The Second Ship Read online

  The points had even penetrated Jennifer’s clothing, so fine and thin that they had left no mark.

  Once more Heather focused on the hologram display of the brain activity. Mark’s brain showed the same raging electrical activity that Jennifer’s had, all centers active at the same level—no favorites, no laggards. Something was wildly wrong with her theory on how they were being affected. By what she was seeing, they should all be displaying the same types of enhancements instead of specialized effects.

  “This is magnificent,” Mark said. “It’s perfect biofeedback.”

  His speech and the accompanying grin produced a reaction that looked completely alien as the hundreds of needles attached to his face moved, forming a wave in the sea of clear tentacles.

  “Watch this.” Mark breathed in deeply and then exhaled slowly, repeating the technique again and again.

  As Heather watched, the display of his vascular system changed, the heartbeat slowing steadily. The count in her brain shifted, forty beats per minute, thirty-three, twenty-nine, twenty-four, eighteen, fifteen, thirteen.

  “Mark, stop it!”

  Jennifer’s panicked voice brought a slow smile to his lips as the count began to rise steadily to a normal resting heart rate. He suddenly sat up and leaped off the table, the tentacles melting away as if they had no more substance than air.

  Heather did not know how long she had not been breathing, but by the size of the gulping breath she now took, she guessed that it had been a considerable time.

  “Mark Smythe!” she exclaimed angrily. “If you pull something like that again without telling us first, I’m going to kill you myself.”

  “Sorry about that,” Mark said, although his grin did not seem sorry at all. “It was just some of the meditations I’ve been practicing in my aikido. I got the idea that, with this kind of biofeedback, I could take it a lot farther than before. It felt wonderful.”

  Jennifer continued to scowl at her brother. “Well it looked like you were dying. You scared me to death.”

  Mark shrugged, turning toward Heather. “You want to give it a try?”

  Heather was already up on the table. It felt like lying down on some sort of warm, soft gel. The tentacles flowed to embrace her, and at the spot where each tiny tip touched her skin, a warm glow spread outward in waves. It should have left goose bumps, it felt so wonderful.

  My God, she thought. I’m never getting up. I just want to lie here and feel this good forever.

  After a couple of minutes, she began refocusing on the displays above her. The sensation was odd. Despite the tentacles attached to her face and eyes, she could clearly see the bubble and its displays in her head. Just like Mark and Jennifer, Heather saw that her entire brain was lit up in an ongoing storm of electrical activity. While this wasn’t like any medical equipment on Earth, Heather had no doubt that none of them wanted to be hooked up to an electroencephalogram. Not if they didn’t want to freak out the entire hospital.

  Heather stepped off the table feeling more rested and relaxed than ever before.

  Mark glanced at his watch. “Much as I would love to stay and play around with this stuff, we have to get a move on. We barely have enough time to check the QT recording.”

  The review of the recordings proved disappointing. While the QT device had captured some small snippets of activity, for the most part the devices on the model airplane had remained off. The lights in the room were not turned on often enough to keep the battery charged. This meant that all that had been recorded was a few minutes here and there of Dr. Stephenson typing at his computer.

  As Jennifer and Mark reviewed the recording, mumbling in disgust at the lack of any useful data, Heather sat in one of the command couches exploring her headset connection with the central computer. She began working on something that fascinated her: physics.

  Heather decided to start with the basic assumptions that girded all of modern physics, to see if she could communicate ideas that would generate understandable responses. Everything in humans’ modern understanding of the functioning of the universe eventually came back to the notion that energy is neither created nor destroyed, only changed from one form to another. Almost immediately the imagery she was seeing changed to one of a set of distant stars, accompanied by a very deep sense of wrongness.

  The scene focused on a single star and then swept away from it, the color of the starlight shifting to red as she got farther away. This repeated itself with star after star, from multiple directions, over and over, faster and faster.

  Every star shifted red the farther the observer was from the star. Okay. Nothing new there. The redshift was a well-known phenomenon and was explained by the theory that all stars were moving away from a central big bang, the first stars flung out the hardest and fastest. Of course, this caused the light coming from them to have a bigger Doppler effect, like the changing sound of a train’s horn as it approaches and then passes a stationary listener.

  Again she felt the wrongness. A new sequence began, showing a single star, her perspective stepping away from it in all directions, and always yielding about the same redshift. Now that made no sense.

  Another rapid shift in data, then another, then another. Heather gasped in shock, stunned to her very core. Energy was not conserved.

  The bulk of the redshift was not caused by the Doppler effect. It was caused by a tiny fraction of the energy of the light waves leaking between the quantum grains of space-time into subspace. The farther light waves traveled outward from the source, the more energy leaked off into subspace, causing the wavelengths to shift toward the red end of the spectrum.

  Ideas were spinning so fast in Heather’s head that she barely noticed Mark prodding her with his finger.

  “Heather. We have to go. We’ll barely get home by dark, even if we pedal like hell.”

  Reluctantly, Heather followed the Smythe twins back to the lower level and out of the cave. Her mind was still reeling with the incredible implications of her discovery as they spun their tires onto the dirt trail leading back toward home.

