SPIN

"More like conflicted. I'm thinking about leaving town."

"Really? Some kind of business trip?"

"For good."

"Oh?" Her smile faded. "When did you decide that?"

"I haven't decided. That's the point."

She opened the door wider and waved me in. "Seriously? Where are you going?"

"Long story."

"Meaning you need a drink before you talk about it?"

"Something like that," I said.

* * * * *

Giselle had introduced herself to me at a tenants' meeting in the basement of the building last year. She was twenty-four years old and about as tall as my collarbone. She worked days at a chain restaurant in Renton, but when we started getting together for coffee Sunday afternoons she told me she was "a hooker, a prostitute, it's my part-time job."

What she meant was that she was part of a loose group of female friends who traded among themselves the names of older men (presentable, usually married) who were willing to pay generously for sex but were terrified of the street trade. As she told me this Giselle had squared her shoulders and looked at me defiantly, in case I was shocked or repelled. I hadn't been. These were, after all, the Spin years. People Giselle's age made their own rules, for better or worse, and People like me abstained from passing judgment.

We continued to share coffee or an occasional di

But the thing about the sex trade, Giselle had told me, was that even at the semi-amateur level it begins to define your life. You become, she said, the kind of person who carries condoms and Viagra in her purse. So why do it, when she could have taken, say, a night job at Wal-Mart? That was a question she didn't welcome and which she answered defensively: "Maybe it's a kink. Or maybe it's a hobby, you know, like model trains." But I knew she had run away from an abusive stepfather in Saskatoon at an early age, and the ensuing career arc wasn't difficult to imagine. And of course she had the same ironclad excuse for risky behavior all of us of a certain age shared: the near-certainty of our own mass extinction. Mortality, a writer of my generation once said, trumps morality.

She said, "So how drunk do you need to get? Tipsy or totally fucked? Actually we may not have a choice. Liquor cabinet's a little bare tonight."

She mixed me something that was mostly vodka and tasted like it had been drained from a fuel tank. I cleared the daily paper off a chair and sat down. Giselle's apartment was decently furnished but she kept house like a freshman in a dorm room. The newspaper was open to the editorial page. The cartoon was about the Spin: the Hypotheticals portrayed as a couple of black spiders gripping the Earth in their hairy legs. Caption: do we eat them now or wait for the election?

"I don't get that at all," Giselle said, slumping onto the sofa and waving at the paper with her foot.

"The cartoon?"

"The whole thing. The Spin. 'No return.' Reading the papers, it's like… what? There's something on the other side of the sky, and it's not friendly. That's all I really know."

Probably the majority of the human race could have signed off on that declaration. But for some reason—maybe it was the rain, the blood that had been spilled in my presence today—what she said made me feel indignant. "It's not that hard to understand."

"No? So why's it happening?"

"Not the why. Nobody knows the why. As for the what—"

"No, I know, I don't need that lecture. We're in a sort of cosmic baggie and the universe is spi

Which irked me again. "You know your own address, don't you?"

She sipped her own drink. "Course I do."

"Because you like to know where you are. A couple of miles from the ocean, a hundred miles from the border, a few thousand miles west of New York City—right?"

"Right, but so what?"

"I'm making a point. People don't have any trouble distinguishing between Spokane and Paris, but when it comes to the sky all they see is a big amorphous mystery blob. How come?"

"I don't know. Because I learned all my astronomy from Star Trek reruns? I mean, how much do I really have to know about moons and stars? Things I haven't seen since I was a little kid. Even the scientists admit they don't know what they're talking about half the time."

"And that's okay with you?"

"The fuck difference does it make if it's okay with me? Listen, maybe I should turn on the TV. We can watch a movie and you can tell me why you're thinking about leaving town."

Stars were like people, I told her: they live and die in predictable spans of time. The sun was aging fast, and as it aged it burned its fuel faster. Its luminosity increased ten percent for every billion years. The solar system had already changed in ways that would render the raw Earth uninhabitable even if the Spin stopped today. Point of no return. That's what the newspapers were talking about. It would not have been news, except that President Clayton had made it official, admitted in a speech that according to the best scientific opinion there was no way back to the status quo ante.

And she gave me a long unhappy stare and said, "All this bullshit—"

"It's not bullshit."

"Maybe not, but it's not doing me any good."

"I'm just trying to explain—"

"Fuck, Tyler. Did I ask for an explanation? Take your nightmares and go home. Or else settle down and tell me why you want to leave Seattle. This is about those friends of yours, isn't it?"

I had told her about Jason and Diane. "Mostly Jason."

"The so-called genius."

"Not just so-called. He's in Florida…"

"Doing something for the satellite people, you said."

"Turning Mars into a garden."

"That was in the papers, too. Is it really possible?"

"I have no idea. Jason seems to think so."

"But wouldn't it take a long time?"

"The clocks run faster," I said, "past a certain altitude."

"Uh-huh. So what's he need you for?"

Well, yeah, what? Good question. Excellent question. "They're hiring a physician for the in-house clinic at Perihelion."

"I thought you were just an ordinary GP."

"I am."

"So what makes you qualified to be an astronaut doctor?"

"Absolutely nothing. But Jason—"

"He's doing a favor for ah old buddy? Well, that figures. God bless the rich, huh? Keep it among friends."

I shrugged. Let her think so. No need to share this with Giselle, and Jase hadn't said anything specific…

But when we talked I had formed the impression that Jason wanted me not just as a house doctor but as his personal physician. Because he was having a problem. Some kind of problem he didn't want to share with the Perihelion staff. A problem he wouldn't talk about over the phone.

Giselle had run out of vodka but she rummaged in her purse and came up with a joint concealed in a box of tampons. "The pay is good, I bet." She clicked a plastic lighter and applied the flame to the twist of the joint and inhaled deeply.

"We didn't get into details."

She exhaled. "Such a geek. Maybe that's why you can stand thinking about the Spin all the time. Tyler Dupree, borderline autistic. You are, you know. All the signs. I bet this Jason Lawton is exactly the same. I bet he gets a hard-on every time he says the word 'billion.'"

"Don't underestimate him. He might actually help preserve the human race." If not any particular specimen of it.

"A geek ambition if I ever heard one. And this sister of his, the one you slept with—"

"Once."

"Once. She got religion, right?"

"Right." Got it and still had it, as far as I knew. I hadn't heard from Diane since that night in the Berkshires. Not entirely for lack of trying. A couple of e-mails had gone unanswered. Jase didn't hear much from her either, but according to Carol she was living with Simon somewhere in Utah or Arizona—some western state I'd never visited and couldn't picture—where the dissolution of the New Kingdom movement had stranded them.