“And… Colonel Richards?”
Comb-Over looked in Vance’s direction, as though Vance could help. Though Gibraltar had no love for the other man, he took a deep breath and generously deflected some of the fallout in his own direction.
“Debra, as you can see here, Richards is sitting in one of the last pieces of reusable hardware from the mission. Theoretically, he’s working on his memoirs. He hasn’t drifted from the course that the computers have suggested. He has been in regular contact with his daughter and his wife. And while he’s not communicating with us, he has been shaping his memoirs and has tried to find a purchaser for these writings among nationally distributed electronic-publishing entities. Notwithstanding symptoms of post-traumatic stress, which wouldn’t be unusual considering the mission, we had until recently every reason to believe he was in rather good shape. If the pathogen that Rob referred to, correct me if I’m wrong, if the pathogen were liable to be flourishing in him, it ought to have been apparent by now—”
“Absolutely,” Rob added.
“Considering that we have experienced catastrophic personnel loss on this mission, including some men who had been carefully selected to perform tasks both civilian and military, we do find ourselves with some successes here. The first person born on Mars, Madam Director, is a citizen of the United States of America. I believe, and perhaps legal could help me out here, that since there is now a legitimate Martian inhabitant, we have more than a legal framework for claiming the planet as a possession of the United States, with respect to drilling and mining. This is a huge advantage. Meanwhile, we have Richards on his way back with soil samples, with geological samples, and with himself, though possibly exposed to the Martian pathogen, available for scientific study that could net us positive publicity, patents, and years of academic leadership at the forefront of the interplanetary sciences, you name it.”
A bow-tied and rather preppy fellow with an excessively eager smile chimed in. “The evolving legal standards of extraterrestrial ownership are just that, evolving. But we do feel, at present, that unless God himself claims his right as the creator of the solar system, the first nation to establish a legitimate colony on Mars, or any of the other planets, is justified in claiming territory. In the case of an actual native-born Martian inhabitant, these claims are even more valid.”
Debra Levin, gazing up at the real-time video of Richards, interrupted the good-news palaver of the meeting to prod, instead, at more infected tissue.
“What can you all tell me about the state of the contagion?”
The young woman from medical spoke up. Vance couldn’t remember having met her. The chief medical administrator, Julio Hernandez, was off having rotator cuff surgery. In his stead, he’d sent up this greenhorn, Dr. Fales, and she was palpably nervous.
“A number of possibilities have been explored, ma’am, by the medical department. First, based on what we know from Colonel Richards’s own accounts, and also from film footage and stills that we have of the other astronauts, we believe that the pathogen, whether it is earthborn or native to Mars, has a hemorrhagic effect on human beings. The analogies would be Marburg, hantavirus, plague, and so forth. By hemorrhagic—”
“We’re familiar with—” Levin said.
“Of course. Well, most hemorrhagic pathogens cause death quickly in the presence of high fever, but this pathogen, commonly referred to as M. thanatobacillus, seems to allow people to continue to function for weeks, if not months, with only minimal psychological effects. That’s probably what accounts for the difficulty distinguishing the pathogen from the psychological effects of long-term space travel.”
And now the audiovisual gnomes made a kind of triptych of images of astronauts Lepper and Rose flanking the webcam footage of Richards. These stills were from the period of advanced infection, and to Vance Gibraltar, the men looked, in the acute phase of their illness, as though they might very well have marched forth from an outbreak of plague.
“As you can see,” the unremarkable Dr. Fales remarked, “the hemorrhagic phase is characterized by considerable blood loss, facial masking, sclerotic problems in the musculature, skin failure — all rather horrible to look at, despite the fact that the patient tends to present a rather odd misapprehension that no illness is present. There was a story circulating among the astronauts, which I believe comes from DOD, that M. thanatobacillus caused bodies to… well, to disassemble. We don’t really know what that means, but we do know that with organ failure and sudden skin failure, the body as a vessel does give out. Death follows skin failure pretty quickly. The question we need to continue to address concerns the route of infection, the communicability of the pathogen, and so forth. If it’s directly communicable, then, in a population that has never been exposed to the disease before, the collateral damage could be significant.”
Debra fiddled with a barrette that restrained her tasteful and professionally ambitious coiffure. “In addition to doomsday medical predictions, what I need to know is what the implications are for a successful touchdown, since for better or worse that is the face that we present to the public.”
Rob Antoine fielded this one. As if tag-teaming. And this Gibraltar could admire. “What we do need to ascertain is whether or not Colonel Richards is infected. It all comes down to this. If he is uninfected, do we allow him to land, quarantine him for a sufficient period to ascertain that he’s not a danger, and then release him? Is it possible that he’s some kind of carrier? We know, for example, that Richards has certain medical singularities, among them IBS, and it’s possible that because his body doesn’t process food well — we’ve had him on vitamin supplements throughout the mission — he somehow repelled the pathogen from his body. Assuming, that is, that the infection route is oral. Another theory might be that his depressed immune system is somehow a factor. He has late-stage addictive illness, having depleted the mission of virtually all the synthetic painkillers available, including especially the narcotic we were going to use for the flights home. That would be OxyPlus. This guy has a constitution like a rhino where drugs are concerned, and he’s got so many opiates in his body now that it’s as if he’s preserved with formaldehyde. In this view, it’s possible that the M. thanatobacillus, whatever it is, requires a healthy immune system for its biological ‘disassembly.’
“In any event, up until now we’ve assumed he’s not infected. That means we can move on to other questions ultimately, but before that I’d like to introduce a craniofacial medical expert, Dr. Morris Downes. We’ve been using him as a symbolic field analyst of mission video throughout. He looks at the body language of the astronauts, so that we might gather information they’re unwilling to give us through more traditional means, and he’s going to discuss Jed’s face, as you see it before you.”
Levin interrupted, “We have, ladies and gentlemen, an impatient public to think about. I need to know what you are proposing to do about this astronaut. How are you going to tell his story to our audience?”
Vance leaned forward, from the relaxed posture in which he had been allowing the drama to play out, and most of the middle managers quieted, as if in anticipation. “Ma’am,” he said, “the situation is simple. If we think he’s well, we’re going to let him land, and we’re going to give him a hero’s welcome. If he’s sick, well, then despite what we have aboard that craft, the soil samples, the rock samples, the terabytes of data, we really don’t have much choice but to abort.”