The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: He was here earlier, and I sent him home, because I’m just not comfortable with him staying over with Ginger here. Occasionally, she goes over to stay with your cousins. And those are the only nights I let anybody stay here or when I stay anywhere else. And in case you’re thinking a lot about this, if you don’t think that Jim’s wife and Steve’s wife aren’t going through similar things, you should think again. It’s not two hundred years ago, you know, when women were meant to sit here and wait for their men to return home from the front with missing legs and completely shell-shocked and they’re going to give up everything that’s good and fun about being a mature woman for some man that they never get to be with.

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Did he tell you about the bacterium? Did he tell you about that? I assume that even a flunky in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory would be able to tell you about the germ.

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: What germ?

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: I’ll tell you what germ, the bug they sent us up here to gather for them. There’s a bacterium up here, on Mars, and they think that it has military applications, and I don’t give a damn if they are reading this entire exchange, because I’m going to tell the truth now, and the truth is that they don’t intend for this to be a scientific mission and they never did intend for it to be. This bacterium is so top-secret that the majority of us on the mission didn’t even know about it. And it’s incredibly deadly. No one on Earth will have any resistance to it, since it has existed on Mars for however many millions of years. This germ is so powerful that it made it impossible for any life to take hold here, because what it does is completely wipe out higher life-forms.

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: Now you’re really sounding totally paranoid, because from what I’ve heard, the only supposedly military application any bacteria farming is going to have is not military but commercial, and it has to do with some new way of making microchips, and the reason why they are concentrating on microchips is that they managed to defray some of the costs of the mission with underwriting from tech machinery manufacturers.

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Don’t believe everything you hear. It gets more and more dangerous here every day, and I believe I have seen one or two of the astronauts who are already infected with the bacterium. Don’t even ask. It will all become clear soon enough. I am just hoping to get out of here with my own skin, though I don’t have any real hope that I’m going to be able to do that. I’ve been spending weeks up here doing nothing but drugging myself, that’s all I’ve been doing. I have myself righteously addicted. It started with the missing finger, and the reattachment. You can’t even believe how horrible my hand looks. It looks like it was rescued from some Frankenstein movie, and then there’s the stump from the middle finger. And it was really bothering me, as you’d imagine, and I was having a lot of phantom pains, and I started taking morphine for it, and then I was just unable to stop, and all the synthetic pain relievers, I mean, once I ran through the morphine, I started taking the lower-level painkillers, and they weren’t enough and I had to double up, and sometimes I am so high for so long that I don’t know what day it is, and I don’t know if that’s really the best way to be operating a nuclear power facility. Wait, wait a second. Just for one second, okay? Stay with me for a moment? I think there’s someone at the door.

  April 30, 2026

  The chase began in the desert, as many compelling chases do, and it involved giving up the succor of any remaining comfort. As always with a proper manhunt, it was not always clear who was hunter and who was prey. This I managed to learn from the hapless Steve Watanabe, who, so attuned to the possibility that he would somehow fail to make it home, was now providing round-the-clock updates on everything that was happening around him to the authorities. As if this would be enough to preserve his sorry ass. He was able, using tracking satellites designed by the authorities, to perform round-the-clock global-positioning updates on the space suits of Mars mission astronauts, exploiting not only heat signatures but a space suit design feature that had been built in for good reasons: reflectors. Steve was somewhat prepared, therefore, for the coming of Jim Rose. And he anticipated hand-to-hand combat, as well as all registers of high-tech pursuit and entrapment, even if he suspected the endgame would rely on kinds of violence better known to earlier epochs of human history. Above all, he advised Brandon Lepper, a guy he had always disliked, to take advantage of the pause before the storm to move himself farther out of harm’s way.

  According to Brandon, there was nothing to worry about. According to Brandon, the integrity of NASA’s long-term goals—terraforming, resource exploitation, a permanent human colony on Mars—had long since been jeopardized by José. Brandon had no choice but to do what had to be done. Likewise the Debbie Quartz incident. Debbie was nice enough, sure, but she was unprepared for what was required, for the Darwinism of the Mars mission, and he’d proved it by just talking sternly to her. She had to go.

