Phil’s eyes shifted back and forth between the two windows on the screen. The more he stared at it, the more certain he became.
He was right. He had to be!
The signal wasn’t music.
It was code.
DNA code.
A full set of blueprints for a species.
His mind had begun racing then. First he’d have to convert the signal from the notation he’d assigned into genetic notation. That was a simple matter of substitution.
But which notes to substitute for what protein? It was purely coincidence that two of the notes from the signal happened to correspond to two of the letters that human beings use to symbolize the substances that comprise DNA. He hadn’t wanted to try to calculate the odds that an alien race would not only have come up with the same musical scale that was native only to certain parts of planet Earth, but would also have assigned the same symbols to the proteins that dictated their own anatomic structure, whatever it might be.
By ten o’clock he’d given up and called a mathematician at the university who had been able to come up with a simple program to construct an entire directory of new files. Each file would differ only in the notes for which the letters A, C, T, and G were substituted. In all, there would be twenty-four files representing every possible combination of substitutions.
Then the supercomputer could begin comparing each of those twenty-four files to every file containing DNA data on every computer within its reach.
Even the mathematician had been unwilling to venture a guess as to how long it would take. Though Phil was nearly ready to pass out from exhaustion, he had been sitting in front of the computer most of last night and all day today, unable to tear himself away for more than a few minutes at a time for fear of missing the moment when a match was made.
If a match was going to be made. The mathematician had told him a match was statistically so improbable as to be virtually impossible. “But that’s not to say you won’t find something similar,” his friend had gone on, confusing the issue even further. “In fact, I’d be surprised if you didn’t. After all, if space is truly infinite, then somewhere there has to be an exact match. In fact, there has to be an infinite number of exact matches. But of course the likelihood of your finding one would be one in — what? An infinity of infinities?”
All day long Phil Howell watched the letters stream by, and he was no closer to the answer he was looking for than when he’d started.
But he’d find it. If it was there, he’d find it.
All the way from Makawao to Kihei, Katharine rehearsed what she was going to say to Phil Howell, and in her own mind it sounded perfectly reasoned, perfectly logical.
And utterly insane!
Takeo Yoshihara was one of the most respected men on Maui. Why should Phil Howell — or anyone else — believe her?
If only Rob were with her!
What if he didn’t find her note? What if someone else found it, and figured out what it meant, and—
Stop! She spoke the word so sharply to herself that she reflexively stamped on the brake pedal, eliciting an instant and angry response from the car behind her. Paranoia, she reminded herself as she got the car back under control, moved into the left lane of the Piilani Highway, and turned up Lipoa Street. It was just an innocent note! And if Rob didn’t get there, she’d just have to convince Phil by herself that she wasn’t crazy.
But when she reached Howell’s office, he wasn’t there. She felt a moment of desperation as she thought of how far she was from the top of the mountain, but then the receptionist told her he hadn’t gone up Haleakala to work with the telescope. “He’s right across the street at the Computer Center.”
Relief flooded through Katharine, and she hurried out of the building. Just as she was crossing the street, a horn honked and she heard Rob Silver call out.
“Kath, what’s going on? I found your note and—” She turned around, and he saw the look on her face. “Katharine, what’s wrong? What is it?” A moment later he was out of the car, his arms around her.
She let her head rest against his chest a moment, then took a deep breath, trying to remember the words she’d so carefully rehearsed, and failing utterly. Instead she blurted, “Rob, something horrible is going on, and we have to convince Phil Howell to help us find out exactly how bad it is.”
For the next ten minutes she talked steadily, trying to separate what she knew from what she only suspected; trying to knit the fragmentary pieces of the story into a coherent structure. But even as she talked, she could see the doubt in Rob’s eyes. “You don’t believe any of it, do you?” she asked when she was finally done.
Rob took a deep breath. “It’s not that I don’t believe you, Kath,” he said carefully. “It’s just that so much of what you say is — well, it’s supposition.”
“I know what I saw in the lab, Rob,” Katharine said, her voice taking on an edge.
“I’m not questioning what you saw,” Rob went on quickly. “But the conclusions you’ve come to— I mean, what you’re implying about Takeo Yoshihara—”
“That he could be experimenting on human beings?” Katharine broke in. “Why is that such a difficult concept to accept? There have always been people willing to experiment on other people. And maybe I’m wrong. God, you have no idea how badly I want to be wrong. But I have to know, Rob. I have to know exactly what’s going on down there, and I can’t do it by myself. And I’m sure it’s all in that damned Serinus directory that we can’t break into! So you have to help me convince Phil to hack into it, or—” Katharine’s voice broke as all her pent-up fear crashed over her like a great wave bearing down, crushing her beneath its weight. Her eyes welled with tears and her body began to tremble. For a moment she felt as if her legs were going to give way beneath her and she was going to collapse, but then Rob’s arms were around her once again.
“It’s all right, Kath,” he whispered in her ear, his fingers gently stroking her hair. “It’s all right. Of course I’ll help you. Just don’t worry anymore, all right?”
Katharine’s arms went around him and she held him tight. “I’ll try,” she breathed. “But I’ve been so frightened that something terrible is going to happen to Michael—”
Rob pulled her closer. “It won’t,” he told her. “I promise you. Nothing bad will happen to Michael.”
Katharine listened to the words and tried to cling to them as she was clinging to Rob himself, but as they started across the road to the Computer Center and she struggled to put her faith in what he’d said, another voice was speaking to her.
That voice was telling her that despite what Rob was saying, and despite the clear evidence of Michael’s well-being, which she’d witnessed at the school only an hour earlier, it might already be far too late.
Phil Howell was still staring at the screen when he slowly became aware that he was no longer alone. When he looked up and saw Katharine’s ashen complexion and the worry in Rob’s eyes, he knew something had gone wrong.
“We need your help, Phil,” Rob said quietly. “And we need it now.”
Phil frowned, his eyes returning to the screen. If a match was found and he didn’t see it—
“Please?” Katharine begged. “I’m afraid—” Her quavering voice was enough to convince Phil that she was truly frightened.
Certain that whatever Katharine and Rob wanted of him involved the computer, he opened yet another new window on his monitor.
The signal was already fifteen million years old.
It could wait a little longer.
Katharine, clearly, could not.
A tiny point of light glimmered faintly in the darkness, so dim that at first Michael was barely aware of it. As it slowly began to brighten, he found himself fastening onto it as the watchman on a ship might fasten on a beacon signaling safe shelter from a storm. He concentrated on the glimmer of light, willing it to grow larger, burn brighter, and wash away the darkness that had enveloped him.
The empty silence that had embraced him along with the darkness was also starting to give way. At first all he could hear was what sounded like a distant droning coming from some unidentifiable source. But as the light expanded and the blackness began to gray, the sound grew louder, and finally he could distinguish a variation in it.
