SPIN

("Sounds like Canada," Carol said.)

Then to the heart of the matter. Everyone wanted to know about the Hypotheticals. Unfortunately, Wun's people knew little more about them than we did—the Hypotheticals had encapsulated Mars while he was in transit to Earth, and the Martians were as helpless before it as we had been.

He couldn't guess the Hypotheticals' motives. That question had been debated for centuries, but even the greatest Martian thinkers had never resolved it. It was interesting,

Wun said, that both Earth and Mars had been sealed off when they were on the brink of global catastrophes: "Our population, like yours, is approaching the limit of sustainability. On Earth your industry and agriculture both run on oil, supplies of which are rapidly being depleted. On Mars we have no oil at all, but we depend on another scarce commodity, elemental nitrogen: it drives our agricultural cycle and imposes absolute limits on the number of human lives the planet can sustain. We've coped a little better than has the Earth, but only because we were forced to recognize the problem from the very begi

"Perhaps the Hypotheticals understand that truth about us and perhaps it influenced their action. But we don't know that with any certainty. Nor do we know what they expect from us, if anything, or when or even whether the Spin will come to an end. We can't know, until we gather more direct information about the Hypotheticals."

"Fortunately," Wun said, the camera going close on him, "there is a way to gather that information. I've come here with a proposal, which I've discussed with both President Garland and President-elect Lomax as well as other heads of state," and he went on to sketch out the basics of the replicator plan. "With luck this will tell us whether the Hypotheticals have overtaken other worlds, how those worlds have reacted, and what the ultimate fate of the Earth might be."

But when he started talking about the Oort Cloud and "auto-catalytic feedback technology" I saw Carol's eyes glaze over.

"This can't be happening," she said after Wun departed the podium to dazed applause and the network pundits began to chew and regurgitate his speech. She looked genuinely frightened. "Is any of this true, Jason?"

"Most all of it," Jason said calmly. "I can't speak for the weather on Mars."

"Are we really on the brink of disaster?"

"We've been on the brink of disaster since the stars went out."

"I mean about oil and all that. If the Spin hadn't happened, we'd all be starving?"

"People are starving. They're starving because we can't support seven billion people in North American-style prosperity without strip-mining the planet. The numbers are hard to argue with. Yes, it's true. If the Spin doesn't kill us, sooner or later we'll be looking at a global human die-back."

"And that has something to do with the Spin itself?"

"Perhaps, but neither I nor the Martian on television know for sure."

"You're making fun of me."

"No."

"Yes you are. But that's all right. I know I'm ignorant. It's been years since I looked at a newspaper. There was always the risk of seeing your father's face, for one thing. And the only television I watch is afternoon drama. In afternoon drama there aren't any Martians. I guess I'm Rip van Winkle. I slept too long. And I don't much like the world I woke up to. The parts of it that aren't terrifying are—" She gestured at the TV. "Are ludicrous."

"We're all Rip van Winkle," Jason said gently. "We're all waiting to wake up."

* * * * *

Carol's mood improved in tandem with Jason's health and she began to take a livelier interest in his prognosis. I briefed her about his AMS, a disease that had not been formally diagnosed when Carol graduated from medical school, as a way to dodge questions about the treatment itself, an unspoken bargain which she seemed to understand and accept. The important thing was that Jason's ravaged skin was healing and the blood samples I sent to a lab in D.C. for testing showed drastically reduced neural plaque proteins.

She was still reluctant to talk about the Spin, however, and she looked unhappy when Jase and I discussed it in her presence. I thought again of the Housman poem Diane had taught me so many years ago: The infant child is not aware/He has been eaten by the bear.

Carol had been beset by several bears, some as large as the Spin and some as small as a molecule of ethanol. I think she might have envied the infant child.

* * * * *

Diane called (on my personal phone, not Carol's house phone) a few nights after Wun's U.N. appearance. I had retreated to my room and Carol was keeping the night watch. Rain had come and gone all November, and it was raining now, the bedroom window a fluid mirror of yellow light.

"You're at the Big House," Diane said.

"You talked to Carol?"

"I call her once a month. I'm a dutiful daughter. Sometimes she's sober enough to talk. What's wrong with Jason?"

"It's a long story," I said. "He's getting better. It's nothing to worry about."

"I hate it when people say that."

"I know. But it's true. There was a problem, but we fixed it"

"And that's all you can tell me."

"All for now. How are things with you and Simon?" Last time we talked she had mentioned legal trouble.

"Not too good," she said. "We're moving."

"Moving where?"

"Out of Phoenix, anyway. Away from the city. Jordan Tabernacle's been temporarily closed down—I thought maybe you'd heard about it."

"No," I said—why would I have heard about the financial troubles of a little southwest Tribulation church?—and we went on to discuss other matters, and Diane promised to update me once she and Simon had a new address. Sure, why not, what the hell.

But I did hear about Jordan Tabernacle the following night.

Uncharacteristically, Carol insisted on watching the late news. Jason was tired but alert and willing, so the three of us sat through forty minutes of international saber rattling and celebrity court cases. Some of this was interesting: there was an update on Wun Ngo Wen, who was in Belgium meeting with officials of the E.U., and good news from Uzbekistan, where the forward marine base had finally been relieved. Then there was a feature about CVWS and the Israeli dairy industry.

We watched dramatic pictures of culled cattle being bulldozed into mass graves and salted with lime. Five years ago the Japanese beef industry had been similarly devastated. Bovine or ungulate CVWS had broken out and been suppressed in a dozen countries from Brazil to Ethiopia. The human equivalent was treatable with modern antibiotics but remained a smoldering problem in third-world economies.

But Israeli dairy farmers ran strict protocols of sepsis and testing, so the outbreak there had been unexpected. Worse, the index case—the first infection—had been tracked to an unauthorized shipment of fertilized ova from the United States.

The shipment was back-traced to a Tribulationist charity called Word for the World, headquartered in an industrial park outside of Cinci