The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  “Hell’s bells, Harpocrates 7, what’s going on up there? Ah, that is, this is CapCom MUC, do you read? Over.”

  Gordo had been stationed in the Aboriginal flats of Muchea, Australia. I paused my helmsmanship to picture his Cretaceous forehead amassed over his bright blue eyes. Gordo’s was the last friendly voice I’d ever hear. I decided to recompense him with a few words.

  “Pitch is a little sluggish,” said I. “Over.”

  “Roger that, Harpocrates 7, but why are you changing vector?”

  “Africa was so much greener than I imagined,” sighed I. “And so big. While Europe was a piddling peninsula. It is hard to believe that it was to be von Lüth’s Thousand-Year Reich.”

  “Harpocrates 7, I do not understand, I do not copy, over.”

  “Now, Australia. Such fevered red clouds. It is remarkable, remarkable.”

  “Roger that, we’ve got a doozy of a dust storm down here. But if we sit here and talk about the weather, they’re going to kill me. You’re going to need to switch to automatic pilot. Copy? Over.”

  “To see such sights before I leave feels meaningful.”

  “Harpocrates 7, did you say leave? Negative, negative. Say again. Over.”

  I elected not to say again. Onward to Shepard in Kauai, Hawaii; in a tone suggesting he’d rather like to chest-butt me again, he asked me, more or less, to quit goofing around, no one was amused. Then Grissom in Point Arguello, California; he had a gruff voice and used it to ensure I got the message that he’d knock my block off when he saw me next, which he never would. Then Glenn in Corpus Christi, Texas; he’d held his poker face since his blow-up, and he stuck with it, deadpanning Mission Control’s single imperative, once, twice, ten times, twenty.

  It was far too little effort offered much too late. For forty minutes I’d coasted across the bottomless pit of nightside Earth, where all pasts and all futures were told in accelerated theater. Earth began black, casualty to countless Hiroshimas, white strikes of lightning being thrown by Orion and Pleiades, until a blazing crescent bubbled like lava along the contour, our planet in angry flux. A blue band erupted; it was water tossed onto a fire, the world being reborn under the steam of a primordial morning, from which crawled the latest food-chain principals. For that epoch of time—eight minutes by the dashboard clock—all was well. My poison presence had not yet been invented, and so scurried animals in their savage silence, their fungal multiplications, their clean exchanges of death, before apes got a clue, before twigs became guns, before men had the bright idea to salt the soil with soot and grow Millennialists.

  Electric lights fired from daybreak civilizations like flaming arrows.

  I looked away, and instead finished positioning the capsule with its nose toward Earth, the angle least conducive to reentry.

  Carpenter picked me up again as I finished an eight-minute race across America. He sounded, if you’ll allow an understatement, wide awake.

  “Harpocrates 7, this is Cape Canaveral, Mission Control. We are asking you to abort mission. Repeat: abort mission and go to autopilot. Do you copy? Over.”

  Oh, I copied. Second orbit: time for Phase Two.

  “Harpocrates 7, we’re not reading any ionized plasma, but if you can’t communicate, switch to the Morse Code system. Repeat: go to Morse Code if necessary. Do you copy? Over.”

  I lifted my faceplate, wiggled my nose in the harsh, moistureless air, and reached to a box mounted above my armless shoulder, inside which careful engineers had stowed the capsule’s most crucial piece of equipment.

  “Harpocrates 7, I repeat: go to automatic pilot. We’ll take over, assume retro attitude, and begin retro sequence. Please copy. Over.”

  One of Gordo’s seven knives, those marvels of Swedish steel tempered from sweltry slag into stringent sabre, slid from its holster with ease. The lustrous blade bled the control panel’s complement of red-alert lights. Gordo had boasted that the tool would cut through literally anything, and from what I knew of the Oklahoman, he was too guileless for hyperbolizing.

  I set to disabling the capsule. It was tedious work; the cramped quarters lacked space for effective leverage. I began with the fuse board to my left, working the blade beneath the distribution panel and prizing until it popped. There were twenty-five fuses. I twisted the point of the blade under each one. Next I wedged the knife into the seam between left and right console. Behind that bulkhead, promised the SEDR, was the pressure transducer, the removal of which would prevent Mission Control, should they somehow regain control, from collecting reliable readouts, as well as four baroswitches, the mutilating of which would make temperature control impossible.

