He forgot his own creatures for a moment and began hammering on Rebecca’s back, screaming wildly as the creatures went flying, unable to get a grip on the smooth surface of the suit.
“The jellyfish can’t penetrate the biosuits,” Crowe said calmly.
“It’s not them I’m worried about,” Fatboy muttered.
There was a swirling in the fog near the door to the fire escape, and Tane thought he glimpsed a white shape through the mist.
“Here they come,” he breathed.
“The pool,” Rebecca suddenly said. “Water works. Get in the pool!”
“Everybody in the pool,” Crowe ordered. “Now!”
“What about Xena?” Rebecca asked, but a pair of hands cut short the argument, shoving her violently in the back, toppling her headfirst into the water. She didn’t see who did it, but Tane did. It was Lucy Southwell.
Tane let himself over the side of the pool and splashed into the deep water. He sank like a stone and fought a rising panic, until he realized that he was in a fully self-contained suit, with its own oxygen supply. He hoped the metal case of the Chronophone really was watertight.
Fatboy was talking, but Tane could not hear him. Crowe motioned them all into the center of the pool and held out a hand. Manderson laid his hand on Crowe’s, and after a slightly confused moment, the rest followed.
Crowe’s voice sounded suddenly in Tane’s ear. “The radio signals don’t travel underwater. But if you touch one of the other biosuits, the signal will travel directly from one to the other.”
“The entire suit acts as an aerial,” Manderson explained.
“Still think it’s terrorists, Dr. Crowe?” Rebecca asked, a little cynically.
Crowe ignored her.
“How do you know we’ll be safe in here?” Fatboy asked.
Crowe replied immediately, “They can only survive and move in the mist. You kids were right. The fog can’t penetrate the water, so the creatures can’t either.”
The suits were all black again. The jellyfish released their hold the moment they hit the water and floated to the surface. They bobbed around there for a little while, hundreds of them, and gradually disappeared.
It was left to Tane to ask the next obvious question as vague shapes moved around the sides of the pool and across the surface of the water above them. Large, whitish shapes, indistinct and blurred through the water of the pool.
“How much oxygen do these tanks have?” he asked. “How long can we stay down here?”
EPIPHANY
The water above Tane rippled with the passage of one of the—what were they?—above him. The sun, still high in the sky, diffused down through the opaque whiteness of the mist above, then softened and soothed further by the wash of the pool water into the dull brightness of a child’s toy lamp.
When one of them passed over the surface of the water—never breaching the surface—the resulting ripples created undulating patterns over the light blue walls and floor of the pool.
Tane sat with his back to the pool wall and watched the soft light play over the faceplate of Rebecca’s suit. Here under the water, the tinted faceplates turned to mirrors, preventing any glimpse of the face inside.
She could be smiling at him. She could be scowling. He had no way of knowing.
What were they? The snowmen. The human mind always tries to rationalize things. To fit what it sees to what it already knows. To judge new experiences by previous experiences. Tane’s mind wanted to believe that the creatures that now ruled the world above them were human, in some strange costume perhaps. But no matter how hard his mind tried to rationalize that, the image kept recurring of the shape at the door, just as it exploded into a million shards of glass. And human beings couldn’t walk across water. Besides, he had a horrible feeling that they had seen one of these things being born. In the fog tank.
A darker shadow blocked the light for a moment by the edge of the pool. Xena. She had been wandering around the poolside since they had jumped in. Looking for them. Wondering when they would resurface. Rebecca hadn’t mentioned Xena again. Fortunately, the snowmen were no more interested in Xena than the jellyfish had been.
Xena moved on, lurching around the poolside. She must be just about as confused as they were, Tane thought with an ironic inward laugh.
He looked around the bounds of their underwater prison. Rebecca sat opposite him, unmoving. Maybe even sleeping, although he doubted it. Southwell was next to her. Just to his right, Fatboy and Crowe were sitting next to each other against the end wall of the narrow pool, and Manderson had stretched out full length on the bottom of the pool, as if resting.
It was surprisingly comfortable, once you got used to the hiss and click of the oxygen valve. The water bore most of his weight, cushioning him in a soft cradle.
He checked his oxygen levels again. Half full. Crowe had said they had about four hours on a single tank, which was all they had.
Crowe touched him on the arm and his voice came over the radio.
“You went to a lot of trouble to save that suitcase, son.”
Rebecca looked up, and Crowe motioned her to join in the conversation. Southwell did also, but Fatboy and Manderson remained where they were.
Crowe repeated his comment, then added, “These cryptic comments you keep making. ‘Water works’ and ‘Don’t go mist.’ And the submarine. They’re written down in that notebook of yours, aren’t they? It seems that you know more than you are letting on.”
“Tell him, Rebecca,” Tane said, pressing his radio button. “It can’t do any harm now.”
After a moment, Rebecca’s voice came through his earpiece. She said, “Do you remember telling us that we did not know what you might believe?”
“I remember saying something like that.”
“Then would you believe me if I told you that we’ve been receiving messages from the future, warnings about what is going on now?”
Crowe said, “I remember Tane blurting something about that just before you jumped off my ship. Go on, convince me.”
