The Presence (42 page)

Why didn’t he run?

Was he crazy?

Three more feet …

Michael felt no fear as he watched the helicopter hover over the caldera, dropping lower and lower. He could feel something in the ground now, a slight tremor, as if the earth itself were about to come alive. Then, as the helicopter edged lower, the glowing surface of the lake inside the caldera awakened.

The level of the lava rose steeply, the oddly rhythmic undulations of the boiling rock suddenly interrupted by a column of fire that fountained out of the caldera’s throat, hurling rock, ash, and fire into the air in a burst that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.

Michael ducked beneath the cover of a thick lip of lava, but his eyes remained fastened on the spectacle in front of him.

For the helicopter, there was no place to hide, nor time to flee.

The sniper saw the flicker of red on Michael’s face as the laser sight found its mark. But in the instant before he could squeeze the trigger, a fragment of molten lava struck the helicopter’s enormous propeller. One of its blades broke free of the shaft, and as the helicopter yawed wildly in response to its injury, the metal blade boomeranged back, lashing through the open cabin door, severing the marksman’s arm just above the elbow, and sending him, screaming, into the maelstrom below.

Blood from the severed arm splattered across the Plexiglas cabin, blinding the pilot, who was still trying to control the mortally wounded aircraft.

A terrified howl issued from Takeo Yoshihara, his self-control deserting him as he looked down into the yawning hell into which the helicopter was plunging. His scream, unheard by anyone beyond the confines of the Plexiglas cabin, was suddenly cut off as the fuel tank, heated beyond endurance by the all-consuming fire welling up out of the mountain, exploded into yet more flames, blowing the helicopter into a thousand pieces even as it plummeted into the depths of the churning lake.

The fire spout, as if sensing that it had completed the mission for which it had been summoned, subsided back into the bowels of the mountain. Beneath Michael’s feet, the trembling of the earth began to subside.

By the time Katharine and Rob reached Michael, the helicopter and its occupants had vanished, incinerated as completely as if they had never existed at all.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Michael asked, still gazing out over the caldera’s surface.

Katharine slipped one arm around her son, the other around Rob Silver. “It is beautiful,” she agreed. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

It didn’t seem like two weeks. It barely seemed like two days. Yet the exhaustion that had become Katharine’s most familiar and constant companion since the night she and Michael had fled from Takeo Yoshihara’s estate told her that the time had, indeed, passed.

She was back on the estate, now in an office of her own, though not in the north wing of the research pavilion.

The entire north wing had been turned over to the army of press that had descended on the estate. Katharine and Rob had moved into what had been the Serinus Project laboratories, and found it ironic that Takeo Yoshihara’s security system now served to protect them from the swarm of reporters upstairs, freeing them to concentrate on finding a way to reverse the damage that had been done to Michael and a dozen other adolescent children scattered around the globe.

Wherever the victims were found, fumatoria had been immediately set up, funded by the companies that Takeo Yoshihara had controlled, to keep them as comfortable as possible until an answer could be found.

If there was an answer.

Most of the scientists who had been involved in the Serinus Project, acting on the advice of their attorneys, refused to discuss anything about the sphere—or the Seed, as it was still called, the press having latched onto the term the moment they heard it—let alone the project that had been centered around it.

“We knew nothing of it until two days ago,” Herr Doktor Wolfgang von Schmidt had insisted. “As far as we knew, we were called here to be briefed on a new project that Takeo Yoshihara had in mind. Needless to say, when we heard of his plans to indulge in human experimentation, we were all appalled. And we all refused.”

Juan-Carlos Sanchez and all but two of the other scientists who had been housed at the Hotel Hana Maui had clung to von Schmidt’s position, though now they were protesting their ignorance from prison cells in Honolulu rather than hotel suites on Maui.