  Each nut, washer, and wire I dislodged floated around in zero gravity. Birth residue, I chose to think of it, not just from the snipping of my umbilical at the Cape Canaveral launch, but from the true launch: my death on the banks of the Great Lake Michigan. The umbilical’s severed end had to be out there somewhere, in a magnetic-field aurora or crab nebula or asteroid belt, and to find it would be to pull myself, hand over hand, back into the Uterus of Time.

  Glenn believed that Gød had a plan for me. Well, I had a plan for Gød.

  Does the ambition surprise you, Reader, coming from one so notorious for sloth? Everything since I’d gone to Albuquerque had promoted this path—my recognition before Lovelace psychologists that space was a Yggdrasil tree to heaven; the kneebound spaceniks whose faith was stirred by our upward odysseys; Glenn sprinkling cornpone insight into the tureen he poured for the press: I got on this project because it probably would be the nearest to heaven I will ever get.

  Where else, I ask you, could Gød be hiding? Space, I posit, is infinite. It matters not if you disagree; whatever lies beyond space, then, is infinite, and within infinity exists illimitable permutations: a world where Zebulon Finch never left Wilma Sue’s bed and lived out a life with giggling baby Merle; a world where Zebulon Finch lived in kindred prosperity with Little Johnny Grandpa, or Burt Churchwell, or the Whites. There was a world, Reader, where Zebulon Finch had done everything right, and even if I never found that world, the fact that I would soon be tumbling in its direction, somewhere away from Earth, should have unsettled a fearful Gød.

  Yes, fearful—why else had he kept me away? Gød might be the bookie’s favorite in a bout, but hadn’t I once dueled the great marksman Pullman Larry and won? Even if Harpocrates 7 began to be munched by, let us say, a black hole, Gordo’s knife had already impressed me enough for me to believe I could saw through the capsule wall and escape. The mission, even then, would continue. I’d be bare in the vacuum. My organs would harden and collapse. I would decompress. Who cared? Nazis had performed countless decompression experiments on concentration camp inmates; if I withstood the same, perhaps the Fifty-One, at least, would quit hissing criticisms through my helmet speakers.

  From there, the trip ought to have been quite pleasant. I’d drift in deep-freeze until I was the texture of leather and paper, a vellum-bound book, both Messenger and Message. Gød would be forced to read me, to face his neglected son, not as well-liked as sibling Jesus but resurrected all the same, and make His final decision: grab the umbilical and take Zebby back, or kick him down to Hell once and for all.

  Each CapCom took up a desperate encore while I plied the knife. Slayton blamed himself, said he was sorry as hell if he’d played any part in making me do this. Schirra blamed NASA, saying they hadn’t done all they could to make me part of the team. Shepard blamed me, saying I was a turncoat egomaniac to hand Project Mercury, and America, this kind of setback. Grissom, that big lug, got philosophical and blamed the world, saying maybe humans had stared too long at one goal, while other things, important things, had rolled off the bed like unwatched infants.

  I responded to no one but Gordo.

  “Harpocrates 7.” The poor guy sounded drained. “Things are ass over teakettle down here. Do you read me? Over.”

  “How goes your dust storm? I detect calmer skies.”

  “Harpoc
rates 7 . . . did you cut your ECS oxygen? Over.”

  “I did, and with your knife. A topflight piece of cutlery. You should be proud.”

  “With my—? Shit, hang on. We’re losing— Hey, now, are you removing your biosensors? Have you cut open your pressure suit? Jesus Christ. Over.”

  “My actions are producing glitches. I apologize.”

  “Harpocrates 7—Finch. We can still do this. We can still get you down. You just gotta listen to me. You just gotta communicate. Will you do that? Will you?”

  I waited for more. I tapped my helmet speaker. All I could hear was technological death, the severed oxygen hose rasping and the gyros wheezing while the Excelsior counted down Gordo’s precious seconds.

  “Finch? Do you copy?”

  “Sorry,” said I. “You didn’t say ‘over.’ ”

  “Over! Over! Over!”

