The Four Fingers of Death (18 page)

By the time an astronaut is prepared to register a Code 14, the situation is likely already past, and yet here was Laurie, using it, and, from the looks of her, a little bit emotional about what was going on.

“Jed, hi, I’m sorry to… I’m sorry to bother you.” I can hear Abu come on the other screen on the
Pequod
while I’m talking to her, asking the same kinds of questions. “I don’t really know how to say this exactly, but Brandon… Well, Brandon has just tried to assault me.”

“He’s what? He tried to
rape
you?”

“Roger that.”

“What the hell is going on over there?”

“I’m afraid I don’t feel any clearer about that than you do.”

“Well, can you… Look, at the risk of being a bit insensitive, Laurie, can you tell me that we’re agreeing on the terminology here?”

“Jed, I understand what the word means. I’m sure you’re thinking that a space capsule is an awfully small place for a… for a sexual assault to occur. But that’s what happened. I have Arnie here, who’s ready to back up what I’m trying to tell you.”

Laurie’s being incredibly tough, that much is obvious. Jim and José gather with me by the screen. Behind us is the lukewarm Thanksgiving dinner, Velcro’d down to the makeshift table.

“So what happened?”

“What happened was that I was trying to sleep when my shift was completed, and for the record, Jed, I wasn’t wearing anything non-regulation, as I have never worn anything non-reg on the flight, as I have taken my role as a woman on this mission very seriously. Not that my wearing anything non-reg would be any kind of excuse for Brandon’s actions in a court of law, even in the present social and cultural environment. I was wearing a jumpsuit, and I was sleeping. I was tired, in fact. And badly in need of rest. My rest, Jed, was interrupted when suddenly I felt something pressing up against me, and I opened my eyes, and immediately I saw Brandon Lepper, and he wasn’t wearing anything at all. He had, against protocol, taken off all his gear. He had pressed the cough button, and he was in an aroused state, Jed, and he immediately put his hand over my mouth, as if he could keep me from shouting for Arnie. He said that he knew I wanted
it
, that sort of thing, and he began trying to cut through my jumpsuit with a knife, as if he had put a knife aside somewhere just for this purpose.”

“For godsakes. Then what?”

“Well, because I’ve had some hand-to-hand training, and some self-defense classes as a young woman, I reached back to remember the advice I’d had about sexual assault, and once my limbs were freed, I utilized this training. I disabled Brandon Lepper.”

“Meaning?”

“Basically, he had cut the immobilizing straps, which was not a strategically advantageous decision on his part, but when I was freed, I pretended to be complying, until I could hit him with a blunt force object on the back of the head.”

“Which blunt force object was it?”

“It was a fire extinguisher.”

“You hit him on the head with a fire extinguisher?”

“Roger that.”

There’s a pause in the conversation while the three of us on the
Excelsior
look around at one another. I assume we are all counting bodies. Debbie Quartz is in an opiate fog, and now there’s Brandon Lepper, out cold or worse, and it’s obvious to anyone, any idiot, that we are indisputably beginning to have serious personnel issues.

“Can you put Arnie on for a moment, Laurie?” I say. The doctor to the Mars mission then appears on the screen. He’s a small guy, kind of slight, with a thick beard and pale Eastern European coloring. Arnie is a serious fellow, never less than thoughtful and warm. I ask what he thinks.

“I’m surprised by Brandon’s behavior, Jed. And I think that it’s not really Brandon himself that we’re encountering here.”

“You think he’s got PES?”

“I’ve lived with the guy for seven or eight weeks, and while I think he’s immature, and hard to like, I don’t think he’s the kind of person who would premeditate a crime like this. I can only think that the long period of confinement has taken a considerable toll on all of us, and that it is possible to see here a pathology that’s related to long periods of confinement. This is another way of saying that there are real dangers to the mission.”

“And are you suggesting that the causes are
merely
those of psychological stress, Arnie?”

“There are other things to consider, solar winds, neutrinos, gamma rays, space-time curvature, close proximity to antimatter, who knows what else? Tanning by the reactor downstairs? But I don’t have time to run those tests while Brandon is constrained.”

Laurie comes back on-screen to tell me that she has him down in the hatch, and that, yes, she has covered him up. As with Debbie, he has been heavily sedated. By the time we get to Mars, how many of us will still be awake?

When we finish this portion of the conversation, the transmission from Houston arrives. It’s a big moment in the Mars mission. In fact, it’s a big fourteen minutes, these minutes where Brandon is reaping the harvest he perhaps sowed many years back, as a young Turk from Houston, a believer in the warrior code, who, in the peculiar ethics of interplanetary travel, sullied a woman’s dignity, or attempted to. Laurie tells me that she’s going to take the call and that she’ll get back to me ASAP.

