Island, along the Kalapana coast.”
“Where the black sand beach used to be,” Rob interjected. “But it’s all under fresh lava now.”
“Exactly,” Yoshihara said. “At any rate, they found what appeared to be a geode near a lava vent, which they brought here. But instead of containing the typical crystals of most geodes, this one contains some kind of liquified gas. We began experimenting with the substance, and have discovered that when it is administered to oxygen-breathing animals, it has the effect of allowing them to thrive in an atmosphere containing what would normally be lethal doses of various gases and contaminants.”
“I’m not sure I’m following you,” Rob Silver said.
Takeo Yoshihara smiled. “I’m not surprised—I have only the most tenuous of grasps on it myself. But Dr. Jameson tells me our research animals seem able to function perfectly normally in an atmosphere that is heavily laden with such things as unburned hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen. Also ozone, sulfur dioxide, and hydrogen cyanide.”
“Cyanide?” Rob said in disbelief.
The thinnest of smiles passed over Yoshihara’s lips. “I can assure you, Dr. Silver, most of us breathe such things every day, but in amounts so slight as to be harmless. Except, of course, in areas of very heavy pollution. But this compound seems to make our lab animals immune to the effects of such pollution, even in the heaviest of concentrations.”
“It sounds like a miracle,” Rob said.
“Perhaps it is,” Yoshihara agreed. “Except that there is a side effect. Our laboratory animals all have become allergic to oxygen. Once the compound has been administered, they are no longer able to breathe what we consider to be an unpolluted atmosphere.”
The puppy, Katharine thought. She had killed the puppy by taking it out of the box. She felt a chill spread through her body as she anticipated Takeo Yoshihara’s next words, and when they came, she heard them as an oddly distant echo of what her own mind had already told her. Yoshihara’s features settled into an expression of utmost concern, though Katharine found that even as he mouthed the words of sorrow, his eyes seemed to betray no emotion.
“I’m so very sorry to have to tell you this, Katharine, but I’m afraid your son and his friends have become exposed to the compound inside the geode. We’ve no idea yet how such an accident could have occurred.”
The dive! But nothing terrible had happened on the dive! Michael had said so. The only thing that went wrong was that some of them had run out of air, but even that hadn’t been a problem.
“We think Michael and his friends must have come across another geode,” she heard Takeo Yoshihara say.
A geode! But it wasn’t a geode! She’d seen it herself, and it was a perfectly round sphere, the contents of which, she was absolutely certain, had been cooked up right here on Takeo Yoshihara’s own estate!
“I want to see him,” she said, her voice calm, though her mind was still reeling. “I want to see my son.”
Katharine had to use every bit of her self-control not to scream when she saw Michael.
His room was on the subterranean level, and while it was neither a part of the complex that made up the Serinus Project nor a part of the laboratory she had discovered, it was, if possible, even more horrifying than what she’d seen before.
He was in a bed, but the bed was in a box.
The same kind of Plexiglas box she had seen in the Serinus labs, housing the animals which, though still alive, had seemed listless and ill.
The box was equipped with a pair of large ducts, as well as a variety of air-locked access ports that would allow food and drink to be passed inside without contaminating the internal atmosphere.
The atmosphere inside the cube was actually visible, swirling around Michael like smoke, filling the box with a brownish haze. The sight of it made Katharine feel like choking, though it was completely contained inside the plastic walls.
Michael, propped up against a pillow that rested on the raised head of a hospital bed, was awake. His face looked deathly pale to Katharine, but he managed a smile as she came into the room, followed by Rob Silver, Takeo Yoshihara, and Stephen Jameson.
“I guess I had a major attack of asthma this time,” he said. His voice emerged from a speaker that was invisible to Katharine. It sounded both tinny and hollow, as if it were coming from a long distance away.
Don’t cry! But even as she silently issued herself the order, Katharine felt her eyes welling with tears. She took a step toward him, wanting to put her arms around her son, to hold him, to tell him that everything was going to be all right.
The box stopped her.
Suddenly she felt helpless, unable to do anything for Michael or even to comfort him.
“Oh, Michael,” she whispered. “What happened? You’ve been feeling so good. I thought …” She shook her head and bit her lip against the tears threatening to overwhelm her.
“I was feeling great,” Michael said. “You saw me, Mom!”
“I sure did!” Katharine told him. “And you looked fine! I even stopped worrying about you.” Once again she instinctively reached toward him, this time actually touching the hard plastic that separated her from her son. “Darling, what happened?”
Michael shrugged. “I–I’m not sure,” he stammered. Haltingly, he told her that it had been getting harder and harder to breathe all day. “But then I found a bottle in the closet in the boys’ room,” he finished. “And as soon as I sniffed it, I felt great!”
Rick Pieper’s broken message echoed in Katharine’s ears.
Ammonia! He’d been breathing ammonia! Of course he was sick!
But no sooner had the thought occurred to her than she knew it was simply a straw she was grasping at to avoid facing the truth.
The ammonia hadn’t made him sick. In fact, it had made him feel better.
Her mind spun as more and more pieces of the puzzle clicked into place.
Mark Reynolds — the boy from L.A. — hadn’t been trying to kill himself; he’d been trying to save himself, and the medics who came to his rescue had unwittingly killed him by administering oxygen.
Oxygen!
For the first time since she’d entered the room, Katharine’s eyes strayed from Michael’s face as she took in her surroundings.
A computer monitor was mounted in the wall, its screen divided into a series of windows; some displayed a continuous graph of Michael’s vital signs, while others monitored the makeup of the atmosphere within the box. Some she could identify: CO, SO2.
Carbon monoxide.
Sulfur dioxide.
Most of them, long strings of atomic symbols designating complex chemical compounds, possibly hydrocarbons, she guessed, might as well have been written in Greek.
“Can I be alone with him for a few minutes?” she asked.
“Of course,” Takeo Yoshihara agreed. “I have some business that must be attended to immediately. Dr. Silver can wait for you with Dr. Jameson.”
When they were alone, Katharine moved as close to Michael as she could, placing her hands on the plastic as gently as if it were his skin she was touching. “I’m so sorry, darling,” she whispered. “It’s my fault. If I hadn’t brought us here—”
“It’s not your fault,” Michael said. “It’s just something that happened. It must have happened on—”
Katharine briefly held a finger to her lips, and as Michael fell silent, she pulled her pen and notebook out of her bag. The cameras might see — Katharine knew sharp lenses must be monitoring this room — but perhaps they would not read. It was a chance she had to take. There was no other choice. She began talking as she quickly scribbled on the pad. “They think you must have gotten exposed to something they found in a geode,” she said out loud.
What happened on the night dive? she wrote. I don’t believe a geode was involved. Opening the access lock, she put the notebook and pen inside. The air in the lock was instantly evacuated, and replaced with the toxic
