saratoga
. It had spoken frankly to him. And it had warned him about everything that was going on. Did that seem possible? he wanted to know. I confess that it was hard for me to believe any of this. I assumed that the story was a delusion of his illness, not a genuine happenstance that he was reporting to me from his time away. His impressions tumbled out helter-skelter, and I couldn’t always understand him, but I could hear, in the thickness of his incoherences, a fever to narrate, and so I let him talk for a while. Chief among the contradictions that he could not reconcile, especially in his condition, had to do with the possible military applications of the Mars mission, hinted at by the
Saratoga
. Were we, he wanted to know, supposed to be harvesting
M. thanatobacillus
, as he and I had long assumed we were? Or was there some other military application that had to do with the perfectable crystals of silicon dioxide out in the Valles Marineris, as told to Steve Watanabe? Or were these two reasons for the mission somehow linked up, like some chain of supercomputers, such that there was a biotechnical purpose to all of this, which, in cooperating, we were hastening? These questions were hard for him to articulate, as though he could no longer talk about the very issues that he himself had raised on Mars, as though, like the Moses he now resembled, he was destined not to participate in the Martian civilization he had brought about. It was after he had been talking in this way for a while that he admitted to having found abundant sources of water.

“You what?”

“It’s almost everywhere.”

“And do you have some with you?”

He rummaged through his pack, which lay beside him, forcing some zippers abraded with Martian grit, and produced a couple of bottles of it. There were also drums of the stuff in the hold of the ultralight.

“It… vaporizes outside. But I think if we keep it—”

“Inside. Right. Did you—”

“I drank some.”

“You drank some?”

“I drank a lot.”

“Jim, are you out of your mind?”

“Someone had to do it.”

“It might be radioactive, on top of everything else. Are you feeling sick? We should have boiled it first! Or we could have ionized it. It’s no wonder you’re feeling ill. I’m going to call Arnie.”

He just needed to sleep, he said, and maybe something to eat, and yet despite how famished he was, he said, despite how beat up his body must have been, how frostbitten and irradiated and exhausted, he’d never felt more alive. The very cells of him had been lit up by the heavens, by the actual
heavens
, the almost infinite ocean of stars, not the ground on which we found ourselves. And it was at this moment that he did something so horrible that I don’t even know how to describe it. Upon getting to his feet he paced, shambled, from one side of the cargo hold to the other, and while teasing out some hard-to-follow part of his story, he went over by where Abu lay, and gazing upon our Muslim sculptor, Jim just cupped his hand over Abu’s mouth and nose, pressed hard, and then, turning fully upon the slumbering man, he put a little muscle into it and held the breathing passageways closed. Until Abu, the sculptor, was no more.

It was so studied in its casualness, this dispatch, that I didn’t really take in what he was doing at first. I couldn’t believe what was happening; I didn’t believe I was seeing it, which may have had to do with the opiates, with the amount of them flooding the moral center of my brain. How many times I have thought back on this moment since, and wondered how to interpret what took place onboard the
Geronimo
. Was the old Jim, the Jim I once desired, still in there somewhere, was it he who recognized immediately that we couldn’t carry Abu like that, given the shortage of resources? This old Jim understood mercy, and he knew that this sort of mercy was not permitted on the home planet. There were no laws governing what we could and couldn’t do on Mars. Pragmatic decisions were required here. They were within our power. But part of me believed it was Jim’s illness, whatever it was, that made the decision. Without feeling. The second of these hypotheses was the darker one, a theory that was hard to ignore under the circumstances, that Jim was no longer Jim.

I said, “Do you want to move in here, into the reactor camp, with me?” Hoping that the thought would never occur to him. “We could go back to the
Excelsior
and bring some of your stuff over here. Make it a bit more habitable. Like a proper home.”

Did I detect some kind of fiendish laugh? Was the new Jim capable of a fiendish laugh? It was perhaps some variant on the deceitful
snorting
that I had noticed in the old Captain Jim Rose. His reply was long in coming. And he stood up straighter, while pacing, as if to deliver it like a proper orator of old.

“I’m going to Valles Marineris.”

“You’re going—”

“To find Brandon.”

“And what do you propose to do when you get there?”

No answer.

“Will you, at least, leave some of the water behind so we can test it?”

He nodded, but in heading for the door he offered little more. It was me who kept filling in the empty spots in the Mars mission now, with the pleasantries, the witticisms, the little things that are so easy to say and which, whether you believed in them or not, made the people around you feel a little better. The pleasantry was perhaps one of Earth’s greatest exports. The mild but generous ways that people lied to one another about their hopes and fears. If I had a longing, after the advent of Jim’s illness, his change of character, it was for just one stranger with whom I could venture a few harmless pleasantries.

