The Four Fingers of Death (50 page)

May 1, 2026

There can no longer be a language with which to describe the psychology of Captain Jim Rose, because his consciousness as it might now have been described was so
other
from Jim Rose, as I had understood him, that language itself no longer applied. In the process of hunting Brandon Lepper on foot, Jim was reduced to a very primordial set of impulses. Of what did his consciousness consist? His command structure was at its most uncomplicated. He wanted only to find Brandon and squeeze the life out of him. It was no longer entirely apparent, nor would it have been to the old Jim, why this was so important. But the impulse remained to be satisfied, and Jim followed the tracks in the sand, and with an acute sense of smell that was new to him, he tasted the breezes. Amid the natural sulfur reek of this desolate place, he smelled the desperation of Brandon.

Jim would have been troubled by the spontaneous bleeding, had he language with which to describe it. The spontaneous bleeding was happening from a number of unlikely places. From interstitial spots in his physique, the crevice in his elbow, from somewhere in his neck. He would have been frightened in language, but outside of language he was just irritated with the gouts of blood that occluded his eyes. Or he was slowed down. The same with the rents in the uniform that he was wearing. He had slept out in the desert and had been incautious, for a lack of language, about preventing frostbite. The tips of his fingers had lost all sensation, but he had no particular allegiance to the individual fingers. He had no particular allegiance to anything except to the tracking and elimination of Brandon Lepper.

Brandon was traveling west, and so Jim followed westerly, though this meant that they were moving farther along the cliff face of the Valles Marineris, and farther away from the rest of the colonists. Brandon’s path was erratic. Here he swerved in on the plateau, and here he seemed to decide that if he didn’t keep the Ius Chasma on his left, he was doomed to wandering endlessly, unsure of his location.

It was on the morning of the third day that Jim, who had slowed to a few meager steps for each minute that passed on the Martian clock, saw, up ahead, a body slumped over in the sands, and he knew, in a way that was no longer
of language
, that he had treed his quarry, so to speak. He had little left to accomplish in his time on Mars. He rested, now that Brandon was in sight, and licked his fetid and cracking lips, which were streaming with some combination of viscosities that would not entirely clot, despite the lack of fluids in him. The rest of him, his back brain seemed to suggest, would aid in the dispatch of the evildoer. Brandon, meanwhile, as Jim drew closer, also readied himself. He was in possession of a knife, or perhaps a homemade razor, his Taser having plunged into the canyon, and the reflection from this weapon kept striking Jim retinally, so that, in a primeval way, he too knew to be prepared. And Brandon took this opportunity to try to use language, what was left of it, to head off the mortal assault that was in his immediate future. Since Jim didn’t care about language any longer, and had cast himself back into some much more elemental system of clicks and grunts, this poetical and uninflected plea for Brandon’s life was lost on him. Brandon muttered something about the good times they’d had together in the old days. Perhaps he said something like: “Can’t you just let me do what NASA brought me here to do?” Or : “Do you know what this meant to me?” Or something like this: “Could you really cut a man’s life short?” Which was not a question Jim asked himself. He responded resoundingly in the positive with a quickening of his pulse at the idea of squeezing the life out of Brandon. It was invigorating, except that he was not in possession of the concept of vigor. “You know that if you get back to Earth they will execute you.” But what was Earth to Jim now?
Earth
was nothing
.

The moment of last resort was upon Lepper now. Pleas for mercy had gone unheard. Appeals to Captain Jim Rose’s conscience had elicited no reply. Lepper had only one remaining bargaining chip that he could introduce into the exchange. As Jim approached, Brandon rummaged in the pocket of his jumpsuit (which, kids, let me tell you, is not easy to do with the gloves on, even though the gloves are magnetically tipped in order to make it easier, theoretically, to pick up tools). With the onrushing of his antagonist, he was unable, at first, to procure the item he wanted to procure, but in time he did. He pulled it out, and in the palm of his glove, at first, it looked perhaps like some ancient home-rolled stogie, or perhaps like a small doughy confection that was ready to be oven fired into an agreeable dinner roll.

It was my finger.

“You looking for this?” Brandon said, and now the malice in his heart, since he believed his cause was nearly lost, surfaced in him, and he didn’t care any longer what Jim thought. “You looking for the finger of your friend? He’s your friend, right? Or maybe he was a little more than your friend? José, you know, he really wasn’t that bad a guy, until he went all soft, and at first he was kind of worried that he had been bunked on the gay capsule. So maybe you want a little memento of your good friend. I’ll give you this if you let me go. I think it’s only a little bit decomposed. Actually, you know, the Martian surface would be really good for tanning
skins
. Look how well preserved this is!”

And it is likely, kids, that this was an accurate description of my finger, which in the months since it had been separated from me had mostly been cleaned of the blood and gluey material that it secreted at first. It was now mainly a talisman. And that must have been the reason Brandon kept it, to remind himself that there was something that divided him from me, from the rest of us. He believed, at this late hour—while holding aloft in one hand his straight razor and in the other my finger—in
duty
, nothing more, and was willing to die a nasty, unrepentant death in order to indicate how devoted he was to his concept of duty. Jim Rose was happy to oblige.

