The Four Fingers of Death (66 page)

Once these three principals were situated in the available chairs, Rob Antoine, without much conviction on the subject, asked to be patched through to the capsule, where the Tasmanian dog who had once been Antoine’s homecoming astronaut was strapped in, gazing at the camera. Soon, through the miracle of radio transmission, a link was established.

“Jed, can you hear me? It’s Rob Antoine. I’m here with the director of the agency, Debra Levin, and with Vance Gibraltar. Can you hear us?”

A ripple of consciousness in that mammalian face, as though it understood somewhat. Some mild neurological firing, the use of Richards’s name perhaps, had enabled the part of him that remained.

“We need to know, if you’re able to tell us, how you’re feeling. Can you talk to us about that?”

The director felt she needed to add something, though whether this was useful was debatable. “Colonel Richards, at this historic juncture, we want you to know how much you’ve given to the country, and how much that means to us. You are a true hero. A man of great stature. A patriot. Your contribution to the life of the country will not be forgotten.”

Then a hoarse whisper
was
audible in the transmission.

“What’s that, Jed?” Antoine asked. “Are you able to communicate in there? If you are able, please let us know.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” the voice whispered.

“Jed, we have no intention of
bullshitting
you; that, as you know, is not how we operate here at NASA.”

There was a chortle, or something halfway between a snigger and some kind of pneumonic hacking. Bits of lung tissue involved. Still, it was hard not to think of this particular sound as sardonic.

“Jed, let’s not beat around the bush, if that’s all right. We have work to do. We have some important questions to answer quickly. For example, we need to know whether you imagine you are infected, whether your immune system is compromised.”

The astronaut said, “Definitely… infected. I used to look better than this.”

“Is it the same course of infection,” Antoine went on, “that you saw in the others back on Mars?”

“I want you to promise me,” Richards wheezed, “that any… footage you’re collecting now… will never be seen by my wife and daughter. Is that understood? I want all of this footage erased.… I don’t want it turning up in some museum exhibition… down the line.… Promise me.”

“There’s no problem with that, Jed.”

Gibraltar added, “Jed, your wife is being supplemented by the agency now, to make sure she has everything she needs—in terms of expenses, child-care options, subsidized housing in perpetuity—and that will all continue. Don’t worry on that account at all.”

“Kind of you… Vance.”

“Jed,” Rob said, “we are wondering if you have noticed that the life-support systems in the capsule seem a little bit off there. Or at the very least the monitoring is way off. Is that something you noticed, and, if so, is that… intentional?”

“I set the levels.… Of course… I shouldn’t be… Well, it’s obvious… right? The rumors of my… demise are… accurate, ladies… and gentlemen.”

“Do you have stamina or strength remaining? We should get the facts to the medical department, you know, right away. They’re advising us on treatment options.”

“I have… the strength… of a dead man.”

There was an interval of stunned silence.

“Well, do you think you’re up to the landing? Because we really only have a very short time until splashdown. We need as much as we can get of your—”

“Blow the capsule,” Richards interrupted.

The troika had discounted this possibility, at least publicly, had not fully discussed it, had premeditated only in the hopeless moments the idea of the auto-destruct sequence. As though the idea itself were an illness, an affliction. It was a backup plan, a Plan C or a Plan D, scarcely mentioned in all of the computer models. No one had thought that they’d do it. Not really. There was too much to let go of. Too much labor and ambition. Too many dreams. Too much human aspiration. The auto-destruct sequence, as an approach, amounted to admitting to themselves and to the world that
not even one astronaut
was able to make it back from Mars. Not one. And yet here was the decision, expressing itself as the choice of the remainder of the mission, the one whose carefully composed diary entries were now part of the documentation of what had taken place out there, 40 million miles away.

“Could you repeat that, Jed?” Antoine asked. “So that I know I heard what I heard.”

“Blow the capsule… please….” And then a long and weary pause. “Let’s be direct.… I want your… agreement… on this point. My situation, as you… can see… has declined… and it’ll continue to do so… and since I have reason to believe… that I know… what happens with the… later stages of infection… I would like to get your commitment so that… my family… will not see me… this way.”

“Jed, we’re going to talk here for a few minutes, and then we’ll be back to you.”

Rob Antoine turned to face the other two, realizing that they, Levin and Gibraltar, were already making decisions, organizational decisions. It was this way. You found yourself on the inside or the outside. Here at the agency, science was always the lapdog of the political and military objectives. The pure scientists were the yahoos, the ones who were unsophisticated, the ones who had no idea how the world worked.

And yet it was Debra Levin who said “Rob, we cannot afford to lose the colonel.”

“What do you mean we can’t afford to lose him?”

