Immune

by Richard Phillips

  The sound of the Smythe kitchen door opening into the garage brought Heather's head up in time to see Mark stride in, a broad grin spreading across his face.

  "I've figured out how to give Jack the information he wants, but not in the way he expects."

  Jennifer looked up from her computer on the workbench.

  "Okay. How is that?"

  As Mark's gaze settled on his twin's face, a brief glint of anger darkened his features before he turned back toward Heather. She didn't know how long his bitterness toward his twin would hang on, but at least they were still working on the same team.

  "I've read everything that is available in the public record, and I couldn't come up with anything that would point us to the classified computer network that might have the information. Then it hit me. Only someone with Jack's experience would know how to do that."

  Heather nodded slowly, the light dawning in her mind. "So we just need to provide Jack with a link where he can find the information himself."

  "Right. We need to let him feed in the coordinates of a building, and then we establish a link from here, feeding the information across the QT link to Jack's computer."

  "I can do better than that if we can get the subspace transmitter working in time," said Jennifer. "I can drop a program on Jack's machine that will let him log in to our system here and do the search himself."

  Heather's eyes narrowed. "I don't think it's a good idea to give him that kind of control of our subspace transmitter."

  "We would still be in control," Jennifer continued. "We could limit him any way we wanted to. Maybe we would just give him a couple of hours of access on certain days. And we could monitor whatever he was doing."

  Mark sat down on a stool on the other side of the workbench. "Jack would figure we were monitoring him."

  "Sure. That's his problem."

  Heather shook her head. “I don’t like helping Jack search for people he is probably going to kill.”

  Before Mark could respond, Jennifer leaned toward Heather. “We can’t control what Jack does. We can only hope that he’s on our side.”

  As the three teens glanced from one to the other, Mark stood up.

  "Then I guess you two better get this thing working before we run out of time."

  "Where are you going?" Jennifer asked.

  "For someone who does whatever she wants without telling us, you're awfully nosey."

  "Fine. Forget it."

  "I will."

  The door slammed behind Mark before Heather could interject. Jennifer scowled after him, then turned her attention back to the computer. Deciding there was nothing she could say to break the icy quiet, Heather focused her thoughts back on the theoretical problem at hand.

  Three days to produce a breakthrough of this magnitude wasn't much time. But if they were going to have any chance to pull it off, Jennifer was going to need her help. Maybe if she focused hard enough, she could forget about the psychiatrist and the possibility that she might be going crazy.

  55

  Mark's pace quickened, his anger rising as the front door slammed behind him. As he stepped out onto the street, he broke into a ground-burning jog, nothing fast enough to attract attention, just enough to burn off some of the energy building up within him.

  He could feel his heart thundering in his chest, pumping blood through his body in massive pulses, which only fed his need to hit someone. Mark knew something was wrong with him. He had known it since their last experience in the alien ship. Ever since that day, his emotions had been jacked up, leaving him feeling stretched taught, a pinprick away from an explosion.

  It wasn't just anger either. Every emotion had been amplified so heavily that he felt like someone had shot him with an elephant-sized dose of adrenaline. Right now, the only thing he knew to control it was to get away from everyone.

  In addition to his becoming an adrenaline junky, there were other changes going on with his body. For one thing, Mark wasn't sleeping. He just didn't feel the need. That was one change that didn't bother him. Although he had to stay in his room so that his parents wouldn't discover his sleepless nights, he had used the time to practice his speed reading. The only problem he had run into with that practice was difficulty in turning the pages fast enough.

  Another nighttime activity he had taken to was meditation. He had thought that if he could improve his already considerable meditation skills, then perhaps he could get control of the emotional thunderstorms that raged through his brain and body. However, when the adrenaline rushes hit, he had no time to begin a meditation, and once he was in thrall to the attack, it took several minutes of concentration to restore a quiet to his mind.

  His workouts helped, so he had thrown himself into a routine that even an Olympian would have found exhausting. Now, as Mark turned off the street, cutting out onto a bike trail into the woods, he could feel the muscles rippling beneath his skin. He had certainly put on some more muscle mass, but he wasn't bulked out. Ripped was the word that popped into his mind.

  A stiff breeze had sprung up, carrying with it eddies of coolness that hinted at a coming storm. As the trail opened out onto the ridgeline, Mark could see the line of thunderheads in the distance, dark streaks of rain hanging like a curtain below them.

  Good. Let the rain come. Maybe it would cool his overheated brain.

  Mark increased his pace. It felt good to stretch out into a real run. His sister's angry face swam into his mind. Shit, after the way he had treated her, Jen had a right to be angry. Mark knew he should already be over his own anger at what she had done. Shutting down the ship had probably been what they would have done even if they had talked it over first. He should have already forgiven her, but he just couldn't.

  The first drop of rain smacked him in the face, the big, fat globule splattering on his forehead as twin forks of lightning split the sky across the canyon. Mark's eyes focused on the scene ahead. Christ. He didn't think he had been running that long.

