The Presence (38 page)

And Stephen Jameson actually had the nerve to smile at her as he looked up from the computer terminal at which he sat. “He’s doing very well,” he said. “You have quite the boy here.”

As if Michael had just won some kind of race! Katharine thought, her anger threatening to overwhelm her.

For the first time, then, she knew with absolute conviction that she would get her son out of the vile box in which he lay. Somehow. Even if it meant killing Stephen Jameson and the female guard. And anyone else who tried to stand in her way. Indeed, right this instant, she would take a distinct pleasure in ending the life of this man who regarded her son as nothing more than a lab specimen. “He’s always had a lot of courage,” she said, revealing nothing of her thoughts. “May I talk to him?”

“Certainly.”

She glanced around the room as she moved closer to the Plexiglas box, searching for the camera she knew was hidden there. As before, she saw nothing.

“Hello, darling,” she said softly. “Are you all right?”

Inside the box, Michael nodded. “I think so.” Then: “Am I ever going to be able to breathe regular air again?”

The question wrenched at Katharine’s heart.
Tonight!
she wanted to scream.
I’m going to get you out of here, and I’m going to take you to a place where you can breathe until we can fix what they did to you!
But she could say none of it.

Then, as her silence stretched, she noticed that Michael’s head was moving. He seemed to be nodding toward his own lap.

Looking down, she saw the forefinger of his right hand moving. For just a moment she didn’t understand what he was doing.

Then it came back to her.

He was forming letters with his fingers, tracing them on the sheet so casually that no one who wasn’t looking for it would have realized what he was doing. “Of course you’ll
be able to,” she said. “And Dr. Jameson says you’re doing very well.”

GET ME OUT, his fingers spelled.

Glancing quickly to be certain that Jameson was still concentrating on the computer screen, she nodded once. “Tonight,” she said, raising her right hand to her stomach, its four fingers extended while the thumb remained folded under the palm. Her eyes fixed on Michael, willing him to understand that she was responding to the plea he’d traced on the sheet. She spoke again, almost immediately repeating the word. “Tonight, I’ll stay right here with you. Okay?”

She was almost certain she saw his eyes flick to the four fingers she’d displayed at the instant she uttered the word “Tonight.” Would he understand that she was giving him the time of escape—four
A.M.
?

His wink confirmed that he did.

“Got it!”

For several seconds Al Kalama’s shout didn’t register on Rob. Over the last three hours, as Al had worked patiently at the terminal next to the one at which Phil Howell labored, Rob had become increasingly fascinated with the innumerable lists of files that scrolled on the terminal in front of the astronomer’s monitor. Hour after hour it had gone on as the supercomputer in the room a few yards away reached out into every other computer it could find, hunting for files containing DNA sequences, and whenever it found one, comparing its contents not only to the single file that the supercomputer had calculated bore a ninety-seven percent probability of listing the DNA sequence of an unknown organism, but to the other twenty-three files it had generated as well.

By the time Al Kalama spoke, thousands of files had been put through the process, and each of them had been added to the ever-lengthening list of digitally stored DNA sequences—the genetic codes for the tiniest single-celled organisms, for thousands of species of algae, mosses, ferns, bushes, and trees, as well as for additional thousands of worms, insects, spiders, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and every species of warm-blooded creature known to man.

The astonishing result was that there were sequences—some short, some long—in every single file that perfectly duplicated one or another sequence that could be found in the file the computer had generated from the signal from the far reaches of space. A signal, Howell had told Rob, that had come from something called the Whirlpool Galaxy. In every case, the computer dutifully reported the exact percentage of match it had found. Though there was no complete match—not even anything the computer considered significantly close—more and more segments of the sequence from the galaxy fifteen million light-years away were matching to one or another segment of the DNA of some organism on Earth.

Cumulatively, Howell was already nearly certain, the proof would be irrefutable: not only was life not unique to Earth, but its basic building blocks, the four nitrogenous bases found here, were found on other planets as well.

