The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  “You’re talking to me like I’m ill.”

  “I’m talking to you like you’re a person I’ve known for three years and worked closely with all that time, and I’m begging you not to do anything that’s going to jeopardize the mission, or anything that’s going to get you or me in trouble. Because we’ve known each other for a long time, and I know you know what it’s like for me to be a Muslim on this mission, and how important it is to me to be a Muslim up here. I want to insure that I have done something that I can be proud of. And I know how you feel about being a woman science officer, and how you don’t have a family back on Earth, not the way many of the others do, and you want people to think that’s okay, that a woman can come up here and withstand three years, in the prime of her life, without a husband and kids back on Earth. I know that’s important to you, and in the same way it’s important to me that I can be an American who’s a Muslim, and I am up here, and I’m going to be one of the first people to set foot on Mars. I know you respect that. And I respect why you are here. I wouldn’t jeopardize that for you, and I’m hoping you won’t jeopardize it for me either.”

  When Abu finished this impressive speech, he could see that Debbie was moved, because her breathing slowed, and she looked at the soldering gun in her hand, and she was probably really irritated that she was still crying, because she didn’t want to be the kind of astronaut who cried at a time like this, and at last he found the time to free an arm, while with her free hand she clutched her tortured brow, and to depress the intercom button, which did have a red indicator lamp on it. He was hoping that she wouldn’t see the indicator light, and if he could get her to come around the left side of the bed, maybe she wouldn’t see that the intercom light was on, and that he was broadcasting locally back up to where Steve was sleeping.

  “So are you going to allow me to get out of this bed now, Debbie?”

  “No,” she said flatly.

  “Well, at least help me loosen these straps, because my legs are asleep. I’m not going anywhere. I will listen as long as you want.”

  “Listening is exactly what you’re going to have to do, Abu, because I’m going to tell you something that you don’t know about. What I’m going to tell you about is a certain bacteria, a bacteria that is so classified that almost nobody has ever heard of it. And the reason that it has never been heard of is because it was only ever seen on Earth twice. The first time was when they found that Mars rock in Antarctica. And the second time anyone ever saw it was in the Mars missile that the robot mission from 2015 sent back.”

  “That was just another mapping and atmospherics mission, and the robots locked up solid after that dust storm three months in.”

  “Abu,” Debbie said, “that’s what they want you to think, of course. Have you seen any photos of the robots lately?”

  “Why would I have seen any photos?”

  “Well, I have seen photos of them, and they were in one of the basins, and then they traveled from there, hundreds of miles, and they were taking samples wherever they went, and they found all sorts of bacteria along the way, frozen bacteria that blossoms out of its dormant state not just at a certain time of day, but only at a certain time of year, and only when the planet is on a certain tilt on its axis, which means only maybe every seventy thousand years or so, which is to say not very often, and so it was kind of hard to figure out, at first, whether this bacteria was of any use on planet Earth.”

  “Wait,” Abu said, trying to keep her going for the sake of the intercom, and praying all the while that Steve was transmitting so that Mars mission guys back in Houston were getting all of this. “You’re saying that they had some reason to suppose that there was a bacterium that had certain properties, and they were planning to harvest it for experimental purposes on Earth.”

  She was tired. Planetary Exile Syndrome has exhaustion as one of its key features. And this kind of histrionic and desperate behavior was tiring too. And her exhaustion was causing her to be sloppy. Her eyes were ringed with red, and puffy. And her cheeks were striated from where the tears had coursed across them.

  “You bet your ass, Abu. And they fired it back to Earth in this little rocket, and it splashed down in the Indian Ocean, and they had an aircraft carrier, and a bunch of Navy SEALs, and all kinds of stealth aircraft, and every other thing they have, tactical warheads, trained on anyone who might want to get to that payload before we got to it. The only problem with it, Abu, was that they had no idea what would happen to it at Earth temperatures. They just had no idea. It was a completely new bacterium! Because who knew how long it had been frozen, and under the kind of air pressure where most things evaporate? Who knew? Thousands of years? Tens of thousands of years? Millions of years?”

