Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

Afterward, I paid my respects to a dead man. I was getting used to the signs of mortality around me on Mars, planet of death. Abu had been one of the people I liked best on the Mars mission. A man noteworthy for grace and reasonableness. On Earth, he had smoked the occasional cigar, but not in a way that irritated anyone. He liked the blues. I drew the blanket up over his face. I mulled over attempting to pray facing in an easterly direction. Was there, strictly speaking, an east on Mars? I wanted to respect the traditions of a desert faith. In the end, I whispered to him, under the blanket, there in the cargo hold, but I don’t want to sully a good astronaut’s memory by going on and on. Some things, kids, are designed for the privacy of eternity.

Next, when I’d made sure that Abu was covered and for the moment undisturbed, I hastened to the console of the Geronimo . It was a sign of my distress that I was about to contact the home planet . I’d been writing my diary regularly, true, except for those moments when my hands swam in front of my face from how high I was, but I had long since abandoned filing my diary with NASA since they had dismantled its web portal. As I said, I’d disconnected all the communications equipment in the Excelsior , where most of the text was stored in the first place. But there was still enough backup equipment on the Geronimo for me to send distress messages to Earth .

On duty, at NASA headquarters, was a young woman named Nora. She appeared to me like a fuzzy passport photo, thirty-nine minutes delayed. I thought I could make out some kind of bow in her hair. Unless that was part of her headset. Otherwise she was got up in the de rigueur navy blue warm-up suit that passed, at NASA, for cutting-edge fashion. Nora was so young. I had aged in the course of my interplanetary travel, despite the blessings of general relativity, which asserted that I should age more slowly. I introduced myself to Nora Huston, by videoconference. She replied, as if coming out of suspended animation, “Colonel Richards, hello, we know who you are down here.”

“I’ve been out of touch for a little while, I know. Forgive me. Things have just been busy. But I think that there are a few developments here you need to know about.”

In the next minutes of waiting I had ample time to scan her face for signs of judgment. It was hard to see any. She had been selected precisely for her earnestness, for her inability to appear conspiratorial. This was not to suggest that she was one of NASA’s spying lackeys, bent on reining us in and getting the mission back under control. It was just that they couldn’t help themselves — they recruited in order to fortify the chain of command.

“Colonel Richards, we have almost everyone who’s still awake here — it’s about three in the morning — including the flight director, and we are ready to listen. Please feel free to give us a full briefing.”

Was I about to bring Martian civilization to a grinding halt? The morality of what I was doing was imprecise, and I probably wasn’t in the state of mind where clear thinking was easy to come by. But the import of recent events was hard to ignore. If I slowed down, shook off a little of my nod, military training returned, if only for a few minutes.

“I need to report a Code 14,” I said, “and I’m afraid it’s my cabinmate, Jim Rose. You all know that I have nothing but esteem for Jim Rose, having served with him as long as I have, and having known him for years before that. It is therefore the case that I am using this Code 14 designation advisedly. I know, ladies and gentlemen, what I’m telling you. But I have reason to believe that Captain Rose is no longer operating with his faculties intact.”

Because he had been a singer of show tunes and country and western, because he had been a teller of bad jokes and an adherent of the pun, because he’d been good-natured and nervous at the same time, because he’d played video games with me, because he was worried about elections back home, because he didn’t understand how he was going to send his wife lingerie for their anniversary from this great distance, because he’d been my lover, and because I knew that even if he couldn’t say it, he had loved me, he had reached for me when the loneliness and isolation got too bad, because he once needed companionship, I knew he was not himself.

“On what basis, specifically, do you alert us to this Code 14, Colonel Richards?”

“On the basis that Jim leaned down and squeezed the last bit of life out of Abu Jmil this afternoon. Abu had been suffering from hypothermia, we think.… I don’t know. That’s another story. Anyway, Jim came back from being out in the desert.”

“Can you tell us where Captain Rose had been?”

“He was out surveying various areas here by Nanedi Vallis,” I improvised, without really being sure if this was true at all. “The runoff patterns there are really quite extraordinary, and Jim was keen to see them. There’s the question of a source for the Nanedi Vallis riverbed, and we had it on the logbooks for some time that we were going to fly over there and have a look.”

I removed myself from the camera while awaiting their reply.

“And how would you characterize the condition of Captain Rose? If you could.”

“I would characterize Captain Rose as in rather dire condition. He’s certainly not well. He seemed to me to be… not himself. The Jim Rose I have known in the course of our professional duties, I should say, would not take a life the way he did just this afternoon. On the other hand, we’ve been having trouble with outbreaks of violence among the crew, which is virtually the entirety of the Martian population.… First, there was Brandon and the situation with José. And then, well, it seems like what happened to Abu is that he was… Well, in each of these circumstances you could make the case that the astronaut whose actions are in question was suffering with some kind of interplanetary disinhibitory disorder , as you might call it, and this has bothered all of us to one degree or another. But Jim seemed…” Again, I just couldn’t seem to complete the sentence.

“We are aware of the other situations and we thank you for corroborating what we know. And we are curious to learn whether there were any specific physiological changes in Captain Rose. Did you notice anything different?”

I leaned in close to the camera, which really did resemble some sleepless eye, some all-seeing lens, and I alerted her thus:

“There did seem something physically wrong with him, which was partly in the area of his eyes; he seemed bruised around the eyes, or contused, I don’t know the proper terminology, and then there was his dishevelment. He just isn’t looking after his appearance. And then I’d say he was full of a rather unusual amount of strength, like he was on some sort of adrenaline high. He was not himself. That was my impression. That he was physically changed in some small degree, but also that he was unselfed . He wasn’t Jim Rose. And I would like to know what you expect me to do about it, since we are now down to a mere capsule full of astronauts, what with Steve Watanabe disappearing. And so I would like to know now what you would have me do about Jim Rose. Do you have some kind of contingency plan?”

I waited an interminable length for a reply, an interminable length that was really not significantly longer than usual, and then the young, fresh face of Nora Huston again seemed to animate itself from out of the static and fuzz of interplanetary transmission. She was as cheerful as some telemarketer as she said, “Thanks very much, Colonel Richards. We’ll take it from here!”