The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  I said, “Arnie, I’m very happy to be getting this lecture on bacteriology, which I will definitely be including in my diary for the online community back home when I type later this evening—”

  “You’re still working on that, Jed?”

  “That is not the point, Arnie. The point is that you and Laurie have food, whereas I don’t have any food, except what’s remaining of our rations, and I need some, and we need to coordinate about the return mission, which I am thinking should probably begin sooner rather than later, because—”

  “You know how much farther you’re going to have to go?”

  “I know how much farther we will have to go.”

  “There’s no ‘we’ about it, Jed. Laurie and I, and Prima, aren’t going.”

  By now, I’d sort of slid down the plane of the door. To a modified prone position.

  “You’re going to stay?” I said. And perhaps I betrayed some of my consternation about this. It wasn’t that I wanted to go adventuring back to the home planet with a happy young couple and their newborn crying and throwing up and needing its cloth diaper changed, so that we’d be stockpiling baby shit throughout the journey. But I also wasn’t sure that I wanted to make the journey, well, alone.

  “What about Steve? Have you heard anything from Steve? Did he—”

  Arnie said, “He somehow managed to get the reflectors off his suit.”

  “Reflectors.”

  “He piloted the rover off a cliff, and so it’s likely that his body is out there, somewhere in the Valles Marineris, and we’ll find it the next time one of us goes out there digging. In the meantime, we were intended to wait for liftoff until the next manned mission, and NASA has now committed to sending the resupply shot in the next month, as they said they were going to do, and I think I can make enough fuel with the hydrogen that we have left over—”

  I pressed my palm to the door one last time, to feel what the warmth of common goals felt like. Then I brushed myself off and was again heading east of paradise, leaving the edenic couple and their newborn to do as they intended. They would build the new world. And if that necessitated my exile, I supposed I could understand. Then it was back to the power station, which I was now going to leave to Arnie and Laurie, and then to the capsule I had always known, the Excelsior, where I was going to see if I had enough fuel, myself, to jettison the lower stage of the housing and lift off.

  Steve Watanabe, upon awaking, on the ledge. Steve Watanabe and his cranial trauma. The broken collarbone. Steve Watanabe, looking at his hands, in heavy gloves. Steve Watanabe, and the middle space between unconsciousness and grave physical pain. Wondering how exactly he got here and where exactly this was. An oblong moon, shaped like an Idaho potato, drifted overhead. Was he in the desert Southwest? He’d been there once, on vacation. He was certain he’d been there, that he took his wife there for a rafting trip. He had a wife. He remembered some things about his wife. His wife smelled a certain way. His wife had a horrible temper, and the burning sensation of being hectored by his wife was also easy to summon up. Of the trip to the desert, however, the vast majority of details were missing. He didn’t remember being asked to don this unusual outfit. Were they trying to break the land-speed record? Steve Watanabe flipped up the visor, and the bright salmon-colored sky appeared to him in more indelible glory. The sky was the color of a yam.

  It was coming back to him. He had trained to go somewhere that was rusty in the way this place was rusty. Mars! This first bit of important information, very important information, came back to Steve Watanabe—he was on Mars. Another planet. Far from home. The circumstances in which he had arrived here were not easy to reconstruct. He was getting flashes of detail, as from a stainless steel pan into which he was meant to put his personal effects.

  He attempted to remove the helmet, to see if it would be possible to breathe the air on Mars, but when he did so, he found that the air was incredibly cold, like daggers, and that almost immediately he couldn’t catch his breath. He struggled for breath for ten or twenty seconds, aware that his anxiety wasn’t helping particularly, and then he secured the helmet on his head again. He must have had some kind of sophisticated oxygen supply in the jumpsuit, but for how long?

  Then there was the ledge on which he lay. Here was an incredibly dramatic view, it could not be denied, this series of striated and jagged cliffsides that stretched beyond him in both directions as far as he could see. What an awesome and overpowering vista. The problem from a logistical viewpoint was that he was stuck on the canyon wall, on this ledge, and though there was a sloping decline not far off, it was unclear how to get there. There was no direct route to this spot, to this ledge, and certainly none below. And yet the more carefully he looked, the more he was convinced that there was some machine apparatus at the bottom of the canyon. Some conveyance. It was a long way down. Hundreds and hundreds of feet down, and though Watanabe was not scared of heights, he was a little bit worried about falling off the ledge and meeting the same fate as the vehicle.

  As the sun rose, the winds dwindled some, and the jumpsuit was becoming a little bit warm, at least when the sun began to shine brightly upon Watanabe. As long as he was flush against the rock wall, it really wasn’t as cold as he imagined it should have been. It was very nearly in the tolerable range. Greenland in August, or so he thought.

