"Are you expecting a search?"
I pictured federal functionaries in biohazard suits swarming up the steps of the Big House.
"Of course not. But it's never a bad idea to hedge a risk." He gave me a closer look, though his eyes jerked to the left every few seconds, another symptom of his disease. "Feeling a little apprehensive?"
I said we could conceal the spares in the house across the lawn, unless they needed refrigeration.
"According to Wun they're chemically stable under any condition short of thermonuclear warfare. But a warrant for the Big House would cover the entire property."
"I don't know about warrants. I do know where the hiding places are."
"Show me," Jason said.
So we trooped across the lawn, Jason following a little unsteadily behind me. It was early afternoon, election day, but in the grassy space between the two houses it might have been any autumn, any year. Somewhere off in the wooded patch straddling the creek a bird announced itself, a single note that began boldly but faded like a reconsidered thought. Then we reached my mother's house and I turned the key and opened the door into a deeper stillness.
The house had been periodically cleaned and dusted but essentially closed since my mother's death. I hadn't been back to organize her effects, no other family existed, and Carol had preferred to maintain the building rather than change it. But it wasn't timeless. Far from it. Time had nested here. Time had made itself at home. The front room smelled of enclosure, of the essences that seep out of undisturbed upholstery, yellow paper, settled fabric. In winter, Carol told me later, the house was kept just warm enough to prevent the pipes from freezing; in summer the curtains were drawn against the heat. It was cool today, inside and out.
Jason came across the threshold trembling. His gait had been ragged all morning, which was why he had let me carry the pharmaceuticals (apart from what I had already set aside for his treatment), a half pound or so of glass and biochemicals in a foam-padded leather overnight bag.
"This is the first time I've been here," he said shyly, "since before she died. Is it stupid to say I miss her?"
"No, not stupid."
"She was the first person I ever noticed being kind to me. All the kindness in the Big House came in the door with Belinda Dupree."
I led him through the kitchen to the half-size door that opened into the basement. The small house on the Lawton property had been designed to resemble a New England cottage, or someone's notion of one, down to the rude concrete-slab cellar with a ceiling low enough that Jason had to stoop to follow me. The space was just big enough to contain a furnace, water heater, washing machine and dryer. The air was even colder here and it had a moist, mineral scent.
I crouched into the nook behind the sheet-metal body of the furnace, one of those dusty cul-de-sacs even professional cleaners habitually ignore. I explained to Jase that there was a cracked slab of drywall here, and with a little dexterity you could pry it out to reveal the small uninsulated gap between the pine studs and the foundation wall.
"Interesting," Jason said from where he stood a yard behind me and around the angle of the quiescent furnace. "What did you keep in there, Tyler? Back issues of Gent?"
When I was ten I had kept certain toys here, not because I was afraid anyone would steal them but because it was fun knowing they were hidden and that only I could find them. Later on I stashed less innocent things: several brief attempts at a diary, letters to Diane never delivered or even finished, and, yes, though I wouldn't admit it to Jason, printouts of some relatively tame Internet porn. All these guilty secrets had been disposed of long ago.
"Should have brought a flashlight," Jase said. The single overhead bulb cast negligible light into this cobwebbed coiner.
"There used to be one on the table by the fuse box." There still was. I backed out of the gap long enough to take it from Jason's hand. It emitted the watery, pale glow of a dying battery pack, but it worked well enough that I could find the loose chunk of drywall without groping. I lifted it away and slid the overnight bag into the space behind it, then fitted the drywall in place and brushed chalky dust over the visible seams.
But before I could back out I dropped the flashlight and it rolled even farther into the spidery shadows behind the furnace. I grimaced and reached for it, following the flickery glow. Touched the barrel of it. Touched something else. Something hollow but substantial. A box.
I pulled it closer.
"You almost finished in there, Ty?"
"One second," I said.
I trained the light on the box. It was a shoe box. A shoe box with a dusty New Balance logo printed on it and a different legend written over that in fat black ink: mementos (school).
It was the box missing from my mother's etagere upstairs, the one I hadn't been able to find after her funeral.
"Having trouble?" Jason asked.
"No," I said.
I could investigate later. I pushed the box back where I'd found it and crawled out of the dusty space. Stood up and brushed my hands. "I guess we're done here."
"Remember this for me," Jason said. "In case I forget."
* * * * *
That night we watched the election returns on the Lawtons' impressively large but outdated video rig. Carol had misplaced her corrective lenses and sat close to the screen, blinking at it. She had spent most of her adult life ignoring politics—"That was always E.D.'s department"—and we had to explain who some of the major players were. But she seemed to enjoy the sense of occasion. Jason made gentle jokes and Carol obliged him by laughing, and when she laughed I could see a little of Diane in her face.
She tired easily, though, and she had gone to her room by the time the networks began calling states. No surprises there. In the end Lomax collected all the Northeast and most of the Midwest and West. He did less well in the South, but even there the dissenting vote was split almost evenly between old-line Democrats and the Christian Conservatives.
We started clearing away our coffee cups about the time the last opposing candidate delivered a grimly polite concession.
"So the good guys win," I said.
Jase smiled. "I'm not sure any of those were running."
"I thought Lomax was good for us."
"Maybe. But don't make the mistake of thinking Lomax cares about Perihelion or the replicator program, except as a convenient way to lowball the space budget and make it look like a great leap forward. The federal money he frees up will be dumped into the military budget. That's why E.D. couldn't put together any real anti-Lomax sentiment from his old aerospace cronies. Lomax won't let Boeing or Lockheed Martin starve. He just wants them to retool."
"For defense," I supplied. The lull in global conflict that had followed the initial confusion of the Spin was long past. Maybe a military refit wasn't such a bad idea.
"If you believe what Lomax says."
"Don't you?"
"I'm afraid I can't afford to."
On that note I retired to bed.
In the morning I administered the first injection. Jason stretched out on a sofa in the Lawtons' big front room, facing the window. He wore jeans and a cotton shirt and looked casually patrician, frail but at ease. If he was frightened he wasn't showing it. He rolled up his right sleeve to expose the crook of his elbow.
I took a syringe from my kit, attached a sterile needle, and filled it from one of the vials of clear liquid we had held back from the hiding place. Wun had rehearsed this with me. The protocols of the Fourth Age. On Mars there would have been a quiet ceremony and a soothing environment. Here we made do with November sunlight and the ticking of expensive clocks.
I swabbed his skin prior to the injection. "You don't have to watch," I said.