“He’s strapped into his bed downstairs,” he said.
Meaning Abu Jmil, first officer, sculptor, engineer of nuclear power. What was left of him. We went around to the cargo entrance and closed the squeaky hatch door behind us. There was a pall to the Geronimo. I could never understand how people could feel productive in low light. Abu, as advertised, was stretched out on one of the pallets in the cargo hold. Covered with a blanket.
“How did you get him home?”
“He was still able to walk at that point,” Steve said. “He was partially conscious. His legs did a little bit of work. Then he blacked out completely — once we got back here.”
It hadn’t occurred to me to arm myself that morning. In truth, it never occurred to me to arm myself, despite my military training. I left that to tougher people, like Abu. Pulling off my gloves and my helmet, and setting them down on the floor, I got out the radiophone I kept on my person and radioed over to the Pequod. Bad reception. All the while Steve gaped at me, as though he just didn’t know what to do with himself.
“Arnie? Laurie? It’s Jed calling.”
Arnold Gilmore’s sleepy voice on the squawk box, compressed, tinny.
“Kind of early, isn’t it?”
“Got a situation,” I said.
“What kind of a situation?”
“Steve tell you about Abu?”
He sounded confused. “What about him?”
“Says he found him out back of the power station, with his sculptures, and that Abu spent the night out there. In the permafrost. And, well, he says that Abu took off most of his outerwear. Parts of his skin were even exposed.”
“Repeat, please?” Laurie, who must have been there in the room with him, could be heard in the background. To her, Arnie mumbled, “Hang on, there’s something wrong with Abu.”
I took up the story: “Steve says that Abu was out all night working on his sculpture and that he was exposed to the low temps overnight, and Steve further observes that Abu must have elected to remove his gear.”
“Doubtful,” said Arnie, improvising. “Unless he was set on a painful death.”
“Could you make a house call?”
“As soon as I can get there.”
I holstered the communications device. Once the call to Arnie was effected, I found myself standing in a half-lit cargo bay with a very jittery young man who clearly had something on his mind. Steve shifted himself from leg to leg so violently that even in his lightweight extraterrestrial Mars surface exploration jumpsuit he was some kind of kundalini adept. And perhaps I haven’t adequately described Steve Watanabe, the George Harrison of the Mars mission, and so let me present to you, those of you who haven’t seen the portrait photo that NASA took of him in his space suit (one gloved palm on the top of his helmet as it sat imposingly on a table), nor read the press releases, nor seen the feed: the actual Steve, which is to say the Martian Steve, was generally mute, some people would say downright chilly. Not given to a smile, nor to pleasantries that lasted longer than the minimum. During the training portion of our mission, we sometimes referred to Steve as the Department of Quantitative Analysis, because of his capacity to miss the human dimension, and also because he always thought through a problem from a number of practical angles before proceeding, immobilizing himself in the process.
As I’ve mentioned, Steve has a son who had come down with an antibiotic-resistant infection just before we lifted off, and he spent quite a bit of the early portion of the trip very preoccupied with the health of this youngster. There must have been an afternoon before liftoff when Steve and his wife, Danielle, perhaps with the blessing of this eleven-year-old boy, thought through whether it would be a good thing for Steve to make his fateful journey, in a fateful black limo, to Cape Canaveral, before the final intake for liftoff. There must have been an afternoon when he and his wife tearfully arrived at a decision, with Steve, Department of Quantitative Analysis, drawing up some list of debits and credits. Worldwide fame, check. A lifetime of guilt, debit. Fantastic, unfathomable voyage, check. Shell-shocked, inconsolable wife, debit. The son, who Steve no doubt believed would improve, had been in and out of the hospital in the months since that day. Steve had been remarkably stoic, as far as I could tell, but it did seem that it wasn’t until he touched down on Mars that the enormity of the mission, the cost of it to him personally, hit home.
He was on the short side, with longish dark hair that even before the Mars adventure flirted with regulation. And he had an odd white patch in the front that he liked to claim was owing to his having seen an incarnation of the Buddha in his attic as a boy. This delusional anecdote was a rare departure from Steve’s military humorlessness otherwise. Steve and Danielle lived in a ranch-style house just outside Tampa, not far from the Gulf of Mexico. Steve’s hobbies (everyone who filled out a personnel form at NASA had to list a hobby) included the construction of model planes and paint-by-numbers velvet paintings, which he bought at tag sales and painted all “wrong,” with “hilarious” results. These velvet pieces were really quite stunning, but as Steve himself had pointed out, it had been years. Simply watching output monitors on a nuclear reactor, occasionally using a forklift to take spent fuel assemblies out into a gully, and filling out reports for Houston, these things had stamped out any vestige of the velvet painter in Steve Watanabe.
It must have made it that much harder to bunk with Abu Jmil, whose enthusiasm, and whose adaptive qualities, were the envy of the rest of the crew. Steve, in his quiet, understated way, and without ever seeming to do much but look like a public-relations brochure, was incredibly competitive and would stay up nights memorizing facts and figures that would make him the premier Mars mission astronaut, at least ahead of launch. Back during the selection process, he worked hard at besting a Mormon triathlete from Provo, UT, Norman Backus, who believed himself to be Steve’s close personal friend. On the other hand, they could test and retest the astronauts of the Mars mission until the proverbial cows came home. Not one of the testers, with their little three-dimensional computer interfaces with their multiple-choice questions about how we would deal with the ethics of biological warfare or hand-to-hand combat with alien life-forms, had ever been to Mars. They had not spent six or eight months with nine (or eight, or six) people, in cramped quarters, dealing with the imponderables that cannot be included in a manual. The testers had opinions. They would tell you that they were once trapped in the back of a shipping container on a pier in a port city in Lebanon, where they had been sequestered by thugs bent on using them for ransom. These kinds of stories were everywhere in the chain of command at NASA. But the testers didn’t understand Mars, and they didn’t understand the effects of planetary exile.
“I think you have something to tell me,” I said to Steve, bearing in mind what I knew. “I don’t know what it is, but if you’re worried about having kept something from me, from us, you should unburden yourself, because we’re together in all of this, no matter what it is you’ve done. We’re inhabitants of Mars. You and I. We can solve our disagreements according to our own evolved legal standards.”