Afterward, I paid my respects to a dead man. I was getting used to the signs of mortality around me on Mars, planet of death. Abu had been one of the people I liked best on the Mars mission. A man noteworthy for grace and reasonableness. On Earth, he had smoked the occasional cigar, but not in a way that irritated anyone. He liked the blues. I drew the blanket up over his face. I mulled over attempting to pray facing in an easterly direction. Was there, strictly speaking, an
east
on Mars? I wanted to respect the traditions of a desert faith. In the end, I whispered to him, under the blanket, there in the cargo hold, but I don’t want to sully a good astronaut’s memory by going on and on. Some things, kids, are designed for the privacy of eternity.

Next, when I’d made sure that Abu was covered and for the moment undisturbed, I hastened to the console of the
Geronimo
. It was a sign of my distress that I was about to contact
the home planet
. I’d been writing my diary regularly, true, except for those moments when my hands swam in front of my face from how high I was, but I had long since abandoned filing my diary with NASA since they had dismantled its web portal. As I said, I’d disconnected all the communications equipment in the
Excelsior
, where most of the text was stored in the first place. But there was still enough backup equipment on the
Geronimo
for me to send distress messages to
Earth
.

On duty, at NASA headquarters, was a young woman named Nora. She appeared to me like a fuzzy passport photo, thirty-nine minutes delayed. I thought I could make out some kind of bow in her hair. Unless that was part of her headset. Otherwise she was got up in the de rigueur navy blue warm-up suit that passed, at NASA, for cutting-edge fashion. Nora was so young. I had aged in the course of my interplanetary travel, despite the blessings of general relativity, which asserted that I should age more slowly. I introduced myself to Nora Huston, by videoconference. She replied, as if coming out of suspended animation, “Colonel Richards, hello, we know who you are down here.”

“I’ve been out of touch for a little while, I know. Forgive me. Things have just been busy. But I think that there are a few developments here you need to know about.”

In the next minutes of waiting I had ample time to scan her face for signs of judgment. It was hard to see any. She had been selected precisely for her earnestness, for her inability to appear conspiratorial. This was not to suggest that she
was
one of NASA’s spying lackeys, bent on reining us in and getting the mission back under control. It was just that they couldn’t help themselves—they recruited in order to fortify the chain of command.

“Colonel Richards, we have almost everyone who’s still awake here—it’s about three in the morning—including the flight director, and we are ready to listen. Please feel free to give us a full briefing.”

Was I about to bring Martian civilization to a grinding halt? The morality of what I was doing was imprecise, and I probably wasn’t in the state of mind where clear thinking was easy to come by. But the import of recent events was hard to ignore. If I slowed down, shook off a little of my nod, military training returned, if only for a few minutes.

“I need to report a Code 14,” I said, “and I’m afraid it’s my cabinmate, Jim Rose. You all know that I have nothing but esteem for Jim Rose, having served with him as long as I have, and having known him for years before that. It is therefore the case that I am using this Code 14 designation advisedly. I know, ladies and gentlemen, what I’m telling you. But I have reason to believe that Captain Rose is no longer operating with his faculties intact.”

Because he had been a singer of show tunes and country and western, because he had been a teller of bad jokes and an adherent of the pun, because he’d been good-natured and nervous at the same time, because he’d played video games with me, because he was worried about elections back home, because he didn’t understand how he was going to send his wife lingerie for their anniversary from this great distance, because he’d been my lover, and because I knew that even if he couldn’t say it, he
had
loved me, he
had
reached for me when the loneliness and isolation got too bad, because he once needed companionship, I knew he was not himself.

“On what basis, specifically, do you alert us to this Code 14, Colonel Richards?”

“On the basis that Jim leaned down and squeezed the last bit of life out of Abu Jmil this afternoon. Abu had been suffering from hypothermia, we think.… I don’t know. That’s another story. Anyway, Jim came back from being out in the desert.”

“Can you tell us where Captain Rose had been?”

“He was out surveying various areas here by Nanedi Vallis,” I improvised, without really being sure if this was true at all. “The runoff patterns there are really quite extraordinary, and Jim was keen to see them. There’s the question of a source for the Nanedi Vallis riverbed, and we had it on the logbooks for some time that we were going to fly over there and have a look.”

I removed myself from the camera while awaiting their reply.

“And how would you characterize the condition of Captain Rose? If you could.”

“I would characterize Captain Rose as in rather dire condition. He’s certainly not well. He seemed to me to be… not himself. The Jim Rose I have known in the course of our professional duties, I should say, would not take a life the way he did just this afternoon. On the other hand, we’ve been having trouble with outbreaks of violence among the crew, which is virtually the entirety of the Martian population.… First, there was Brandon and the situation with José. And then, well, it seems like what happened to Abu is that he was… Well, in each of these circumstances you could make the case that the astronaut whose actions are in question was suffering with some kind of
interplanetary disinhibitory disorder
, as you might call it, and this has bothered all of us to one degree or another. But Jim seemed…” Again, I just couldn’t seem to complete the sentence.