SPIN

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, una

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 ru

"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 ru

Some weekends I drove up the coast to Ke

I liked the grandeur of the launches. What fascinated Jase, he admitted was the relativistic disco

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.

"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 pi

"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.