Spin by Robert Charles Wilson Page A

flung into the absolute darkness over Vandenberg Air Force Base. It had looked like a failure almost immediately. The satellite, which had been designed to spend a week in orbit, dropped into the Atlantic Ocean off Bermuda moments after its launch. As if, Jason said, it had hit the Event boundary and bounced back.
    But it
hadn’t
bounced. “When they recovered it they downloaded a full week’s worth of data.”
    “How is that possible?”
    “The question isn’t what’s
possible
but what
happened
. What
happened
was, the payload spent seven days in orbit and came back the same night it left. We know that’s what happened because it happened with every launch they tried, and they tried it repeatedly.”
    “
What
happened? What are you talking about, Jase? Time travel?”
    “No… not exactly.”
    “Not
exactly
?”
    “Just let him tell it,” Diane said quietly.
    There were all sorts of clues to what was really happening, Jason said. Ground-based observation seemed to suggest that the boosters actually accelerated into the barrier before they vanished, as if they had been drawn into it. But the recovered onboard data showed no such effect. The two sets of observations couldn’t be reconciled. As seen from the ground, the satellites accelerated into the barrier and then dropped almost immediately back to Earth; the satellites themselves reported that they had progressed smoothly into their programmed orbits, remained there for the allotted span of time, and returned under their own power weeks or months later. (Like the Russian cosmonaut, I thought, whose story, never officially confirmed or denied, had become a sort of urban legend.) Assuming both sets of data were legitimate, there was only one explanation:
    Time was passing differently outside the barrier.
    Or, to turn the equation around, time on Earth was passing more slowly than in the universe at large.
    “You understand what that means?” Jason demanded. “Before, it looked like we were in some kind of electromagnetic cage that was regulating the energy that reaches the surface of the Earth. And that’s true. But it’s really only a side effect, a small part of a much bigger picture.”
    “Side effect of what?”
    “Of what they’re calling a
temporal gradient
. You grasp the significance? For every second that passes on Earth, a whole lot more time passes outside the barrier.”
    “That doesn’t make sense,” I said immediately. “What the hell kind of physics would that involve?”
    “People with a lot more experience than me are struggling with that question. But the idea of a time gradient has a certain explanatory power. If there’s a time differential between us and the universe, ambient radiation reaching the surface of the Earth at any given moment—sunlight, X rays, cosmic radiation—would be speeded up proportionally. And a year’s sunshine condensed into ten seconds would be instantly lethal. So the electromagnetic barrier around the Earth isn’t concealing us, it’s
protecting
us. It’s screening out all that concentrated—and, I guess, blue-shifted—radiation.”
    “The fake sunlight,” Diane said, getting it.
    “Right. They gave us fake sunlight because the real thing would be deadly. Just enough of it, and appropriately distributed, to mimic the seasons, to make it possible to raise crops and drive the weather. The tides, our trajectory around the sun—mass, momentum, gravitation—
all
these things are being manipulated, not just to slow us down but to keep us alive while they do it.”
    “
Managed”
I said. “It’s not an act of nature, then. It’s engineering.”
    “I think we’d have to admit that,” Jason said, “yes.”
    “This is being done
to
us.”
    “People are talking about a hypothetical controlling intelligence.”
    “But what’s the purpose, what’s it supposed to achieve?”
    “I don’t know. No one knows.”
    Diane stared at her brother across a gap of cold and motionless winter air. She