At least, that was how he felt until he saw what was happening in the capsule. Apparently, Richards, who’d been lucid only moments before, had given in to some hallucinatory phase or episode in the course of his illness in which he could no longer vocalize actual English-language words. These words had been replaced by something closer to a primate hooting, a sort of primitive pseudo-language that would have been human, perhaps, if human beings no longer had the fine motor control that was necessary to produce dentals and fricatives and plosives. Richards, that is, seemed to be, well, kind of barking and kind of growling, and in a way that didn’t sound like a human being barking or growling, but in a way, rather, that sounded, if not primatical, well, then lupine.
“Jed, can you hear me?”
There was no end to the dismal and bloodcurdling growling, despite the use of the colonel’s name. It was as if some kind of pulsing, regularized barking and growling was now necessary to maintain respiration for the entity, the being that had once been Jed Richards. Rob Antoine looked back at Debra Levin, and it was the first time he saw fear on her face. Fear, he thought, got trained out of people who spent long enough inside the famous Beltway. For them the only fear was loss of power. And yet here was Levin, deeply shaken by Richards’s condition.
“Is this the man you want me to bring home?”
“Mr. Antoine, it’s irrelevant what I want, or what you want.”
“Vance, are you satisfied with what we’re doing?”
Gibraltar, Rob supposed, had also schooled himself in advanced poker playing. He would give away nothing.
“Jed, it’s Rob here. I have some good news. You are cleared to land! That’s affirmative on landing! We’re going to have people on the ground to look after you, and immediately upon landing, we’re going to take you to a facility in Washington where we expect we’re going to be able to explore advanced treatment options for what’s ailing you. We’ve had ongoing discussions with medical here, and that’s what we think. Isn’t that fine news? I’m personally looking forward to seeing you when you splash down, and I’ve just had word from some of the people in telemetry that your likely touchdown is in the North Atlantic, somewhere near to the Faeroe Islands, though perhaps a little west, maybe Iceland or even the coast of Nova Scotia. And we’ve already got people out that way, high-speed ships and so forth. Jed, isn’t that great news? You are going to be celebrated, lauded, you name it.”
The barking and growling Colonel Richards, the Richards with the face of death, did not, as far as could be inferred from the video footage, take too well to this news. Which is to say that the sublingual or prelingual utterances crescendoed with a series of microtonal hiccups, at which point a rather great volume of blood began to issue forth from Richards’s mouth. It was nearly a vomitus of blood, or would have been described as such, except for the absence of reverse-peristaltic contracting, making the more likely causal agent esophageal lesions; at any rate, in the middle of this blood flow, Richards violently unstrapped himself from his station, from which he would be required to help in the landing process, in monitoring the heat on the exterior shields of the ERV, and began throwing things around the capsule. True, he was drifting, because his orbit had not yet decayed quite enough for him to have Earth weight or mass, and there was only so much in the capsule that was not attached, so as to forbid exactly this kind of tantrum, but he did a good job, anyhow, in destroying federally issued and multinationally sponsored, branded Mars mission material, until there were dangerous pieces of metal drifting everywhere in the capsule. There was bodily effluvium drifting to and fro, giving it all a Grand Guignol horror.
Rob Antoine’s indignation began to boil, with righteousness. And it was at that point that he began to formulate his personal, if treasonous, response to the critical moment in which he found himself. What he recalled, from the distant recesses of mission operation protocols, was that there had been, in case of transmission difficulties, a series of hand signals agreed upon between Rob and the officers of the three ships. In fact, the sign language was borrowed in part from the beautiful and ornate hand signals of NAFTA’s Central American gangbangers, who, at some point in the past twenty years, had decided that spoken language was far too dangerous for them, with all the law-enforcement intervention into their circles. They had settled upon the notion of a constantly changing series of hand signals to indicate most aspects of their business, which would be safer than voice messages or any kind of written documentation. The gangbangers themselves, whose fellowships preferred to be known as urban entrepreneurial collectives, had fashioned the early examples of this language partly from the leftover sign language of the deaf, which had been all but abandoned after the perfection of cochlea-implant surgery and eardrum transplants. From this American Sign Language, the urban entrepreneurial collectives borrowed an alphabet and many simple sentences, especially sentences involving cursing and obscenity. Some new signs were invented, especially signs referring to bodily harm, and then a large number of signs and styles of signing were borrowed from the signs used by the coaches in the sport known as X-treme lacrosse. The lacrosse signs enabled the urban entrepreneurial collectives to negate any signal that had come before, to contradict what had just been said, and so forth. This argot was not entirely different from the whistling languages that had taken off so powerfully in the urban Northwest, where the organized crime from the Sino-Indian countries had found a toehold. Nor was it entirely different from the rhyming slang of Rust Belt cities. With these languages, signed criminal argot had in common that it empowered those who felt disempowered, who felt hundreds of years of oppression, to throw off the language of the oppressor class.
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.