"A cult, in other words."

"No, not exactly. 'NK' is a catchphrase for the whole Christian Hedonist spectrum, so it's not a cult in itself, though it does include some cultlike groups. There's no single leader. No holy writ, just a bunch of fringe theologians the movement is loosely identified with—C. R. Ratel, Laura Greengage, people like that." I'd seen their books on the drugstore racks. Spin theology with question-mark titles: Have We Witnessed the Second Coming? Can We Survive the End of Time? "And not much agenda, beyond a kind of weekend communalism. But what draws crowds isn't the theology. You ever see footage of those NK rallies, the kind they call an Ekstasis?"

I had, and unlike Jase, who had never been much at home with matters of the flesh, I could understand the appeal. What I had seen was recorded video of a gathering in the Cascades, summer of last year. It had looked like a cross between a Baptist picnic and a Grateful Dead concert. A sunny meadow, wildflowers, ceremonial white robes, a guy with zero-percent body fat blowing a shofar. By nightfall a bonfire was burning briskly and a stage had been set up for musicians. Then the robes began to drop and the dancing started. And a few acts more intimate than dancing.

For all the disgust evinced by the mainstream media it had looked winsomely innocent to me. No preaching, just a few hundred pilgrims smiling into the teeth of extinction and loving their neighbors like they'd like to be loved. The footage had been burned onto hundreds of DVDs and passed from hand to hand in college dorms nationwide, including Stony Brook. There is no sexual act so Edenic that a lonely med student can't whack off to it.

"It's hard to picture Diane being attracted to NK."

"On the contrary. Diane's their target audience. She's scared to death of the Spin and everything it implies about the world. NK is an anodyne for people like her. It turns the thing they're most afraid of into an object of adoration, a door into the Kingdom of Heaven."

"How long has she been involved?"

"Most of a year now. Since she met Simon Townsend."

"Simon's NK?"

"Simon, I'm afraid, is hard-core NK."

"You met this guy?"

"She brought him to the Big House last Christmas. I think she wanted to watch the fireworks. E.D., of course, doesn't approve of Simon. In fact his hostility was pretty obvious." (Here Jason winced at the memory of what must have been one of E. D. Lawton's major tantrums.) "But Diane and Simon did the NK thing—they turned the other cheek. They practically smiled him to death. I mean that literally. He was one gentle, forgiving look away from the coronary ward."

Score one for Simon, I thought. "Is he good for her?"

"He's exactly what she wants. He's the last thing she needs."

* * * * *

They arrived that afternoon, sputtering up the driveway in a fifteen-year-old touring car that appeared to burn more oil than Mike-the-yard-guy's tractor. Diane was driving. She parked and climbed out on the far side of the car, obscured by the luggage rack, while Simon stepped into full view, smiling bashfully.

He was a good-looking guy. Six feet tall or a little over; skinny but not a weakling; a plain, slightly horsey face offset by his unruly golden-blond hair. His smile showed a cleft between his upper front teeth. He wore jeans and a plaid shirt and a blue bandanna tied around his left biceps like a tourniquet; that was an NK emblem, I learned later.

Diane circled the car and stood beside him, both of them grinning up the porch stairs at Jason and me. She was also decked out in high NK fashion: a cornflower-blue floor-sweeper skirt, blue blouse, and a ridiculous black wide-brimmed hat like the kind Amish men wear. But the clothes suited her, or rather they framed her in a pleasing way, suggested rude health and hayseed sensuality. Her face was as alive as an unplucked berry. She shaded her eyes in the sunlight and grinned—at me in particular, I wanted to believe. My god, that smile. Somehow both genuine and mischievous.

I began to feel lost.

Jason's phone trilled. He pulled it out of his pocket and checked the caller ID.

"Gotta take this one," he whispered.

"Don't leave me alone here, Jase."

"I'll be in the kitchen. Right back."

He ducked away just as Simon lofted his big duffel bag onto the wooden planking of the porch and said, "You must be Tyler Dupree!"

He stuck out his hand. I took it. He had a firm grip and a honeyed Southern accent, vowels like polished driftwood, consonants polite as calling cards. He made my name sound positively Cajun, though the family had never been south of Millinocket. Diane bounded up after him, yelled, "Tyler!" and grabbed me in a ferocious embrace. Suddenly her hair was in my face and all I could register was the sunny, salty smell of her.

We backed off to a comfortable arm's length. "Tyler, Tyler," she exclaimed, as if I had turned into something remarkable. "You're looking good after all these years."

"Eight," I said stupidly. "Eight years."

"Wow, is it really?"

I helped drag their luggage inside, showed them to the parlor off the porch, and hurried away to retrieve Jason, who was in the kitchen interacting with his cell. His back was turned when I came in.

"No," he said. His voice was tense. "No… not even the State Department?"

I stopped in my tracks. The State Department. Oh my.

"I can be back in a couple of hours if—oh. I see. Okay. No, it's all right. But keep me informed. Right. Thanks."

He pocketed the phone and caught sight of me.

"Talking to E.D.?" I asked.

"His assistant, actually."

"Everything okay?"

"Come on, Ty, you want me to let you in on all the secrets?" He attempted a smile, not too successfully. "I wish you hadn't overheard that."

"All I heard was you offering to go back to D.C. and leave me here with Simon and Diane."

"Well… I may have to. The Chinese are balking."

"What's that mean, balking!"

"They refuse to entirely abandon their planned launch. They want to keep that option open."

The nuclear attack on the Spin artifacts, he meant. "I assume somebody's trying to talk them out of it?"

"The diplomacy is ongoing. It's just not exactly succeeding. Negotiations seem to be deadlocked."

"So—well, shit, Jase! What's it mean if they do launch?"

"It means two high-yield fusion weapons would be detonated in close proximity to unknown devices associated with the Spin. As for the consequences… well, that's an interesting question. But it hasn't happened yet. Probably won't."

"You're talking about doomsday, or maybe the end of the Spin…"

"Keep your voice down. We have guests, remember? And you're overreacting. What the Chinese have in mind is rash and probably futile, but even if they go ahead with it it's not likely to be suicidal. Whatever the Hypotheticals are, they must know how to defend themselves without destroying us in the process. And the polar artifacts aren't necessarily the devices that enable the Spin. They could be passive observational platforms, communications devices, even decoys."

"If the Chinese do launch," I said, "how much warning do we get?"

"Depends what you mean by 'we.' The general public probably won't hear anything until it's over."

This was when I first began to understand that Jason wasn't just his father's apprentice, that he had already begun to forge his own connections in high places. Later I would learn a great deal more about the Perihelion Foundation and the work Jason did for it. For now it was still part of Jason's shadow life. Even when we were children Jase had had a shadow life: away from the Big House he'd been a math prodigy, breezing through an elite private school like a Masters titleist playing a mini-golf course; home, he was just Jase, and we had been careful to keep it that way.