The Four Fingers of Death

  “I remember the Ownership Projects in Las Vegas,” José said. “I remember when there was the Compulsive Gamblers and Games of Chance Act—that’s what it was called, right? For a while after, the city government constructed those buildings for people who had lost everything. Anyone remember all this?” The other seven astronauts were all but silenced at the wincing nostalgia of José’s reverie. Perhaps he had, once upon a time, sought to conceal the modesty of his origins beneath a haze of acronyms, but not any longer, kids. “You know, my dad was a naturalized citizen, and once he got his papers, he went into the casinos and he didn’t come out. Not for many, many years. I remember when the authorities seized the house that we’d bought. My mother bought it with the money she made working at the Pompeii. There was a foreclosure date, and an eviction date, and then we just had to leave. Anyhow, once we were bounced out, as I’m recalling it, we got a small apartment in the Ownership Projects, which we shared with my uncle and his family. It should have been stifling, and maybe it really was, but the thing I remember is how the electricity was so bad out there that you really could see the stars, from right outside the projects. My cousin, the one who later was shot, we used to lie out on the lawn at night—it was just a patch of loose rock—and look at the stars. And I used to say to him, ‘Not a day past eighteen.’ That was our pact, that we wouldn’t stay in those Ownership Projects a day past our eighteenth birthdays. The place I aimed to go, and this is what I told him, was to those stars.”

  “That’s a beautiful story,” Arnie said, patient and gentle. “Do you have any more-recent memories?”

  This was a leading question. It probed at the mystery of NASA’s plans. The government’s plans. There were, and had always been, things we didn’t know, and this leading question intimated as much.

  “In fact, I had this whole long memory yesterday,” José said. “But I’m not sure if it was a genuine memory. It might have been a daydream or something. It was while I was still in bed. Anyone else here found that their dreams on Mars are a whole heck of a lot more vivid? Anyway, I remember that there was some kind of asteroid or something, before I was born, and this asteroid had plunged onto the Antarctic shelf, and the guys back at NASA were always obsessed with it. In fact, at one point someone let me look at this microscope and see what they had found in the asteroid, and what they had found was this frozen extraterrestrial bacteria. They were really sure that the asteroid was from Mars, was maybe even a part of Mars that had been blasted from the planet somehow. From some asteroid strike. This stuff, the NASA scientists said, was liable to still be on Mars, this bacteria. They were sure about this, in my daydream, and they were beginning to do some experiments to see what kind of properties the bacteria had.”

  Now, I know that I personally had set down my flatware and was waiting expectantly, hoping that José’s faulty memory would not, for example, reconstruct that he had once refused to tell me anything about the fateful bacteria, the bacteria that he had so kept to himself for the first part of the mission. Perhaps predictably, this was the moment when Brandon Lepper, sullen and uncommunicative throughout the course of the meal, chose to interrupt José. There was an almost palpable sense of dread as this miscreant, over whom a cloud of suspicion hovered, spoke.

  “Listen, buddy,” he said with a wheedling familiarity, “I don’t know if you are alert to what you’re saying, and I’m guessing you’re not, but this is classified-type stuff. Most of the people at this table don’t need to know.”

  José looked up with a naive astonishment. Yes, it was evident that the bacteria, whatever else it was, was one of the mnemonic keys to his recovery from concussion. And it was evident who would wish to stanch the flow of José as he was now expressing himself. Arnie leaped into the awkward silence that followed, to defend José.

  “Maybe it’s a reasonable treatment plan for José to try to think through all the memories, through every precious one of them, Brandon, if you don’t mind.”

  “I do mind,” he said. “And you can stay the hell out of it.”

  “I have no intention of staying out of it, and I’m not threatened by your tone, if that’s what you’re after. You may have threatened some other people around here, but you will not do so again. Not while I’m around.”

  “Lepper,” Jim Rose said, throwing down his own flatware, rising up from the meager folding chair so that it toppled behind him, “you’re way out of line.”

