The Presence

CHAPTER 18

“You’re really sure you’re all right?” Katharine fretted as she pulled the Explorer to a stop in the school’s parking lot. Despite the doctor’s assurances, she couldn’t convince herself that her son’s terrible wheezing last night had been caused by nothing more than a bad dream.

“I’m fine,” Michael insisted for at least the fourth time since they’d left the estate. Grabbing his book bag from the backseat, he swung out of the car and slammed the door. Then he opened it again and stuck his head back in. “Look, I’m really sorry about what happened last night, Mom. I didn’t mean to scare you, and I won’t do it again. But you’ve got to stop worrying about me every minute of the day. I’m really okay now.”

Katharine sighed and stretched in the driver’s seat. Her whole body felt as tired and sore as if she’d already been crouching over the skeleton up in the ravine all day, instead of still having that job to look forward to. “I’ll try,” she agreed. Before she could say anything more, Michael glanced at his watch, waved to her, then turned and started toward the building. She watched him until he’d disappeared inside, still unable to shake the feeling that, despite his assurances, there was something he wasn’t telling her, something he was keeping to himself. But as she started out of the parking lot a moment later, she told herself that maybe the problem wasn’t Michael at all.

Maybe it was her.

She hadn’t gotten more than an hour’s sleep last night — maybe two — and she felt bone weary already. And she still had an entire day of work ahead, moving the skeleton from the site in the ravine into the safety of Rob’s office. But the very thought of spending the rest of the day stooped over the bones, carefully freeing them from their shallow grave, only made her feel even more exhausted. Finally she pulled her cell phone out of her bag and called Rob. “I’ve got a deal for you,” she said. “If you can get the skeleton collected without me, I’ll fix you dinner tonight. I think I’m getting too old to stay up all night and then work in the field all day.”

“Not a problem,” he replied. “Go home. By this afternoon I’ll have it all moved indoors. See you later.”

Dropping the phone back in her bag, Katharine pulled out of the parking lot, remembering as she was starting up the road toward her house that the only things in the refrigerator were a half gallon of milk, a few eggs, and a six-pack of Cokes. Taking a deep breath, she made a right half a mile farther on and headed for the market in Kula, wondering whether Rob would prefer steak or chicken.

Hearing her name half an hour later as she was pushing the cart through the last aisle of the grocery store, Katharine looked up in surprise. The man who was smiling at her looked familiar, but for a moment she couldn’t quite place him.

“Phil Howell,” he said, reading her confusion. “Astronomer? Friend of Rob Silver’s?”

“Of course,” Katharine assured him, her memory finally putting it together. “Sorry — I’m afraid I was up all night. In fact, I’m on my way home to sleep the entire day.”

“Lucky you,” Howell sighed. “I’ve been on top of the mountain all night, and now I’ve got about five hours of work on the supercomputer down in Kihei.”

Katharine cocked her head. “Kihei? Isn’t that down by the water on the other side of the island? I thought the computer was up on the mountain.”

“I wish,” Howell sighed. “But our guys only use a little tiny part of it. Most of it’s being used by everyone else. Schoolkids, business types — you name it. It’s an amazing machine — you can do anything with it if you know how.”

Katharine went silent, the image she’d seen on the monitor in Rob’s office popping into the forefront of her mind: the skull, and the strange video file that had been linked to it, both of which had mysteriously vanished from the screen, defying even Rob’s ability to reconstruct the file. Now an idea was forming in her mind. “How good are you with that computer?” she asked.

“A lot better than I wish, actually,” Phil Howell said wryly. “I spend far more time on the computer than I do with my telescopes these days. What do you need?”

Katharine told him about the file that had disappeared yesterday. “Do you think there’s any way of finding out where it came from?” she asked.

Howell thought for a moment. “I’m not sure,” he mused. “But practically everything that goes through the Net gets cached one place or another. If we can find the right cache record—”

Suddenly, the exhaustion Katharine had felt only a moment ago evaporated. If Phil Howell could find that file for her again — or even just the location of it — she’d at least have a chance of figuring out what the strange skull she’d uncovered in the ravine might be. “Could we do it this morning?”