  There were some tracks on the sloping part of the cliff wall. And so it seemed that the vehicle, and Steve Watanabe, had been either descending or ascending, and that other persons in the vehicle had been thrown clear and, he imagined, done considerable harm. Given these circumstances, there was no choice for Steve Watanabe but that he climb up the cliff face. Watanabe could not remember whether on his desert vacation he had done any rock climbing, and he could not remember whether he was the type of person who rock climbed effectively, but there was no alternative, despite the possibility of a fractured collarbone, and perhaps cranial injury.

  What was the gravity situation on Mars, Steve Watanabe wanted to remember. Would it be easier to climb up the cliff wall? Could he somehow make leaps and bounds that were out of range for him back on Earth? He began climbing without answering these pertinent questions, and mainly because he remembered the smell of his wife’s body, and in the process of remembering this warm-bread smell, he came to remember that he had a son too, and perhaps it was the wife and son who had brought him to this place, this ledge on the wall somehow. Because if he was able to get into this predicament in pursuit of the elusive reunion with wife and son, then Steve Watanabe could extricate himself from this predicament, because now it was the case that reunion was a reason to keep moving, and maybe they would be looking for him, whoever they were, the other people with whom he had come to this place, to Mars, and this would make the matter of rescue and reunion with the wife and son that much more likely and that much more sweet. How many days, weeks, months, had he been here on Mars, and wasn’t there some space agency that was meant to prevent things like this on the planet Mars? Bodily injury?

  He fitted his hand into one crevice, and fitted his foot into another, and happily the erosion of the high winds did seem to make footholds and handholds a likelihood, except that occasionally he heard scree plummeting down underneath him. The plummeting took a very long time. Watanabe did not look down, despite the bodily shooting pains; he kept climbing, and when other shelves presented themselves for rest, he rested, and over the course of some hours, he did see that he was coming near to the ledge, the ledge of the cliff, and what concerned him, at this point, was the exact nature of the sights that he would behold upon summiting and peering over the lip of that cliff. What would he find? Would he find some other cliff on the other side? Would he find some limitless assortment of ridges and cliff faces, extending into nothingness? Would he find his fellow astronauts?

  There were some near misses. Some moments when he hung on dangerously with his good arm. And there were rips and tears in the gloves of his jumpsuit. But he continued going up. As the
middle of the Martian day gave way to the afternoon, Watanabe was at last reassured that his exertions were paying off. The summit was no more than thirty or forty feet up, and there was an excellent seam between sheets of the cliff wall, probably due to some kind of tectonic activity or perhaps volcanic tremors. He didn’t know for certain; he was just making these things up. All of his prior life seemed to be in preparation for this moment, the moment when he would climb over the top of the cliff, thinking of the smell of his wife and the sound of his son eating breakfast cereal, which seemed, in these last thirty or forty feet, like the times he remembered his son best, at least since the accident that brought him to the ledge. His son was a series of small audio samples, the sound of cereal being chewed, this was very memorable, some kind of particularly crunchy cereal; his son battering a set of wind chimes with a stick out on the porch… the porch, he had a porch, and it was next to a canal, and the weather was humid and it was… it was in Florida. Steve Watanabe now felt the humid summer air of Florida, felt its tropical heat, the oncoming hurricane season, heard the sound of the emergency vehicles rumbling through the streets, saw the water levels swelling over the years, taking out another atoll of expensive real estate in the Keys; they came back in one big, moldy steamer trunk, the memories of Florida, just as he reached out a desperate grasping hand to the top of the cliff, and it crumbled, and some of the Martian scree again fell however many hundreds, if not thousands, of feet down beneath him. He didn’t even want to know. He swung a leg up and screamed, he could hear himself screaming in the helmet, as though it were some distant sound, and then he was up. He was up! He lay there, giddy with laughter, on his back on the summit of the cliff, and he lay there awhile because he knew what would happen as soon as he stopped laughing. When he stopped laughing, he would have to get up and think about which way to go next. There was something running out of his eyes, tears, he supposed, he was laughing so hard. It was good to just lie there and think about the swirling of memories like solar winds in him.

  Then Watanabe, who remembered that he had assumed a name, an Anglo first name, at some point in his youth, but who now chose to cast off the Anglo name—if he had to be named, he would just go by the surname, just Watanabe, first name no longer applicable—rose up on one knee, and then onto his feet, and looked around. Perhaps there had been tracks before, but if the faint declivities were tire tracks, they quickly became indistinguishable from the waves of sand. And in the other direction a nothingness just as perfect and exacting. Watanabe tried to decide if the ruined vehicle at the bottom of the canyon had been coming this way to get away from something, on its way home, or if home, whatever the word meant on Mars, was in the direction of the expunged track. He had no way of knowing, having no other data from which to make a reasoned decision. And so he set off, kids, into the wilderness.