  He’d freed his arms, calmly, slowly, during the speech, and he was thinking that it wouldn’t be too hard to overpower her, because she just wasn’t paying the same kind of attention to the soldering gun, but he wanted, if possible, not to injure her or startle her unduly, since it might inhibit her recovery from her delusional state, and so he waited yet a little longer.

  “And what was the special property of the bacterium, Debbie?” Abu asked.

  “That’s what I’m about to tell you. The special property of the bacteria, Abu, is that—”

  This was the moment when Steve Watanabe hit Debbie Quartz in the neck with a hypodermic. He’d crept down the ladder silently, drifted behind Debbie while she was talking, and then looked for a good spot for the injection, since he wasn’t a doctor (the only doctor on the mission is Arnie Gilmore, on the Pequod ). I guess Steve hadn’t had time yet, or authorization, to tell Gilmore, or any of us on the Excelsior, about the situation. The way Steve told me the story, injecting an unwilling and delusional person in zero gravity is not the easiest thing to do, and he had to be sure that he was right up next to her, without running the risk of being heard, which is exactly what he did. There was the risk of rupturing an artery, sure, with a predictable heavy blood flow, brain damage, all of that, but what had to be done had to be done. And so Steve plunged the needle into Debbie’s neck, and she screamed like, well, like a stuck pig, and she tried to keep him from depressing the plunger, until Abu finished unstrapping himself and lurched into the middle of the conflict to help restrain her—Debbie screaming, telling Steve he had no idea what he was doing, what he was bringing down on himself, the disaster that lay in wait for him on the Red Planet. But then Steve managed to depress the plunger, while nearly strangling poor Debbie, with whom he had played many enjoyable games of cribbage back when we were all in Florida. He watched as Debbie writhed for a couple minutes and then slept. Sleep as a rare interval of happiness, or as an interval of oblivion, descended on her. She drifted over toward one wall, her limp body, like she was a coil of NASA hose.

  The two men hovered idly in the silent cargo hold, watching their sedated colleague. They didn’t want to believe what had just come to pass. They knew what it was. Big trouble.

  “You had word from Houston, huh?” Abu asked.

  And Steve, wordlessly, removed the clipboard from his back pocket and handed it over to Jmil. On the screen: “Immobilize Quartz. Narcotics in first-aid kit. Follow dosage guidelines. Advise when completed.”

  November 18, 2025

  We were about seven weeks out, and halfway to the Red Planet. Things had been a little tense around the Excelsior. In order to depict just how tense, I suppose I need to render for you more of the conversational stylings of José Rodrigues, science officer, your favorite character in this weblog (at least as judged by posts from you in the comments section: “How would José order in a French restaurant?”). What better time than now? Besides, never was “graveyard shift” a more appropriate term. Though really all the shifts were graveyard shifts in the soda can. I’m going to work on my José Rodrigues impression by hand, that’s right, by hand, with specially designed ink pen and paper. What the hell else do I have to do? (Well, I have been contacting my daughter, Ginger, once a week or so,
during which time we have extremely strained conversations about whatever rumor she heard about the heavily expurgated version of these diaries. For one thing, I couldn’t become accustomed to her implanted PDA. I can’t understand why kids would want to have a digital communication device implanted subcutaneously in their wrists. It’s so ugly! Never mind the ones in the skull. And all they do on there is shop. Call me old-fashioned. Maybe some of you can explain the phenomenon to me. During our last conversation, my daughter typed, with one hand, some nonsense about her grades, or she went on and on about some boy who visited her nightly at the pizzeria. All to get rid of me as quickly as possible, while she had teenage teleconferences. What was I to her? A postage-stamp-sized image on her PDA? The one with six weeks’ growth of beard? The one whose messages she neglected to save?)

