A hush in this place of worry, this place of consternation and ignominy. It was unclear to those who were there if it was the hush of Debra Levin entering, in a maroon, understated knee-length dress, with a sense of perfect timing, at least if her goal was to gut the last few NASA programs extant. Or perhaps the hush was because everyone in the room knew what the monitor underneath the environmental controls was, and there was a sort of gasp when all considered the video image that Richards had haphazardly preserved in moving the camera out of his face. He had perfectly centered the image so that it was capturing the—
“Auto-destruct and fail-safe sequencer,” Gibraltar remarked, from his chair. It was rare that the budgetary director knew or understood these particular mechanisms. It was counterproductive when he got into this kind of micromanagement. But Rob never underestimated Gibraltar’s grasp of the basic engineering principles of space exploration.
“That’s right,” Rob said. “I saw it in my mind’s eye. I saw that auto-destruct timer in my mind’s eye, and I wondered, if he were just an animal now, or a disassembling body, or whatever it is we think he is, would he have situated this camera so that at its dead center we would see the auto-destruct sequencer? Can someone review for us?”
The kid called Fielding again: “An auto-destruct sequence can be begun at either of two locations, on the craft or remotely, at Mission Control—”
“Because?” Rob asked.
“Because no one mission team should have the ability to abort, but by having the go-ahead from the other party, by having mutual agreement, the craft can in effect auto-destruct.”
“Though it’s also true, I believe,” said Debra Levin, silent until now, “that the space administration arrogates to itself the right to oversee any and all auto-destruct sequences, correct?”
“Of course, Madam Director. If we—”
“The world may have passed on to another news cycle, but the world recognizes that only one man has gone to Mars and attempted to return to speak of it, Mr. Antoine, and that man comes from the United States of America, and while there’s still a chance that our man from Mars may be returned for the hero’s welcome he deserves, the administration prefers to think that our reputation as the country of innovation will enable us to treat this man, to bring him back from the scourge with which he suffers. We discovered the polio vaccine here, Mr. Antoine; we mapped the five different strains of Marburg virus. It is this country that landed Colonel Richards on Mars in the first place, and it seems to me we ought to be the ones who are able to bring him home. When some other nation has the record of innovation and heroism that this country has, why then, Mr. Antoine—”
“With all due respect, Madam Director,” said Antoine, trying to avoid some kind of ceaseless nationalistic prose poem, “having just arrived, you missed the tedious beginning of the conversation, where I was describing my theory that a kind of primitive linguistic statement has been prepared for us, rather carefully, it seems, by Colonel Richards, in this feed that we have here. Before you came in, I was pointing out that it was possible that he had specifically calibrated these monitors before video-capturing them for us. I think what’s noteworthy about the auto-destruct sequence is not that it requires our input, or your input, before it can be effected, but, rather, and correct me if I’m wrong here, Fielding, that Jed has actually already engaged his end. Am I reading this monitor correctly?”
“It’s the preliminary subroutine,” Fielding muttered. “He has given himself one hour on the clock.”
“And we have how much time left before splashdown?”
“About twice that much.”
How had it grown so late? How had it grown so late? How had years of preparation and endlessly redundant plans come down to this? It had grown late while the Mars mission pondered, again and again, a list of possible responses without arriving at one that it could collectively stomach, and now it was nearly too late.
“Which means,” Rob said, “that we have how long if we’re trying to insure that pieces of the craft burn up in the outer atmosphere?”
The question hung like a cloud over a blasting site, and while the crowd murmured and prepared to return to its workstations, Rob Antoine, still relying on some auxiliary tank of energy that he had long since used up, gave the image on the screen one last look. That was when he saw the fuzzy onboard video monitor way over on the left side of the feed. Because of Rob’s nearness and the screen’s fuzzy resolution, the monitor was very hard to make out. It was a blur of primary colors.
“Wait, wait!” Rob called to those who would exit. “Anyone look at this? Right here?” He indicated with the pointer.
“A personal monitor,” said Fielding Ayler. “That’s just whatever he’s watching on the idiot box. Or was.”
“Just for my own edification, Fielding, do you happen to know what’s on his idiot box?”
“As you know, sir, we can’t see what’s on their personal screens. For reasons of privacy. However, sir, there is a work-around, insisted on by security personnel.”
“Is that right?” Antoine replied.
“We do have, for example, a record of web-related transactions by the employees, just like with anyone here on staff. They are networked to us, after all, even at a distance. Anything that’s been watched would have been cached in a file folder for the individual astronaut, and that material, unless they uploaded it from a flash drive, which they shouldn’t have, is contained on the server right here.”
“I’m guessing, Fielding, that you have seen a few reports about individual usage.”
“I’m guessing, sir, that everyone with clearance has.”
“What does everyone with clearance know about the viewing habits of our courageous voyagers?”
“That Captain Jim Rose liked gay porn, sir, that Arnie and Laurie follow professional tennis, and ballet, and that Colonel Richards, well, sir, he’s sentimental about his daughter.”
“You’re saying what, exactly?”
“Unless I miss my guess, sir, that blurry image is Colonel Richards’s daughter at a dance. A recent high school dance. Uploaded by her to his e-mail box about six weeks ago. She’s a good dancer apparently. Very, uh, flamboyant.”
In this way Rob Antoine came to wonder about the mysteries of syntax, of language. Had he learned, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Colonel Jed Richards was trying to tell him something? No, he didn’t believe he’d learned any such thing. Over all meanings was the shadow of unmeaning. In all utterances was the exasperated sigh of those lapsing into silence. Where one man was certain about what he had just said, beside him was a Vance Gibraltar, or others like him, who had heard no such thing, who had heard, in fact, nothing at all. Woe to the words and sentences and paragraphs that were not even understood as such, for they faded from recollection like trash blowing across a glass-strewn vacant lot. This, however, did not prevent Rob Antoine from divining with tea leaves, and perhaps this was because of his fixation upon the long, slow march of truth across the canvas of the boring. What was boring was somehow more elegant, more perfect, for it was incontrovertible. The boring was everything that certainly was. The boring was everything that had stood the test of time. The boring was that set of truths that were so long fixed that erosion had begun to sand them down. The boring was geological; the boring was universal. The boring, therefore, was preferable. And so when the meeting attendants had agreed to research and return in half an hour, the room emptied, so that all the Mars mission team managers could go to their workstations to prepare for what came next, if not auto-destruct. Rob Antoine was still looking at the image, and that was when the syntax of the remark — for that was what he had come to call it in his fuzzy mind, the remark—appeared to him, with the blunt force of an equation, something perfect and mathematical — what Jed Richards was trying to tell him, trying to tell Rob Antoine, another husband and father whose family had left him while he attempted to learn the truth that the stars and the planets were bent upon announcing: