Shutting off the monitor, she turned off the lights in the office and started back down the corridor.
“All set?” the guard asked as she reentered the lobby.
Katharine nodded and picked up her suitcase, glancing at her watch one last time as she followed the guard through the doors that led to the south corridor and the elevator at its far end.
“Nothing worse than having your kid get sick, is there?” the guard asked as he passed his card over the gray panel next to the elevator door. Katharine shook her head but made no reply. After what seemed to her to be an eternity, the elevator car arrived and she stepped inside.
To her relief, the guard remained where he was, nodding his head a fraction of an inch, then turning away as the doors slid closed.
Glancing at her watch, she saw that “eternity” had amounted to fifty-two seconds.
Katharine counted the seconds it took for the car to descend to the lower level.
Fifteen, including the time it took for the doors to open.
Leaving the car, she moved down the corridor to the door behind which Michael lay.
An anteroom guarded the chamber in which Michael had been put. Behind a desk, empty of anything except a telephone, a woman sat. A nurse, or a guard? Though she wore a white uniform, her posture and her steely gaze told Katharine that here was no angel of mercy. This woman would not simply sit still as she and Michael walked out of the room.
If Michael could walk.
“You can go right in, Dr. Sundquist,” the woman said. “Dr. Jameson is with your son.”
She went through the door into Michael’s room, and felt a terrible fury begin to rise in her as she looked at her son.
The atmosphere inside the box was now so foul that a brown film was building up on the inside of the Plexiglas. In places, it had grown so thick that it was actually running down the surface of the plastic, leaving behind long, slimy-looking trails.
And Stephen Jameson actually had the nerve to smile at her as he looked up from the computer terminal at which he sat. “He’s doing very well,” he said. “You have quite the boy here.”
As if Michael had just won some kind of race! Katharine thought, her anger threatening to overwhelm her.
For the first time, then, she knew with absolute conviction that she would get her son out of the vile box in which he lay. Somehow. Even if it meant killing Stephen Jameson and the female guard. And anyone else who tried to stand in her way. Indeed, right this instant, she would take a distinct pleasure in ending the life of this man who regarded her son as nothing more than a lab specimen. “He’s always had a lot of courage,” she said, revealing nothing of her thoughts. “May I talk to him?”
“Certainly.”
She glanced around the room as she moved closer to the Plexiglas box, searching for the camera she knew was hidden there. As before, she saw nothing.
“Hello, darling,” she said softly. “Are you all right?”
Inside the box, Michael nodded. “I think so.” Then: “Am I ever going to be able to breathe regular air again?”
The question wrenched at Katharine’s heart. Tonight! she wanted to scream. I’m going to get you out of here, and I’m going to take you to a place where you can breathe until we can fix what they did to you! But she could say none of it.
Then, as her silence stretched, she noticed that Michael’s head was moving. He seemed to be nodding toward his own lap.
Looking down, she saw the forefinger of his right hand moving. For just a moment she didn’t understand what he was doing.
Then it came back to her.
He was forming letters with his fingers, tracing them on the sheet so casually that no one who wasn’t looking for it would have realized what he was doing. “Of course you’ll be able to,” she said. “And Dr. Jameson says you’re doing very well.”
GET ME OUT, his fingers spelled.
Glancing quickly to be certain that Jameson was still concentrating on the computer screen, she nodded once. “Tonight,” she said, raising her right hand to her stomach, its four fingers extended while the thumb remained folded under the palm. Her eyes fixed on Michael, willing him to understand that she was responding to the plea he’d traced on the sheet. She spoke again, almost immediately repeating the word. “Tonight, I’ll stay right here with you. Okay?”
She was almost certain she saw his eyes flick to the four fingers she’d displayed at the instant she uttered the word “Tonight.” Would he understand that she was giving him the time of escape — four A.M.?
His wink confirmed that he did.
“Got it!”
For several seconds Al Kalama’s shout didn’t register on Rob. Over the last three hours, as Al had worked patiently at the terminal next to the one at which Phil Howell labored, Rob had become increasingly fascinated with the innumerable lists of files that scrolled on the terminal in front of the astronomer’s monitor. Hour after hour it had gone on as the supercomputer in the room a few yards away reached out into every other computer it could find, hunting for files containing DNA sequences, and whenever it found one, comparing its contents not only to the single file that the supercomputer had calculated bore a ninety-seven percent probability of listing the DNA sequence of an unknown organism, but to the other twenty-three files it had generated as well.
By the time Al Kalama spoke, thousands of files had been put through the process, and each of them had been added to the ever-lengthening list of digitally stored DNA sequences — the genetic codes for the tiniest single-celled organisms, for thousands of species of algae, mosses, ferns, bushes, and trees, as well as for additional thousands of worms, insects, spiders, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and every species of warm-blooded creature known to man.
The astonishing result was that there were sequences — some short, some long — in every single file that perfectly duplicated one or another sequence that could be found in the file the computer had generated from the signal from the far reaches of space. A signal, Howell had told Rob, that had come from something called the Whirlpool Galaxy. In every case, the computer dutifully reported the exact percentage of match it had found. Though there was no complete match — not even anything the computer considered significantly close — more and more segments of the sequence from the galaxy fifteen million light-years away were matching to one or another segment of the DNA of some organism on Earth.
Cumulatively, Howell was already nearly certain, the proof would be irrefutable: not only was life not unique to Earth, but its basic building blocks, the four nitrogenous bases found here, were found on other planets as well.
Not only was life universal, but its forms, when they were finally found, would be familiar.…
Rob’s thoughts were shattered by a hand roughly shaking his shoulder. “Rob,” Al Kalama was saying, “what do you want me to do now that I’ve cracked it?”
Rob whirled around, fixing his attention on the screen Kalama had been slaving over for the last few hours. The Serinus directory was open at last, displaying several more subdirectories. Under each subdirectory were dozens — in some cases hundreds — of files.
“Can you search them?” he asked, his eyes scanning a small portion of the long list of cryptically named files that filled the screen.
“No problem,” Al replied. “What are we looking for?”
“Names,” Rob replied. “Michael Sundquist, Josh Malani, and Kioki Santoya, for starters. Also, look for a kid named Mark Reynolds, and another named …” He hesitated, searching his memory for the name of the boy from New Jersey, then found it. “Shelby. Shane Shelby. Start with those.”