The Four Fingers of Death (47 page)

[email protected]
:
What are you telling her? Are you telling her things that you are hearing over at NASA? Where does she get all this type of thing? I’m really irritated about it. You can’t just let her live her life without filling her head full of all this stuff? Dangers of interplanetary travel? And what took you so long to get to the computer?

[email protected]
: Jed, there’s a lot of rumor and innuendo going on about the Mars mission. The press is onto other things, because they forget things, but there’s still a lot of gossip kicking around online. Some of this is easy to control and some of it is not.

[email protected]
: What if her future is contingent upon her not being contaminated with this kind of nonsense? Wouldn’t you do what was necessary to protect her?

[email protected]
: The father who has not only abandoned the family, but abandoned it all the way off the planet, is trying to get all interested now in how his daughter is parented? Do you want to help with the homework, Jed? Do you want to start doing that? Because most of her homework is done on the computer console that the school loans her, and the geometry teacher, for example, grades the pieces very promptly as soon as Ginger hits send. I’m sure that NASA, in their wisdom, who have made it possible for you to read the newspapers and play simulation games with ex-cons from Indiana and the like, could make it possible for a deadbeat like you to review your daughter’s homework once in a while. Did you know, Jed, that your daughter is having particular trouble with trigonometry? I don’t suppose you do. Well, if you want to start talking about how I’m supposed to be raising her, while you’re off scraping rock samples off the floor of a crater, then start today. I’ll be happy to relinquish some of the responsibility. I guess you won’t be able to pick her up three days a week, like this separation agreement I have here says you are supposed to do, so that I can have a day off now and then. And I guess you won’t be able to see her two weekends and one Sunday a month, and you won’t be able to maintain a room for her at your domicile, will you, Jed? Unless you’re going to have her fired up into space. Am I right about that, Jed?

[email protected]
:
Don’t bring up that agreement. Don’t do that. You don’t need to do that. I’m under a lot of stress here right now, and it’s natural that I would be a little short-tempered about things I can’t control back home. But you can believe me, Pogey, when I say that I intend to address all of this when I get back. I’m a changed person, in many ways, a more philosophical and thoughtful person. I will make that clear to you and Ginger when I am able. I will prove it.

[email protected]
: That’s very sweet of you to say, Jed, but it is possible, you know, that things have changed here a little bit too. You’ve been gone for over six months, and there were times when I was younger when that would not have been a real burden to me, when separations were a part of our being together. But I’d already moved into Dan’s place
before
you left, Jed, I don’t expect you have forgotten that. And now six months have passed, and I have met someone else. I wish there were a better time to tell you this, but there isn’t a better time, so there it is.

[email protected]
:
What are you saying to me?

[email protected]
:
I’m saying what it looks like I’m saying. I’m saying that I’m seeing someone else.

[email protected]
:
Who is the someone else?

[email protected]
:
I thought you were against the short replies, what with the delay? What difference does it make who it is? It’s no one you know. The point is that now I’m realizing how much suffering I was doing, while hoping you would be someone else, or do something else, and I don’t want to suffer as much, or not in the same way, anymore. I want to try to be happy.

[email protected]
:
A man or a woman?

[email protected]
: What are you talking about?

[email protected]
:
Is it someone from NASA? Are you sleeping with someone from NASA?

[email protected]
:
What difference would it make if I were? I didn’t choose him, or you, or any other man I’ve ever been involved with, based on professional credentials. If I had, I’d have left you long ago, Jed.

[email protected]
:
You’re sleeping with someone from NASA? You have the audacity to say to me that it doesn’t matter what the person does? Do you have any idea what you have done? Has it not occurred to you that NASA could have some powerful reasons for wanting to compromise you in that way? What have you told him about me? Have you told him about any conversations we have had lately, or anything I said to you before?

[email protected]
: Jed, you’re beginning to sound… I don’t know… kind of crazy. Like I said, people are not sitting around checking any weekly video updates about the Mars mission. Everyone at the agency knows that the Mars mission is not being cooperative. You said as much yourself.

[email protected]
: You just have no idea what you’re talking about right now. Who is this person? Is it the flight director, what’s his name, Rob Antoine, toupée guy, are you sleeping with him?

[email protected]
:
You don’t know him. He’s assistant manager of propulsion systems, if you have to know, and the most he has to do with you is that he’s figuring out ways to make the trip home faster. Because the payload is lighter.

