The Four Fingers of Death (25 page)

It was supposed to be three minutes until the aerobrakes, and we could easily be as an asteroid falling to the surface, we could burn up on orbital insertion, or else, as I was saying earlier, we could bounce off the atmosphere and go end over end, ass over teakettle, out toward the next star system, and in this dramatic moment, Jim wouldn’t even make eye contact with me, just to acknowledge that some tenderness had taken place. Maybe there wasn’t time for sentimentality, truly, because just as I was going to remark volubly on his remoteness, something went very seriously wrong, something that Houston was not up to predicting. We hadn’t yet done our redundant flight-modeling tests, nor had we hooked up our ventilators, nor had we had any kind of countdown, when the rear thrusters nonetheless ignited, but still there was the scraping of large pieces of lightweight aluminum and flame-resistant heat shields moving into place on the outside of the capsule, and the explosion of combustion down in the engine room, and suddenly we went from however many miles per second we were going into an atmosphere-enhanced slowdown. We went from an interplanetary velocity, as fast as Earth itself hurtles around the sun, down to a couple thousand kilometers per hour. Everything that was not Velcro’d down in the cabin went shooting up into the soup of compressed oxygen, and we strained against our straps, and then, miracle of miracles, we heard sound! We heard sound! Earsplitting sound! Outside the capsule! We heard sound because, ahead of schedule, and without catching on fire, we had been captured by the Red Planet, kids, and this meant sound again! Ours was no longer a vacuum! There was, well, a lot of carbon dioxide, methane, and some nitrogen and stuff, not a lot of oxygen, but who’s quibbling? We were falling into an atmosphere! We had made it somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 million miles across nothingness, and we were in the blissful soup of atmosphere. Martian atmosphere! And there was another sound, besides the aerobrakes firing and the hull shuddering, and that was a sharp yelp of pain from downstairs, which was, apparently, José being thrown violently across the capsule as we began again to experience the great mystery of gravity. Because even this far out, where we were just being captured by that perpetual falling, which is orbit, even here the little Martian gravitrons were interacting with our gravitrons, and as a result it was becoming temporarily possible to feel ourselves in these chairs, to feel our limbs. What this conferred on me, after the months of zero g’s, was an intense nausea. It was a good thing that we didn’t have the ventilators on, because Jim, who was holding on to a throttle between us on the off chance that he was going to have to do something, leaned over and vomited. I had the zero-gravity reaction to this: now there was going to be vomit drifting around the capsule, like there had been vomit the first couple of days. But the amazing quality of Jim’s leftover, semi-dehydrated breakfast was that it kind of
spilled
. What a novelty! And I would have stopped to consider all this myself, had I not been vomiting.

There was a deceleration gradient (we were in search of a velocity of 9.8 m/s
²
), and Jim gathered himself up from his slumped-over position as the hull of the
Excelsior
shuddered again, to make sure we were on track for the stable orbit that Houston had planned for us. The surface of the planet rushed up to meet us.

“You want to give a yell to José?” Jim said to me, somewhat nervously.

On the intercom, I called to our science officer.

“All right down there?”

No answer.

“José, are you there?”

Still nothing.

“I think he’s down.” I got on the keyboard and typed the message to Houston:
Code 8
,
science officer failed to buckle in
. This was followed by some important acronyms that José himself would have used in this message. There wasn’t going to be a chance to get downstairs, however. Not in the midst of the landing. Not unless I manufactured one. “You want me to go look?”

“We’ll go around half a revolution to make sure we’re where we’re supposed to be. Let’s make sure we’re secure.”

I don’t think I have commented at any length on the tiny moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. They are scarcely moons in the normal sense, and some people think they are just hunks of Mars that got blown out by some impact. And yet from my earliest days of training for the Mars mission, I have had an unnatural excitement about seeing Phobos. Phobos goes around the Martian equator, more or less, which our orbit was not far from, and so I was keenly hoping we would have a chance to see Phobos up close. It orbits the Red Planet every seven hours and thirty-nine minutes. And while I was thinking about what to do with José, watching for the moon was what I was able to do. Phobos, kids, is not exactly circular, by any means; it looks like the handset of an old-fashioned telephone, oblong, and as we swept by it, under it, my first thought was how good it would be for some variety of advertising. No doubt a Sino-Indian conglomerate will come up with just this sort of plan, and they will get a telegenic actor to announce it, perhaps broadcasting the message on the side of Phobos itself, for the eventual Mars colonists to see:
The little Martian moon Phobos is just how you want to feel about your investments as you approach your retirement—modest, predictable, reliable. That’s why we named the company after it. Call a Phobos financial planner today. Phobos, a world apart
.

“How beautiful,” I said, “the unseen majority of things in the universe,” pointing out Phobos to Jim, but he was still performing calculations and typing status updates. It didn’t seem long before my clipboard lit up with a text message from Houston, asking for more details about the injury.

“Okay, go have a look,” Jim said. “We’re as stable as we’re going to be before the touchdown.”

