The Four Fingers of Death

  Jim fell upon the other man without mercy, and as he went to grab Brandon’s razor with a hand, a hand mostly without feeling from the night spent outdoors, the possibility of injury was not of particular concern. When he was cut, the blood poured forth from his hand as elsewhere. He could see the effect of himself on the other man. Still, he could see how he inspired fear, and it made him only more murderous, and having flung the offending blade free, he went as to pick up the other man, who had no more fight in him, nor even the strength to pull at Jim’s outer layer or his hemorrhaging flesh. There was a paradoxical tenderness in the moment, as if deep within Jim was a sense that it would be possible, at last, to do this thing without violence, without some display of machismo. He could do it without, for example, eating Brandon’s heart, or making a stew out of him, or stealing back my finger from Brandon, because these were unnecessary, because all Brandon had to do was to give in to this place of death. Brandon had to become one with the tendency of death to pool in the valleys of Mars, likewise upon its mountaintops. Brandon submitted to being carried to the edge of the Valles Marineris, to one of its most imposing rises, because Brandon was, at this point, so close to being congruent with the reality of Martian death as to be nearly indistinguishable from it. And then Brandon submitted, summarily, without warning, as Jim heaved his body from the top of the cliff, nearly four miles up. There was a little bit of stumbling at the last moment. Jim didn’t want to fall into the ravine himself. But he also wanted to watch. It was reflexive. The thrill of gravity at a moment like that.

  Brandon didn’t twist, gyrate, cry out, or anything of this sort. His was a smooth death. He fell with a remarkable lack of resistance. He could have been a sack of grapefruit or a pile of wet towels. He fell, and then he was dead. He carried a little piece of me with him.

  Jim turned from the edge of the cliffside, as soon as he assured himself that his thirst for this moment was now slaked, and then he began his long walk.

  What simple, uncomplicated perceptions were his during the march that followed? Were even the simplest grammars still relevant to his primitive consciousness? We can assume that sunlight, glorious and perfect, which, despite its cosmic radiation, was still a lovely thing on Mars, was part of his sensory perceptions. Jim was happy at the appearance of sunlight, each and every day, after the nights he spent out in the elements, trying to stay warm in his Martian jumpsuit, which was leaking oxygen and which properly ought to have killed him days before. This fact—that he ought to have been dead—was probably lost on Jim. The sunlight warmed him, and the sunlight was good. Trudging along the Ius Chasma for days, without food or water, even this was somehow satisfying, because he became, in a way, part of the Ius Chasma. In different kinds of light, the canyon was perceptibly different, and there were layers of bedrock that he hadn’t seen the day before. He didn’t recognize this, but he recognized that the canyon belonged to him somehow; he had assumed ownership. The danger of it was like his own menace, and this was reassuring. Eventually, he repaired the ultralight to a barely workable condition and traversed the outflow portion of the Valles Marineris until he crash-landed it somewhere outside of base camp. Which is to say that he walked in. A representative of the walking dead. There were only these simple commands coming from the back brain, keep going, don’t stop, keep going. It’s fair to say now, kids, that there was some kind of homing beacon in him, and I employ the word home with the full sense of its meaning.

  I was in the power station when he finally turned up, dragging himself, dragging a leg that looked as though it would not stay attached to him for another five steps, and bleeding, garishly, in many spots, bleeding chiefly from the eye sockets. It was the most shocking illness I’d seen in my life, and I have seen some horrible things. I have seen what weaponry can do; I have watched men drown in their own wounds. I don’t know how to describe what I saw. I am still trying to figure out what I saw. It was as if Jim had emerged from the Dark Ages, from some savage and merciless eon, and when he thundered on the door, and I attempted to admit him, I was not really sure that I ought to have done so. Because I had given myself over to thinking that it was all about the germ, that the Mars mission was now all about the germ, no matter what they told us. And I didn’t know if the germ was communicable, and I didn’t want the germ. But once I saw him, and I saw the confusion on his face, a confusion that plainly wondered what had happened, what had become of him (when his intentions had once been so noble), I had no choice but to admit him.

