The Four Fingers of Death (60 page)

“He’s sending us messages, Rob?”

Antoine turned to the mirror again and, breathing in the urine reek and an abundantly masculine cloacal perfume, which all men secretly recognize as their signature scent, he actually fluffed the combed-over forelock and said, “Why ignore a message if it’s staring us in the face?”

Gibraltar gave the notion a long, ambiguous pause.

“If it’s really a message.”

Once this had settled in, the two of them left the men’s room together, repairing down the long, sterile corridor, their worn, comfortable shoes like the universally recognized sound effect for horses’ hooves. They made for the nearest video monitor. Because this was much more than a not-bad idea; this was a
new
idea. Rob Antoine was actually attempting to type into his wrist assistant as he went, summoning staff to the conference room; he was sending the feed there—have the design specifications available,
please
. By the time the two of them were in that conference room, having executed a number of joint decisions in an unusual symbiosis, a father-son lockstep, the feed was already up on the wall monitor. Rob had the laser pointer fired up, and he pointed at certain indicators illuminated in the image there.

“Our theory has been that this camera setup is devoid of meaningful project-related information. But what if there is another kind of symbol making at work? One that we have only begun to consider? You know, for example, how certain kinds of primates have been taught to use symbolic manipulation. They are shown pictures of objects, and from these they make syntactical units, sentences, paragraphs, out of a sequential juxtaposition of photo images. If
M. thanatobacillus
has as part of the course of its infection the gradual erosion of higher-order linguistic dexterity, then Richards, who himself witnessed multiple cases of the infection, would have known this—”

The room had begun to fill, and among its experts now were members of the team that had designed the capsule interior, who had stacked the solid-state computer systems on the wall rack in the shot. If they didn’t quite understand Antoine’s sleepless monologue, they began to understand it through the vehemence of his performance.

“What if this is object-oriented syntactical manipulation? What if by assembling a sort of line-by-line message, we can divine a syntagmatic declarative statement? That’s what I’m trying to say! For example, who can tell me what
this
panel right
here
controls? Can someone remind me? Is that water level and water flow in the capsule?”

“Exactly right,” said one sandal-wearing, dreadlocked young engineer. “Water levels are monitored in such a way that they recirculate wastewater produced by the astronaut and funnel some of this water out through the onboard catchment systems and then redissolve it into capsule air, to keep humidity at a comfortable level. On the way
out
we did find that we had trouble keeping the air wet enough, which resulted in skin problems for nearly everyone. We made adjustments in the direction of greater humidity.”

“Your name is?”

“Fielding.”

“First or last?”

“First.”

“Fielding, what can you tell me about what you’re reading on this monitor?”

“What I’m seeing is that there’s a really unusual amount of water available in the system. A very unusual amount. It looks as though he has completely shut off the humidifier and has allowed as much water into the catchment system as it can reasonably store. The short version, I guess, is that he’s not drinking very much. Certainly not enough for someone who wants to remain healthy and comfortable.”

“So what is this telling us?”

“I don’t know, sir. Hydrophobia? That his condition is somehow related to hydrophobia?”

Gibraltar, from a chair by the monitor where he had now settled himself, arms folded, grumbled, “You’re going to have to do better than hydrophobia.”

“We’re getting warmed up. Let me continue, if you would. Could someone tell me what’s below the water monitor here in the feed?”

“That would be oxygen levels, sir.” This was Amin, the designer whom Rob liked to talk to when he had to be in the engineering department, which mostly he avoided. Engineers only understood things in literal ways. Engineers were always blaming mission failures on human error and deflecting any responsibility away from their laborious and convoluted designs.

“Amin, what does the oxygen monitor do?”

“It does exactly what you’d think it would do. It monitors the oxygen levels in the cabin. It automatically makes corrections when the CO
₂
dips below a baseline that would inhibit robust functioning of the astronauts.”

The assembled experts now knew something that Rob didn’t grasp himself. The designers had been schooled in the use and interpretation of these monitors long before management. Rob, and by extension Gibraltar, needed someone to spell it all out, and here was how it was spelled, rather dramatically:

“The thing is,” Amin said, “the oxygen monitor must not be working or something. Because if it was working, that red indicator would be telling us that—”

“What?”

“Well, that the colonel can’t possibly be
alive
. Because the oxygen level in the capsule is so low that he would eventually suffocate, it’s…”

“Did no one think to look at this level at any other point in the past three days? Amin, aren’t you supposed to monitor this? People, I know we’re all tired. But has this been sitting right in front of us?”

Amin replied, “Sir, I think we’ve selected for monitoring
pulse
and
respiration
and all of that—life-support systems—and those are still going. I mean, as I understand it, and here I defer to the medical team, he’s not going to do any jumping jacks, but he is still alive.”

