Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

I said: “I’m with you there, Laurie. If we can get enough fuel for one of the ultralights, maybe we can make it over there. For recon, if nothing else.” There had been a time when the Mission Control decision makers were thinking about landing there, because the caldera is so far across that you might not be able to see the other side from the rim, because it’s three times as tall as Mount Everest, because it’s still active, because it could be releasing water vapor into the thin Martian atmosphere, because it’s there!

“There’s the risk of eruption, 15,000-foot cliff walls, and the increased threat of radiation, but I don’t intend to let that stop me.”

I know that she didn’t want to go to Olympus Mons. But I know she had an obligation to the audience back home. What did she really want to talk about? If she was anything like me, she was worrying about whether or not we were going to land on the Red Planet without getting squashed, and whether we were going to be able to grow anything in the greenhouse, whether we would be able to generate sufficient oxygen, and so forth. Come on, who gave a shit where we landed?

Laurie looked behind her, and for a second, I saw a look of unmitigated horror flicker across her face, as Brandon basically pushed past her to edge into the shot. “You’ve got to admit we’d have excellent bragging privileges if we were to see the largest volcano in the entire solar system.” Laurie tried to finish the thought with dignity. But it turned out Brandon had a few things to say.

“Jed,” he offered, “did I tell you about the time I was fighting welterweight back in the city, against a bunch of gangster kids from the—”

“You did,” I said. Because he had. It seems that Brandon felt he had nothing going for him but that he was not a hurricane transplant, like the waves of the disenfranchised who populated Houston, TX, his hometown, because of the mismanagement of successive generations of politicians. “As I recall, you had already been knocked down when—”

He said, “When I pulled out a technical knockout in the last—”

“Brandon, my shift’s almost over,” I said.

“What’s the word from the Geronimo ?”

“They’re playing a lot of cards.”

“Have you talked to Debbie?”

I punched the disengage button, and his face went black. I would let the other ship go till the next day. After all, they could call over here at any time. The ominous thing I’d heard, however, was that Debbie, on the Geronimo , very likely had Planetary Exile Syndrome. This unpleasantness, kids, has been described in the NASA literature, though widely hushed up during the space station period, as well as during the Apollo missions. Once the crowded, polluted, warlike planet on which you live is far enough from the spacecraft, certain astronauts, no matter how sturdy they seemed in the training phase of the expedition, will begin to exhibit symptoms of intense homesickness, verging on the completely unstable, falling victim to convulsive weeping, fits of rage, and so forth. You have to watch them very closely, lest they injure themselves or the mission. Even though Debbie had been trying to focus on experiments she was going to conduct on Martian water purification with some fast, cheap, and dirty tools given to us by corporations back home, she had instead been talking about how the trip wasn’t worth it, and how it had crossed her mind to turn around and head back for Earth. In fact, NASA provided instructions on this. The first part of the instructions involved immobilizing any member of the crew who exhibited long-term symptoms of PES, with shackles and/or rubberized restraints. If that was insufficient, Plan B was that you loaded them up with a synthetic opiate for a couple of weeks. The last option was to eject the astronaut. If they became a serious danger to the mission.

After mission communications, I watched Jim sleeping for a while. He had strawberry-blond hair and strawberry-blond eyebrows, and if he weren’t so by the book, I would probably have thought he was kind of attractive. For example, when he was sleeping on his wall cot, with his favorite music on the headphones (choral music, and country and western), he held his hands in a certain way, as if they were flippers, not hands. He pursed his lips as though he were dreaming of citrus wedges. His features were masculine and decisive, but the sleeping Jim Rose was, well, a lot like a rose.

How frail was humankind, kids, out in this little soda can, just a thin skin of some alloy keeping us from the absolute zero of all creation. Asteroids could carve a hole in any of us, and then there was radiation from the Van Allen belt. Cosmic rays, you name it. How frail, how desperate, and yet how resilient. We had come so far, and we had so much farther to go. Jim got a warm blast on his seat warmer, which was the way they elected to wake us, and he rubbed his eyes and said, “Still here?”

It was unlikely I’d be anywhere else.

“What’s your biggest regret in life?” Jim asked. On the cusp of our first space walk of the mission.

I was going through the prep list. We had to don the inner layer of the space suit, which took about half an hour, and then we had to start on the outer layer, which got really bulky. It weighed eighty pounds on Earth, and we had trained for eighty pounds, but we were weightless here. I helped him with the second glove, screwing it onto the wrist coupling, and then he did the same for me, and then there was the double layer of sun visors. Easy to go blind out there if you didn’t take precautions, you know. Once he had the visor and helmet on, I heard his voice through the static of the intercom — through the override that enabled a low-intensity transmission, or, as we called it, suit to suit. He locked my helmet onto me.

“Look,” I said, “we’re going to go out there and repair the couplings on the solar panels, and we are going to tether ourselves, and then we’re coming right back in. I don’t accept that we need to address ourselves to the big questions.”

“I’m cool as a cucumber,” Jim said, deflecting my deflection, and I think I know now the expression that he would have been wearing on his face when he asked what he asked, the expression of inscrutable distraction and expedience. “But the extremes of space lend… well, a little poetry to things.”

In fact, in these first three weeks in the capsule, because of how little stimulation there was beyond the bland seductions of a radio-transmitted Internet signal, I too had occasion to wonder about these matters of the heart, the sentimentalities. Instead of thinking about making it to the Red Planet, which had finally become unmistakable off one side of the capsule, or wondering if we would ever make it back to Earth, I thought about what I might have done. Interpersonally. Despite the hackneyed qualities of these sentiments, I was helpless before them. I might, for example, have told my parents more about how grateful I was; I might have explained to my wife that the thing for me was the work, that the work had to come first. I regretted, I might have told her, that I ever made it seem otherwise. I regretted that I barely knew my daughter. I regretted any time I was ever timid, when I might have been more forthright and more direct. I regretted instances of simulation and deceit. I regretted sunsets and flowers unobserved, children unhugged, all times when I didn’t pull over and admire the view. I regretted the astronauts I had stomped on, in making my way onto the roster of the Mars mission. I regretted the times I lived in, and my inability to live in them completely and willfully. Not that I was going to come clean about any of this.