  Anyway, José Rodrigues, to get to the point, spoke almost entirely in acronyms. You know, kids, that space travel is noteworthy for its acronyms. It’s a part of what we do and how we live. If not for NASA and space travel, maybe acronyms would never have achieved the cultural acceptance they now enjoy. There are so many things in life that one is tempted to abbreviate. Acronyms worked for us, for astronauts, just as for military personnel, and so certain persons were disposed to use them for any and all purposes when a regular word would have served as well.

  Lately, José and I had been meeting up when our shifts overlapped. Usually during his dinner. I could have eaten then myself, but I’m not sure his daily fare of freeze-dried rice and beans would have agreed with my delicate stomach, not for breakfast. Moreover, I had been making sure when José and I were on the same shift that he didn’t get anywhere near my food. The surfaces of the interior of the capsule quickly became rather slick, with biowaste of various kinds, human excrementa, because of our disinclination to expend water rinsing down. We had onboard antibacterial disinfectant, and it was part of protocol to use it weekly on everything inside the capsule, but the truth was that most surfaces were reasonably sterile, it being space and all. We didn’t bring that much organic life with us! Anything we were liable to catch from one another we had long since caught. Because we’d been here for more than a month. So probably the warm, sticky layer was just moist material from our hands, our perspiration, the linings of our lungs and colons, and the petroleum jelly we used for cracking lips and skin. But that didn’t mean you wanted to eat the stuff. And José liked to simulate cooking.

  It was at our shared meals that I’d begun noticing, and detesting, the proliferating use of acronyms. This compulsion of speech resembled a space version of alphabet soup. For example, José would say he was going to have to squish some KRs (for K rations) out of the little plastic squeeze-paks from which we take our convenient meals. (Squeeze-paks or gelpaks, that’s how they are designated on the side, by the official licensor to the Mars mission, whose corporate logo I have been advised to avoid in my blogs.) These José referred to as squeeze-p’s. Not shorter, you might notice, in terms of linguistic savings. Just different.

  José got the KRs out of the squeeze-p’s, in the kitchen area that according to one early blueprint of the capsule was to be called the culinary engineering zone, and thus José was in the CEZ, where he further squished out some succotash and some chipped-beef flakes (CBFs), the latter of which he mixed with some water (using the traditional chemical abbreviation thereof ), and washed it down with some RCJ, or reconstituted cranberry juice, decrying in the midst of his meal, though I was pretending not to listen, the absence of onboard FMBBs, otherwise known as fermented malt and barley beverages, and when he was done, he headed around the corner for some minimal privacy at the WEP, which I’m sure my younger readers already know to be waste-evacuation privy, all of this being narrated for me, during and after the fact, including consumption of m-salts, or magnesium, which he took to insure regularity, “because we got a C&R [composting and reformulation program] for a reason.”

  Yes, as I mentioned earlier, we were obliged to make phosphorus and other fertilizer products out of our solid wastes, for the cultivation of genetically modified soybeans and other vegetables. That is one of our most important experiments on the planet Mars, genetically modified wheat, soybeans, and other vegetables that could exist in very low temperatures, with boosted levels of carbon dioxide, and in ridiculously low atmospheric pressure. Not to mention solar radiation. These soybean seedlings were provided by the licensed agricultural supplier to the Mars mission.

  José was also liable to refer humbly to his occasional bouts of masturbation, or FSAs (fits of self-abuse), which he regarded as a mission-related obligation, in order to maintain good health through “reproductive-fluid release,” and I’m betting you know what the acronym for that is, as well as the acronym for “bagging and disposal” of the relevant ejaculate.

