Federal money had helped keep the domestic economy afloat, at least in the Southwest, greater Seattle, coastal Florida. But it was a laggard and ice-thin prosperity, and Sarah was worried about her daughter: her son-in-law was a licensed pipe fitter, laid off indefinitely by a Tampa-area natural gas distributor. They were living in a trailer, collecting federal relief money and trying to raise a three-year-old boy, Sarah's grandson, Buster.
"Isn't that an odd name," she asked, "for a boy? I mean, Buster? Sounds like a silent-movie star. But the thing is, it kind of suits him."
I told her names were like clothes: either you wore them or they wore you. She said, "Is that right, Tyler Dupree?" and I smiled sheepishly.
"Of course," she said, "I don't know why young people want to have children at all these days. As awful as that sounds. Nothing against Buster, of course. I dearly love him and I hope he'll have a long and happy life. But I can't help wondering, what are the odds?"
"Sometimes people need a reason to hope," I said, wondering if this banal truth was what Giselle had been trying to tell me.
"But then," she said, "many young people aren't having children, I mean deliberately not having them, as an act of kindness. They say the best thing you can do for a child is to spare it the suffering we're all in store for."
"I'm not sure anybody knows what we're in store for."
"I mean, the point of no return and all…"
"Which we've passed. But here we are. For some reason."
She arched her eyebrows. "You believe there are reasons, Dr. Dupree?"
We chatted some more; then Sarah said, "I must try to sleep," wadding the airline's miniature pillow into the gap between her neck and the headrest. Outside the window, partially obscured by the indifferent Russian, the sun had set, the sky had gone sooty black; there was nothing to see but a reflection of the overhead light, which I dimmed and focused on my knees.
Idiotically, I had packed all my reading material in my checked luggage. But there was a tattered magazine in the pouch in front of Sarah, and I reached over and snagged it. The magazine, with a plain white cover, was called Gateway. A religious publication, probably left behind by a previous passenger.
I leafed through it, thinking, inevitably, of Diane. In the years since the failed attack on the Spin artifacts the New Kingdom movement had lost whatever coherence it had once possessed. Its founding figures had disavowed it and its happy sexual communism had burned out under the pressure of venereal disease and human cupidity. No one today, even on the avant fringe of trendy religiosity, would describe himself simply as "NK." You might be a Hectorian, a Preterist (Full or Partial), a Kingdom Reconstructionist—never just "New Kingdom." The Ekstasis circuit Diane and Simon had been traveling the summer we met in the Berkshires had ceased to exist.
None of the remaining NK factions carried much demographic clout. The Southern Baptists alone outnumbered all the Kingdom sects put together. But the millenarian focus of the movement had lent it disproportional weight in the religious anxiety surrounding the Spin. It was partly because of New Kingdom that so many roadside billboards proclaimed tribulation in progress and so many mainstream churches had been compelled to address the question of the apocalypse.
Gateway appeared to be the print organ of a West Coast Reconstructionist faction, aimed at the general public. It contained, along with an editorial denouncing Calvinists and Covenanters, three pages of recipes and a movie review column. But what caught my eye was an article called "Blood Sacrifice and the Red Heifer"—something about a pure red calf that would appear "in fulfillment of prophecy" and be sacrificed at the Temple Mount in Israel, ushering in the Rapture. Apparently the old NK faith in the Spin as an act of redemption had grown unfashionable. "For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole Earth," Luke 21:35. A snare, not a deliverance. Better find an animal to burn: the Tribulation was proving more troublesome than expected.
I tucked the magazine back into the seat pouch while the aircraft bumped into a wave of turbulence. Sarah frowned in her sleep. The Russian businessman rang for the steward and ordered a whiskey sour.
* * * * *
The car I rented at Orlando the next morning had two bullet holes in it, puttied and painted but still visible in the passenger-side door. I asked the clerk if there was anything else. "Last one on the lot," he said, "but if you don't mind waiting a couple of hours—"
No, I said, it would do.
I took the Bee Line Expressway east and then turned south on 95. I stopped for breakfast at a roadside Denny's outside Cocoa, where the waitress, maybe sensing my essential homelessness, was generous with the coffeepot. "Long haul?"
"Not more than an hour to go."
"Well, then, you're practically there. Home or away?" When she realized I didn't have a ready answer she smiled. "You'll sort it out, hon. We all do, sooner or later." And in exchange for this roadside blessing I left her a silly-generous tip.
The Perihelion campus—which Jason had called, alarmingly, "the compound"—was located well south of the Canaveral/Kennedy launch platforms where its strategies were transformed into physical acts. The Perihelion Foundation (now officially an agency of the government) wasn't part of NASA, although it "interfaced" with NASA, borrowing and lending engineers and staff. In a sense it was a layer of bureaucracy imposed on NASA by successive administrations since the beginning of the Spin, taking the moribund space agency in directions its old bosses couldn't have anticipated and might not have approved. E.D. ruled its steering committee, and Jason had taken effective control of program development.
The day had begun to heat up, a Florida heat that seemed to rise from the earth, the moist land sweating like a brisket in a barbecue. I drove past stands of ragged palmettos, fading surf shops, stagnant green roadside ditches, and at least one crime scene: police cars surrounding a black pickup truck, three men bent over the hot metal hood with their wrists slip-tied behind their backs. A cop directing traffic gave my rental's license plate a long look and then waved me past, eyes glittering with a blank, generic suspicion.
* * * * *
The Perihelion "compound," when I reached it, was nothing as grim as the word suggested. It was a salmon-colored industrial complex, modern and clean, set into an immaculate rolling green lawn, heavily gated but hardly intimidating. A guard at the gatehouse peered inside the car, asked me to open the trunk, pawed through my suitcases and boxes of disks, then gave me a temporary pass on a pocket clip and directed me to the visitor's lot ("behind the south wing, follow the road to your left, have a nice day"). His blue uniform was indigo with perspiration.
I had barely parked the car when Jason came through a pair of frosted-glass doors marked all visitors must register and crossed a patch of lawn into the blistering desert of the parking lot. "Tyler!" he said, stopping a yard short of me as if I might vanish, a mirage.
"Hey, Jase," I said, smiling.
"Dr. Dupree!" He grinned. "But that car. A rental? We'll have somebody drive it back to Orlando. Set you up with something nicer. You have a place to stay yet?"
I reminded him that he'd promised to take care of that, too.
"Oh, we did. Or rather, we are. Negotiating a lease on a little place not twenty minutes from here. Ocean view. Ready in a couple of days. In the meantime you'll need a hotel, but that's easily arranged. So why are we standing out here absorbing UV?"
I followed him into the south wing of the complex. I watched the way he walked. I noted the way he listed a little to the left, the way he favored his right hand.
Air conditioning assaulted us as soon as we were inside, an arctic chill that smelled as if it had been pumped out of sterile vaults deep in the earth. There was a great deal of polished tile and granite in the lobby. More guards, these trained to an impeccable politeness. "So glad you're here," Jase said. "I shouldn't take the time but I want to show you around. The quick tour. I've got Boeing people in the conference room. Guy from Torrance and a guy from the IDS group in St. Louis. Xenon-ion upgrades, they're very proud, squeezing out a little more throughput, as if that mattered much. We don't need finesse, I tell them, we need reliability, simplicity…"