Gravity

by Tess Gerritsen

  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 1, into the U.S. lab. The stench of dried blood was just as strong in here, and even in the gloom, she could see the dark splatters on the walls. She floated across to the 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 thrashing 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 corkscrewing in agony. A thread of blood curled out from between the hind legs, broke off into swirling droplets. Emma knew what would come next: the final flurry of seizures as the brain dissolved into a soup of digested proteins. She 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 umbilical cord.

  “Jack,” she whispered. “Jack!”

  “I’m here.”

  “The mouse—the female—”

  “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 realized…”

  “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, to be pawing through another woman’s private possessions. Even a 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 tomorrow—if we got the hormones up to you—”

  “They won’t launch! And even if you could send up a whole damn 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 signals—an internal communication system at the cellular level. They work by activating or repressing gene expression. By changing the cell’s programming . . .” He was rambling now, letting his stream of consciousness lead him toward a 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 of the right lock in which to fit. Maybe if we studied the data from SeaScience—if we could find out what other DNA Dr. Koenig grafted onto this organism’s genome—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 more 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 item 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 the payload computer. The monitor glowed an eerie amber in the darkened module. She called up the operations data files and clicked on “ESA.” European Space 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 dozens…”

  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. But 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 mass measurement data.

  “Emma?”

  “Hold on, hold on! I’ve got the most recent mass 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 mass in normal saline…plug in my body weight as forty-five kilograms . . .” She typed in the numbers. She was making wild assumptions here. She didn’t know how quickly HCG was metabolized, or what its half-life would be. The answer at last appeared on-screen.

  “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.”

  THE ORIGIN

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It was 1:45 A.M., and Jack’s vision was blurred from fatigue, the
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 glasses, for that matter—thick horn-rim glasses that magnified her pinched eyes. “I’m telling you guys, this is all I can find on Lexis-Nexis search. Almost nothing on Helen Koenig. On SeaScience, there’s only the usual corporate news releases. And as for the name 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 the media is on the financial pages of The Wall Street Journal. Business articles about SeaScience and its products. There’s no biographical 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 hits 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.” (Washington 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 and 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 Galápagos Diving Accident’ (New York Times).”

  “The Galápagos,” said Jack. “That’s where Dr. Koenig discovered the Archaeon strain. In the Galápagos 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 Galápagos 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 ship’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 shifted 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 his undersea death in the Galápagos.

  One article was from the year prior to his death:

  “UCSD Professor to Present Latest Findings on Tektite 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.

  Tektite.

  JSC director Ken Blankenship’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 in the glare of the security lights, 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 Blankenship, 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 Blankenship to answer the front door. It took several rings of the doorbell before they saw lights come on inside. Then Blankenship appeared, a squat little Napoleon dressed in a bathrobe.

  “It’s three in the morning,” said Blankenship. “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.”

  Blankenship 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.”

  “What did you find out?”

  Jack answered the question. “We know Chimera has human, mouse, and amphibian DNA. But USAMRIID won’t tell us what other DNA is on the genome. They won’t tell us what Chimera really is, or where it comes from.”

  “You told me last night the bug was sent up in a SeaScience payload. A culture of Archaeons.”

  “That’s what we thought. But Archaeons are not dangerous organisms. They’re incapable of causing disease in humans—that’s why the experiment was accepted by NASA. Something about this particular Archaeon is different. Something SeaScience didn’t tell us.”

  “What do you mean, different?”

  “Where it came from. The Galápagos Rift.”

  Blankenship shook his head. “I don’t see the significance.”

  “This culture was discovered by scientists aboard the vessel Gabriella, a ship belonging to SeaScience. One of those researchers was a Dr. Stephen Ahearn, who was flown out to Gabriella, apparently as a last-minute consultant. Within a week, he was dead. His minisub became trapped at the bottom of the rift, and he suffocated.”

  Blankenship said nothing, but his gaze remained focused on Jack’s.

  “Dr. Ahearn was known for his research on tektites,” said Jack. “Those are glassy fragments produced whenever a meteor collides with the earth. That was Dr. Ahearn’s field of expertise. The geology of meteors and asteroids.”

  Still Blankenship said nothing. Why isn’t he reacting? Jack wondered. Doesn’t he understand what this means?

  “SeaScience flew Ahearn to the Galá
pagos because they needed a geologist’s opinion,” said Jack. “They needed confirmation of what they’d found on the sea floor. An asteroid.”

  Blankenship’s face had gone rigid. He turned and walked toward the kitchen.

  Jack and Gordon followed him. “That’s why the White House is so scared of Chimera!” said Jack. “They know where it comes from. They know what it is.”

  Blankenship picked up the telephone and dialed. A moment later, he said, “This is JSC director Kenneth Blankenship. I need to speak to Jared Profitt. Yes, I know what time it is. This is an emergency, so if you could connect me to his home . . .” There was a moment’s silence. Then he said into the phone, “They know. No, I did not tell them. They found out on their own.” A pause. “Jack McCallum and Gordon Obie. Yes, sir, they’re standing right here in my kitchen.” He handed the receiver to Jack. “He wants to speak to you.”

  Jack took the phone. “This is McCallum.”

  “How many people know?” was the first thing Jared Profitt asked him.

  That question instantly told Jack how sensitive this information was. He said, “Our medical people know. And a few people in Life Sciences.” That was all he’d say; he knew better than to name names.

  “Can you all keep it quiet?” asked Profitt.

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether your people cooperate with us. Share information with us.”

  “What do you want, Dr. McCallum?”

  “Full disclosure. Everything you’ve learned about Chimera. The autopsy results. The data from your clinical trials.”

  “And if we don’t share? What happens?”

  “My colleagues at NASA start faxing every news agency in the country.”

  “Telling them what, exactly?”

  “The truth. That this organism is not terrestrial.”

  There was a long silence. Jack could hear his own heartbeat thudding in the receiver. Have we guessed right? Have we really uncovered the truth?