CORRELATE WITH ALL KNOWN HUMAN BIORHYTHMS
He watched the cursor stop blinking for a few seconds, then the answer flashed on the screen with a beep:
NO CORRELATION
Charles typed:
CORRELATE WITH MEMORY
That would initiate a search through the computer's entire memory bank, one of the most complete bioscience data bases in the world. It was a longer wait, but finally came the beep:
NO CORRELATION
This was looking like a dead end, but for the hell of it, Charles decided to let the computer search the memory banks of other computers all over the world:
CORRELATE RHYTHM WITH ALL OTHER ACCESSIBLE DATA BASES
PROCESSING flashed on the screen.
This search would take considerable time, so while that was going on, he cleared the screen and prepared to find out what there was to know about Dr. Alan Bulmer. He decided to start with the basics, so he cued up Bulmer's blood profile.
As expected, no abusable substances were floating around in his blood or urine.
So far so good. His cardiogram and chest X ray were normal, too. Next he cued up Bulmer's CT scan from Downstate and reviewed the series of radiographic slices of the brain at various levels with and without contrast: no infarcts or masses evident anywhere. The MRI studies done here were negative as well.
So Bulmer didn't have a brain tumor and hadn't had any previous strokes. No surprise. He moved on to see what his brainwaves looked like.
An edited version of Bulmer's twenty-four-hour EEG from yesterday scrolled horizontally across the screen. The computer presented a good sample of the six parallel zigzag lines that formed the basic electrical pattern of his brain, then edited that particular pattern out of the rest of the record, leaving only irregularities and significant variations for review.
Charles noticed immediately that the basic pattern was diffusely abnormal. Nothing terribly specific, but the background activity was disorganized, showing generalized slowing.
That puzzled Charles. This was not the type of EEG he would associate with an active professional pushing forty. It was a senile old man's EEG.
He scrolled on. The first variation showed around 7:15 a.m., when an undulating pattern began to appear, barely noticeable at first, but growing more pronounced with every passing minute. It wasn't confined to any one section of the brain, but affected all the leads, causing the lines to glide up and down. The undulation was most pronounced at 7:45, after which the magnitude of each wave began to slacken off, finally disappearing at 8:16.
Charles leaned back and chewed his lip. Odd. He couldn't remember ever seeing anything like that before. He shrugged it off. Probably some transient electrical disturbance in the telemetry. He scrolled on, finding nothing until 7:37 p.m. last night, when the same pattern repeated itself, peaking shortly after 8:00 and disappearing by 8:35.
Doubly odd. Two apparent artifacts, both identical, approximately twelve and half hours apart, each lasting an hour.
The Hour of Power!
A tingle ran up Charles' back.
He shook himself. This was ridiculous. It was just an artifact—a unique one, he'd grant that, but a mere artifact nonetheless.
He cleared the screen, cued up Bulmer's PET scan, and gasped. The EEG had been unsettling, but this was outright shocking. He ran through a number of slices on the PET, then flashed back to the CT scan and MRI. Those were definitely normal, with normal ventricles and sulci and no sign of impaired circulation in any area of the brain. Back to the PET scan—grossly abnormal. The FDG injected into Bulmer had not been taken up by his brain cells in the usual way. The CT scan showed that nothing was stopping the glucose from getting there, but in the PET, the yellow and orange areas of active brain were markedly reduced, while other areas of the scan were dark, showing no uptake at all of the glucose. The neurons there weren't working.
Which meant that areas of Bulmer's brain were not functioning.
Charles' mind whirled in confusion. He had seen PET scans with similar abnormalities before, but not in a brain that was perfectly normal in anatomy and vasculature.
The computer beeped and flashed in the lower left corner of the screen:
SEARCH COMPLETED—0.95 CORRELATION FOUND
Charles quickly cleared the screen and typed:
LIST CORRELATION
The computer beeped and wrote:
SOURCE: NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DATA BASE. CORRELATION: TIME COORDINATES OF ALL DATA ENTERED APPROXIMATE TIME OF HIGH TIDE IN LONG ISLAND SOUND OFF GLEN COVE, NY. COMMENCING APPROXIMATELY 30 MINUTES BEFORE HIGH TIDE AND CEASING APPROXIMATELY 30 MINUTES AFTER.
Charles slumped back in his chair. Well, he had wanted to identify the rhythm of Bulmer's so-called Hour of Power, and here it was. The oldest rhythm in the world.
The tide.
It gave him the creeps.
He stood up and walked around his desk and back again to relieve the tension that had begun to grip his muscles. He remembered the two sine-wave artifacts that had risen and fallen about twelve hours apart. Didn't the tide rise and fall twice a day, about twelve hours apart? He rechecked the tracings on the screen and jotted down the time each artifact appeared and disappeared—7:15 a.m. to 8:16 a.m. and 7:37 p.m. to 8:35 p.m. If the artifact represented Bulmer's Hour of Power, and it was linked to the rise and fall of the tide, then high tide should occur right in the bloody middle of those two periods. He figured the midpoints, then sat down at the terminal again.
Correlate with high tide in long island sound off glen cove July 11: 7:45 a.m. and 8:06 p.m. refer to n.w.s. data base.
The computer beeped almost immediately.
NO SIGNIFICANT CORRELATION
Damn! If that had correlated, he'd have had something concrete to go on.
Wait! Bulmer hadn't been near Long Island Sound when the tracing was made. He'd been here, on Park Avenue in Manhattan. The East River was the nearest body of water.
Charles leaped to the keyboard.
CORRELATE WITH HIGH TIDE IN THE EAST RIVER JULY 11: 7:45 A.M. AND 8:06 P.M. REFER TO N.W.S. DATA BASE
An instant beep:
0.97 CORRELATION
Got it!
But exactly what did he have?
___40.___
Alan
Alan felt his heart throw a few premature beats when he answered the knock on his door and saw Axford standing there.
This is it, he thought.
Axford had a bottle in one hand and a sheaf of papers under his other arm. He looked like he had already sampled the bottle a couple of times before his arrival.
"Is this a party?" Alan said, stepping back to let him in. "Or a wake?"
"Get some glasses," Charles said gruffly. "This is good stuff, even if you don't like bourbon."
He poured an inch or so into each of the two plastic cups Alan got from the bathroom and they tossed it off together.