  Half a mile ahead, the finger of land they called The Mesa came to a point, below which the Second Ship rested in its cave. But the spot no longer resembled the place they had come to know so well.

  Military vehicles had been parked in precisely aligned rows just inside a newly erected chain-link fence topped with concertina razor wire. A guard bunker abutted the gate, and though he could imagine guards with machine guns pointed outward, Mark was unable to see them in the gathering darkness of the storm.

  Another gust of wind brought a swarm of droplets splashing down, a swarm that was followed by a downpour as the sky opened up. There at the edge of the wood line, as bolt after bolt of lightning ripped the black clouds, Mark stared in the direction of their lost ship, his tears washed from his cheeks by the rain.

  56

  Freddy stared through the Nikon's viewfinder, the image magnified by the zoom lens until it seemed that he could reach out and touch it. The gothic-style mansion looked as out of place in Podunk, California, as an igloo in Miami.

  Built by a New Yorker named Winston Archibald, who had struck it rich selling dry goods to miners during the California gold rush, the place looked like he hadn't been able to decide whether to build a cathedral or an English castle. Desirous of seclusion, Mr. Archibald had chosen a location near the rural community of Porterville for his monstrosity.

  Once completed, the mansion occupied the center of 120 acres of lawns, hedges, and gardens, the entire compound surrounded by a ten-foot-tall wrought-iron fence. After his death, the estate had passed to the State of California, which had converted it to an asylum for the criminally insane.

  Unfortunately for Porterville, an extremely violent inmate had escape from the compound on Christmas Eve, 1949. His subsequent atrocities had caused an uproar in the horrified community that had forced the state to close Archibald Mansion and transfer the inmates to more secure facilities elsewhere in the state.

  In the years that followed, Archibald Mansion fell into disrepair. Then, in 1986 the property had
been purchased by the Henderson Foundation, the old buildings and grounds restored. Renamed Henderson House, the estate now provided round-the-clock care for patients suffering from severe mental and physical handicaps.

  As a private foundation, Henderson House received its funding from a combination of private charities and from the fees it charged for the care of its wards. From what Freddy had discovered in three weeks of snooping, many of the patients were the unwanted retarded spawn of the super-rich. For others at the facility, there was no background information at all, but somebody was paying the bills.

  The deeper Freddy dug, the more the Henderson House creeped him out. He hadn't been sleeping a lot, but the creepiness wasn’t the cause. For one thing, he’d been following a convoluted money trail. He’d been able to call in a few favors from sources in the banking industry and at the treasury department, but the data they had provided was raw and unfiltered. And, as with all unfiltered data, someone had to do the filtering. While there was plenty here to keep an investigator busy for years, Freddy's interest was limited to recent arrivals at the facility.

  He had been lucky to pick up the trail that had led him here. After he had uncovered the empty coffin of Billy Randall and the subsequent murder of Dr. Callow, the Barstow medical examiner, Freddy had tracked down Callow’s secretary. Mary O’Reilly had been at work on the day the bodies of Billy Randall and his family had been picked up from the Barstow morgue. A night at the bingo hall had netted a description of the two men who had come to collect the bodies for transport to the LaGrone funeral home in Wickenburg, Arizona.

  Mrs. O’Reilly, a talkative Irish woman in her mid-forties, had remembered that the men had seemed out of place for funeral home employees. But when she had asked for identification, both men had supplied the proper credentials, which were promptly verified by Dr. Callow.

  Except for the uncomfortable feeling that she had gotten from the two men, Mary could only remember one other oddity. As one of the men had removed his identification card from his wallet, a second card had fallen onto the desk. Mary had reached out to hand it back to him, but the man had scooped the ID card up fast, as if he didn’t want her to see it. Even though she hadn't been able to see much, she remembered a stylized logo, the letters HH connected in flowing golden script.

  Freddy leaned forward as the auto-winder on the Nikon buzzed, directing the camera at the massive gates that blocked the entrance to the old Archibald Mansion grounds. There in flowing golden letters, the twin Hs of Henderson House filled his lens.

  57

  Power. The pulse rippled through every fiber of his extended being, from the nerve endings in his skin, along the neural pathways in the alien computers, crawling along the mechanical systems of the ship itself. Raul had never felt such exultation.

  Even though it had been what he was hoping for, the resulting energy produced from this one tiny wave packet disrupter surprised him. It was only one cell in a shipboard power production grid that had once enjoyed billions working in tandem, but it was his first major repair. And it would allow him to do so much more without worrying about draining the limited shipboard energy reserves.

  The technology behind the disrupter was relatively simple but made human nuclear technology seem laughable in comparison. Raul's ability to periodically tap into the Internet had allowed him to feed on information he hadn't learned in high school, information that the ship's neural network processed effortlessly. And whatever the ship knew, Raul knew. After all, his thinking was augmented by the ship's superior, although damaged, brain.

