Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

I took a solar-powered robotic dolly. It wasn’t quick, but the tracks to the greenhouse were well worn down now, which made this, perhaps, one of the first roads on the planet Mars. I didn’t need to have a satellite tracking device to tell me where to go, and no compass would work here. I just followed the tracks, while there was still some light. In due course, I came to the door of the greenhouse. And at this point, you know what happened, right? I found the door locked. I had locked the door myself, according to the wishes of the inhabitants, the last time I was there, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I would be locking myself out. I knocked on the door; I pounded on the door. They had not yet been out, nor had any visitors in the days since delivery.

It would have been easy enough just to smash the plastic sheeting on the exterior of the greenhouse, but even I would not have gone that far, would not have sacrificed the frail plant life that had been induced to grow there with great difficulty, so I kept pounding. They were ignoring me; this was clear enough. They were hoping I would go away. And I tried calling out, “Arnie, I know you’re in there! Please answer the door!” Imagining that a feminine sensibility might be even more easily swayed by my predicament, I tried Laurie too: “Laurie, it’s me! Jed! Please! I have things I need to discuss with you!”

It was hard to hear with the helmet on, but I thought, at last, I heard some commotion within. Arnie’s voice shouted through the door.

“Jed, I’m afraid I can’t let you in.”

“What do you mean you can’t let me in?” I shouted through the muffling of the helmet.

“There’s the danger of infection, Jed. We have a newborn here, who has no immunological defense. Imagine what could happen to this newborn. She hasn’t been exposed to any Earth diseases at all. Except what insignificant bacteria we managed to bear with us into this nearly sterile environment. We don’t have any inoculations to give her, and we can’t allow her to be in contact with anyone who might be a vector of contagion.”

“What makes you think that I am?”

“Jed, we have been briefed on everything that has happened on Mars in the last few days.”

“You’ve what?”

“When situations like this become complicated, it becomes important to go where the competence is. Laurie and I were never entirely comfortable with all of Jim’s Mars First! business. We were just trying to get along with everyone else, since we were going to live here for some time. At this point, our job seems to be to survive , and that’s what we’re going to continue doing.”

“And you think I want to get in the way of that reasonable goal?” I said.

“Jed,” Arnie said, “we know that the bacteria is genuine. I have tried to harvest some from around the surfaces where Brandon slept earlier, and from around the various waste depositories, and in concert with people back home, I have managed to see some slides under the microscope. And I don’t recognize it as anything I have ever seen before. It’s very difficult with the tools I have on hand to identify the mechanisms that make it so deadly, but I’m still trying. The interesting thing about the bacteria, Jed, is that you’d expect it, or them, to be traditional extremophile bacteria, bacteria that can thrive in any kind of location, like in volcanic steam vents or on Antarctica. Maybe you would expect them to have features like archaea, you know, different from regular bacteria, such as we experience them back on Earth. But oddly enough, they do have traditional bacterial structures. They are rod shaped like other bacilli. I’m pretty sure they’re gram-positive. They have just somehow managed to adapt to the extreme coldness and dryness of life on Mars. It’s as if they are waiting around for life to come, just so that they can work upon it according to their rather hostile impulses.”

I said, “Arnie, I’m very happy to be getting this lecture on bacteriology, which I will definitely be including in my diary for the online community back home when I type later this evening—”

“You’re still working on that, Jed?”

“That is not the point, Arnie. The point is that you and Laurie have food, whereas I don’t have any food, except what’s remaining of our rations, and I need some, and we need to coordinate about the return mission, which I am thinking should probably begin sooner rather than later, because—”

“You know how much farther you’re going to have to go?”

“I know how much farther we will have to go.”

“There’s no ‘we’ about it, Jed. Laurie and I, and Prima, aren’t going.”

By now, I’d sort of slid down the plane of the door. To a modified prone position.

“You’re going to stay?” I said. And perhaps I betrayed some of my consternation about this. It wasn’t that I wanted to go adventuring back to the home planet with a happy young couple and their newborn crying and throwing up and needing its cloth diaper changed, so that we’d be stockpiling baby shit throughout the journey. But I also wasn’t sure that I wanted to make the journey, well, alone .

“What about Steve? Have you heard anything from Steve? Did he—”

Arnie said, “He somehow managed to get the reflectors off his suit.”

“Reflectors.”

“He piloted the rover off a cliff, and so it’s likely that his body is out there, somewhere in the Valles Marineris, and we’ll find it the next time one of us goes out there digging. In the meantime, we were intended to wait for liftoff until the next manned mission, and NASA has now committed to sending the resupply shot in the next month, as they said they were going to do, and I think I can make enough fuel with the hydrogen that we have left over—”

I pressed my palm to the door one last time, to feel what the warmth of common goals felt like. Then I brushed myself off and was again heading east of paradise, leaving the edenic couple and their newborn to do as they intended. They would build the new world. And if that necessitated my exile, I supposed I could understand. Then it was back to the power station, which I was now going to leave to Arnie and Laurie, and then to the capsule I had always known, the Excelsior , where I was going to see if I had enough fuel, myself, to jettison the lower stage of the housing and lift off.

Steve Watanabe, upon awaking, on the ledge. Steve Watanabe and his cranial trauma. The broken collarbone. Steve Watanabe, looking at his hands, in heavy gloves. Steve Watanabe, and the middle space between unconsciousness and grave physical pain. Wondering how exactly he got here and where exactly this was. An oblong moon, shaped like an Idaho potato, drifted overhead. Was he in the desert Southwest? He’d been there once, on vacation. He was certain he’d been there, that he took his wife there for a rafting trip. He had a wife. He remembered some things about his wife. His wife smelled a certain way. His wife had a horrible temper, and the burning sensation of being hectored by his wife was also easy to summon up. Of the trip to the desert, however, the vast majority of details were missing. He didn’t remember being asked to don this unusual outfit. Were they trying to break the land-speed record? Steve Watanabe flipped up the visor, and the bright salmon-colored sky appeared to him in more indelible glory. The sky was the color of a yam.

It was coming back to him. He had trained to go somewhere that was rusty in the way this place was rusty. Mars! This first bit of important information, very important information, came back to Steve Watanabe — he was on Mars. Another planet. Far from home. The circumstances in which he had arrived here were not easy to reconstruct. He was getting flashes of detail, as from a stainless steel pan into which he was meant to put his personal effects.