Rick Pieper’s voice.
“Michael? Michael, what’s wrong? What is it?”
Feeling the strength ebbing from his body, Michael struggled to form a word. His lips worked, but as the seconds ticked by, no sound came out.
Rick Pieper looked up at the coach, his eyes filled with terror. Kioki Santoya was already dead, and Jeff Kina and Josh Malani had both disappeared. And now Michael looked like he was dying right in front of his eyes. “Do something!” he begged “For God’s sake, can’t you do something?”
The coach leaned down. “What is it?” he demanded, speaking directly into Michael’s ear. “What are you trying to say?”
Michael’s tongue felt thick, but he struggled hard, and in a whisper he managed to stammer out a single word.
“A-Ammonia—”
Exhausted by the effort it took to utter the word, he gave up his struggles and concentrated what little energy he had left on the normally simple task of breathing.
A task that was now nearly impossible.
Takeo Yoshihara and Stephen Jameson were in the helicopter when the call came through that Michael Sundquist had collapsed on the field at Bailey High School.
“Where are we?” Yoshihara demanded, speaking into the headset that allowed him to communicate with the pilot despite the thundering racket of the rotor spinning overhead.
“We can make it there in five minutes,” the pilot responded.
“Do it,” Yoshihara ordered. Then he turned his attention to Stephen Jameson “Will he make it?”
“If we get there before the ambulance does,” Jameson replied. “But if they give him the same treatment they gave the boy from Los Angeles, they’ll kill him”
“Then speak to the rescue crew,” Yoshihara ordered. “Tell them you are the boy’s doctor and that they are to do nothing until you arrive.”
The pilot’s voice came over the headsets. “We can’t do that. We don’t have the same frequencies the ambulances use And speak of the devil — take a look!” He was pointing downward and slightly off to the right through the helicopter’s Plexiglas bubble. Speeding along the road below them was an ambulance; even from here they could see its lights flashing.
“Faster,” Takeo Yoshihara ordered. Though he didn’t raise his voice a single decibel, there was a note of total authority in the command that galvanized the pilot.
Tipping the chopper forward, he increased the speed of the rotor, and with a lurch that brought a sickening bile into Stephen Jameson’s throat, though Takeo Yoshihara seemed not to notice the motion, the aircraft shot ahead.
They reached the school thirty seconds before the ambulance. By the time the medics appeared with a stretcher, Stephen Jameson was in full control.
Obeying the doctor’s orders without hesitation, the paramedics strapped Michael onto a stretcher and loaded him into the helicopter.
“Maui Memorial?” the pilot asked, already revving the engine in preparation for lifting off.
Takeo Yoshihara shook his head. “Home.”
The pilot, like the ambulance crew, obeyed his orders without a single question.
CHAPTER 26
Phil Howell’s right shoulder felt as if it were on fire, his eyes were gritty, and the images on the computer screen he’d been staring at through most of last night and all of today were blurring in front of him. But finally it was all coming together.
It had begun late yesterday afternoon, when he’d forced himself to admit that there was no way he could have the supercomputer compare the string of strange nonmelodic tones the radio-telescopes had been picking up to every file in every computer in the world Finally he’d had the computer assign letters to the tones, choosing the four notes that came closest to matching the tones: A, B-flat, D-sharp, and G. Even as he’d done it, he was skeptical that it would lead anywhere: after all, there were no four-note musical scales that he knew of, and certainly no reason to think that a civilization — if there really was one — fifteen million light-years away would have any sense of earthly music anyway.
It was just that he hadn’t been able to think of anything else to do But then, as the notes had streamed across the screen, something had begun rising out of the fog swirling in his mind. At last he’d punched the Pause key at the top right of his keyboard and sat gazing at the screen.
Nothing more than a string of the four notes, one following another randomly, as completely free of a recognizable pattern as the sound — now emanating from the terminal’s speaker — was free of a repeated melody.
Yet something about it looked oddly familiar. Then it came to him. Opening a new window on the monitor, he searched the web until he found a site that displayed a certain kind of code.
Genetic code.
A moment later Phil’s eyes fixed on a long sequence of code. Not presented as rungs on the double-helix of chromosomal structure as it usually was, the code had simply been typed out in sequence, each of the nitrogenous bases — adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine — reduced to single letters.
A, G, C, and T.
His heart began to beat rapidly as his eyes went to the other screen, displaying the signal from deep in space.
A, B-flat, D-sharp, and G.
Substitute C and T for B-flat and D-sharp, and—
— and it was so obvious.
He thought of the rocket NASA had sent out into deep space years ago, bearing a plaque with simple stick figures of a man and a woman, and some mathematical symbols.
But if you really wanted to communicate with another life-form — a life-form similar enough to yours so that your two races might have some slight hope of communicating — what better symbol to send out than an exact depiction of the sort of being you were?
Particularly when the very definition of your being could be conveyed in a simple code of four symbols, issued in a specific sequence?
Surely any culture that found such a signal, and was far enough advanced to recognize it, would also have had to develop in a way so similar as to make communication between the two species not only possible, but comprehensible as well.
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.