We trekked through the house. There was a twentieth-century fussiness about it, walls painted apple green or harvest orange, sturdy barn-sale antique furniture and brass bed frames, lace curtains over warped window glass down which the rain streamed relentlessly. Modern amenities in the kitchen and living room, big TV, music station, Internet link. Cozy in the rain. Downstairs again, Jason poured coffee. We sat at the kitchen table and tried to catch up.

Jase was vague about his work, out of modesty or for security reasons. In the eight years since the revelation of the true nature of the Spin he had earned himself a doctorate in astrophysics and then walked away from it to take a junior position in E.D.'s Perihelion Foundation. Perhaps not a bad move, now that E.D. was a ranking member of President Walker's Select Committee on Global and Environmental Crisis Planning. According to Jase, Perihelion was about to be transformed from an aerospace think tank into an official advisory body, with real authority to shape policy.

I said, "Is that legal?"

"Don't be naive, Tyler. E.D.'s already distanced himself from Lawton Industries. He resigned from the board and his shares are being administered by a blind trust. According to our lawyers he's conflict-free."

"So what do you at Perihelion?"

He smiled. "I listen attentively to my elders," he said, "and I make polite suggestions. Tell me about med school."

He asked whether I found it distasteful to see so much of human weakness and disease. So I told him about my second-year anatomy class. Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility. But it was also a marker, a passage. Beyond this point there was nothing left of childhood.

"Jesus, Tyler. You want something stronger than coffee?"

"I'm not saying it was a big deal. That's what's shocking about it. It wasn't a big deal. You walk away from it and you go to a movie."

"Long way from the Big House, though."

"Long way. Both of us." I raised my cup.

Then we started reminiscing, and the tension drained out of the conversation. We talked about old times. We fell into what I recognized as a pattern. Jason would mention a place—the basement, the mall, the creek in the woods—and I would supply a story: the time we broke into the liquor cabinet; the time we saw a Rice girl named Kelley Weems shoplift a pack of Trojans from the Pharmasave; the summer Diane insisted on reading us breathless passages from Christina Rossetti, as if she had discovered something profound.

The big lawn, Jason offered. The night the stars disappeared, I said.

And then we were quiet for a while.

Finally I said, "So… is she coming or not?"

"She's making up her mind," Jase said neutrally. "She's juggling some commitments. She's supposed to call tomorrow and let me know."

"She's still down south?" This was the last I'd heard, the news relayed from my mother. Diane was at some southern college, studying something I couldn't quite remember: urban geography, oceanography, some other unlikely -ography.

"Yeah, still," Jason said, shifting in his chair. "You know, Ty, a lot of things have changed with Diane."

"I guess that's not surprising."

"She's semi-engaged. To be married."

I took this pretty gracefully. "Well, good for her," I said. How could I possibly be jealous? I had no relationship with Diane anymore—had never had one, in that sense of the word "relationship." And I had almost been engaged myself, back at Stony Brook, to a second-year student named Candice Boone. We had enjoyed saying "I love you" to each other, until we got tired of it. I think Candice got tired first.

And yet: semi-engaged? How did that work?

I was tempted to ask. But Jason was clearly uncomfortable with the whole drift of the conversation. It called up a memory: once, back at the Big House, Jason had brought a date home to meet his family. She was a plain but pleasant girl he'd met at the Rice chess club, too shy to say much. Carol had remained relatively sober that night, but E.D. had clearly disapproved of the girl, had been conspicuously rude to her, and when she was gone he had berated Jase for "dragging a specimen like that into the house." With great intellect, E.D. said, comes great responsibility. He didn't want Jason to be shanghaied into a conventional marriage. Didn't want to see him "hanging diapers on the line" when he could be "making a mark on the world."

A lot of people in Jason's position would have stopped bringing home their dates.

Jason had just stopped dating.

* * * * *

The house was empty when I woke up the next morning.

There was a note on the kitchen table: Jase had gone out to pick up provisions for a barbecue. Back noon or later. It was nine-thirty. I had slept luxuriously late, summer-vacation languor creeping over me.

The house seemed to generate it. Last night's storms had passed and a pleasant morning breeze came through the calico curtains. Sunlight picked out imperfections in the grain of the butcher-block kitchen counters. I ate a slow breakfast by the window and watched clouds like stately schooners sail the horizon.

A little after ten the doorbell rang, and for a second I was panicked by the thought that it might be Diane—had she decided to show up early? But it turned out to be "Mike, the landscape guy," in a bandanna and sleeveless T-shirt, warning me that he was going to do the lawn—he didn't want to wake anybody up but the mower was pretty loud. He could come back this afternoon if it was a problem. No problem at all, I said, and a few minutes later he was riding the contours of the property on an ancient green John Deere that smudged the air with burning oil. Still a little sleepy, I wondered how this yard work would look to what Jason was fond of calling the universe at large. To the universe at large, Earth was a planet in near-stasis. Those blades of grass had arisen over centuries, as stately in their motion as the evolution of stars. Mike, a force of nature born a couple of billion years ago, scythed them with a vast and irresistible patience. The severed blades fell as if lightly touched by gravity, many seasons between sun and loam, loam in which Methuselah worms slid while elsewhere in the galaxy, perhaps, empires rose and fell.

Jason was right, of course: it was a difficult thing to believe in. Or, no, not to "believe in"—people believe all kinds of implausible things—but to accept as a fundamental truth about the world. I sat on the porch of the house, on the side away from the roaring Deere, and the air was cool and the sun felt fine when I turned my face to it even though I knew it for what it was, radiation filtered from a star in full-out runaway Spin, in a world where centuries were squandered like seconds.

Can't be true. Is true.

I thought about med school again, the anatomy class I had told Jason about. Candice Boone, my one-time almost-fiancee, had shared that class with me. She had been stoic during the dissection but not afterward. A human body, she said, ought to contain love, hate, courage, cowardice, soul, spirit… not this slimy assortment of blue and red imponderables. Yes. And we ought not to be dragged unwilling into a harsh and deadly future.

But the world is what it is and won't be bargained with. I had said as much to Candice.

She told me I was "cold." But it was still the closest thing to wisdom I had ever been able to muster.

* * * * *

The morning rolled on. Mike finished the lawn and drove off, leaving the air full of humid silence. After a time I stirred myself and telephoned my mom in Virginia, where the weather, she said, was less inviting than in Massachusetts: still cloudy after a storm last night that had brought down a few trees and power lines. I told her I'd made it safely to E.D.'s summer rental. She asked me how Jason seemed, though she had probably seen him more recently than I had, during one of his visits to the Big House. "Older," I said. "But still Jase."