The Presence

CHAPTER 28

“I still don’t understand why they brought him up here,” Rob said as he steered the Explorer through the gates of Takeo Yoshihara’s estate.

“She didn’t tell me,” Katharine said. She sat tensely in the passenger seat, arms wrapped tightly around herself, as if to contain the anxiety within. Her mind was reeling with images of Michael hidden away in one of the subterranean rooms below the south wing of the research building; Michael imprisoned like the poor puppy that died in her arms. “All Yolanda Umiki said was that I should come to Yoshihara’s office.”

Leaping from the car a moment after they pulled up, she ran across the gardens that separated the research pavilion from the collection of structures that made up Takeo Yoshihara’s personal residence, as Rob followed — and stopped, realizing that she had never seen Takeo Yoshihara’s office, and wasn’t certain where it was. She looked about in confusion just as a servant materialized and bowed respectfully to them.

“Mr. Yoshihara is waiting in his office. This way, if you please.”

A small bridge led to an Oriental-style building like a perfect teahouse, floating in the center of a pond. Inside were the two rooms that Takeo Yoshihara used as an office on the estate. The smaller, rather cramped anteroom held Yolanda Umiki’s desk, two ornately carved teak chairs, a tonsu, and several filing cabinets. In Takeo Yoshihara’s own office there was only a simple table of highly polished wood that served as a desk — bare save for a telephone — and a single chair. Several cushions were scattered on the floor. Takeo Yoshihara himself stepped into the room through an open shoji that led to a veranda that overlooked the mirrorlike surface of the pond and the perfectly tended garden of bonsai conifers that lay beyond. Sliding the screen closed, Yoshihara approached Katharine, his hand extended, his expression grave.

Katharine was tempted not to take his hand at all, but thought better of it at the last second.

Why warn him of her suspicions?

“Dr. Sundquist, I can’t tell you how sorry I am about your son.”

“Where is he?” Katharine demanded. “I want to see him.”

“I shall take you to him myself in just a few moments.”

“A few moments?” Katharine repeated, her voice rising. “Mr. Yoshihara, you’re talking about my son! My son! From what I already know, he collapsed on the playing field at Bailey High. Why wasn’t he taken to Maui Memorial Hospital?”

Takeo Yoshihara tried to gesture her onto one of the cushions on the floor, but when she remained standing, he did, too. “It was upon my orders that he was brought here,” he explained.

“Your orders?” Katharine shot back. “Who are you to be giving orders as to what is to be done with my son? And how did you even know something had happened to him? Have you been watching him?”

If she expected him to flinch at the accusation, she was disappointed; far from being taken aback by the question, Takeo Yoshihara appeared to welcome it. “As a matter of fact, we have,” he said. “Ever since Kioki Santoya died, I have been concerned not only about Michael, but about his friends Josh Malani and Jeff Kina, as well.” He hesitated, then: “I’m not sure how to tell you this, Dr. Sundquist, but the Malani boy died on the beach at Spreckelsville yesterday afternoon.”

The words struck Katharine like a physical blow. Instinctively she reached out to Rob for support. As Rob took her arm, Takeo Yoshihara brought the chair around from behind his desk. “I can have Yolanda bring you something,” he offered as Katharine sank onto the chair.

She shook her head but could say nothing. Josh? Dead? How could it have happened? And if Josh were dead … “How?” she asked, the bravado of a moment before gone from her voice, her hand slipping unconsciously into Rob’s. “Dear God, why?”

“Dr. Jameson isn’t yet certain where the problem began,” Takeo Yoshihara said, leaning back against his desk. “But he was very interested in what happened to the Santoya boy, particularly the condition of his lungs. When he analyzed the lung tissue, it appeared that the boy’s lungs had somehow become incapable of allowing oxygen to be absorbed into the blood. In fact, it was as if he had become allergic to it. When it was determined that your son was having respiratory problems but seemed not to be having difficulty in moving air in and out of his lungs, Dr. Jameson thought it imperative that Michael not be given oxygen.”

Katharine’s fingers clamped down hard on Rob’s hand as she struggled against the terrible panic rising inside her. Rob tightened his arm around her, as if to protect her from whatever Takeo Yoshihara might say next. “But you still haven’t told us exactly what’s wrong with Michael,” he said.

“In order to do that, I have to explain to you about some experiments that are going on here,” Yoshihara replied. His gaze shifted to Katharine. “Dr. Silver has already signed a confidentiality agreement. It was part of his employment contract. I’m afraid I shall also have to ask you to sign one.” He pressed a button on the telephone, summoning Yolanda Umiki, who appeared with a single sheet of paper in her hand.

