The Four Fingers of Death (24 page)

“More,” he said.

“More what?”

“More of you.”

More of me? The balding, formerly paunchy (but now frequently hungry), blue-eyed, and impish guy with vanishing muscle mass? The
space arm
said
yes
. The
space arm
was rich in veins and purply sections, and the head of it resembled a poisonous mushroom of some kind, perhaps the fly amanita, which I was always told to avoid as a youngster. The
space arm
was cruel and foul, for example in the profusion of pubic hairs that I kept finding stuck against the roof of my mouth, but I recognized, yes, that cruelty was a fair and beautiful thing, and I wanted it. There were no lengths to which I would not go, nothing I would not do. I was the first-ever interplanetary space slut. Or the first, at any rate, to enter the literature.

“Wait,” I said.

He looked stricken. As though I were going to draw a permanent halt to our space explorations! But I had no such intention. Petrolatum was an important product on the
Excelsior
, because our skin was patchy and flaky for lack of moisture in the pressurized, recirculated air of the cabin. There was even an official supplier of petrolatum to the Mars mission, and as with other licensing firms, I’m discouraged from naming it, though you will find its banner advertising throughout the site. Nor am I allowed to remark that the official sponsor of petrolatum to the Mars mission was about to serve as the lubricant for Uranian delights.

By my bed, on the little overhead shelf where my personal effects were Velcro’d down, was a precious tube of the stuff. I brandished it, as if I already knew how these props of the trade became fetish objects in their own right.

Jim was stroking his
space arm
while he waited for me, and making some noises that sounded like a bull elephant in the midst of toppling banyan trees, and this was both deeply shameful and not at all feminine, and about the most exciting thing I had ever heard. The cry of the heron lifting off from the swamps, that prehistoric and laughable squawk, didn’t hold a candle to Jim Rose in the moment of ecstatic celebration. I urged him to apply the petrolatum, if possible, without any getting loose in the cabin. The place already felt like the inside of an immemorial triple-X film emporium, where the patrons were all lacquered with their juices. Jim was only too happy to oblige.

“How do we do it?” he asked.

“How complicated can it be?” I said. “They were doing it in ages past. Well before the combustion engine, for example.”

He reached down and took hold of me, as though he had neglected my own little reentry hose coupling. “Are you going to do me too?”

“Is that what you want, you Southern prince?”

“I’ve been thinking about it for days.”

“You first.”

“Which?”

“In me.”

And I turned, so that I was facing the reinforced windscreen of the capsule, and beyond the windscreen, in the foreground of the great mass known as the Milky Way, was our imminent destination,
the Red Planet
, like the hide of a great mother to whom we were soon going to apply ourselves for nourishment, and as I took note of the massed dry ice of the North Pole, I could feel the
space arm
, hungering at the opening of me, and then the
space arm
, plunging in. I would like to say, kids, that this is nothing but a pleasant sensation, and that when you love someone enough it is a consensual and loving act, but if I’m being honest, this is not how I experienced it. There was a sharp intake of breath, as though I were somehow responsible for inspiring all the oxygen in the capsule, and then there was a sharp stabbing sensation, sort of how I imagine it must feel to find your innards impaled on a pike, and this coincided with Jim driving in harder and deeper, till I was sure he was going to stir up that evening’s ham somewhere, up in my stomach. I’m afraid I just couldn’t get the hang of it, the first time, and it smelled a little rank too. They just don’t tell you about that in all the pornographic literature.

For a second, therefore, I needed him to pull the
space arm
out, while I got myself better situated. After all, we were drifting around, and the only thing stabilizing us was Jim hanging on to my hips, and that made it hard for me to feel like much but his pincushion, his voodoo doll. After one last gigantic thrust, in fact, we went careening across the capsule and smacked our heads on the hatch to the upper air lock. That was going to result in
contusion
. Jim was all overheated, however, and he did not want to stop, as men never want to stop, I suppose. As I myself, on many an occasion, did not want to stop. But by grabbing on to a maintenance step by the hatch coupling, I did manage to unimpale myself briefly. Unfortunately, Jim Rose was at the segment of the curve of masculine desire known as the
point of no return
, and he could not stop, and he whimpered like a kicked mutt, and from out of the
space arm
issued a torrent of celestial blobs. Given what I have already explained to you, kids, it would have been a lot better, from virtually every point of view, if this spunk had been fired off into some kind of receptacle, like my mouth or some other opening. Because now Jim’s issue was scattering in many directions at once, toward all the walls of the capsule, according to the very physical properties of explosions. This was the Big Bang of interplanetary sex.

“My God in the heavens!” Jim said. The last few drops expelling themselves from his cock, now withering. “Oh, man, we gotta do something about this! Will you help me…” Immediately, he set about rappelling from side to side of the capsule, trying, vainly, to capture droplets of jism. But in order to put them where, exactly? Kids, it’s like trying to keep still the little marbles of mercury.

