Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Giselle was good person and she was leading a perilous life. I never saw her again, but I hope she survived the chaos that came later.

  The flight to Orlando was a creaking old Airbus. The cabin upholstery was threadbare, the seatback video screens overdue for replacement. I took my place between a Russian businessman in the window seat and a middle-aged woman on the aisle. The Russian was sullenly indifferent to conversation but the woman wanted to talk: she was a professional medical transcriptionist bound for Tampa for a two-week visit with her daughter and son-in-law. Her name was Sarah, she said, and we talked medical shop while the aircraft lumbered toward cruising altitude.

  Vast amounts of federal money had been pumped into the aerospace industry in the five years since the Chinese fireworks display. Very little of it had been devoted to commercial aviation, however, which was why these refurbished Airbuses were still flying. Instead the money had gone into the kind of projects E. D. Lawton was managing from his Washington office and Jason was designing at Perihelion in Florida: Spin investigations, including, lately, the Mars effort. The Clayton administration had shepherded all this spending through a compliant Congress pleased to appear to be doing something tangible about the Spin. It was good for public morale. Better still, no one expected immediate tangible results.

  Federal money had helped keep the domestic economy afloat, at least in the Southwest, greater Seattle, coastal Florida. But it was a laggard and ice-thin prosperity, and Sarah was worried about her daughter: her son-in-law was a licensed pipe fitter, laid off indefinitely by a Tampa-area natural gas distributor. They were living in a trailer, collecting federal relief money and trying to raise a three-year-old boy, Sarah’s grandson, Buster.

  “Isn’t that an odd name,” she asked, “for a boy? I mean, Buster? Sounds like a silent-movie star. But the thing is, it kind of suits him.”

  I told her names were like clothes: either you wore them or they wore you. She said, “Is that right, Tyler Dupree?” and I smiled sheepishly.

  “Of course,” she said, “I don’t know why young people want to have children at all these days. As awful as that sounds. Nothing against Buster, of course. I dearly love him and I hope he’ll have a long and happy life. But I can’t help wondering, what are the odds?”

  “Sometimes people need a reason to hope,” I said, wondering if this banal truth was what Giselle had been trying to tell me.

  “But then,” she said, “many young people aren’t having children, I mean deliberately not having them, as an act of kindness. They say the best thing you can do for a child is to spare it the suffering we’re all in store for.”

  “I’m not sure anybody knows what we’re in store for.”

  “I mean, the point of no return and all…”

  “Which we’ve passed. But here we are. For some reason.”

  She arched her eyebrows. “You believe there are reasons, Dr. Dupree?”

  We chatted some more; then Sarah said, “I must try to sleep,” wadding the airline’s miniature pillow into the gap between her neck and the headrest. Outside the window, partially obscured by the indifferent Russian, the sun had set, the sky had gone sooty black; there was nothing to see but a reflection of the overhead light, which I dimmed and focused on my knees.

  Idiotically, I had packed all my reading material in my checked luggage. But there was a tattered magazine in the pouch in front of Sarah, and I reached over and snagged it. The magazine, with a plain white cover, was called Gateway. A religious publication, probably left behind by a previous passenger.

  I leafed through it, thinking, inevitably, of Diane. In the years since the failed attack on the Spin artifacts the New Kingdom movement had lost whatever coherence it had once possessed. Its founding figures had disavowed it and its happy sexual communism had burned out under the pressure of venereal disease and human cupidity. No one today, even on the avant fringe of trendy religiosity, would describe himself simply as “NK.” You might be a Hectorian, a Preterist (Full or Partial), a Kingdom Reconstructionist—never just “New Kingdom.” The Ekstasis circuit Diane and Simon had been traveling the summer we met in the Berkshires had ceased to exist.

  None of the remaining NK factions carried much demographic clout. The Southern Baptists alone outnumbered all the Kingdom sects put together. But the millenarian focus of the movement had lent it disproportional weight in the religious anxiety surrounding the Spin. It was partly because of New Kingdom that so many roadside billboards proclaimed TRIBULATION IN PROGRESS and so many mainstream churches had been compelled to address the question of the apocalypse.