“If we don’t do it this morning, I suspect there’s practically no chance we’ll find it,” Howell told her. “The caches are all timed to dump after a set period of time, which I suspect isn’t any more than twenty-four hours. But it could be a lot less.”

“Then let’s go,” Katharine said. Abandoning the rest of her shopping, she headed for the checkout stand.

If dinner wasn’t very interesting, Rob and Michael would just have to deal with it.

Josh Malani’s whole body hurt.

Instinctively trying to escape the pain, he drew his knees up to his chest, but that only hurt more. Then, as he came fully awake and felt the heat of the sun on his face, he knew why he hurt.

He wasn’t in bed. He wasn’t even home.

He was in the back of his truck, which was parked in the lot at Makena Beach.

Slowly, as if he were thumbing through a stack of snapshots, the memories of last night came back to him.

Feeling kind of funny when he’d left Mike Sundquist’s place.

Picking up Jeff, and taking off into the night.

The burning cane field that had been vomiting fire and smoke into the air.

The images flashed faster: glimpses of Jeff, getting out of the truck.

Another truck coming toward them.

Losing his nerve, and driving away. But if the police had caught him—

But they hadn’t caught him. He hadn’t dared to go home last night, afraid that someone in the car with the flashing lights that raced past him on the highway might have written down his license number. If the cops came looking for him at home, and his dad was drunk, the mess would only get worse. So instead he’d come out here to Makena, parked the pickup under the trees, and finally fallen asleep on the hard metal surface of the truck’s bed.

He sat up. The sun was already above the mountain, so he was way late for school. Maybe he should just cut the rest of the day and hang out here at the beach.

But what about Jeff? He remembered the crazy way Jeff had been acting — getting out of the truck as if he were going to run right into the flaming field.

What if he was dead? What if he’d choked to death, or tried to get away from the fire crew in the truck and run into the cane field?

Josh shuddered as he imagined Jeff charging through the burning cane. If he tripped … Josh shut his eyes against the image that came into his head. Why the hell had he left? If anything happened to Jeff …

But nothing had happened to Jeff, he told himself. Jeff was okay. Jeff had to be okay.

He was kidding himself, he knew. How the hell would he know if Jeff was all right? He sure hadn’t stayed around to find out. What would have happened if Mike Sundquist had just swum off the day he’d gotten caught under the reef, instead of trying to help him?

He would be dead now.

A hot ember of shame starting to burn deep inside him, Josh Malani moved from the bed of the truck to the cab, started the engine, and set off toward his house. Maybe, if no one was home, he’d grab a quick shower and change his clothes. Then, even if he didn’t get there till noon, he’d go to school, find Jeff, and apologize to him.

If Jeff was still speaking to him.

An hour later he slowed down as he neared the rundown house he and his parents had moved into six months ago, after his father had lost his last job. Seeing his dad’s rust-eaten Dodge sitting in the driveway — and his father himself slouched on the sofa in the living room, staring at the TV — he sped up and drove on by. He’d take a shower at school, and put on the same clothes he’d been wearing since yesterday. Better that than having his dad yelling at him; if the old man had been drinking, he might even take a swing at him.

Still accelerating as he squealed around the corner at the end of the block, concerned only with getting out of sight before his father noticed he was there, Josh never saw the brown sedan that pulled out of its parking space three houses down from his own, falling in behind him as he continued on to school.

In the stillness of the black-glass building in Kihei, the more than six hundred nodes that comprised one of the world’s two most powerful computers were hard at work. Yet as Katharine Sundquist gazed through the large window that gave anyone in the building’s lobby an unobstructed view of the immense machine, nothing betrayed the furious electronic activity going on within.

She saw a reel of tape spinning now and then, and a few lights occasionally blinking.

