Spin

by Wilson, Robert Charles Charles

  “Basically,” he said, “it has three parts: the ion drive and reaction mass, the onboard navigational systems, and the payload. Most of the mass is engine. No communications: it can’t talk to Earth and it doesn’t need to. The nav programs are multiply redundant but the hardware itself is no bigger than a cell phone, powered by solar panels.” The panels weren’t attached but there was an artist’s impression of the fully deployed vehicle pinned to the wall, the doghouse transformed into a Picasso dragonfly.

  “It doesn’t look powerful enough to get to Mars.”

  “Power isn’t the problem. Ion engines are slow but stubborn. Which is exactly what we want—simple, rugged, durable technology. The tricky part is the nav system, which has to be smart and autonomous. When an object passes through the Spin barrier it picks up what some people are calling ‘temporal velocity,’ which is a dumb descriptor but gets the idea across. The launch vehicle is speeded up and heated up—not relative to itself but relative to us—and the differential is extremely large. Even a tiny change of velocity or trajectory during launch, something as small as a gust of wind or a sluggish fuel feed on the booster, makes it impossible to predict not how but when the vehicle will emerge into exterior space.”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “It matters because Mars and Earth are both in elliptical orbits, circling the sun at different speeds. There’s no reliable way to precalculate the relative positions of the planets at the time the vehicle achieves orbit. Essentially, the machine has to find Mars in a crowded sky and plot its own trajectory. So we need clever, flexible software and a rugged, durable drive. Fortunately we’ve got both. It’s a sweet machine, Tyler. Plain on the outside but pretty under the skin. Sooner or later, left to its own devices and barring disaster, it’ll do what it’s designed to do, park itself in orbit around Mars.”

  “And then?”

  Jase smiled. “Heart of the matter. Here.” He pulled a series of dummy bolts from the mock-up and opened a panel at the front, revealing a shielded chamber divided into hexagonal spaces, a honeycomb. Nestled in each space was a blunt, black oval. A nest of ebony eggs. Jason drew one of these from its resting place. The object was small enough to hold in one hand.

  “It looks like a pregnant lawn dart,” I said.

  “It’s only a little more sophisticated than a lawn dart. We scatter these into the Martian atmosphere. When they reach a certain altitude they pop out vanes and spin the rest of the way down, bleeding off heat and velocity. Where you scatter them—the poles, the equator—depends on each vehicle’s particular payload, whether we’re looking for subsurface brine slurries or raw ice, but the basic process is the same. Think of them as hypodermic needles, inoculating the planet with life.”

  This “life,” I understood, would consist of engineered microbes, their genetic material spliced together from bacteria discovered inside rocks in the dry valleys of Antarctica, from anaerobes capable of surviving in the outflow pipes of nuclear reactors, from unicells recovered from the icy sludge at the bottom of the Barents Sea. These organisms would function mainly as soil conditioners, meant to thrive as the aging sun warmed the Martian surface and released trapped water vapor and other gasses. Next would come hyper-engineered strains of blue-green algae, simple photosynthesizers, and eventually more complex forms of life capable of exploiting the environment the initial launches helped to create. Mars would always be, at best, a desert; all its liberated water might create no more than a few shallow, salty, unstable lakes…but that might be enough. Enough to create a marginally habitable place beyond the shrouded Earth, where human beings might go and live, a million centuries for each of our years. Where our Martian cousins might have time to solve puzzles we could only grope at.

  Where we would build, or allow evolution to build on our behalf, a race of saviors.

  “It’s hard to believe we can actually do this—”

  “If we can. It’s hardly a foregone conclusion.”

  “And even so, as a way of solving a problem—”

  “It’s an act of teleological desperation. You’re absolutely right. Just don’t say it too loudly. But we do have one powerful force on our side.”

  “Time,” I guessed.

