The Four Fingers of Death (49 page)

“Steve!”

There was nothing for Steve Watanabe to do but to get in as close as he could get, in order to, if possible, affect the outcome of the struggle. The two wrestlers flipped each other around a couple of times, working toward some ineffectual attempts to strangle, and when Jim Rose was on top, about to prevail, Steve grasped a spade and went up and whacked him hard on the back of the head, on the part that he knew controlled autonomic physiologic functions like breathing and swallowing, so that Rose toppled over onto his side and was disoriented for a moment. It was precisely in this moment that Steve climbed into the nearby rover. He was followed not long after by Brandon Lepper, who flung himself into the back where the mining equipment was meant to go, and then, as quickly as he was able, Steve thrust the rover into drive and started off. The rovers can’t go very quickly on Mars, where there are no roads and where there are bits of disjecta from crater impact everywhere. Even when Brandon and Steve were making the best time they were able to, they were not terribly fast. They were in danger of shredding their tires. This made it not at all impossible for Jim Rose to chase after his quarry on foot. At the first opportunity, he attempted to latch on to the back of the rover. They were dragging him for a little bit, until Brandon, with a hammer he found in a wheel well, tried to hammer Jim’s digits. Because of the choppiness of the ride, he missed many times before he was able to connect with one, leaving Jim howling in pain, as, upon letting go, he collided with some rocks on his way to a prone position.

Now there was time enough for Brandon and even Steve, who kept turning back to survey the progress of the fight before nearly hitting various boulders, to understand how disheveled and unlike himself Captain Jim Rose appeared. Not the magnetic and dashing former military hero who was, in the press, one of the bright stars of the Mars mission. Steve’s question to himself later was: Had he himself fallen as far as Jim? Had he become
someone else entirely
, a nomad of the desert of this place, a miner in the salt mines of Mars, someone capable of malevolence or of crimes that were unacceptable to his earthling analogue?

The rover ground along the floor of the Ius Chasma, its enormous and threatening wall flush against the side of the vehicle. Brandon lay in the back clutching at an assortment of burns and wounds, until they came, after thirty minutes’ time, to the collapse where a slope had been rendered for them. A slope brushed clear of debris by the ceaseless winds. Elsewhere, Jim was undoubtedly heading for his ultralight, where he would wait for sunlight in order to conduct the second phase of the manhunt. Steve and Brandon needed to get as much lead time on him as they could. But the question was
which way to go?
They were soon to be on the far side of the Ius Chasma, and it had taken Brandon a good ten days to get there when first surveying his mining sites. Upon crossing the chasm, they would be far enough from the campsites containing the remaining Martian colonists, not to mention food and water, to make long-term survival difficult.

It was the beginning of night. If they wore their thermal jumpsuits, there was the chance that the ionic reflectors sewn into them would be visible from space. By these means, anyone with a brain in his head would be able to track them. On the steep slope up onto the plateau, Steve did his best to keep the rover from toppling. Likewise he did his best to keep Brandon from falling out. They were making a lot of noise, the kind of noise that, if the wind were to die down, would be echoing up and down the canyon for kilometers.

Yet Steve felt a profound exhilaration, a giddy sense of accomplishment, when they had ascended to the vertiginous shelf and could look down upon it, as into the very center of the Red Planet’s formation, its most show-offy line drawings, to know that they had once again thwarted the desire of Mars to squash any eruption of
life
. The sun was just now over the line of the horizon, and the Milky Way was splashed across the canvas of the galaxy, and they had only this illumination to get them out into the center of the plateau, four or five kilometers off from the cliff wall, where Steve shut down the engine, sputtering from a shortage of fuel. It was here that an urgent and unlikely-to-succeed plan began to formulate. Steve suggested that he and Brandon get
under
the rover and put on oxygen tanks and masks and see, thus arrayed, if they could keep each other warm.
Under the rover
, that is, in case they were being watched from above.

