Gravity. Part 32

"It's so stupid that I waited this long to tell you. You probably think I'm only saying it now because I'm going to die. But, Jack, honest-to-G.o.d truth isa""

"You're not going to die." He said it again, with anger. "You not going to die."

"You've heard Dr. Roman's results. Nothing has worked."

"The hyperbaric chamber has."

"They can't get a chamber up here in time. And without a lifeboat, I can't get home. Even if they'd let me return."

"There's got to be a way. Something you can do to reproduce the chamber's effect. It's working on infected mice. It's keeping them alive, so it's doing something. They're the only ones who've survived." No, she suddenly realized. Not the only ones.

Slowly, she turned and stared at the hatchway leading into Node 1. The mouse, she thought. Is the mouse still alive?

"Emma?"

"Stand by. I'm going to check something in the lab." She swam through Node I, into the U.S. lab. The stench of dried blood was just as strong in here, and even in the gloom, could see the dark splatters on the walls. She floated across to animal habitat, pulled out the mouse enclosure, and shone a flashlight inside.

The beam captured a pitiful sight. The bloated mouse was in its agonal throes, limbs thras.h.i.+ng out, mouth open, drawing in gulps of air.

You can't be dying, she thought. You're the survivor, the exception to the rule. The proof that there's still hope for me.

The mouse twisted, body corks.c.r.e.w.i.n.g in agony. A thread of blood curled out from between the hind legs, broke off into droplets. Emma knew what would come next, the final flurry of seizures as the brain dissolved into a soup of digested proteins. saw a fresh pulse of blood stain the white fur of the hindquarters.

And then she saw something else, something pink, protruding between the legs.

It was moving.

The mouse thrashed again.

The pink thing slid all the way out, writhing and hairless.

Tethered to its abdomen was a single glistening strand. An cord.

"Jack," she whispered. "Jack!"

"I'm here."

"The mousea"the femalea""

"What about it?"

"These last three weeks, she's been exposed again and again to Chimera, and she hasn't gotten sick. She's the only one who's survived."

"She's still alive?"

"Yes. And I think I know why. She was pregnant." The mouse began to writhe again. Another pup slid out in a glistening veil of blood and mucus.

"It must have happened that night when Kenichi put her with the males," she said. "I haven't been handling her. I never realizeda"

"Why would pregnancy make a difference? Why should it be protective?" Emma floated in the gloom, struggling to come up with an answer. The recent EVA and the shock of Luther's death had left her physically drained. She knew that Jack was just as exhausted.

Two tired brains, working against the ticking time bomb of her infection.

"Okay. Okay, let's think about pregnancy," she said. "It's a complex physiological condition. It's more than just the gestation of a fetus. It's an altered metabolic state."

"Hormones. Pregnant animals are chemically high on hormones. If we can mimic that state, maybe we can reproduce what's happened in that mouse." Hormone therapy. She thought of all the different chemicals circulating in a pregnant woman's body. Estrogen. Progesterone. Prolactin. Human chorionic gonadotropin.

"Birth control pills," said Jack. "You could mimic pregnancy with contraceptive hormones."

"We have nothing like that on board. It's not part of the medical kit."

"Have you checked Diana's personal locker?"

"She wouldn't take contraceptives without my knowledge. I'm the medical officer. I'd know about it."

"Check it anyway. Do it, Emma." She shot out of the lab. In the Russian service module, she quickly pulled open the drawers in Diana's locker.

It felt wrong, be pawing through another woman's private possessions.

Even dead woman's. Among the neatly folded clothes she uncovered a private stash of candy. She hadn't known that Diana loved sweets, there was so much about Diana she would never know. In another drawer she found shampoo and toothpaste and tampons. No birth control pills.

She slammed the drawer shut. "There's nothing on this station I can use!"

"If we launched the shuttle tomorrowa"if we got the hormones up to youa""

"They won't launch! And even if you could send up a whole d.a.m.n pharmacy, it'd still take three days to get to me!" In three days, she would most likely be dead.

She clung to the blood-splattered locker, her breaths coming hard and fast, every muscle taut with frustration. With despair.

"Then we have to approach this from another angle," said Jack.

