Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

“It is our opinion that Captain Lepper requires your aid, and we have directed him to contact you. We believe he is not making the kind of progress with decanting the silicates that he was expected to make. Can we be any clearer on these matters? Can we persuade you of the seriousness of these experiments? We can tell you, meanwhile, in order to assure that you are attentive to this part of the present communication, Lieutenant Watanabe, that your son, despite the best efforts of exotic-disease specialists in the state of Florida, has been suffering with a relapsing and remitting version of one of the families of streptococcus that have been circulating equatorially, here on Earth. We understand, Lieutenant Watanabe, that your wife has brought your son into the quarantine facility at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Florida for treatment. Your wife is unwilling to have her son treated at any of the public hospitals. We have a videotaped message from her on the subject, which will be available to you at the successful conclusion of the projects just mentioned.

“What we would like to express to you, Lieutenant Watanabe, is how honored we were to be trusted in this way by your wife and son, and how honored we are to tell you that we believe your son’s recovery will be complete. We would also like to remind you that you serve on the Mars mission as a representative of the government of this country, and by special appointment to the executive branch. For these reasons, we believe you are likely to find, when looking into your heart, when evaluating your moral chemistry, that you have a debt to us, as regards your mission, a debt that comes into sharper focus when you consider how we were able to help your son and your family as a whole.

“Therefore, Lieutenant Watanabe, we would ask that by 0500 hours, Martian time, tomorrow morning, you relocate to the Valles Marineris site, where you will find Captain Lepper, and we would ask you to begin harvesting the silicon dioxide with Captain Lepper, according to directives made clear to the science officers on the Mars mission, at which point you will be given directions on how to procure bacterial samples from the Chryse region. This information as regards the bacterial samples, we would like to add, is completely secure and should not even be discussed with Captain Lepper in any detail. You are tasked with different objectives. I should stress, however, that at no time will you need to be performing the complicated experimental hybridization of the microprocessors with the bacteria. This very dangerous task — essentially the creation of a new cybernetic life-form — will be accomplished back here on Earth. At the conclusion of this mining and harvesting operation, we would offer you a trip home on an accelerated schedule. With fewer colleagues, the two of you will find your trip back will be faster and smoother, and we will make the needed propellant available to you.

“Let us know your feelings and your plans, Lieutenant Watanabe. Please make them known to me personally through secure channels. I will, naturally, be conveying the information to the appropriate parties. Over.”

When the transmission was complete, I looked back at Steve Watanabe, and he was, again, drying off some non-cybernetic tear duct effluent. It seemed, in fact, that he was in some human torment that I could scarcely understand, especially since I was part of the herd of intractable Martians, those who had fallen away from the economics and the space race dimensions of the mission.

“What does this have to do with Abu?” I said, when I had recovered enough.

Steve said, hotly, “I can’t believe you can even ask me that.”

“When did this arrive?”

“Yesterday.”

“Let me see if I understand the nuances. You’re saying that you tried to eliminate Abu because he knew about the pressure that was being exerted on you by the higher-ups at NASA? And because he might have seen the video and might be aware of the M. thanatobacillus microbe, and this alleged silicon dioxide mining? You needed to silence him?”

“No,” Steve said, “that’s not what I’m saying. I can’t believe you’d… What I’m saying is…” But the enormity of his malfeasance was now out in the open. It was as if some drapery that had once concealed the Geronimo had been lifted from it, and we were seeing the contents of the capsule in their true light for the first time. “ … it had to do with his sculptures.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“… because of the sculptures! Because of the sculptures! What do you want me to say? Jed, I went out and I saw the sculptures, and I saw how Abu was making something of his time here, and I’d made nothing of my time here. Do you know what brought me out here? Do you know what it was? It was that stuff I read as a kid. All the early rocketeers, those guys out in the backyards and in the flatlands of the desert, lighting off their homemade rockets and watching them soar into the firmament. I could never do that, because I was never smart that way. That dream of theirs, Goddard and those guys, was what kept me awake at night. That, and the fact that rocketry was a bunch of failures interrupted by the occasional improbable success. That was something I thought — and maybe I was just ridiculously vain here or something — but I thought it was something I could help with. All the failures on the way to Mars, the fact that Mars itself is a failure of planning built upon a failure of vision, in which there is wreckage and phenomenal waste at every turn, Jed, I really thought that I could be one of the people who made a difference! And what did I give up to make a difference? Look, reflect back on all the early thinkers about the planets; you have what’s his name, the guy who was covered with boils and scars and abandoned by his family, Kepler, right? His wife dies and leaves him with the kids, and he is chased from town to town until he dies of hunger somewhere trying to find food for his kids, or there’s Tycho Brahe, missing part of his nose. The guy actually wore a metal nose, and that was in, like, 1560 or something. Galileo died under house arrest after the Vatican hounded him for years. Do I have to go on? Do I have to talk about all the Mars missions? The Soviets lost five Mars orbiters between 1960 and 1962! Five of them. They didn’t get out of Earth’s atmosphere or their communications failed or they had badly designed rockets! The same for the majority of the American missions in the next ten years. Failed to achieve orbit or crashed on Mars. In 1971, the Soviets had an orbiting satellite broadcast back for eighteen seconds! Then more failures! In 1973, the Mars 7 from the Soviet Union missed the planet! Where is it now? Fifty years later? Near Alpha Centauri, maybe? Then there were the two Phobos missions, both failures, the first Mars observer, which failed in Mars orbit. The Nozomi from Japan never lifted off properly. You want more? The Polar Lander was supposed to harvest water ice, but crashed, and I saw pieces of it on the radar recently; the Deep Space probe went too deep into space; in 2010, Headstrong, the chimpanzee, went insane from the stress of the three-month interplanetary journey, despite an endless supply of bananas, and electrocuted himself. The Greenlander terraforming lab struck Deimos and shattered, right? The Arcadia 1 explorer unit somehow dismantled itself upon achieving a smooth landing. Jed, you get the idea.

“Space travel is littered with the flameouts, with the outcasts, and I decided I was one of them. I decided I wanted to contribute to space travel the way these people did, and I left behind my wife and son to do it. I sat them down and I said I had to do this, I had to come to Mars, because what we needed to accomplish on Mars was more important than any one person. And I did believe I was going to come back. But then somewhere along the way, after Debbie died, I started to be privy to all the communications from the home planet, because I assumed some of Debbie’s job description, and I started to realize that it was less likely that I was going to make it home. I started to realize that what I accomplished here meant nothing, nothing , Jed, and I’d been lied to, and that NASA would just as soon leave our bodies out on the desert floor as they would throw a party to celebrate a successful launch back in the Everglades. We were coming to Mars for strategic reasons, not for the science. And I’d made the decision to leave my family, to leave behind my son, terribly ill, and I had traveled all the way out here to live like an indigent, and I had this big horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach, every day, seemed like, when I’d get up and look out the window at the red desert. I felt like something horrible was going to happen, and all I could bring myself to do was to drink the ethyl alcohol in the maintenance closet, the alcohol that I was supposed to be using to clean component parts of the reactor. I started drinking it a little bit at a time, and I started swiping all kinds of meds from the first aid closet. That’s how it was over here on the Geronimo , Jed; worse than in some tent community back on Earth.