The machine worked in an oddly eerie solitude, monitoring itself, curing most of its own ills long before any of the humans involved in its maintenance were even aware that anything had gone wrong.

Beneath the false floor of the machine’s perfectly air-conditioned chamber, a maze of wires connected each node of the computer to all the others. In its turn, the entire mass of processing units and wiring was connected to cables that snaked from the building, to connect to the immense fiber-optic cable that lay deep beneath the surface of the Pacific, the essential aorta that supplied the machine with its lifeblood.

Data.

Billions upon billions upon billions of bytes of data, a seeming infinity of information, flowing through the computer’s systems; billions upon billions of connections every second, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Though Katharine had a vague understanding of how it worked, her mind could no more truly grasp the reality of it than it could the concept of infinity.

Too much happening in too little time and with no apparent effort.

Not like archaeology at all.

Turning away from the window, she crossed the lobby and pushed through the doors into the terminal rooms, where dozens of monitors and keyboards sat in the small carrels into which the rows of tables in the room had been subdivided.

Most of the monitors were idle; only a few people were quietly tapping at keyboards.

At the sixth carrel in the fourth row, Katharine found Phil Howell, looking as if he hadn’t moved at all during the few minutes she’d been stretching her aching muscles. The exhaustion that had dissipated so quickly when she thought there might be a chance of locating the vanishing file had quickly returned as Phil began setting up a search program that would pore through every cache in the enormous computer, searching for references to graphics files that had passed through the computer yesterday afternoon.

“Maybe between two and three,” Katharine had told him when he’d asked what time she and Rob had seen the file. “Maybe a little earlier — maybe a little later.”

The first list the computer generated seemed to scroll on endlessly. Even if the files they were looking for were there, she thought, it would be like searching for a needle in forty acres of haystacks.

As Phil patiently narrowed the search, Katharine felt both her excitement and her energy ebb.

Then, as she leaned a little closer to the screen, an electronic beep sounded and a window opened.

She felt a rush of adrenaline. “Is that it?” she asked.

“It’s something,” Phil told her. “But it’s mine, not yours.” With a flick of the mouse, he blew the window up to fill the screen. “I’ve been doing a search of my own,” he said. “A lot of people have been picking up strange radio signals from somewhere near a nova I’ve been watching. They’re just scraps, but they’re really weird. So I’ve had the computer run a search, looking for any more signals that might match, but that I haven’t heard about.” He grinned at the puzzled look that came over Katharine’s face. “It’s sort of like hunting for the score to an entire symphony, when all you’ve got to match it to is a few notes. Frankly, I didn’t really think I’d come up with anything.” He turned his attention to the computer screen, which was now displaying another box:

Data Search Report:

Project Name: Star Bright

Requested By: Phil Howell

Search Begun: 17:46:24

Search Ended: 22:06:58

Analysis Begun: 22:06:58

Analysis Ended: 10:37:13

Report Generated: 10:37:14

See Starbrit.rtf

Tapping at the keyboard, he brought up the report the computer had generated. A list of the files the computer had copied from all over the world scrolled down the screen, followed by another list, nearly as long, of the files upon which the report was based.

Each file was annotated as to its size, the date it had been created, the computer on which it had been stored, and the source of the raw data contained within the files.

Phil felt the first flush of excitement as he noted that the second list of files contained only data gathered from radio telescopes.

Next came the results of the computer’s attempt to put the files together in a cohesive string.

His heart began to race as he saw that the signal appeared to have been coming in steadily for a period of months, starting more than two years ago. But then, 79 days after it had begun, it abruptly ended. After a silence of 142 days, it reappeared, and was picked up by one or another of dozens of radio telescopes for a period of 209 days. Then there had been another 142 days of silence. It had been detected again for a period of 132 days, ending last Saturday at noon, GMT.

Phil Howell gazed at the screen in something near disbelief: If the signal had been received for as long as the computer claimed, and by as many telescopes as the computer claimed, why had there been almost nothing written about it?

