The Presence

CHAPTER 26

Phil Howell’s right shoulder felt as if it were on fire, his eyes were gritty, and the images on the computer screen he’d been staring at through most of last night and all of today were blurring in front of him. But finally it was all coming together.

It had begun late yesterday afternoon, when he’d forced himself to admit that there was no way he could have the supercomputer compare the string of strange nonmelodic tones the radio-telescopes had been picking up to every file in every computer in the world Finally he’d had the computer assign letters to the tones, choosing the four notes that came closest to matching the tones: A, B-flat, D-sharp, and G. Even as he’d done it, he was skeptical that it would lead anywhere: after all, there were no four-note musical scales that he knew of, and certainly no reason to think that a civilization — if there really was one — fifteen million light-years away would have any sense of earthly music anyway.

It was just that he hadn’t been able to think of anything else to do But then, as the notes had streamed across the screen, something had begun rising out of the fog swirling in his mind. At last he’d punched the Pause key at the top right of his keyboard and sat gazing at the screen.

Nothing more than a string of the four notes, one following another randomly, as completely free of a recognizable pattern as the sound — now emanating from the terminal’s speaker — was free of a repeated melody.

Yet something about it looked oddly familiar. Then it came to him. Opening a new window on the monitor, he searched the web until he found a site that displayed a certain kind of code.

Genetic code.

A moment later Phil’s eyes fixed on a long sequence of code. Not presented as rungs on the double-helix of chromosomal structure as it usually was, the code had simply been typed out in sequence, each of the nitrogenous bases — adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine — reduced to single letters.

A, G, C, and T.

His heart began to beat rapidly as his eyes went to the other screen, displaying the signal from deep in space.

A, B-flat, D-sharp, and G.

Substitute C and T for B-flat and D-sharp, and—

— and it was so obvious.

He thought of the rocket NASA had sent out into deep space years ago, bearing a plaque with simple stick figures of a man and a woman, and some mathematical symbols.

But if you really wanted to communicate with another life-form — a life-form similar enough to yours so that your two races might have some slight hope of communicating — what better symbol to send out than an exact depiction of the sort of being you were?

Particularly when the very definition of your being could be conveyed in a simple code of four symbols, issued in a specific sequence?

Surely any culture that found such a signal, and was far enough advanced to recognize it, would also have had to develop in a way so similar as to make communication between the two species not only possible, but comprehensible as well.

Phil’s eyes shifted back and forth between the two windows on the screen. The more he stared at it, the more certain he became.

He was right. He had to be!

The signal wasn’t music.

It was code.

DNA code.

A full set of blueprints for a species.

His mind had begun racing then. First he’d have to convert the signal from the notation he’d assigned into genetic notation. That was a simple matter of substitution.

But which notes to substitute for what protein? It was purely coincidence that two of the notes from the signal happened to correspond to two of the letters that human beings use to symbolize the substances that comprise DNA. He hadn’t wanted to try to calculate the odds that an alien race would not only have come up with the same musical scale that was native only to certain parts of planet Earth, but would also have assigned the same symbols to the proteins that dictated their own anatomic structure, whatever it might be.

By ten o’clock he’d given up and called a mathematician at the university who had been able to come up with a simple program to construct an entire directory of new files. Each file would differ only in the notes for which the letters A, C, T, and G were substituted. In all, there would be twenty-four files representing every possible combination of substitutions.

Then the supercomputer could begin comparing each of those twenty-four files to every file containing DNA data on every computer within its reach.

Even the mathematician had been unwilling to venture a guess as to how long it would take. Though Phil was nearly ready to pass out from exhaustion, he had been sitting in front of the computer most of last night and all day today, unable to tear himself away for more than a few minutes at a time for fear of missing the moment when a match was made.

If a match was going to be made. The mathematician had told him a match was statistically so improbable as to be virtually impossible. “But that’s not to say you won’t find something similar,” his friend had gone on, confusing the issue even further. “In fact, I’d be surprised if you didn’t. After all, if space is truly infinite, then somewhere there has to be an exact match. In fact, there has to be an infinite number of exact matches. But of course the likelihood of your finding one would be one in — what? An infinity of infinities?”

All day long Phil Howell watched the letters stream by, and he was no closer to the answer he was looking for than when he’d started.

But he’d find it. If it was there, he’d find it.

All the way from Makawao to Kihei, Katharine rehearsed what she was going to say to Phil Howell, and in her own mind it sounded perfectly reasoned, perfectly logical.

