The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  Antoine had performed this summary many times in the past dozen months, and whenever he did so he looked as though he were experiencing a massive intestinal blockage. His eyes grew moist; his reedy voice climbed upward toward a strangulated mew. With one hand, he massaged his open collar, as if he needed to coax the words from his pharynx, and then he waded into the litany of disasters.

  “Madam Director. Let’s reemphasize that we recognize now—that there is a significant psychic cost to personnel during interplanetary travel. What we used to call, among the mission staff, Space Panic, we have since relabeled interplanetary disinhibitory syndrome, according to recommendations of the experts. Our attempts to treat the syndrome remotely from Earth demonstrate that the binding, civilizing agency of human association fails out in space. To a man, every one of the astronauts on the Mars mission suffered with this complaint. We had episodes of psychosis; we had rampant addictive behavior, promiscuous sexuality, substance abuse, reclusive tendencies, and so forth. This syndrome got in the way of every aspect of the mission, as we have now seen.

  “That’s the first problem. The second problem is that we now believe there was some kind of infectious agent loose in the Mars population. Some of you may be wondering, legitimately, if there were classified parts of the mission that made this contagion possible or even probable. Obviously we can’t speak freely to the military applications of the Mars mission. However, we can say that at no time did we bring bacterial or viral agents onboard that might have been able to cause the spectrum of symptoms that we’ve seen there.

  “It becomes difficult in a case like this, and I’m thinking particularly of Brandon Lepper and Captain Jim Rose, to distinguish between the psychological syndrome I’ve described, which like many physical illnesses is communicable in an enclosed population that operates in a high-stress environment, and an actual pathogen, especially when the early phases of infection seem, as in the case of earthbound hydrophobia, to cause behavior not unlike what we’re seeing in interplanetary disinhibitory syndrome. Broadly speaking, both the pathogen and the mission itself seem to have caused a great number of Code 14 events. Never in the history of NASA have we had Code 14s the way we are now.”

  Gibraltar broke in, “Rob, we still have a NASA employee up there, about whom we have to make some hard decisions. So let’s move it along.”

  “Right. Let me simply remind everyone that astronauts are people too. The spread of bad decision making, insubordination, and physical violence among this group is unprecedented, but it’s fair to point out that it is not substantially different from the situation here on Earth. Where are we? you might ask. On the one hand we do have a measure of success, in that Chief Medical Officer Arnold Gilmore and Captain Laurie Corelli, despite the fact that each of them has a family back on Earth, have elected to remain on the planet’s surface, to await the next manned Mars shot, in the process parenting the very first extraterrestrial human baby, named Prima, and creating a very profitable, for us, documentary series about their lives and struggles. At least we can spin this in a way that looks good for the agency. The child is six months old, having been raised in an effective quarantine in the absence of any human stimulus other than her parents, and, while underweight, she is a normal human baby. Prima and her family are going to have to be resupplied on a regular basis to avoid starvation or long-term power outages, which, as we know from our mission reports, would likely result in exposure or hypothermia.”

  Debra Levin winced at a swallow of mulled coffee sludge. And then she too brought the unfortunate background material into the foreground.

  “And… Colonel Richards?”

  Comb-Over looked in Vance’s direction, as though Vance could help. Though Gibraltar had no love for the other man, he took a deep breath and generously deflected some of the fallout in his own direction.

  “Debra, as you can see here, Richards is sitting in one of the last pieces of reusable hardware from the mission. Theoretically, he’s working on his memoirs. He hasn’t drifted from the course that the computers have suggested. He has been in regular contact with his daughter and his wife. And while he’s not communicating with us, he has been shaping his memoirs and has tried to find a purchaser for these writings among nationally distributed electronic-publishing entities. Notwithstanding symptoms of post-traumatic stress, which wouldn’t be unusual considering the mission, we had until recently every reason to believe he was in rather good shape. If the pathogen that Rob referred to, correct me if I’m wrong, if the pathogen were liable to be flourishing in him, it ought to have been apparent by now—”

  “Absolutely,” Rob added.

