End of Days Read Online Free Page A

additional powers,” Hay noted with a firm but friendly tone.
    “You’re saying that you have the right to kidnap a person?”
    “Yes.”
    “Next thing you’ll be telling me you have the right to take the life of anybody you please,” Sheppard said.
    Neither answered, and that silence was chilling.
    “Let me ask you a question, Professor Sheppard,” Donahue said. “Do you think that all human life is sacred?”
    “Of course I do.”
    “And is each life equally important?” he asked.
    “Theoretically, of course.”
    “So your life is no more valuable than that of any other person. Correct?”
    “That would be the logical position.”
    “And if there was an opportunity to save either the life of one man or the lives of ten, which would be the logical choice to make?” Donahue asked.
    “Ten lives, of course.”
    “How about one life or the lives of a million?”
    “The million,” Sheppard answered.
    “So there’s no doubt in your mind that your individual life would not be as important as the lives of a billion or two billion or eight billion other human beings?”
    “Now you’re just being facetious,” Sheppard said.
    “He’s not,” Hay replied. “You are here because there are billions of lives at stake, and you are one of those who holds the key to their very survival.”
    “That’s ridiculous. I can’t see how—”
    “Daniel, let him explain,” Markell said, putting a hand on the professor’s shoulder. “Just
listen.”
    Sheppard silently nodded.
    “You and many others have been working independently, and in isolation. This was by design. As long as you moved forward with your research, and there was no risk of you revealing the results, you were allowed to continue in this way.”
    “So I am here because I was going to publish.”
    “You’re here because of
what
you were going to publish, and the potential reaction to that knowledge becoming public,” Hay explained.
    “I still can’t see how the return of a long-lost space explorer is of such consequence.”
    “Can you please tell me, in a few words, your findings?” Donahue asked.
    “According to what I’ve been told, you are already well aware of my results, but regardless, in brief, the space explorer, which was launched over thirty years ago and left our solar system over fifteen years ago, has miraculously reappeared, sending radio signals back to Earth.”
    “Miraculous indeed,” Hay agreed.
    “Having plotted those signals over the past two years I have been able to project, with a fairly high degree of mathematical probability, that the explorer is returning home. It will, on some day twenty-four years hence, make a close pass by the planet of its origin, Earth.”
    “And to what factor or causal event do you attribute the return of the explorer?” Hay asked. “What caused it to reverse its course and plot its way back to our solar system?”
    “That is well beyond my area of expertise,” Sheppard admitted. “There might be numerous factors, though, certainly.”
    “Perhaps if you had more information, you could reduce numerous possible events to one probable event,” Donahue suggested. “Are you aware that the explorer is programmed to maintain a positional lock on Earth?”
    “That would only make sense. How else would it be able to send back signals, either during its initial stage of exploration or subsequently upon its re-emergence? That would be the only reason we are even aware that it’s returning.”
    “What you are
not
aware of, however, is the fact that we receive those signals on a regular basis—approximately every seventeen hours.”
    “Seventeen hours … but that makes no sense. Any interference from another planetary body would be sporadic. It wouldn’t be at any regular interval. The only thing that could possibly explain such a phenomenon would be that the explorer is somehow in an—” He stopped. He felt as if the blood had all rushed from his body, leaving him