I sat on the bed next to him. When he turned his head toward me the motion was smooth but agonizingly slow. I took a penlight from my shirt pocket and flashed it into his right eye in order to watch the pupil contract.
It didn't.
It did something worse.
It glittered. The pupil of his eye glittered as if it had been injected with tiny diamonds.
Jason must have felt me jerk back.
"That bad?" he asked.
I couldn't speak.
He said, more somberly, "I can't use a mirror. Please, Ty. I need you to tell me what you see."
"This… I don't know what this is, Jason. This isn't something I can diagnose."
"Just describe it, please."
I tried to muster a clinical detachment. "It appears as if crystals of some kind have grown into your eye. The sclera looks normal and the iris doesn't seem to be affected, but the pupil is completely obscured by flakes of something like mica. I've never heard of anything like this. I would have said it was impossible. I can't treat it."
I backed away from the bed, found a chair and sat in it. For a while there was no sound but the ticking of the bedside clock, another of Carol's pristine antiques.
Then Jason draw a breath and forced what he seemed to imagine was a reassuring smile. "Thank you. You're right. It isn't a condition you can treat. But I'm still going to need your help during—well, during the next couple of days. Carol tries, but she's way out of her depth."
"So am I."
More rain beat at the window. "The help I need isn't entirely medical."
"If you have an explanation for this—"
"A partial one, at best."
"Then please share it with me, Jase, because I'm getting a little scared here."
He cocked his head, listening to some sound I hadn't heard or couldn't hear, until I began to wonder whether he had forgotten me. Then he said, "The short version is that my nervous system has been overtaken by something beyond my control. The condition of my eyes is just an external manifestation of it."
"A disease?"
"No, but that's the effect it's having."
"Is this condition contagious?"
"On the contrary. I believe it's unique. A disease only I can develop—on this planet, at least."
"Then it has something to do with the longevity treatment."
"In a way it does. But I—"
"No, Jase, I need an answer to that before you say anything else. Is your condition—whatever it is—a direct result of the drug I administered?"
"Not a direct result, no… you're not at fault in any way, if that's what you mean."
"Right now I couldn't care less who's at fault. Diane is sick. Didn't Carol tell you?"
"Carol said something about flu—"
"Carol lied. It's not flu. It's late-stage CVWS. I drove two thousand miles through what looks like the end of the world because she's dying, Jase, and there's only one cure I can think of, and you just threw that into doubt."
He rolled his head again, perhaps involuntarily, as if he were trying to shake off some invisible distraction.
But before I could prompt him he said, "There are aspects of Martian life Wun never shared with you. E.D. suspected as much, and to a certain extent his suspicions were well founded. Mars has been doing sophisticated biotechnology for centuries. Centuries ago, the Fourth Age was exactly what Wun told you it was—a longevity treatment and a social institution. But it's evolved since then. For Wun's generation the Fourth was more like a platform, a biological operating system capable of running much more sophisticated software applications. There isn't just a four, there's a 4.1, 4.2—if you see what I mean."
"What I gave you—"
"What you gave me was the traditional treatment. A basic four."
"But?"
"But… I've supplemented it since."
"This supplement was also something Wun transported from Mars?"
"Yes. The purpose—"
"Never mind the purpose. Are you absolutely certain you're not suffering from the effects of the original treatment?"
"As certain as I can be."
I stood up.
Jason heard me moving toward the door. "I can explain," he said. "And I still need your help. By all means take care of her, Ty. I hope she lives. But keep in mind… my time is also limited."
* * * * *
The case of Martian pharmaceuticals was where I had left it, unmolested, behind the broken wallboard in the basement of my mother's house, and when I had retrieved it I carried it across the lawn through the gusting amber rain to the Big House.
Carol was in Diane's room administering sips of oxygen by mask.
"We need to use that sparingly," I said, "unless you can conjure up another cylinder."
"Her lips were a little blue."
"Let me see."
Carol moved away from her daughter. I closed the valve and set the mask aside. You have to be careful with oxygen. It's indispensable for a patient in respiratory distress, but it can also cause problems. Too much can rupture the air sacs in the lung. My fear was that as Diane's condition worsened she would need higher doses to keep her blood levels up, the kind of oxygen therapy generally delivered by mechanical ventilation. We didn't have a ventilator.
Nor did we have any clinical means of monitoring her blood gases, but her lips looked relatively normal when I took the mask away. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, however, and though she opened her eyes once she remained lethargic and unresponsive.
Carol watched suspiciously as I opened the dusty case and extracted one of the Martian vials and a hypodermic syringe. "What's that?"
"Probably the only thing that can save her life."
"Is it? Are you sure of that, Tyler?"
I nodded.
"No," she said, "I mean, are you really sure? Because that's what you gave Jason, isn't it? When he had AMS."
There was no point in denying it. "Yes," I said.
"I may not have practiced medicine for thirty years, but I'm not ignorant. I did a little research on AMS after the last time you were here. I looked up the journal abstracts. And the interesting thing is, there isn't a cure for it. There is no magic drug. And if there were it would hardly be cross-specific for CVWS. So what I'm assuming, Tyler, is that you're about to administer a pharmaceutical agent probably connected with that wrinkled man who died in Florida."
"I won't argue, Carol. You've obviously drawn your own conclusions."
"I don't want you to argue; I want you to reassure me. I want you to tell me this drug won't do to Diane what it seems to have done to Jason."
"It won't," I said, but I think Carol knew I was editing out the caveat, the unspoken to the best of my knowledge.
She studied my face. "You still care for her."
"Yes."
"It never fails to astonish me," Carol said. "The tenacity of love."
I put the needle into Diane's vein.
* * * * *
By midday the house was not merely hot but so humid I expected moss to be hanging from the ceilings. I sat with Diane to make sure there were no immediate ill effects from the injection. At one point there was a protracted knocking at the front door of the house. Thieves, I thought, looters, but by the time I got to the foyer Carol had answered and was thanking a portly man, who nodded and turned to leave. "That was Emil Hardy," Carol said as she pulled the door closed. "Do you remember the Hardys? They own the little colonial house on Bantam Hill Road. Emil printed up a newspaper."
"A newspaper?"
She held up two stapled sheets of letter-sized paper. "Emil has an electrical generator in his garage. He listens to the radio at night and takes notes, then he prints a summary and delivers it to local houses. This is his second issue. He's a nice man and well meaning. But I don't see any point in reading such things."
"May I look at it?"
"If you like."
I took it upstairs with me.