Something inside her let go then, a tangled knot of fear and tension that had been building ever since she'd seen David shoot the gunman in his kitchen. A stuttering rush of sobs came from her throat.

"Dr. Weiss?" said McCaskell. "Are you all right?

"Yes… thank you so much for calling. There's something terrible going on, and Dr. Tennant has been trying to warn the president about it."

"Try to calm down, Doctor. I know you have a med¬ical situation there, so I'm going to bring Dr. Ravi Nara in on our call. I'm told he's the only man who has the knowledge to deal with Dr. Tennant's problem."

Rachel tensed at the mention of Nara. There was a crackle as though the connection had been lost.

"Dr. Nara?" said McCaskell. "Are you there?"

A precise voice in a higher register came on the line. "Yes, hello? Dr. Weiss? This is Ravi Nara. Can you hear me?”

CHAPTER 34

My eyes opened like those of a newborn, startled by the world's bare brightness. As I blinked against the overhead bulb, my body announced itself with aching hunger and an overwhelming urge to empty my bladder. I sat up and looked around. I was sitting in a medical treatment room. I'd worked in dozens just like it.

'Water, I thought. I need water.

A woman somewhere said, "I can't begin to thank you for this." Her voice was familiar. I listened for more words, but none followed.

A door opened across the room. Rachel walked in and froze. Then her hand flew to her mouth, and she started toward me.

"David? Can you hear me?"

I held up my hand, and she stopped.

"You've been in a coma. You've been out for…" she looked at her watch-"fifteen hours. Alpha coma nearly all that time. I thought you were brain dead." She pointed at my face. "Why are you crying?"

I wiped my face. My fingers came away wet. "I don't know."

"Do you remember anything? The seizure at the church?"

I remembered kneeling, then thrusting my fingers through a hole in a silver plate. A current of energy had shot into my arm, straight up to my brain, a current too intense to endure. I felt as though my mind were a tiny glove, and the hand of a giant was trying to force its way inside it. My body began to shake, then…

"I remember falling."

"Do you remember anything after that?"

I fell toward the floor, but before I reached it, the boundary of my body melted away, and I felt an oceanic unity with everything around me: the earth and rock beneath the church, the birds nesting among the stones above, the flowers in the courtyard and the pollen they loosed on the wind. I was not falling but floating, and I saw that a deeper reality underlay the world of things, a pulsing matrix in which all boundaries were illusory, where the pollen grain was not distinct from the wind, where matter and energy moved in an eternal dance, and life and death were but changing states of both. Yet even as I hovered there, floating in the world like a sentient jellyfish, I sensed that beneath that pulsing matrix of matter and energy lay something still deeper, a thrumming substrate as ephemeral and eternal as the laws of mathematics, invisible but immutable, governing all without force.

The thrumming was deep and distant, like turbines churning in the heart of a dam. As I listened, I discerned a pattern, more numerical than melodic, as of an undis¬covered music whose notes and scales lay just beyond my understanding. I tuned my mind to the sound, searching for repetitions, the elusive keys to any code. Yet though I listened with all my being, I could not read meaning in the sound. It was like listening to a rain¬storm and trying to hear the pattern of the individual drops as they hit the ground. Something in me craved knowledge of the underlying order, the vast sheet music that scored the falling of the rain.

And then I understood. The pattern I was searching for was no pattern at all. It was randomness. A pro¬found randomness that pervaded the seeming order of the world. And in that moment I began to see as I had never seen before, to hear what few men had ever heard, the voice of-

"David? Can you hear me?"

I blinked and forced myself to focus on my surround¬ings. Medical cabinets. An EEG machine on a cart. Rachel's exhausted eyes.

"I hear you."

She took a step forward, wringing her hands. "I called Washington. I told them we were here. I didn't know what else to do."

"I know."

"Did you hear the call?"

"No."

"Then how did you know?"

The same way I know we're in danger now. I looked down and started to pull the IV line from my wrist.

"Don't do that!"

"We have to go."

Her eyes went wide. "What?"

"This is going to bleed when I pull it out. Could you find me a bandage? Where are my clothes?"

She quickly closed the distance between us and stopped me from pulling out the IV. "David, you're not yourself right now. You've been unconscious for a whole night. I spoke to Ewan McCaskell. The president is flying Ravi Nara over here to treat you. He's seen this type of coma before. He was in one himself for over thirty hours, and he woke up with no ill effects. They want to help us-"

"Ravi Nara was never in alpha coma. His MRI side-effect was uncontrollable sexual compulsions. Nothing else."

"But he told me-"

"He told you what he knew would calm you down. We have to leave. Now."

"But the president wants to get to the truth. McCaskell told me that, and I believe him."

There was no way I could communicate the knowl¬edge inside me without appearing insane. I stood, and the sheet fell away from my body.

"If we stay here, we won't live to see the president. I have something very important to do. Please get my clothes."

As Rachel looked toward a bag in the corner, I yanked the IV catheter from my wrist. Dark blood ran down the back of my hand. I applied pressure, then went to the counter and found a 4x4 bandage in a glass jar. Rachel saw what I was doing and taped the gauze tightly over the IV site.

"Keep your hand on that," she said. Then she got the plastic bag from the corner and laid it on the examining table. "Your clothes."

There was a commode against one wall, but no cur¬tain or partition for privacy.

"I need to use that," I told her, pointing.

"Go. I've seen it before."

I walked to the commode and turned my back to her.

"Why do you think people are coming to kill us?" she asked.

"Because nothing has changed in their minds. And now they know where we are."

"You still don't trust anyone? Not even the presi¬dent?"

"The president has no idea what's really happening."

I walked back to the table and slipped on my shirt, then fastened my money belt around my waist.

"But where do you want to go?" Rachel asked.

"White Sands."

"Where?"

"White Sands Proving Ground." I carefully pulled on my pants, then sat on the floor to put on my shoes. "It's in New Mexico."

"Why do you want go there?"

"That's where the real Trinity prototype is."

"How do you know that?"

"I just know."

She shook her head. "You're scaring me, David."

"Don't think about it."

"Wait." She held up one hand. "That's what was in Andrew Fielding's FedEx letter. White gypsum. White sand. Is that what he was trying to tell you? Where the second Trinity site was?"

"Yes. He wanted to let me know, but he didn't want anyone who intercepted that letter to know that he knew." I looked at the closed door. "What part of the hospital are we in?"

"The emergency department."

"Good. First floor. You know the way out?"

"Yes, but…"

I stood and took her hand in mine. "Everything has changed, Rachel. I know what I have to do. But we have to go now."

I saw her faith in me cracking under the weight of her training as a psychiatrist and her desire to deny the danger.