Rebecca said, “We discovered a way of deciphering messages embedded in bursts of gamma radiation, picked up by a NASA satellite.”
“From whom, exactly?”
“From ourselves.”
There was a brief silence. Then Crowe said, “Okay. It’s a bit far-fetched so far, but under these circumstances…Carry on.”
Rebecca explained, “Only so many characters can fit into a gamma-ray burst, so the messages have been extremely short and cryptic. But we figured out enough to buy the submarine, to try to stop the Chimera Project, and to end up in the mess we’re in now.”
Tane added, “We’re not scoring too well at the moment.”
“No,” Crowe mused. “If it were true, and I’m not saying I believe you just yet, then it would raise some interesting complications. Have you heard of the grandfather paradox?”
“Oh God, don’t start,” Tane groaned. “You’ll be building a Möbius strip soon.”
“What?” Crowe asked, but got no answer.
“I’ve been thinking about the snowmen,” Rebecca said.
So that was why she had been so still for so long.
She continued, “And I don’t think they fit with your theory of bacterial clusters.”
“Go on,” said Crowe.
“And you surely don’t still think we’re dealing with terrorists?”
“Possibly not.”
Rebecca lapsed back into silence.
A new voice joined the conversation, and Tane realized that Manderson had shifted one of his long legs across, touching Rebecca’s and thus linking him in to the conversation.
Manderson said, “I might try sticking just my hand above water and seeing if I can pick up a signal. Let the others know where we are.”
Crowe’s helmet bobbed up and down in a nod. “Worth a try.”
Manderson rolled himself into a sitting position, then squatted, tentatively raising a hand up into the air above the po
ol.
“Blue Three, this is…” He stopped talking and snatched his hand into the water again as fast ripples spread across the surface of the pool toward him. The light cascaded in waves over the sides of the pool as some kind of feeding frenzy took place above them.
The short flurry of activity died away as Manderson lay back down on the floor of the pool. “Won’t be trying that again,” he said.
“Any chance the fog will move on?” Tane asked.
“It’s several miles wide and growing,” Crowe answered. “It won’t pass us by in time. We only have a couple of hours of air left.”
“And then what?” Rebecca asked.
“You tell me,” Crowe replied. “Ask your friends from the future.”
Manderson asked, “How did they know that I was there? I’m in a biosuit; they can’t smell me. They can’t see me, except for my hand. They’re not bothering Z1. How did they even know who or what I am?”
“Maybe they know what a human hand looks like,” Crowe conjectured.
The words connected with some hidden memory in Tane’s brain, and he said absently, “Shape recognition.”
“What’s that again?” Rebecca asked abruptly.
“Shape recognition,” Tane repeated, wondering where he had heard the phrase before.
Rebecca removed her hand, cutting herself out of the conversation, and was still again, thinking.
Tane looked at his oxygen gauge. What would they do when the air ran out? Face the snowmen? Pray that the fog had moved on more quickly than they expected? The only thing to do now was wait it out. “Don’t move too much,” Crowe had said to them just after they had submerged. “It uses oxygen.”
The tranquillity of the pool bottom was shattered suddenly with a huge splash, and Tane’s heart leaped inside his chest as something plunged into the water at the shallow end of the pool. It was a snowman. It had to be a snowman. He cowered away from the shock wave that swept past him and fought the urge to surface. That would be fatal.
It wasn’t a snowman. It was a rescue harness, attached to a long steel wire cable.
Crowe was at the harness in a second. He ignored it and grabbed the wire cable with his hand, using his free hand to key his radio.
It took Tane a moment to realize what he was doing. The steel cable acted as a huge aerial, taking the signal from Crowe’s radio out above the water. He touched Crowe lightly on the ankle, to hear the conversation.
“Rescue helicopter, this is Dr. Crowe of the USABRF,” Crowe said. “We are mighty glad to see you.”
A New Zealand accent came back through the earpiece, terse and professional. “Dr. Crowe, how many in your party? Over.”
“Six. How fast is your winch?”
“Two feet a second at full speed. Why do you ask? Over.”
“Not fast enough. We will be attacked on the way up. I repeat, we will be under attack on the way up. You have to get us clear of the fog faster than that.”
“We could climb as we winch. That would more than double the speed. Over.”
“That’ll have to do.”
Crowe motioned Rebecca toward him and strapped her into the harness. He grabbed the wire again. “Crowe to rescue helicopter. Allow some slack in the line also. Then start climbing and winching at the same time. You’ll whip us out of here like a slingshot.”
“Roger that. Over.”
“First person ready,” Crowe said. “Take her away.”
Rebecca grasped onto the harness tightly, as if she might fall out of it, although it was a secure-looking strap. Tane lifted a hand in a kind of goodbye wave, but she was already gone.
She was there one moment and not there the next as the whiplashing cable snatched her from the bottom of the pool like a tiny doll on the end of a bungee cord.
A moment or two later, the harness splashed back into the water, near Crowe. He pointed to Tane.
The harness felt snug and secure around his shoulders, but like Rebecca, he grasped it firmly. He had seen the speed of the whiplash and did not want to be jerked out of the harness by it. He clipped the handle of the Chronophone to a metal clip at his shoulder.
