Pop, pop, pop!
Now the room’s overhead lights were igniting, erupting, blowing apart with not even their filaments left behind. Alex’s brain whistled in his head, a teakettle signaling it had come to a boil, when big hands grabbed hold of his legs and yanked him free of the machine.
The hands tried to restrain him once he was out, but Alex brushed them off, shaking free as easily as he dodged multiple tackles en route to the end zone. He looked down to see an orderly bigger than any lineman he’d ever faced lying on the floor, trying to push himself up.
Alex stretched a hand down to help him and ended up toppling off the table, hitting the floor hard enough to rattle his brain and send a fresh surge of pain through his head. A burst of light like a flashbulb went off in front of his eyes and he felt a pressure in both ears until one popped and then the other, leaving behind a persistent throbbing.
“Alex! Alex!”
He heard Payne’s voice and looked up to see the doctor standing between him and the giant orderly Alex had dropped like the tiniest of running backs.
“Don’t move,” Payne was saying.
“I … can’t,” Alex said fearfully, his whole body feeling like it was frozen in place.
16
HOME INVASION
“TAKE ANYTHING YOU WANT,” Li Chin said from the armchair in which the men had placed him. “Anything we have is yours—just don’t hurt us.”
The four of them had barged in as soon as Li cracked open the front door of their Millbrae home. The door had rocketed backward, slamming into Li and knocking him off his feet. An rushed from the kitchen when she heard the sounds of a struggle to find two of the men lifting her husband into a chair. Before she could scream, another of them was upon her, hand clamped over her mouth. He jerked her into the matching armchair and dragged it closer to Li’s.
“Please,” Li repeated. “Anything we have is yours.”
But the men seemed utterly disinterested in the contents of the house, their focus purely on them.
“We only want what your wife took from us,” the man standing in front of the others, in the shadows splayed by a single lamp, said. “From the laboratory eighteen years ago.”
“I took nothing!” An insisted, her voice cracking. “I was a good worker. I was promoted to supervisor!”
The man took a single step closer to the Chins, his cold, emotionless gaze bearing down on An as the lamp flickered, his face framed by the shadows it cast. “You took what is ours and we have come to get it back.”
“I was searched every day when my work was done. We all were.”
“Except one day.”
A cold dread hit An in the pit of her stomach. She tried to swallow and failed.
“You took something from the lab that day,” the man continued. “It belonged to us and we have come to take it back.”
The speaker turned to the other three men, seeming to pass some unspoken signal. The four of them looked virtually indistinguishable from one another. Not identical by any means, but in possession, eerily, of the same blank, nondescript features, hairstyles, eye color, and musculature, and carried themselves with a demeanor detached and utterly lacking in emotion. Their matching dark suits seemed stitched to their skin, so molded as to appear an extension of it.
But it was something else that both Li and An had noted they found most unnerving of all: their eyes never blinked, at least those of the three silent ones who’d centered themselves behind the speaker in a semicircle, enclosing him in their shadows, which fell over the Chins too in the light cast by the single lamp the men had left on.
“We have taken nothing, from you or anyone else,” Li Chin said, sounding more indignant than frightened.
“You took something that belonged to us eighteen years ago,” the same man said. “Where is the boy you call Alex?”
THREE
AMES
Truth makes many appeals,
not the least of which is its power to shock.
—JULES RENARD
17
INTERN
“DIXON! DIXON, WHERE ARE you?”
Sam looked up from her desk at the Ames Research Center, where she was analyzing the latest research on habitable planets as part of NASA’s Kepler mission. “Right here, Doctor. And I was hoping I could—”
“Where? I can’t see you.” Her supervisor, Dr. Thomas Donati, spun toward her, still wearing the mirror goggles he’d forgotten to remove upon finishing the latest view provided by the spectron holographic microscope. “Someone’s turned off the lights again.”
She moved to him and eased the specially formulated goggles up to his forehead, where they pinned the hairs that had escaped his gray ponytail in place.
“Yes, there we go. Much better, much better indeed. Extraordinary day, truly extraordinary. You know why, Dixon?”
“I know you’re going to tell me.”
“Because we’re alive. Life is the greatest miracle of all, as well as the least appreciated. But not here; here we’ve learned to appreciate the sanctity and singular rarity of life, have we not?”
Samantha started to answer, but Donati rolled right over her words.
“I’d say ‘intelligent’ life but I realized a long time ago that there’s not enough of that to uncover even here on our planet. You know why?”
Again he resumed before she had a chance to answer.
“Because man chooses to think small, more than satisfied with what the five percent of his brain shows him about the world around him. We, on the other hand, are explorers—are we not, Dixon? Without ever leaving this center we explore new worlds and new possibilities. Breakthroughs, Dixon, every day a breakthrough no matter how small it might be. Because like life itself there is no such thing as a small breakthrough. What are you working on?”
“The Kepler research.”
“Put it aside, put it aside. There’s something I must show you, something you must see. Follow, Dixon, and do your best to keep up. Don’t lag.”
