Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

A good question would be why I am telling you all of this. How is this relevant to the Mars mission, for which I am the official documentarian? How is a young man’s death in the 1990s relevant to the adventure of interplanetary travel? I can’t answer these questions, actually. Maybe I am just a little bit more vulnerable to these ghosts of my youth, these revenants, the way Captain Jim Rose is seeing the faces of people from the past in the stars. Maybe there is something about space travel that makes you vulnerable to these specters. Maybe this is why Colonel Jed Richards became an astronaut, to flee from the loss of his brother. Or maybe he became an astronaut to honor the memory of his brother, because Jed was good at so little else, despite the love and affection of his parents, who tried their hardest to help him overcome the feeling that he should have done something , and thus, well, he was the editor of the school paper, and then he was a fighter pilot in Central Asia, and he was good for nothing , and that’s why Jed Richards kept moving, and that’s why he didn’t need to be told twice, when Jim Rose went cartwheeling through the Milky Way, out at the length of his tether; Jed Richards jumped , and he kind of knew, in this moment, what the movie superheroes must feel when they are first able to race, en plein air , across the heavens. And here’s the really disturbing part, kids, and NASA can censor this all they want to censor it, I don’t give a shit, because what does it matter now, none of this matters now, the arresting part of flying in space while Captain Jim Rose was dancing around and singing bad dance music numbers in space, what matters was that I suddenly had this thought that maybe I was in love with this man.

Okay, this is definitely going to be a really unsettling entry, because I am going to tell you about the week when the situation on the Geronimo deteriorated quite badly. You know there were only nine astronauts going to Mars, kids, and you know that one of them was Brandon Lepper, who was most interested in trying to get some kind of interstellar tan by going down into the propulsion bay and lying beside the reactor. There was a window there, too, one that didn’t quite have the UV protection it ought to have had, and Lepper had figured out exactly how to get the leathery and faux-healthy veneer that he might have had were he a seventy-five-year-old Florida retiree who’d had himself enhanced with steroids and genetic engineering at a curbside drop-in cosmetic-enhancement salon. If you didn’t count Lepper, you’d have eight astronauts. But now it’s even fewer.

The story, as told by the others on the Geronimo , well, not the others, but specifically by Steve Watanabe, the pilot, is that Steve and Abu Jmil, the first officer of the Geronimo , were getting increasingly worried about Debbie Quartz. Debbie had been one of the bright spots during training, and I’ve often wished that I had her bunking on my ship. She was short, blond, and had kind of a hatchet nose, a very severe nose. Her eyes had raccoon rings under them all the time, and she often complained of a lack of sleep. Still, she told really awful jokes in an appealing way — a termite walks into the bar, that kind of thing — and she was fiercely protective about her fellow astronauts. If Debbie was on your side, you were in good shape.

The Geronimo , a couple weeks back, got the same strange announcement from Mission Control that José got, the one indicating that though they had been training for the Martian South Pole, the mission destination had been moved to the Valles Marineris. As with the Excelsior , the Geronimo navigational systems had been readjusted by the computers in Houston without so much as a consultation. These were the moments when you had to think, why the hell was it a manned mission? What did the men and women actually do on the mission? Not all that much. We were going to get our boot prints on the planet’s surface, all right, but they could have just taken an imprint from one of our space suits and sent a boot facsimile up, for all we did. We could have been in suspended animation for the vast majority of the flight, like they are planning to do for the Centauri flights. These days, computers did everything. We were their house pets. Anyway, I guess Jim and I were not the only ones to think that the change of landing sites was ominous. Because as Steve on the Geronimo told me, Debbie Quartz took this information unusually hard. She’d never gotten over her Planetary Exile Syndrome. She hadn’t been sleeping at all, for example, to such a degree that she’d started hitting the sleeping medication kind of hard. On one occasion, they had trouble waking her, and when she did finally get out of bed, she was disoriented. What constitutes disoriented? The part that was significant to Steve was that she said something about wanting to eject herself from one of the hatch doors. That was the end point of a long monologue about political conspiracies back home, religious conflicts, habitat destruction, environmental degradation, polar melt, you name it.

Because monologues of this kind weren’t entirely out of character, Steve and Abu didn’t pay attention at first. Debbie indicated that it was certain that North America would be wiped out by a high-yield nuclear warhead while we were away on the trip. She insisted on this point. Was this a joke? No, it was no joke. She wouldn’t shut up.

And then she said she might as well just blow herself out the hatch.

Steve and Abu became worried about sleeping themselves. They became worried about what would happen if they slept. They didn’t know what kind of trouble Debbie would get into, especially down there in the cargo hold, where they couldn’t keep an eye on her.

“Debbie, why don’t you swap beds with me tonight?” Abu said to Quartz one night. “You’ll get a better view of the nebulae, and I have some wiring and stuff that I need to repair anyhow.”

This had been the suggestion from Houston, in fact, because, like I’ve said, they were monitoring most of this stuff. Back then, we sort of listened when they gave us advice on various things. There were some provisions for privacy, like when I was using that nozzle that I needed to use during my highly classified episodes of gastrointestinal distress. Jim called it the cough button , using the temporary shutoff button on the teleconferencing cameras that shot us day and night (during these temporary reboots the cameras showed an image of a waterfall instead). Now and then we used the cough button when we wanted to have an hour without constant observation. Remember when NASA sold the rights to some of the Tecumseh footage to the network? Where you could watch the guys on the capsule all day and night? It was kind of must-see programming, at least until the Beneficence exploded on the return launch and they caught the entire thing, inside the launch module , on tape. I knew a couple of those guys. They were mentors to me in my early days. NASA had budget reductions for the next three years, and a lot of it had to do with the decision to broadcast that mission. That’s when they engineered in the cough button. And Debbie Quartz knew very well where the cough button was.

There was silence in the cargo hold after Abu volunteered to swap cots with Debbie. And then before Steve and Abu knew what was happening, she was up in the front of the capsule, in the display window. While she was not refusing the offer to sleep up top, there was an uneasiness about the whole exchange. Steve could tell there was something wrong, and he had the clipboard with the directive from Houston, indicating that this was the plan they suggested back on Earth. She was going to sleep up top where Steve could keep an eye on her. There were many months to go on the Mars mission, and the administration was not going to allow this to get in the way.