The Four Fingers of Death (53 page)

Why was Vance Gibraltar the de facto general administrator at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration? Anyone who’d ask obviously wasn’t traveling in the right circles. Gibraltar was kingmaker by design; Gibraltar was eager to get down in the trenches to protect his agency interests. He had the one desire, the desire to maximize visibility and profitability for the agency. He was looking anywhere and everywhere for additional research dollars, and was willing to invite foreign governments into bed with him, even Asian governments, if necessary. And so Gibraltar had been at the job almost twenty years. He’d had every heart procedure that you could have these days, valve replacement, a pacemaker; he was working toward the complete artificial pumper. All he cared about was space. Not himself, not his country, not God, not his congregation. Space. He’d never been thin; he’d never been good at football. He’d stammered as a kid. He couldn’t be an astronaut; he’d have failed the physical. But what he could be was a man who financed the astronauts, and a man who was at every launch whether successful or not. He wept by himself, alone, away from the cameras, when rockets went down or missions collapsed. And when they were successful he sent the reporters to interview someone else, some hard scientist, some academic, some engineer, men and women who would be happy to take the credit. He was effective, merciless, and silent to those on the outside.

In all these years, nothing had presented the problems that the Mars mission presented. To say that they had rushed the launch, because of the Sino-Indian joint initiative, this was to understate the extent of the ineptitude. The results had been two years of wretchedness. The news just got worse and worse, and allowing even sanitized bits of it into the press, to the degree that they did so, the deaths, the madness, the experiments uncompleted, the completely hostile environment, just made it worse. No one could have foreseen the complex of problems. And while the public responsibility fell on Dr. Anatoly Thatcher, and now his successor, Debra Levin, nobody felt worse than Gibraltar did himself.

In part because of the failures of the Mars mission, Debra Levin had been skulking around the various regional offices swinging the ax of cost cutting as fervently as if she were selling off the last few hectares of Brazilian rain forest. A pair of Deep Space Probes that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had designed to withstand ten thousand years of unknowns, the Titan explorer that was supposed to follow the lander already on its way to that moon of Jupiter, Ganymede, both of these had fallen to the cost-cutting blade. Gibraltar understood what Levin had to do, but he disliked her anyway, and he wouldn’t intervene to prevent her political sacrifice, just as he had not done with the five or six other NASA directors he had served under during his time at the agency.

In dwelling on the political, though, it was easy to obscure the fact that there was a man alive in the Earth Return Vehicle. Jed Richards. Richards was a lot like Gibraltar himself, the kind of guy who was as loyal as you could be, in word and deed, but also extremely hard to deal with otherwise. Space professionals, the both of them. Richards seemed to have no interests besides training for the Mars mission, and the proof was in his domestic situation. His wife was sleeping with every middle manager at Cape Canaveral.

Before liftoff, they suspected that there was something psychologically off about him. They now believed that there was something psychologically off about
all
the Mars astronauts. Each of them in turn. This was one item on the agenda for the meeting they were about to have, in the windowless, video-equipped room in Houston, with the scuff marks on the walls and the rancid, irradiated coffee. When Debra Levin was satisfied that they had as many attendees as needed, the audiovisual assistant got the screens warmed up, and a gigantic feed of Richards’s careworn visage appeared before all of them. If he’d had a lot of lines on his face before, now he looked like some canal system, chiseled and abraded.

Levin, after remarking that they were all tired, etc., etc., addressed herself to Comb-Over first, almost as if Gibraltar himself, who’d been troubleshooting these issues during the months of Levin’s confirmation, wasn’t even in the room.

“Rob, can you summarize what we know?”

Antoine had performed this summary many times in the past dozen months, and whenever he did so he looked as though he were experiencing a massive intestinal blockage. His eyes grew moist; his reedy voice climbed upward toward a strangulated mew. With one hand, he massaged his open collar, as if he needed to coax the words from his pharynx, and then he waded into the litany of disasters.

“Madam Director. Let’s reemphasize that we recognize now—that there is a significant psychic cost to personnel during interplanetary travel. What we used to call, among the mission staff,
Space Panic
, we have since relabeled
interplanetary disinhibitory syndrome
, according to recommendations of the experts. Our attempts to treat the syndrome remotely from Earth demonstrate that the binding, civilizing agency of human association fails out in space. To a man, every one of the astronauts on the Mars mission suffered with this complaint. We had episodes of psychosis; we had rampant addictive behavior, promiscuous sexuality, substance abuse, reclusive tendencies, and so forth. This syndrome got in the way of every aspect of the mission, as we have now seen.

“That’s the first problem. The second problem is that we now believe there was some kind of infectious agent loose in the Mars population. Some of you may be wondering, legitimately, if there were classified parts of the mission that made this contagion possible or even probable. Obviously we can’t speak freely to the military applications of the Mars mission. However, we can say that at no time did we bring bacterial or viral agents onboard that might have been able to cause the spectrum of symptoms that we’ve seen there.

“It becomes difficult in a case like this, and I’m thinking particularly of Brandon Lepper and Captain Jim Rose, to distinguish between the psychological syndrome I’ve described, which like many physical illnesses
is
communicable in an enclosed population that operates in a high-stress environment, and an actual pathogen, especially when the early phases of infection seem, as in the case of earthbound hydrophobia, to cause behavior not unlike what we’re seeing in
interplanetary disinhibitory syndrome
. Broadly speaking, both the pathogen and the mission itself seem to have caused a great number of Code 14 events. Never in the history of NASA have we had Code 14s the way we are now.”