Jim fell upon the other man without mercy, and as he went to grab Brandon’s razor with a hand, a hand mostly without feeling from the night spent outdoors, the possibility of injury was not of particular concern. When he was cut, the blood poured forth from his hand as elsewhere. He could see the effect of himself on the other man. Still, he could see how he inspired fear, and it made him only more murderous, and having flung the offending blade free, he went as to pick up the other man, who had no more fight in him, nor even the strength to pull at Jim’s outer layer or his hemorrhaging flesh. There was a paradoxical tenderness in the moment, as if deep within Jim was a sense that it would be possible, at last, to do this thing without violence, without some display of machismo. He could do it without, for example, eating Brandon’s heart, or making a stew out of him, or stealing back my finger from Brandon, because these were unnecessary, because all Brandon had to do was to give in to this place of death. Brandon had to become one with the tendency of death to pool in the valleys of Mars, likewise upon its mountaintops. Brandon submitted to being carried to the edge of the Valles Marineris, to one of its most imposing rises, because Brandon was, at this point, so close to being congruent with the reality of Martian death as to be nearly indistinguishable from it. And then Brandon submitted, summarily, without warning, as Jim heaved his body from the top of the cliff, nearly four miles up. There was a little bit of stumbling at the last moment. Jim didn’t want to fall into the ravine himself. But he also wanted to watch. It was reflexive. The thrill of gravity at a moment like that.

Brandon didn’t twist, gyrate, cry out, or anything of this sort. His was a smooth death. He fell with a remarkable lack of resistance. He could have been a sack of grapefruit or a pile of wet towels. He fell, and then he was dead. He carried a little piece of me with him.

Jim turned from the edge of the cliffside, as soon as he assured himself that his thirst for this moment was now slaked, and then he began his long walk.

What simple, uncomplicated perceptions were his during the march that followed? Were even the simplest grammars still relevant to his primitive consciousness? We can assume that sunlight, glorious and perfect, which, despite its cosmic radiation, was still a lovely thing on Mars, was part of his sensory perceptions. Jim was happy at the appearance of sunlight, each and every day, after the nights he spent out in the elements, trying to stay warm in his Martian jumpsuit, which was leaking oxygen and which properly ought to have killed him days before. This fact—that he ought to have been dead—was probably lost on Jim. The sunlight warmed him, and the sunlight was good. Trudging along the Ius Chasma for days, without food or water, even this was somehow satisfying, because he became, in a way, part of the Ius Chasma. In different kinds of light, the canyon was perceptibly different, and there were layers of bedrock that he hadn’t seen the day before. He didn’t recognize this, but he recognized that the canyon belonged to him somehow; he had assumed ownership. The danger of it was like his own menace, and this was reassuring. Eventually, he repaired the ultralight to a barely workable condition and traversed the outflow portion of the Valles Marineris until he crash-landed it somewhere outside of base camp. Which is to say that he walked in. A representative of the walking dead. There were only these simple commands coming from the back brain,
keep going, don’t stop, keep going
. It’s fair to say now, kids, that there was some kind of homing beacon in him, and I employ the word
home
with the full sense of its meaning.

I was in the power station when he finally turned up, dragging himself, dragging a leg that looked as though it would not stay attached to him for another five steps, and bleeding, garishly, in many spots, bleeding chiefly from the eye sockets. It was the most shocking illness I’d seen in my life, and I have seen some horrible things. I have seen what weaponry can do; I have watched men drown in their own wounds. I don’t know how to describe what I saw. I am still trying to figure out what I saw. It was as if Jim had emerged from the Dark Ages, from some savage and merciless eon, and when he thundered on the door, and I attempted to admit him, I was not really sure that I ought to have done so. Because I had given myself over to thinking that it was all about the
germ
, that the Mars mission was now all about the germ, no matter what they told us. And I didn’t know if the germ was communicable, and I didn’t want the germ. But once I saw him, and I saw the confusion on his face, a confusion that plainly wondered what had happened, what had become of him (when his intentions had once been so noble), I had no choice but to admit him.

He didn’t need to say anything. I knew enough to know what he felt. And I filled a bucket with water that was warm from the reactor, and I found a rag, and I began to try to bathe his wounds, the many, many wounds on the sallow, fetid body of Captain Jim Rose. He lay there, soundlessly, on the floor. Whenever a wound was rinsed, a fresh gurgle of corpuscular material seemed to bubble forth from it. I felt his forehead, kids, and his forehead was cold, horribly cold.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked him. “Is there something I can do for you? Do you want me to talk to NASA and tell them what’s happened?”

Jim said nothing.

“Do you even know what’s happened? Because I’m not sure I know what’s happened.” And I didn’t know. I had my surmises. But I had not yet assembled the dossier of reports and video footage and satellite images that would enable me to re-create the end of the Mars mission for you kids. I was still mulling over the crisscrossing of disinformation that was being fed to us by a government agency that was so wound up in the budgetary conflicts and the rapacious needs of independent contractors that it couldn’t give a straight story to any taxpayer, no matter how earnest his entreaties.

Jim managed, with some great effort, to struggle to his feet, and he wandered back and forth in the control room of the power station, as though he were looking for something specific, even though I couldn’t imagine what it was. He would linger in front of some computer screen, gazing upon it as though he had never seen a computer screen before, and then he would press a bloody palm down on some surface, look at the handprint, and then in his disturbed way, he would begin wandering again. As if he couldn’t stop. He seemed stunned by an array of tools that was stored on one wall. He looked at a whisk broom for a while. There was a gas mask, and for a second it seemed that he was going to try to fit the gas mask onto his face, to replace that cracked helmet and visor he’d left out on the front step.

Then he found the Taser.

Somehow Jim still knew very well what the Taser was for. Not only did he know what the Taser was for, but he knew how to set it on the setting that would inflict the maximum amount of damage. It occurred to me, kids, and I am not proud of saying it, that he was going to use the Taser
on me
. My survival skills had become uppermost. I was working hard at staying out of trouble, but now trouble had come to my door.