Cradle (21 page)

They were standing in front of a large tank with crystal-clear water. About half a
dozen small whales were swimming in circles around the tank, occasionally going to
the surface for air. ‘You came and asked my opinion in the beginning, my young friend,’
he said quietly. ‘And I told you that I thought your souls were not compatible. Do
you remember what you said to me?’

‘Yes,’ she answered with a rueful smile. ‘I asked you what the chief scientist of
MOI could possibly know about souls. I’m sorry, Oscar. I was sorry at the time. I
was so headstrong. Dale looked great on paper and I wanted your approval—’

‘Forget it,’ he interrupted her. ‘You know how I feel about you. But never underestimate
a scientist. Some of them,’ he said abstractedly, ‘want to know facts and concepts
so that ultimately they can understand the overall nature of every thing. Including
the putative soul.

‘Now take these whales,’ Oscar continued, increasing the tempo and adroitly changing
the subject. ‘We have been mapping their brains for almost a decade now, isolating
various kinds of functions in specific locations, and trying to correlate their brain
structure with that of a human being. We have been reasonably successful. The language
function that governs their singing has been separated and the location of the physical
controls for all parts of the body have been identified. In fact, we have found an
area in the whale brain that corresponds to the equivalent function for every major
capability in the human brain. But there’s still a problem, a mystery if you will.’

One of the whales stopped in its normal circuit about the tank. It seemed to be watching
them. ‘There’s a large section of their brain that we have been unable to allocate
to any specific function. A brilliant scientist years ago, after listening to the
whales’ songs while they were migrating and correlating those songs with the rest
of their behaviour, postulated that this large, unmapped portion of their brain was
a multidimensional memory array. His hypothesis was that the whales store entire incidents
in that array, including sights, sounds, and even feelings, and that they relive these
incidents during migration to alleviate the boredom. Our tests are starting to confirm
his theory.’

Carol was intrigued. ‘You mean, they might put in that array the entire set of sensory
impressions from something important, like calving, and then have, in a sense, a full
instant replay during a particularly boring part of the migration route? Wow. That’s
fascinating. My memory irritates me all the time. It would be great if somehow I could
go in there, in a directed sense, and pull out anything I want. Complete with feelings.’
She laughed. ‘There have been times in the summers when I couldn’t remember exactly
how great it felt to ski and almost panicked, worrying about whether or not that feeling
might be gone the next winter.’

Oscar waved at the whale and it swam away. ‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘Other people have
also thought that it would be fantastic if our memories were more complete, like a
computer’s. But suppose we did have a perfect, multidimensional memory like that hypothesized
for the whale. And suppose we had the same lack of entry control that is characteristic
of human memory as it now exists. You know, where
what
we remember and
when
we remember it are not under our individual control. Then there would be problems.
We might even be nonfunctional as a species. A song, a picture, a smell, even the
taste of a cake might suddenly force us to confront anew the full emotions associated
with the death of a loved one. We might have to see again a painful fight between
our parents. Or even the trauma of our own birth.’

Oscar was quiet for a moment. ‘No,’ he said finally, ‘evolution has served us in good
stead. It couldn’t develop an entry control mechanism for our memories. So to protect
us, to keep us from being demolished by mistakes or past events, evolution built a
natural fade process into our memories—’

‘Carol Dawson. Carol Dawson. Report immediately to the audiovisual conference room
adjacent to the director’s office.’

The loudspeaker interrupted the quiet in the MOI aquarium. Carol gave Oscar a hug.
‘It’s been great, Ozzie, as always,’ she said, watching him wince as she used her
pet name for him. ‘But it looks like they’ve finished developing the pictures. Incidentally,
I think the whole business about the whales’ memories is fascinating. I want to come
back and do a feature on it. Maybe next week sometime. Give my love to your daughter
and grandson.’

Carol had become so engrossed in the discussion with Oscar that she had momentarily
forgotten why she had flown to Miami early that morning. Now she felt anew a keen
sense of excitement as she drove back to the main MOI administrative building from
the aquarium. Dale had been confident at breakfast that processing the infrared images
would reveal something of interest. ‘After all,’ he had said logically, ‘the foreign
object alarm was triggered repeatedly. And nothing could be seen in the visual images.
Therefore, either the infrared observations caused the alarm or the algorithm did
not work properly. The second possibility is very unlikely, since I designed the data
flow myself and my best programmers tested it after it was coded.’

Dale was uncharacteristically excited when she walked into the conference room. Carol
started to ask him a question, but was silenced by a vigorous negative motion of the
head that followed his smile of greeting. Dale was talking to two of the image-processing
technicians. ‘Okay, then, we’re squared away? Display the images in this sequence.
I’ll call for each one by using the pickle.’ The technicians left the room.

Dale came over and grabbed Carol. ‘You are not going to believe this,’ he said, ‘what
a bonanza. What a fucking bonanza!’ He settled down a little. ‘But first things first.
I promised myself that I wouldn’t spoil it for you.’ He showed her to a seat at the
conference table in front of the large screen and then sat down beside her.