  I’m only exaggerating a little bit. What happens after a while, in a tiny little soda can halfway between two planets, is that you stop talking to one another entirely, in order that you might begin talking primarily to yourself. My mother, the schoolteacher, who was used to lecturing in front of audiences, was the person in my family most opposed to talking to oneself, viewing this as a sign of mental illness. And yet this was the communication modality most perfect for the eavesdropper. On the Excelsior, I began to grow quite weak, listening, despite my misery, to José’s nasal whine, “… because the MMEs are suggesting that the shipboard calcs are giving bad results on the SRBs that boosted us into EPT, and since we aren’t an ELV, we have high levels of sig error, which means that in terms of landing trajectory, we will be wanting to make sure we have an SSM.” Was he saying these things to me? Or was he saying them to whatever sleep-deprived kid, fresh out of MIT, whose job it was to listen to José by radio this night? Was he trying to impress this young astrophysicist, as well as whoever else might be listening on the radio transmissions that NASA organized each day? Or was he actually saying something substantive? Jim didn’t talk to himself—he would have regarded it as unwise from a security perspective—but he had a strange snorting thing that he performed. For example, he snorted when he was about to say something that he knew was not entirely true. These snorts had gotten more pronounced in recent days. I knew, therefore, that Jim felt that José was up to no good, as I have already said, and so there was some kind of all-purpose cognitive dissonance that created this need to know. What he was saying was out of phase with what he was actually thinking, and so he was always snorting, before almost every sentence. And the snorts, which sounded a little bit like what a pachyderm might do in extreme cold, were achingly vulnerable, human, especially since they implied that the three astronauts on the Excelsior were now in a state where all privacy and dignity were vanishing away.

  So what did I surmise, you might wonder, when I heard José saying to himself, “… as far as the Geronimo goes, the SO is probably an eject, if you want to know what I think, she’s EVWE.” What did I surmise? When he was describing a fellow astronaut in terms of “extra-vehicular waste ejection”? Did I mark this moment as the moment when I was alerted from checking supermarket prices back on Earth to hearing the origins of conspiracy? There are times in a man’s life when ordinary complacency and a basic good-guy, can-do attitude simply have to give way to greater concerns—moral concerns—and this was one such moment.

  “Do you mean you’re suggesting they eject Debbie Quartz from the Geronimo?” I called past Jim’s sleeping body.

  “I have to have close contact with the other SOs because we’re coordinating missions. I have a duty to coordinate with them, and one of the SOs, as you are aware, is so loaded on narcotics that she probably can’t operate heavy machinery. I’m supposed to go to the surface of the planet and work with her on terraforming, mining, and industrial projects?”

  “What kind of industrial projects?”

  “You will know when it’s NTN for your clearance level. As of 1900 on 18 November, that’s a negative. The mission is a matter of national security. Some of us around here are actually worried
about maintaining appropriate security protocols, policing our IODs and our blog posts, and if others were as conscientious, things would go smoother all around. An unconscious malcontent is a problem, sure, which is why, yes, Jed, I think they ought to make like she’s EVWE.”

  “She has PES,” I said, employing the acronym with a hint of irony. José had finished putting away the last of the kitchen gear. He drifted over to where I was strapped down, and his unshaven face broke into a grin. I got a good look at his gold-capped incisors. This smile was impressively malevolent.

  “She was a high-risk assignment right from the beginning. She’s weak. If you ask me, the public-relations people wanted more women. They already took one fella who wasn’t stable in the first place, Brandon, and now they got a bad apple in Debbie. What are we supposed to do? You know how long we’re out here. You know how long the mission is. There’s a likelihood we’re going to lose people, Jed, or we’re going to start to have problems with the Martian environment. The weak are going to go. You think I’m being hard, Jed? I’m not being hard. I just care about the rest of us. If you ditch her body from the Geronimo, then you use up that much less oxygen, which means more for the bubble when we touch down, more for the ship on the way back, and it also means less weight, which means less thrust. It just makes good practical sense.”

  “There’s only one problem,” I said. “Even though she doesn’t have immediate family, she is nonetheless a person with a life, a social existence. There are friends and distant relatives who all care about her. The problem becomes, from their point of view, that they would like for her to stay alive.”

  “If you call that alive,” he said. “But I guess you don’t get bedsores at zero g. If it were me I’d press the ejection button myself.”

  “I’ll hold you to that.” At which he rappelled down the ladder into the cargo hold. And to think we let him look after the seedlings down there. Who knows what’s going on with those seedlings? They could be totally poisonous.