  “No. Time is a useful lever. But the active ingredient is life. Life in the abstract, I mean: replication, evolution, complexification. The way life has of filling up cracks and crevices, surviving by doing the unexpected. I believe in that process: it’s robust, it’s stubborn. Can it rescue us? I don’t know. But the possibility is real.” He smiled. “If you were chairing a congressional budget committee I’d be less equivocal.”

  He handed me the dart. It was surprisingly light, no weightier than a Major League baseball. I tried to imagine hundreds of these raining out of a cloudless Martian sky, impregnating the sterile soil with human destiny. Whatever destiny was left us.

  E. D. Lawton visited the Florida compound three months into the new year, the same time Jason’s symptoms recurred. They had been in remission for months.

  When Jase had come to me last year he had described his condition reluctantly but methodically. Transient weakness and numbness in his arms and legs. Blurred vision. Episodic vertigo. Occasional incontinence. None of the symptoms were disabling but they had become too frequent to ignore.

  Could be a lot of things, I told him, although he must have known as well as I did that we were probably looking at a neurological problem.

  We had both been relieved when his blood tests came back positive for multiple sclerosis. MS had been a curable (or containable) disease since the introduction of chemical sclerostatins ten years ago. One of the small ironies of the Spin was that it had coincided with a number of medical breakthroughs coming out of proteinomic research. Our generation—Jason’s and mine—might well be doomed, but we wouldn’t be killed by MS, Parkinson’s, diabetes, lung cancer, arteriosclerosis, or Alzheimer’s. The industrialized world’s last generation would probably be its healthiest.

  Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. Nearly five percent of diagnosed cases of MS still failed to respond to sclerostatins or other therapy. Clinicians were starting to talk about these cases as “poly-drug-resistant MS,” maybe even a separate disease with the same symptomology.

  But Jason’s initial treatment had proceeded as expected. I had prescribed a minimum daily dose of Tremex and he had been in full remission ever since. At least until the week E.D. arrived at Perihelion with all the subtlety of a tropical storm, scattering congressional aides and press attachés down the hallways like wind-blown debris.

  E.D. was Washington, we were Florida; he was administration, we were science and engineering. Jase was poised a little precariously between the two. His job was essentially to see that the steering committee’s dictates were enforced, but he had stood up to the bureaucracy often enough that the science guys had stopped talking about “nepotism” and started buying him drinks. The trouble was, Jase said, E.D. wasn’t content to have set the Mars project into motion; he wanted to micromanage it, often for political reasons, occasionally handing off contracts to dubious bidders in order to buy congressional support. He was sneered at by the staff, though they were happy enough to shake his hand when he was in town. This year’s junket culminated in an address to staff and guests in the compound auditorium. We all filed in, dutiful as schoolchildren but more plausibly enthusiastic, and as soon as the audience was settled Jason stood up to introduce his father. I watched him as he mounted the risers to the stage and took the podium. I watched the way he kept his left hand loose at thigh-level, the way he turned, pivoting awkwardly on his heel, when he shook his father’s hand.

  Jase introduced his father briefly but graciously and melted back into the crowd of dignitaries at the rear of the stage. E.D. stepped forward. E.D. had turned sixty the week before Christmas but could have passed for an athletic fifty, his stomach flat under a three-piece suit, his sparse hair cut to a brisk military stubble. He gave what might as well have been a
campaign speech, praising the Clayton administration for its foresight, the assembled staff for their dedication to the “Perihelion vision,” his son for an “inspired stewardship,” the engineers and technicians for “bringing a dream to life and, if we’re successful, bringing life to a sterile planet and fresh hope to this world we still call home.” An ovation, a wave, a feral grin, and then he was gone, spirited away by his cabal of bodyguards.

  I caught up with Jase an hour later in the executive lunchroom, where he sat at a small table pretending to read an offprint from Astrophysics Review.

  I took the chair opposite him. “So how bad is it?”

  He smiled weakly. “You don’t mean my father’s whirlwind visit?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  He lowered his voice. “I’ve been taking the medication. Clockwork, every morning and evening. But it’s back. Bad this morning. Left arm, left leg, pins and needles. And getting worse. Worse than it’s ever been. Almost by the hour. It’s like an electric current running through one side of my body.”

