The Rising(20)

“Like the time it might take a signal to reach Earth from another solar system.”

“Good thought but, no, not in this case. What we may be looking at here is more a harbinger. Define it for me, Dixon.”

“Something that foreshadows a future event.”

“Not exactly in this case, but close enough. A precursor for something else, now and eighteen years ago. There’s that number again. Significance, we must find the significance. Tell me you’re not as excited as I am, Dixon!”

“I am, but…”

“But? There are no ‘but’s in science, Dixon. Haven’t I taught you anything?”

“Lots. Everything.”

“Lots, yes. Far from everything. You know what they call a scientist who knows everything?”

“No.”

“God, Dixon, they call him God. Do I look like God to you?” he asked, turning away.

“Doctor?” she offered instead.

Donati swung, as if jarred from a trance. “What?”

“I was just going to say I have something else I have to do tonight. Not all of it; I mean, I just need to be gone for a few hours. I’ll come back the second I’m done.”

“A few hours,” he repeated, sounding more disappointed than perturbed. “And if you happen to miss history unfolding in that time, don’t blame me.”

“I won’t. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“See that it doesn’t. Because I have a warning for you, Dixon, an important one: science waits for no man.”

“Then I guess it’s a good thing I’m a girl,” Sam said, finally finding the courage to broach the subject she’d been rehearsing for days. “I need to tell you about … something I’ve uncovered. I wasn’t sure I should, but now I wonder if it might be, well, connected.”

“Wonderful! Connected to what?”

“This anomaly you found. Because I think I’ve found some too, an interconnected series of them.”

“Series of what?”

“Anomalies. Otherwise inexplicable individual phenomena until they are considered as a whole.”

“What phenomena?”

Sam thought of her stolen iPad, containing her findings, her proof. “It’s all on my iPad.”

“So show me.”

“I can’t. Somebody stole it last night.”

Donati nodded, eyes narrowing. “Got your cell phone?”

Sam fished it from her pocket. “Why?”

“Because it’s more powerful than the Friendship Seven that took John Glenn into orbit and even Apollo Eleven that brought man to the moon. Know what us scientists did in those days before e-mail?”

“What?”

“We talked. So talk to me, Dixon, explain it to me absent an iPad or supercomputer.”

“All right.” Sam tried, collecting her thoughts. “The largest avalanche in history occurred just last week in Nepal,” she told Donati, imagining the photos and overhead shots revealing the indescribable destruction. “Three towns were buried, thousands missing or dead. An estimated billion tons of snow and ice released from their perch to form a rolling wall that buried a hundred square miles.”

Donati nodded. “I’m glad I don’t ski. What else?”

“A lake in Spain.”

“I don’t swim, either. So what?”

“It exploded.”

“What exploded?”

“The lake. Well, not really exploded. More like combusted. A limnic eruption in which dissolved carbon dioxide, or carbonic acid, stages an escape from the waters that contain it, normally under intense pressure. In this case in an inordinately deep lake high on the flank of an inactive volcano in the Costa Brava region, complete with that pocket of magma leaking carbon dioxide into the water. A large cloud of carbon dioxide in the form of carbonic acid burst out of the water and suffocated around seventeen hundred people in nearby towns and villages. Spread for miles. No one in range was spared, livestock included.”

Sam seemed to have Dr. Donati’s complete attention now. His normally distant expression had tightened, as if the relentless energy driving him had throttled back a bit.

“Suffocated, you say. And why is this important, Dixon?”

“I’m getting to that,” Sam said. “Two weeks ago geothermal satellite readings confirmed one of the largest sea earthquakes ever recorded, in the Sargasso Sea, that released a tsunami wave—”

“Wait, did you say tsunami?” Donati interrupted.

“Yes,” Sam confirmed for him, “also believed to be the largest ever seen. It swallowed three islands, all uninhabited.”

Donati’s eyes bulged. He pulled at his graying ponytail with one set of tightly wrapped fingers. “What else?”

“A wildfire in South Dakota’s Badlands National Park.”

“Not tremendously unusual.”

“But witnesses said this one started on its own.”

“Spontaneous combustion,” Donati drawled, as if it hurt to get the words out.

“Boy Scouts on the scene said the ground just started burning, followed by the trees. I know it sounds crazy, but—”

“Not at all,” Donati said, seeming to picture it in his mind. “A fissure or crack going deep down beneath the surface.”