  A sudden rush of cold air swept down from the high peaks above, stirring the branches of the thick brush lining the top of the canyon. From deep in that brush, the Rag Man watched them go.

  39

  Vice President George Gordon crawled out of bed quietly, pausing to stare down at his wife's naked body sprawled across the bed. The slight smile that lifted the corners of Harriet's sleeping lips showed a deep satisfaction that, until just a few weeks ago, he had never expected to see again.

  He glanced at the clock. 3:02 a.m. He felt new, strong, young. He felt more alive now than he had since his early twenties.

  Passing out of the bedroom and into the bathroom, he stared across the sink at his reflection in the mirror. How good it felt to see that old vigor back in his eyes, to feel the muscles beneath his skin. It was like being back at the Naval Academy once more, getting psyched up for the Army-Navy game that weekend. He could almost hear his fellow midshipmen raising their voices, cheering their team on toward the coming victory.

  Looking back now on the last several weeks, George Gordon thanked his lucky stars. Better yet, his intuition. Something had pulled him to Los Alamos to check on Dr. Stephenson’s progress. Something had made him pressure the deputy director into showing him more. And Dr. Stephenson had responded.

  Once he had learned about the second alien technology, the old Gordon recklessness had taken over, leading him to insist that Stephenson inject him with the gray fluid. In hindsight, it had been madness, a madness borne of desperation at his deteriorating heart, at the loss of the vitality that made him who he was. Thank God for that madness.

  Reaching into the medicine cabinet, Vice President Gordon retrieved a pair of tweezers. Setting them on the vanity, he moved across to the cabinet atop which a small picture frame stood, a recent image of he and his wife at the inaugural ball. Moving the picture onto the vanity and retrieving the tweezers, he began carefully plucking hair
s from his high forehead, removing the new growth to match his preexisting receding hairline. It would never do to let the press discover such an obvious difference in his body, at least not yet.

  Throwing on his robe, George grabbed his cell phone and moved out into the hallway, heading for his office. As he dialed, a thin smile twitched his lips. One of the pleasures of power was the ability to wake your chief of staff in the middle of the night, just because you felt like it.

  The phone rang three times before Gordon’s chief of staff picked up, his voice still thick with sleep when he answered. “Hello? Carl Palmer.”

  “Carl, this is George.”

  On the other end of the line, the vice president’s chief of staff cleared his throat. “Yes? What can I do for you, Mr. Vice President?”

  George Gordon’s grin widened. Now he knew that the man was struggling to wakefulness, having used the formal salutation that he normally dispensed with in dealings with his boss.

  “Carl, I need you to look up something for me real quick. When am I scheduled for my next physical examination over at Walter Reed?”

  “Just a second, I’ll check.” The phone clattered as Carl set down his receiver. A minute later, he returned. “I have you down for an appointment on February fourteenth.”

  “Valentine’s Day? Those doctors over there are getting a little funny with their heart jokes, don’t you think?”

  “It could be a coincidence.”

  “Uh-huh. Carl, you don’t believe that for a second, and neither do I. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I want you to cancel it. With all that’s going on in the world right now, I don’t want to be out of the loop, even for a day.”

  “Sir, do you really think that’s wise?” A note of concern sounded in Palmer's voice.

  “Carl, I feel fine. Once things settle down, they can prod me to their hearts’ content. For right now, though, make the call.”

  “Okay. I’ll do it this morning. Anything else, sir?”

  “No. I think I’ve bothered you enough for one night. Go back to sleep, Carl.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Good night, sir.”

  “Good night, Carl.”

  As he clicked off his phone, the vice president leaned back in his chair, hearing the creak of soft leather as he settled all the way into it. You just couldn’t beat the feel of Italian leather.

  40

  The sunlight streaming through the dirty attic window spotlighted a small cloud of dust specks that floated above the secure SATCOM link. That link to the NSA provided fax, voice, and data, all digitally encrypted. The attic provided a discrete office, exactly the type Jack wanted, complete with pull-down steps from the second-floor hallway below. It was why he had chosen to rent this house.

  “Janet, what have you got for me?”

  “Just what you’ve been looking for, Jacky boy.” Janet Price walked across the small attic space and dropped a small stack of papers on Jack’s desk. “Hot off the fax. The profile of our mole is on top since I knew you were hot for it,” she continued. “Next are the security clearance background investigations of every person assigned to the Rho Project.”

  Jack leafed through the stack.

  “Hmm. Heavy-duty mathematician. Real shocker there. Excellent computer programmer but inexperienced with top-level security systems. Good language skills but nonnative Russian speaker. Blah, blah, blah…” Jack tossed the top couple of pages in the shredder pile. “Exactly what we already thought. Why do they pay those folks?”

  Jack continued through the rest of the background reports on Rho Project personnel. Now this was more like it. After several minutes, he looked across the small room to where Janet sat patiently awaiting his response.

  “So let’s run through what we know and what we suspect. We know this person is a math wizard and really, really good with computers. We suspect they haven’t had much secure network experience. That last rules out a Special Forces or spy type.”

