Cradle (2 page)

Far above Canthor a gigantic cylindrical spaceship awaits the return of its robot
minions. Twenty miles on a side, this travelling planet opens itself to a fleet of
returning vehicles the size of large aeroplanes that bring back the quarry from Canthor.
The cylinder rotates slowly as Canthor and its giant moon shine in the background.
A solo laggard vehicle returns, a door opens to receive it in the back of the larger
craft, and for a while there is no more activity. At length the cylinder tips over
on its side and fires several small rockets. It is out of sight in seconds, departing
Canthor for other worlds.

The snow falls steadily on the huge man trudging silently through the forest. Clad
in skins, carrying a heavy load on his back and a large spear in one hand, he turns
his hairy unkempt face toward the others behind him, his family, and grunts at them
to hurry. There are five altogether, an infant carried by the woman and two teenage
children. The teenagers are wearing skins like their parents and have large bundles
slung across their backs. The teenage boy is also carrying a spear. At close distance
all of them look very weary, almost exhausted.

They break free from the forest for a moment and enter a meadow that surrounds a frozen
pond. The snow continues to fall, adding to the three inches that already cover the
ground. The father motions to his family to stop and approaches the pond gingerly.
As the others huddle together against the cold, the man takes a crude tool from his
bundle and, after brushing the snow off the surface of the pond in a small area, begins
to cut the ice. Almost an hour passes. Finally he succeeds, utters a grunt of happiness,
and bends down to drink the water. He pulls out a skin, fills it, and brings the water
to his wife and children.

The teenage daughter smiles at her father, a smile of love and admiration, as he offers
her the water. Her face is tired, etched with the lines of sun and wind and cold.
She reaches up to take the skin. Suddenly her face contorts with fear, she screams,
and her father turns just in time to protect himself from a snarling wolf, poised
in midair in attack. He strikes the wolf forcefully with his powerful arm, knocking
it away from its target, and then stumbles toward his spear on the ground beside the
pond. He grabs the spear and turns around quickly, prepared to defend his family.

Three wolves have attacked them. His son has deftly impaled one of the animals through
the midriff with his spear, but now a second wolf has pinioned the boy, defenceless,
in the snow, before he has been able to withdraw his weapon and strike again. In a
frenzy, the father jumps forward and thrusts his spear into the wolf attacking his
son. But it is too late. The hungry predator has already found the boy’s throat, severing
the jugular vein with one quick snap of his powerful jaws.

Whirling around, the caveman moves against the last of the wolves. His wife lies bleeding
in the snow and his infant child is unprotected, screaming in its wrappings some twenty
feet from the mother. The last wolf, wary of the huge man, feints an attack against
the father and then leaps for the baby. Before the man can respond, the wolf has grabbed
the baby by its clothes and headed off for the forest.

The young girl is spared physical injury in the attack but is devastated by the near-instant
death of her brother and the disappearance of her tiny sister. She holds her dead
brother’s hand and sobs uncontrollably. Her father stuffs virgin snow in his wife’s
wounds and then lifts her upon his back along with the heavy bundles. He grunts a
couple of times to his daughter and she finally, reluctantly, picks herself up and
starts gathering what remains of the family’s things into another bundle.

As night falls the three surviving members of the family are approaching some caves
at the edge of the forest. The father is near exhaustion from the weight of his wife
and the family’s meagre belongings. He sits down to rest for a moment. His daughter
stumbles down beside him, placing her head in his lap. She cries silently and her
father tenderly wipes away her tears. A bright light suddenly shines down on them
from above and an instant later all three are unconscious.

A tethered metallic basket about fifteen feet long and five feet wide descends in
the eerie snowy light and comes to rest softly on the ground beside the three humans.
The sides of the basket drop and metal belts extend themselves outward, wrapping around
each of the people. They are pulled into the basket, the sides of the basket are closed,
and the strange object then ascends into the snowy night. Seconds later the spotlight
disappears and life returns to normal in the prehistoric forest.

