by Rick Moody
“Just eat it,” I said, with the weariness of the just-fucked.
“Eat it?”
“Put it in your mouth, for godsakes,” I said. And then the two of us breaststroked around the capsule, attempting to swallow down the afterglow of our profane and inadvisable entanglement.
December 29, 2025
There was a lot to do during the orbital insertion, kids. Next morning, we had that fellow with the sibilant s’s from Houston on the line, reminding us how things were going to proceed, and where and when Jim was going to have to monitor the aerobraking system, to insure that the computer-automated pilots were performing according to instructions from Mission Control—whose messages, I should say, were now reaching us with a thirty-something-minute delay. If something were going wrong, it was going to be a long time before we could do anything about it.
The nearer we got to the planet, the more unnerving the whole business became. As long as we were looking at Mars from a distance, it still resembled an artist’s rendering, something from the forty years of public-television programming, or the kind of thing they put on postage stamps, back when there were actual postage stamps. Maybe it was just some bonbon out there suspended in the heavens. Still, the closer we got, the more likely it was we would have to land. That big, inhospitable desert that could freeze you to death at high noon, that was where we were going to land, amid the unfiltered solar and interstellar radiation, which even as we spoke was making the likelihood of certain varieties of cancer that much likelier.
You know, kids, that the famous storms of Mars have been visible as far back as the nineteenth century, right? There just isn’t that much on Mars but dust. And there’s so much temperature swing on the planet that the seasonal changes, particularly in late summer, spawn massive storms. Also, because the gravity isn’t as strong as on Earth, the size of the stuff that’s liable to go blowing in the dust storms… Well, when you get right up close to the surface, and you can see down to the craters, the dust begins to compel your attention.
At about 0800 hours (six hours before the Geronimo and twelve hours before the Pequod), we got the confirmation from Houston. We were, indeed, to begin braking in ten minutes. They gave us an opportunity to talk to the other ships, and Steve from the Geronimo came on the screen almost immediately, wishing godspeed.
“We’ll be seeing you down there,” I replied, “before long. Make sure that reactor is working properly, okay?” A nervous reminder, and thus an unprofessional one. For what else was he to do?
“We’re on it.”
“Everything okay there?” Jim asked from beside me. After all, they still had Brandon on board.
“Roger. Three peas in a pod.” In fact, Steve’s face didn’t suggest the three legumes. Maybe we were all kind of nervous. Need I remind you that even if we made it to the surface, we were facing another year and change under very uncertain circumstances?
Laurie and Arnie called in next. I was watching while Jim spoke with them. The same kind of thing. Bland offers of support. What else could they say? We’ll be happy to shovel up your remains on the surface? If any one of the three ships didn’t make it to the surface, the remaining mission astronauts were, effectively, doomed. We were interdependent, we were worried, we were tired of one another. Except for Laurie and Arnie. (I was pretty sure there was something going on there.) And there was Jim and me.
Behind us, watching the whole thing, was José, and he was doing some more of his strange Asian spiritual exercises, which at this point seemed to involve a lot of facial grimacing and isometric convulsions, unless his version of Planetary Exile Syndrome involved a tic douloureux.
“I can’t stand it when you loiter behind me,” I reminded him.
“That’s all you have to say after three months stuck in this aluminum can?” José replied.
“Six minutes to strap in,” I said.
“Jim, you got it under control?” said he.
“Late to be asking.”
“Maybe you didn’t sleep well last night,” José said. And when I looked back to catch his eye, he was grinning in a way both somber and knowing.
“Like a baby,” Jim said.
“Five and a half,” I said. “Don’t forget the ventilator.”
“I know what the MMPs are,” José said, as he retreated down the ladder to the cargo bay. “I know as much about the mission as you do. I have more to do than type away on a diary.” And then: “What is this gunk all over the banister?” The sound of his coyote laugh was muffled as he disappeared into his lair of science projects. I hadn’t been down there in days to see if his plants were still growing, and when you consider that the capsule is only 1,200 square feet, that’s saying something.
Kids, my large philosophical thought for today is that I know what the woman wants. I’m like Tiresias, who was each woman and man. What women observe, kids, what they have said to me often enough, is that with men there is the big crushing embrace of intimacy, from out of nowhere, when you are mushed in his arms, and you are more there, more useful than you have ever been, because you can complete this man, you can make him stronger, kinder, better, you can compel his softness to the surface, you can nurture it, until he is like a little lion cub, and all is good, all is sweet, up until the man’s desire crests, and he spills his frenzied self upon the earth, at which point man is revealed as faithless and unloving, as man waltzes off to go watch X-treme lacrosse and eat salty snack items. Like you were never there at all. Never there at all! Until fluid backs up in the vas deferens or the prostate, and suddenly he requires some kind of liquidy release and becomes willing again to need to crush you in his faithless bear hug.