But then, as he studied the data further, he began to understand.

The signal had been picked up in so many bits and pieces that they simply went unnoticed in the sea of data being received from the universe every day.

Then he noticed something else, and he felt his skin go clammy with excitement.

The signal had not been consistently picked up on a single frequency. Instead, it was picked up on hundreds of frequencies, as if it had been blasted out by some kind of cosmic shotgun.

A normal radio signal emitted by a star or a quasar was carried on a single frequency.

Stars, obviously, had no technology that would allow them to change the frequency of a broadcast.

Nothing did, as far as Phil Howell knew, with a single exception.

And that exception was mankind.

“A planet,” Phil breathed, almost inaudibly. “My God.”

Katharine frowned. “A planet? What are you talking about?”

Howell’s eyes never left the computer screen as he spoke. “It’s this transmission,” he said, his fingers touching the numbers on the screen almost as if he would be able to feel the signal they represented. “It stopped coming in twice, each time for a period of 142 days. That pause is very significant. And one explanation for it is if the signal was being broadcast from a planet rather than pulsating out from a star. If the planet’s orbit was in the right plane, then the signal would be blocked from our telescopes whenever the planet was in the shadow of its own sun.”

Katharine gazed at him, trying to absorb the full implication of the report on the screen. “But that means—”

She stopped, leaving it to the astronomer to finish her thought.

“If I’m right,” Howell finally said, “it means there was someone out there.”

“If you’re right?” Katharine echoed. “You just said the only explanation—”

“I said, it’s one explanation,” Howell interrupted. “And certainly my favorite,” he went on, a wry smile twisting his lips, “since finding someone out there would make me the most famous astronomer on the planet. But unfortunately I have a feeling there are about a hundred other explanations, all of them far more probable than what I just told you.” His eyes returned to the computer monitor. “Look, don’t say anything about this to anyone else, okay? There’s not much chance I’m right, and the opposite of being known as the most famous astronomer on the planet is being known as the stupidest. Okay?”

“But if you’re right—” Katharine began, and again the astronomer interrupted her.

“If I’m right, you can testify that you were here when the discovery was made. But I’d just as soon prove it first before talking about it.” He looked up at her. “Deal?”

“Deal,” Katharine agreed.

Another soft electronic signal sounded, and both of them looked back at the monitor to see that another window had opened in the lower right quadrant of the screen Howell had been studying.

“Well, look at that,” he said. “This morning we both get results.”

Katharine studied the two file names that appeared in the box, both of them stark in their simplicity.

Skull.jpg

Video.avi.

Both of them were annotated with their domain of origin, which was listed as mishimoto.com.

“I’m almost sure the file names were a lot longer than these,” Katharine said. “It’s as though the computer looked for names that matched what I saw, instead of content.”

Phil Howell shook his head. “You said there was a link on the page with the skull that took you to the video. The file name you saw was probably the one for the page that contained the graphic of the skull, and the link. These would be the files themselves.”

“But how do I find the files themselves?”

“Go back to Rob Silver’s office,” the astronomer told her. “Mishimoto is the name of Takeo Yoshihara’s company, which should mean that mishimoto dot com is the name of his private domain for e-mail purposes. Which means that those files are somewhere on one of Takeo Yoshihara’s own computers.”

“Can you find them from here?”

Howell shrugged. “Maybe, if I were an expert hacker. But it shouldn’t be too hard to find them from Rob’s office, since he’s already inside Yoshihara’s network. As for me, I’m going back to work on my signal. And remember,” he added, nodding toward the computer screen that was still displaying the results of his own search. “Not a word about this. Please?”

“Not even a hint,” Katharine promised. “And thanks for helping me out. If I find anything, believe me, I’ll let you know.”

“Great,” Howell replied. But by the time Katharine was back in her car less than a minute later, the astronomer had already dismissed the two files from his mind. To him, the strange radio signal from a star fifteen million light-years away was far more interesting than any image of an earthbound skull could ever be.