  “I am? Says who exactly? I don’t know about the rest of you,” Brandon said, “but I was recruited to carry out a mission. Hundreds if not thousands of global citizens would have given everything they had in order to fly this mission. I gave everything I had. Therefore, I’m still intending to do the job that I was hired to do. Because I believe in duty.”

  “And what,” I tried to break in, “is the nature of your—”

  “I don’t have to listen to this,” Brandon continued. “I don’t have to have my character called into question by a bunch of edenic nitwits who want to drink wine and watch the plants grow. A couple of weeks, you’ll all be dead from exposure, and then you’ll all get your memorial broadcasts back home, where they interview your neighbors and talk about how poignant it was that you saved coyotes from the brink of extinction. Well, fuck yourselves, I say. I came to open the mystery of this place, this world, to take it back home where something can be done with it, something practical, for our national economy.”

  His plate, when he flung it, with its rehydrated chipped beef, clattered across the greenhouse, colliding at last with the lightweight petrochemical sheeting that sealed off the place. This in itself was dangerous, because had he managed to puncture the sealant or the construction material, we were all going to start choking pronto, not to mention it was going to get pretty cold. Before any of us could take note of the situation, however, he was gone, having commandeered the helmet nearest, from the row of dusty gray globes. In the embarrassed gulp that followed, it was Steve who said:

  “Uh, the rover!”

  By the time we understood the perfidy of Brandon’s intentions, we could hear the grinding of its ignition. Jim and I raced out, into the howling Martian wastes, and watched as the rover bounced off in the direction of nothing that we knew.

  January 28, 2026

  Let me tell you a few things about the canyon. The Valles Marineris. The great dark place. The planetary bifurcation. Named after the unmanned orbiter that first discovered it more than fifty years ago now, and composed not just of the one fissure, four thousand kilometers long, but also of a whole system of parallel striations and offshoots. So deep that you could stack that famous canyon from Arizona in it a couple of times over. Cliff walls that exceed 14,000 feet running hundreds of miles. Imagine walking up to the edge of a 14,000-foot cliff wall and looking down! And then seeing that the wall extends as far along as you are able to see. Meanwhile, the Valles Marineris is so far across that if you accidentally landed in it, somehow, you could make the mistake of thinking you were on the legitimate surface of the planet, at least until you attempted to hike out of your position and saw, on the horizon, that immensity, that other towering basaltic wall, overlaid with the silent and magisterial geological ages.

  Basaltic, you see, because the Valles Marineris is located in the same general vicinity as a great number of volcanoes. This being just east of the Martian region known as Tharsis. Although the original force that created the canyon was tectonic plate shifting of some kind, it’s also true that something flowed through here, kids, some portion of which was volcanic lava from nearby eruptions. Later, however, there was probably water here too, otherwise how to explain all the collapses. There have been a lot of collapses. They are not infrequent. There are parts of the canyon that, according to the unmanned missions, look like ancient Roman amphitheaters, or those graduated stadia that they use for X-treme lacrosse tourneys, from where portions of the walls, all 14,000 feet of them, came tumbling down.

  Why is the Valles Marineris so important? you as
k. This is the question we have been asking ourselves, ever since the advent of the mysterious bacteria became so vital to the Mars colony, if only because of its recurrence as poetical figure in all our conversations. Originally, as you know, we were scheduled to put down at the South Pole, where, mixed with the liquid dry ice, there would have been plentiful water by Martian standards. Or that, at any rate, is the theory. Instead, we have been attempting the impossible, using makeshift drilling mechanisms to search beneath the topsoil for ice that we can then heat with the by-products of nuclear fission at our reactor. So far it makes for nonpotable water, and there’s not a lot of it, and there’s a little bit of a worry that we’re going to plunder what’s nearby and then we’ll be back to reusing, relentlessly, the water given us for the capsules, which we’ve been heating and reheating, and which is now admixed with all kinds of additives that I for one don’t want to know about. Uremic acid crystals, e.g.

