I liked the grandeur of the launches. What fascinated Jase, he admitted was the relativistic disconnect they represented. These small payload packages might spend weeks or even months beyond the Spin barrier, measuring the distance to the receding moon or the volume of the expanding sun, but would fall back to Earth (in our frame of reference) the same afternoon, enchanted bottles filled with more time than they could possibly contain.
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 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 attaches down the hallways like wind-blown debris.