Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

The room had begun to fill, and among its experts now were members of the team that had designed the capsule interior, who had stacked the solid-state computer systems on the wall rack in the shot. If they didn’t quite understand Antoine’s sleepless monologue, they began to understand it through the vehemence of his performance.

“What if this is object-oriented syntactical manipulation? What if by assembling a sort of line-by-line message, we can divine a syntagmatic declarative statement? That’s what I’m trying to say! For example, who can tell me what this panel right here controls? Can someone remind me? Is that water level and water flow in the capsule?”

“Exactly right,” said one sandal-wearing, dreadlocked young engineer. “Water levels are monitored in such a way that they recirculate wastewater produced by the astronaut and funnel some of this water out through the onboard catchment systems and then redissolve it into capsule air, to keep humidity at a comfortable level. On the way out we did find that we had trouble keeping the air wet enough, which resulted in skin problems for nearly everyone. We made adjustments in the direction of greater humidity.”

“Your name is?”

“Fielding.”

“First or last?”

“First.”

“Fielding, what can you tell me about what you’re reading on this monitor?”

“What I’m seeing is that there’s a really unusual amount of water available in the system. A very unusual amount. It looks as though he has completely shut off the humidifier and has allowed as much water into the catchment system as it can reasonably store. The short version, I guess, is that he’s not drinking very much. Certainly not enough for someone who wants to remain healthy and comfortable.”

“So what is this telling us?”

“I don’t know, sir. Hydrophobia? That his condition is somehow related to hydrophobia?”

Gibraltar, from a chair by the monitor where he had now settled himself, arms folded, grumbled, “You’re going to have to do better than hydrophobia.”

“We’re getting warmed up. Let me continue, if you would. Could someone tell me what’s below the water monitor here in the feed?”

“That would be oxygen levels, sir.” This was Amin, the designer whom Rob liked to talk to when he had to be in the engineering department, which mostly he avoided. Engineers only understood things in literal ways. Engineers were always blaming mission failures on human error and deflecting any responsibility away from their laborious and convoluted designs.

“Amin, what does the oxygen monitor do?”

“It does exactly what you’d think it would do. It monitors the oxygen levels in the cabin. It automatically makes corrections when the CO 2dips below a baseline that would inhibit robust functioning of the astronauts.”

The assembled experts now knew something that Rob didn’t grasp himself. The designers had been schooled in the use and interpretation of these monitors long before management. Rob, and by extension Gibraltar, needed someone to spell it all out, and here was how it was spelled, rather dramatically:

“The thing is,” Amin said, “the oxygen monitor must not be working or something. Because if it was working, that red indicator would be telling us that—”

“What?”

“Well, that the colonel can’t possibly be alive . Because the oxygen level in the capsule is so low that he would eventually suffocate, it’s…”

“Did no one think to look at this level at any other point in the past three days? Amin, aren’t you supposed to monitor this? People, I know we’re all tired. But has this been sitting right in front of us?”

Amin replied, “Sir, I think we’ve selected for monitoring pulse and respiration and all of that — life-support systems — and those are still going. I mean, as I understand it, and here I defer to the medical team, he’s not going to do any jumping jacks, but he is still alive.”

A hand in the rear of the room went up. One of the mission doctors, Kathleen Fales. Since luck and superstition had crept into the hard science of the Mars mission in recent days, he wished he could call on someone else. Because of her surname.

“Kathy.”

“Rob, there’s no easy way to say this, but the short version is that we find ourselves with a medical contradiction here, because if what we are learning from all the external monitoring data is true, then there would seem to be no way that Colonel Richards is still alive. He has effectively shut off the oxygen in the room, as though he is trying to starve himself of it somehow, and the same could be said of the water supply. And yet he still has some kind of pulse activity, and we have a Gaussmeter that indicates electromagnetic impulses coming from him consistent with nervous system function as we understand it. If I had my choice, I’d say he’s dead, or at least very close to death, and perhaps just hanging on because he has turned the temperature down inside to forty-seven degrees. You can’t see it on this image, really. It’s the blurry monitor way off to the left. He’s refrigerating himself. As far as I’m concerned, he’s not really alive in the conventional sense, certainly not to such a degree that he could communicate with us.”

Rob stalled, sifting through his perceptions. “In that sense, perhaps, you might say that he’s both dead and not dead?”

“I suppose,” said Dr. Fales. “I’d try to formulate an intermediate terminology, something in the cryogenic family, something less quaint than undead .”

“Kathy, I’m going to say that I think you’re leading the witness here, and that I’m not sure your conclusion helps us in the matter of decoding possible communicative sequences in Richards’s environment. I’m not, in the final analysis, preoccupied with the semantics of life or death. I am, however, wondering if he’s trying to tell us something . So I’m wondering if we can move on a little bit to the monitor that’s directly under the environmental controls here, and I’m wondering if we can address this for a second—”

A hush in this place of worry, this place of consternation and ignominy. It was unclear to those who were there if it was the hush of Debra Levin entering, in a maroon, understated knee-length dress, with a sense of perfect timing, at least if her goal was to gut the last few NASA programs extant. Or perhaps the hush was because everyone in the room knew what the monitor underneath the environmental controls was, and there was a sort of gasp when all considered the video image that Richards had haphazardly preserved in moving the camera out of his face. He had perfectly centered the image so that it was capturing the—

“Auto-destruct and fail-safe sequencer,” Gibraltar remarked, from his chair. It was rare that the budgetary director knew or understood these particular mechanisms. It was counterproductive when he got into this kind of micromanagement. But Rob never underestimated Gibraltar’s grasp of the basic engineering principles of space exploration.

“That’s right,” Rob said. “I saw it in my mind’s eye. I saw that auto-destruct timer in my mind’s eye, and I wondered, if he were just an animal now, or a disassembling body , or whatever it is we think he is, would he have situated this camera so that at its dead center we would see the auto-destruct sequencer? Can someone review for us?”

The kid called Fielding again: “An auto-destruct sequence can be begun at either of two locations, on the craft or remotely, at Mission Control—”

“Because?” Rob asked.

“Because no one mission team should have the ability to abort, but by having the go-ahead from the other party, by having mutual agreement, the craft can in effect auto-destruct.”