“I mean, Rob, that regardless of the colonel’s feelings about his situation, we cannot afford to lose him. In fact, the colonel is now a military weapons
system
, and we have need of this particular military weapons system. We are, as you know, a nation that is potentially at war with a much larger force massed in the East. We are a nation, a consortium of trading partners that has been running a net loss in terms of scientists, with many of them now moving to universities in Beijing and Delhi. We cannot afford to have a genuine turning point in the history of American innovation, innovation with global political ramifications, stifled because of the feelings of one man. I have therefore been directed by the highest possible levels of government to be certain that if there is a military weapons
system
available to us as a result of the Mars mission, no matter the collateral costs, then I am to be certain that we secure this military weapons system and deliver it expeditiously to the laboratories in Langley and Washington. What they do with the technology, thereafter, is not our affair. We are, at this point, a freight operation.”

“What if he’s already dead?”

“Rob, if he’s dead, why did we just have a conversation with him? He’s rather talkative. And, to answer your question, it doesn’t matter if Colonel Jed Richards is dead, although I grieve for his discomfort. And for his family and loved ones. What matters, however, is what he’s carrying.”

“But what about the risk to the population in the area around the landing site? I mean, assuming we can predict the landing site with any accuracy, what about the risk to local populations? What if the pathogen gets into the water? What if our efforts to quarantine Richards, upon splashdown, are inadequate? Are you going to want it on your conscience, Madam Director, that you let loose a germ of which we know next to nothing and against which no inhabitant of Earth has any resistance at all?”

“Rob,” Gibraltar said, reaching across to set a hand on the shoulder of the younger man. And there was a strange serenity to this gesture, the serenity of Antoine being told that his voice in the final stages of a project to which he had given years of his life was marginal. “Your conscience should be clear. Mine is clear. The orders come from above. There are principles here. We have no duty but to follow the orders.”

“Even if it’s a
bad
decision?”

“For whom?” Gibraltar took pause, as if to punctuate. He sipped from a coffee cup before him. “For Jed Richards? Jed has already offered his life for the betterment of his country several times over. You just heard him do it. And for everyone else, for the people who care about this mission, for this agency, for the military complex, for the nation as a whole, an end to the mission that does
not
include the auto-destruct sequence is by far preferable. We all look better. NASA gets better funding. I know Jed Richards, and I admire Jed Richards, but I like to think that if he were here with us right now he would make this decision the very same way.”

“And you”—Rob looked into Gibraltar’s bureaucratic eyes carefully and then moved on to Levin, passing from one to the other—“probably want me to tell him.”

The NASA director gazed briefly at her lacquered nails. “You have the relationship. It’s your call, but we think you will do it best.”

Rob Antoine felt the stirring of powerful emotions, and it would have been easy, when he was so exhausted, so confused, to play the role of the scientist who cared too much, who let his feelings get away from him. But he had risen to the position at the top of the Mars mission by virtue of his willingness to be responsible, above all, to make the unpopular decision, to tell his employees the bad news whether they wanted it or not. Without consulting further with Levin and Gibraltar, therefore, he had the uplink to the capsule reestablished. He didn’t want to say what he was about to say to Jed Richards. But his professionalism was of a strong alloy, and he would do what needed to be done.

At least, that was how he felt until he saw what was happening in the capsule. Apparently, Richards, who’d been lucid only moments before, had given in to some hallucinatory phase or episode in the course of his illness in which he could no longer vocalize actual English-language words. These words had been replaced by something closer to a primate hooting, a sort of primitive pseudo-language that would have been human, perhaps, if human beings no longer had the fine motor control that was necessary to produce dentals and fricatives and plosives. Richards, that is, seemed to be, well, kind of barking and kind of growling, and in a way that didn’t sound like a human being barking or growling, but in a way, rather, that sounded, if not primatical, well, then lupine.

“Jed, can you hear me?”

There was no end to the dismal and bloodcurdling growling, despite the use of the colonel’s name. It was as if some kind of pulsing, regularized barking and growling was now necessary to maintain respiration for the
entity
, the being that had once been Jed Richards. Rob Antoine looked back at Debra Levin, and it was the first time he saw fear on her face. Fear, he thought, got trained out of people who spent long enough inside the famous Beltway. For them the only fear was loss of power. And yet here was Levin, deeply shaken by Richards’s condition.

“Is this the man you want me to bring home?”

“Mr. Antoine, it’s irrelevant what I want, or what you want.”

“Vance, are you satisfied with what we’re doing?”

Gibraltar, Rob supposed, had also schooled himself in advanced poker playing. He would give away nothing.

“Jed, it’s Rob here. I have some good news. You are cleared to land! That’s affirmative on landing! We’re going to have people on the ground to look after you, and immediately upon landing, we’re going to take you to a facility in Washington where we expect we’re going to be able to explore advanced treatment options for what’s ailing you. We’ve had ongoing discussions with medical here, and that’s what we think. Isn’t that fine news? I’m personally looking forward to seeing you when you splash down, and I’ve just had word from some of the people in telemetry that your likely touchdown is in the North Atlantic, somewhere near to the Faeroe Islands, though perhaps a little west, maybe Iceland or even the coast of Nova Scotia. And we’ve already got people out that way, high-speed ships and so forth. Jed, isn’t that great news? You are going to be celebrated, lauded, you name it.”