The Presence (31 page)

Even after having beaten every sprinting record for the school, he still felt totally terrific So terrific, in fact, that maybe he’d just try some of the longer runs.

He set out down the straightaway, pacing himself carefully to make it all the way around the quarter-mile loop of the track. Settling into a comfortable jog, he wasn’t even breathing hard as he turned into the first curve. He held his pace steady until he came into the long straightaway on the opposite side of the field from the bleachers, but then put on some speed as he started down the backstretch.

A month ago—even a week ago—he would be feeling it by now. His breath would be getting shallow, and his legs starting to burn, and by the time he got to the far end, he’d have to slow down to a walk, if he didn’t collapse onto the ground, gasping and panting until his breath finally returned to normal Today, though, there was no pain in his legs and his breathing was still regular,
though he was finally starting to feel the effects of the stress he was putting his body under.

Mostly it was just the beginning of a slight heaviness in his chest. It didn’t hurt, really. It was just a feeling that something wasn’t quite right.

Moving into the turn, he stepped up the pace a little more; whatever was going on in his chest would go away if he just ignored it. Shifting from the jog into a fast trot, he came out onto the stretch in front of the empty grandstands. As his gaze swept across the bank of empty seats, Michael imagined them filled with cheering people, and once again he upped his pace, the fast trot giving way to a lope that was easier on his legs but required more work by his lungs.

He made it around the second lap, and finally he was starting to feel a little heat in his legs. And his chest was hurting, too, but it wasn’t the same as the asthmatic agony he’d grown up with.

This felt like the healthy pain of exertion, and he was sure that if he didn’t give in to it—if he just kept his pace steady, or even increased it a little—he might break right through the pain and, for the first time, experience the high he’d heard long-distance runners talk about since he was a little kid, but which he had never felt himself. As he finished the third lap, his coach fell in beside him.

“What’s going on, Sundquist? You said you couldn’t do distances.”

Michael flashed the coach a quick grin. “Just feel like running, that’s all.”

Peters shot him a quizzical look. “You been taking something?”

Michael felt an instant stab of guilt. What should he
say? Should he lie? But ammonia wasn’t a drug! It was nothing but cleaning fluid.

All the warnings he’d read on the label flashed through his mind. But if it was really as poisonous as the label had claimed, how come he was still feeling so good?

Except that suddenly he wasn’t feeling so good.

The breakthrough he’d been expecting—the surge of pheromones that he’d been sure would wash the pain from his chest, giving him a second wind that would send him sprinting around the last quarter of the mile run he’d set out to do—hadn’t come.

Instead, the pain in his chest was worse, and now the burning in his legs was starting to feel like fire.

The ammonia! That was it!

It had to be!

The pain was increasing by the second now, and he felt himself falter.

Keep going. If you can just keep going, you can get through it!

The coach, still keeping pace beside him, spoke again. “What’s going on, Sundquist? You don’t look so good.”

So the pain was starting to show in his face now. If he got caught—if the coach found out what he’d been doing in the cleaning closet—he’d get kicked off the team for sure!

Run,
he told himself.
Just keep on running. It’ll be okay!

But as he turned into the curve leading to the backstretch, his stride was way off and he could feel himself losing the pace.

His breath was getting ragged, too, and now every time he expanded his lungs, it felt as if knives were thrusting into his chest.

Stumbling, he lost his pace completely, regained it for
a couple of steps, then stumbled again. This time, knowing he was going to fall, he veered off onto the grass of the football field, and finally collapsed onto the ground.

“Sundquist? Sundquist!” Jack Peters was crouching beside him now. Michael was lying on his back, and as he stared up into the sky, he saw it darken, lights darting around the edges of his vision, as though he was about to black out.

Or die.

No! He couldn’t be dying. Not now! Not after he’d just been feeling so good, and running better than he’d ever run in his life!

He had to get back on his feet, keep going, get through it. He rolled over, tried to pull himself into a crouch, and flopped back onto the ground. Then he felt the coach’s hands on his shoulders, turning him back over.

“Just lie there,” he heard the coach say. “What is it, Sundquist? What happened?”

Darkness was closing in on him now, and no matter how hard he tried to catch his breath, he couldn’t seem to get any air.

Then he felt another pair of hands on him and heard another voice.

Rick Pieper’s voice.

“Michael? Michael, what’s wrong? What is it?”

Feeling the strength ebbing from his body, Michael struggled to form a word. His lips worked, but as the seconds ticked by, no sound came out.

Rick Pieper looked up at the coach, his eyes filled with terror. Kioki Santoya was already dead, and Jeff Kina and Josh Malani had both disappeared. And now Michael looked like he was dying right in front of his eyes. “Do
something!” he begged “For God’s sake, can’t you do something?”

The coach leaned down. “What is it?” he demanded, speaking directly into Michael’s ear. “What are you trying to say?”

Michael’s tongue felt thick, but he struggled hard, and in a whisper he managed to stammer out a single word.

“A-Ammonia—”

Exhausted by the effort it took to utter the word, he gave up his struggles and concentrated what little energy he had left on the normally simple task of breathing.

A task that was now nearly impossible.

Takeo Yoshihara and Stephen Jameson were in the helicopter when the call came through that Michael Sundquist had collapsed on the field at Bailey High School.

“Where are we?” Yoshihara demanded, speaking into the headset that allowed him to communicate with the pilot despite the thundering racket of the rotor spinning overhead.

“We can make it there in five minutes,” the pilot responded.

“Do it,” Yoshihara ordered. Then he turned his attention to Stephen Jameson “Will he make it?”

“If we get there before the ambulance does,” Jameson replied. “But if they give him the same treatment they gave the boy from Los Angeles, they’ll kill him”

“Then speak to the rescue crew,” Yoshihara ordered. “Tell them you are the boy’s doctor and that they are to do nothing until you arrive.”

The pilot’s voice came over the headsets. “We can’t do that. We don’t have the same frequencies the ambulances use And speak of the devil—take a look!” He was pointing
downward and slightly off to the right through the helicopter’s Plexiglas bubble. Speeding along the road below them was an ambulance; even from here they could see its lights flashing.

“Faster,” Takeo Yoshihara ordered. Though he didn’t raise his voice a single decibel, there was a note of total authority in the command that galvanized the pilot.

Tipping the chopper forward, he increased the speed of the rotor, and with a lurch that brought a sickening bile into Stephen Jameson’s throat, though Takeo Yoshihara seemed not to notice the motion, the aircraft shot ahead.

They reached the school thirty seconds before the ambulance. By the time the medics appeared with a stretcher, Stephen Jameson was in full control.

Obeying the doctor’s orders without hesitation, the paramedics strapped Michael onto a stretcher and loaded him into the helicopter.

“Maui Memorial?” the pilot asked, already revving the engine in preparation for lifting off.

Takeo Yoshihara shook his head. “Home.”

The pilot, like the ambulance crew, obeyed his orders without a single question.

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—