The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  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:

  GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: 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.

  And what was the furnace of that explosion like? The furnace of that explosion was like all great light shows. If your planetarium remains open in these times of endless night, then you are lucky, but, if not, perhaps you remember going to the planetarium in days past, in order to smoke various controlled substances and to listen to the thunder of the genre known as dead girlfriend, while the lasers etched out their predictable patterns above. Would you require another manifestation of the light show? While it is true that all fireworks displays resemble all other fireworks displays, especially those mounted in hard-luck small towns, there is still something earnest and generous about these fireworks displays, because they are the light of munitions put to good use, the light of munitions tamed. How else might this light of munitions be used? This light might be used for ill, as in the carpet-bombing of Central Asian cities by computer-controlled drones. This conflagration illuminates the night in a startling way, but is that what you want lighting your pockmarked highways and your blown bridges? It’s a transient light, as all exploding things are transient, unless perhaps your explosion is of the nuclear sort, fission or fusion, of which only eleven have ever been exploded above ground in combat, and the most recent of these of a very modest sort, with deaths only in the tens of thousands. And while there are all kinds of treaties preventing this particular kind of light, nuclear fission, it continues to persist, even to proliferate, likewise the unpleasant suntan that goes with it, as well as the thyroid tumors and the relentless nightmares. What is the best of all kinds of light? Well, the best of all the varieties of light, since you ask, is the so-called Big Bang, coming from the perturbance within (and upon) an infinitely hot and dense speck that exists in what can only be referred to as the Nothingness or otherwise as the Time Before. This something in the middle of the Nothingness, this infinitely hot and dense singularity, because of a perturbance within and without, experiences some kind of rapid transformation at incalculably hot temperatures, and it commences the transition from infinitely dense to something quite a bit larger and more diffuse, and this light, which is, as far as we know, the light that has in turn generated all other light, it flings material far into its recesses and emptinesses, which open up in all directions, and some of this material, this gas and matter, begins to coalesce into constituent lights, which are themselves imitations of the originary light, the expanding and expansive light, as all lights are fragmentary and pale imitations of some preliminary light, and around these lights spheroids begin to accumulate, some of them rocky, some of them icy, some of them gaseous, some of them possessed of spectacular rings, but it should be noted that all these nightlights, scattered, as they say, like grains of sand across what is, these are all imitative, and not terribly successful as such, but their light is adequate, in millions upon millions of cases, to permit the kinds of chemical processes that bring about organic compounds. What these orbiting spheroids require, when life is present, is light itself, and all light has a backwardly gazing tonality to it, recalling, as it does, the originary light, and so despite the fact that great destructive force necessarily occasions light, any kind of light is nonetheless the sign that some kind of something is mitigating or flying in the face of the much more frequent and much more permanent Nothingness.

  And so the explosion in the sky over the American Southwest was light, was continuous with the history of light as shown above, and light can’t be bad, and light involves the transmutation of some kind of energy into some other kind of energy, and there is poetry to this, but occasionally there is also tragedy, at least if, for example, you were watching the light from the ground, if you were well-informed enough to know that you needed to be watching, or if you were one of the people in the desert of the Southwest who happened to be looking up at the sky, or who had a telescope or very good binoculars, or who just knew what was going on, you might have thought of this turn of events as tragic, but properly considered it was just another example of light as a celebration of not-darkness, and in this case, perhaps there could be plenty of good involved, because a badly contagious astronaut was going to be obliterated in this particular light show, as well as most of the metal casing in which he was housed at the time of the explosion, and this was good, from a public-health perspective, as were the extraordinarily violent temperature extremes that were involved in the reentry of the ERV; these could be responsible for killing off potentially lethal infectious agents, referred to in some circles as military weapons systems.

  The only outstanding question, when the explosion was considered as a field of possibilities upon which one might, for example, wager, if one were part of a national gambling syndicate that gambled on the outcomes of political events and natural disasters, was: whether the ERV was high enough in its flight path to be completely incinerated or blown apart in the upper atmosphere, as was to be hoped. Because a large, far-flung trail of debris would constitute a civic emergency, not to mention a national security problem, even more so if, as appeared to be the case, the debris field included large portions of a sovereign NAFTA cosignatory that was, nonetheless, trying to minimize border incursions from the North.

  The staff at NASA was monitoring the path of the ERV very carefully and they were satisfied, until the last moment, that it was on a northwesterly course to make a reasonable splashdown in the North Atlantic. A splashdown, though long outmoded in the landing protocols of a NASA that was now smaller and more efficient, allowed NASA the resources to go to the planet Mars itself and to avoid building wings onto the ERV. With splashdown, you could design a very simple reentry craft, and it could be kept away from population centers for a time. But NASA, or the better part of NASA (except for one middle manager who was at the moment of the explosion on his way down the corridor to liberate the one returning astronaut, Colonel Jed Richards, by toggling the auto-destruct emergency switch), was well into a collective delusion about the ERV, and into the midst of their shared delusion came a scrim of bright white fuzz on the screens that depicted the craft itself, and this white fuzz was followed by instantaneous blackness, which was followed by an absence of radio transmission, and, according to radar that tracked the craft, a multitude of pieces of the ERV, instead of one large, easily tracked ERV, rained across the screen, and many of these pieces vanished in front of the personnel manning the radar, until there were only a few minor bits of the ERV that were capable of being tracked, and these were falling out of the sky at the usual accelerating rate of thirty-two feet per second per second.

  There was no device manufactured by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that could track, from the ground, the remaining mind of Colonel Jed Richards. While there were devices that could, and did, track his heart rate, his blood pressure, his galvanic skin response, brain activity, temperature, even the condition of his bowels (not very good), these devices were useless after the advent of the explosion. If it were possible to track the mind of Richards, what would NASA have learned? In the explosion, the last of Richards’s mind, however it was able to operate, was lost, and with it all the details of the way in which Colonel Jed Richards effected his departure from this world. Did he use some inflammatory device, like the onboard welder, to blow up the liquid oxygen reserve
s and therefore likewise to ignite some of the solid fuel that remained, which was meant to effect a few gentle booster firings if necessary? These things would long be unknown, despite a blue-ribbon commission that was soon to be put into motion.

  However: the mind of Colonel Jed Richards could be said, at the instant of the explosion, to have come to approximate, in terms of its brutal monomania, the infinite singularity of the universe prior to expansion. It had become the density of a consciousness that was capable of one last gesture, of saying I am, and almost nothing else, a perceiving consciousness, otherwise devoid of characteristics. Perhaps, in retrospect, there was muscular memory of prior cerebral function, and this muscular memory was able to ignite the oxygen tank, even to plan its ignition. Whichever Richards was in charge—the strictly muscular Richards, the proto-Richards, the amoebic Richards, the particularity of Richards—the explosion, notwithstanding, did take place, outside of NASA’s jurisdiction, and most of the ERV and its occupant were incinerated above the Sonoran Desert.