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.
"Smooth. What's the brand?"
"Maker's Mark," Axford said. "Have some more." He quickly poured another shot, but Alan didn't drink.
"Well?" Alan said, forcing himself to ask the question that had made the last two days a living nightmare. He had envisioned himself slowly deteriorating over the next few years until he became a drooling vegetable sitting in a pool of his own excrement. "Do I have Alzheimer's disease or don't I?"
Axford emptied his glass and walked over to the window.
"You know something, Bulmer? Sometimes I have to wonder about myself. I'd have found it so much easier to tell you you've got Alzheimer's than what I really have to say. Some kind of bloody bastard, what?"
"I'll tell you something, Axford," Alan said, allowing his rancor to rise to the surface. "You've got the bedside manner of Attila the Hun! What did you find?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?" He knew he was shouting, but he couldn't help it. "All those tests—"
"—reveal something I can't explain."
Alan sat down on the bed and sipped at his glass. "So there is something after all."
"Your memory changes are similar to the Alzheimer pattern, but as you know, the way things stand now, the only way to make a definitive diagnosis is at autopsy."
Alan couldn't help but smile. "I signed a lot of consents, but I don't remember agreeing to that."
Axford's face was completely deadpan as he looked at Alan. "You did. You just don't remember. It's scheduled for nine a.m. tomorrow."
"Not funny."
"But seriously, though, we can make a pretty good presumptive diagnosis of Alzheimer's clinically and radiographically without cutting into your brain and finding some neurofibrillary tangles."
Alan realized that Axford was speaking to him as he might to a layman, probably not sure of how much Alan had retained about the disease. Alan himself didn't know what he knew or had forgotten, so he let Axford go on.
"Clinically you might be suspected of having a case, but your CT scan shows none of the usual stigmata—no cerebral atrophy or ventricular dilation, no widening of the sulci."
"That's a relief."
"Your PET scan, on the other hand, is markedly abnormal. Areas of the cortex and hippocampus have shut down, showing no metabolism—a classic picture of the advanced Alzheimer brain."
Alan's insides knotted. "Well, is it or isn't it?"
"I can't say. If you have Alzheimer's, you don't have any form I've ever seen."
Alan held out his cup for more bourbon. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
"Do you think it's the Touch that's doing it to me?"
Axford shrugged. "I don't know."
"Don't know much, do you?" Alan snapped.
"We know what rhythm your 'Hour of Power' follows."