A hand in the rear of the room went up. One of the mission doctors, Kathleen Fales. Since luck and superstition had crept into the hard science of the Mars mission in recent days, he wished he could call on someone else. Because of her surname.

“Kathy.”

“Rob, there’s no easy way to say this, but the short version is that we find ourselves with a medical contradiction here, because if what we are learning from all the external monitoring data is true, then there
would
seem to be no way that Colonel Richards is still alive. He has effectively shut off the oxygen in the room, as though he is trying to starve himself of it somehow, and the same could be said of the water supply. And yet he still has some kind of pulse activity, and we have a Gaussmeter that indicates electromagnetic impulses coming from him consistent with nervous system function as we understand it. If I had my choice, I’d say he’s dead, or at least very close to death, and perhaps just hanging on because he has turned the temperature down inside to forty-seven degrees. You can’t see it on this image, really. It’s the blurry monitor way off to the left. He’s refrigerating himself. As far as I’m concerned, he’s not really alive in the conventional sense, certainly not to such a degree that he could communicate with us.”

Rob stalled, sifting through his perceptions. “In that sense, perhaps, you might say that he’s both dead
and
not dead?”

“I suppose,” said Dr. Fales. “I’d try to formulate an intermediate terminology, something in the cryogenic family, something less quaint than
undead
.”

“Kathy, I’m going to say that I think you’re leading the witness here, and that I’m not sure your conclusion helps us in the matter of decoding possible communicative sequences in Richards’s environment. I’m not, in the final analysis, preoccupied with the semantics of life or death. I am, however, wondering if he’s trying to
tell us something
. So I’m wondering if we can move on a little bit to the monitor that’s directly
under
the environmental controls here, and I’m wondering if we can address this for a second—”

A hush in this place of worry, this place of consternation and ignominy. It was unclear to those who were there if it was the hush of Debra Levin entering, in a maroon, understated knee-length dress, with a sense of perfect timing, at least if her goal was to gut the last few NASA programs extant. Or perhaps the hush was because everyone in the room knew what the monitor underneath the environmental controls was, and there was a sort of gasp when all considered the video image that Richards had haphazardly preserved in moving the camera out of his face. He had perfectly centered the image so that it was capturing the—

“Auto-destruct and fail-safe sequencer,” Gibraltar remarked, from his chair. It was rare that the budgetary director knew or understood these particular mechanisms. It was counterproductive when he got into this kind of micromanagement. But Rob never underestimated Gibraltar’s grasp of the basic engineering principles of space exploration.

“That’s right,” Rob said. “I saw it in my mind’s eye. I saw that auto-destruct timer in my mind’s eye, and I wondered, if he were just an
animal
now, or a
disassembling body
, or whatever it is we think he is, would he have situated this camera so that at its dead center we would see the auto-destruct sequencer? Can someone review for us?”

The kid called Fielding again: “An auto-destruct sequence can be begun at either of two locations, on the craft or remotely, at Mission Control—”

“Because?” Rob asked.

“Because no one mission team should have the ability to abort, but by having the go-ahead from the other party, by having mutual agreement, the craft can in effect auto-destruct.”

“Though it’s also true, I believe,” said Debra Levin, silent until now, “that the space administration arrogates to itself the right to oversee any and all auto-destruct sequences, correct?”

“Of course, Madam Director. If we—”

“The world may have passed on to another news cycle, but the world recognizes that only one man has gone to Mars and attempted to return to speak of it, Mr. Antoine, and that man comes from the United States of America, and while there’s still a chance that our man from Mars may be returned for the hero’s welcome he deserves, the administration prefers to think that our reputation as the country of innovation will enable us to treat this man, to bring him back from the scourge with which he suffers. We discovered the polio vaccine here, Mr. Antoine; we mapped the five different strains of Marburg virus. It is this country that landed Colonel Richards on Mars in the first place, and it seems to me we ought to be the ones who are able to bring him home. When some other nation has the record of innovation and heroism that this country has, why then, Mr. Antoine—”

“With all due respect, Madam Director,” said Antoine, trying to avoid some kind of ceaseless nationalistic prose poem, “having just arrived, you missed the tedious beginning of the conversation, where I was describing my theory that a kind of primitive linguistic statement has been prepared for us, rather carefully, it seems, by Colonel Richards, in this feed that we have here. Before you came in, I was pointing out that it was possible that he had specifically calibrated these monitors before video-capturing them for us. I think what’s noteworthy about the auto-destruct sequence is not that it requires our input, or your input, before it can be effected, but, rather, and correct me if I’m wrong here, Fielding, that Jed has actually
already engaged his end
. Am I reading this monitor correctly?”