  “Considering that we have experienced catastrophic personnel loss on this mission, including some men who had been carefully selected to perform tasks both civilian and military, we do find ourselves with some successes here. The first person born on Mars, Madam Director, is a citizen of the United States of America. I believe, and perhaps legal could help me out here, that since there is now a legitimate Martian inhabitant, we have more than a legal framework for claiming the planet as a possession of the United States, with respect to drilling and mining. This is a huge advantage. Meanwhile, we have Richards on his way back with soil samples, with geological samples, and with himself, though possibly exposed to the Martian pathogen, available for scientific study that could net us positive publicity, patents, and years of academic leadership at the forefront of the interplanetary sciences, you name it.”

  A bow-tied and rather preppy fellow with an excessively eager smile chimed in. “The evolving legal standards of extraterrestrial ownership are just that, evolving. But we do feel, at present, that unless God himself claims his right as the creator of the solar system, the first nation to establish a legitimate colony on Mars, or any of the other planets, is justified in claiming territory. In the case of an actual native-born Martian inhabitant, these claims are even more valid.”

  Debra Levin, gazing up at the real-time video of Richards, interrupted the good-news palaver of the meeting to prod, instead, at more infected tissue.

  “What can you all tell me about the state of the contagion?”

  The young woman from medical spoke up. Vance couldn’t remember having met her. The chief medical administrator, Julio Hernandez, was off having rotator cuff surgery. In his stead, he’d sent up this greenhorn, Dr. Fales, and she was palpably nervous.

  “A number of possibilities have been explored, ma’am, by the medical department. First, based on what we know from Colonel Richards’s own accounts, and also from film footage and stills that we have of the other astronauts, we believe that the pathogen, whether it is earthborn or native to Mars, has a hemorrhagic effect on human beings. The analogies would be Marburg, hantavirus, plague, and so forth. By hemorrhagic—”

  “We’re familiar with—” Levin said.

  “Of course. Well, most hemorrhagic pathogens cause death quickly in the presence of high fever, but this pathogen, commonly referred to as M. thanatobacillus, seems to allow people to continue to function for weeks, if not months, with only minimal psychological effects. That’s probably what accounts for the difficulty distinguishing the pathogen from the psychological effects of long-term space travel.”

  And now the audiovisual gnomes made a kind of triptych of images of astronauts Lepper and Rose flanking the webcam footage of Richards. These stills were from the period of advanced infection, and to Vance Gibraltar, the men looked, in the acute phase of their illness, as though they might very well have marched forth from an outbreak of plague.

  “As you can see,” the unremarkable Dr. Fales remarked, “the hemorrhagic phase is characterized by considerable blood loss, facial masking, sclerotic problems in the musculature, skin failure—all rather horrible to look at, despite the fact that the patient tends to present a rather odd misapprehension that no illness is present. There was a story circulating among the astronauts, which I believe comes from DOD, that M. thanatobacillus caused bodies to… well, to
disassemble. We don’t really know what that means, but we do know that with organ failure and sudden skin failure, the body as a vessel does give out. Death follows skin failure pretty quickly. The question we need to continue to address concerns the route of infection, the communicability of the pathogen, and so forth. If it’s directly communicable, then, in a population that has never been exposed to the disease before, the collateral damage could be significant.”

  Debra fiddled with a barrette that restrained her tasteful and professionally ambitious coiffure. “In addition to doomsday medical predictions, what I need to know is what the implications are for a successful touchdown, since for better or worse that is the face that we present to the public.”