"Emma, stay with me on this! I need you to help me think." She released a sharp breath. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Why would hormones work? What's the mechanism? We know they're chemical signalsa"an internal communication system at the cellular level. They work by activating or repressing gene expression. By changing the cell's programminga" He was rambling now, letting his stream of consciousness lead him toward solution. "In order for a hormone to work, it has to bind to a specific receptor on the target cell. It's like a key, in search the right lock in which to fit. Maybe if we studied the data from SeaSciencea"if we could find out what other DNA Dr. Koenig grafted onto this organism's genomea"we might know how to shut off Chimera's reproduction."

"What do you know about Dr. Koenig? What other research has she worked on? That might be a clue."

"We have her curriculum vitae. We've seen her published papers on Archaeons. Other than that, she's something of a mystery to us. So is SeaScience. We're still trying to dig up information." That will take precious time, she thought. I don't have much of it left.

Her hands ached from gripping Diana's locker. She relaxed her hold and drifted away, as though swept along on a tide of despair.

Loose items from Diana's locker floated around her in the air, evidence of Diana's sweet tooth. Chocolate bars. M&M's. A cellophane package of crystallized ginger candy. It was that last that Emma suddenly focused on. Crystallized ginger.

Crystals.

"Jack," she said. "I have an idea." Her heart was racing as she swam out of the Russian service module and headed back into the U.S. Lab. There she turned on payload computer. The monitor glowed an eerie amber in the darkened module. She called up the operations data files and clicked on "ESA." European s.p.a.ce Agency. Here were all the procedures and reference materials required to operate the ESA payload experiments.

"What are you thinking, Emma?" came Jack's voice over her comm unit.

"Diana was working on protein crystal growth, remember? Pharmaceutical research."

"Which proteins?" he shot back, and she knew he understood exactly what she was thinking.

"I'm scrolling down the list now. There are dozensa" The protein names raced up the screen in a blur. The cursor halted on the entry she'd been searching for, "Human chorionic gonadotropin."

"Jack," she said softly. "I think I've just bought myself some time."

"What've you got?"

"HCG. Diana was growing the crystals. I'd have to do an IVA to get to it. They're in the ESA module, and that's at vacuum. If I start depress now, I could get to those crystals in four or five hours."

"How much HCG is on board?"

"I'm checking." She opened the experiment file and quickly scanned the ma.s.s measurement data.

"Emma?"

"Hold on, hold on! I've got the most recent ma.s.s here. I'm looking up normal HCG levels in pregnancy."

"I can get those for you."

"No, I've found it. Okay. Okay, if I dilute this crystal ma.s.s in normal saline a plug in my body weight as forty-five kilogramsa" She typed in the numbers. She was making wild a.s.sumptions here. She didn't know how quickly HCG was metabolized, or what its half-life would be.

The answer at last onscreen.

"How many doses?" said Jack.

She closed her eyes. It's not going to last long enough. It's not going to save me.

"Emma?" She released a deep breath. It came out as a sob. "Three days."

It was 1:45 A.M. and Jack's vision was blurred from fatigue, words on the computer screen fading in and out of focus.

"There must be more," he said. "Keep searching."

Gretchen Liu, seated at the keyboard, glanced up at Jack and Gordon in frustration. She had been sound asleep when they called her to come in, and she'd arrived without her usual camera-ready makeup and contact lenses. They had never seen their normally elegant public affairs officer looking so unglamorous. Or wearing gla.s.ses, for that mattera"thick horn-rim gla.s.ses that magnified pinched eyes. "I'm telling you guys, this is all I can find on Lexisnexis search. Almost nothing on Helen Koenig. On SeaScience, there's only the usual corporate news releases. And as for the Palmer Gabriel, well, you can see for yourself he doesn't court publicity. In the last five years, the only place his name turns up in media is on the financial pages of The Wall Street Journal articles about SeaScience and its products. There's no data. There's not even a photo of the man."

Jack slumped back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. The three of them had spent the last two hours in the Public Affairs Office, combing every article about Helen Koenig and SeaScience they could find on Lexis-Nexis. They had turned up numerous. .h.i.ts for SeaScience, dozens of articles in which its products had been mentioned, from shampoos to pharmaceuticals to fertilizers. But almost nothing had turned up on Koenig or Gabriel.

"Try the name Koenig again," said Jack.

"We've done every possible spelling variation on her name," said Gretchen. "There's nothing."

