By the time an astronaut is prepared to register a Code 14, the situation is likely already past, and yet here was Laurie, using it, and, from the looks of her, a little bit emotional about what was going on.
“Jed, hi, I’m sorry to… I’m sorry to bother you.” I can hear Abu come on the other screen on the Pequod while I’m talking to her, asking the same kinds of questions. “I don’t really know how to say this exactly, but Brandon… Well, Brandon has just tried to assault me.”
“He’s what? He tried to rape you?”
“Roger that.”
“What the hell is going on over there?”
“I’m afraid I don’t feel any clearer about that than you do.”
“Well, can you… Look, at the risk of being a bit insensitive, Laurie, can you tell me that we’re agreeing on the terminology here?”
“Jed, I understand what the word means. I’m sure you’re thinking that a space capsule is an awfully small place for a… for a sexual assault to occur. But that’s what happened. I have Arnie here, who’s ready to back up what I’m trying to tell you.”
Laurie’s being incredibly tough, that much is obvious. Jim and José gather with me by the screen. Behind us is the lukewarm Thanksgiving dinner, Velcro’d down to the makeshift table.
“So what happened?”
“What happened was that I was trying to sleep when my shift was completed, and for the record, Jed, I wasn’t wearing anything non-regulation, as I have never worn anything non-reg on the flight, as I have taken my role as a woman on this mission very seriously. Not that my wearing anything non-reg would be any kind of excuse for Brandon’s actions in a court of law, even in the present social and cultural environment. I was wearing a jumpsuit, and I was sleeping. I was tired, in fact. And badly in need of rest. My rest, Jed, was interrupted when suddenly I felt something pressing up against me, and I opened my eyes, and immediately I saw Brandon Lepper, and he wasn’t wearing anything at all. He had, against protocol, taken off all his gear. He had pressed the cough button, and he was in an aroused state, Jed, and he immediately put his hand over my mouth, as if he could keep me from shouting for Arnie. He said that he knew I wanted it, that sort of thing, and he began trying to cut through my jumpsuit with a knife, as if he had put a knife aside somewhere just for this purpose.”
“For godsakes. Then what?”
“Well, because I’ve had some hand-to-hand training, and some self-defense classes as a young woman, I reached back to remember the advice I’d had about sexual assault, and once my limbs were freed, I utilized this training. I disabled Brandon Lepper.”
“Meaning?”
“Basically, he had cut the immobilizing straps, which was not a strategically advantageous decision on his part, but when I was freed, I pretended to be complying, until I could hit him with a blunt force object on the back of the head.”
“Which blunt force object was it?”
“It was a fire extinguisher.”
“You hit him on the head with a fire extinguisher?”
“Roger that.”
There’s a pause in the conversation while the three of us on the Excelsior look around at one another. I assume we are all counting bodies. Debbie Quartz is in an opiate fog, and now there’s Brandon Lepper, out cold or worse, and it’s obvious to anyone, any idiot, that we are indisputably beginning to have serious personnel issues.
“Can you put Arnie on for a moment, Laurie?” I say. The doctor to the Mars mission then appears on the screen. He’s a small guy, kind of slight, with a thick beard and pale Eastern European coloring. Arnie is a serious fellow, never less than thoughtful and warm. I ask what he thinks.
“I’m surprised by Brandon’s behavior, Jed. And I think that it’s not really Brandon himself that we’re encountering here.”
“You think he’s got PES?”
“I’ve lived with the guy for seven or eight weeks, and while I think he’s immature, and hard to like, I don’t think he’s the kind of person who would premeditate a crime like this. I can only think that the long period of confinement has taken a considerable toll on all of us, and that it is possible to see here a pathology that’s related to long periods of confinement. This is another way of saying that there are real dangers to the mission.”
“And are you suggesting that the causes are merely those of psychological stress, Arnie?”
“There are other things to consider, solar winds, neutrinos, gamma rays, space-time curvature, close proximity to antimatter, who knows what else? Tanning by the reactor downstairs? But I don’t have time to run those tests while Brandon is constrained.”
Laurie comes back on-screen to tell me that she has him down in the hatch, and that, yes, she has covered him up. As with Debbie, he has been heavily sedated. By the time we get to Mars, how many of us will still be awake?
When we finish this portion of the conversation, the transmission from Houston arrives. It’s a big moment in the Mars mission. In fact, it’s a big fourteen minutes, these minutes where Brandon is reaping the harvest he perhaps sowed many years back, as a young Turk from Houston, a believer in the warrior code, who, in the peculiar ethics of interplanetary travel, sullied a woman’s dignity, or attempted to. Laurie tells me that she’s going to take the call and that she’ll get back to me ASAP.
The three J’s of the Excelsior then get down to the business of Thanksgiving, as described earlier, and I know that I have a lot to be grateful for, because — and I don’t know if I have said this before — I am soon going to be the first person to set foot on the planet Mars. I can’t really think of a better time than now to tell you this exciting news. Yes, I am the one who has been selected first to set foot outside the Mars mission, on the sulfurous, subzero surface of Mars. Because Jim will be flying the lander, and José will be coordinating the particulars of the mission with Houston and the other science officers, if any of them are left alive by the time we touch down. And that leaves me, kids. I was chosen for this. From the first day, I was chosen, because I am the word slinger, I am the man of imagination and vision, and I have a half-dozen sentences, preselected by a NASA subcommittee on first utterances, from which I am to choose one when I step outside of the lander, and I am meant to pronounce this sentence (with prior notification and authorization), and this sentence will go down in human history, for reasons I can’t need to explain. So it’s Thanksgiving, and I should be grateful, because I get to spend the next three weeks thinking about which of these statements I like best, and I get to confer with subcommittee members, like Jonas Jonas, poet laureate of the United States of America, who is trying to boil down a sonnet sequence he wrote to an unrhymed couplet, so that I won’t, if I use his text, have to memorize too terribly much. Yes, being chosen as the first man to set foot on Mars is something to be thankful for, as is the fact that my daughter, Ginger, sent me a school paper this morning on the following topic, “The History of and Future Prospects for Mars Exploration,” the first sentence of which is: “No kid in the world could be prouder of her dad than I am, no kid could be prouder, and no kid could be luckier.” These are the kinds of things you think about on Thanksgiving, and while I don’t bring these things up to the other guys, I do think about them in passing.
But what about what Arnie was saying? What Arnie was saying, kids, is that our civilization, the civilization of the Mars mission, has become very small, our civilization has become nine people, of whom six are at considerable remove from us here in the Excelsior, as far away as Auckland is from New York City, let’s say, and our little colony just doesn’t have the same sense of inevitability about its civilizing abilities as does your planet, with its nearly seven billion souls, most of them at least passingly familiar with the rule of law. And what we are doing here, on the little tin can, is falling into the lawlessness of ancient times, like in Westerns, where everyone has a checkered past and a dark motive, and it’s all going to come out eventually, the evil, and a lot of people are going to get shot. That, indeed, is what Arnie was talking about, as I understand it, and it isn’t lost on those of us on the Excelsior.