"They want to shut us down."
"They won't shut us down. Even if Lomax loses the election. Even if they scale us back to surveillance missions, we're the only eye on the Spin the nation has."
"Which doesn't mean we won't all be fired and replaced."
"It's not that bad."
She looked unconvinced.
Molly was the nurse/receptionist I had inherited from Dr. Koenig when I first came to Perihelion. For most of five years she had been a polite, professional, and efficient piece of office furniture. We had exchanged little more than customary pleasantries, by which I had come to know that she was single, three years younger than I was, and living in a walk-up apartment away from the ocean. She had never seemed especially talkative and I had assumed she preferred it that way.
Then, less than a month ago, Molly had turned to me as she collected her purse for a Thursday-night drive home and asked me if I'd like to join her for dinner. Why? "Because I got tired of waiting for you to ask. So? Yes? No?"
Yes.
Molly turned out to be smart, sly, cynical, and better company than I had expected. We'd been sharing meals at Champs for three weeks now. We liked the menu (unpretentious) and the atmosphere (collegial). I often thought Molly looked her best in that vinyl booth at Champs, gracing it with her presence, lending it a certain dignity. Her blond hair was long and, tonight, limp in the massive humidity. The green in her eyes was a deliberate effect, colored contacts, but it looked good on her.
"Did you read the sidebar?" she asked.
"Glanced at it." The magazine's sidebar profile of Jason had contrasted his career success with a private life either impenetrably hidden or nonexistent. Acquaintances say his home is as sparsely furnished as his romantic life. There has never been a rumor of a fiance, girlfriend, or spouse of either gender. One comes away with an impression of a man not merely married to his ideas but almost pathologically devoted to them. And in many ways Jason Lawton, like Perihelion itself, remains under the stifling influence of his father. For all his accomplishments, he has yet to emerge himself as his own man.
"At least that part sounds right," Molly said.
"Does it? Jason can be a little self-centered, but—"
"He comes through reception like I don't exist. I mean, that's trivial, but it's not exactly warm. How's his treatment going?"
"I'm not treating him for anything, Moll." Molly had seen Jason's charts, but I hadn't made any entries about his AMS. "He comes in to talk."
"Uh-huh. And sometimes when he comes in to talk he's practically limping. No, you don't have to tell me about it. But I'm not blind. For your information. Anyway, he's in Washington now, right?"
More often than he was in Florida. "Lot of talking going on. People are positioning themselves for the post-election."
"So something's in the works."
"Something's always in the works."
"I mean about Perihelion. The support staff gets clues. For instance, you want to know what's weird? We just acquired another hundred acres of property west of the fence. I heard this from Tim Chesley, the transcriptionist in human resources. Supposedly, we've got surveyors coming in next week."
"For what?"
"Nobody knows. Maybe we're expanding. Or maybe they're turning us into a mall."
It was the first I'd heard of it.
"You're out of the loop," Molly said, smiling. "You need contacts. Like me."
* * * * *
After dinner we adjourned to Molly's apartment, where I spent the night.
I won't describe here the gestures, looks, and touches by which we negotiated our intimacy. Not because I'm prudish but because I seem to have lost the memory. Lost it to time, lost it to the reconstruction. And yes, I register the irony in that. I can quote the magazine article we discussed and I can tell you what she had for dinner at Champs… but all that's left of our lovemaking is a faded mental snapshot: a dimly lit room, a damp breeze turning spindles of cloth in an open window, her green eyes close to mine.
* * * * *
Within a month Jase was back at Perihelion, stalking the hallways as if he had been infused with some strange new energy.
He brought with him an army of security personnel, black-clad and of uncertain origin but believed to represent the Department of the Treasury. These were followed in turn by small battalions of contractors and surveyors who cluttered the hallways and refused to speak to resident staff. Molly kept me posted on rumors: the compound was going to be leveled; the compound was going to be expanded; we would all be fired; we would all get raises. In short, something was afoot.
For most of a week I heard nothing from Jason himself. Then, a slow Thursday afternoon, he paged me in my office and asked me to come up to the second floor: "There's someone I want you to meet."
Before I reached the now heavily guarded stairwell I had picked up an escort of armed guards with all-pass badges who conducted me to an upstairs conference room. Not just a casual hello, obviously. This was deep Perihelion business, to which I should not have been privy. Once again, apparently, Jason had decided to share secrets. Never an unmixed blessing. I took a deep breath and pushed through the door.
The room contained a mahogany table, a half dozen plush chairs, and two men in addition to myself.
One of the men was Jason.
The second man could have been mistaken for a child. A horribly burned child in desperate need of a skin graft: that was my first impression. This individual, roughly five feet tall, stood in a corner of the room. He wore blue jeans and a plain white cotton T-shirt. His shoulders were broad, his eyes were wide and bloodshot, and his arms seemed a trifle too long for his abbreviated torso.
But what was most striking about him was his skin. His skin was glossless, ash black, and completely hairless. It wasn't wrinkled in the conventional sense—it wasn't loose, like a bloodhound's skin—but it was deeply textured, furrowed, like the rind of a cantaloupe.
The small man walked toward me and put out his hand. A small wrinkled hand at the end of a long wrinkled arm. I took it, hesitantly. Mummy fingers, I thought. But fleshy, plump, like the leaves of a desert plant, like grabbing a handful of aloe vera and feeling it grab back. The creature grinned.
"This is Wun," Jason said.
"One what?"
Wun laughed. His teeth were large, blunt, and immaculate. "I never tire of that splendid joke!"
His full name was Wun Ngo Wen, and he was from Mars.
* * * * *
The man from Mars.
It was a misleading description. Martians have a long literary history, from Wells to Heinlein. But in reality, of course, Mars was a dead planet. Until we fixed it. Until we birthed our own Martians.
And here, apparently, was a living specimen, 99.9 percent human if slightly oddly designed. A Martian person, descended through millennia of Spin-hinged time from the colonists we had dispatched only two years ago. He spoke punctilious English. His accent sounded half Oxford, half New Delhi. He paced the room. He took a bottle of spring water from the table, unscrewed the cap, and drank deeply. He wiped his mouth with his forearm. Small droplets beaded on his corrugated flesh.
I sat down and tried not to stare while Jase explained.
Here's what he said, a little simplified and fleshed out with details I learned later.
* * * * *
The Martian had left his planet shortly before the Spin membrane was imposed upon it.
Wun Ngo Wen was a historian and a linguist, relatively young by Martian standards—fifty-five terrestrial years— and physically fit. He was a scholar by trade, currently between assignments, donating labor to agricultural cooperatives, and he had just spent a Sparkmonth on the delta of the Kirioloj River, in what we called the Argyre Basin and Martians called the Baryal Plain (Epu Baryal) when his summons to duty came.