  I smiled, and with some affection.

  “Good-bye, Gordo,” said I. “Over and out.”

  Leroy Gordon Cooper, that sun-baked mystery of a man, faded into the Australian dust, his low drawl flipping into falsetto in his closing seconds. I was glad I could hear no more. It was past time for Phase Three, the final stage. I plucked the knife from where it floated midair and cycled through what I’d memorized about the communications system. The main antennae were in the nose, impossible to reach, and carving through the rightside cabinet to reach the transmitters, amplifiers, beacons, and multiplexers would be no picnic. Fortunately, on a shelf beside my head, sat the Command Receiver Decoder, ten input/output channels through which all signals were processed.

  I took the knife like a dagger and stabbed the decoder.

  The blade made butter of steel. Signals, however, continued to snort from both helmet and local speakers. I yanked the knife, examined the gash, and crowbarred the blade to wrench the cover. It began to bend. I kept at it until I could fit my glove beneath the lid, whereupon I gave the cover a vigorous pull.

  The cover came off and made slow-motion somersaults through zero-g. I slid the blade beneath two auxiliary cables, twisted them into one, and cut them in a single slice. Three cables remained. Three little noodles of wire, and I’d never hear a human voice ever again. I snugged the blade against them.

  I paused.

  The whole universe, you know, can tilt on a pause.

  Static blasted. I peered out the window and saw the browns of basins, ranges, canyons, and deserts. Texas: John Glenn. If anything could hurry me along, it was the thought of suffering through the inducements of Bobby Bowtie, but no sooner had I returned my attention to demolition than words begin yipping through the noise. It was Glenn’s voice, but he wasn’t addressing me. What could be more important, wondered I, than talking me down from the celestial ledge?

  “Negative. Tell Mission Control we don’t . . . Roger that, Scott, it’s my idea. I’ll take the heat if things go Charlie Foxtrot. . . . Affirmative, patch him through. Go, go, boost the . . . TEX, Tango Echo X-ray, Corpus Christi, thirty-seven, thirty-nine north, ninety-seven, twenty-three west. . . . All right, we’ve got him, Bravo Zulu. We’ve got him. Hope you’re listening, Harpocrates 7. The signal ought to last four minutes. Going live in three, two . . .”

  The radiocast cut from Glenn’s treble trill to a warped bass ballooned out of shape by the very-long-distance conduction. A single syllable was being repeated, but it was slabbered inside sibilation beyond comprehension. Suits, though, were good for nothing if not twiddling tuners. The rainstorm hiss filtered to light rain, the hailstorm crackle softened, and the word grew clearer and clearer.

  “Sweltsch.”

  “Swensch.”

  “Swinsch.”

  “Frinsch.”

  “Finsch.”

  “Finch.”

  You could almost see cigarette smoke ooze through the speaker’s pinholes.

  It was Rig.

  XIII.

  SOMEWHERE IN UNSUBSTANTIATED ANNALS OF conspiracy theory exists a transcript typed from a rogue broadcast caught by a ham radio enthusiast around the time that dawn was breaking on January 12, 1962. Even the few who bothered to read it when published in a cheaply printed journal of the paranormal, I am quite certain, considered it fiction, and the more its submitter insisted that it was real, the crazier he seemed. But it behooves one, Dearest Reader, to keep the doors of the mind thrown wide, for once in a great while the obvious counterfeit is legitimate, and the dead do walk the Earth—and soar above it.

  ZF: How are you on my radio?

  AR: I . . . moved back to Albuquerque.

  ZF: Which is near Corpus Christi.

  AR: Close enough, I guess. I’m on my shortwave. John Glenn called me, woke me up, got me patched in.

  ZF: Doesn’t that create a . . . ?

  AR: Security breach. Yes, it does. We probably shouldn’t mention . . .

  ZF: Who we are. What we’re doing.

  AR: If we can avoid it.

  ZF: So . . . people are listening to this right now?

  AR: Maybe a few. If they’re on the bandwidth.

  ZF: Well, they shan’t hear anything of interest. It is suitably diverting, this late walk-on of yours, but there is nothing you can say that the others haven’t. I am cutting communication. My mind is decided.