José was right about the banister, in fact. It was tacky with some foreign substance, though I couldn’t precisely identify this compound. It could have been anything at this point. Long-term confinement brought out these residues.

When I rappelled myself down to José’s floor, meanwhile, I confronted a very disturbing sight. A sight that would have limitless and unforeseeable implications for the mission. José, that is, lay on the floor with his leg dislocated to a remarkable angle, an impossible angle. And the belt loop of his reentry gear was hooked around a gaffing tool that was intended to be used to load out the ultralight on the surface. He didn’t respond to my repeated attempts to rouse him. I depressed the nearby intercom on button.

“He’s unconscious. And it looks like he has a broken leg.”

“You kidding? How the hell?” Jim’s tinny voice rebounded.

“You saw him. He wasn’t prepared. Better get Arnie. I’m going to go ahead and revive him.”

However, that wasn’t what I did immediately. There was an odd peacefulness in the cargo bay. I considered my surroundings. I noticed that José’s grow-light garden was doing very well. There were even blossoms on some of the tomato plants. We could have fresh tomatoes on Mars in a few weeks. An unimaginable treat. Maybe soybeans too. I took the opportunity, in that silence, to say a little prayer for José, because even though I disliked the man, I didn’t want to see him disabled on Mars, or unable to contribute further to the mission. Did God even answer prayers from space? Maybe we were out of bounds. Nonetheless, it was in a spirit of gentleness and affection for the sleeping wretch that I drifted over to the first aid station and fetched out the smelling salts.

He was not very happy when he woke, that was for sure, and based on the cries of pain, it was evident that José was not in shock, which, in any event, is oversold as a medium of pain relief. José resorted to a syntactical bonanza of Spanish-language curses.

“What happened?” he kept asking. “What happened?”

“I think we hit the orbit very hard, and a lot sooner than we were supposed to, and everything that was loose went flying. You were one of the loose things.”

“Orbit?” he said.

“Orbit.”

“You mean?”

The implications of this question took a moment to sink in.

“You know where you are, right? You’re on the
Excelsior
, and we’re on our way to Mars.”

He stared at me. In disbelief.

“Jim, are you hearing this?” I called.

From intercom: “I’m hearing it.”

There was a penlight in the first aid box. I took it out and shone it in his eyes. The pupils were
not
entirely responsive to the stimulus. Not really a good sign.

“How much pain are you in?”

I went to touch the leg, and José began crying out immediately.

“I’m going to administer an injection, José,” I said, “which will help with the pain. But we’re going to have to try to splint your leg a little later. I have to warn you that that is not going to be very pleasant.” José blanched at what was taking place, as though he were uncertain about all of it, and yet he still held out his arm. I squeezed a little OxyPlus out of the hypodermic to make sure there were no air bubbles, and then I dosed him up. He went slack within seconds. So I lugged him and his gravity-enhanced bulk up from cargo and strapped him to his chair, where he should have been anyway, and climbed back up to command and control.

At 2000 hours, the
Pequod
also went into orbit, not long after the
Geronimo
, but I was busy elsewhere. It was a long twelve hours of sitting with José and his mangled leg, asleep and awake, attempting to keep his leg immobile, explaining a lot of things to him, explaining that we were close personal friends and had been since early on in the years of training that it took to prepare for the Mars mission, explaining that he had an exalted position in the mission, as science officer on the first capsule that was going to touch down on the planet. I also had to brush him up on some recent global history, like the fact that NAFTA, by virtue of repeated cycles of inflation and stagflation and the exporting of all manufacturing jobs to Asia, was no longer the economic powerhouse he remembered.

I explained to José my personal theory that the Mars mission was the last great story that the NAFTA signatories had remaining in their arsenal. It was the good yarn we could tell the people of the world. Now that the Sino-Indian economic cooperative pact was in control of the show, their profiteers were able to engage in the kind of miserly fiscal policy that would
prevent
a government from the spending necessary to promote aggressive space travel. The rich wanted to get richer, I counseled José, and so the rich didn’t approve of the profligacy of a Mars mission, especially one involving
three ships
and no less than twelve additional preflight unmanned missions in order to deliver various kinds of modules that would be required by the crew when it touched down. The Mars mission was the last act of the leadership in Washington as we knew it, I told him. There was a Hail Mary desperation to our labors. That was why so many things had gone wrong, that was why the aerobrakes had fired without warning, that was why his guess was as good as mine if we would make it to the surface, and forget about getting home.

If we controlled the surface of Mars, I told José, meaning NAFTA in general, or the USA in particular, then we controlled the next phase of human development, of human history. The winnings accrue to the winners, I told him, but we had been on a losing streak of a decade or more. We’d lurched from one ill-advised police action to another. As to the mission itself, I said, “All you need to know is that we lost one astronaut, and we’re not going to lose another.”

“What?” José said, groggy with the pain.

“You don’t remember?”

“Starting to come back,” he said. Which meant it wasn’t.