The Presence (43 page)

The night it disappeared, he was certain, would be the night he died.

He spent the day alone, hiking on the mountain, visiting all his favorite places, inhaling the smoke and fumes, praying they would banish the pain in his chest and replace the flagging energy in his body.

They did not.

It was nearly three o’clock when he heard the roar of rotors and looked up into the sky to see Puna’s helicopter cruising above him, then dropping lower, and finally landing in the oasis. Even before the blades stopped spinning, his mother and Rob scrambled out. Then his mother’s hands were on his shoulders, and her eyes intently studying his face, and she asked the questions she asked every day since he’d come here.

“How do you feel? Are you all right?”

Michael hesitated, then decided there wasn’t any reason
for her to be as frightened as he’d been when the pain in his chest persisted throughout the day. “I’m fine,” he said. There was a flicker of something in his mother’s eyes, and when she spoke again, she almost sounded disappointed.

“You’re sure? You aren’t in any pain? You have plenty of energy?”

Michael’s smile faltered. “I—I’m okay, Mom. Really!”

For some reason, his words didn’t seem to make her feel better. She took a deep breath. “I brought you something,” she said.

Michael glanced at the helicopter, but saw nothing except Rob and Puna unloading some kind of box from behind the aircraft’s rear seats.

A Plexiglas box.

A Plexiglas box that looked big enough for him to get into.

Involuntarily, he took a step backward. His mother grabbed his arm. “No!” he said. “I won’t—” He fell abruptly silent when he realized the box wasn’t empty.

Inside it was a chimpanzee.

“She’s from the laboratory,” he heard his mother say as Rob unlocked the door to the Plexiglas box. “This morning I thought she was dying.”

Rob opened the lid of the box, and the chimpanzee, as if surprised to find its prison door open, hesitated, then slowly came out. It looked curiously around for a moment, and then its eyes fixed on Michael. In two short bounds it crossed the space between them and leapt up, its arms encircling Michael’s neck as it sniffed at his ear.

“But how can she breathe?” Michael asked, certain that at any second the chimpanzee would begin gasping.
As if on cue, the chimp began to wheeze. “Put her back in the box,” Michael pleaded. “She’s going to die!”

Katharine shook her head. “She’s not, Michael. She’s going to be fine.”

Michael blinked. “I don’t understand—” he began, but then his mother’s arms were around him again, hugging both him and the chimpanzee.

“It’s over,” she said. “The reason the animals in the lab have been dying is because the effect of the Seed doesn’t last! It wears off, and when it does, the animals can only survive on oxygen again. Even this morning I was afraid this baby wasn’t going to make it through the day. But in the middle of the morning, someone changed her atmosphere and started giving her oxygen again. And look at her! She’s all right!”

As the words slowly sank in, Michael pulled away from his mother and looked into her eyes. “How long?” he asked. “How long before me did they give it to her?”

“Not quite two weeks,” Katharine told him. “And it was just about a week ago that she started failing. We thought she was getting sicker, but it was just the opposite. She was getting better, but we kept on poisoning her.”

Michael was no longer listening. Instead, he was gazing up at the nova, and remembering what Rob had told him about how long it would take before it began to die.

A couple of weeks.

Perhaps a month, or even more.

But now it no longer mattered, for long after the star had died, he would still be alive.

A sheepish smile came over his face. “Mom?”

Katharine looked at him.

“When you asked me if I was okay and I said I was fine?”

Katharine nodded.

“Well, I lied. Actually, I’ve been feeling kind of lousy all day, and breathing fumes and smoke hasn’t helped much at all!”

Darkness was falling as the helicopter took off from the Big Island for the last time, carrying Michael, Katharine, and Rob back to Maui.

Below them the glowing vents of the volcano were brightening, and the flames above the caldera were beginning their nightly dance, but Michael could see that the lake of lava was beginning to recede, and the writhing serpents of molten rock were slowing in their progress toward the sea. The eruption was ending; the mountain was slowly dropping back into an uneasy slumber.

Above them the nova hung alone in the sky, but other stars were beginning to appear as well.

And soon—very soon—the nova would fade away.

Unlike the volcano, it would never awaken again.

More than a year and a half ago the idea for
The Presence
came to me while I was walking on the beach near my home on Maui. Here, on this island paradise, exists one of the finest astronomical observatories in the world, as well as one of the most powerful computers on earth. And, within a few short miles, an active volcano, Kilauea, sends forth continual lava flows. From these intriguing, disparate-seeming ingredients, the basic concept began to take shape for a book of “speculative fiction.”

Little did I know as I began to write that my “speculative” fiction might turn out to be not quite so speculative. First it was discovered that there may well have been life on Mars, and the remnants of that life may have been carried to Earth within the core of a meteorite. On the heels of that discovery came new photos from the spacecraft
Galileo,
revealing that Europa, a moon circling Jupiter, may well have water and volcanic action beneath its covering of ice. More than one scientist has theorized that these conditions could presage the presence of life.

Just three months prior to publication of
The Presence, Smithsonian Magazine
reported that at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings in Seattle, there was discussion of very unusual life-forms
living on the floors of our own oceans, near hydrothermal volcanic vents: life-forms surviving and developing with
no
oxygen,
no
sunlight; life-forms thriving in 500° F heat, on gases such as hydrogen sulfide—the very “poisonous” gases that would terminate life as we have previously known it. Additionally, many scientists now believe that volcanoes deep under the ocean may not simply harbor life, but be the very place where life
began.

Suddenly, all our presumptions about the source of life have been turned upside down. So, now that I have finished writing
The Presence,
and you have finished reading it, the question arises: Is this truly
speculative
fiction?

Or is it possible that perhaps things might have happened just this way?

Somewhere in the Arizona desert
April 30, 1997

Many thanks go to John L. Africano, Astronomer and Senior Engineering Specialist at Rockwell International Corporation, and Paul W. Kervin, Chief Scientist at Phillips Laboratory, for their assistance and time.
Mahalo,
guys, for the tours, the stories, and your work.

Much appreciation is extended to David Fisher, Center Director of the Small Business Development Center at the Maui Research and Technology Park. Thanks for showing me around and introducing me to a group of fascinating people.

I am grateful to A. Keith Pierce, Designer of the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope, for the time he spent guiding me around Kitt Peak. Thanks, Keith, it was lots of fun.

Special thanks also go to Les Horn and William Longacre, who connected me to the right people.

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