The Four Fingers of Death (67 page)

The barking and growling Colonel Richards, the Richards with the face of death, did not, as far as could be inferred from the video footage, take too well to this news. Which is to say that the sublingual or prelingual utterances crescendoed with a series of microtonal hiccups, at which point a rather great volume of blood began to issue forth from Richards’s mouth. It was nearly a vomitus of blood, or would have been described as such, except for the absence of reverse-peristaltic contracting, making the more likely causal agent esophageal lesions; at any rate, in the middle of this blood flow, Richards violently unstrapped himself from his station, from which he would be required to help in the landing process, in monitoring the heat on the exterior shields of the ERV, and began throwing things around the capsule. True, he was drifting, because his orbit had not yet decayed quite enough for him to have Earth weight or mass, and there was only so much in the capsule that was not attached, so as to forbid exactly this kind of tantrum, but he did a good job, anyhow, in destroying federally issued and multinationally sponsored,
branded
Mars mission material, until there were dangerous pieces of metal drifting everywhere in the capsule. There was bodily effluvium drifting to and fro, giving it all a Grand Guignol horror.

Rob Antoine’s indignation began to boil, with righteousness. And it was at that point that he began to formulate his personal, if treasonous, response to the critical moment in which he found himself. What he recalled, from the distant recesses of mission operation protocols, was that there had been, in case of transmission difficulties, a series of
hand signals
agreed upon between Rob and the officers of the three ships. In fact, the sign language was borrowed in part from the beautiful and ornate hand signals of NAFTA’s Central American gangbangers, who, at some point in the past twenty years, had decided that spoken language was far too dangerous for them, with all the law-enforcement intervention into their circles. They had settled upon the notion of a constantly changing series of hand signals to indicate most aspects of their business, which would be safer than voice messages or any kind of written documentation. The gangbangers themselves, whose fellowships preferred to be known as
urban entrepreneurial collectives
, had fashioned the early examples of this language partly from the leftover sign language of the deaf, which had been all but abandoned after the perfection of cochlea-implant surgery and eardrum transplants. From this American Sign Language, the
urban entrepreneurial collectives
borrowed an alphabet and many simple sentences, especially sentences involving cursing and obscenity. Some new signs were invented, especially signs referring to bodily harm, and then a large number of signs and styles of signing were borrowed from the signs used by the coaches in the sport known as X-treme lacrosse. The lacrosse signs enabled the
urban entrepreneurial collectives
to negate any signal that had come before, to contradict what had just been said, and so forth. This argot was not entirely different from the whistling languages that had taken off so powerfully in the urban Northwest, where the organized crime from the Sino-Indian countries had found a toehold. Nor was it entirely different from the rhyming slang of Rust Belt cities. With these languages,
signed criminal argot
had in common that it empowered those who felt disempowered, who felt hundreds of years of oppression, to throw off the language of the oppressor class.

Antoine, and some of his inner circle, had clipped a dozen or so emergency signs from
signed criminal argot
, or was it from lacrosse, and they had taught them to the astronauts late in the training process. The question was: Who knew? Who knew about the emergency hand signals? Because if anyone knew, what Antoine was about to do was hopelessly obvious, especially after Debra Levin’s impassioned speech about Jed Richards being a military weapons system. Antoine was all but certain, however, that Gibraltar and Debra Levin had no idea, and that most of the people watching the video feeds in the rest of the building would have no idea about the hand signals, at least not today.

Which message was it that he meant to use? Well, naturally, Antoine had made sure to have a message for the auto-destruct sequence, because what other message could have been more important? It was in fact the criminal symbol for
respect
. The index finger and thumb on either hand were spread as wide as possible, and in this ninety-degree angle, the two index fingertips were pressed together, likewise the two thumb pads. It looked roughly like a Greek delta: Δ. The delta sign was placed in front of the heart.

There was one other symbol that was necessary in order to bring about “respect,” also known as the auto-destruct sequence, which was the symbol for “all prior communications are null.” Antoine needed to pat the top of his head. He needed, that is, to pat his pompadour, his comb-over. Normally, he refrained from disturbing this coiffure.

But he didn’t need that long to think it over. He needed to do what he believed in and to accept the consequences. And thus, to the marauding, barking, hemorrhaging
thing
that was once Jed Richards, and whose only Richards-like characteristic at this point was that one of his hands clearly still had only four fingers, Antoine said:

“Okay, Jed, expect further communications imminently. Antoine out.”

And then, looking carefully into the camera right below Levin’s video monitor, Rob Antoine patted down his pompadour, and, as if praying for Colonel Jed Richards’s safe return, he made the delta sign, the sign of “respect,” which meant that Richards, if there was enough of him left to understand, had cooperation on the ground, at least from Antoine.

When he turned to face his superiors, Antoine’s English-language transmission was in the category of the patently untrue. “That went pretty well.” He didn’t wait for significant reply.