It was supposed to be three minutes until the aerobrakes, and we could easily be as an asteroid falling to the surface, we could burn up on orbital insertion, or else, as I was saying earlier, we could bounce off the atmosphere and go end over end, ass over teakettle, out toward the next star system, and in this dramatic moment, Jim wouldn’t even make eye contact with me, just to acknowledge that some tenderness had taken place. Maybe there wasn’t time for sentimentality, truly, because just as I was going to remark volubly on his remoteness, something went very seriously wrong, something that Houston was not up to predicting. We hadn’t yet done our redundant flight-modeling tests, nor had we hooked up our ventilators, nor had we had any kind of countdown, when the rear thrusters nonetheless ignited, but still there was the scraping of large pieces of lightweight aluminum and flame-resistant heat shields moving into place on the outside of the capsule, and the explosion of combustion down in the engine room, and suddenly we went from however many miles per second we were going into an atmosphere-enhanced slowdown. We went from an interplanetary velocity, as fast as Earth itself hurtles around the sun, down to a couple thousand kilometers per hour. Everything that was not Velcro’d down in the cabin went shooting up into the soup of compressed oxygen, and we strained against our straps, and then, miracle of miracles, we heard sound! We heard sound! Earsplitting sound! Outside the capsule! We heard sound because, ahead of schedule, and without catching on fire, we had been captured by the Red Planet, kids, and this meant sound again! Ours was no longer a vacuum! There was, well, a lot of carbon dioxide, methane, and some nitrogen and stuff, not a lot of oxygen, but who’s quibbling? We were falling into an atmosphere! We had made it somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 million miles across nothingness, and we were in the blissful soup of atmosphere. Martian atmosphere! And there was another sound, besides the aerobrakes firing and the hull shuddering, and that was a sharp yelp of pain from downstairs, which was, apparently, José being thrown violently across the capsule as we began again to experience the great mystery of gravity. Because even this far out, where we were just being captured by that perpetual falling, which is orbit, even here the little Martian gravitrons were interacting with our gravitrons, and as a result it was becoming temporarily possible to feel ourselves in these chairs, to feel our limbs. What this conferred on me, after the months
of zero g’s, was an intense nausea. It was a good thing that we didn’t have the ventilators on, because Jim, who was holding on to a throttle between us on the off chance that he was going to have to do something, leaned over and vomited. I had the zero-gravity reaction to this: now there was going to be vomit drifting around the capsule, like there had been vomit the first couple of days. But the amazing quality of Jim’s leftover, semi-dehydrated breakfast was that it kind of spilled. What a novelty! And I would have stopped to consider all this myself, had I not been vomiting.
There was a deceleration gradient (we were in search of a velocity of 9.8 m/s2), and Jim gathered himself up from his slumped-over position as the hull of the Excelsior shuddered again, to make sure we were on track for the stable orbit that Houston had planned for us. The surface of the planet rushed up to meet us.
“You want to give a yell to José?” Jim said to me, somewhat nervously.
On the intercom, I called to our science officer.
“All right down there?”
No answer.
“José, are you there?”
Still nothing.
“I think he’s down.” I got on the keyboard and typed the message to Houston: Code 8, science officer failed to buckle in. This was followed by some important acronyms that José himself would have used in this message. There wasn’t going to be a chance to get downstairs, however. Not in the midst of the landing. Not unless I manufactured one. “You want me to go look?”
“We’ll go around half a revolution to make sure we’re where we’re supposed to be. Let’s make sure we’re secure.”
I don’t think I have commented at any length on the tiny moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. They are scarcely moons in the normal sense, and some people think they are just hunks of Mars that got blown out by some impact. And yet from my earliest days of training for the Mars mission, I have had an unnatural excitement about seeing Phobos. Phobos goes around the Martian equator, more or less, which our orbit was not far from, and so I was keenly hoping we would have a chance to see Phobos up close. It orbits the Red Planet every seven hours and thirty-nine minutes. And while I was thinking about what to do with José, watching for the moon was what I was able to do. Phobos, kids, is not exactly circular, by any means; it looks like the handset of an old-fashioned telephone, oblong, and as we swept by it, under it, my first thought was how good it would be for some variety of advertising. No doubt a Sino-Indian conglomerate will come up with just this sort of plan, and they will get a telegenic actor to announce it, perhaps broadcasting the message on the side of Phobos itself, for the eventual Mars colonists to see: The little Martian moon Phobos is just how you want to feel about your investments as you approach your retirement—modest, predictable, reliable. That’s why we named the company after it. Call a Phobos financial planner today. Phobos, a world apart.
“How beautiful,” I said, “the unseen majority of things in the universe,” pointing out Phobos to Jim, but he was still performing calculations and typing status updates. It didn’t seem long before my clipboard lit up with a text message from Houston, asking for more details about the injury.
“Okay, go have a look,” Jim said. “We’re as stable as we’re going to be before the touchdown.”
José was right about the banister, in fact. It was tacky with some foreign substance, though I couldn’t precisely identify this compound. It could have been anything at this point. Long-term confinement brought out these residues.