  “Unless they’re trying to look amateurish.”

  “No. That doesn’t feel right. This person's no spy.”

  “So he or she is a scientist.”

  “Yes. Number one or two in his class, Cal Tech type, doctorate by twenty-five, flat-out genius.”

  “That describes about half the people on the project. Hell, Jack, a third of the physicists and mathematicians in Los Alamos fit that profile.”

  “That’s okay. We can narrow it down. It has to be someone on the project, but we can eliminate the technicians. They don’t have the math background.”

  Janet crossed her legs, leaning farther back in the chair. “So that’s our in.”

  “You’ve got it. We don’t want to go after anyone who could be our man. He’d get suspicious. We want to start with someone on the project who we know can’t be the mole, but who has access.”

  Jack shuffled the papers, finally pulling two sets.

  “This one is perfect. A technician with a reputation for being able to build anything. Everyone uses him to build specialized equipment.”

  Janet reached over to take the papers from Jack’s outstretched hand. “Gilbert McFarland? Looks boring enough. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “We did that last night.” Jack winked at her.

  “Play your cards right and it might not be a one-time occurrence.” Janet’s wicked smile seemed to heat the room.

  Jack shook off the thought. That would have to wait. “Did you notice that the McFarlands are regular churchgoers?”

  “Lutherans. Sounds like we’re going to get a little religion, Mr. Johnson.”

  “We could use it, Mrs. Johnson. By the way, how’d it go down at the school today?”

  “No problems. I met with Principal Zumwalt. I told him we had just moved here and that I wanted to apply for a teaching job next year. He seemed impressed with my application and certifications and said I’d start getting substitute calls right away. It’s cold and flu season.”

  “Good. We want you hopping around the classrooms. And anything let slip in front of a high school kid is guaranteed to slip further. Besides, we only need to spot little oddities.”

  “How about you, Jack? How’d your day go?”

  “As expected. I made the rounds of all the local government offices. Introduced myself as Jack Johnson, field agent for the Environmental Protection Agency.”

  Janet’s throaty laugh once again elevated his blood pressure. “That must’ve made you quite popular.”

  “I don’t need to be popular. Just expected to be out snooping around the area.”

  “Did you get in touch with Harry?”

  “Just talked to him over lunch.”

  “How’s the telephone line repair business?”

  “He seems to have found a home over at the phone company. He gets the fun outdoor work.”

  “Too bad we’re staying away from him. I’d take him a hot chocolate and some soup. Poor boy.”

  Jack stood and walked over to the hatch leading down from the attic. “I’ve got to run a couple of quick errands. In the meantime, pull up everything you can on Mr. McFarland. Before church comes around this Sunday, I want to know everything about his inner circle: wife, kids, everyone.”

  As he climbed down the stairs, Jack could already hear the click of Janet’s fingertips on the computer keyboard. The McFarlands were about to acquire some special new friends.

  41

  If there was one thing Heather didn’t feel like doing today, it was going to Ms. Gorsky’s history class. After the incident in the hallway, Heather’s level of self-consciousness around the woman was epic. While their PDAs had been returned the next day, Ms. Gorsky still stared at Heather at times during class, the barest hint of a malevolent grin distorting her jowls.

  As Heather neared the classroom, Mark intercepted her in the hallway.

  “Did you hear the news?”

  “What news?” Heather asked, angling through the mass of students toward the doorway to the classroom.

  “Ms.
Gorsky’s out sick. The flu bug got her.”

  “What a shame. Who’s the sub?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t care. I figure it’s a day of freedom no matter who it is.”

  “You’ve got that right,” Heather said, sliding between two girls blocking the doorway.

  As she pulled out her book, notebook, and pencil and slid into her seat, a sudden hush fell upon the room. Heather half expected to look up and see the Pope himself—white gown, pointy hat, and all.

  The woman bore no resemblance whatsoever to the Pope, although all the boys in the room appeared to have suddenly found religion.

  “Hello, class. I am Mrs. Johnson,” said the dark-haired woman in the dark skirt and blouse. She peered over dark glasses positioned well forward on her perfect nose. As Mrs. Johnson stood in the doorway, Heather wasn’t sure why all the dark adjectives were suddenly popping into her mind. After all, the skirt was navy blue, not black, and the blouse was a red, tending toward scarlet, that bled down into navy blue lace that perfectly matched the skirt. Her hair, pulled back into a tight bun, would have looked prudish on most women, but on Mrs. Johnson it merely looked aggressive.

  As the substitute made her way across the front of the room toward the teacher’s desk, Heather had a brief déjà vu moment. Mrs. Johnson moved like one of the dancers in the musical Cats. And the way the boys followed the woman’s movements reminded Heather of an audience at the US Open Tennis Tournament. If this kept up for the entire class, all the guys would have whiplash.

  Glancing across the classroom, Heather spotted Jennifer staring around in wide-eyed wonderment. She had also noticed that the herd of normally babbling males in the room had become as enthralled as kittens watching a dangling strand of yarn. It suddenly struck Heather: another sexy female named Johnson. Christ. What was it about that name?