  Gateway appeared to be the print organ of a West Coast Reconstructionist faction, aimed at the general public. It contained, along with an editorial denouncing Calvinists and Covenanters, three pages of recipes and a movie review column. But what caught my eye was an article called “Blood Sacrifice and the Red Heifer”—something about a pure red calf that would appear “in fulfillment of prophecy” and be sacrificed at the Temple Mount in Israel, ushering in the Rapture. Apparently the old NK faith in the Spin as an act of redemption had grown unfashionable. “For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole Earth,” Luke 21:35. A snare, not a deliverance. Better find an animal to burn: the Tribulation was proving more troublesome than expected.

  I tucked the magazine back into the seat pouch while the aircraft bumped into a wave of turbulence. Sarah frowned in her sleep. The Russian businessman rang for the steward and ordered a whiskey sour.

  The car I rented at Orlando the next morning had two bullet holes in it, puttied and painted but still visible in the passenger-side door. I asked the clerk if there was anything else. “Last one on the lot,” he said, “but if you don’t mind waiting a couple of hours—”

  No, I said, it would do.

  I took the Bee Line Expressway east and then turned south on 95. I stopped for breakfast at a roadside Denny’s outside Cocoa, where the waitress, maybe sensing my essential homelessness, was generous with the coffeepot. “Long haul?”

  “Not more than an hour to go.”

  “Well, then, you’re practically there. Home or away?” When she realized I didn’t have a ready answer she smiled. “You’ll sort it out, hon. We all do, sooner or later.” And in exchange for this roadside blessing I left her a silly-generous tip.

  The Perihelion campus—which Jason had called, alarmingly, “the compound”—was located well south of the Canaveral/Kennedy launch platforms where its strategies were transformed into physical acts. The Perihelion Foundation (now officially an agency of the government) wasn’t part of NASA, although it “interfaced” with NASA, borrowing and lending engineers and staff. In a sense it was a layer of bureaucracy imposed on NASA by successive administrations since the beginning of the Spin, taking the moribund space agency in directions its old bosses couldn’t have anticipated and might not have approved. E.D. ruled its steering committee, and Jason had taken effective control of program development.

  The day had begun to heat up, a Florida heat that seemed to rise from the earth, the moist land sweating like a brisket in a barbecue. I drove past stands of ragged palmettos, fading surf shops, stagnant green roadside ditches, and at least one crime scene: police cars surrounding a black pickup truck, three men bent over the hot metal hood with their wrists slip-tied behind their backs. A cop directing traffic gave my rental’s license plate a long look and then waved me past, eyes glittering with a blank, generic suspicion.

  The Perihelion “compound,” when I reached it, was nothing as grim as the word suggested. It was a salmon-colored industrial complex, modern and clean, set into an immaculate rolling green lawn, heavily gated but hardly intimidating. A guard at the gatehouse peered inside the car, asked me to open the trunk, pawed through my suitcases and boxes of disks, then gave me a temporary pass on a pocket clip and directed me to the visitor’s lot (“behind the south wing, follow the road to your left, have a nice day”). His blue uniform was indigo with pe
rspiration.

  I had barely parked the car when Jason came through a pair of frosted-glass doors marked ALL VISITORS MUST REGISTER and crossed a patch of lawn into the blistering desert of the parking lot. “Tyler!” he said, stopping a yard short of me as if I might vanish, a mirage.

  “Hey, Jase,” I said, smiling.

  “Dr. Dupree!” He grinned. “But that car. A rental? We’ll have somebody drive it back to Orlando. Set you up with something nicer. You have a place to stay yet?”

  I reminded him that he’d promised to take care of that, too.

  “Oh, we did. Or rather, we are. Negotiating a lease on a little place not twenty minutes from here. Ocean view. Ready in a couple of days. In the meantime you’ll need a hotel, but that’s easily arranged. So why are we standing out here absorbing UV?”

  I followed him into the south wing of the complex. I watched the way he walked. I noted the way he listed a little to the left, the way he favored his right hand.