When I rappelled myself down to José’s floor, meanwhile, I confronted a very disturbing sight. A sight that would have limitless and unforeseeable implications for the mission. José, that is, lay on the floor with his leg dislocated to a remarkable angle, an impossible angle. And the belt loop of his reentry gear was hooked around a gaffing tool that was intended to be used to load out the ultralight on the surface. He didn’t respond to my repeated attempts to rouse him. I depressed the nearby intercom on button.
“He’s unconscious. And it looks like he has a broken leg.”
“You kidding? How the hell?” Jim’s tinny voice rebounded.
“You saw him. He wasn’t prepared. Better get Arnie. I’m going to go ahead and revive him.”
However, that wasn’t what I did immediately. There was an odd peacefulness in the cargo bay. I considered my surroundings. I noticed that José’s grow-light garden was doing very well. There were even blossoms on some of the tomato plants. We could have fresh tomatoes on Mars in a few weeks. An unimaginable treat. Maybe soybeans too. I took the opportunity, in that silence, to say a little prayer for José, because even though I disliked the man, I didn’t want to see him disabled on Mars, or unable to contribute further to the mission. Did God even answer prayers from space? Maybe we were out of bounds. Nonetheless, it was in a spirit of gentleness and affection for the sleeping wretch that I drifted over to the first aid station and fetched out the smelling salts.
He was not very happy when he woke, that was for sure, and based on the cries of pain, it was evident that José was not in shock, which, in any event, is oversold as a medium of pain relief. José resorted to a syntactical bonanza of Spanish-language curses.
“What happened?” he kept asking. “What happened?”
“I think we hit the orbit very hard, and a lot sooner than we were supposed to, and everything that was loose went flying. You were one of the loose things.”
“Orbit?” he said.
“Orbit.”
“You mean?”
The implications of this question took a moment to sink in.
“You know where you are, right? You’re on the Excelsior, and we’re on our way to Mars.”
He stared at me. In disbelief.
“Jim, are you hearing this?” I called.
From intercom: “I’m hearing it.”
There was a penlight in the first aid box. I took it out and shone it in his eyes. The pupils were not entirely responsive to the stimulus. Not really a good sign.
“How much pain are you in?”
I went to touch the leg, and José began crying out immediately.
“I’m going to administer an injection, José,” I said, “which will help with the pain. But we’re going to have to try to splint your leg a little later. I have to warn you that that is not going to be very pleasant.” José blanched at what was taking place, as though he were uncertain about all of it, and yet he still held out his arm. I squeezed a little OxyPlus out of the hypodermic to make sure there were no air bubbles, and then I dosed him up. He went slack within seconds. So I lugged him and his gravity-enhanced bulk up from cargo and strapped him to his chair, where he should have been anyway, and climbed back up to command and control.
At 2000 hours, the Pequod also went into orbit, not long after the Geronimo, but I was busy elsewhere. It was a long twelve hours of sitting with José and his mangled leg, asleep and awake, attempting to keep his leg immobile, explaining a lot of things to him, explaining that we were close personal friends and had been since early on in the years of training that it took to prepare for the Mars mission, explaining that he had an exalted position in the mission, as science officer on the first capsule that was going to touch down on the planet. I also had to brush him up on some recent global history, like the fact that NAFTA, by virtue of repeated cycles of inflation and stagflation and the exporting of all manufacturing jobs to Asia, was no longer the economic powerhouse he remembered.
I explained to José my personal theory that the Mars mission was the last great story that the NAFTA signatories had remaining in their arsenal. It was the good yarn we could tell the people of the world. Now that the Sino-Indian economic cooperative pact was in control of the show, their profiteers were able to engage in the kind of miserly fiscal policy that would prevent a government from the spending necessary to promote aggressive space travel. The rich wanted to get richer, I counseled José, and so the rich didn’t approve of the profligacy of a Mars mission, especially one involving three ships an
d no less than twelve additional preflight unmanned missions in order to deliver various kinds of modules that would be required by the crew when it touched down. The Mars mission was the last act of the leadership in Washington as we knew it, I told him. There was a Hail Mary desperation to our labors. That was why so many things had gone wrong, that was why the aerobrakes had fired without warning, that was why his guess was as good as mine if we would make it to the surface, and forget about getting home.
If we controlled the surface of Mars, I told José, meaning NAFTA in general, or the USA in particular, then we controlled the next phase of human development, of human history. The winnings accrue to the winners, I told him, but we had been on a losing streak of a decade or more. We’d lurched from one ill-advised police action to another. As to the mission itself, I said, “All you need to know is that we lost one astronaut, and we’re not going to lose another.”
“What?” José said, groggy with the pain.
“You don’t remember?”
“Starting to come back,” he said. Which meant it wasn’t.
“She jettisoned herself into space.”
It occurred to me to wonder if he could be falsifying the severity of his amnesiac symptoms. Perhaps in concert with military subcontractors who were paying him additional sums. The only thing I could think to do was to probe around the limits of his awareness.
“She did say something, you know, before her accident, about a bacteria on the surface that she thought might be a little dangerous,” I said. “It might have had a military application. This was probably something she was just making up, don’t you think?”
“Bacteria?”
“You were briefed by subcommittees of the agency I know nothing about.”
