Schott caved. For her trouble, he said, she was welcome to the Pulverizer.
It was the fourth consecutive round-the-clock shift for many if not all at Mission Control. There were facilities people, janitors and HVAC experts, there were even some cafeteria dishwashers who had remained on-site. There were the numerous Mars mission department heads and subdepartment heads. They were all here, around the clock, beards grown out, slips showing. So much halitosis, so much body odor. All of these NASA employees were camped in front of their screens, whether personal or wall-mounted, in the cafeteria, in the control room, as the monitors documented the reentry, the ERV containing Colonel Jed Richards as it neared the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere. The world had its news cycles, its narcotic game shows, its sports pages, its violent hot spots, all of which had come to eclipse the Mars mission, as though the billions and billions of light-years beyond this dust mote where we lived were of no consequence. Not so among the employees of NASA. They had given up their lives and their families to live the Mars mission.
Mission Director Rob Antoine’s sleeplessness was of such magnitude that if you had told him that there were little green men in the capsule with Colonel Richards, in the last hours before reentry, he would not have batted a heavy-lidded eye. In fact, Antoine would have attempted to execute message discipline by describing the appearance of these green men as interplanetary mutual interfacing, or focused coevolutionary exchange. In fact, Antoine saw indeterminate mammalians crawling all around his office corners. The rest of the team fared little better.
At some point in midafternoon, he found himself in the men’s room, and he took the opportunity to despair about his thinning hair. He was a man of systemic reiterations. He looked at opportunities for failure and then he worried at them, like the polar bear in the cage whose neurotic steps become perfectly metronomic. Pool, ball, rock ledge, pool, ball, rock ledge, fish. Antoine saw the thinning hair, heard the voice of his ex-wife telling him that the combing over was pathetic, that it looked like topiary, and still his hand seized upon the brush, and the brush brushed up the forelock and over the shiny bald part of his head, as if powerless to do otherwise.
Three days now since Colonel Jed Richards had turned the video camera on a certain spot in the capsule that revealed absolutely nothing. An empty part of the capsule. A bank of onboard monitors. That was it. The attendant question, as Antoine saw it, and this had been the focus of much of his thinking when his thinking was capable of being focused, involved the course of Richards’s infection with M. thanatobacillus. Or lack thereof. If Richards was still alive, why didn’t he simply turn off the video? Antoine had been an early believer of the theory that Richards had shoved the video camera out of reach, to get it away from his face, to deny Earth its final attempt to consume images of the return of its heroic explorer. Antoine had promoted this theory as a sort of impulsive machismo interpretation. And yet the only evidence that Richards was still alive in the capsule was the life-support-systems monitor that indicated the presence of something at 96.6 degrees Fahrenheit. A pulse and respiration could be faintly heard.
Three days of video feed. It gave you a lot of time to think. It was easy to get distracted by the relentlessness of that image. For example, Antoine had to admit, among his other foibles, that he tolerated, even revered, extremely boring things, boring art, boring music, boring film, televised golf. He had a wall-sized monitor in his home office, one of those total-wall guys, and he liked to loop footage from the original Mars explorer missions, grainy, amateurish footage from the rovers. He’d leave it up there for days at a time, while he was doing paperwork or realphabetizing books. Antoine would even, when trying to solve vexing interpersonal problems, watch the Mars rover footage. Mars was one of the truly boring places. It was matched only by Uranus. The guys working on the Uranus explorer craft were excited when there was a cloud on Uranus. It happened very rarely.
Antoine watched Mars while his wife was leaving him, and he watched Mars while his kids were packing up, and he watched Mars, sometimes, while he was brushing his forelock thirty times or when he was folding his socks. He bought socks in twelve-packs, in twelve-packs of twelve-packs.
It was some time before he realized that there was another occupant next to him in the men’s room, also standing at the mirror, and Antoine could feel, as he had in these days of sleeplessness, a certain belated perception cresting, and the perception expressed itself in language but not in a phrase that fulfilled a social obligation like “Hey, how are you doing?” Rob understood, in this phase of language failure, long after lips and pharynx and larynx had begun assembling themselves into the preliminary words of a sentence, that it would be a good thing to say something sociable to his superior Vance Gibraltar, who ordinarily did not grace the men’s room with his presence, although there were certain legendary stories about the kind of unselfconscious and performative shitting that Gibraltar had enacted there when he was a younger and more arrogant employee.
Gibraltar too was surprised to reckon with another life-form here in the restroom. Rob could see his boss, who reminded him of his father, if only in his capacity to withhold most kindness, looking at his, Rob’s, hair. Antoine could feel that in some way his upcoming performance review would touch on the issue of his hair. If Rob could just improve his hairstyle, then it seemed Gibraltar would support him again, and yet Rob believed with nearly evangelical certitude that his hair was just how it was. Even if Gibraltar sent him tomorrow to the overcrowded office of unemployment, so that Rob would be back in Kentucky living in a trailer behind his mother’s house, writing computer programs for video-gaming simulations, even then Gibraltar would not leave off Rob’s brushing-up of the forelock. But how long, exactly, had he been standing here, having this thought, and how much of it had he actually verbalized to the back-channel kingmaker of NASA?
“I had a thought,” Rob said. At a minimum.
“They’re in short supply,” Gibraltar observed.
“Maybe it was several short thoughts. In sequence.”
Antoine, impervious to hurt, or so attenuated by sleeplessness that he could have withstood any array of taunts and scarcely remembered to worry, stopped for a moment to consider the teardrop shape of a certain puddle of water on the counter before him, and then he listened astonished as the thought, which he had not yet fully admitted to himself, began to form in the air.
“Have we completely considered whether Jed is filming that bank of monitors for a reason?”
“We’ve considered many things,” Gibraltar said, reaching some fingers behind his front teeth to ensnare a particle. “The man is ill. He’s probably reduced to some proto-hominid condition where he is too stupid to figure out how to eject himself. He’s not in a place where he’s able to make creative decisions about his video feed.”
“How do you know?” Rob said, warming to the argument in turn. “How do you know that this is not some symbolic repository of mission information, gleaned from his earlier life, lingering in him, a part of him that is able to make these signifying decisions, in an automatic way, so that they can be interpreted by us, as direct communication, communication that might affect the reentry process?”