Rob Silver’s eyes narrowed. “Is this really necessary?” he asked. “Given the circumstances, I can’t believe—”

“I’m afraid I shall have to insist.” Taking a silver pen from the pocket inside his jacket, Yoshihara handed it to Katharine.

Without reading a single line of the document — not caring at all what it might say — Katharine scribbled her signature on it and handed it back to the woman.

As silently as she’d come in, the secretary left, quietly closing the door behind her.

When the three of them were alone, Takeo Yoshihara turned to Katharine. “As Dr. Silver may have told you, we are doing a great deal of environmental research here. What he hasn’t told you, because until now he hasn’t known, is that we have been working with a substance that appears to give oxygen-sustained, carbon-based life-forms — which comprise most of what we have on this planet — the ability to sustain themselves on gases other than oxygen. Gases that would ordinarily be poisonous to them.”

“Are you saying you’ve developed a compound that would let people survive in badly polluted air?” Katharine asked, carefully keeping any clue that she had seen the subterranean labs out of her voice.

“We haven’t developed it,” Yoshihara explained. “We found it.”

“Found it?” Rob echoed. “You mean you’re mining it?”

Yoshihara shook his head. “One of my research teams — a group of divers — was working off the Big Island, along the Kalapana coast.”

“Where the black sand beach used to be,” Rob interjected. “But it’s all under fresh lava now.”

“Exactly,” Yoshihara said. “At any rate, they found what appeared to be a geode near a lava vent, which they brought here. But instead of containing the typical crystals of most geodes, this one contains some kind of liquified gas. We began experimenting with the substance, and have discovered that when it is administered to oxygen-breathing animals, it has the effect of allowing them to thrive in an atmosphere containing what would normally be lethal doses of various gases and contaminants.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you,” Rob Silver said.

Takeo Yoshihara smiled. “I’m not surprised—I have only the most tenuous of grasps on it myself. But Dr. Jameson tells me our research animals seem able to function perfectly normally in an atmosphere that is heavily laden with such things as unburned hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen. Also ozone, sulfur dioxide, and hydrogen cyanide.”

“Cyanide?” Rob said in disbelief.

The thinnest of smiles passed over Yoshihara’s lips. “I can assure you, Dr. Silver, most of us breathe such things every day, but in amounts so slight as to be harmless. Except, of course, in areas of very heavy pollution. But this compound seems to make our lab animals immune to the effects of such pollution, even in the heaviest of concentrations.”

“It sounds like a miracle,” Rob said.

“Perhaps it is,” Yoshihara agreed. “Except that there is a side effect. Our laboratory animals all have become allergic to oxygen. Once the compound has been administered, they are no longer able to breathe what we consider to be an unpolluted atmosphere.”

The puppy, Katharine thought. She had killed the puppy by taking it out of the box. She felt a chill spread through her body as she anticipated Takeo Yoshihara’s next words, and when they came, she heard them as an oddly distant echo of what her own mind had already told her. Yoshihara’s features settled into an expression of utmost concern, though Katharine found that even as he mouthed the words of sorrow, his eyes seemed to betray no emotion.

“I’m so very sorry to have to tell you this, Katharine, but I’m afraid your son and his friends have become exposed to the compound inside the geode. We’ve no idea yet how such an accident could have occurred.”

The dive! But nothing terrible had happened on the dive! Michael had said so. The only thing that went wrong was that some of them had run out of air, but even that hadn’t been a problem.

“We think Michael and his friends must have come across another geode,” she heard Takeo Yoshihara say.

A geode! But it wasn’t a geode! She’d seen it herself, and it was a perfectly round sphere, the contents of which, she was absolutely certain, had been cooked up right here on Takeo Yoshihara’s own estate!

“I want to see him,” she said, her voice calm, though her mind was still reeling. “I want to see my son.”

Katharine had to use every bit of her self-control not to scream when she saw Michael.

His room was on the subterranean level, and while it was neither a part of the complex that made up the Serinus Project nor a part of the laboratory she had discovered, it was, if possible, even more horrifying than what she’d seen before.

He was in a bed, but the bed was in a box.

The same kind of Plexiglas box she had seen in the Serinus labs, housing the animals which, though still alive, had seemed listless and ill.

The box was equipped with a pair of large ducts, as well as a variety of air-locked access ports that would allow food and drink to be passed inside without contaminating the internal atmosphere.