Sam rose from her chair. “If there’s time, Doctor, I’d like to—”
“You’re lagging, Dixon. Focus, hear me? Focus!”
Sam fell into step behind him.
The Ames Research Center, one of ten field centers operated by NASA, offered one of the most competitive internship programs in the country. Science geeks from miles and states around applied for admission, and Sam couldn’t believe her luck when she got the e-mail informing her that she’d been accepted.
And she was assigned to her first choice: the Astrobiology Institute, which specialized in advancing the technologies for long-term manned space flights to make them friendlier on the body. Under her assigned mentor, Dr. Thomas Donati, she’d actually been working more in another area she’d found even more fascinating. Ames had assumed the leading role in the fledgling field of synthetic biology. The new NASA Synthetic Biology (SynBio) initiative at Ames harnessed biology in reliable, robust, engineered systems to support NASA’s exploration and science missions. Dr. Donati’s specific role was to develop technologies aimed at manufacturing regolith-based composites to be used as bio-based building materials in space. His department was developing SynBio technologies to enable environmental closed-loop life support systems to create novel solutions for the purification of air and water and the production of methane from waste carbon dioxide.
Donati’s team, of which Samantha was a part three afternoons a week and Saturdays, was also investigating the utility of SynBio for 3D printing to produce bio-based products, biomining to obtain minerals from planetary surfaces or recover valuable elements from spent electronics, as well as the production and purification of pharmaceuticals that might be necessary to maintain crew health on long-duration spaceflights. A science geek’s dream.
And Samantha’s work under Donati had been so stellar that he had recently recommended she be included in a team devoted to the conceptual study of astrobiology and exobiology that covered all issues pertaining to Earth’s place in a
universe that almost surely contained other life forms. Much of the real work at Ames was top secret, taking place in a combination lab and think tank to which her security clearance didn’t yet permit access.
Because she was always in a lab, of course, she’d heard things. She knew that along with Donati’s bioresearch, his division also studied what they referred to as wormholes or black holes in space—shortcuts through the millions of light-years that it could take man to get from one spot to the other. A problem of space travel remained time—it was no good to get someone somewhere if they’d been dead of old age hundreds of years before they arrived. And, just as the Earth rotated around the sun, and the sun found its place in the galaxy, other masses moved in space.
All that movement, Sam had learned, meant that there were “doors” that only opened at certain times and then closed again until maybe the next thousand years or so went by. So it was crucial for scientists at Ames and elsewhere to study and understand the doors to ensure that future space travelers didn’t find themselves sucked into the true darkness of oblivion—a tremendous amount to comprehend, for sure.
Sam loved everything that she learned, and she knew she’d found her calling at NASA. For the first time in her life she was judged entirely on her brains and productivity, with no weight given to popularity and social standing. At Ames she was finally one of the cool kids, giving her a whole new perspective on how little all that meant in the great scheme of things. Because that very scheme of things, you learned at Ames, wasn’t just about this world.
It was about thousands of others, potentially.
And that had a tendency to change your view of the microscopic part of the universe taken up by high school. Sam wondered what aliens might make of Earth if all they got to see was a school, even one as well regarded and run as St. Ignatius. She imagined they’d be so horrified as to question how the human race had lasted as long as it had.
The vastness of Ames, employing over two thousand people who were spread out over six separate facilities in its Silicon Valley site thirty miles from her home in Moss Beach, had enthralled instead of intimidated Sam. She saw in it not so much a village-size community as a uniquely compartmentalized world where nothing was too impossible to consider. No theory was discounted out of hand, and even lowly interns like Sam were encouraged to provide input and formulate honest responses to data affecting their particular department. Speaking of which …
“Doctor?” she called, almost running to keep Donati’s pace.
“Not now, Dixon,” he said, from slightly ahead of her. “We’re headed to the future and I don’t want to get sidetracked along the way.”
18
PATTERNS
IT TOOK DONATI’S OWN top-level security card to access the extraterrestrial monitoring station through a sliding door where automated machines collected and collated millions of bits of data every day, most of which were ultimately discarded for being planetary echoes, star bursts, and other easily explicable events.
But today must have been different.
Inside the sprawling station, Donati stopped at one of the primary computer terminals displaying two versions of a bar grid projecting subspace electromagnetic chatter that could indicate some type of advanced or rudimentary form of communication.
“See? Can you see?”
Samantha couldn’t.
“The difference is what I’m talking about, the difference in the grids! There’s movement, consistent movement, not just a blip.”
Sam looked closer at the dual bar grids and, yes, there was a deviation from the standard level indicating the norm. No more than a hair—well, a micromillimeter, actually—but definitely a jump recorded steadily over a six-hour period earlier that day.
“There was a similar bump yesterday,” Donati explained. “But I discounted it, taking it for a blip. I hate blips, all the false hope they give us. But it repeated today and didn’t fall off. See? Can you see?”
