Probably, it was a big deal for Steve Watanabe to decompensate in front of me. It must have been a betrayal of his most cherished values. Consider the facts. I wasn’t close to him particularly. I was quite a bit older. I was balding, skinny, missing some teeth, and I had come to take a dim view of the chain of command. I suppose I never expected the Department of Quantitative Analysis to be crying in front of me, nor did I expect him to tip ever so slightly forward, with his stifled, hiccupy sobs, bubbles of mucus ballooning from his squat, flattened nose, muttering that he didn’t know what had come over him, leaning toward me almost as if he intended to put his head on my shoulder; I felt in myself a strange compound of rectitude and sympathy and disgust, but before he could do it, touch me, some vestigial training lecture on the subject of military bearing surfaced in him, and he snapped himself into a more dignified posture. Then he invited me to follow him to the command console in the Geronimo.
What he showed me next was a personal video from Vance Gibraltar, budgetary director of the Mars mission, from back in D.C. My feeling upon encountering Vance Gibraltar, on the occasions when I did — which was whenever there was a phalanx of photographers from lackluster tabloid web addresses in the area — was that I had just been irradiated, or that he had somehow managed to conduct an identity-theft-style assault on my perineum, from which region he had extracted medical records, the drug history of my parents, and my tax forms going back beyond the statute of limitations.
Vance Gibraltar was the person you didn’t want contacting you on Mars. He called when NASA began to feel that the mission was slipping beyond their control. Too much was riding on the Mars mission. Of course, they were already disappointed with me, since I had long ago stopped sugarcoating my web posts, nor was I reading your replies, nor remembering to post responses to them. Having given up on me, and probably on most of the rest of us, Vance Gibraltar, it turned out, had sent a highly unusual for your eyes only message to Steve Watanabe, a scrambled, encrypted communication, and this, I came to learn, was one of a series of such communications, the culmination.
Gibraltar’s fat, self-satisfied face appeared on the screen with the NASA seal behind him. He had his hands folded on a desk in front of him, as if addressing the nation as a whole — instead of one nervous young man in a poorly insulated tin shack on the edge of the wastes. “Lieutenant Watanabe,” began the bureaucrat, “I know I don’t need to tell you how sensitive this communication is, and how unfortunate it would be if its contents became known to some of your colleagues there. Let me begin again where we left off in our previous communication, by telling you that the Mars mission, from the perspective of the cabinet-level administration that created and financed it, is not an unqualified success. It is not a success from the point of view of science, nor from the point of view of our national objectives.
“The communications we get from your people, when we get them at all, are largely unintelligible. The footage we are getting from our few cameras, the ones that your people have not disabled, is of inconsequential landscapes. Rock and dust. We have photographed better landscapes ourselves, and created better composites, with the unmanned explorers in the last thirty years. The only person we feel is still acting in the interest of this administration, namely Captain Lepper, has been so isolated and set upon by the rest of our employees that he has had no choice but to take drastic measures to defend his person.
“Lieutenant Watanabe, in contacting you we believe that the time has come to insure some of our mission objectives. You do know, do you not, that among the principal objectives of the Mars mission is the testing of silicon dioxide for improved microprocessor design. We have already made clear the specifics of this hybrid microprocessor design, but to reiterate, it involves, essentially, a live information-carrying colony of bacteria, where the organisms will be able to amass into self-replicating and self-programming computing systems. It is these samples that Captain Lepper now possesses at the Valles Marineris site. While the microbial samples are willing to interact with the silicon dioxide to make microprocessors, according to principles of nanotechnology and QED, thus far the microprocessors are resistant to being used as designed. We urgently require the completion of these experiments, as the research is likely being duplicated by Sino-Indian industrialists, if in the limited theater of Earth. Because of our unqualified lead in the interplanetary space race, Lieutenant Watanabe, we are in a position to lap our competitors, if only these experiments can be completed. This, Lieutenant Watanabe, is the one area as regards twenty-first-century economics, where your home, the nation that brought you into prominence as an astronaut, still manages to hold a significant edge on its enemies.
“It is our opinion that Captain Lepper requires your aid, and we have directed him to contact you. We believe he is not making the kind of progress with decanting the silicates that he was expected to make. Can we be any clearer on these matters? Can we persuade you of the seriousness of these experiments? We can tell you, meanwhile, in order to assure that you are attentive to this part of the present communication, Lieutenant Watanabe, that your son, despite the best efforts of exotic-disease specialists in the state of Florida, has been suffering with a relapsing and remitting version of one of the families of streptococcus that have been circulating equatorially, here on Earth. We understand, Lieutenant Watanabe, that your wife has brought your son into the quarantine facility at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Florida for treatment. Your wife is unwilling to have her son treated at any of the public hospitals. We have a videotaped message from her on the subject, which will be available to you at the successful conclusion of the projects just mentioned.
“What we would like to express to you, Lieutenant Watanabe, is how honored we were to be trusted in this way by your wife and son, and how honored we are to tell you that we believe your son’s recovery will be complete. We would also like to remind you that you serve on the Mars mission as a representative of the government of this country, and by special appointment to the executive branch. For these reasons, we believe you are likely to find, when looking into your heart, when evaluating your moral chemistry, that you have a debt to us, as regards your mission, a debt that comes into sharper focus when you consider how we were able to help your son and your family as a whole.
“Therefore, Lieutenant Watanabe, we would ask that by 0500 hours, Martian time, tomorrow morning, you relocate to the Valles Marineris site, where you will find Captain Lepper, and we would ask you to begin harvesting the silicon dioxide with Captain Lepper, according to directives made clear to the science officers on the Mars mission, at which point you will be given directions on how to procure bacterial samples from the Chryse region. This information as regards the bacterial samples, we would like to add, is completely secure and should not even be discussed with Captain Lepper in any detail. You are tasked with different objectives. I should stress, however, that at no time will you need to be performing the complicated experimental hybridization of the microprocessors with the bacteria. This very dangerous task — essentially the creation of a new cybernetic life-form — will be accomplished back here on Earth. At the conclusion of this mining and harvesting operation, we would offer you a trip home on an accelerated schedule. With fewer colleagues, the two of you will find your trip back will be faster and smoother, and we will make the needed propellant available to you.