At this point, however, no one appeared to notice or to care. They were rolling her through the steel air lock. On the other side, Winston Bartlett was already waiting, standing next to a gurney with straps.

No!

Chapter 34

_Friday, April 10

9:34 P.M.

_

She was still conscious as David and Debra lifted her onto the gurney.

There was no operating table in the laboratory, but this procedure did not require one. It consisted of a series of small subcutaneous injections along both sides of the spine, followed by a larger injection at the base of the skull.

As the injections began, she drifted into a mind-set where she was never entirely sure how much was real, how much was fantasy, how much deliberate, how much accidental. She remembered that she felt her grasp of reality slipping away, but there was no sense of pain. Instead, images and sensations in a sequence that corresponded to the pa.s.sage of time drifted through her mind. It was couched in terms of the people she knew.

The first image was her mother, Nina, and they were together, struggling through a dense forest Initially, she thought they were looking for her father's grave, but then it became clear they were searching for some kind of magic potion that would save her mother's life. As they clawed their way through tangled tendrils and dark arbors, she became increasingly convinced their quest was doomed, that she was destined to watch Nina pa.s.s into oblivion.

But then something happened. The forest opened out onto a vast meadow bathed in sunshine. In the center was a cl.u.s.ter of snow-white mushrooms, and she knew instinctively that these would bring eternal life to anyone who ate them.

"Come," she said to Nina, "these can save you."

"Ally, I'm too old now. I don't want to be saved. There comes a moment in your life when you've done everything you feel you needed to do.

You've had the good times and now all that's left is the slow deterioration of what's left of your body. It robs the joy out of living."

"No, Mom, this is different," she said plucking one of the white mushrooms and holding it out. "This prevents you from growing any older. You'll stay just the way you are. You can have a miracle."

"'To never escape this vale of tears? To watch everyone you love grow old and wither and die? Is that the 'miracle' you want me to have?" Then she looked up at the flawless blue sky and held out her arms as though to embrace the sun. "My mind Ally. You've given me back my mind. Now I can live out whatever more life G.o.d will see fit to give me and actually know who I am and where I am. That's miracle enough for me."

As she said it, a beam of white light came directly from the sun and enveloped her. Then the meadow around them faded away and all she could see was Karl Van de Vliet, who was bending over her and lifting back her eyelids.

"Alexa, I can't tell you what you're about to feel, because no one has ever been where you're about to be. G.o.d help us, but we're on the high wire without a net here. But any new cell configurations should immediately form tissue that's a facsimile of what's already there.

That's what the simulations show."

She was listening to him, not sure if he was real or a dream. Then she heard Bartlett's voice.

"Why are you talking to her, Karl? She can't hear you."

"We don't actually know whether she can or not. At some level I think she's aware of her surroundings. In a way we should hope that she is.

If there are going to be impacts on her consciousness, I'd rather she be alert and able to remember what it was like."

Then the voices drifted away, but she was sure she had no control over anything. The white mushrooms. She was thinking about them again. Only now they were above her and growing toward the sky and then she realized she was underground, buried and looking up from her own grave.

What happened next was a journey through time--somewhere in the far- distant future. She seemed to be watching it through a large window, unable to interact with what was happening on the other side.

Time.

She felt a sensation at the back of her neck and the images faded away.

"This d.a.m.ned well better be right" came a voice. "There's not going to be another chance."

"I did an activity simulation for a range of antibodies, just to make sure she wouldn't automatically reject the enzyme because of the earlier injection." The voice belonged to Karl Van de Vliet Her mind was clearing and she recognized it "But all the results indicate that the effect of the antibodies is essentially washed out at this concentration of active enzyme. Have the good grace to let me try to get this right."

She was listening and trying to understand what was going on. Her mind had been drifting through time and s.p.a.ce, but now she was aware that something new was happening. The hallucinations, the conversations around her, all were beginning to focus in, to build in intensity.

But that was not what was really happening; it was merely a mask over something that had entered the laboratory, some kind of force.

Then her vision began to work in a strange way that felt more like a sixth sense. She was "seeing" what was going on in the room, even though her eyes were shut. Or perhaps they weren't. She didn't know and she was still strapped to the gurney, so she had no way to check.

"Kristy," Winston Bartlett said dismay in his voice, "you shouldn't be in here. You should be resting."

"What the h.e.l.l are you doing down here?" Van de Vliet demanded. The pitch of his voice had noticeably gone up.

Who? Ally wondered. Who's he talking to?

There are definitely new people in the room.

"Come on, Ally," said a voice in her ear, urgent. This time she knew who it was. It was Stone. "d.a.m.n them all. I'm getting you out of here.

Now."