  Air conditioning assaulted us as soon as we were inside, an arctic chill that smelled as if it had been pumped out of sterile vaults deep in the earth. There was a great deal of polished tile and granite in the lobby. More guards, these trained to an impeccable politeness. “So glad you’re here,” Jase said. “I shouldn’t take the time but I want to show you around. The quick tour. I’ve got Boeing people in the conference room. Guy from Torrance and a guy from the IDS group in St. Louis. Xenon-ion upgrades, they’re very proud, squeezing out a little more throughput, as if that mattered much. We don’t need finesse, I tell them, we need reliability, simplicity….”

  “Jason,” I said.

  “They—what?”

  “Take a breath,” I said.

  He gave me a stiff, irritated look. Then he relented, laughed out loud. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just, it’s like—remember when we were kids? Any time one of us got a new toy we had to show it off?”

  Usually it had been Jase who had the new toys, or at least the expensive ones. But yes, I told him, I remembered.

  “Well, it would be flippant to describe it this way to anyone but you, but what we have here, Tyler, is the world’s biggest toy chest. Let me show it off, okay? Then we’ll get you settled. Give you time to adjust to the climate. If possible.”

  So I followed him through the ground floor of all three wings, duly admiring the conference rooms and offices, the huge laboratories and engineering bays where prototypes were devised or mission goals shuffled before plans and objectives were handed off to big-money contractors. All very interesting, all very bewildering. We ended up at the in-house infirmary, where I was introduced to Dr. Koenig, the outgoing physician, who shook my hand without enthusiasm and then shuffled off, saying “Good luck to you, Dr. Dupree” over his shoulder.

  By this time Jason’s pocket pager had buzzed so often he could no longer ignore it. “The Boeing people,” he said. “Gotta admire their PPUs, or else they’ll get sulky. Can you find your own way back to reception? I’ve got Shelly waiting there—my personal assistant—she’ll set you up with a room. We can talk later. Tyler, it’s really good to see you again!”

  Another handshake, strangely weak, and then he was off, still listing to the left, leaving me to wonder not whether he was ill but how ill he was and how much worse it would get.

  Jason was as good as his word. Within a week I had moved into a small furnished house, as apparently fragile as all these Florida houses seemed to my eyes, wood and lath, walls mostly windows, but it must have been expensive: the upstairs porch looked down a long slope past a commercial strip to the sea. During this time I was briefed on three occasions by the taciturn Dr. Koenig, who had clearly been unhappy at Perihelion but handed over his practice with great gravitas, entrusting me with his case files and his support staff, and on Monday I saw my first patient, a junior metallurgist who had twisted his ankle during a game of intramural football on the south lawn. Clearly, the clinic was “overengineered,” as Jase might say, for the trivial work we did on a daily basis. But Jason claimed to be anticipating a time when medical care might be hard to come by in the world outside the gates.

  I began to settle in. I wrote or extended prescriptions, I dispensed aspirin, I browsed the case files. I exchanged pleasantries with Molly Seagram, my receptionist, who liked me (she said) a lot better than she had liked Dr. Koenig.

  Nights, I went home and watched lightning flicker from clouds that parked themselves off the coast like vast electrified clipper ships.

  And I waited for Jason to call: which he didn’t, not for most of a month. Then, one Friday evening after sunset, he was suddenly at the door, unannounced, in off-duty garb (jeans, T-shirt) that subtracted a decade from his apparent age. “Thought I’d drop by,” he said. “If that’s okay?”

  Of course it was. We went upstairs and I fetched two bottles of beer from the refrigerator and we sat awhile on the whitewashed balcony. Jase started saying things like “Great to see you” and “Good to have you on board,” until I interrupted him: “I don’t need the fuckin’ welcome wagon anymore. It’s just me, Jase.”

  He laughed sheepishly, and it was easier after that.

  We reminisced. At one point I asked him, “You hear much from Diane?”

  He shrugged. “Rarely.”

  I didn’t pursue it. Then, when we had both killed a couple of beers and the air was cooler and the evening had grown quiet, I asked him how he was doing, personally speaking.