  Why Valles Marineris, indeed. There have been many papers written about the canyon, about the importance of it. I am in a position to spill the beans on certain still-classified documents along these lines, and as you probably suspect, the fact is that the canyon, because of its substantial air pressure, by comparison, and because of its access to a much earlier period of Martian geological history, is likely to harbor frozen water of an early Martian vintage, and, just perhaps, some of this water, in turn, is home to the early Martian life-forms that undoubtedly once lived in it.

  The meteorite that José was alluding to, as I have mentioned earlier, is called by the rather unpoetical name of ALH 84001, kids, and it’s 4.5 million years old, and the deepest layers of the Valles Marineris are, apparently, almost precisely its coeval, and perhaps this is how it came to be that scientists wanted to look in the canyon for sister bacteria, and thus, apparently, the reason for our change of venue.

  The morning after Brandon stole the rover (and we had to drive back to the Excelsior in one of the open Martian cargo transport vehicles, on our ventilators, in not a little bit of danger of freezing solid, since the sun was going over the horizon), I was shaken awake, on my modest bed, by José. He had a kind of mad look in his eye. He was chewing on a piece of chocolate that I had been saving for weeks. Which was irritating. I could hardly complain about the chocolate, when he was so excited about whatever he was to tell me.

  “M. thanatobacillus. M. thanatobacillus!”

  “It’d be less of a mouthful if you weren’t eating my chocolate bar. Those chocolate bars have a three-year shelf life.”

  “The bacteria. That’s the name of the bacteria.”

  “The bacteria from the meteorite?”

  Jim followed him in, carrying a mug of battery acid coffee, and soon the three of us were sitting there, like a Martian coffee klatch. The sun shone in the salmon-fishery sky. All was quiet, except for the hum of capsule life support.

  “It’s a gram-positive bacteria, it has flagella, it has an S-layer, and it can consume phenols, so it’s good for industrial accidents. And it has characteristics almost exactly like Earth bacteria.”

  To Jim, I said, “Are you following?”

  “His memory,” Jim said. Jim’s beard was now moving toward an Old Testament type of tonsorial styling, and he stroked it meditatively when considering the larger implications. You had to try to read into the few abbreviated remarks that did get uttered.

  “Are you implying that we somehow exported our own bacteria to Mars?” I asked.

  “Or bacteria came from somewhere else and was exported to both Earth and Mars through some interstellar transaction,” Jim said.

  “And you remembered all this?” I said to José.

  “And my Social Security number, from back when I was a kid. Not that it will come in handy now.”

  “Nope.”

  I don’t need to go into what Social Security was. Anyway, Social Security is irrelevant to the further revelations of this conversation, because once it was established that José could remember a few things from his past, such as the condition of his financial accounts, the web code of his long-term debt-repayment plan, and the name of his pet snake from childhood, he parted with the following scrap of info from his level-five mission briefings:

  “The thing about the M. thanatobacillus is that, like some other gram-positive types of bacteria, it causes illness. Serious illness. I guess the closest relative would be B. anthracis, or maybe the resistant S. aureus, except that M. thanatobacillus goes into a kind of feeding frenzy in the presence of certain carbon-based life-forms, at least when it’s heated to the right temperature. A temperature that’s rare on Mars. Basically, it causes bodies to sort of… disassemble.”

  “What?” I said.

  “It’s not an airborne type of infection because it doesn’t do well when it’s not really hot, and it stays dormant in the hundred-degree-below-zero-type temperature range. But in a tropical or semitropical environment, like the one you might get in a period of generalized greenhouse emissions, it thrives. It eats its way through bodies.”

  Jim, tugging on his beard: “The flesh-eating germ.”

  José: “Maybe a little bit worse.”

  Jim said, “You’re saying that you were briefed by NASA about coming to Mars in order to harvest cultures of a bacterium that is so dangerous to human life that it causes human bodies to break down upon contact? What would we be using that for?”

  “We’d be using it on our military enemies.”

  “It was a rhetorical question.”