The three J’s of the
Excelsior
then get down to the business of Thanksgiving, as described earlier, and I know that I have a lot to be grateful for, because—and I don’t know if I have said this before—I am soon going to be the first person to set foot on the planet Mars. I can’t really think of a better time than now to tell you this exciting news. Yes, I am the one who has been selected first to set foot outside the Mars mission, on the sulfurous, subzero surface of Mars. Because Jim will be flying the lander, and José will be coordinating the particulars of the mission with Houston and the other science officers, if any of them are left alive by the time we touch down. And that leaves me, kids. I was chosen for this. From the first day, I was chosen, because I am the word slinger, I am the man of imagination and vision, and I have a half-dozen sentences, preselected by a NASA subcommittee on
first utterances
, from which I am to choose one when I step outside of the lander, and I am meant to pronounce this sentence (with prior notification and authorization), and this sentence will go down in human history, for reasons I can’t need to explain. So it’s Thanksgiving, and I should be grateful, because I get to spend the next three weeks thinking about which of these statements I like best, and I get to confer with subcommittee members, like Jonas Jonas, poet laureate of the United States of America, who is trying to boil down a sonnet sequence he wrote to an unrhymed couplet, so that I won’t, if I use his text, have to memorize too terribly much. Yes, being chosen as the first man to set foot on Mars is something to be thankful for, as is the fact that my daughter, Ginger, sent me a school paper this morning on the following topic, “The History of and Future Prospects for Mars Exploration,” the first sentence of which is: “No kid in the world could be prouder of her dad than I am, no kid could be prouder, and no kid could be luckier.” These
are
the kinds of things you think about on Thanksgiving, and while I don’t bring these things up to the other guys, I do think about them in passing.

But what about what Arnie was saying? What Arnie was saying, kids, is that our civilization, the civilization of the Mars mission, has become very small, our civilization has become nine people, of whom six are at considerable remove from us here in the
Excelsior
, as far away as Auckland is from New York City, let’s say, and our little colony just doesn’t have the same sense of inevitability about its civilizing abilities as does your planet, with its nearly seven billion souls, most of them at least passingly familiar with the rule of law. And what we are doing here, on the little tin can, is falling into the lawlessness of ancient times, like in Westerns, where everyone has a checkered past and a dark motive, and it’s all going to come out eventually, the evil, and a lot of people are going to get shot. That, indeed, is what Arnie was talking about, as I understand it, and it isn’t lost on those of us on the
Excelsior
.

The meal is further interrupted when Houston puts forth its ideas about how to prevent disorder from breaking out on the Mars mission. The note is to Laurie Corelli, who has probably already been briefed as to its contents, but we are copied on it, as is the
Geronimo
. The note is among the evening bulletins for the mission, and so it shows up on my clipboard, right by the dinner table.

“Read it out,” Jim says.

“‘
Pequod
and
Geronimo
, dock ship-to-ship at 0500 hrs, 28 Nov, instructions, coordinates to follow. Astronauts Lepper and Quartz to be exchanged.
Excelsior
as per earlier orders.’ ”

“Holy shit,” Jim says.

José says, “I say we cook them and eat them.”

“José,” Jim says, “you don’t have manners.”

“I’m not paid to. That was nowhere in the job description. There were, however, some sections about geological training, the chain of command, and absolute loyalty to mission objectives.”

Dinner comes to an end at this point. The discussion lapses, that is, and this is when I do the dishes. We hear nothing more from the
Pequod
for the evening, and I am loath to ring them up in order to hear about what’s going on, just as I am loath to fire a message off to Debbie Quartz, who may or may not be conscious. Back at home, you kids probably think that all is going well up here, and that we are following a mission plan that allows certain crew members to go into cryonic suspension, or something approaching cryonic suspension, in order to preserve resources until such time as we arrive. If only we could freeze José.

Three days pass, and we do our best not to dwell on what we cannot control. The big questions have to do with how you sleep, and whether you can still move your bowels after two months of reconstituted, freeze-dried food products. Answer: not exactly. This is not such a bad thing for someone like your correspondent, who, as I have said, is noted for explosive difficulty in these areas. On one of these three days, I spend a long time reading up on
necrotizing fasciitis
, which is having that big outbreak in the Detroit area. It’s probably only when you are up in the little soda can that you feel fully protected against an outbreak of
necrotizing fasciitis
that is sweeping through the rather large tent encampments in that city. If there are any of you reading these remarks from the Detroit area, please accept my condolences for the outbreak, and let me say that I dedicate today’s portion of the journey to any of you; you are in my thoughts, and I really mean that.

Of course
necrotizing fasciitis
makes me think about this mysterious bacterium that Debbie Quartz mentioned, the one that was originally found in ALH 84001, the interplanetary bauble that washed up on Antarctica. I keep thinking I should ask José about ALH 84001, or maybe I should ask Arnie Gilmore about this.