This time Sam nodded, wondering maybe, just maybe …
“I’m going to isolate its source,” Donati continued, “even if it takes me all of the night, all of tomorrow, all of the next week. Here I’ll be, ready for the breakthrough to break through. I had to tell somebody. This is too big to keep to myself. I could fall, bang my head, lose my memory, and then no one would ever know it wasn’t just a blip this time. That somebody out there’s talking. There was something similar, indicators anyway, before—about eighteen years ago—but that’s, well, another story. The source, Dixon, we must find the source! Are you with me?”
With him? This was Sam’s ultimate dream, to be involved on the forefront of something this exciting. But she was supposed to tutor Alex tonight; not that he’d care if she had to postpone the session until tomorrow. Still, they’d made plans and the truth was—
“Eighteen years,” Donati repeated, breaking her thought. “Wonder if there’s significance in that, a cycle or something. Know what I mean?”
“Like the time it might take a signal to reach Earth from another solar system.”
“Good thought but, no, not in this case. What we may be looking at here is more a harbinger. Define it for me, Dixon.”
“Something that foreshadows a future event.”
“Not exactly in this case, but close enough. A precursor for something else, now and eighteen years ago. There’s that number again. Significance, we must find the significance. Tell me you’re not as excited as I am, Dixon!”
“I am, but…”
“But? There are no ‘but’s in science, Dixon. Haven’t I taught you anything?”
“Lots. Everything.”
“Lots, yes. Far from everything. You know what they call a scientist who knows everything?”
“No.”
“God, Dixon, they call him God. Do I look like God to you?” he asked, turning away.
“Doctor?” she offered instead.
Donati swung, as if jarred from a trance. “What?”
“I was just going to say I have something else I have to do tonight. Not all of it; I mean, I just need to be gone for a few hours. I’ll come back the second I’m done.”
“A few hours,” he repeated, sounding more disappointed than perturbed. “And if you happen to miss history unfolding in that time, don’t blame me.”
“I won’t. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“See that it doesn’t. Because I have a warning for you, Dixon, an important one: science waits for no man.”
“Then I guess it’s a good thing I’m a girl,” Sam said, finally finding the courage to broach the subject she’d been rehearsing for days. “I need to tell you about … something I’ve uncovered. I wasn’t sure I should, but now I wonder if it might be, well, connected.”
“Wonderful! Connected to what?”
“This anomaly you found. Because I think I’ve found some too, an interconnected series of them.”
“Series of what?”
“Anomalies. Otherwise inexplicable individual phenomena until they are considered as a whole.”
“What phenomena?”
Sam thought of her stolen iPad, containing her findings, her proof. “It’s all on my iPad.”
“So show me.”
“I can’t. Somebody stole it last night.”
Donati nodded, eyes narrowing. “Got your cell phone?”
Sam fished it from her pocket. “Why?”
“Because it’s more powerful than the Friendship Seven that took John Glenn into orbit and even Apollo Eleven that brought man to the moon. Know what us scientists did in those days before e-mail?”
“What?”
“We talked. So talk to me, Dixon, explain it to me absent an iPad or supercomputer.”
“All right.” Sam tried, collecting her thoughts. “The largest avalanche in history occurred just last week in Nepal,” she told Donati, imagining the photos and overhead shots revealing the indescribable destruction. “Three towns were buried, thousands missing or dead. An estimated
billion tons of snow and ice released from their perch to form a rolling wall that buried a hundred square miles.”
Donati nodded. “I’m glad I don’t ski. What else?”
“A lake in Spain.”
“I don’t swim, either. So what?”
“It exploded.”
“What exploded?”
“The lake. Well, not really exploded. More like combusted. A limnic eruption in which dissolved carbon dioxide, or carbonic acid, stages an escape from the waters that contain it, normally under intense pressure. In this case in an inordinately deep lake high on the flank of an inactive volcano in the Costa Brava region, complete with that pocket of magma leaking carbon dioxide into the water. A large cloud of carbon dioxide in the form of carbonic acid burst out of the water and suffocated around seventeen hundred people in nearby towns and villages. Spread for miles. No one in range was spared, livestock included.”
Sam seemed to have Dr. Donati’s complete attention now. His normally distant expression had tightened, as if the relentless energy driving him had throttled back a bit.
“Suffocated, you say. And why is this important, Dixon?”
“I’m getting to that,” Sam said. “Two weeks ago geothermal satellite readings confirmed one of the largest sea earthquakes ever recorded, in the Sargasso Sea, that released a tsunami wave—”
“Wait, did you say tsunami?” Donati interrupted.
“Yes,” Sam confirmed for him, “also believed to be the largest ever seen. It swallowed three islands, all uninhabited.”
Donati’s eyes bulged. He pulled at his graying ponytail with one set of tightly wrapped fingers. “What else?”
“A wildfire in South Dakota’s Badlands National Park.”
“Not tremendously unusual.”
“But witnesses said this one started on its own.”
“Spontaneous combustion,” Donati drawled, as if it hurt to get the words out.