  “Been busy,” he said. “As you may have guessed. We’re close to the first seed launches—closer than we’ve let on to the press. E.D. likes to stay ahead of the game. He’s in Washington most of the time, Clayton himself is keeping a close eye on us, we’re the administration’s darlings, at least for now. But that leaves me doing managerial shit, which is endless, instead of the work I want and need to do, mission design. It’s—” He waved his hands helplessly.

  “Stressful,” I supplied.

  “Stressful. But we’re making progress. Inch by inch.”

  “I notice I don’t have a file on you,” I said. “At the clinic. Every other employee or administrator has a medical jacket. Except you.”

  He looked away, then laughed, a barking, nervous laugh. “Well…I’d kind of like to keep it that way, Tyler. For the time being.”

  “Dr. Koenig had other ideas?”

  “Dr. Koenig thinks we’re all a little nuts. Which is, of course, true. Did I tell you he took a job running a cruise-ship clinic? Can you picture that? Koenig in a Hawaiian shirt, handing out Gravol to the tourists?”

  “Just tell me what’s wrong, Jase.”

  He looked into the darkening eastern sky. There was a faint light hanging a few degrees above the horizon, not a star, almost certainly one of his father’s aerostats.

  “The thing is,” he said, almost whispering, “I’m a little bit afraid of being sidelined just when we’re starting to get results.” He gave me long look. “I want to be able to trust you, Ty.”

  “Nobody here but us,” I said.

  And then, at last, he recited his symptoms—quietly, almost schematically, as if the pain and weakness carried no more emotional weight than the misfires of a malfunctioning engine. I promised him some tests that wouldn’t be entered on my charts. He nodded his acquiescence, and then we dropped the subject and cracked yet another beer, and eventually he thanked me and shook my hand, maybe more solemnly than necessary, and left this house he had rented on my behalf, my new and unfamiliar home.

  I went to bed afraid for him.

  Under the Skin

  I learned a lot about Perihelion from my patients: the scientists, who loved to talk, more than the administrators, who were generally more taciturn; but also from the families of staff who had begun to abandon their crumbling HMOs in favor of the in-house clinic. Suddenly I was running a fully functional family practice, and most of my patients were people who had looked deeply into the reality of the Spin and confronted it with courage and resolve. “Cynicism stops at
the front gate,” a mission programmer told me. “We know what we’re doing is important.” That was admirable. It was also infectious. Before long I began to consider myself one of them, part of the work of extending human influence into the raging torrent of extraterrestrial time.

  Some weekends I drove up the coast to Kennedy to watch the rockets lift off, modernized Atlases and Deltas roaring into the sky from a forest of newly constructed launch platforms; and occasionally, late that fall, early that winter, Jase would set aside his work and come with me. The payloads were simple ARVs, preprogrammed reconnaissance devices, clumsy windows on the stars. Their recovery modules would drift down (barring mission failure) into the Atlantic Ocean or onto the salt pans of the western desert, bearing news from the world beyond the world.

  I liked the grandeur of the launches. What fascinated Jase, he admitted was the relativistic disconnect they represented. These small payload packages might spend weeks or even months beyond the Spin barrier, measuring the distance to the receding moon or the volume of the expanding sun, but would fall back to Earth (in our frame of reference) the same afternoon, enchanted bottles filled with more time than they could possibly contain.

  And when this wine was decanted, inevitably, rumors would sweep the halls of Perihelion: gamma radiation up, indicating some violent event in the stellar neighborhood; new striations on Jupiter as the sun pumped more heat into its turbulent atmosphere; a vast, fresh crater on the moon, which no longer kept one face aligned with Earth but turned its dark side toward us in slow rotation.

  One morning in December Jase took me across the campus to an engineering bay where a full-scale mockup of a Martian payload vessel had been installed. It occupied an aluminum platform in a corner of the huge sectored room where, around us, other prototypes were being assembled or rigged for testing by men and women in white Tyvek suits. The device was dismayingly small, I thought, a knobby black box the size of a doghouse with a nozzle fitted to one end, drab under the merciless high ceiling lights. But Jase showed it off with a parent’s pride.