Gateway appeared to be the print organ of a West Coast Reconstructionist faction, aimed at the general public. It contained, along with an editorial denouncing Calvinists and Covenanters, three pages of recipes and a movie review column. But what caught my eye was an article called "Blood Sacrifice and the Red Heifer"—something about a pure red calf that would appear "in fulfillment of prophecy" and be sacrificed at the Temple Mount in Israel, ushering in the Rapture. Apparently the old NK faith in the Spin as an act of redemption had grown unfashionable. "For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole Earth," Luke 21:35. A snare, not a deliverance. Better find an animal to burn: the Tribulation was proving more troublesome than expected.

I tucked the magazine back into the seat pouch while the aircraft bumped into a wave of turbulence. Sarah frowned in her sleep. The Russian businessman rang for the steward and ordered a whiskey sour.

* * * * *

The car I rented at Orlando the next morning had two bullet holes in it, puttied and painted but still visible in the passenger-side door. I asked the clerk if there was anything else. "Last one on the lot," he said, "but if you don't mind waiting a couple of hours—"

No, I said, it would do.

I took the Bee Line Expressway east and then turned south on 95. I stopped for breakfast at a roadside Denny's outside Cocoa, where the waitress, maybe sensing my essential homelessness, was generous with the coffeepot. "Long haul?"

"Not more than an hour to go."

"Well, then, you're practically there. Home or away?" When she realized I didn't have a ready answer she smiled. "You'll sort it out, hon. We all do, sooner or later." And in exchange for this roadside blessing I left her a silly-generous tip.

The Perihelion campus—which Jason had called, alarmingly, "the compound"—was located well south of the Canaveral/Kennedy launch platforms where its strategies were transformed into physical acts. The Perihelion Foundation (now officially an agency of the government) wasn't part of NASA, although it "interfaced" with NASA, borrowing and lending engineers and staff. In a sense it was a layer of bureaucracy imposed on NASA by successive administrations since the beginning of the Spin, taking the moribund space agency in directions its old bosses couldn't have anticipated and might not have approved. E.D. ruled its steering committee, and Jason had taken effective control of program development.

The day had begun to heat up, a Florida heat that seemed to rise from the earth, the moist land sweating like a brisket in a barbecue. I drove past stands of ragged palmettos, fading surf shops, stagnant green roadside ditches, and at least one crime scene: police cars surrounding a black pickup truck, three men bent over the hot metal hood with their wrists slip-tied behind their backs. A cop directing traffic gave my rental's license plate a long look and then waved me past, eyes glittering with a blank, generic suspicion.

* * * * *

The Perihelion "compound," when I reached it, was nothing as grim as the word suggested. It was a salmon-colored industrial complex, modern and clean, set into an immaculate rolling green lawn, heavily gated but hardly intimidating. A guard at the gatehouse peered inside the car, asked me to open the trunk, pawed through my suitcases and boxes of disks, then gave me a temporary pass on a pocket clip and directed me to the visitor's lot ("behind the south wing, follow the road to your left, have a nice day"). His blue uniform was indigo with perspiration.

I had barely parked the car when Jason came through a pair of frosted-glass doors marked all visitors must register and crossed a patch of lawn into the blistering desert of the parking lot. "Tyler!" he said, stopping a yard short of me as if I might vanish, a mirage.

"Hey, Jase," I said, smiling.

"Dr. Dupree!" He grinned. "But that car. A rental? We'll have somebody drive it back to Orlando. Set you up with something nicer. You have a place to stay yet?"

I reminded him that he'd promised to take care of that, too.

"Oh, we did. Or rather, we are. Negotiating a lease on a little place not twenty minutes from here. Ocean view. Ready in a couple of days. In the meantime you'll need a hotel, but that's easily arranged. So why are we standing out here absorbing UV?"

I followed him into the south wing of the complex. I watched the way he walked. I noted the way he listed a little to the left, the way he favored his right hand.

Air conditioning assaulted us as soon as we were inside, an arctic chill that smelled as if it had been pumped out of sterile vaults deep in the earth. There was a great deal of polished tile and granite in the lobby. More guards, these trained to an impeccable politeness. "So glad you're here," Jase said. "I shouldn't take the time but I want to show you around. The quick tour. I've got Boeing people in the conference room. Guy from Torrance and a guy from the IDS group in St. Louis. Xenon-ion upgrades, they're very proud, squeezing out a little more throughput, as if that mattered much. We don't need finesse, I tell them, we need reliability, simplicity…"

"Jason," I said.

"They—what?"

"Take a breath," I said.

He gave me a stiff, irritated look. Then he relented, laughed out loud. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's just, it's like— remember when we were kids? Any time one of us got a new toy we had to show it off?"

Usually it had been Jase who had the new toys, or at least the expensive ones. But yes, I told him, I remembered.

"Well, it would be flippant to describe it this way to anyone but you, but what we have here, Tyler, is the world's biggest toy chest. Let me show it off, okay? Then we'll get you settled. Give you time to adjust to the climate. If possible."

So I followed him through the ground floor of all three wings, duly admiring the conference rooms and offices, the huge laboratories and engineering bays where prototypes were devised or mission goals shuffled before plans and objectives were handed off to big-money contractors. All very interesting, all very bewildering. We ended up at the in-house infirmary, where I was introduced to Dr. Koenig, the outgoing physician, who shook my hand without enthusiasm and then shuffled off, saying "Good luck to you, Dr. Dupree" over his shoulder.

By this time Jason's pocket pager had buzzed so often he could no longer ignore it. "The Boeing people," he said. "Gotta admire their PPUs, or else they'll get sulky. Can you find your own way back to reception? I've got Shelly waiting there—my personal assistant—she'll set you up with a room. We can talk later. Tyler, it's really good to see you again!"

Another handshake, strangely weak, and then he was off, still listing to the left, leaving me to wonder not whether he was ill but how ill he was and how much worse it would get.

* * * * *

Jason was as good as his word. Within a week I had moved into a small furnished house, as apparently fragile as all these Florida houses seemed to my eyes, wood and lath, walls mostly windows, but it must have been expensive: the upstairs porch looked down a long slope past a commercial strip to the sea. During this time I was briefed on three occasions by the taciturn Dr. Koenig, who had clearly been unhappy at Perihelion but handed over his practice with great gravitas, entrusting me with his case files and his support staff, and on Monday I saw my first patient, a junior metallurgist who had twisted his ankle during a game of intramural football on the south lawn. Clearly, the clinic was "overengineered," as Jase might say, for the trivial work we did on a daily basis. But Jason claimed to be anticipating a time when medical care might be hard to come by in the world outside the gates.

I began to settle in. I wrote or extended prescriptions, I dispensed aspirin, I browsed the case files. I exchanged pleasantries with Molly Seagram, my receptionist, who liked me (she said) a lot better than she had liked Dr. Koenig.