A door at one corner of the front of the lecture hall opened and Glinn appeared. He walked slowly along the wall of electronics, stepped up onto the platform, and turned to address the small gathering.
“Thank you all for coming,” he said. “I thought it would be appropriate to formally conclude this mission with a brief discussion, held for those of you who were most responsible for its success.”
He stepped forward and waved one hand toward the model. “Because, as far as we have been able to tell, the mission was a success. The liquid-liquid explosion, theorized by Sam and detonated by Gideon, seems to have worked. We’ve sent a research ship down to the area—on the sly, of course—and a sidescan sonar was towed across the entire area. The wreck of the Rolvaag is no more; there is a huge crater in the abyssal floor, as this model demonstrates; and it appears the explosion reached deep enough to kill all the parasitized brains. Dead and rotting remains of the creature were observed floating on the surface, but life has already begun to return to the dead zone.”
“What about the radioactivity of the explosion?” Gideon asked.
“The ocean is a marvelous thing. Its incredible vastness—the thousands upon thousands of square miles of seawater surrounding the detonation—absorbed and dispersed it. While I wouldn’t recommend taking any dives down to the bomb crater itself, as I said, the surrounding area seems to be flourishing once again. And—as we’d hoped—local and global seismic stations have chalked it up as a single, violent undersea volcanic eruption: nothing more.”
He took a seat on the edge of the table. “All of you know some of the details. But I’m here to give you the complete picture. It would appear that the worms that had infected so many of the crew and scientific staff of the Batavia—and had, in effect, taken over the ship, at the behest of the Baobab—died along with it. At the moment of the detonation, they became somnolent. From what we can tell, they were in the process of drying up, dying—even as, of course, the ship sank, taking them to the bottom.”
“And the infected crew?” asked Rosemarie Wong.
Glinn’s face grew grim. “From what we witnessed, and from later reports, at the moment the Baobab was destroyed, the affected crewmembers became lethargic and confused. They refused to leave the ship. As the Batavia was sinking, many of them began suffering brain hemorrhages—presumably as the worms in their brains died.” He paused. “The official report was that the undersea volcanic eruption sank the ship—which, after all, is not far from the truth.”
“How many?” asked Sam McFarlane.
“I’m sorry?”
“How many lives were lost when the Batavia went down?”
This time, it was Garza who spoke up. “Fifty-seven.”
Fifty-seven, Gideon thought. Add that to the hundred and eight who went down with the Rolvaag, and one hundred and sixty-five lives could be chalked up to the so-called meteorite. Not to mention Alex Lispenard; Barry Frayne; Prothero; Dr. Brambell—others. It was tragic, truly tragic: but of course, it could have been much, much worse.
Apparently, McFarlane thought so, too, because—while at first his face hardened and he appeared about to say something—he relaxed and sat back in his seat.
Glinn seemed to notice this, because he turned toward the meteorite hunter. “Sam,” he said, “the rest of us in this room are all employees or officers of EES. This was a job we had to take on. You did not. And it was your insights—into the depths of the root structure containing the brains, into the possibility of a liquid-liquid explosion—that helped destroy the Baobab.”
McFarlane made a dismissive gesture. “Gideon here was the real hero. He assembled the nuke. He armed it, placed it. And he did so believing it to be a suicide mission. He was fully prepared to die so the rest of us could live.”
“And Gideon has my eternal thanks, as well as the thanks of all of us here at EES. He will be around to enjoy that thanks, in the many forms it will take, over the coming months. But you—I know you’re already planning to leave New York.” Glinn patted his jacket pocket. “I have here a check for five hundred thousand dollars—a token of our appreciation for your contribution to the mission.”
“Keep your check,” McFarlane said.
Everyone turned to look at him. Even Glinn seemed surprised.
“Palmer Lloyd got in touch with me,” McFarlane said. “Apparently, you’d already spoken with him.”
Glinn inclined his head.
“In any case, he’s sent me a check for many times that amount. And since getting the news, it appears he’s improving by the day. In fact, he’s back to eating his mignonettes dijonnaise with a fork instead of a straw.”
“What are you going to do with all the money?” Garza asked him.
“I’m going to use half of it to establish a charitable trust in the name of my old partner, Nestor Masangkay. The other half I’m going to spend.” And he stretched luxuriously in his seat. “There’s this little island in the Maldives I’ve got my eye on. Only a hundred acres, but almost half of that is beach. On a good night, the bioluminescent phytoplankton is something you have to see to believe.”
This was greeted by a brief silence.
“What about the worms?” Gideon asked. “Have you been able to determine how the Baobab was able to communicate with them—how it could direct the actions of the Batavia crew in such specific ways?”
“That’s one of many mysteries that remain to be solved—if solve them we can. It appears—this is classified—that the creature emitted extremely low-frequency radio waves, similar to what we use to communicate with nuclear submarines. While we were at the Ice Limit, such waves were picked up by the US Navy, thousands of miles away. They think the Russians may have deployed a new submarine communications system—and it’s driving them crazy.
“But there’s an even deeper mystery that troubles us.” Glinn stood again, paced before the model. “While the UQC was on—when you, Gideon, were speaking with Sax—a digital download came in. Perhaps you were aware of it. We rescued a dump of that transmission, in the Batavia’s black boxes, just before we abandoned ship. The download appears to have come from the creature—or rather, from the alien brain the creature was using for its intelligence and central motor control. We know that brain was very large, at least by human standards. We also know—thanks to Prothero and Dr. Wong, here—that it had come, against its will, across light-years of space and millions of years.”
“That must have given it plenty of time to think,” McFarlane said drily.
“We can only assume it came from a race more intelligent than ours. Its message was a mass of binary data—zeros and ones. Our engineers have been trying to decode it for three weeks now. It does not appear to have any relationship to numbers or mathematics or known algorithms. Nor does it appear to be language or some form of logical communication. And it does not consist of images.” He paused again. “We believe the alien brain knew what was about to happen; it knew this would be its final communication with us. It must, therefore, have some importance. But the fact is, we’re still working on it—and we have no real leads.”
“Have you tried playing it?” Wong asked quietly.
Glinn looked at her, frowning. “Excuse me?”
“I said: have you tried playing it?”
“Playing it?” Glinn asked. “You mean, like music?”