The atmosphere inside the cube was actually visible, swirling around Michael like smoke, filling the box with a brownish haze. The sight of it made Katharine feel like choking, though it was completely contained inside the plastic walls.

Michael, propped up against a pillow that rested on the raised head of a hospital bed, was awake. His face looked deathly pale to Katharine, but he managed a smile as she came into the room, followed by Rob Silver, Takeo Yoshihara, and Stephen Jameson.

“I guess I had a major attack of asthma this time,” he said. His voice emerged from a speaker that was invisible to Katharine. It sounded both tinny and hollow, as if it were coming from a long distance away.

Don’t cry! But even as she silently issued herself the order, Katharine felt her eyes welling with tears. She took a step toward him, wanting to put her arms around her son, to hold him, to tell him that everything was going to be all right.

The box stopped her.

Suddenly she felt helpless, unable to do anything for Michael or even to comfort him.

“Oh, Michael,” she whispered. “What happened? You’ve been feeling so good. I thought …” She shook her head and bit her lip against the tears threatening to overwhelm her.

“I was feeling great,” Michael said. “You saw me, Mom!”

“I sure did!” Katharine told him. “And you looked fine! I even stopped worrying about you.” Once again she instinctively reached toward him, this time actually touching the hard plastic that separated her from her son. “Darling, what happened?”

Michael shrugged. “I–I’m not sure,” he stammered. Haltingly, he told her that it had been getting harder and harder to breathe all day. “But then I found a bottle in the closet in the boys’ room,” he finished. “And as soon as I sniffed it, I felt great!”

Rick Pieper’s broken message echoed in Katharine’s ears.

Ammonia! He’d been breathing ammonia! Of course he was sick!

But no sooner had the thought occurred to her than she knew it was simply a straw she was grasping at to avoid facing the truth.

The ammonia hadn’t made him sick. In fact, it had made him feel better.

Her mind spun as more and more pieces of the puzzle clicked into place.

Mark Reynolds — the boy from L.A. — hadn’t been trying to kill himself; he’d been trying to save himself, and the medics who came to his rescue had unwittingly killed him by administering oxygen.

Oxygen!

For the first time since she’d entered the room, Katharine’s eyes strayed from Michael’s face as she took in her surroundings.

A computer monitor was mounted in the wall, its screen divided into a series of windows; some displayed a continuous graph of Michael’s vital signs, while others monitored the makeup of the atmosphere within the box. Some she could identify: CO, SO₂.

Carbon monoxide.

Sulfur dioxide.

Most of them, long strings of atomic symbols designating complex chemical compounds, possibly hydrocarbons, she guessed, might as well have been written in Greek.

“Can I be alone with him for a few minutes?” she asked.

“Of course,” Takeo Yoshihara agreed. “I have some business that must be attended to immediately. Dr. Silver can wait for you with Dr. Jameson.”

When they were alone, Katharine moved as close to Michael as she could, placing her hands on the plastic as gently as if it were his skin she was touching. “I’m so sorry, darling,” she whispered. “It’s my fault. If I hadn’t brought us here—”

“It’s not your fault,” Michael said. “It’s just something that happened. It must have happened on—”

Katharine briefly held a finger to her lips, and as Michael fell silent, she pulled her pen and notebook out of her bag. The cameras might see — Katharine knew sharp lenses must be monitoring this room — but perhaps they would not read. It was a chance she had to take. There was no other choice. She began talking as she quickly scribbled on the pad. “They think you must have gotten exposed to something they found in a geode,” she said out loud.

What happened on the night dive? she wrote. I don’t believe a geode was involved. Opening the access lock, she put the notebook and pen inside. The air in the lock was instantly evacuated, and replaced with the toxic atmosphere inside the Plexiglas chamber.

“What kind of geode?” Michael asked, quickly reading the note, then scrawling a response. There wasn’t anything like a geode, he wrote. Four of the tanks ran out of air, and we started choking on something. Mine, Jeff’s, Kioki’s, and Josh’s. He passed the notebook and pen back through the air lock.

“I’m not sure Mr. Yoshihara even said,” Katharine replied as she read what he’d written. Then she wrote: Where did you get the tanks?

“I don’t remember ever seeing anything like a geode,” Michael said. Kihei Ken’s, he wrote. Josh said it would be okay.

After she’d read his last entry, Michael said, “Mom? Am I going to be all right?”

Katharine could contain her tears no longer, and even before she could speak, Michael read the truth in her expression.

“I’m going to die, aren’t I?” he asked. His voice sounded very young.

Very young, and very frightened.