Spin by Robert Charles Wilson Read Free Book Online

I thought of it occasionally in the years that followed—Jason’s machine and Jason’s body locked into a dangerous acceleration, and his unflappable belief that he could make it come out right, all by himself, if only he tried hard enough, if only he didn’t lose control.
     
     
    We left the hopelessly broken bicycle in the gutter and I walked Jason’s high-end wheels home for him. He trudged beside me, hurting but trying not to show it, holding his right hand over his oozing forehead as if he had a bad headache, which I guessed he did.
    Back at the Big House, both Jason’s parents came down the porch steps to meet us in the driveway. E. D. Lawton, who must have spotted us from his study, looked angry and alarmed, his mouth puckered into a frown and his eyebrows crowding his sharp eyes. Jason’s mom, behind him, was aloof, less interested, maybe even a little drunk by the way she swayed when she walked out the door.
    E.D. examined Jase—who suddenly seemed much younger and less sure of himself—then told him to run in the house and clean up.
    Then he turned to me.
    “Tyler,” he said.
    “Sir?”
    “I’m assuming you’re not responsible for this. I hope that’s true.”
    Had he noticed that my own bike was missing and that Jason’s was unscathed? Was he accusing me of something? I didn’t know what to say. I looked at the lawn.
    E.D. sighed. “Let me explain something. You’re Jason’s friend. That’s good. Jason needs that. But you have to understand, as your mother understands, that your presence here comes with certain responsibilities. If you want to spend time with Jason, I expect you to look out for him. I expect you to exercise your judgment. Maybe he seems ordinary to you. But he’s not. Jason’s gifted, and he has a future ahead of him. We can’t let anything interfere with that.”
    “Right,” Carol Lawton chimed in, and now I knew for a fact that Jason’s mom had been drinking. She tilted her head and almost stumbled into the gravel berm that separated the driveway from the hedge. “Right, he’s a fucking genius. He’s going to be the youngest genius at M.I.T. Don’t break him, Tyler, he’s fragile.”
    E.D. didn’t take his eyes off me. “Go inside, Carol,” he said tonelessly. “Do we understand each other, Tyler?”
    “Yessir,” I lied.
    I didn’t understand E.D. at all. But I knew some of what he had said was true. Yes, Jason was special. And yes, it was my job to look after him.
     
     
     

TIME OUT OF JOINT
     
     
    I first heard the truth about the Spin, five years after the October Event, at a sledding party, on a bitterly cold winter night. It was Jason, typically, who broke the news.
    The evening began with dinner at the Lawtons‘. Jason was home from university for Christmas break, so there was a sense of occasion about the meal even though it was “just family”—I had been invited at Jase’s insistence, probably over E.D.’s objections.
    “Your mother should be here, too,” Diane whispered when she opened the door for me. “I tried to get E.D. to invite her, but…” She shrugged.
    That was okay, I told her, Jason had already stopped by to say hello. “Anyway, she’s not feeling well.” She was in bed with a headache, unusually. And I was hardly in a position to complain about E.D.‘s behavior: just last month E.D. had offered to underwrite my med school tuition if I passed the MCAT, “because,” he said, “your father would have liked that.” It was a gesture both generous and emotionally false, but it was also a gesture I couldn’t afford to refuse.
    Marcus Dupree, my father, had been E. D. Lawton’s closest (some said only) friend back in Sacramento, back when they were pushing aerostat monitoring devices to the weather bureau and the Border Patrol. My own memories of him were sketchy and had morphed into my mother’s stories about him, though I did distinctly remember the knock at the door the night he died. He had been the only son of a