Gibraltar broke in, “Rob, we still have a NASA employee up there, about whom we have to make some hard decisions. So let’s move it along.”

“Right. Let me simply remind everyone that astronauts are people too. The spread of bad decision making, insubordination, and physical violence among this group is unprecedented, but it’s fair to point out that it is not substantially different from the situation here on Earth. Where are we? you might ask. On the one hand we do have a measure of success, in that Chief Medical Officer Arnold Gilmore and Captain Laurie Corelli, despite the fact that each of them has a family back on Earth, have elected to remain on the planet’s surface, to await the next manned Mars shot, in the process parenting the very first extraterrestrial human baby, named Prima, and creating a very profitable, for us, documentary series about their lives and struggles. At least we can spin this in a way that looks good for the agency. The child is six months old, having been raised in an effective quarantine in the absence of any human stimulus other than her parents, and, while underweight, she is a normal human baby. Prima and her family are going to have to be resupplied on a regular basis to avoid starvation or long-term power outages, which, as we know from our mission reports, would likely result in exposure or hypothermia.”

Debra Levin winced at a swallow of mulled coffee sludge. And then she too brought the unfortunate background material into the foreground.

“And… Colonel Richards?”

Comb-Over looked in Vance’s direction, as though Vance could help. Though Gibraltar had no love for the other man, he took a deep breath and generously deflected some of the fallout in his own direction.

“Debra, as you can see here, Richards is sitting in one of the last pieces of reusable hardware from the mission. Theoretically, he’s working on his memoirs. He hasn’t drifted from the course that the computers have suggested. He has been in regular contact with his daughter
and
his wife. And while he’s not communicating with us, he has been shaping his memoirs and has tried to find a purchaser for these writings among nationally distributed electronic-publishing entities. Notwithstanding symptoms of post-traumatic stress, which wouldn’t be unusual considering the mission, we had until recently every reason to believe he was in rather good shape. If the pathogen that Rob referred to, correct me if I’m wrong, if the pathogen were liable to be flourishing in him, it ought to have been apparent by now—”

“Absolutely,” Rob added.

“Considering that we have experienced catastrophic personnel loss on this mission, including some men who had been carefully selected to perform tasks both civilian and military, we do find ourselves with some successes here. The first person born on Mars, Madam Director, is a citizen of the United States of America. I believe, and perhaps legal could help me out here, that since there is now a legitimate Martian inhabitant, we have more than a legal framework for claiming the planet as a possession of the United States, with respect to drilling and mining. This is a huge advantage. Meanwhile, we have Richards on his way back with soil samples, with geological samples, and with himself, though possibly exposed to the Martian pathogen, available for scientific study that could net us positive publicity, patents, and years of academic leadership at the forefront of the interplanetary sciences, you name it.”

A bow-tied and rather preppy fellow with an excessively eager smile chimed in. “The evolving legal standards of extraterrestrial ownership are just that,
evolving
. But we do feel, at present, that unless God himself claims his right as the creator of the solar system, the first nation to establish a legitimate colony on Mars, or any of the other planets, is justified in claiming territory. In the case of an actual native-born Martian inhabitant, these claims are even more valid.”

Debra Levin, gazing up at the real-time video of Richards, interrupted the good-news palaver of the meeting to prod, instead, at more infected tissue.

“What can you all tell me about the state of the contagion?”

The young woman from medical spoke up. Vance couldn’t remember having met her. The chief medical administrator, Julio Hernandez, was off having rotator cuff surgery. In his stead, he’d sent up this greenhorn, Dr. Fales, and she was palpably nervous.

“A number of possibilities have been explored, ma’am, by the medical department. First, based on what we know from Colonel Richards’s own accounts, and also from film footage and stills that we have of the other astronauts, we believe that the pathogen, whether it is earthborn or native to Mars, has a hemorrhagic effect on human beings. The analogies would be Marburg, hantavirus, plague, and so forth. By hemorrhagic—”

“We’re familiar with—” Levin said.

“Of course. Well, most hemorrhagic pathogens cause death quickly in the presence of high fever, but this pathogen, commonly referred to as
M. thanatobacillus
, seems to allow people to continue to function for weeks, if not months, with only minimal psychological effects. That’s probably what accounts for the difficulty distinguishing the pathogen from the psychological effects of long-term space travel.”

And now the audiovisual gnomes made a kind of triptych of images of astronauts Lepper and Rose flanking the webcam footage of Richards. These stills were from the period of advanced infection, and to Vance Gibraltar, the men looked, in the acute phase of their illness, as though they might very well have marched forth from an outbreak of plague.

“As you can see,” the unremarkable Dr. Fales remarked, “the hemorrhagic phase is characterized by considerable blood loss, facial masking, sclerotic problems in the musculature, skin failure—all rather horrible to look at, despite the fact that the patient tends to present a rather odd misapprehension that no illness is present. There was a story circulating among the astronauts, which I believe comes from DOD, that
M. thanatobacillus
caused bodies to… well, to
disassemble
. We don’t really know what that means, but we do know that with organ failure and sudden skin failure, the body as a vessel does give out. Death follows skin failure pretty quickly. The question we need to continue to address concerns the route of infection, the communicability of the pathogen, and so forth. If it’s directly communicable, then, in a population that has never been exposed to the disease before, the collateral damage could be significant.”