  The human concept of quantum physics was really quite funny, beginning with the dual nature of light. Because scientists couldn't figure out how a photon could act like both a wave and a particle, they just decided it was both, applying two completely inconsistent models to the same thing, a particle governed by waves of probability.

  As if waves of probability could physically interfere with each other. Typical scientific nonsense.

  The true comedy was in the way earth technology attacked the problem of determining the structure of matter. In order to understand how particles were pieced together, they built giant accelerators to smash particles into one another at high speed so they could watch for what pieces flew out. It was like jamming a stick of dynamite up someone’s ass and setting it off so you could examine his organs. What remained after the explosion was quite different than before.

  Matter really had little to do with the notion of particles. The universe was actually made of stuff through which energy waves traveled, a substance with very tiny grains. Those waves traveled through the substance at only one speed—the speed of light.

  Certain combinations of waves could combine to form stable vibrational packets, something like musical chords. Only a limited number of frequency combinations formed stable packets, and these produced the elements in the periodic table.

  But there were other wave packets that did not form harmonically stable chords. Unstable packets tried to get rid of the clashing frequencies, giving off radiation as they attempted to move to a more harmonious combination.

  Most human nuclear reactors were fission reactors, which packed unstable elements tightly together so that the splitting packets combined with others, producing a chain reaction. Fusion reactors crammed together two relatively stable wave packets into one massively discordant jumble. The resultant mess radiated hard in its attempt to cast off the incompatible frequencies.

  Both these processes were inefficient in the extreme. The way the disrupter technology worked was different. Since every particle is composed of a specific set of vibrational frequencies, it merely had to know what those frequencies were. Then it could send a complete set of canceling frequencies, an anti-packet, which would result in an instantaneous and total release of all energy. Or it could cancel selected frequencies in the particle, resulting in controlled instability, which bled off energy at a controlled rate.

  The disrupter cell could do either equally well. It could use any type of matter as fuel, although some elemental wave packets were easier to manipulate than others. Its other function was to collect the energy that had been released from the particle and pass that energy to the ship's systems. There was no need for energy storage. Matter was the stored energy.

  Actually, that was not completely correct. The disrupters did require energy to start the entire process once they had been shut down. It was the one thing that had worried Raul about this test. The ship had a store of energy reserves, but these had been heavily depleted by Raul's worm fiber experimentation. And even though a single disrupter cell was tiny, there was a risk that attempting to restart the repaired cell could drain the remainder of those shipboard reserves.

  Fortunately, that had not happened. Now he had power. It wouldn't be enough to let him do everything he wanted, but it would increase the amount of time he could operate the systems.

  There was something he needed, and this was going to help him get it.

  Raul crawled higher along the wall, the set of umbilical cables that dangled from his amputated legs trailing along behind him. Extracting a specially designed tool from a hidden niche, Raul returned to the floor, propping himself against the near wall.

  Taking a deep breath, he brought the instrument down to his leg stumps, slicing deeply into the skin around the umbilical. Dr. Stephenson’s crude connections had served their purpose. It was now time to establish a more complete linkage with the ship. Besides, a tail was no fitting appendage for a child of God.

  58

  Shift.

  Heather struggled to make sense of the sudden change of surroundings although she had no doubt what had happened. A fugue. It wasn’t quite right, but it was the word she had come to call the eerie dream state into which her conscious mind was sometimes summoned.

  The place where she now found herself was like nothing she had ever imagined. In the gray light, it was hard to focus her vision, almost as if she drifted in a fog. All around her strange mach
inery filled the room, odd conduits snaking between them in a jumble of chaotic connections.

  She heard something, a skittering noise, but when she tried to turn toward it she found herself unable to move, draped with some sort of invisible force that held her suspended above the floor.

  Heather gasped. She hung in the air, face upward, completely naked.

  Concentrating her efforts, Heather struggled, her renewed efforts having no more effect than her first. Something was with her here in the room, something that moved along the walls just outside her vision, something that was getting steadily closer.

  A deep-seated dread consumed her, rising in intensity with each passing second. Heather increased her concentration, casting away the self-image-imposed limitations that usually blocked her from using all of her neurally enhanced strength. Straining until it seemed that she would tear every muscle in her body, Heather failed to produce the slightest change in position. She couldn't wiggle so much as a finger or a toe.

  As a small child, she had once tried to crawl through a drainage pipe and had gotten stuck, her arms pinned to her sides. It had taken the fire department two hours to get her out. The sense of claustrophobic panic Heather had felt in that pipe washed her once again, hyperventilation further constricting her chest.

  The other thing in the room was close now, so close she could feel the subtle current in the air from its excited breathing. In that air, Heather could feel a sick desire radiating toward her.

  A hand caressed her cheek from behind, slowly making its way along her throat, the fingers quivering as they moved down along her chest. Heather braced herself against a growing revulsion, accompanied by a vague sense of familiarity, as a new purpose formed in her mind. She needed to see the face connected to that hand.