* * * * *
We adjourned to a reception room along with the rest of the invited guests, pending a round of press interviews. (Jason was scheduled for twenty minutes with a cable news network, I was scheduled for ten. I was "the physician who attempted to save the life of Wun Ngo Wen," though all I had done was extinguish his burning shoe and pull his body out of the line of fire after he fell. A quick ABC check—airway, breathing, circulation—made it abundantly clear that I couldn't help him and that it would be wiser simply to keep my head down until help arrived. Which is what I told reporters, until they learned to stop asking.)
President Lomax came through the room shaking hands before he was hustled away once more by his handlers. Then E.D. cornered Jason and me at the buffet table.
"I guess you got what you wanted," he said, meaning the comment for Jason but looking at me. "It can't be undone now."
"In that case," Jason said, "perhaps it's not worth arguing about."
Wun and I had made a point of keeping Jase under observation in the months after his treatment. He had submitted to a battery of neurological tests including another series of clandestine MRIs. None of the tests had revealed any deficiency, and the only obvious physiological changes were the ones connected with his recovery from AMS. A clean bill of health, in other words. Cleaner than I once would have imagined possible.
But he did seem subtly different. I had asked Wun whether all Fourths underwent psychological changes. "In a certain sense," he had answered, "yes." Martian Fourths were expected to behave differently after their treatment, but there was a subtlety embedded in the word "expectation"—yes, Wun said, it was "expected" (i.e., considered likely) that a Fourth would change, but change was also "expected of him" (required of him) by his community and peers.
How had Jason changed? He moved differently, for one thing. Jase had disguised his AMS very cleverly, but there was a perceptible new freedom in his walk and his gestures. He was the Tin Man, post-oilcan. He was still occasionally moody, but his moods were less violent. He swore less often—that is, he was less likely to stumble into one of those emotional sinkholes in which the only useful adjective is "fucking." He joked more than he used to.
All these things sound good. And they were, but they were also superficial. Other changes were more troubling. He had withdrawn from the daily management of Perihelion to such a degree that his staff briefed him once a week and otherwise ignored him. He had begun reading Martian astrophysics from the raw translations, skirting security protocols if not absolutely violating them. The only event that had penetrated his newfound calm was the death of Wun, and that had left him haunted and hurt in ways I still didn't quite understand.
"You realize," E.D. said, "what we just saw was the end of Perihelion."
And in a real sense it was. Apart from interpreting whatever feedback we received from the replicators, Perihelion as a civilian space agency was finished. The downsizing had already begun in earnest. Half the support staff had been laid off. The tech people were draining away more slowly, lured by universities or big-money contractors.
"Then so be it," Jason said, displaying what was either the innate equanimity of a Fourth or a long-suppressed hostility to his father. "We've done the work we needed to do."
"You can stand here and deliver that verdict? To me?"
"I believe it's true."
"Does it matter that I spent my life building what you just tore down?"
"Does it matter?" Jason pondered this as if E.D. had asked a real question. "Ultimately, no, I don't suppose it does."
"Jesus, what happened to you? You make a mistake of this magnitude—"
"I don't think it's a mistake."
"—you ought to assume the responsibility for it."
"I think I have."
"Because if it fails, you'll be the one they'll blame."
"I understand that."
"The one they'll burn."
"If it comes to that."
"I can't protect you," E.D. said.
"You never could," Jason said.
* * * * *
I rode back to Perihelion with him. Jase was driving a German fuel-cell car these days—a niche car, since most of us still owned gas-burners designed by people who didn't believe there was a future worth worrying about. Commuters burned past us in the speed lanes, hurrying home before dark.
I told him I meant to leave Perihelion and establish a practice of my own.
Jase was silent for a little while, watching the road, warm air boiling off the pavement as if the edges of the world had softened in the heat. Then he said, "But you don't have to, Tyler. Perihelion ought to struggle along for a few years yet, and I have enough clout to keep you on payroll. I can hire you privately, if need be."
"That's the point, though, Jase. There is no need. I was always a little underutilized at Perihelion."
"Bored, you mean?"
"It might be nice to feel useful for a change."
"You don't feel useful? If not for you I'd be in a wheelchair."
"That wasn't me. That was Wun. All I did was push the plunger."
"Hardly. You saw me through the ordeal. I appreciate that. Besides… I need someone to talk to, someone who isn't trying to buy or sell me."
"When was the last time we had a real conversation?"
"Just because I weathered one medical crisis doesn't mean there won't be another."
"You're a Fourth, Jase. You won't need to see a doctor for another fifty years."
"And the only people who know that about me are you and Carol. Which is another reason I don't want you to leave." He hesitated. "Why not take the treatment yourself? Give yourself another fifty years, minimum."
I supposed I could. But fifty years would carry us deep into the heliosphere of the expanding sun. It would be a futile gesture. "I'd rather be useful now."
"You're absolutely determined to leave?"
E.D. would have said, Stay. E.D. would have said, It's your job to take care of him.
E.D. would have said a lot of things.
"Absolutely."
Jason gripped the wheel and stared down the road as if he had seen something infinitely sad there. "Well," he said. "Then all I can do is wish you luck."
* * * * *
The day I left Perihelion the support staff summoned me into one of the now seldom-used boardrooms for a farewell party, where I was given the kind of gifts appropriate to yet another departure from a dwindling workforce: a miniature cactus in a terracotta pot, a coffee mug with my name on it, a pewter tie pin in the shape of a caduceus.
Jase showed up at my door that evening with a more problematic gift
It was a cardboard box tied with string. It contained, when I opened it, about a pound of densely printed paper documents and six unlabelled optical memory disks.
"Jase?"
"Medical information," he said. "You can think of it as a textbook."
"What kind of medical information?"
He smiled. "From the archives."
"The Martian archives?"
He nodded.
"But that's classified information."
"Yes, technically, it is. But Lomax would classify the phone number for 911 if he thought he could get away with it. There may be information here that would put Pfizer and Eli Lilly out of business. But I don't see that as a legitimate concern. Do you?"
"No, but—"
"Nor do I think Wun would have wanted it kept secret. So I've been quietly doling out little pieces of the archives, here and there, to people I trust. You don't have to actually do anything with it, Tyler. Look at it or ignore it, file it away—fine."
"Great. Thanks, Jase. A gift I could be arrested for possessing."
His smile widened. "I know you'll do the right thing."