And somehow the whole situation reminds me of those last three hundred whooping cranes, those birds that someone has been forcibly migrating back and forth from Florida for the past twenty-odd years with the aid of an ultralight. This small population of birds is not a sustainable population, the experts all say, because with the right outbreak of avian flu, which we already know can knock out a couple million people in an overcrowded ecosystem, the entire whooping crane population could collapse. One germ and extinction follows. A beautiful thing, though, a whooping crane, and in the not-so-distant future there will be only a couple of them left, and they will have only one wing apiece, and they will idle on some lawn, like the lawn near Cape Canaveral. One of this nonmating pair will die of old age, and then there will be the one last whooping crane, and it will eat moldy popcorn from underneath the NASA reviewing stand, and it will have delusional thoughts, mothballed memories in which it was part of a
flock
, and this flock followed an ultralight down to Brazil for the winter, and then back again. What does our whooping crane think? The last whooping crane of planet
Earth?
The last one? It thinks that the currents of air are a marvel, and it conceives of them in colors, spectra, as we think of sunsets; just so does the last whooping crane, despite the fact that only the one wing works, think of those air currents; it remembers treetops, which were like sofas to the whooping crane; back when it still had two wings, it could land in any treetop and put its head under its wing, and the whooping crane remembers, or believes it remembers, certain kinds of fish that are particularly savory, and maybe a certain level of freshness in the matter of seafood is what a whooping crane most prizes, and it remembers mating, because back when it was young it was picky in the mating department, and like many whooping cranes it was not, despite its lanky beauty, terribly kind to the girls; moreover, there was always the danger of infighting among the whooping cranes, and this last crane remembers all of this, and because the crane cannot speak of it, the memories are that much more painful, and now, in his loneliness, there is no other bird who protects that past of cranes, that long history of the most beautiful bird in this part of the country, and so the only other account of these events, after the others fade, is the memory of the guy who flew the ultralight, a balding guy with a not-very-good sense of humor, a guy who told the worst jokes, not that the whooping crane understood the jokes, but rather the whooping crane recognized the timbre of this man’s voice, a kind of ragged baritone that shaded into the tenor range, but with outbreaks of alto when he got nervous, and this was the call of the ultralight, as far as the last whooping crane is concerned, this guy’s rather humorous voice; it was not the cry of the whooping crane, which is a majestic sound, it was the cry of some bald guy who never much expected to be piloting birds. He probably believed he would have a career in civil aviation, or maybe he thought he would be an astronaut or something, and in fact that is what he decides to do because the day comes when this pilot can no longer fly the ultralight, because there are not enough cranes anymore, there is only the one crane, and he is
crushed
, well, come on, everyone is crushed, life crushes you, and this is just one more story to stomp up and down on your crushed heart, this balding fellow going to visit the last crane sometimes, over where he thinks the crane might still be living, in some cage for injured birds, and he and the crane recognize each other, indeed, though they have no common language in which to speak of their recognition, there is no way for the crane to speak of the man as a man speaks of a crane, and it would all go fine if the man could speak in the tongue of cranes, but he can’t. While he’s visiting with the crane, there is, in the distance, a
liftoff
, one of the last space shuttle missions, and you can see it from almost twenty miles away, the conditions are that favorable in south Florida that day, and the guy, the balding pilot, the one with the bad jokes and the not-terribly-reliable timbre to his voice, thinks that maybe the only reasonable thing to pursue after the experience of flying the ultralight is the experience of going up into space,
as soon as he can
, and he sits on a bench by the one-winged whooping crane for a while, and then he notices that he is talking to the whooping crane, and he’s saying, “Well, I don’t exactly want to leave you here like this; I can’t really think of anything worse, and I have left some people behind in my life, who hasn’t, even some people I loved, but none of that is as bad as thinking that I won’t see you here again, and no one who comes here to see you will know what I know about you, and you won’t recognize these people, nothing could be worse, but still a man has to move on sometimes, I can’t just stay here doing this, and so I’m wondering, would you think it was okay for me to go ahead and undertake to become an astronaut? Do you think you could possibly give me your blessing?” He knows that the whooping crane
can’t
answer him, that’s obvious enough, but he feels he owes a reasonable explanation to the whooping crane, even more of an explanation than he owes his wife or his parents, and the crane can’t see how bad the pilot feels, how broken up he is, when the man thinks that he won’t be able to visit the crane again. When the crane is a thing of the past, when the crane is nothing more than fertilizer for creatures to come, the pilot will only learn of it online, because he will be off pursuing his ambition, flying his test missions, sleeping in the barracks, all so that he might get the hell off the planet that slew the whooping cranes.