Not only was life universal, but its forms, when they were finally found, would be familiar.…

Rob’s thoughts were shattered by a hand roughly shaking his shoulder. “Rob,” Al Kalama was saying, “what do you want me to do now that I’ve cracked it?”

Rob whirled around, fixing his attention on the screen Kalama had been slaving over for the last few hours. The
Serinus directory was open at last, displaying several more subdirectories. Under each subdirectory were dozens—in some cases hundreds—of files.

“Can you search them?” he asked, his eyes scanning a small portion of the long list of cryptically named files that filled the screen.

“No problem,” Al replied. “What are we looking for?”

“Names,” Rob replied. “Michael Sundquist, Josh Malani, and Kioki Santoya, for starters. Also, look for a kid named Mark Reynolds, and another named …” He hesitated, searching his memory for the name of the boy from New Jersey, then found it. “Shelby. Shane Shelby. Start with those.”

Al Kalama’s fingers flew over the keyboard as he activated a search program, typed in the names Rob had just given him, and pressed the Enter key. A list of fifteen files appeared, five in each of three subdirectories of the main Serinus directory.

As Rob was studying the list, trying to decide which of the files to look at first, a soft chime sounded from the terminal in the next carrel, and he heard Phil Howell utter a single quiet phrase in a tone barely above an awed whisper: “Oh, Jesus.”

For a moment Rob wasn’t certain what the chime meant, but then it came back to him.

Phil Howell had set an alarm.

An alarm that would go off if the supercomputer found a match for the file it was comparing to hundreds of thousands of others.

Not a partial match.

Not even a ninety-nine percent match.

Only a perfect match.

But it was impossible! They knew what the sequence
was, and knew that there was no possibility of a perfect match—at least not on this planet! Yet the alarm had gone off.

His pulse quickening, Rob moved over to gaze at the screen in front of Phil Howell.

A single line was highlighted. The moment he looked at it, Rob felt a sensation of déjà vu, as though he’d seen this display, this file name, in precisely this configuration, before. It took him an instant to realize it was not the name of the file that was familiar.

It was the name of the directory it was in.

The Serinus directory.

“Al,” he said softly, “take a look at this.”

Al Kalama, still in his chair, slid over and peered at the screen on which Rob Silver’s eyes remained fixed. “Jesus,” he whispered, unconsciously echoing Howell’s exclamation as he read the full address of the file that was highlighted on the screen. “What the hell is going on?”

Half an hour later, all three of them knew.

Takeo Yoshihara had not been lying after all when he said his people had found something resembling a geode containing an organic substance. But Rob knew now that neither Yoshihara nor the team of scientists he had put together to analyze and find a use for the substance—the group he had called the Serinus Society—could have had any idea where the substance within the sphere had come from.

Though it had emerged from deep within the crust of the Earth, spewed up by violent volcanic activity far beneath the ocean floor, its source was a mystery only the conjunction of Phil Howell’s accidental discovery could unravel.

And suddenly Rob understood: the object at the heart of the Serinus Project wasn’t a geode at all.

It was a seed.

A seed that had arrived sometime so far in the past as to be almost beyond comprehension, from a planet so far away as to be entirely invisible. Indeed, a planet that had ceased to exist fifteen million years ago.

A seed that was undoubtedly one of many—thousands, perhaps even millions—that had been sent out into the universe like spores riding on the wind. Most of them would have floated endlessly in space, moving through the freezing void for millennia upon millennia.

Some would have fallen into stars, to be instantly burned.

But a few—the most minuscule of fractions—would have fallen onto planets, burying themselves far below the surface. And there they would have lain, dormant, waiting. Every now and then one would have risen to the surface, carried by rising tides of magma, and broken open.

If conditions were wrong—if the chemical makeup of the atmosphere was improperly balanced—the life within the seed would die.

But sometime, somewhere, one of the seeds would open, and find an atmosphere that nurtured its contents, and the life contained within would begin to reproduce.

A new planet would be seeded, and evolution would begin.

And the life of the dead planet—the planet that had long ago been destroyed by the explosion of the star around which it orbited—would go on.

