Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

True, she had a little background in the earth sciences, and a degree from the Ivy League, where she likely consorted with Islamists and professors of Queer Studies. No doubt she’d taken a year off to live with the Inuit to see if she could forestall the clubbing of seal pups. She believed she had a mandate from the White House. If she could complete the Mars mission without further political fallout, put the punctuation mark on it, Gibraltar thought, she could go back to academe or onto the lecture circuit with a most handsome curriculum vitae.

Across the table in the conference room: Mars mission flight director Rob Antoine, the middle manager with the comb-over and imperfect hygiene, whom Gibraltar had hired himself and had once loved like a son. Like all sons, Comb-Over had disappointed him, especially in the matter of personnel. Gibraltar could not look at Rob and his tonsorial stylings without wanting to launch him out toward Mercury. There were others in the room, deputies with too many opinions, people whom Gibraltar didn’t bother to get to know — because everything went more smoothly in an absence of personal relationships.

Why was Vance Gibraltar the de facto general administrator at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration? Anyone who’d ask obviously wasn’t traveling in the right circles. Gibraltar was kingmaker by design; Gibraltar was eager to get down in the trenches to protect his agency interests. He had the one desire, the desire to maximize visibility and profitability for the agency. He was looking anywhere and everywhere for additional research dollars, and was willing to invite foreign governments into bed with him, even Asian governments, if necessary. And so Gibraltar had been at the job almost twenty years. He’d had every heart procedure that you could have these days, valve replacement, a pacemaker; he was working toward the complete artificial pumper. All he cared about was space. Not himself, not his country, not God, not his congregation. Space. He’d never been thin; he’d never been good at football. He’d stammered as a kid. He couldn’t be an astronaut; he’d have failed the physical. But what he could be was a man who financed the astronauts, and a man who was at every launch whether successful or not. He wept by himself, alone, away from the cameras, when rockets went down or missions collapsed. And when they were successful he sent the reporters to interview someone else, some hard scientist, some academic, some engineer, men and women who would be happy to take the credit. He was effective, merciless, and silent to those on the outside.

In all these years, nothing had presented the problems that the Mars mission presented. To say that they had rushed the launch, because of the Sino-Indian joint initiative, this was to understate the extent of the ineptitude. The results had been two years of wretchedness. The news just got worse and worse, and allowing even sanitized bits of it into the press, to the degree that they did so, the deaths, the madness, the experiments uncompleted, the completely hostile environment, just made it worse. No one could have foreseen the complex of problems. And while the public responsibility fell on Dr. Anatoly Thatcher, and now his successor, Debra Levin, nobody felt worse than Gibraltar did himself.

In part because of the failures of the Mars mission, Debra Levin had been skulking around the various regional offices swinging the ax of cost cutting as fervently as if she were selling off the last few hectares of Brazilian rain forest. A pair of Deep Space Probes that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had designed to withstand ten thousand years of unknowns, the Titan explorer that was supposed to follow the lander already on its way to that moon of Jupiter, Ganymede, both of these had fallen to the cost-cutting blade. Gibraltar understood what Levin had to do, but he disliked her anyway, and he wouldn’t intervene to prevent her political sacrifice, just as he had not done with the five or six other NASA directors he had served under during his time at the agency.

In dwelling on the political, though, it was easy to obscure the fact that there was a man alive in the Earth Return Vehicle. Jed Richards. Richards was a lot like Gibraltar himself, the kind of guy who was as loyal as you could be, in word and deed, but also extremely hard to deal with otherwise. Space professionals, the both of them. Richards seemed to have no interests besides training for the Mars mission, and the proof was in his domestic situation. His wife was sleeping with every middle manager at Cape Canaveral.

Before liftoff, they suspected that there was something psychologically off about him. They now believed that there was something psychologically off about all the Mars astronauts. Each of them in turn. This was one item on the agenda for the meeting they were about to have, in the windowless, video-equipped room in Houston, with the scuff marks on the walls and the rancid, irradiated coffee. When Debra Levin was satisfied that they had as many attendees as needed, the audiovisual assistant got the screens warmed up, and a gigantic feed of Richards’s careworn visage appeared before all of them. If he’d had a lot of lines on his face before, now he looked like some canal system, chiseled and abraded.

Levin, after remarking that they were all tired, etc., etc., addressed herself to Comb-Over first, almost as if Gibraltar himself, who’d been troubleshooting these issues during the months of Levin’s confirmation, wasn’t even in the room.

“Rob, can you summarize what we know?”

Antoine had performed this summary many times in the past dozen months, and whenever he did so he looked as though he were experiencing a massive intestinal blockage. His eyes grew moist; his reedy voice climbed upward toward a strangulated mew. With one hand, he massaged his open collar, as if he needed to coax the words from his pharynx, and then he waded into the litany of disasters.

“Madam Director. Let’s reemphasize that we recognize now — that there is a significant psychic cost to personnel during interplanetary travel. What we used to call, among the mission staff, Space Panic , we have since relabeled interplanetary disinhibitory syndrome , according to recommendations of the experts. Our attempts to treat the syndrome remotely from Earth demonstrate that the binding, civilizing agency of human association fails out in space. To a man, every one of the astronauts on the Mars mission suffered with this complaint. We had episodes of psychosis; we had rampant addictive behavior, promiscuous sexuality, substance abuse, reclusive tendencies, and so forth. This syndrome got in the way of every aspect of the mission, as we have now seen.

“That’s the first problem. The second problem is that we now believe there was some kind of infectious agent loose in the Mars population. Some of you may be wondering, legitimately, if there were classified parts of the mission that made this contagion possible or even probable. Obviously we can’t speak freely to the military applications of the Mars mission. However, we can say that at no time did we bring bacterial or viral agents onboard that might have been able to cause the spectrum of symptoms that we’ve seen there.

“It becomes difficult in a case like this, and I’m thinking particularly of Brandon Lepper and Captain Jim Rose, to distinguish between the psychological syndrome I’ve described, which like many physical illnesses is communicable in an enclosed population that operates in a high-stress environment, and an actual pathogen, especially when the early phases of infection seem, as in the case of earthbound hydrophobia, to cause behavior not unlike what we’re seeing in interplanetary disinhibitory syndrome . Broadly speaking, both the pathogen and the mission itself seem to have caused a great number of Code 14 events. Never in the history of NASA have we had Code 14s the way we are now.”