  Steve Watanabe, when he heard these enfeebled rationalizations, which have been much fleshed out in my account, felt that Brandon was not himself. There was no gratitude for his having made a drive of many days on a forklift. And Steve was not reassured by the dull, lifeless tone with which Brandon directed him to the grinding and milling tools. They were to drill in the eastern outflow channel of the Valles Marineris, technically known by another one of those creepy Greek names, the Ius Chasma. The Ius Chasma, you’ll recall, is about three and a half miles beneath the plains into which it is carved, running parallel to it the Tithonium Chasma, which gets so narrow it’s just like a big crack in the ground, except that the crack goes down miles. Between the two is a ridge that runs along the center. Ius is about four hundred miles long, but it’s only a tiny portion of the enormous Valles Marineris complex, which I have already said is about as far across as the United States. In most of it, you wouldn’t even know you were in a canal. Not so here at Ius. You see a canyon wall that’s miles high, you don’t forget it.

  Steve and Brandon had got down twenty-five feet or so, into the bottom of one of the chasm walls, and they were digging mostly into basalt. These were the kinds of environments, however, according to the Martian surveillance satellites, where you found salt beds and, in some cases, dampness. The evolving theory—that there were periodic underground aquifers that had in the past caused catastrophic flooding on Mars—provided for, indeed required, spots of dampness. That water had to carve out those canyons somehow, and it wasn’t all evaporated. It couldn’t be. A team of geologists back in Florida watching all of this on a video screen cheered for every new foot of exposed crust. Much of this work, excepting the occasional buzz and roar of drilling automata, was done in silence and darkness. Steve, according to the notes he was posting, tried to engage Brandon periodically, but Brandon would no longer participate in the subtler human interactions. Brandon, former boxer and smartass, had, in the weeks alone, become a grim, silent wraith. When there was a lapse in the pace of operations, he would berate Steve until Steve was willing to get back to work, and the only thing that Steve could seem to do to get time off was to faint from exertion, which he did periodically. The deprivation of sunlight in the chasm was somehow even more obliterating than he imagined it might be on Earth, since it was the last thing he felt he had in common with those he missed back home: sunlight.

  They had a rope-and-pulley system that led down into the godforsaken hole in the ground, and a heat lamp that they used to keep warm, and they ran it off the battery of the rover, via reinforced extension cord, and there was a small generator, and it was in this half-light that Steve saw Brandon’s grimy face, as Brandon pulled off his visor and attempted to taste the salt they were blasting away from the walls of the excavation site in a storage drum. Brandon tasted it. There was some kind of liquid there, undeniably, and the action of the drills, the friction of it, was liquefying some of what was frozen.

  “You aren’t drinking that, are you?”

 
; “Keep drilling. It’s sterile.”

  “Seriously, are you sure you should be drinking that?”

  “Drinking what?”

  “Weren’t you just drinking some of that stuff coming off the walls?”

  Brandon, in his relentless monotone: “There’s water here. I’m verifying. We’ll be reporting back to Earth.”

  “You’re not going to be doing very much verifying if you catch some germ.”

  “Conductors. Radioactive material. That’s our brief. No germs.”

  There was, however, the possibility of geological collapse. That was another peril. The Valles Marineris had all kinds of collapses. There were entire canyons in the complex of Valles Marineris that were sealed off because the walls had collapsed, and when you were digging at the base of miles of canyon wall, trying to get down a hundred meters, to the beginning of the aquifer, in search of Martian life, or in search of some new kind of raw material for semiconductors, it was not unreasonable to assume that there might have been or could be again a collapse. Hebes Chasma had a collapse. It was sealed off. And the way the wind blew in there, there were all kinds of erosion taking place all the time. And Steve worried ceaselessly about when the others were going to come for them. In what way would they come? Would they come in the ultralight? In a ragtag army? Flown in and air-dropped in a secure perimeter? And when they came, in what way would they mete out Martian justice, that resource which only begins to obtain when a certain critical mass of human beings, a community, is present? In what form would justice be dispatched, and who would be the duly appointed jurist?

  At sunset, when the batteries were run down on the drills, the two trudged out of the cave to load the last of the minerals into the drums on the back of the rover. Deimos, the second moon, hung in the salmony sky.

