Unfortunately she was echoing questions I had already begun to ask myself. No, I didn't know what I was injecting into him, not in any rigorous scientific sense. I had believed the promises of the man from Mars, but that was hardly a defense I could lay at Carol's feet. The process itself was more difficult, more obviously agonizing, than I had allowed myself to expect. Maybe it was working incorrectly. Maybe it wasn't working at all.
Jase emitted a mournful howl that ended in a sigh. Carol put her hands over her ears. "He's suffering, you fucking quack! Look at him!"
"Carol—"
"Don't Carol me, you butcher! I'm calling an ambulance. I'm calling the police!"
I came across the room and took her by the shoulders. She felt frail but dangerously alive under my hands, a cornered animal. "Carol, listen to me."
"Why, why should I listen to you?"
"Because your son put his life in my hands. Listen. Carol, listen. I'm going to need someone to help me here. I've been running on no sleep for days. Before too long I'm going to need someone to sit with him, someone with real medical savvy who can make informed judgments."
"You should have brought a nurse."
I should have, but it hadn't been possible, and that was beside the point. "I don't have a nurse. I need you to do this."
That took a moment to sink in. Then she gasped and stepped back. "Me!"
"You still have a medical license. Last I heard."
"I haven't practiced for—is it decades? Decades…"
"I'm not asking you to perform heart surgery. I just want you to keep an eye on his blood pressure and his temperature. Can you do that?"
Her anger dissipated. She was flattered. She was frightened. She thought about it. Then she gave me a steely look. "Why should I help you? Why should I make myself an accomplice to this, this torture?"
I was still composing an answer when a voice behind me said, "Oh, please."
Jason's voice. One of the trademarks of this Martian drug regimen was the lucidity that came at random and left at will. Apparently it had just arrived. I turned around.
He grimaced and made an attempt, not quite successful, to sit up. But his eyes were clear.
He addressed his mother: "Really," he said, "isn't this a little unseemly? Please do what Tyler wants. He knows what he's doing and so do I."
Carol stared at him. "But I don't. I haven't. I mean I can't—"
Then she turned and walked unsteadily out of the room, one hand braced against the wall.
I sat up with Jase. In the morning Carol came to the bedroom looking chastened but sober and offered to relieve me. Jason was peaceful and didn't really need tending, but I put her in charge and went off to catch up on my sleep.
I slept for twelve hours. When I came back to the bedroom Carol was still there, holding her unconscious son's hand, stroking his forehead with a tenderness I had never seen in her before.
* * * * *
The recovery phase began a week and a half into the course of Jason's treatment. There was no sudden transition, no magic moment. But his lucid periods began to lengthen and his blood pressure stabilized somewhere near the nominal range.
On the night of Wun's speech to the United Nations I located a portable TV in the servants' part of the house and lugged it up to Jason's bedroom. Carol joined us just before the broadcast.
I don't think Carol believed in Wun Ngo Wen.
His presence on Earth had been officially announced last Wednesday. His picture had been on front pages for days now, plus live footage of him striding across the White House lawn under the avuncular arm of the sitting president. The White House had made it clear that Wun was here to help but that he had no instant solution to the problem of the Spin and not much new knowledge about the Hypotheticals. Public reaction had been cautious.
Tonight he mounted the dais in the Security Council chamber and stepped up to the podium, which had been adjusted to suit his height. "Why, he's just a tiny thing," Carol said.
Jason said, "Show some respect. He represents a single continuous culture that's lasted longer than any of ours."
"Looks more like he represents the Lollipop Guild," Carol said.
His dignity was restored in the close-ups. The camera liked his eyes and his elusive smile. And when he spoke to the microphone he spoke softly, which took the effective pitch of his voice down to a more terrestrial level.
Wun knew (or had been coached to understand) how unlikely this event seemed to the average Earthling. ("Truly," the secretary general had said in his introduction, "we live in an age of miracles.") So he thanked us all for our hospitality in his best mid-Atlantic accent and talked wistfully about his home and why he had left it to come here. He painted Mars as a foreign but entirely human place, the kind of place you might like to visit, where the people were friendly and the scenery was interesting, although the winters, he admitted, were often harsh.
("Sounds like Canada," Carol said.)
Then to the heart of the matter. Everyone wanted to know about the Hypotheticals. Unfortunately, Wun's people knew little more about them than we did—the Hypotheticals had encapsulated Mars while he was in transit to Earth, and the Martians were as helpless before it as we had been.
He couldn't guess the Hypotheticals' motives. That question had been debated for centuries, but even the greatest Martian thinkers had never resolved it. It was interesting,
Wun said, that both Earth and Mars had been sealed off when they were on the brink of global catastrophes: "Our population, like yours, is approaching the limit of sustainability. On Earth your industry and agriculture both run on oil, supplies of which are rapidly being depleted. On Mars we have no oil at all, but we depend on another scarce commodity, elemental nitrogen: it drives our agricultural cycle and imposes absolute limits on the number of human lives the planet can sustain. We've coped a little better than has the Earth, but only because we were forced to recognize the problem from the very beginning of our civilization. Both planets were and are facing the possibility of economic and agricultural collapse and a catastrophic human die-off. Both planets were encapsulated before that end point was reached."
"Perhaps the Hypotheticals understand that truth about us and perhaps it influenced their action. But we don't know that with any certainty. Nor do we know what they expect from us, if anything, or when or even whether the Spin will come to an end. We can't know, until we gather more direct information about the Hypotheticals."
"Fortunately," Wun said, the camera going close on him, "there is a way to gather that information. I've come here with a proposal, which I've discussed with both President Garland and President-elect Lomax as well as other heads of state," and he went on to sketch out the basics of the replicator plan. "With luck this will tell us whether the Hypotheticals have overtaken other worlds, how those worlds have reacted, and what the ultimate fate of the Earth might be."
But when he started talking about the Oort Cloud and "auto-catalytic feedback technology" I saw Carol's eyes glaze over.
"This can't be happening," she said after Wun departed the podium to dazed applause and the network pundits began to chew and regurgitate his speech. She looked genuinely frightened. "Is any of this true, Jason?"
"Most all of it," Jason said calmly. "I can't speak for the weather on Mars."
"Are we really on the brink of disaster?"
"We've been on the brink of disaster since the stars went out."
"I mean about oil and all that. If the Spin hadn't happened, we'd all be starving?"
"People are starving. They're starving because we can't support seven billion people in North American-style prosperity without strip-mining the planet. The numbers are hard to argue with. Yes, it's true. If the Spin doesn't kill us, sooner or later we'll be looking at a global human die-back."