“Aye, aye, Captain.”
He snapped off the overhead light and reached for the gearshift.
With a distant click, the light that he had just turned off now turned itself on.
He looked at Tina, and she met his eyes.
He clicked off the light again.
Immediately it switched on.
“Here we go,” Tina said.
The radio came on. The digital station indicator began to sweep across the frequencies. Split-second blasts of music, commercials, and disc jockeys’ voices blared senselessly out of the speakers.
“It’s Danny,” Tina said.
The windshield wipers started thumping back and forth at top speed, adding their metronomical beat to the chaos inside the Chevy.
The headlights flashed on and off so rapidly that they created a stroboscopic effect, repeatedly “freezing” the falling snow, so that it appeared as if the white flakes were descending to the ground in short, jerky steps.
The air inside the car was bitterly cold and growing colder by the second.
Elliot put his right hand against the dashboard vent. Heat was pushing out of it, but the air temperature continued to plunge.
The glove compartment popped open.
The ashtray slid out of its niche.
Tina laughed, clearly delighted.
The sound of her laughter startled Elliot, but then he had to admit to himself that he did not feel menaced by the work of this poltergeist. In fact, just the opposite was true. He sensed that he was witnessing a joyous display, a warm greeting, the excited welcome of a child-ghost. He was overwhelmed by the astonishing notion that he could actually feel goodwill in the air, a tangible radiation of love and affection. A not unpleasant shiver raced up his spine. Apparently, this was the same astonishing awareness of being buffeted by waves of love that had caused Tina’s laughter.
She said, “We’re coming, Danny. Hear me if you can, baby. We’re coming to get you. We’re coming.”
The radio switched off, and so did the overhead light.
The windshield wipers stopped thumping.
The headlights blinked off and stayed off.
Stillness.
Silence.
Scattered flakes of snow collided softly with the windshield.
In the car, the air grew warm again.
Elliot said, “Why does it get cold every time he uses his… psychic abilities?”
“Who knows? Maybe he’s able to move objects by harnessing the heat energy in the air, changing it somehow. Or maybe it’s something else altogether. We’ll probably never know. He might not understand it himself. Anyway, that isn’t important. What’s important is that my Danny is alive. There’s no doubt about that. Not now. Not anymore. And I gather from your question, you’ve become a believer too.”
“Yeah,” Elliot said, still mildly amazed by his own change of heart and mind. “Yeah, I believe there’s a chance you’re right.”
“I know I am.”
“Something extraordinary happened to that expedition of scouts. And something downright uncanny has happened to your son.”
“But at least he’s not dead,” Tina said.
Elliot saw tears of happiness shining in her eyes.
“Hey,” he said worriedly, “better keep a tight rein on your hopes. Okay? We’ve got a long, long way to go. We don’t even know where Danny is or what shape he’s in. We’ve got a gauntlet to run before we can find him and bring him back. We might both be killed before we even get close to him.”
He drove away from the airport. As far as he could tell, no one followed them.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Suffering one of his occasional bouts of claustrophobia, Dr. Carlton Dombey felt as though he had been swallowed alive and was trapped now in the devil’s gut.
Deep inside the secret Sierra complex, three stories below ground level, this room measured forty feet by twenty. The low ceiling was covered with a spongy, pebbly, yellowish soundproofing, which gave the chamber a peculiar organic quality. Fluorescent tubes shed cold light over banks of computers and over worktables laden with journals, charts, file folders, scientific instruments, and two coffee mugs.
In the middle of the west wall — one of the two shorter walls — opposite the entrance to the room, was a six-foot-long, three-foot-high window that provided a view of another space, which was only half as large as this outer chamber. The window was constructed like a sandwich: Two one-inch-thick panes of shatterproof glass surrounded an inch-wide space filled with an inert gas. Two panes of ironlike glass. Stainless-steel frame. Four airtight rubber seals — one around the both faces of each pane. This viewport was designed to withstand everything from a gunshot to an earthquake; it was virtually inviolable.
Because it was important for the men who worked in the large room to have an unobstructed view of the smaller inner chamber at all times, four angled ceiling vents in both rooms bathed the glass in a continuous flow of warm, dry air to prevent condensation and clouding. Currently the system wasn’t working, for three-quarters of the window was filmed with frost.
Dr. Carlton Dombey, a curly-haired man with a bushy mustache, stood at the window, blotting his damp hands on his medical whites and peering anxiously through one of the few frost-free patches of glass. Although he was struggling to cast off the seizure of claustrophobia that had gripped him, was trying to pretend that the organic-looking ceiling wasn’t pressing low over his head and that only open sky hung above him instead of thousands of tons of concrete and steel rock, his own panic attack concerned him less than what was happening beyond the viewport.
Dr. Aaron Zachariah, younger than Dombey, clean-shaven, with straight brown hair, leaned over one of the computers, reading the data that flowed across the screen. “The temperature’s dropped thirty-five degrees in there during the past minute and a half,” Zachariah said worriedly. “That can’t be good for the boy.”
“Every time it’s happened, it’s never seemed to bother him,” Dombey said.
“I know, but—”
“Check out his vital signs.”
Zachariah moved to another bank of computer screens, where Danny Evans’s heartbeat, blood pressure, body temperature, and brainwave activity were constantly displayed. “Heartbeat’s normal, maybe even slightly slower than before. Blood pressure’s all right. Body temp unchanged. But there’s something unusual about the EEG reading.”
“As there always is during these cold snaps,” Dombey said. “Odd brainwave activity. But no other indication he’s in any discomfort.”
“If it stays cold in there for long, we’ll have to suit up, go in, and move him to another chamber,” Zachariah said.
“There isn’t one available,” Dombey said. “All the others are full of test animals in the middle of one experiment or another.”
“Then we’ll have to move the animals. The kid’s a lot more important than they are. There’s more data to be gotten from him.”
He’s more important because he’s a human being, not because he’s a source of data, Dombey thought angrily, but he didn’t voice the thought because it would have identified him as a dissident and as a potential security risk.
Instead, Dombey said, “We won’t have to move him. The cold spell won’t last.” He squinted into the smaller room, where the boy lay motionless on a hospital bed, under a white sheet and yellow blanket, trailing monitor wires. Dombey’s concern for the kid was greater than his fear of being trapped underground and buried alive, and finally his attack of claustrophobia diminished. “At least it’s never lasted long. The temperature drops abruptly, stays down for two or three minutes, never longer than five, and then it rises to normal again.”