In making his way back to his desk, Rob Antoine pondered all the possible ways to blow up the capsule. Best of all was for the capsule to fail to make it out of orbit, to reenter the atmosphere at too high a velocity, so that it would burn up in the process of coming down. But this would require the cooperation of so many technicians in the main control room that Rob felt he could never effect the Houston-based reply to the auto-destruct sequence without his intention becoming obvious to those in the employ of the military. Similarly, there was no point in blowing the air lock, because that could potentially leave the contents of the craft intact as they fell to Earth, and anyway, Richards already had essentially created a vacuum in the capsule. The temperature and the oxygen levels had only gone
down
in the past few hours. But, and this was a big
but
, if Rob could somehow enlist the support of Danielle Walters, the staff member who babysat the auto-destruct systems in the control room, he could possibly trigger the switch on this end and thus begin an ineradicable sequence, a sequence that couldn’t be reversed without both sides agreeing to stand down.

But the final auto-destruct sequence, in order to make sure that those involved had time to ponder the enormity of the decision, lasted for one eternal minute. That is, once you flipped the second switch, a clock started, and the clock had a solid sixty seconds on it. In that minute, armed personnel in the control room could do anything, they really could. They could shoot Rob. They could arrest Rob. They could arrest Danielle. They could lock down the entire facility and look for the perpetrators of the auto-destruct sequence, assuming Rob could somehow throw the switch without being seen. If there was a computer program involved, which there always was, it might be possible to hack a way into the software, but if he remembered correctly, it had the most redundant firewalls of any code in the entire mission.

There were things that bound Rob Antoine together with Jed Richards, or the man who had once been Jed Richards. Rob too believed himself to be on the outside, despite his accomplishments. Rob believed himself to be an outsider, the kind of person
least
likely to succeed, and thus he had given over the whole of himself to his professional advancement. These things bound him to Richards. Also, there were the weeks and months of training together. And there was the fact that they had both lost their families recently. Their loneliness, their solitariness, their ethics, these were the things that made them alike; oh, and their appreciation for steel drums, which they had often spoken of, back in the old days. If this wasn’t enough for Rob to do what needed to be done, what more could there be?

And yet, when it came down to it, there was a part of Rob Antoine that was reluctant. What if Debra Levin, after all, was right? What if it was this pathogen,
M. thanatobacillus
, that would make a huge difference in the national security portfolio during the years in which NAFTA fought for its economic sovereignty? Rob, sleepless, sat at his desk, looking at the face of death, and he found that he, Rob Antoine, was the picture of human irresolution. In this immobilized state, he received text bulletins at his workstation, as the orbit of the ERV decayed, as the capsule began to plummet to Earth, racing past Mongolia, and then Siberia, dropping out of the sky, with Richards still aboard. Rob Antoine sat, unable to move, unable even to call Danielle Walters and take her temperature on the whole thing. His head felt swollen. His blood pressure was probably well above the lethal, and yet he couldn’t move. It was then that he got the worst of all messages, an exterior instant-message communication of the sort that were routinely blocked for middle managers at NASA. At least this had been the case for the past several weeks. The Mars mission had turned them all inward. Nothing from outside got in. Except this:

[email protected]
:
Mr. Antoine, hi, this is Ginger Richards writing you. I just want to know how my dad is doing and if he’s really going to be okay coming home today. I mean, I guess you’re going to say he’s fine and everything. We heard from Mr. Miller who supposedly is in the press office or something, and we read what was in the news, but both my mom and me are really worried, and anything you could tell us would really be a big help. And I’m really sorry to interrupt. We know everyone there is really busy. But any information you could give us would be great.

Antoine’s throbbing skull percussed with a new intensity. Had he failed to contact Richards’s family in the past couple of days? He knew that Miller and other public-relations people were dealing with this part of the mission return, but that wasn’t enough. Of course not. What would he have felt himself, were he Jed Richards’s wife or daughter? He tried to compose a reply to Ginger, but when faced with it, faced with the responsibility, he was fresh out of shapely rhetoric, of organizational spin. He was a man who had no resource left but compassion. And it was this, finally, that drove him from his desk, like Hamlet bent upon his own bloody finale; Antoine got up from his desk, sweating profusely, and began to make his way to the control room, where no matter what the opposition, no matter what volley of automatic weapons fire would rain down upon him, he would reach over Danielle’s shoulder, and while talking to her about the weather or some other pleasantry about which he knew nothing at all, he would break the seal on the auto-destruct toggle switch, and then he would throw that switch. It was decided. If he could spare Ginger Richards the day of shame and worry, the day when she saw her father as he now was, which was not like a man at all but like something else entirely, he would do it. Rob had children too.

However, as Rob made his way toward the relevant workstation, the relevant panel, in the glow of screens and video, the Earth Return Vehicle carrying Jed Richards approached the Sonoran Desert, heading north, on one of its many revolutions around the globe, and for a brief moment it hovered at the latitude on which Antoine walked in Houston, moving west across the desertified part of NAFTA, and that was the moment when Jed Richards, in the process exhibiting some engineering sophistication, took it upon himself to blow the oxygen tanks in his craft.

Because earthlings really weren’t built for space travel, what went up would come down. Would come down. Because all the systems of rocketry, the advanced engineering, the physics, the computer calibrations, when you considered them, just decorated what were in the first place large incendiary devices. Combustion for good or ill. A big, unused oxygen tank sitting one reinforced wall away from a nuclear reactor could at high temperatures be made into
fuel
if you knew a little bit about engineering. A man bent on self-slaughter will in time find the way to effect his passing.