  “You have time to come to the infirmary?”

  “I have time, but—” His eyes glittered. “I may not have the means. Don’t want to alarm you. But I’m glad you showed up. Right now I’m not certain I can walk. I made it in here after E.D.’s speech. But I’m pretty sure if I try to stand up I’ll fall over. I don’t think I can walk. Ty—I can’t walk.”

  “I’ll call for help.”

  He straightened in his chair. “You’ll do no such thing. I can sit here until there’s nobody around except the night guard, if necessary.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Or you can discreetly help me stand up. We’re what, twenty or thirty yards from the infirmary? If you grab my arm and look congenial we can probably get there without attracting too much attention.”

  In the end I agreed, not because I approved of the charade but because it seemed to be the only way to get him into my office. I took his left arm and he braced his right hand on the table edge and levered himself up. We managed to cross the cafeteria floor without weaving, though Jason’s left foot dragged in a way that was hard to disguise—fortunately no one looked too closely. Once we reached the corridor we stayed close to the wall where his shuffling was less conspicuous. When a senior administrator appeared at the end of the hallway Jason whispered, “Stop,” and we stood as if in casual conversation with Jason braced against a display case, his right hand gripping the steel shelf so fiercely that his knuckles turned bloodless and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. The exec passed with a wordless nod.

  By the time we made the clinic entrance I was bearing most of his weight. Molly Seagram, fortunately, was out of the office; once I closed the outer door we were alone. I helped Jase onto a table in one of the examination rooms, then went back to the reception desk and posted a note for Molly to make sure we wouldn’t be disturbed.

  When I returned to the consultation room Jason was crying. Not weeping, but tears had streaked his face and lingered on his chin. “This is so fucking awful.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I couldn’t help it,” he said. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it.”

  He had lost control of his bladder.

  I helped him into a medical gown and rinsed his wet clothes in the consulting room sink and put them to dry next to a sunny window in the seldom-used storage room beyond the pharmaceutical cupboards. Business was slow today and I used that excuse to give Molly the afternoon off.

  Jason recovered some of his composure, though he looked diminished in the paper gown. “You said this was a curable disease. Tell me what went wrong.”

  “It is treatable, Jase. For most patients, most of the time. But there are exceptions.”

  “And what, I’m one of them? I won the bad news lottery?”

  “You’re having a relapse. That’s typical of the untreated disease, periods of disability followed by intervals of remission. You might just be a late responder. In some cases the drug needs to reach a certain level in the body for an extended length of time before it’s fully effective.”

  “It’s been six months since you wrote the prescription. And I’m worse, not better.”

  “We can switch you to one of the other sclerostatins, see if that helps. But they’re all chemically very similar.”

  “So changing the prescription won’t help.”

  “It might. It might not. We’ll try it before we rule it out.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?”

  “Then we stop talking about eliminating the disease and start to talk about managing it. Even untreated, MS is hardly a death sentence. Lots of people experience full remission between attacks and manage to lead relatively normal lives.” Although, I did not add, such cases were seldom as severe or as aggressive as Jason’s seemed to be. “The usual fallback treatment is a cocktail of anti-inflammatory drugs, selective protein inhibitors, and targeted CNS stimulants. It can be very effective at suppressing symptoms and slowing the course of the disease.”

  “Good,” Jason said. “Great. Write me a ticket.”

  “It’s not that simple. You could be looking at side effects.”

  “Such as?”

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe some psychological distress—mild depression or manic episodes. Some generalized physical weakness.”

  “But I’ll pass for normal?”

  “In all likelihood.” For now and probably for another ten or fifteen years, maybe more. “But it’s a control measure, not a cure—a brake, not a full stop. The disease will come back if you live long enough.”

  “You can give me a decade, though, for sure?”

  “As sure as anything is in my business.”