Above the Earth the giant cylinder sits quietly, waiting for its messengers to return.
The planet below is nearly cloudless and the great blue stretches of ocean tremble
like jewels in the reflected sunlight. Near the evening terminator, the low sun angles
show a vast expanse of ice extending down from the North Pole, covering almost all
of a large continent. To the west, across a great ocean and an all white northern
island, the midday sun shines on another large continent. It is also mostly covered
by ice. Here the ice extends southward across two thirds of the land mass and only
disappears completely as the continent begins to taper and the southern sea is reached.

The hunting shuttles sent out from the great cylinder return to their base and unload
their prey. The father, injured mother, and teenage daughter are inside the small
shuttle craft along with fifty to sixty other humans, selected from disparate points
around the world. None of the humans is moving. After the shuttle safely docks with
the mother ship, all the prehistoric humans are moved in a large van to a receiving
station. Here they are admitted and catalogued, and then taken inside a vast module
that re-creates the environment of Earth.

Far above the Earth, the last of the drone scouts returns to the giant cylinder. There
is a momentary pause, as if some unknown checklist were being verified, and then the
cylindrical space vehicle disappears.

They were there on the beach at sunrise. Sometime during the night seven whales had
run aground at Deer Key, five miles east of Key West. The powerful leviathans of the
deep, ten to fifteen feet long, looked helpless as they lay floundering on the sand.
Another half-dozen members of this misguided pod of false killer whales were swimming
in circles in the shallow lagoon just off the beach, obviously lost and confused.

By seven o’clock on the clear March morning, whale experts from Key West had arrived
and were already beginning to coordinate what would later become a concerted effort
by local fishermen and boating enthusiasts to push the beached animals back into the
lagoon. Once the whales were off the beach, the next task would be to coax the entire
pod into the Gulf of Mexico. There was little or no chance that the animals would
survive unless they could be returned to open water.

Carol Dawson was the first reporter to arrive. She parked her sleek new Korean station
wagon on the shoulder of the road, just off the beach, and jumped out to analyse the
situation. The beach and lagoon at Deer Key formed a cove that was shaped like a half
moon. An imaginary chord connecting the two points of land at the ends of the cove
would extend almost half a mile across the water. Outside the chord was the Gulf of
Mexico. The seven whales had penetrated the cove in the centre and were beached at
the point farthest from the open sea. They were about thirty feet apart and perhaps
twenty-five feet up on the sand. The rest of the whales were trapped in the shallows
no more than a hundred feet offshore.

Carol walked around to the back of her station wagon. Before pulling out a large photographic
case, she stopped to adjust the strings on her slacks. (She had dressed quickly this
morning when awakened in her Key West hotel room by the call from Miami. Her exercise
sweat-suit was hardly her usual working attire. It hid the assets of a shapely, finely-tuned
body that looked closer to twenty than thirty.) Inside the case was a collection of
cameras, both still and video. She selected three of the cameras, popped a couple
of sweets from an old packet into her mouth, and approached the beach. As she walked
across the sand toward the people and the beached whales, Carol stopped occasionally
to photograph the scene.

Carol first approached a man wearing a uniform from the South Florida Marine Research
Centre. He was facing the ocean and talking to two Naval officers from the Marine
Patrol section of the US Naval Air Station in Key West. A dozen or so local volunteers
were in close orbit around the speakers, keeping their distance but listening intently
to the discussion. Carol walked up to the man from the research centre and took him
by the arm.

‘Good morning, Jeff,’ she said.

He turned to look at her. After a moment a vague smile of recognition crossed his
face.

‘Carol Dawson,
Miami Herald
,’ she said quickly. ‘We met one night at MOI. I was with Dale Michaels.’

‘Sure, I remember you,’ he said. ‘How could I forget a gorgeous face like yours?’
After a moment he continued, ‘But what are you doing here? As far as I know, nobody
in the world knew these whales were here until an hour ago. And Miami is over a hundred
miles away.’