  Rob Antoine fielded this one. As if tag-teaming. And this Gibraltar could admire. “What we do need to ascertain is whether or not Colonel Richards is infected. It all comes down to this. If he is uninfected, do we allow him to land, quarantine him for a sufficient period to ascertain that he’s not a danger, and then release him? Is it possible that he’s some kind of carrier? We know, for example, that Richards has certain medical singularities, among them IBS, and it’s possible that because his body doesn’t process food well—we’ve had him on vitamin supplements throughout the mission—he somehow repelled the pathogen from his body. Assuming, that is, that the infection route is oral. Another theory might be that his depressed immune system is somehow a factor. He has late-stage addictive illness, having depleted the mission of virtually all the synthetic painkillers available, including especially the narcotic we were going to use for the flights home. That would be OxyPlus. This guy has a constitution like a rhino where drugs are concerned, and he’s got so many opiates in his body now that it’s as if he’s preserved with formaldehyde. In this view, it’s possible that the M. thanatobacillus, whatever it is, requires a healthy immune system for its biological ‘disassembly.’

  “In any event, up until now we’ve assumed he’s not infected. That means we can move on to other questions ultimately, but before that I’d like to introduce a craniofacial medical expert, Dr. Morris Downes. We’ve been using him as a symbolic field analyst of mission video throughout. He looks at the body language of the astronauts, so that we might gather information they’re unwilling to give us through more traditional means, and he’s going to discuss Jed’s face, as you see it before you.”

  Levin interrupted, “We have, ladies and gentlemen, an impatient public to think about. I need to know what you are proposing to do about this astronaut. How are you going to tell his story to our audience?”

  Vance leaned forward, from the relaxed posture in which he had been allowing the drama to play out, and most of the middle managers quieted, as if in anticipation. “Ma’am,” he said, “the situation is simple. If we think he’s well, we’re going to let him land, and we’re going to give him a hero’s welcome. If he’s sick, well, then despite what we have aboard that craft, the soil samples, the rock samples, the terabytes of data, we really don’t have much choice but to abort.”

  Onscreen, Richards was grimacing at that moment, as though experiencing some of the stomach pain that the medical people said was associated with an ulcer he’d contracted over months of famine. It was as if he knew that they were all talking about him back home. Levin gazed at the grizzled, bearded, and exhausted face.

  “And that means what, exactly?”

  Vance said, “That means something happens to the craft.”

  In the American Southwest, the sun had just risen over the preposterous saguaros, that primordial vegetation. In the aubergine tonalities of the post-technological evening, this crop seemed to have no purpose but to cast comical shadows across the serious business of that very porous NAFTA border. Rio Blanco was in the seventh year of its drought. Real estate values had found yet another trapdoor in the floor below. The mortgage market was in its third bust cycle, a genuine boom nowhere to be found between them. In the prior years, the region had got nine-tenths of its annual rainfall in the monsoons, cascading walls of water that roared through the parched washes like apocalyptic bulldozers, flattening everything that opposed them. And in this biblical season, the monsoons were quickly followed by outbreaks of fire in the bone-dry Sonoran Desert, conflagrations that wiped out whole subdivisions, some of them only lately rebuilt with dwindling federal matching money. These fires were by now so predictable that there was no point in searching out the hapless smoker or the pathological teen who served as their cause. The city tracked the fires on the evening news (likewise the floods), and even created the SexyFirefighters.com web portal, where the firefighting crews of the Southwest could be seen shirtless, pinned down in invigorating ravines of flame. What to do about conflagration when there was no water, excepting flash floods, when there was always someone upriver, stealing your supply, namely the exploding Mormon underclasses of Utah. To fight fires in Rio Blanco, they used shovels and explosive ordnance. The fires sputtered out when there was nothing left to burn. Like last summer: the brownouts and blackouts on the grid in Arizona had caused many of the buildings in the city to crack and fail in the warmer months, when the temperature hovered around one hundred and twenty.

  It took a special stubbornness to stay in Rio Blanco, and that was the kind of stubbornness exhibited by renowned international stem cell theoretician Woo Lee Koo.

