SPIN

"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 attaches 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 ru

"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.