  “A decade,” he said thoughtfully. “Or a billion years. Depending on how you look at it. Maybe that’s enough. Ought to be enough, don’t you think?”

  I didn’t ask, Enough for what? “But in the meantime—”

  “I don’t want a ‘meantime,’ Tyler. I can’t afford to be away from my work and I don’t want anyone to know about this.”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “I’m not ashamed of it.” He gestured at the paper gown with his right hand. “Fucking humiliated, but not ashamed. This isn’t a psychological issue. It’s about what I do here at Perihelion. What I’m allowed to do. E.D. hates illness, Tyler. He hates weakness of any kind. He hated Carol from the day her drinking became a problem.”

  “You don’t think he’d understand?”

  “I love my father, but I’m not blind to his faults. No, he would not understand. All the influence I have at Perihelion flows through E.D. And that’s a little precarious at the moment. We’ve had some disagreements. If I became a liability to him he’d have me relegated to some expensive treatment facility in Switzerland or Bali before the week was out, and he’d tell himself he was doing it for my sake. Worse, he would believe it.”

  “What you choose to make public is your business. But you need to be seeing a neurologist, not a staff GP.”

  “No,” he said.

  “I can’t in good conscious continue to treat you, Jase, if you won’t talk to a specialist. It was dicey enough putting you on Tremex without consulting a brain guy.”

  “You have the MRI and the blood tests, right? What else do you need?”

  “Ideally, a fully equipped hospital lab and degree in neurology.”

  “Bullshit. You said yourself, MS is no big deal nowadays.”

  “Unless it fails to respond to treatment.”

  “I can’t—” He wanted to argue. But he was also obviously, brutally tired. Fatigue might be another symptom of his relapse, though; he had been pushing himself hard in the weeks before E.D.’s visit. “I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll see a specialist if you can arrange it discreetly and keep it off my Perihelion chart. But I need to be functional. I need to be functional tomorrow. Functional as in walking without assistance and not pissing myself. The drug cocktail you talked about, does it work fast?�
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  “Usually. But without a neurological workup—”

  “Tyler, I have to tell you, I appreciate what you’ve done for me, but I can buy a more cooperative doctor if I need one. Treat me now and I’ll see a specialist, I’ll do whatever you think is right. But if you imagine I’m going to show up at work in a wheelchair with a catheter up my dick, you’re dead wrong.”

  “Even if I write a script, Jase, you won’t be better overnight. It takes a couple of days.”

  “I might be able to spare a couple of days.” He thought about it. “Okay,” he said finally. “I want the drugs and I want you to get me out of here inconspicuously. If you can do that, I’m in your hands. No arguments.”

  “Physicians don’t bargain, Jase.”

  “Take it or leave it, Hippocrates.”

  I didn’t start him on the whole cocktail—our pharmacy didn’t stock all the drugs—but I gave him a CNS stimulant that would at least return his bladder control and the ability to walk unassisted for the next few days. The downside was an edgy, icy state of mind, like, or so I’m told, the tail end of a cocaine run. It raised his blood pressure and put dark baggage under his eyes.

  We waited until most of the staff had gone home and there was only the night shift at the compound. Jase walked stiffly but plausibly past the front desk to the parking lot, waved amicably to a couple of late-departing colleagues, and sank into the passenger seat of my car. I drove him home.

  He had visited my little rental house several times, but I hadn’t been to his place before. I had expected something that reflected his status at Perihelion. In fact the apartment where he slept—clearly, he did little else there—was a modest condo unit with a sliver of an ocean view. He had furnished it with a sofa, a television, a desk, a couple of bookcases and a broadband media/Internet connection. The walls were bare except for the space above the desk, where he had taped a hand-drawn chart depicting the linear history of the solar system from the birth of the sun to its final collapse into a smoldering white dwarf, with human history diverging from the line at a spot marked THE SPIN. The bookcases were crowded with journals and academic texts and decorated with exactly three framed photographs: E. D. Lawton, Carol Lawton, and a demure image of Diane that must have been taken years ago.