Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

“I was thinking about having the Dover sole,” Arnie said, with an ease that probably came from the fact that he was already her confederate, if not more.

“Dover sole!” I cried. “If only we were going to dig up Dover sole down there in the canyon. If only there were going to be fish in some of the dry ice.”

“Atlantic salmon,” said Jim. “Or bluefish. Or haddock. Do haddock still exist?”

Steve and Abu sat off to one side, looking as though they carried a dark burden. It was only when Abu volunteered to help me with some more botanical transplanting from the Excelsior that the tip of the iceberg drifted ominously into view. We both redonned our helmets, though probably if you ran fast enough to and from craft to base, you needn’t worry unduly about the climate, or at least not about instant death from the 95 percent carbon dioxide and only 0.13 percent oxygen. The rover was only ten or fifteen yards from the greenhouse, but we wore our helmets, then set them aside and fell into a debrief.

“I don’t want to sugarcoat it,” he said. “We have a problem. With Brandon. We have a very, very serious problem.”

Which somehow was exactly where we would come out in this particular conversation.

“And what kind of problem is that?”

“We never got comfortable with the guy, Jed, the whole rest of the trip out. In fact, Steve and I never allowed ourselves to go to sleep at the same time. I don’t even know where to start. There’s just some very strange stuff coming off him all the time. Makes you not want to trust him. At all. He ate food reserves and lied about it. He read our journals, our private mail, whenever he had the chance. He seemed to be taking what he called dietary supplements of some kind, probably more serious drugs, HGH in a base of pituitary enhancers or what have you. He had communications from Houston that no one else knew anything about. He made remarks about how certain people on the mission were definitely expendable , all of that, and that there was no way the return vehicle could fit eight of us, and it was never intended to.”

I said, “I guess we know that when Laurie wanted him off the Pequod she wasn’t imagining anything.”

“Sexual coercion would probably be natural for him. I mean, maybe this all sounds like mild sociopathy. But I wouldn’t want to rule out stuff like sadism and espionage and conspiracy. But the thing I should tell you, I guess, is that one of the people he seemed most convinced was expendable was José. He just wouldn’t stop trash-talking.”

“José?”

“Maybe it has to do with the alternate landing coordinates, the Valles Marineris; maybe there’s some kind of objective that the science officers were meant to collaborate on. Brandon wants the entire project to himself. Or that’s what I imagine I’m understanding from what he’s been saying.”

“José’s just not going to be able to get very far, if Brandon comes after him.”

“True. We’re keeping an eye on Brandon for now. But I don’t feel it’s a guarantee that we can do that around the clock, now that we’re not locked in the capsules, completely isolated from one another. What happens if he follows through on this stuff? We have no court in place to deal with violent crimes. I’d feel demoralized if I had to conclude that with only eight astronauts we’ve already managed to bring all our worst earthly problems with us. And here’s an even worse thought: What if Debbie would still be alive somehow, if it weren’t for him?”

We’d begun putting our helmets on again, so as to avoid being gone for too long. If I was vague about the conversation that came next, perhaps it was simply because I didn’t know who to trust yet, not with the closely held pieces of the story. It seemed that trust, in fact, was one of the first casualties of Mars exploration.

“Abu, we just don’t really know what it means to be so far from the home planet. We don’t know yet what kinds of trouble long-term planetary exile can create. I feel like we’re only beginning to understand.”

“I was out there,” Abu said. “I was on the space walk. I was there that day. There was something about it that was even worse than you think. From the beginning, when I got him into the Geronimo , he had this look in his eyes. A primal look, merciless even, like he was on the mission precisely because someone had to have no compassion of any kind. It occurred to me that maybe the personnel people wanted a guy like this. Maybe they had a reason.”

“What are you trying to—”

“I’m just thinking aloud. Except I know I don’t trust the guy. I guess what I’m saying is keep an eye on José. While you still can.”

“Well, he’s been behaving erratically since the orbital insertion. It’s odd. He’s lost his edge. But in a good way. I never used to like the guy.”

We closed tight the doors on the rover. The vehicle was already dusty and orange. The tires were already caked with the thin topsoil of the Red Planet. The rover didn’t go fast, and it wasn’t pretty, but it was reliable. And it was ours. The only complicated part of it was the oxygen supply couplings and the tanks that we had to lug on the back in the course of a journey.

Once outdoors, I piled him down with genetically modified wheat that one of the large corporations had been working on for the launch. It was meant to grow in extremely dry environments, in landscapes with lots of iron in the soil, and it had a very long growing season. Since we were here for the two warmest seasons (roughly six Earth months each), if we could get this stuff to grow in the mixture of nutrient-rich earth and the Martian topsoil we were going to start introducing into the greenhouse, then we could be harvesting the wheat for the better part of the year, which meant that we could make bread, that staple of all evolving human civilizations. Then we could leave the plants for whoever came next.

If anyone came next.

Abu carried the flats of wheat into the back of the greenhouse, and I followed with the soybean plants. We carted in the flats, and again I was impressed with the scale of Laurie and Arnie’s botanical experiment. Most of the plants were still alive. In discrete biomes, sealed off with some plastic sheeting from the habitable living quarters, though some of the oxygen they were producing was, theoretically, being recirculated too, through the HVAC system.

Back in the habitable partition, an awkward silence had risen up and crested over the heads of the Mars mission astronauts. Apparently, there had been brief attempts to re-create an attitude of collegiality, but these attempts had not been terribly effective. Jim was bantering with Steve, and they were discussing issues relating to the reactor and whether the dust in the Martian air, through the agency of the winds, was clogging any of the turbines there. Steve was such an important member of the mission. He was sturdy, thoughtful, and totally humorless. If there was one astronaut who seemed entirely free of Planetary Exile Syndrome, it was Steve Watanabe. Though of course it was also possible that I just didn’t know him yet, at least not the Martian Steve.

Once we returned, Laurie brought out the rehydrated meal packets, which we no longer had to serve in pouches, and this alone amounted to culinary liberation. Also, the food was piping hot, and we shared it in portions that were a bit less stingy than during the voyage from Earth. Arnie had also begun testing a regional delicacy, Martian salt, which could be easily mined from the surface of the planet. This we used as a seasoning at table.

“I precipitate it out during my geological tests,” Arnie said, brandishing a rather provisional-looking vial fashioned from scrap metal. “As you know, the water that at one time covered portions of the planet, including, I think, the crater where we are located, was very brackish, like in your most redolent earthly tidal marsh. It makes for a rather smoky table salt.”