Crane took a seat, passed a weary hand over his eyes, then spread the readout across his desk. A welter of horizontal lines greeted him: the inner landscape of Mary Philips’s brain, lines rising and falling with changes in amplitude and frequency. At first glance, all the lines seemed unremarkable, but Crane reminded himself it was always that way with electroencephalograms. They weren’t like EKGs, where anomalies jumped out at you. It was more a question of relative values over time.
He turned his attention to the alpha rhythm. It displayed maximum amplitude in the posterior quadrants; this was normal for waking adults. He ran his eye along it for several sheets without seeing any abnormality beyond the kind of transients consistent with anxiety, perhaps hyperventilation. In fact, the woman’s alpha PDR was quite well organized: very rhythmic, with no sign of admixed slower frequencies.
Next, he turned to the beta activity. It was present frontocentrally, in perhaps greater amounts than usual, but still within normal range. Neither set of waves displayed any particular amount of asymmetry or irregularity.
As he ran his eye across the sheets, following the thin black lines as they rose, then fell, a depressingly familiar sensation gathered within him: disappointment. This was proving, yet again, to be a dead end.
There was a knock on the door, and a lab technician appeared. She had a large stack of papers in her hand. “Dr. Crane?”
“Yes?”
“Here are the rest of the EEGs you requested.” She stepped forward and put them on his desk.
Crane eyed the foot-high pile of printouts. “How many are there?”
“Fourteen.” She smiled, nodded, and quickly left the office.
Fourteen. Great. Wearily, he turned back to Mary Philips’s brain scan.
He moved down to the theta and delta waves, scanning from left to right, careful to interpret each ten-second digital epoch separately. The background activity seemed a little asymmetric, but that was more or less standard for the beginning of the test: the patient would no doubt settle down as the procedure continued…
Then he noticed it: a series of prefrontal spikes, small but definitely noticeable, among the theta waveforms.
He frowned. Theta activity, beyond a few random low-voltage waves, was extremely rare in adults.
He glanced through the rest of the readout. The spikes in the theta line did not go away: if anything, they increased. At first glance they were reminiscent of encephalopathy or perhaps Pick’s disease, a form of cerebral atrophy that ultimately led to “flat affect” and dementia. The type of weakness Mary Philips had complained about was, in fact, an early symptom.
But Crane wasn’t convinced. There was something about these spikes that troubled him.
Flipping back to the beginning of the printout, he turned the graph paper on its side. “Vertical reading”—examining the EEG from top to bottom rather than left to right—would allow him to concentrate on a particular brain wave and its distribution, rather than viewing the overall left-brain, right-brain picture. He turned the pages slowly, running his eye down the theta waveform.
Suddenly, he froze in place. “What the hell?” he said.
He dropped the printout on his desk and opened a nearby drawer, fishing for a ruler. Locating one, he quickly placed it against the paper, peering closely. As he did so, he felt a strange tingle start at the base of his neck and work its way down his spine.
Slowly, he sat back in his chair. “That’s it,” he murmured.
It seemed impossible—but the evidence lay right in front of him. The spikes in Mary Philips’s theta waves were not the intermittent rise and fall of normal brain activity. They were not even random discharges of some physical pathology. The spikes were regular—precisely, inexplicably regular…
He pushed the Philips EEG aside and reached for the top readout from the stack the technician had brought him. It belonged to the man who had suffered the TIA, the ministroke. A quick examination confirmed it: the same theta spikes were present in his brain, as well.
It was the work of fifteen minutes to go through the rest of the EEGs. The patients had suffered from an incredible variety of symptoms: everything from sleeplessness to arrythmia to nausea to outright mania. And yet every one showed the same thing: spikes in their theta waveforms of a regularity and precision simply not found in nature.
He pushed the stack of printouts aside with a sense of unreality. At last he’d done it: he’d found the commonality. It was neurological. The theta waveforms of normal adults were supposed to be flatline. And even when they did spike, they were never supposed to fire in a precise, quantifiable rhythm. This was something utterly unknown to medical science.
He stood up and walked toward the internal phone, his thoughts piling up fast. He needed to consult with Bishop about this, and right away. With the autonomous nervous system affected, all these seemingly disparate symptoms suddenly snapped into place. He was a fool not to have seen it before. But how was it propagated? Neurological deficits on such a broad spectrum were absolutely unheard of…
Unless…
“Oh, Jesus,” he breathed.
Quickly, almost frantically, he reached for a calculator. His gaze flew from the EEGs to the calculator as he furiously punched in numbers. Then he stopped abruptly, staring at the readout in disbelief.
“It couldn’t be,” he whispered.
The phone rang, shockingly loud in the quiet office. He jerked upright in his chair, then reached for it, heart racing. “Crane.”
“Peter?” It was Asher’s voice, sounding reedy and artificial in the oxygenated atmosphere of the hyperbaric chamber.
“Dr. Asher!” Crane said. “I’ve found the common vector! And, my God, it’s something so—”
“Peter,” Asher interrupted. “I need you to come here right now. Just drop everything and get down here.”
“But—”
“We’ve done it.”
Crane paused, mentally struggling with this abrupt shift. “Deciphered the message?”