  He didn’t need to say anything. I knew enough to know what he felt. And I filled a bucket with water that was warm from the reactor, and I found a rag, and I began to try to bathe his wounds, the many, many wounds on the sallow, fetid body of Captain Jim Rose. He lay there, soundlessly, on the floor. Whenever a wound was rinsed, a fresh gurgle of corpuscular material seemed to bubble forth from it. I felt his forehead, kids, and his forehead was cold, horribly cold.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked him. “Is there something I can do for you? Do you want me to talk to NASA and tell them what’s happened?”

  Jim said nothing.

  “Do you even know what’s happened? Because I’m not sure I know what’s happened.” And I didn’t know. I had my surmises. But I had not yet assembled the dossier of reports and video footage and satellite images that would enable me to re-create the end of the Mars mission for you kids. I was still mulling over the crisscrossing of disinformation that was being fed to us by a government agency that was so wound up in the budgetary conflicts and the rapacious needs of independent contractors that it couldn’t give a straight story to any taxpayer, no matter how earnest his entreaties.

  Jim managed, with some great effort, to struggle to his feet, and he wandered back and forth in the control room of the power station, as though he were looking for something specific, even though I couldn’t imagine what it was. He would linger in front of some computer screen, gazing upon it as though he had never seen a computer screen before, and then he would press a bloody palm down on some surface, look at the handprint, and then in his disturbed way, he would begin wandering again. As if he couldn’t stop. He seemed stunned by an array of tools that was stored on one wall. He looked at a whisk broom for a while. There was a gas mask, and for a second it seemed that he was going to try to fit the gas mask onto his face, to replace that cracked helmet and visor he’d left out on the front step.

  Then he found the Taser.

  Somehow Jim still knew very well what the Taser was for. Not only did he know what the Taser was for, but he knew how to set it on the setting that would inflict the maximum amount of damage. It occurred to me, kids, and I am not proud of saying it, that he was going to use the Taser on me. My survival skills had become uppermost. I was working hard at staying out of trouble, but now trouble had come to my door.

  “Jim, pal, you’re not going to use that on me? Are you? There’s no reason you’d want to use that on me, right? I guess I have only a few reasons left to want to stick around, or maybe just one reason, and that reason is Ginger. I was just thinking maybe it would be possible for me to get back to Earth so I could see my cat, Havoc, and Ginger, and maybe I could watch Ginger graduate or something like that. I mean, I understand that I have not been the best member of the Mars mission, and I have not always leaped to defend your plans, your philosophies, and all of that, but I think we have been friends for a long time, and I would like to ask you to think carefully about what you’re about to do.”

  He closed in on me, kids, he backed me toward the door that led into the inner sanctum where the graphite-moderated uranium was percolating away, and I didn’t really want to go in there. I hadn’t really gone in there yet, and I didn’t want to start now. I was tired of all the science. I was tired of it all. Jim held the Taser in one bloody hand, and he came toward me, and I was going to do what I could to disarm him, but my heart wasn’t even up to the fight.

