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.