“Not message. Messages. It’s all on the laptop.” Asher’s voice not only sounded thin—it had an air of desperation to it as well. “I need you here, Peter. Immediately. Because it’s imperative, absolutely imperative, that we don’t—”
There was a crackle, and then the phone abruptly went dead.
“Hello?” Crane frowned at the phone. “Dr. Asher? Hello?”
Silence.
Still frowning, Crane hung up the phone. He glanced at the pile of reports on his desk. Then he turned and quickly exited the office.
35
The last time Crane had been on deck 7—less than five hours before—the scientific level had been in its usual state of orderly bustle. But now when he stepped out of the elevator, he found himself in the midst of sudden chaos. Alarms were blaring; shouts mingled with cries; marines, technicians, and scientists ran past him. There was a feeling in the air very much like panic.
Crane stopped a maintenance worker. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Fire,” the man said breathlessly.
Sudden fear lanced through Crane. As a submariner, he had learned to dread fire underwater. “Where?”
“Hyperbaric chamber.” And the man freed himself from Crane’s grasp and ran off.
Crane’s fear redoubled. Asher…
Without another thought, he tore down the hallway.
The hyperbaric suite was full of emergency response crews and rescue workers. As he pushed his way through the crowd, Crane caught the acrid scent of smoke.
“Doctor coming through!” he shouted, forcing himself into the control room. The tiny area was jammed with security personnel. Hopkins, one of the young medical technicians, was at the controls. Commander Korolis stood behind him. As Crane approached, Korolis glanced at him briefly, then returned his gaze to Hopkins without a word.
“What happened?” Crane asked Hopkins.
“Don’t know.” Sweat poured from Hopkins’s forehead as his hands flew over the inst
rumentation. “I was down the hall in Pathology when the alarm sounded.”
“When was that?”
“Two minutes ago, maybe three.”
Crane glanced at his watch. It has been less than five minutes since Asher had telephoned him. “You’ve called in a paramedic team?”
“Yes, sir.”
Crane looked through the glass partition toward the hyperbaric chamber itself. As he did so, he saw a gout of flame leap up the chamber porthole.
Jesus! It’s still on fire!
“Why hasn’t the water deluge system engaged?” he shouted at Hopkins.
“Don’t know,” the medic repeated, still feverishly working the controls. “Both the primary and backup extinguisher systems have been overridden somehow. They’re not responding. I’m doing a crash depressurization now.”
“You can’t do that!” Crane said. “The chamber would have been at peak pressure!”
It was Korolis who answered. “With the sprinklers out, it’s the only way to get the hatch open and extinguishers at the fire.”
“The pressure in the chamber was set at two hundred kilopascals. I did it myself. You dump it suddenly, you’ll kill Asher.”
Korolis raised his eyes once again. “He’s dead already.”
Crane opened his mouth to speak, then stopped. Whether or not Korolis was right, they could not let the fire continue to burn: if it reached the oxygen tanks, the entire level might be threatened. There was no choice. Crane slammed his fist against the bulkhead in rage and frustration, then forced his way out into the waiting area.
Rescue teams were clustered around the entrance to the chamber, readying extinguishers and snugging oxygen masks over their mouths and noses. A small speaker above the glass partition to the control room squawked into life. “Full decompression in fifteen seconds,” came the electrified voice of Hopkins.
The rescue crews checked their equipment, donned their masks.
“Decompression complete,” said Hopkins. “Locks disengaging.”
With a snap of electronic bolts, the entrance to the chamber sprang open. Immediately, heat and black smoke flooded into the waiting area. The stench of acrid smoke and burnt flesh suddenly became overpowering. Crane turned away involuntarily, eyes welling over with sudden tears. From behind came the sound of running feet, shouted orders, the sharp nasal gush of fire extinguishers.
He turned back. The extinguishers were still going. The crews were inside the cylinder itself now, and the dark plumes of smoke had been replaced by a thick fog of flame retardant. Stepping forward, he clambered into the chamber and forced his way past the rescue workers. Then he stopped abruptly.
Asher was lying on the floor, curled up around his laptop. Marris was lying nearby. They had crouched on the floor in an attempt to avoid the flames and smoke. A futile attempt: Asher’s clothes hung in charred flakes from his limbs, and his skin was horribly blackened. His mane of gray hair had been burned away, and the bushy eyebrows singed to tiny curls.
Crane knelt quickly for a gross examination. Then he reconsidered. It seemed inconceivable Asher could have survived. Blood was flowing freely from his ears, but that was the only sign of movement. Barotrauma—the sudden loss of pressure—had ruptured his middle ear. And that would have been the least of the effects: the emergency depressurization would have caused massive gas embolisms, basically carbonating his blood. And the smoke inhalation, the massive third-degree burns…
The suddenness of this tragedy, the loss of a friend, the sheer waste of it all, staggered Crane; and yet part of him almost felt glad Asher was dead. The burns and the embolisms would have left him in unimaginable pain…
The emergency crews were receding now, the palls of fog rolling away. Fire suppressant dripped from every surface. Outside the chamber, Crane heard a scattering of voices as the paramedic team arrived. Gently, he laid a hand on Asher’s shoulder. “Good-bye, Howard,” he said.