  And then, he came right up close to me to, well, it didn’t have a
nything to do with the Taser, kids. He dropped the Taser. It wasn’t that kind of moment. It wasn’t the kind of moment when a man does another man wrong. It was the kind of moment when a person kisses another person. Which is quite the opposite of someone doing another man wrong. So the weary, lost Jim Rose, who had almost nothing left in his wracked body, all but emptied even of his soul, moved, as if drifting some inches above the floor, near to me. And his face came close to mine, and his lips were cracking and bleeding, and his poor eyes had tears in them, at least I prefer to think that his eyes had tears in them, rather than just droplets of blood. And he collected me into his arms, as I sort of tried to do the same to him, in a state of astonishment, and then he was kissing me, the kiss of death, maybe, but a kiss nonetheless, a kiss for a pair of men who were expiring for lack of love, for lack of the things that connect one person to another. Jim held me, and I held him, and his lips were one with my lips; I expect before Jim I didn’t really know what kissing was for, or: I was so used to disappointing people, disappointing women, disappointing everyone, that I often forgot to kiss because I didn’t want the recipients of my meager affections to feel bad, because that was what I thought I brought to these kisses, a lot of conflicted feeling, and a lot of regret, and a lot of destitution; and yet the kind of destitution I had then, back on the home planet, was nothing like what I had here; this new destitution was grander, was the kind that made an African living on a dollar a day and perishing of malaria and HIV seem fortunate, and this despite the fact that my destitution cost billions upon billions, so that men (and women) such as myself could come here to this godforsaken place and rot from the inside out; kids, let me tell you, if you want a kiss you will remember, a kiss that you can take with you to tell your children and grandchildren about, have one of those kisses that is about how hopeless your situation is; add to this the fact that you are likely never to see again the person you are kissing; now this makes for a rather spectacular kiss; these are the moments that we stick around for, and apparently Jim had stuck around for this, for the two of us crying like we were teenagers, and holding each other, and I still had a lot of, well, a lot of his blood all over me when he pulled himself away, and I could see the complex of things going through his face, as though his face were a projector, and these were slides projected upon him: photographs of his past, of his children, of his first wife and his second wife, of the myriad places he had traveled; I watched as these stills were removed from the carousel of slides in him, so that he was no longer their steward.

  While I was recovering from the embrace, while I was living through the awkward aftermath of it, the time when we were no longer embracing, he stood in the open door, allowing the frigid wind in, evacuating all the oxygen from the interior and wailing like some blues harp player summoning a distant freight train. As I made for the door, to close it, I watched as Jim picked up the Taser and struggled out onto the front step, and because of my abstraction, it didn’t occur to me that it was there, with his last bit of energy, that he would use the Taser on himself. It was nearly inaudible, because he could scarcely any longer groan with pain, not in the condition he was in. He gave it a good shot, on the way to delivering the lethal dose, and this seemed herculean under the circumstances. He probably didn’t need such a large charge in order to be brought down. Upon the Martian soil.

  I went to him, naturally. I looked at the life-support information on the little LCD screen on his wrist. I put my head on his chest. But I knew there was little I could do. Jim Rose was dead. I decided to drag him by the boots to a spot where I could bury him later in the day. When I had cleaned myself up. This I did. I hauled him to an igneous boulder adjacent, and then I went and fetched a blanket to lay upon him. I held it down with some Martian rocks. The discharging of tasks and responsibilities was keeping me going. I felt like I was doing some good. And that was enough. Who was there left to tell?

  I passed a long evening filling my veins with things from the first aid kit. While I was doing that, I pondered a next move. Have I properly indicated the route back to Earth in my diary? The route back to Earth relied upon our being able to blast off in a reassembled ERV, built, in a stripped-down version, from a modular portion of the Excelsior, and some spare pieces, with available fuel from the planet Mars. A lot of consideration, in the planning stages of the Mars mission, went into the discussion of when exactly to send along the spare parts, the extra fuel. One school of thought had it that you sent the orbiter a few weeks before the astronauts were intended to return. If for some reason the astronauts needed to abort the mission early, ahead of schedule, in this schematic there was no chance that the Martian colonists would be able to get off the planet.

  Additionally, there was the oblong Martian orbit, and the fact that at its farthest elliptical point, in its six hundred—odd days around the sun, it was awfully far from Earth. The amount of food and supplies needed was significantly higher if you were flying an orbiter 100 million miles back instead of 36 million. However, an emergency was an emergency. I had to secure permission from NASA to break the seal on the return fuel stockpile and begin assembling the ERV. Which, I admit, was not terribly likely. But if my assumptions were valid, as they later proved to be, that Jim’s trip out to Valles Marineris had not ended felicitously for any of our antagonists, then it was the case that there were only a very few Martian colonists left whose blessing I required. So I attempted to radio to the greenhouse.

  Meanwhile, it was only natural to spend some of my spare time in consideration of the germ as well, kids. Because if the germ was communicable, then I was one with the germ, I had the germ in me, how could I not? If the hemorrhagic mess that had been Jim Rose was an example of what the germ was able to bring about in a higher life-form, I had no hope of avoiding the illness. He had embraced me, he had kissed me, I had his blood all over me still, despite my efforts to rinse some of it off in a very short, cold shower with what water was left in the power station.