  “I’m guessing,” I said, “that you weren’t informed about which enemies they were talking about.”

  José said, “The critical phase doesn’t happen immediately, the disassembling part. It takes a little while. The gestation of a full-blown infection is several weeks. You have to come in bodily contact with an infected party. It’s not airborne like with B. anthracis, which I guess suggests it can’t be aerosolized, although I don’t really know if they tried that yet.”

  “Where did they do all this research?”

  “I know they let the bacteria infect a sheep farm. They had a population of sheep in a lab they were borrowing from the Kiwis, I think. South Island of New Zealand. It was closer to McMurdo that way, and they could transport the bacteria on military aircraft more easily, while it was in its BDP. They could fly it into the PST bases, Los Angeles, Phoenix, places like that. So they introduced the germ into this sheep population near Dunedin, and the results were grisly. Even though the whole project is need to know, like Brandon was saying. They were going to great lengths to impress on us the kind of precautions we needed to take while mining.”

  “And this is why we’re going into the canyon.”

  “This is why Brandon may be heading there already,” Jim said.

  How did Jim know this? That Brandon was already there? Well, there were homing beacons on the rover, because of the danger of getting lost on Mars (no magnetic field!). It was therefore not hard to track the movement of our lost vehicle. Brandon had likely attempted to strip off the beacons without success. Or perhaps he was simply unconcerned about our tracking him. Brandon needed to drive about four hundred kilometers from our landing zone in the Chryse Planitia to get to the easternmost end of the Valles Marineris, where the evidence of water leaving the canyon was plain for all to see. In fact, he had already taken a couple of exploratory missions to the edge of the canyon, where he had no doubt beheld the 14,000-foot cliff face that I was explaining about earlier. In each of his exploratory maneuvers, Brandon had ventured farther west, according to Jim, coming back at night to his base camp to recharge the rover. He was camping near the remains of an old unmanned mission—there were almost twenty junk sites on Mars, and no shortage of them in Chryse—and he was using some of its solar panels and its old computing equipment while trying to stay warm during the Martian nights.

  What to do about all of this? What to do about Brandon, and how seriously should we take the search for M. thanatobacillus? If he did manage to locate a s
ample of the bacteria, he would then be faced with the problem of returning with it to Earth. With seven of us resisting him, he was going to have a hard time. He couldn’t just walk off with the Earth Return Vehicle and leave the rest of us here.

  “The risk of infection is certainly unappetizing,” Jim said.

  “I think NASA, at the service of the DOD, felt a number of us could be expended in the effort to procure and incubate the bacteria. This loss would be offset by the military application back on Earth,” José said. “And the public-relations part of it would be easy to finesse. Since this is a dangerous mission.”

  “That’s just what Brandon said on the Geronimo, according to Abu,” I said. “And I hate to break the news to you, but he specifically threatened you, José. He was already working hard to cover up the whole story of the military acquisition of the bacteria.”

  José attempted to seem unperturbed.

  “I say let’s fly in there and be ready when he comes. We can take the ultralight, launch it off the cliff wall, which may be why we carried it all this way anyhow. I mean, I don’t have any FAA certification or anything. You guys will have to do the flying. But, come on, I smashed my skull on the fuselage of the damn thing! I feel like I want to get every bit of value out of the ultralight before we leave it sticking out of a dune somewhere.”

  “What do we do with him when we find him?” I asked.

  “We leave him,” Jim said.

  We didn’t give the implications of it a second thought, I’m ashamed to say. The three of us agreed. The Mars colony would do what human beings had done for the entirety of their species on the home planet, sacrifice one another in the pursuit of public safety, that lofty goal. We obviously felt we had no choice. But this is what the human animal and his primate forebears have always done. Beat on chest! Thump the forest floor with stick! Grunt threateningly, and if the interloper does not desist from his attempts to seize your local tree canopy, tear the interloper limb from limb and leave the body parts, and especially the entrails, in obvious places as a lesson. All wars are territorial wars; remember this, no matter what anyone tells you.