The cable above him tensed, and then suddenly the water was gone, fog rushing down past him. White shapes roared toward him, rising up with him, but then he was above the mist, hanging below a large black helicopter in the broad sunshine of a beautiful summer’s day.
He wanted to scream with exhilaration. It had been a short but wild ride. He clambered over the side of the helicopter with a little help from a crewman as he was winched on board.
He looked down. The helicopter was hovering well clear of the fog. Being careful. Just as well, he thought. If you knew what was roaming around in there, though, you’d be a lot higher still.
Ten or twenty minutes later, they were leaving the fog-covered township of Orewa behind them, soaring high above the mist on the black blades of the chopper.
Crowe was leaning forward, busy on the radio, asking questions, and answering them as well. Their faceplates were open and the fresh air tasted great.
Crowe sat back after a few moments and his eyes were grim. Tane had heard why. Four of his men had disappeared when the mist had rolled in from the north.
“What about Xena?” he asked Fatboy.
“We’ll go back for her later,” he said carefully. “When the fog has cleared.”
Tane wasn’t sure if that was likely to happen or not, but he let it go. He didn’t want to upset Rebecca any further.
She had been silent since they had been snatched off the rooftop, thinking, wordlessly working away inside her own mind. She looked up now, though, and said suddenly, “I know what they are.”
All eyes were on her.
“I bought into the idea of bacterial clusters”—she was looking directly at Crowe—“of giant pathogens, because we didn’t have any other ideas. But that didn’t explain, that couldn’t explain, the snowmen.”
She paused, thinking, and Crowe took the opportunity to interject, “It’s the best guess we’ve got. Until some more reasonable explanation is found. And I mean reasonable, not some fantastical story about—”
Rebecca was staring at him now, frowning, a look of realization slowly dawning on her face.
“You know, don’t you? You don’t want to admit it, but you know too.”
Crowe interrupted, “I don’t know what you’re—”
“The moment that Tane said ‘shape recognition.’ That’s when you realized. You couldn’t not have known. You’re an immunologist. Heck, I’m just a fourteen-year-old kid, so it took me a little longer to work it out, but you must have known straightaway.”
Southwell seemed shocked. “Rebecca, are you saying what I think you’re saying? My God, you’d better be wrong.”
“They are bacterial clusters,” Crowe insisted.
“They’re not! And you know they’re not.” Rebecca was thinking furiously now. “The strange Y-shaped jellyfish. Those…things…in the fog. It’s so obvious. You do know. I know you know.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Tane shouted. “What are they? What are the jellyfish if they’re not bacterial clusters?”
Rebecca spoke distinctly, as the rotor blades of the helicopter changed pitch in preparation for landing.
“Antibodies,” she said.
IMMUNITY
Manderson lowered his eyes and smiled quietly to himself. Crowe just sighed tiredly. Only Lucy Southwell looked kindly at Rebecca and said, “You know that’s impossible, don’t you?”
Manderson looked up with a bemused expression and said, “I suppose that would make the big ones, the snowmen, phagocytes of some kind.”
“Macrophages,” Rebecca said firmly. “Mother Nature’s immune system. Now triggered by Dr. Vicky Green. Against the human race.”
Southwell put a hand on her arm. “Rebecca, it’s an imaginative idea but just not very likely. Antibodies are simple proteins. They’re microscopic.”
“I never said
they were human antibodies,” Rebecca said, and wouldn’t say anything else until the helicopter had landed on the lined green surface of the main playing field at the North Harbor Sports Stadium in Albany.
The Command and Control Center was set up in a sponsors’ lounge on the fourth floor of the stadium. Through huge plate-glass windows, the green rectangle of the rugby ground was now home to a number of helicopters and row upon row of armored fighting vehicles, preparing for battle.
Tane, Rebecca, and Fatboy were waiting to leave. Their transportation was coming up from the central city. All vehicles here apparently were already hard at work, transporting troops and equipment to build the defensive line.
“They are antibodies,” Rebecca finally spoke again, in a small but determined voice. “Antibodies and macrophages. Accept it. You have to. You can’t defeat what you can’t understand.”
Crowe glanced momentarily up from a detailed topographical map of the surrounding area that he and a gray-haired officer from the SAS had been poring over for about fifteen minutes, discussing something called kill zones, along with fields of fire and “claymores.”
Crowe said without any further trace of humor, “Rebecca, even if that were possible, think about what you’re saying. That would make us—human beings—pathogens. Antibodies attack pathogens.”
“I know,” Rebecca said softly.
Crowe shook his head and turned back to his work. An SAS trooper entered, saluted, and passed a note to the SAS officer.
Rebecca said, “We think of the Earth as a lump of rock, floating through space. Just a big stone, conveniently placed in a nice warm spot for us to grow on, like mold on cheese. But that’s just a way of thinking about it. What if we thought of this planet in a different way. As a complex web of interrelated ecosystems, host to billions upon billions of smaller organisms.” She paused. “Not all that unlike the human body when you think about it.”
The Tomorrow Code Page 20