  AR: I know.

  ZF: You know? So you’re not even going to try?

  AR: I did nothing but try, Finch. I tried so hard.

  ZF: You tried to keep your job. To use me as has everyone else.

  AR: Maybe. I don’t know. What else did I have to keep?

  ZF: And you lost it anyway.

  AR: Trying to protect you, yes.

  ZF: Do you know what I’m looking at now? The Milky Way. It is colossal. Matter entirely without depth, length, or dimension. Your excuses are smaller than Delaware. I never asked you to protect me. I never asked you for anything. I would have been better off without you. If your people hadn’t hauled me in after Pearl Harbor, in handcuffs, I would be buried right now somewhere along the Western Front.

  JG: Three minutes. Repeat: three minutes left of signal.

  ZF: And John Glenn chimes in! How perfect that my last exchanges are with the two humans most culpable for my final torments. John, you little eavesdropper, I insist that you say “T-minus three minutes.” It will add so much drama.

  AR: You didn’t let me finish, Finch.

  ZF: By all means, Rig, old boy, finish, finish! At length! Run out the clock, as sportsmen say.

  AR: I said I tried. I didn’t say I tried for you.

  ZF: You’re baiting me. I won’t let you bait me.

  AR: You want to shut me up, I sure as hell can’t stop you. Cut the cable. Smash the gyros. Blow the escape hatch if you want. It’s easy. Take the cap off. Pull the safety pin. Hit the button.

  ZF: I hadn’t thought of that. Thank you.

  AR: Go to hell.

  ZF: All right, your charm has won me over. Go on, tell me. If you didn’t try for me, who did you try for?

  AR: For . . .

  ZF: The clock is ticking, Rig.

  AR: For . . .

  ZF: NASA? Gilruth? The Suits? Is your patriotism so staunch?

  AR: Forget it. This is a waste of time. I don’t know why John called me. I can’t help here. I can’t help anyone.

  ZF: I could not agree more.

  AR: You’ve lost a few body parts, so what? You’re not the only one who’s lost things.

  ZF: Do you mean . . . ?

  AR: Go to hell.

  JG: Two minutes. Repeat: two minutes left of signal.

  ZF: I refuse to let you bring dead children into this. It has nothing to do with me.

  AR: How many times do I have to say it, Finch? This isn’t about you. I just need . . .

  ZF: What? What is it you require from me? What is the purpose of this conversation?

  AR: I need you to . . . What do you see up there, Finch?

  ZF: I told you. Stars. Planets. Moons. The Sun.

  AR: There’s nothing else? Noth
ing more?

  ZF: Rig . . .

  AR: I need you to tell me there’s more. That they’re all right. That they are waiting for me.

  ZF: Rig. I don’t know what—

  AR: Just one of them. Just one? Little Florence?

  ZF: Do you need me to . . . forgive you?

  AR: It’s unforgivable. Unforgivable.

  ZF: There is nothing up here to help you. You need to accept it.

  AR: It’s not real. It can’t be real. If I keep working, just keep working, it can’t be—

  ZF: You brought those bodies out. Every one.

  AR: No, no—

  ZF: Janet, Roy, Sandra, Walter, Patty, Stanley, Florence. You placed them on the mud. It happened, Rig.

  AR: Why you and not them? How come a no-good bastard like you keeps coming back and sweet Florence just lies there on the mud?

  ZF: I . . . don’t know.

  JG: One minute. Repeat: one minute left of signal.

  AR: I—Finch, I—

  ZF: You think crying like a baby will impress me? I’m beyond tricks, Rig. I’m beyond everything!

  AR: I lost all of them, Finch. All of them.

  ZF: Don’ t do this to me. Do not do this.

  AR: I can’t lose someone else.

  ZF: You are not some sort of father to me.

  AR: I can’t lose you, too.

  ZF: You didn’t have to call me every day at the base like a child at boarding school. You didn’t have to fend off my bullies. You didn’t have to do any of it! Not any of it!

  AR: I can’t fail someone again.

  ZF: What did I say the last time we spoke?

  JG: Losing signal. Maybe twenty seconds—

  ZF: I said I don’t need you. Do you understand?

  AR: Yes . . .