"Jason," I said.
"They—what?"
"Take a breath," I said.
He gave me a stiff, irritated look. Then he relented, laughed out loud. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's just, it's like— remember when we were kids? Any time one of us got a new toy we had to show it off?"
Usually it had been Jase who had the new toys, or at least the expensive ones. But yes, I told him, I remembered.
"Well, it would be flippant to describe it this way to anyone but you, but what we have here, Tyler, is the world's biggest toy chest. Let me show it off, okay? Then we'll get you settled. Give you time to adjust to the climate. If possible."
So I followed him through the ground floor of all three wings, duly admiring the conference rooms and offices, the huge laboratories and engineering bays where prototypes were devised or mission goals shuffled before plans and objectives were handed off to big-money contractors. All very interesting, all very bewildering. We ended up at the in-house infirmary, where I was introduced to Dr. Koenig, the outgoing physician, who shook my hand without enthusiasm and then shuffled off, saying "Good luck to you, Dr. Dupree" over his shoulder.
By this time Jason's pocket pager had buzzed so often he could no longer ignore it. "The Boeing people," he said. "Gotta admire their PPUs, or else they'll get sulky. Can you find your own way back to reception? I've got Shelly waiting there—my personal assistant—she'll set you up with a room. We can talk later. Tyler, it's really good to see you again!"
Another handshake, strangely weak, and then he was off, still listing to the left, leaving me to wonder not whether he was ill but how ill he was and how much worse it would get.
* * * * *
Jason was as good as his word. Within a week I had moved into a small furnished house, as apparently fragile as all these Florida houses seemed to my eyes, wood and lath, walls mostly windows, but it must have been expensive: the upstairs porch looked down a long slope past a commercial strip to the sea. During this time I was briefed on three occasions by the taciturn Dr. Koenig, who had clearly been unhappy at Perihelion but handed over his practice with great gravitas, entrusting me with his case files and his support staff, and on Monday I saw my first patient, a junior metallurgist who had twisted his ankle during a game of intramural football on the south lawn. Clearly, the clinic was "overengineered," as Jase might say, for the trivial work we did on a daily basis. But Jason claimed to be anticipating a time when medical care might be hard to come by in the world outside the gates.
I began to settle in. I wrote or extended prescriptions, I dispensed aspirin, I browsed the case files. I exchanged pleasantries with Molly Seagram, my receptionist, who liked me (she said) a lot better than she had liked Dr. Koenig.
Nights, I went home and watched lightning flicker from clouds that parked themselves off the coast like vast electrified clipper ships.
And I waited for Jason to calclass="underline" which he didn't, not for most of a month. Then, one Friday evening after sunset, he was suddenly at the door, unannounced, in off-duty garb (jeans, T-shirt) that subtracted a decade from his apparent age. "Thought I'd drop by," he said. "If that's okay?"
Of course it was. We went upstairs and I fetched two bottles of beer from the refrigerator and we sat awhile on the whitewashed balcony. Jase started saying things like "Great to see you" and "Good to have you on board," until I interrupted him: "I don't need the fuckin' welcome wagon anymore. It's just me, Jase."
He laughed sheepishly, and it was easier after that.
We reminisced. At one point I asked him, "You hear much from Diane?"
He shrugged. "Rarely."
I didn't pursue it. Then, when we had both killed a couple of beers and the air was cooler and the evening had grown quiet, I asked him how he was doing, personally speaking.
"Been busy," he said. "As you may have guessed. We're close to the first seed launches—closer than we've let on to the press. E.D. likes to stay ahead of the game. He's in Washington most of the time, Clayton himself is keeping a close eye on us, we're the administration's darlings, at least for now. But that leaves me doing managerial shit, which is endless, instead of the work I want and need to do, mission design. It's—" He waved his hands helplessly.
"Stressful," I supplied.
"Stressful. But we're making progress. Inch by inch."
"I notice I don't have a file on you," I said. "At the clinic. Every other employee or administrator has a medical jacket. Except you."
He looked away, then laughed, a barking, nervous laugh. "Well… I'd kind of like to keep it that way, Tyler. For the time being."
"Dr. Koenig had other ideas?"
"Dr. Koenig thinks we're all a little nuts. Which is, of course, true. Did I tell you he took a job running a cruise-ship clinic? Can you picture that? Koenig in a Hawaiian shirt, handing out Gravol to the tourists?"
"Just tell me what's wrong, Jase."
He looked into the darkening eastern sky. There was a faint light hanging a few degrees above the horizon, not a star, almost certainly one of his father's aerostats.
"The thing is," he said, almost whispering, "I'm a little bit afraid of being sidelined just when we're starting to get results." He gave me long look. "I want to be able to trust you, Ty."
"Nobody here but us," I said.
And then, at last, he recited his symptoms—quietly, almost schematically, as if the pain and weakness carried no more emotional weight than the misfires of a malfunctioning engine. I promised him some tests that wouldn't be entered on my charts. He nodded his acquiescence, and then we dropped the subject and cracked yet another beer, and eventually he thanked me and shook my hand, maybe more solemnly than necessary, and left this house he had rented on my behalf, my new and unfamiliar home. I went to bed afraid for him.
UNDER THE SKIN
I learned a lot about Perihelion from my patients: the scientists, who loved to talk, more than the administrators, who were generally more taciturn; but also from the families of staff who had begun to abandon their crumbling HMOs in favor of the in-house clinic. Suddenly I was running a fully functional family practice, and most of my patients were people who had looked deeply into the reality of the Spin and confronted it with courage and resolve. "Cynicism stops at the front gate," a mission programmer told me. "We know what we're doing is important." That was admirable. It was also infectious. Before long I began to consider myself one of them, part of the work of extending human influence into the raging torrent of extraterrestrial time.
Some weekends I drove up the coast to Kennedy to watch the rockets lift off, modernized Atlases and Deltas roaring into the sky from a forest of newly constructed launch platforms; and occasionally, late that fall, early that winter, Jase would set aside his work and come with me. The payloads were simple ARVs, preprogrammed reconnaissance devices, clumsy windows on the stars. Their recovery modules would drift down (barring mission failure) into the Atlantic Ocean or onto the salt pans of the western desert, bearing news from the world beyond the world.
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.