"Then type in the word Archaeons." Sighing, Gretchen typed in Archaeons and clicked on "Search." A numbingly long string of article citations filled the screen.

"Alien Earth Creatures. Scientists Hail Discovery of New Branch of Life." (Was.h.i.+ngton Post) "Archaeons to Be Subject of International Conference." (Miami Herald) "Deep Sea Organisms Offer Clues to Life's Origins." (Philadelphia Inquirer) "Guys, this is hopeless," said Gretchen. "It'll take us all night to read every article on this list. Why don't we just call it a night get some sleep?"

"Wait!" Gordon said. "Scroll down to this one." He pointed to a citation at the bottom of the screen," Scientist Dies in Galapagos Diving Accident (New York Times)."

"The Galapagos," said Jack. "That's where Dr. Koenig discovered the Archaeon strain. In the Galapagos Rift." Gretchen clicked on the article and the text appeared. The story was two years old.

COPYRIGHT, The New York Times.

SECTION, International News.

HEADLINE, "Scientist Dies in Deep Sea Diving Accident."

BYLINE, Julio Perez, NYT Correspondent.

BODY, An American scientist studying Archaeon marine organisms was killed yesterday when his one-man submersible became wedged in an undersea canyon of the Galapagos Rift. The body of Dr. Stephen D. Ahearn was not recovered until this morning, when cables from the research vessel Gabriella were able to haul the minisub to the surface.

"We knew he was still alive down there, but there was nothing we could do," said a fellow scientist aboard Gabriella. "He was trapped at nineteen thousand feet. It took us hours to free his submersible and haul it back to the surface." Dr. Ahearn was a professor of geology at the University of California, San Diego. He resided in La Jolla, California.

Jack said, "The s.h.i.+p's name was Gabriella." He and Gordon looked at each other, both of them struck by the same startling thought, Gabriella.

Palmer Gabriel.

"I'll bet you this was a SeaScience vessel," said Jack, "and Helen Koenig was aboard." Gordon's gaze s.h.i.+fted back to the screen. "Now this is interesting. What do you make of the fact Ahearn was a geologist?

"So what?" said Gretchen, yawning.

"What was a geologist doing aboard a marine research vessel?"

"Checking out the rocks on the sea floor?"

"Let's do a search on his name."

Gretchen sighed. "You guys owe me a night's worth of beauty sleep." She typed in the name Stephen D. Ahearn and clicked on "Search." A list appeared, seven articles in all. Six of them were about undersea death in the Galapagos.

One article was from the year prior to his death, "UCSD Professor to Present Latest Findings on Tekt.i.te Research. Will Be Keynote Speaker at International Geological Conference in Madrid." (San Diego Union) Both men stared at the screen, too stunned for a moment to utter a word.

Then Gordon said softly, "This is it, Jack. This is what they've been trying to hide from us." Jack's hands had gone numb, his throat dry. He focused on a single word, the word that told them everything.

Tekt.i.te.

JSC director Ken Blankens.h.i.+p's house was one of the anonymous tract homes in the suburb of Clear Lake, where so many JSC officials lived. It was a large house for a bachelor, and Jack saw that the front yard was immaculately groomed, every hedge clipped into submission. That yard, so well lit at three A.M. , was exactly what one would expect of Blankens.h.i.+p, who was notorious for his perfectionism as well as his almost paranoid obsession with security. There's probably a surveillance camera trained on us right this moment, thought Jack as he and Obie waited for Blankens.h.i.+p to answer the front door. It took several rings of the doorbell before they saw lights come on inside.

Then Blankens.h.i.+p appeared, a squat little Napoleon dressed in a bathrobe.

"It's three in the morning," said Blankens.h.i.+p. "What are you guys doing here?"

"We need to talk," said Gordon.

"Is there something wrong with my phone? You couldn't have called first?"

"We can't use the phone. Not about this." They all stepped into the house. Only after the front door swung shut did Jack say, "We know what the White House is trying to hide. We know where Chimera comes from." Blankens.h.i.+p stared at him, his irritation over a disturbed night's sleep instantly forgotten. Then he looked at Gordon, seeking confirmation of Jack's statement.

"It explains everything," said Gordon. "USAMRIID's secrecy. The White House's paranoia. And the fact that this organism behaves unlike anything our doctors have ever encountered."