Which they were, kids. Being watched. I have passed the point in the story that I assembled from Steve Watanabe’s notes. In any event, his notes, his dispatches from his lowly position as a miner of silicon oxide and water crystals on Mars, were not composed in such a way as to convey detailed or meaningful editorializing about his predicament. These notes, in fact, could be boiled down to a few simple words, words that any reader, such as yourself, would have been able to fathom, if you were a flunky at NASA reading them:
Help us, please!
That’s what he was attempting to convey in the days before he found himself, according to these conjectures, sleeping outside in the Martian night, next to a fellow who may or may not have been infected with some dire germ, such as
M. thanatobacillus
, the germ that was reputed to cause higher life-forms to
disassemble
. Huddling up, he and Brandon looked sort of the way our companion species, our pair of felines, our dog and cat, look when they are nestled together. For whatever reason, Steve Watanabe kept thinking of Debbie Quartz (this is how I reconstruct it), Debbie rappelling out into the vastness of space, Debbie quickly becoming a speck, and how quickly gone, and he wondered if her body was preserved exactly as it was at the instant she made her decision, and how far out? Was it out toward Jupiter? Did it have insufficient thrust to get that far? Did the thrust of one of those oxygen tanks enable any so-called head of steam at all? Maybe it would be possible in some way to figure out where her body was on the way
back
. Maybe it would be possible someday, when interplanetary travel was more routine, to find Debbie Quartz’s body and to return it to her cousins and nephews, which was what remained, as he understood it, of the Quartz family. But he kept imagining, in his delirious semi-sleep, that it was Debbie whose physique was being
disassembled
, until he included Brandon too in this ugly bit of dream work, Brandon, right beside him, disassembling. When Steve woke, according to the fantasy, Brandon’s body would be a splatter of blood and guts beside him, like what’s left after a tomato is heaved at a cement wall, and worse, what if it was somehow communicable, the
germ
, what if mere contact with the blood and guts, the tomato leavings, was somehow enough to pass on the disassembly to himself, just by the mere touching? What if that was enough? Was it somehow the interaction between the germ and some carbon-based cellular material that activated a new bit of disassembly? Was it somehow radioactive too, like so much on the surface of the planet? Because the course of the illness certainly resembled radiation sickness. The infected body just started to fail at the molecular level, the stomach and intestines began to liquefy and to spill their contents into the body cavity, the liver began to shudder to a halt and to seize up, squirting poisons into the bloodstream; it was just like in that rash of polonium killings that swept through the Russian Republic before the beginning of Cold War II. Maybe it, the germ, was like that, it was like radiation sickness. Maybe Steve just shouldn’t have been spooning so close to Brandon Lepper. Maybe character changes, psychological distress and disturbance, were the leading edge of the infection, along with that change in skin pigment. Although everyone on the Mars mission had a change in skin pigment, even Abu had had one, and then that led Steve back to Abu, and the horror of Abu, and how could he have done what he’d done to Abu, unless he too was already
infected
. Abu was a peace-loving guy, a fervent Muslim, despite his parents’ being these renowned astrophysicist types, and why was it that he, Steve, who had never prevailed in any physical confrontation, had crept up on Abu while he was out working on his sculptures and contused him? Was that part of the
interplanetary disinhibitory syndrome
, or was it more like the kind of character changes that were associated with the early stages of the bacterial infection? Every time he thought about the space suit that contained Debbie Quartz spinning out into the beyond, there was a different body in it; at first it was Debbie, and then it was José, and then after José it was Abu Jmil, whom he’d known since they roomed together during training, and how could he have done what he’d done, except by reason of the unremitting loneliness of this place? You could feel it every step you took outside one of the capsules, the loneliness assaulted you, like the cosmic rays, like the dust devils, like the howling winds. And the fact that Abu just didn’t seem to feel this, and didn’t seem at all affected by
interplanetary disinhibitory syndrome
, it just was too much to take, with his renowned parents back there in Kansas City or wherever it was he came from. And they hobnobbed with politicians, his parents, and they appeared on the evening news as expert commentators. Every time there was an asteroid that looked like it was going to strike the Earth. Every time there was talk of some new space initiative, Dr. Jmil was there with his perfect British accent and his equally brilliant and talented wife. Abu could whistle all the Brandenburg Concertos, and he spoke five different languages, and he tried to solve difficult problems in mathematics when he was bored, and nothing bothered him on the Mars mission, not having a soldering iron pointed at his eye, not forecasts of an infectious agent, not the dwindling of the food supply and the nonappearance of a resupply capsule. Abu said the lack of food was good for them, because in controlled studies, rats who were fed less lived that much longer. The most irritating part of the whole thing was that Abu never seemed to feel lonely, not even once. Nor did he seem ever to have sex with anyone, not Debbie or Laurie or any of the men. As far as Steve could tell he didn’t even masturbate. There was no girl back on Earth; there were only mathematics problems, and Brandenburg Concertos, and sculptures. Steve felt as though he’d been driven to it. He’d been driven to take Abu down because the absolute liberty of space demanded it. Everything high was brought low, and everything low was briefly, ephemerally high, before being toppled once again. And in Steve’s semisleep, he saw Abu in Debbie Quartz’s space suit, and Abu was drifting out toward Jupiter, except that Abu seemed unconcerned, even serene, about the wending of his way. If it was his lot on the mission to drift as far as Jupiter, then he would drift as far as Jupiter, and he would keep a running commentary of his own death, except that it was not to be so easy for Steve, observing this space suit and its hapless victims, because he too would have to wear it, and that was what he did, at some point in the middle of the night, he saw himself in the space suit, looking out, and he saw the two ships, uncoupling and heading off, and he felt the last of the oxygen, and he wanted to clutch at his lungs as he breathed in some more carbon dioxide, and then some more, and then he began to tumble into the long sleep in which he was never to be recovered by human history.

Upon awaking, Steve Watanabe found that Brandon was gone. Considering the portion of the night he’d spent awake, this seemed frankly miraculous, nearly as miraculous as the fact that Steve was still alive. He had no food, he had almost no water, he hadn’t bathed in so long he could scarcely remember what pleasure was afforded by bathing. But he was alive. And he was in possession of the rover, and all he had to do was start it and drive around the long way, into the outflow channels of the chasma, and around, and he would be back among the living. It might take a little while, but still. That is assuming, you know, that he intended to rejoin the rest of the crew. Maybe it was some kind of residual guilt about Brandon, and about the bad shape that Brandon had appeared to be in when they last had a conversation, but Steve found that the one way he could expiate some of the remorse he felt about everything that had happened on the Mars mission was to drive back to the site of the dig, so that his son and his wife would be well looked after, so that things would be made right. He waited for the morning sun to charge up the rover, and then he began driving back toward the cliff wall, looking for the spot where they’d come up. This while keeping his eyes fixed on the sky for the marauding ultralight.

In time, he came upon the collapsed section of the wall, which looked quite a bit more fearsome going down than it had coming up, even with the gentler slope, the sort of clamshell slope of the collapse. This was when Steve Watanabe—because going down is always more dangerous than going up—somehow managed, first to get the rover
stuck
between a couple of sheets of rock, and then, in attempting to dislodge it through expert manipulation of gears and transmission, to
plunge
the rover off a steep incline, and, luckily separated from it, to free-fall, landing on a shelf about two hundred meters or so above the floor of the Ius Chasma. The rover landed facedown, at the bottom, so that many of its solar panels were shattered in the accident, and it would have taken any number of Martian colonists, a group of them, to overturn the vehicle and restore it to running condition. In the meantime, Steve Watanabe also fell into unconsciousness.