“Just eat it,” I said, with the weariness of the just-fucked.

“Eat it?”

“Put it in your mouth, for godsakes,” I said. And then the two of us breaststroked around the capsule, attempting to swallow down the afterglow of our profane and inadvisable entanglement.

December 29, 2025

There was a lot to do during the orbital insertion, kids. Next morning, we had that fellow with the sibilant
s’
s from Houston on the line, reminding us how things were going to proceed, and where and when Jim was going to have to monitor the aerobraking system, to insure that the computer-automated pilots were performing according to instructions from Mission Control—whose messages, I should say, were now reaching us with a thirty-something-minute delay. If something
were
going wrong, it was going to be a long time before we could do anything about it.

The nearer we got to the planet, the more unnerving the whole business became. As long as we were looking at Mars from a distance, it still resembled an artist’s rendering, something from the forty years of public-television programming, or the kind of thing they put on postage stamps, back when there were actual postage stamps. Maybe it was just some bonbon out there suspended in the heavens. Still, the closer we got, the more likely it was we would have to land. That big, inhospitable desert that could freeze you to death at high noon, that was where we were going to land, amid the unfiltered solar and interstellar radiation, which even as we spoke was making the likelihood of certain varieties of cancer that much likelier.

You know, kids, that the famous storms of Mars have been visible as far back as the nineteenth century, right? There just isn’t that much
on
Mars but dust. And there’s so much temperature swing on the planet that the seasonal changes, particularly in late summer, spawn massive storms. Also, because the gravity isn’t as strong as on Earth, the size of the stuff that’s liable to go blowing in the dust storms… Well, when you get right up close to the surface, and you can see down to the craters, the dust begins to compel your attention.

At about 0800 hours (six hours before the
Geronimo
and twelve hours before the
Pequod
), we got the confirmation from Houston. We were, indeed, to begin braking in ten minutes. They gave us an opportunity to talk to the other ships, and Steve from the
Geronimo
came on the screen almost immediately, wishing godspeed.

“We’ll be seeing you down there,” I replied, “before long. Make sure that reactor is working properly, okay?” A nervous reminder, and thus an unprofessional one. For what else was he to do?

“We’re on it.”

“Everything okay there?” Jim asked from beside me. After all, they still had Brandon on board.

“Roger. Three peas in a pod.” In fact, Steve’s face didn’t suggest the three legumes. Maybe we were all kind of nervous. Need I remind you that even if we made it to the surface, we were facing another year and change under very uncertain circumstances?

Laurie and Arnie called in next. I was watching while Jim spoke with them. The same kind of thing. Bland offers of support. What else could they say? We’ll be
happy
to shovel up your remains on the surface? If any one of the three ships didn’t make it to the surface, the remaining mission astronauts were, effectively, doomed. We were interdependent, we were worried, we were tired of one another. Except for Laurie and Arnie. (I was pretty sure there was something going on there.) And there was Jim and me.

Behind us, watching the whole thing, was José, and he was doing some more of his strange Asian spiritual exercises, which at this point seemed to involve a lot of facial grimacing and isometric convulsions, unless his version of Planetary Exile Syndrome involved a
tic douloureux
.

“I can’t stand it when you loiter behind me,” I reminded him.

“That’s all you have to say after three months stuck in this aluminum can?” José replied.

“Six minutes to strap in,” I said.

“Jim, you got it under control?” said he.

“Late to be asking.”

“Maybe you didn’t sleep well last night,” José said. And when I looked back to catch his eye, he was grinning in a way both somber and knowing.

“Like a baby,” Jim said.

“Five and a half,” I said. “Don’t forget the ventilator.”

“I know what the MMPs are,” José said, as he retreated down the ladder to the cargo bay. “I know as much about the mission as you do. I have more to do than type away on a diary.” And then: “What is this gunk all over the banister?” The sound of his coyote laugh was muffled as he disappeared into his lair of science projects. I hadn’t been down there in days to see if his plants were still growing, and when you consider that the capsule is only 1,200 square feet, that’s saying something.

Kids, my large philosophical thought for today is that I know what the woman wants. I’m like Tiresias, who was each woman and man. What women observe, kids, what they have said to me often enough, is that with men there is the big crushing embrace of intimacy, from out of nowhere, when you are mushed in his arms, and you are more
there
, more useful than you have ever been, because you can complete this man, you can make him stronger, kinder, better, you can compel his softness to the surface, you can nurture it, until he is like a little lion cub, and all is good, all is sweet, up until the man’s desire
crests
, and he spills his frenzied self upon the earth, at which point man is revealed as faithless and unloving, as man waltzes off to go watch X-treme lacrosse and eat salty snack items. Like you were never there at all. Never there at all! Until fluid backs up in the vas deferens or the prostate, and suddenly he requires some kind of liquidy release and becomes willing again to need to crush you in his faithless bear hug.