  The question of when exactly Jim had been infected also troubled me. Had it been when he’d drunk the water out by the Argyre Basin, on that first flight? Or had it been present in him from some earlier point? And was Brandon suffering with it too, when he killed José? Later in the evening, to discuss these and other issues, I again tried to call the greenhouse, again without success. With a newborn Martian child, those two had a lot on their hands, and they just didn’t have time to respond to every communication that came through. I therefore suited up with what must have been one of Abu’s extra jumpsuits. It didn’t fit me well, which perhaps indicated just how much physical wasting had been going on here. I hadn’t eaten in days. I just didn’t much think about food. Another good reason to go over to the greenhouse.

  I took a solar-powered robotic dolly. It wasn’t quick, but the tracks to the greenhouse were well worn down now, which made this, perhaps, one of the first roads on the planet Mars. I didn’t need to have a satellite tracking device to tell me where to go, and no compass would work here. I just followed the tracks, while there was still some light. In due course, I came to the door of the greenhouse. And at this point, you know what happened, right? I found the door locked. I had locked the door myself, according to the wishes of the inhabitants, the last time I was there, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I would be locking myself out. I knocked on the door; I pounded on the door. They had not yet been out, nor had any visitors in the days since delivery.

  It would have been easy enough just to smash the plastic sheeting on the exterior of the greenhouse, but even I would not have gone that far, would not have sacrificed the frail plant life that had been induced to grow there with great difficulty, so I kept pounding. They were ignoring me; this was clear enough. They were hoping I would go away. And I tried calling out, “Arnie, I know you’re in there! Please answer the door!” Imagining that a feminine sensibility might be even more easily swayed by my predicament, I tried Laurie too: “Laurie, it’s me! Jed! Please! I have things I need to discuss with you!”


  It was hard to hear with the helmet on, but I thought, at last, I heard some commotion within. Arnie’s voice shouted through the door.

  “Jed, I’m afraid I can’t let you in.”

  “What do you mean you can’t let me in?” I shouted through the muffling of the helmet.

  “There’s the danger of infection, Jed. We have a newborn here, who has no immunological defense. Imagine what could happen to this newborn. She hasn’t been exposed to any Earth diseases at all. Except what insignificant bacteria we managed to bear with us into this nearly sterile environment. We don’t have any inoculations to give her, and we can’t allow her to be in contact with anyone who might be a vector of contagion.”

  “What makes you think that I am?”

  “Jed, we have been briefed on everything that has happened on Mars in the last few days.”

  “You’ve what?”

  “When situations like this become complicated, it becomes important to go where the competence is. Laurie and I were never entirely comfortable with all of Jim’s Mars First! business. We were just trying to get along with everyone else, since we were going to live here for some time. At this point, our job seems to be to survive, and that’s what we’re going to continue doing.”

  “And you think I want to get in the way of that reasonable goal?” I said.

  “Jed,” Arnie said, “we know that the bacteria is genuine. I have tried to harvest some from around the surfaces where Brandon slept earlier, and from around the various waste depositories, and in concert with people back home, I have managed to see some slides under the microscope. And I don’t recognize it as anything I have ever seen before. It’s very difficult with the tools I have on hand to identify the mechanisms that make it so deadly, but I’m still trying. The interesting thing about the bacteria, Jed, is that you’d expect it, or them, to be traditional extremophile bacteria, bacteria that can thrive in any kind of location, like in volcanic steam vents or on Antarctica. Maybe you would expect them to have features like archaea, you know, different from regular bacteria, such as we experience them back on Earth. But oddly enough, they do have traditional bacterial structures. They are rod shaped like other bacilli. I’m pretty sure they’re gram-positive. They have just somehow managed to adapt to the extreme coldness and dryness of life on Mars. It’s as if they are waiting around for life to come, just so that they can work upon it according to their rather hostile impulses.”