  In the rover, besides the drums of ore, there were piles of slag, a silvery, reflective muck that definitely had some liquid in it. Whether it was water, or chemical runoff, or what, was unclear. The whole mining operation, like most of Mars, smelled awful, smelled like a sulfur refinery. Steve and Brandon were meant to carry a half ton of the rock back to base camp, where it would ultimately be loaded into the Earth Return Vehicle for the trip home. Assuming they could somehow commandeer the ERV. Steve, according to his diaries, was weary in ways he had not been since landing on the Red Planet, and he wished he could be sure that he was doing the right thing, that cooperation with the authorized mission would be the way to secure things for his family back on Earth. But he wasn’t sure, and this lack of certainty was made worse when he got a good look at Brandon that day, in the remaining sunlight. Brandon, who despite his capacity for vainglory and ethnic one-liners was sort of hale and squeaky clean, now looked like a different person. His skin had become leathery and gray, and his eyes were sunken into his head. And they were black around the rims.

  “Brandon, are you feeling all right?”

  Brandon didn’t say anything, and his heartless and empty glare in reply to the question didn’t inspire confidence. Steve didn’t bother to pursue it. That was when, in looking up for another glimpse of Deimos, the hummingbird of the solar system’s moons, Steve saw it; he saw how justice was going to be pursued and who, exactly, was going to be doing the pursuing. Jim Rose. The captain. Up above Steve now, and coming straight for them in the ultralight, swooping down out of the sky as though it would be easy to land an ultralight in the middle of a canyon, which perhaps it would be, was none other than Captain Jim Rose. The identity of the pilot was easy enough to surmise.

  There was a volume of sand on the floor of the canyon, and a thick carpeting of dust. Not like the rocky plains out where the three spacecraft had done their awkward touchdowns. This was where the ultralight came down, like a flaming eagle out of some interminable Wagnerian opus. The ultralight was easier to fly on Mars, if you believed the hype about a meager supply of gravity and no magnetic poles to speak of. It was borne aloft on the rather manic winds. The ultralight came down out of the sky and seemed to merge with its own shadow in the deep red of sunset, and with it now came the blast, at the site of the rover. There was impact. Blast and heat, enough to knock over the one drum full of silicon oxide and related geological treasures, which in turn toppled over the other that was waiting to be picked up with the hydraulic lift, and two or three days of mined riches spilled out into the sand. The barest portion of the recent treasures collected. The projectile, the missile that caused this damage, was some incendiary device, a container of corn-based ethanol perhaps, from the ultralight, which, like the rover, operated with solar cells but which required a little gas to get aloft.

  Steve went facedown, hoping to avoid shrapnel, and when he got up, he could see Brandon was trying to pat down his flaming suit. Steve grabbed a blanket that he’d dragged out of the rover earlier, when trying to get a nap, and hurried to Brandon’s side to wrap him in it. This while Jim Rose, avenger, walked toward them, the wild Martian winds compassing about him, from the beached aircraft.

  There were a number of things to consider for Steve Watanabe, in the moments he had at his disposal. There was enough juice in the rover to go a little bit. And there was, about ten miles south, a route out of the Ius Chasma. There had been a collapse there, ten or so million years ago, and the wind had eroded the channel down enough that Brandon had found himself able, he’d told Steve, to get the rover in and out. This was the one way, short of driving thousands of miles in one direction or several hundred in another, to get out of the Valles Marineris quickly, if you couldn’t fly. But what would happen if Steve and Brandon just drove off? What would happen with the important scientific work they had recently done, not to mention the gathering of ore necessary for a whole new breed of cybernetic semiconductor, at the behest of levelheaded administrators back home, if they absconded? What would happen, Steve thought, to this work they’d been doing on behalf of a large digital operating systems consortium based in Kuala Lumpur, and its American affiliate in Dallas? Brandon did have a Taser that had been provided by NASA for self-defense, and which he and Steve had been advised to employ as needed.