Asher’s eyes flew open.
For a moment, Crane thought it was muscle contraction, the nucleotide ATP running down after death. But then the eye fixed itself on him.
“Fluids!” Crane called immediately to the paramedic team. “I need massive saline, now! Ice compresses!”
Slowly—agonizingly—Asher raised a claw that was little more than singed meat on bone. It gripped Crane’s shirt collar, pulled him close. The chief scientist struggled to move blackened lips; they cracked with the effort, weeping clear fluid.
“Don’t try to talk,” Crane said in a low, soothing voice. “Lie still. We’ll get you to Medical, get you comfortable.”
But Asher would not lie still. His hand tightened around Crane’s shirt. “Whip,” he said in a desiccated whisper.
An EMT came up behind Crane and, with gloved fingers, began pulling back Asher’s charred clothing and prepping an IV. Another one bent over the still form of Marris.
“Relax,” Crane told Asher. “You’ll be out of here in a moment.”
Asher’s grip grew tighter still, even as his limbs began to convulse. “Whip…”
He let out a high-pitched gasp and shuddered. His eyes flew up in his skull; there was a gargling in his ruined throat. Then his grip relaxed, his arm slid to the floor, and he spoke no more.
36
Crane sat at the desk in his quarters, staring at the computer monitor but seeing nothing. Several hours had passed since the accident but he was still numb. He’d taken a long shower, and he’d delivered his clothes to the laundry, yet his room still stank of charred hair and skin.
He felt a sense of disbelief that was almost paralysis. Was it really only eight hours since he’d performed the autopsy on Charles Vasselhoff? At the time, they’d had one postmortem report to write.
Now they had three.
In his mind, he kept seeing Howard Asher as he’d first appeared: an image on a screen in the Storm King library, tanned and smiling. What we have here, Peter, is the scientific and historical discovery of all time. Asher had never smiled again as much as he had on that first day. In retrospect, Crane wondered how much of it had been a show put on to make him feel welcome, feel comfortable.
There was a soft rap on the door, then it pushed open to reveal Michele Bishop. Her dark blond hair was pulled back severely, exaggerating her high cheekbones. Her eyes looked reddened and sad.
“Peter,” she said, her voice low.
Crane wheeled his chair around. “Hi.”
She stood in the doorway, uncharacteristically hesitant. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“I’ve been better.”
“It’s just that you never said a single word. Not when we moved Asher’s body to the Medical Suite. Not when we performed the final examinations. I guess I’m a little concerned.”
“I can’t understand what went wrong in the hyperbaric chamber. What caused the fire? Why was the sprinkler system off-line?”
“Spartan’s ordered an investigation. He’ll find out what went wrong.”
“I should have done more. Checked the chamber myself. Tested the water deluge system.”
Bishop took a step forward. “That’s exactly what you shouldn’t be thinking. You did everything you had to. It was an accident, that’s all. A terrible accident.”
There was a brief silence before Bishop spoke again. “I guess I’ll head back to the Medical Suite. Can I bring you back something from the pharmaceutical locker? Xanax, Valium, anything?”
Crane shook his head. “I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll look in on you later, then.” And Bishop turned away.
“Michele?”
She looked back.
“Thanks.”
She nodded, then left the stateroom.
Crane turned slowly back toward the terminal. He stared at it, without moving, for several minutes. Then he pushed himself roughly away from the desk and began pacing. That didn’t help, either: he recalled how Asher had paced in much the same way on the day he’d revealed what Deep Storm was really about. r />
That had been just four days ago.
It was all so horribly ironic. Here, at last, he’d made the breakthrough—only for Asher to die before he could hear about it. Asher, who had brought him down to solve the medical mystery in the first place.
Of course he wasn’t the only one who’d made a breakthrough. Asher had as well. But now he was dead: spontaneous pneumothorax, gas emboli, and third-degree burns over 80 percent of his body.
Bishop was right: he had been unnaturally silent in the aftermath of Asher’s death. It wasn’t only the shock, though that was part of it. It was also because of what he couldn’t say. He’d wanted so badly to tell her what he’d discovered, to share it with someone. But she didn’t have the necessary clearance. Unable to speak of it, he’d found himself saying nothing.
He couldn’t put off the PM reports any longer.
He sat back down at his terminal, brought up his desktop. A blinking icon told him he had incoming mail.
With a sigh, he booted up his mail client, moused his way to the in-box. There was one new piece of electronic mail; curiously, no sender was listed.
“There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.”
Homer, Odyssey, Book XI
Dr. Asher was a man of many words. Important words. Now, he can only sleep.
It is a tragedy indeed.
Too much death—and we have not even reached it yet. I fear the worst.
The burden is all on you now, my dear doctor. I’m forced to stay here; you are not. Find the answer, then leave, quick as you can.
If one must labor in darkness, one should not labor alone. Find a friend.
I’m afraid our irrational numbers here on the Facility have grown since we spoke in your cabin. But perhaps there’s a silver lining, because, after all, the answer to your puzzle lies with them.
I bid thee good morrow.