Carol laughed, her eyes politely acknowledging and thanking Jeff for the compliment.
She still didn’t like it but had grudgingly grown to accept the fact that people,
men especially, remembered her for her looks.

‘I was already in Key West on another story. Dale called me this morning as soon as
he heard about the whales. Can I interrupt you for just a minute and get some expert
comments? For the record, of course.’

As she was speaking, Carol reached down and picked up a video camera, one of the newest
models, a 1993 Sony about the size of a small notebook, and began interviewing Dr.
Jeff Marsden, ‘the leading authority on whales in the Florida Keys’. The interview
was standard stuff, of course, and Carol herself could have supplied all the answers.
But Ms. Dawson was a good reporter and knew the value of an expert in situations like
this.

Dr. Marsden explained that marine biologists still did not understand the reasons
for whale beachings, although their increased frequency in the late eighties and early
nineties had provided ample opportunities for research. Most experts blamed the beachings
on infestations of parasites in the individual whales leading each of the unfortunate
pods. According to the prevailing theory, these parasites confused the intricate navigation
systems that told the whales where to go. In other words, the lead whale somehow thought
his migration path led on to the beach and across the land; the others followed because
of the rigorous hierarchy in the pod.

‘I’ve heard some people say, Dr. Marsden, that the increase in whale beachings is
due to us and our pollution. Would you care to comment on the accusation that our
wastes as well as our acoustic and electronic pollution have undermined the sensitive
biosystems that the whales use to navigate?’

Carol used the zoom on her tiny video camera to record the furrowing of Jeff Marsden’s
brow. He was clearly not expecting such a leading question from her this early in
the morning.

After thinking for a moment, he answered. ‘There have been several attempts to explain
why there are so many more beachings now than were recorded in the past. Most researchers
come to the inescapable conclusion that something in the whales’ environment has changed
in the last half-century. It is not too far-fetched to imagine that we may well have
been responsible for the changes.’

Carol knew she had the right quotes for a perfect short piece for television. She
then quickly and professionally wrapped up the interview, thanked Dr. Marsden, and
walked over to the onlookers. In a minute she had plenty of volunteers to take her
out into the lagoon so that she could take some close-up photographs of the confused
whales. Within five minutes not only had Carol finished several discs of still photographs,
but she had also rigged up her video camera with a stabilizing tripod on one of the
little boats and recorded a video clip of herself explaining the beachings.

Before leaving the beach at Deer Key, Carol Dawson opened up the back of her station
wagon. It served her well as a portable photo laboratory. She first rewound and checked
the video tape that she had taken, listening particularly to hear if the splashing
of the whales could be heard behind her while she was in the boat. Then she popped
the discs from the still cameras into readers to see if she liked all the photographs.
They were good. She smiled to herself, closed the back of the station wagon, and drove
back to Key West.

Carol finished the redundant transfer of the videotape through the modem to Joey Hernandez
in Miami and then called another number. She was sitting in one of the private cubicles
inside the large new communications room at the Key West Marriott. The screen in front
of Carol indicated that the connection for her new number had been made, but there
was not yet any picture. She heard a woman’s voice say, ‘Good morning, Dr. Michaels’s
office.’

‘Good morning, Bernice, it’s Carol. I’m on video.’

The monitor cleared in a second and a pleasant, middle-aged woman appeared. ‘Oh, hi,
Carol. I’ll tell Dale you’re on the line.’

Carol smiled as she watched Bernice swivel her chair and roll over to a panel of buttons
on her left. Bernice was almost surrounded by her desk. In front of her were a couple
of keyboards connected to two large screens, a variety of disc drives, and what looked
like a phone embedded in another monitor. Apparently there had been no room for the
communications panel adjacent to the phone, so Bernice had to roll three to four feet
in her chair to signal to Dr. Dale Michaels that he had a call, that it was on video,
that it was Carol, and that it was coming from Key West. Dr. Dale, as he was known
by everyone except Carol, liked to have plenty of information before he answered the
phone.