And utterly insane!

Takeo Yoshihara was one of the most respected men on Maui. Why should Phil Howell — or anyone else — believe her?

If only Rob were with her!

What if he didn’t find her note? What if someone else found it, and figured out what it meant, and—

Stop! She spoke the word so sharply to herself that she reflexively stamped on the brake pedal, eliciting an instant and angry response from the car behind her. Paranoia, she reminded herself as she got the car back under control, moved into the left lane of the Piilani Highway, and turned up Lipoa Street. It was just an innocent note! And if Rob didn’t get there, she’d just have to convince Phil by herself that she wasn’t crazy.

But when she reached Howell’s office, he wasn’t there. She felt a moment of desperation as she thought of how far she was from the top of the mountain, but then the receptionist told her he hadn’t gone up Haleakala to work with the telescope. “He’s right across the street at the Computer Center.”

Relief flooded through Katharine, and she hurried out of the building. Just as she was crossing the street, a horn honked and she heard Rob Silver call out.

“Kath, what’s going on? I found your note and—” She turned around, and he saw the look on her face. “Katharine, what’s wrong? What is it?” A moment later he was out of the car, his arms around her.

She let her head rest against his chest a moment, then took a deep breath, trying to remember the words she’d so carefully rehearsed, and failing utterly. Instead she blurted, “Rob, something horrible is going on, and we have to convince Phil Howell to help us find out exactly how bad it is.”

For the next ten minutes she talked steadily, trying to separate what she knew from what she only suspected; trying to knit the fragmentary pieces of the story into a coherent structure. But even as she talked, she could see the doubt in Rob’s eyes. “You don’t believe any of it, do you?” she asked when she was finally done.

Rob took a deep breath. “It’s not that I don’t believe you, Kath,” he said carefully. “It’s just that so much of what you say is — well, it’s supposition.”

“I know what I saw in the lab, Rob,” Katharine said, her voice taking on an edge.

“I’m not questioning what you saw,” Rob went on quickly. “But the conclusions you’ve come to—I mean, what you’re implying about Takeo Yoshihara—”

“That he could be experimenting on human beings?” Katharine broke in. “Why is that such a difficult concept to accept? There have always been people willing to experiment on other people. And maybe I’m wrong. God, you have no idea how badly I want to be wrong. But I have to know, Rob. I have to know exactly what’s going on down there, and I can’t do it by myself. And I’m sure it’s all in that damned Serinus directory that we can’t break into! So you have to help me convince Phil to hack into it, or—” Katharine’s voice broke as all her pent-up fear crashed over her like a great wave bearing down, crushing her beneath its weight. Her eyes welled with tears and her body began to tremble. For a moment she felt as if her legs were going to give way beneath her and she was going to collapse, but then Rob’s arms were around her once again.

“It’s all right, Kath,” he whispered in her ear, his fingers gently stroking her hair. “It’s all right. Of course I’ll help you. Just don’t worry anymore, all right?”

Katharine’s arms went around him and she held him tight. “I’ll try,” she breathed. “But I’ve been so frightened that something terrible is going to happen to Michael—”

Rob pulled her closer. “It won’t,” he told her. “I promise you. Nothing bad will happen to Michael.”

Katharine listened to the words and tried to cling to them as she was clinging to Rob himself, but as they started across the road to the Computer Center and she struggled to put her faith in what he’d said, another voice was speaking to her.

That voice was telling her that despite what Rob was saying, and despite the clear evidence of Michael’s well-being, which she’d witnessed at the school only an hour earlier, it might already be far too late.

Phil Howell was still staring at the screen when he slowly became aware that he was no longer alone. When he looked up and saw Katharine’s ashen complexion and the worry in Rob’s eyes, he knew something had gone wrong.

“We need your help, Phil,” Rob said quietly. “And we need it now.”

Phil frowned, his eyes returning to the screen. If a match was found and he didn’t see it—

“Please?” Katharine begged. “I’m afraid—” Her quavering voice was enough to convince Phil that she was truly frightened.

Certain that whatever Katharine and Rob wanted of him involved the computer, he opened yet another new window on his monitor.

The signal was already fifteen million years old.

It could wait a little longer.

Katharine, clearly, could not.