The laboratory staff, save for the one man whose job it had been to fill the scuba tanks before they were sent to Kihei Ken’s Dive Shop, was still intact, now working under the supervision of Katharine and Rob and the team of biologists and geneticists they had assembled to reanalyze the compound within the Seed and attempt to find a way to reverse its effects.

Thus far, no progress had been made. Though Katharine was doing her best to remain optimistic, with each day that passed a little more of her hope faded. This morning, when one of the lab technicians rapped on her open door, she looked up from the data she’d been studying and braced herself for more bad news.

“There’s something I think you should see, Dr. Sundquist,” he said. “Right away.”

Following him out of the office, she threaded her way
through the laboratory and then into the room in which the walls were lined with the Plexiglas boxes where the animals waited for death.

The technician stopped in front of a cage. Katharine herself had paused at this box earlier this morning to try to comfort its sole occupant, a chimpanzee whose energy seemed finally to have been sapped. The animal, so heart-breakingly close in appearance to a human child, was still breathing, but seemed unaware of her presence, its dull eyes staring off into space, as if looking at something that wasn’t there. Katharine had talked to it for a moment or two, but it gave no more sign of hearing her than it had of seeing her. Finally, knowing there was nothing she could do for the creature, she’d turned away.

But even as she’d gone on toward her office, a thought had lingered in her mind:

Is this the way it will end for Michael?

Now, standing in front of the cage, she made herself look at its occupant, certain it must have died.

Instead, the chimp was sitting up on the floor, scratching itself with the fingers of its left hand while it clung to a banana with its right. Catching sight of her, it chittered softly, then held out the banana as if offering it to her.

Katharine’s eyes shifted to the gauges monitoring the atmosphere inside the cage. As the significance of their readings slowly sank in, she knew what she had to do.

And she had to do it right now.

Phil Howell, as overwhelmed by the army of reporters as Katharine and Rob, had moved onto the estate, too, hiding out in one of the subterranean offices while he worked on a monograph concerning the origin of the Seed. Now, with the monograph finally completed, he stood nervously
behind the podium of the largest conference room on the estate, trying to quell the attack of stage fright that had seized him the moment he’d entered the room and been surrounded by the pack of journalists, all of them jamming microphones at him, calling out a barrage of questions.

Shaking his head, hand held up as if to ward them off, he fought his way to the front of the room. There, he waited silently until the crowd of reporters had quieted down. Then he began:

“The civilization that created the Seeds knew what was going to happen to them, just as we know how much longer our own sun is going to last, and how it is going to die. For us, that event is so far in the future as not even to be a factor in our thinking.” He paused, then went on. “But they, fifteen million years ago, knew that their sun was going to explode. They knew that their planet was going to be incinerated, and that they were all going to die.

“Not slowly.

“Not over a period of centuries, or decades, or even years.

“They were going to die in an instant.

“And so they prepared. Probably for hundreds of years; perhaps for thousands. They knew they couldn’t prevent their sun from exploding, nor save their planet. So they did something else. They escaped.”

Someone at the back of the room rose to her feet. “But they didn’t,” she said. “The Seed isn’t viable here. Whatever might have hatched out of them couldn’t live in our atmosphere.”

Phil Howell’s gaze shifted to Rob Silver, who was standing
against the wall just inside the conference room’s door. “Perhaps you could comment on that, Rob.”

Coming to the podium, Rob looked out at the faces, some expectant, some skeptical. “The fact of the matter is, we feel fairly certain that the contents of the Seed may be perfectly viable.” The murmuring crowd grew silent as the import of what he was saying slowly sank in. “Right now, Michael Sundquist is living on the slope of Kilauea, thriving in an atmosphere that would poison the rest of us. And in the basement of this building there is a skull and a skeleton, both of which bear very close resemblance to early hominids. Preliminary tests show that the DNA of both of them are a very close match to that of the organic compound inside the Seed. Though we can’t yet prove it, we are fairly certain that the beings whose bones we are currently analyzing must have been affected by the contents of one of the ‘Seeds’ at a very early age, possibly even before birth, through a mother who came into contact with one of them. The atmosphere of this planet, like everything else in the universe, is constantly changing and evolving. If there are areas on this planet right now where organisms such as those who created the Seed can survive, think of how many such areas there would have been eons ago, when life here was just emerging.”

