The oasis was still his headquarters, and in the two weeks that had elapsed since the helicopter deposited him here, a tent had been set up. There was a picnic table and benches, and half a dozen folding chairs stood in a loose circle around the stone ring in which a small fire always smoldered.
A makeshift kitchen had even been constructed, with a Coleman stove for cooking, and an enormous cooler, its ice replenished every three days. They had offered to bring a generator to the oasis, but Michael himself had begged them not to, unwilling to have what little quiet remained on the mountainside destroyed by the constant roar of another machine.
The helicopters overhead were bad enough.
A crowd of reporters had set up camp farther down the mountain, held back only by a team of rangers whose sole job had become to protect the small amount of privacy Michael had, and the reporters had brought their own generators up. When the winds were right, Michael could hear them all too clearly, and when he went to the caldera at night to watch the flames dance over the surface of the boiling lava, the comforting blanket of darkness in which he’d wrapped himself that first night was gone, torn to shreds by the brilliant halogen lights with which the reporters lit their camp.
Visitors came to see him every day, and every day his mother and Rob came as well, if only for an hour or two. Most days, the three of them had supper together, and often one or the other of them spent the night with him, sleeping in the tent while he himself lay outdoors, savoring the expansiveness of the sky.
Each day, he felt a little stronger, and each night the star grew a little brighter. Three days ago, for the first time, it had remained visible into the dawn, only disappearing when it inevitably dropped over the horizon.
But the star, he knew, was eventually going to fade, and though he’d said nothing to either his mother or to Rob, he had begun to fear that day.
This morning, when he’d come awake before dawn and looked up into the sky, something had changed: the nova had been less bright than the night before. He’d gazed at it for a long time, silently willing its brilliance to grow, before he drifted back into a fitful sleep.
When he awoke again, the sun was rising, and the stars, except for the nova, were gone.
And he felt a tightness in his chest.
All morning long he told himself it meant nothing, that he’d simply caught a cold, and that by tomorrow or the next day it would be gone. But he knew better; knew that tomorrow, and on every tomorrow to come, the nova would have dimmed, and the pain in his chest would have spread.
The night it disappeared, he was certain, would be the night he died.
He spent the day alone, hiking on the mountain, visiting all his favorite places, inhaling the smoke and fumes, praying they would banish the pain in his chest and replace the flagging energy in his body.
They did not.
It was nearly three o’clock when he heard the roar of rotors and looked up into the sky to see Puna’s helicopter cruising above him, then dropping lower, and finally landing in the oasis. Even before the blades stopped spinning, his mother and Rob scrambled out. Then his mother’s hands were on his shoulders, and her eyes intently studying his face, and she asked the questions she asked every day since he’d come here.
“How do you feel? Are you all right?”
Michael hesitated, then decided there wasn’t any reason for her to be as frightened as he’d been when the pain in his chest persisted throughout the day. “I’m fine,” he said. There was a flicker of something in his mother’s eyes, and when she spoke again, she almost sounded disappointed.
“You’re sure? You aren’t in any pain? You have plenty of energy?”
Michael’s smile faltered. “I–I’m okay, Mom. Really!”
For some reason, his words didn’t seem to make her feel better. She took a deep breath. “I brought you something,” she said.
Michael glanced at the helicopter, but saw nothing except Rob and Puna unloading some kind of box from behind the aircraft’s rear seats.
A Plexiglas box.
A Plexiglas box that looked big enough for him to get into.
Involuntarily, he took a step backward. His mother grabbed his arm. “No!” he said. “I won’t—” He fell abruptly silent when he realized the box wasn’t empty.
Inside it was a chimpanzee.
“She’s from the laboratory,” he heard his mother say as Rob unlocked the door to the Plexiglas box. “This morning I thought she was dying.”
Rob opened the lid of the box, and the chimpanzee, as if surprised to find its prison door open, hesitated, then slowly came out. It looked curiously around for a moment, and then its eyes fixed on Michael. In two short bounds it crossed the space between them and leapt up, its arms encircling Michael’s neck as it sniffed at his ear.
“But how can she breathe?” Michael asked, certain that at any second the chimpanzee would begin gasping. As if on cue, the chimp began to wheeze. “Put her back in the box,” Michael pleaded. “She’s going to die!”
Katharine shook her head. “She’s not, Michael. She’s going to be fine.”
Michael blinked. “I don’t understand—” he began, but then his mother’s arms were around him again, hugging both him and the chimpanzee.
“It’s over,” she said. “The reason the animals in the lab have been dying is because the effect of the Seed doesn’t last! It wears off, and when it does, the animals can only survive on oxygen again. Even this morning I was afraid this baby wasn’t going to make it through the day. But in the middle of the morning, someone changed her atmosphere and started giving her oxygen again. And look at her! She’s all right!”
As the words slowly sank in, Michael pulled away from his mother and looked into her eyes. “How long?” he asked. “How long before me did they give it to her?”
“Not quite two weeks,” Katharine told him. “And it was just about a week ago that she started failing. We thought she was getting sicker, but it was just the opposite. She was getting better, but we kept on poisoning her.”
Michael was no longer listening. Instead, he was gazing up at the nova, and remembering what Rob had told him about how long it would take before it began to die.
A couple of weeks.
Perhaps a month, or even more.
But now it no longer mattered, for long after the star had died, he would still be alive.
A sheepish smile came over his face. “Mom?”
Katharine looked at him.
“When you asked me if I was okay and I said I was fine?”
Katharine nodded.
“Well, I lied. Actually, I’ve been feeling kind of lousy all day, and breathing fumes and smoke hasn’t helped much at all!”
Darkness was falling as the helicopter took off from the Big Island for the last time, carrying Michael, Katharine, and Rob back to Maui.
Below them the glowing vents of the volcano were brightening, and the flames above the caldera were beginning their nightly dance, but Michael could see that the lake of lava was beginning to recede, and the writhing serpents of molten rock were slowing in their progress toward the sea. The eruption was ending; the mountain was slowly dropping back into an uneasy slumber.
Above them the nova hung alone in the sky, but other stars were beginning to appear as well.
And soon — very soon — the nova would fade away.
Unlike the volcano, it would never awaken again.
AFTERWORD
More than a year and a half ago the idea for The Presence came to me while I was walking on the beach near my home on Maui. Here, on this island paradise, exists one of the finest astronomical observatories in the world, as well as one of the most powerful computers on earth. And, within a few short miles, an active volcano, Kilauea, sends forth continual lava flows. From these intriguing, disparate-seeming ingredients, the basic concept began to take shape for a book of “speculative fiction.”