[email protected]
: Because of all the dead people. He has told you that the payload is going to be lighter not just because most of the hydrogen is going to be left behind, but also because most of the astronauts are dead? Has he told you that? I bet you’re lying on your bed,
our
bed, right now with him looking over your shoulder, and he’s reading all of this aloud to that Rob Antoine fellow, as fast as I type it out here in the lightless, oxygen-deficient interior of a nuclear power plant on this desert planet that is rapidly falling into winter where we’re
all
liable to be dead, if you want to know the truth.

[email protected]
:
He was here earlier, and I sent him home, because I’m just not comfortable with him staying over with Ginger here. Occasionally, she goes over to stay with your cousins. And those are the only nights I let anybody stay here or when I stay anywhere else. And in case you’re thinking a lot about this, if you don’t think that Jim’s wife and Steve’s wife aren’t going through similar things, you should think again. It’s not two hundred years ago, you know, when women were meant to sit here and wait for their men to return home from the front with missing legs and completely shell-shocked and they’re going to give up everything that’s good and fun about being a mature woman for some man that they never get to be with.

[email protected]
: Did he tell you about the bacterium? Did he tell you about that? I assume that even a flunky in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory would be able to tell you about the germ.

[email protected]
:
What germ?

[email protected]
: I’ll tell you what germ, the bug they sent us up here to gather for them. There’s a bacterium up here, on Mars, and they think that it has military applications, and I don’t give a damn if they are reading this entire exchange, because I’m going to tell the truth now, and the truth is that they don’t intend for this to be a scientific mission and they never did intend for it to be. This bacterium is so top-secret that the majority of us on the mission didn’t even know about it. And it’s incredibly deadly. No one on Earth will have any resistance to it, since it has existed on Mars for however many millions of years. This germ is so powerful that it made it impossible for any life to take hold here, because what it does is completely wipe out higher life-forms.

[email protected]
: Now you’re really sounding totally paranoid, because from what I’ve heard, the only supposedly military application any bacteria farming is going to have is not military but commercial, and it has to do with some new way of making microchips, and the reason why they are concentrating on microchips is that they managed to defray some of the costs of the mission with underwriting from tech machinery manufacturers.

[email protected]
: Don’t believe everything you hear. It gets more and more dangerous here every day, and I believe I have seen one or two of the astronauts who are already infected with the bacterium. Don’t even ask. It will all become clear soon enough. I am just hoping to get out of here with my own skin, though I don’t have any real hope that I’m going to be able to do that. I’ve been spending weeks up here doing nothing but drugging myself, that’s all I’ve been doing. I have myself righteously addicted. It started with the missing finger, and the reattachment. You can’t even believe how horrible my hand looks. It looks like it was rescued from some Frankenstein movie, and then there’s the stump from the middle finger. And it was really bothering me, as you’d imagine, and I was having a lot of phantom pains, and I started taking morphine for it, and then I was just unable to stop, and all the synthetic pain relievers, I mean, once I ran through the morphine, I started taking the lower-level painkillers, and they weren’t enough and I had to double up, and sometimes I am so high for so long that I don’t know what day it is, and I don’t know if that’s really the best way to be operating a nuclear power facility. Wait, wait a second. Just for one second, okay? Stay with me for a moment? I think there’s someone at the door.

April 30, 2026

The chase began in the desert, as many compelling chases do, and it involved giving up the succor of any remaining comfort. As always with a proper manhunt, it was not always clear who was hunter and who was prey. This I managed to learn from the hapless Steve Watanabe, who, so attuned to the possibility that he would somehow fail to make it home, was now providing round-the-clock updates on everything that was happening around him
to the authorities
. As if this would be enough to preserve his sorry ass. He was able, using tracking satellites designed by the authorities, to perform round-the-clock global-positioning updates on the space suits of Mars mission astronauts, exploiting not only heat signatures but a space suit design feature that had been built in for good reasons: reflectors. Steve was somewhat prepared, therefore, for the coming of Jim Rose. And he anticipated hand-to-hand combat, as well as all registers of high-tech pursuit and entrapment, even if he suspected the endgame would rely on kinds of violence better known to earlier epochs of human history. Above all, he advised Brandon Lepper, a guy he had always disliked, to take advantage of the pause before the storm to move himself farther out of harm’s way.

According to Brandon, there was nothing to worry about. According to Brandon, the integrity of NASA’s long-term goals—terraforming, resource exploitation, a permanent human colony on Mars—had long since been jeopardized by José. Brandon had no choice but to do what had to be done. Likewise the Debbie Quartz incident. Debbie was nice enough, sure, but she was unprepared for what was required, for the Darwinism of the Mars mission, and he’d proved it by just talking sternly to her. She
had to go
.