Rob paused, fixing his eyes directly on the woman in the back row who had posed the question. “Except, of course, that life was not emerging at all.”

The reporter frowned. “I beg your pardon?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Rob replied. “Life on this planet did not emerge,” he said again. “It adapted.”

For a moment the silence in the room held as the reporters digested what Rob Silver had just said, and then a
dozen of them were on their feet, all shouting questions at once.

Rob waited until the furor died away, then dealt with all the questions in one statement.

“It’s very simple,” he said. “Life did not
arise
on this planet—it
arrived.
Before that planet was destroyed fifteen million years ago, the essence of its life force escaped; this is where it came. Here, and perhaps to hundreds—even thousands—of other planets.” His tone changed, almost as if he were no longer speaking to the people in the room, but to everyone, everywhere. “When you look up into the sky tonight, and see the one star that is brighter than all the others, understand what it is. Or what it was.”

A silence fell over the room, and finally the woman in the back of the room, still on her feet, spoke a single word.

“Home.”

“That’s right,” Rob said softly. “Home.”

Then, seeing Katharine waving to him from the door, Rob turned the press conference back over to Phil Howell and left the room.

Michael had awakened before dawn that morning, his eyes snapping open in the darkness and immediately fixing on the nova that was now the brightest star in the sky. For him, the brilliant beacon of light had taken on a special meaning, appearing for the first time on the night he had been delivered from the confines of the Plexiglas box and brought to the oasis in the lava shield covering the flank of Kilauea.

The oasis was still his headquarters, and in the two weeks that had elapsed since the helicopter deposited him here, a tent had been set up. There was a picnic table and benches, and half a dozen folding chairs stood in a
loose circle around the stone ring in which a small fire always smoldered.

A makeshift kitchen had even been constructed, with a Coleman stove for cooking, and an enormous cooler, its ice replenished every three days. They had offered to bring a generator to the oasis, but Michael himself had begged them not to, unwilling to have what little quiet remained on the mountainside destroyed by the constant roar of another machine.

The helicopters overhead were bad enough.

A crowd of reporters had set up camp farther down the mountain, held back only by a team of rangers whose sole job had become to protect the small amount of privacy Michael had, and the reporters had brought their own generators up. When the winds were right, Michael could hear them all too clearly, and when he went to the caldera at night to watch the flames dance over the surface of the boiling lava, the comforting blanket of darkness in which he’d wrapped himself that first night was gone, torn to shreds by the brilliant halogen lights with which the reporters lit their camp.

Visitors came to see him every day, and every day his mother and Rob came as well, if only for an hour or two. Most days, the three of them had supper together, and often one or the other of them spent the night with him, sleeping in the tent while he himself lay outdoors, savoring the expansiveness of the sky.

Each day, he felt a little stronger, and each night the star grew a little brighter. Three days ago, for the first time, it had remained visible into the dawn, only disappearing when it inevitably dropped over the horizon.

But the star, he knew, was eventually going to fade,
and though he’d said nothing to either his mother or to Rob, he had begun to fear that day.

This morning, when he’d come awake before dawn and looked up into the sky, something had changed: the nova had been less bright than the night before. He’d gazed at it for a long time, silently willing its brilliance to grow, before he drifted back into a fitful sleep.

When he awoke again, the sun was rising, and the stars, except for the nova, were gone.

And he felt a tightness in his chest.

All morning long he told himself it meant nothing, that he’d simply caught a cold, and that by tomorrow or the next day it would be gone. But he knew better; knew that tomorrow, and on every tomorrow to come, the nova would have dimmed, and the pain in his chest would have spread.