  Brandon’s inclination, it seemed, was to tackle the problem mano a mano. Despite mild burns. And Jim Rose seemed to have no better idea himself. The two of them fell upon each other. Steve Watanabe, who, unlike his colleagues here on the Mars mission, had not been in and out of the military in Central Asia, had only rudimentary combat training. He was a Buddhist. In fact, as a kid, he’d never come out on the winning end in any fight. He was the kind of boy, by virtue of excellent skills in areas that others disdained (cello, chemistry, velvet paintings), who had always come in for a lot of racially dubious ribbing about how easy it all was for him, and he had attempted to defend himself physically on certain occasions with disappointing results. He’d had a couple of teeth knocked out; he’d bloodied his nose, even had it reset once. He took these lumps and moved on, more wary and a little bit more hapless about the world.

  Steve’s inclination, therefore, was to escape with the rover, as soon as it was feasible, and to head the ten miles south, hugging the wall of the canyon, where it would be very difficult for the ultralight to follow. Eventually, the plane was going to run out of fuel. Because some of its fuel had already been used to fashion the impressive Molotov cocktail. The ultralight stayed aloft during the day with its solar panels, but the sun was all but set. It was going to get very cold very soon.

  Two men bent on doing each other harm. Even under the best of circumstances, such a thing can be a drawn-out and unpleasant affair, and Steve, in his later report to NASA, did not give an account of every blow and counterblow. We know that Brandon was once a welterweight, and he was probably good on his feet, especially with the gravity only about two-thirds what it was back on Earth, so that the dancing and feinting of this prizefight was like some fabulous ethnic ritual, or like one of the fight sequences from old Hong Kong action films, whose only raison d’être was holding gravity in abeyance. Nothing was more impressive, when th
e goal was insuring the stock valuation of a large Malaysian entertainment provider, than the cessation of the law of gravity. And that’s what this fight was like, with Brandon bobbing around and using, Steve supposed, some very traditional pugilistic combinations. Meanwhile, how inhuman, how cold, how expedient was Brandon’s antagonist. Jim Rose had no compunction about making sure his style, as a combatant, was about forcing total and unconditional submission. There was going to be no prolonged mixing it up. In the dusky light, it seemed as though he’d seized one of Brandon’s arms and had bit down on it, shoving the forearm into his mouth and chomping.

  Brandon squealed and somersaulted out of the way, behind the end of the rover, so as to put the vehicle between them. Whereupon, in the interval available, Brandon seemed to be squatting down to look for a rock of some kind. It was at this point in the conflict that Brandon, who had treated Steve as if he were an indentured servant, called his name. “Steve! Steve!” I have no more details than that, just Steve’s name. And then Brandon heaved some small piece of volcanic rock at Jim Rose, striking him in the solar plexus without much apparent effect. The two warriors breathed great gasping breaths, because they were running short of oxygen as Jim worked his way around the rover, and when they fell against each other, mountain goat style, they clutched and clawed, in an attempt to wrestle each other to the ground.

  “Steve!”

  There was nothing for Steve Watanabe to do but to get in as close as he could get, in order to, if possible, affect the outcome of the struggle. The two wrestlers flipped each other around a couple of times, working toward some ineffectual attempts to strangle, and when Jim Rose was on top, about to prevail, Steve grasped a spade and went up and whacked him hard on the back of the head, on the part that he knew controlled autonomic physiologic functions like breathing and swallowing, so that Rose toppled over onto his side and was disoriented for a moment. It was precisely in this moment that Steve climbed into the nearby rover. He was followed not long after by Brandon Lepper, who flung himself into the back where the mining equipment was meant to go, and then, as quickly as he was able, Steve thrust the rover into drive and started off. The rovers can’t go very quickly on Mars, where there are no roads and where there are bits of disjecta from crater impact everywhere. Even when Brandon and Steve were making the best time they were able to, they were not terribly fast. They were in danger of shredding their tires. This made it not at all impossible for Jim Rose to chase after his quarry on foot. At the first opportunity, he attempted to latch on to the back of the rover. They were dragging him for a little bit, until Brandon, with a hammer he found in a wheel well, tried to hammer Jim’s digits. Because of the choppiness of the ride, he missed many times before he was able to connect with one, leaving Jim howling in pain, as, upon letting go, he collided with some rocks on his way to a prone position.