  His nationality was infamous, let us say, his nationality was a laughingstock. His fatherland had done more to defame his area of expertise than any other nation on Earth. In the popular imagination, the Korean peninsula was, scientifically, a region of dreaming, scheming venture capitalist bumpkins who, in peer-reviewed journals, would say anything to command a few research dollars for a couple of years. When their extravagant claims were subject to experimental scrutiny, they disappeared into their Asian outback. Koo was a Korean who deplored the scientific failures of his homeland; he deplored the South Korea of his youth, the South Korea of unrepeatable experimental data on human cloning, cold fusion, dark matter, replacement body parts, authoritarian law enforcement, and more. Woo Lee Koo dreamed of restoring the reputation of his countrymen, and in this regard he worshipped the elegant empirical methodologies that one encountered only in the New England Journal of Medicine. When he had a chance to leave Seoul, to take a teaching position in the United States, it was as if he could not get on the jet quickly enough. True, many of his classmates stayed in Asia, where biotechnology was growing by leaps and bounds, and where the hands-off government funding approached that of the centralized economies of China and India. There was more money to be made working on these government-financed projects. And the USA, to which he had immigrated, was like some codger on his last bionic legs. Yet there were principles to consider. America, in its period of postimperial stagflation, revered principle. Koo admired the romance of the past, he liked the desolation of America, and he especially liked the remarkable emptiness of the Southwest. The job offer from URB, the University of Rio Blanco, married together the desperation of both employer and employee: Come help us reanimate the nervous systems of neurologically degenerated patients! We’ll give you first-class experimental laboratories, a world-class department, internationally renowned colleagues, housing, every fifth year off. The list of benefits only grew. His friends could not understand why he was leaving, what friends remained.

  There was a reason for his solitude, for his unmoored feeling. He blamed it upon the death of his wife, Nathalie Fontaine, a French missionary to Korea, whom he had met during his undergraduate time, when Koo in some kind of weak moment flirted with the grandeur of Catholicism. Nathalie, whose family had come to Asia from the suburbs of Lyon, had green eyes and a bob that caused her to resemble the late great French actress Juliette Binoche. From the earliest days of their marriage, however, Nathalie also exhibited the wasting symptoms and the spasticity of Huntington’s chorea. A particularly unforgiving malady. Nathalie’s missionary work, it seemed, had much to do with her belief that she would not last. Her gradual dim
inishment was incremental enough that she was able to get pregnant with their son, Jean-Paul, to remit somewhat during pregnancy, and to carry him to term.

  But as Jean-Paul progressed through his elementary and middle school years, Nathalie’s illness grew ever more debilitating. Chronic depression also began to have its way with Nathalie, despite her powerful faith. Koo, to his shame, responded in the way he always had. He worked especially hard. And yet he returned home promptly each night to massage his wife’s limbs, to speak to her as best he could about his projects, making sure that she knew she could rely on him. He believed himself more devoted than any other husband. As a father he was doting and tolerant. At the university, however, in Seoul, he was a hothead, as the Americans would have said, who demanded too much, who burned out laboratory assistants, even the most gifted ones, and whose reputation cowed incoming graduate students. Koo was just as missionary as his wife, missionary about empirical research, missionary about hypothesis and conclusion.

  Of course, Koo believed that there was a stem cell application for Huntington’s chorea. He didn’t tell Nathalie this, as he didn’t bother her with things that he thought would just upset her anyway. As she grew more frail, he could see her working to give herself over to the god that had animated her missionary work. It was as though she were one of the medieval faithful. Her body grew ever more delicate, as if spun out of glass. Koo didn’t need to be the shining knight, the Asian wise man, he didn’t need to indulge in the passionate soliloquies of true love to indicate his devotion. He just needed, as he considered it, to produce results. If this required buttering up some South Korean politicians, burning out a few grad students, tripping up colleagues who had other ideas about departmental priorities, then this is exactly what he would do.

  The story didn’t end as he wished. While medicine had advanced in controlling symptoms of Nathalie’s illness, especially with corticosteroids, medicine didn’t yet know what to do about the loss of fine motor control. Koo chased after new symptoms with temporary solutions, as indicated in the medical literature. Deluxe protein beverages when she could no longer chew solids. Telescoping arms attached to all the walls that could feed her and help to clean her and fetch items for her.