“How many planets?” Rob finally mused, barely realizing he was speaking out loud. “How many planets do you suppose received them?”

For a moment Phil Howell was silent. When he finally spoke, the awe in his whispered voice told Rob that he, too, had realized the truth. “Not them,” he said. “Us. We’re what evolved from the first of those seeds.” His eyes fixed on Rob. “It wasn’t some kind of aliens that sent out that signal, Rob. It was us.”

Midnight.

Four more hours.

How was she going to make it?

I will make it,
she told herself.
I won’t let Michael die. Not here, not anywhere!

Inside the Plexiglas box, Michael seemed to be asleep, though Katharine suspected he wasn’t. Stephen Jameson was gazing down at her son with no more concern than if Michael had been suffering a minor case of the flu. “I think our patient is doing quite well, all things considered,” he said in the professionally comforting tones Katharine thought he must have learned in medical school.

Patient?
How could he call Michael a
patient! Victim
was more like it! She felt like smashing her fist into his face, like locking him into the box in which Michael was trapped, and letting him breathe the deadly atmosphere that was suddenly the only thing that could keep her son alive.

Why wouldn’t he go home? What if he was planning to stay up with Michael all night? What would she do?

Though she managed to keep her own mask in place—a mask she’d carefully composed of equal parts concern for Michael and appreciation of the doctor’s efforts—her
mind was racing. But then she heard the words she’d been waiting for.

“I think maybe I’ll see if I can catch some shut-eye,” Jameson told her, scanning the monitors that were keeping track of Michael’s vital signs one more time. “Everything seems to have stabilized. If there’s a problem, LuAnne knows how to reach me.”

LuAnne, Katharine repeated silently to herself. One look at her hard gray eyes had told Katharine that, despite the nurse’s uniform, the primary job of the woman who sat in the anteroom outside—perhaps her only job—was security. Carefully concealing her true feelings, Katharine tried to inject exactly the right mixture of worry and confidence into her voice. “Do you really think he’s going to be all right?”

“He’ll be fine,” Jameson assured her.

As if I’m a child!
Katharine managed a sigh she hoped sounded like relief. “Well, I hope you get enough sleep for both of us,” she said. “I just don’t think I’ll be able to sleep a wink tonight.” Oh, God. Had she overplayed it? Jameson, though, seemed willing to accept her at face value.

Or did he simply know there was absolutely nothing she could do to extricate Michael from this room? She instantly rejected the question, unwilling to deal with its implications.

Fifteen minutes after Jameson finally left, she set off on the first of what she’d begun to think of as reconnaissance missions. Certain that every word she spoke was being overheard, every move she made watched, she forced herself to tell Michael not to worry and try to get some sleep. Hoping the words didn’t sound as ludicrous to whoever might be listening as they did to her, she took
a Ziploc bag out of her suitcase, left Michael’s room, and asked the “nurse” if there was a kitchen on this level. “If I don’t get some coffee, I’m never going to make it through the night,” she said, sighing.

Eyeing her sharply, LuAnne hesitated, then pointed toward the end of the corridor. “But there’s no coffee,” she said.

“Not to worry.” Ignoring the woman’s coolness and holding up the Ziploc bag, which contained a fistful of single-cup coffee bags still in their foil packets, Katharine explained, “I brought my own.”

LuAnne made no reply, so Katharine proceeded to the kitchen. As she passed the door behind which lay the Serinus Project laboratories, she noticed that the brass plaque was gone, and had to resist an urge to try the knob to see if it was locked.

In the kitchen she put a kettle of water on to boil, then washed out two cups, dropping one of the coffee bags in each of them. After the coffee had steeped, Katharine fished out the bags, then carried both cups back to the anteroom in which the nurse was stationed. “I made you a cup, too,” she announced, setting both cups on the nurse’s desk and willing herself not to react to the look of suspicion that immediately came into the other woman’s eyes. “This one’s Chocolate Mocha, and the other’s French Vanilla Bean.”

“Which one’s your favorite?” the nurse asked.