  Book Two*

  SOME MONTHS later, on the eighth day of the tenth month of the year 2026: Vance Gibraltar, sleep-deprived budgetary director at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, found himself in one of the conference rooms in Houston along with the new director of the agency, that woman named Levin. Debra Levin. A Washington appointee if he’d ever seen one. What became of the former chief executive of NASA, Dr. Anatoly Thatcher, was a cautionary tale. For one and all. Someone had to suffer for the unremitting botch of the Mars mission, a mission once intended to restore luster to the national space program. It wasn’t going to be Vance Gibraltar, who unlike the eggheads around here had political instincts. Thatcher, who’d always been an intellectual in what amounted to a military program, was going back to duck hunting in the Upper Peninsula, or so the press release indicated. Gibraltar had to deal instead with this Levin woman.

  True, she had a little background in the earth sciences, and a degree from the Ivy League, where she likely consorted with Islamists and professors of Queer Studies. No doubt she’d taken a year off to live with the Inuit to see if she could forestall the clubbing of seal pups. She believed she had a mandate from the White House. If she could complete the Mars mission without further political fallout, put the punctuation mark on it, Gibraltar thought, she could go back to academe or onto the lecture circuit with a most handsome curriculum vitae.

  Across the table in the conference room: Mars mission flight director Rob Antoine, the middle manager with the comb-over and imperfect hygiene, whom Gibraltar had hired himself and had once loved like a son. Like all sons, Comb-Over had disappointed him, especially in the matter of personnel. Gibraltar could not look at Rob and his tonsorial stylings without wanting to launch him out toward Mercury. There were others in the room, deputies with too many opinions, people whom Gibraltar didn’t bother to get to know—because everything went more smoothly in an absence of personal relationships.

  Why was Vance Gibraltar the de facto general administrator at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration? Anyone who’d ask obviously wasn’t traveling in the right circles. Gibraltar was kingmaker by design; Gibraltar was eager to get down in the trenches to protect his agency interests. He had the one desire, the desire to maximize visibility and profitability for the agency. He was looking anywhere and everywhere for additional research dollars, and was willing to invite foreign governments into bed with him, even Asian governments, if necessary. And so Gibraltar had been at the job almost twenty years. He’d had every heart procedure that you could have these days, valve replacement, a pacemaker; he was working toward the complete artificial pumper. All he cared about was space. Not himself, not his country, not God, not his congregation. Space. He’d never been thin; he’d never been good at football. He’d stammered as a kid. He couldn’t be an astronaut; he’d have failed the physical. But what he could be was a man who financed the astronauts, and a man who was at every launch whether successful or not. He wept by himself, alone, away from the cameras, when rockets went down or missions collapsed. And when they were successful he sent the reporters to interview someone else, some hard scientist, some academic, some engineer, men and women who would be happy to take the credit. He was effective, merciless, and silent to those on the outside.

  In all these years, nothing had presented the problems that the Mars mission presented. To say that they had rushed the launch, because of the Sino-Indian joint initiative, this was to understate the extent of the ineptitude. The results had been two years of wretchedness. The news just got worse and worse, and allowing even sanitized bits of it into the press, to the degree that they did so, the deaths, the madness, the experiments uncompleted, the completely hostile environment, just made it worse. No one could have foreseen the complex of problems. And while the public responsibility fell on Dr. Anatoly Thatcher, and now his successor, Debra Levin, nobody felt worse than Gibraltar did himself.

  In part because of the failures of the Mars mission, Debra Levin had been skulking around the various regional offices swinging the ax of cost cutting as fervently as if she were selling off the last few hectares of Brazilian rain forest. A pair of Deep Space Probes that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had designed to withstand ten thousand years of unknowns, the Titan explorer that was supposed to follow the lander already on its way to that moon of Jupiter, Ganymede, both of these had fallen to the cost-cutting blade. Gibraltar understood what Levin had to do, but he disliked her anyway, and he wouldn’t intervene to prevent her political sacrifice, just as he had not done with the five or six other NASA directors he had served under during his time at the agency.

  In dwelling on the political, though, it was easy to obscure the fact that there was a man alive in the Earth Return Vehicle. Jed Richards. Richards was a lot like Gibraltar himself, the kind of guy who was as loyal as you could be, in word and deed, but also extremely hard to deal with otherwise. Space professionals, the both of them. Richards seemed to have no interests besides training for the Mars mission, and the proof was in his domestic situation. His wife was sleeping with every middle manager at Cape Canaveral.

  Before liftoff, they suspected that
there was something psychologically off about him. They now believed that there was something psychologically off about all the Mars astronauts. Each of them in turn. This was one item on the agenda for the meeting they were about to have, in the windowless, video-equipped room in Houston, with the scuff marks on the walls and the rancid, irradiated coffee. When Debra Levin was satisfied that they had as many attendees as needed, the audiovisual assistant got the screens warmed up, and a gigantic feed of Richards’s careworn visage appeared before all of them. If he’d had a lot of lines on his face before, now he looked like some canal system, chiseled and abraded.

  Levin, after remarking that they were all tired, etc., etc., addressed herself to Comb-Over first, almost as if Gibraltar himself, who’d been troubleshooting these issues during the months of Levin’s confirmation, wasn’t even in the room.

  “Rob, can you summarize what we know?”