Whup-whup-whup-whup.
It was a sound he’d heard before, a sound he should be able to identify in an instant. But dark tendrils were still wrapped around his mind, confusing him, and it wasn’t until the sound became loud enough to frighten him that he finally recognized it.
A helicopter!
It grew louder and louder, but he couldn’t see anything at all, for the blackness had now been washed away by a brilliance that blinded him as completely as the total night of a few moments before.
The roar of the helicopter’s blades was deafening now. He knew he had only another second or two before those blades would surely crush him.
Run!
He had to get up and run!
But his entire body felt leaden. He could barely flex his muscles.
He tried to breathe, but his lungs hurt, and there was something over his face.
Was that why he couldn’t see?
He tried to twist his head away, and then, over the roar of the helicopter’s rotor, he heard something else.
A voice.
“Don’t, Michael. Don’t try to move. Just relax.”
He knew the voice, but he couldn’t quite place it. Dimly, he began to remember fragments of the last few minutes before the terrible blackness had closed around him.
He’d been running. And running better than ever. Running better because—
Ammonia!
He’d been breathing ammonia, and the coach had been asking him—
But this voice wasn’t Coach Peters’s. It was someone else, someone who—
Dr. Jameson!
That was it. When he’d gotten sick and passed out, they must have called Dr. Jameson.
The thing on his face was an oxygen mask, and they were taking him to the hospital.
No! He hated the hospital — from the very beginning, when the asthma had seized him in its grip for the first time and his mother had rushed him to the emergency room, he had hated everything about the hospital.
Not just the smell and the sickly green paint and the terrible food. The worst was the way they’d treated him, sticking needles in him, shoving pills in his mouth, doctors and nurses, all of whom he had learned to distrust, talking about him like he wasn’t even there. And there was nothing wrong with him today — not really. He had fainted, that was all. He could tell, because he was already feeling a lot better, and when he’d had asthma attacks, the oxygen they’d given him had barely helped. But now the pain in his chest was almost gone, and it wasn’t hard to breathe! If he could just get the mask off his face and tell them—
He struggled harder, and for the first time realized why he couldn’t move his arms or legs: they were strapped down, immobilized.
He twisted his neck, trying to struggle free of the mask, and realized with astonishment what the blinding light was.
The sun, shining down from out of a blue sky through—
The bubblelike windshield of a helicopter! He could see the blur of the propeller spinning overhead, and feel the swaying of the machine as it hurtled through the sky.
“It’s all right, Michael!” He could make out a tinny quality to Dr. Jameson’s voice, and realized he was wearing a headset, as well as an oxygen mask. “If you can understand my voice, nod your head. Not hard, just a little.”
Without thinking, Michael nodded.
“All right. Now, someone back at the school said something about ammonia. Did you drink it?”
Michael froze for an instant, then shook his head.
“Then you breathed it.”
Not a question. A statement. But how did Jameson know?
“It’s all right, Michael,” Jameson told him. “We know what’s wrong. Just relax. You’re going to be all right.”
Again Michael struggled to speak, but couldn’t find the strength. Then he heard Jameson’s voice again, urging him to relax, not to fight against the straps that held him to the stretcher or the mask that covered his face. “Relax,” Jameson repeated, his voice taking on an almost hypnotic quality. “Just relax, Michael. You’re not going to die. Do you hear me? You’re not going to die.”
Concentrating on the voice, Michael felt himself begin to drift back into the darkness, and the steady whupping of the propeller began to fade. But as he drifted back into unconsciousness, he heard another voice.
A voice he didn’t recognize.
“Why do you say he isn’t going to die, Stephen? Why should he be different from all the others?”
“I am a doctor, sir,” he heard Jameson reply. “I believe in comforting my patients, even if it means lying to them.”
The words rang and echoed in Michael’s mind. He wanted to cry out against them, to struggle one more time against the bonds that held him and the mask that was pressed to his face. But his strength was gone.
He let himself sink back into the darkness.
CHAPTER 27
It was edging toward six o’clock. Katharine Sundquist and Rob Silver were still in the Computer Center, Rob watching patiently as Phil Howell worked, while Katharine paced, her frustration ballooning with every minute that passed. To her it seemed the computer itself had almost become an enemy. Her eyes hurt from having stared at the monitor for so long. “Now do you believe me?” she sighed. While one of the windows displayed on the monitor in front of them was filled with the unending stream of random combinations of the letters A, C, G, and T, another window — the one in which Phil Howell had been working for almost an hour — was flashing the same infuriating message that had been the result of everything the astronomer had tried so far:
Password Incorrect.
Please Enter Password:
The vertical line of the cursor blinked tauntingly just to the right of the colon on the second line of the message, as if daring them to try one more time to solve the puzzle of the elusive password that would allow them access to the Serinus directory.
“Well, I certainly believe your boss doesn’t want us getting into that directory,” Howell agreed. “But I still can’t believe it’s the only one guarded by a password. The man has business all over the world, and you can bet he wouldn’t want anyone to see most of what he’s doing. Even if all his transactions are perfectly legal — which I doubt — there must be an enormous amount of proprietary information in his memory banks.”
“But this computer is only for the research pavilion,” Rob Silver reminded him. “The business stuff is somewhere else. Japan, probably.”
“Cayman Islands would be more like it, if you ask me,” Howell muttered, then typed Cayman into the computer, pressed the Enter key, and watched the same box instantly reappear, flashing the same message. “That’s it for me,” he sighed. “It’s going to take a lot better hacker than I am to get into that directory.”
“Do you know one?” Katharine asked.
Howell thought for a moment. “No,” he said glumly. His gaze shifted to the window on the monitor that was displaying his own project, but nothing seemed to have changed, and he felt the gnawing pangs of hunger that reminded him he’d completely forgotten to eat today. “What do you say we break for something to eat? Then we’ll come back and try again.”
Katharine’s first impulse was to object that there wasn’t time for food, but with a glance at the dark circles