A tiny point of light glimmered faintly in the darkness, so dim that at first Michael was barely aware of it. As it slowly began to brighten, he found himself fastening onto it as the watchman on a ship might fasten on a beacon signaling safe shelter from a storm. He concentrated on the glimmer of light, willing it to grow larger, burn brighter, and wash away the darkness that had enveloped him.

The empty silence that had embraced him along with the darkness was also starting to give way. At first all he could hear was what sounded like a distant droning coming from some unidentifiable source. But as the light expanded and the blackness began to gray, the sound grew louder, and finally he could distinguish a variation in it.

Whup-whup-whup-whup.

It was a sound he’d heard before, a sound he should be able to identify in an instant. But dark tendrils were still wrapped around his mind, confusing him, and it wasn’t until the sound became loud enough to frighten him that he finally recognized it.

A helicopter!

It grew louder and louder, but he couldn’t see anything at all, for the blackness had now been washed away by a brilliance that blinded him as completely as the total night of a few moments before.

The roar of the helicopter’s blades was deafening now. He knew he had only another second or two before those blades would surely crush him.

Run!

He had to get up and run!

But his entire body felt leaden. He could barely flex his muscles.

He tried to breathe, but his lungs hurt, and there was something over his face.

Was that why he couldn’t see?

He tried to twist his head away, and then, over the roar of the helicopter’s rotor, he heard something else.

A voice.

“Don’t, Michael. Don’t try to move. Just relax.”

He knew the voice, but he couldn’t quite place it. Dimly, he began to remember fragments of the last few minutes before the terrible blackness had closed around him.

He’d been running. And running better than ever. Running better because—

Ammonia!

He’d been breathing ammonia, and the coach had been asking him—

But this voice wasn’t Coach Peters’s. It was someone else, someone who—

Dr. Jameson!

That was it. When he’d gotten sick and passed out, they must have called Dr. Jameson.

The thing on his face was an oxygen mask, and they were taking him to the hospital.

No! He hated the hospital — from the very beginning, when the asthma had seized him in its grip for the first time and his mother had rushed him to the emergency room, he had hated everything about the hospital.

Not just the smell and the sickly green paint and the terrible food. The worst was the way they’d treated him, sticking needles in him, shoving pills in his mouth, doctors and nurses, all of whom he had learned to distrust, talking about him like he wasn’t even there. And there was nothing wrong with him today — not really. He had fainted, that was all. He could tell, because he was already feeling a lot better, and when he’d had asthma attacks, the oxygen they’d given him had barely helped. But now the pain in his chest was almost gone, and it wasn’t hard to breathe! If he could just get the mask off his face and tell them—

He struggled harder, and for the first time realized why he couldn’t move his arms or legs: they were strapped down, immobilized.

He twisted his neck, trying to struggle free of the mask, and realized with astonishment what the blinding light was.

The sun, shining down from out of a blue sky through—

The bubblelike windshield of a helicopter! He could see the blur of the propeller spinning overhead, and feel the swaying of the machine as it hurtled through the sky.

“It’s all right, Michael!” He could make out a tinny quality to Dr. Jameson’s voice, and realized he was wearing a headset, as well as an oxygen mask. “If you can understand my voice, nod your head. Not hard, just a little.”

Without thinking, Michael nodded.

“All right. Now, someone back at the school said something about ammonia. Did you drink it?”

Michael froze for an instant, then shook his head.

“Then you breathed it.”

Not a question. A statement. But how did Jameson know?

“It’s all right, Michael,” Jameson told him. “We know what’s wrong. Just relax. You’re going to be all right.”

Again Michael struggled to speak, but couldn’t find the strength. Then he heard Jameson’s voice again, urging him to relax, not to fight against the straps that held him to the stretcher or the mask that covered his face. “Relax,” Jameson repeated, his voice taking on an almost hypnotic quality. “Just relax, Michael. You’re not going to die. Do you hear me? You’re not going to die.”

Concentrating on the voice, Michael felt himself begin to drift back into the darkness, and the steady whupping of the propeller began to fade. But as he drifted back into unconsciousness, he heard another voice.

A voice he didn’t recognize.

“Why do you say he isn’t going to die, Stephen? Why should he be different from all the others?”

“I am a doctor, sir,” he heard Jameson reply. “I believe in comforting my patients, even if it means lying to them.”

The words rang and echoed in Michael’s mind. He wanted to cry out against them, to struggle one more time against the bonds that held him and the mask that was pressed to his face. But his strength was gone.

He let himself sink back into the darkness.