He pushed the remote-control switch. Up on the large screen came a still frame of
the three whales in the reef area under the boat. The fissure could clearly be seen
to the right and beneath the whales. Dale looked at Carol. ‘I see,’ she shrugged,
‘but what’s the deal? I took pictures with my underwater camera that are just as good.’

Dale turned back to the screen and pushed the remote several more times. The successive
scenes zoomed in on the hole in the coral reef, eventually isolating and centring
on a small glint in the lower left side of the fissure. Again Dale looked at Carol.
‘I have a similar blowup,’ she said pensively. ‘But it’s impossible to tell if something
is really there or if it’s an artifact of the photographic process.’ She stopped herself.
‘Although the fact that two distinctly different techniques found the light in essentially
the same place suggests that it might not be a processing distortion.’ She leaned
forward, interested. ‘So what’s next?’

There was no way he could contain himself. Dale jumped up and started pacing around
the room. ‘What’s next,’ he began, ‘could be your ticket to the Pulitzer dinner in
New York. Now I am going to show you exactly the same sequence of images, only these
were taken in the infrared a fraction of a second later. Watch closely, especially
in the centre of the fissure.’

The first processed infrared image covered the same area underneath the boat as the
first visual image had shown. In the infrared picture, however, what was shown were
thermal variations in the scene. In the processing, each pixel (an individual picture
element in the image) was given a specific temperature based on the infrared radiation
observed from that portion of the frame. Similar temperatures were then grouped together
by the computer processing and assigned the same colour. This process created isothermal
regions, or regions of roughly the same temperature, that were visually connected
by colour. The result was that in the first picture the whales stood out in red, most
of the reef plants were blue, and the normalized water temperature formed a dusky
grey background. It took Carol a moment to adjust to the display. Dale was smiling
triumphantly. Before Carol had a chance to focus on two small regions, one red and
another brown, down in the centre of the hole in the reef, the zoom process had begun.
In a few seconds an infrared close-up of the fissure clearly demonstrated why Dale
was so excited.

‘I told you there was something under the boat,’ he said, walking to the screen and
pointing at a brown, elongated object. The object was cylindrical at one end and tapered
to a point at the other. The fissure had been blown up by the zoom process so that
it almost completely filled the screen. Even with all the magnification, the quality
of the infrared image was superb. Inside the opening three or four different colours
could be seen; however, only two, the brown and the red, were continuous over a significant
number of pixels.

‘Holy shit,’ said Carol, involuntarily rising from her seat and walking over to join
Dale, ‘that brown thing must be the lost missile. It was underneath us all the time.’
She picked up the pointer and waved it at the screen. ‘But what’s this red area? It
looks like the Cheshire cat from
Alice in Wonderland.’

‘I’m not absolutely certain,’ Dale replied, ‘and it’s probably not anything of major
significance. But I do have a crazy idea. Actually it’s based on what you told me
about the strange behaviour of the whales down there. It
may
be the head of another whale, back away from the light, looking out of the cave.
Or whatever the opening is. Here, look at this. By zooming out a little we obtain
one single picture that shows both of the red isothermal regions. Look how the red
region in the middle of the fissure and the red from your sentinel whales look the
same. Even with additional stretching, the two regions remain comparable in temperature.
Not a proof of any kind, but it certainly supports my proposition.’

Carol’s mind was racing ahead. She was already planning her next move. It was essential
that she retrieve that missile before anybody knew it was there. She needed to return
to Key West as soon as possible. She picked up her purse and her briefcase. ‘Can someone
drive me to the airport, please, Dale? Right now. I want to call that Lieutenant Todd
again and scare him a bit. You know, make him a little more cautious and buy some
time for us.’

She paused, thinking of a million things at once. ‘But I can’t call him from here
without making him suspicious… And I must make some arrangements for a boat for tomorrow…
Oh, incidentally, I assume you have hard copy of those pictures available for me.’

Dale nodded his head. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘But first sit down and relax for a second.
I want to show you something else. I don’t yet know if it’s a real phenomenon, but
if it
is….’
Carol started to protest, but there was something in his manner that told her to
acquiesce. She sat down. He launched into a discussion of enhancement algorithms,
explaining how the information in pictures could be stretched to highlight special
features and allow easier interpretation.

‘Okay, okay,’ she said at length. ‘The bottom line is what I need. I know already
how clever you and your engineers are.’

Dale put the first infrared image back on the screen, the one that showed the full
view of the three whales underneath the boat. ‘This picture does not have much thermal
granularity. Every pixel in the region coloured red, for example, does not correspond
to exactly the same temperature. In reality, the spread in temperatures for the same
colour is roughly five degrees. Now if we stretch the image, and make the isothermal
regions only cover a total spread of
two
degrees each, we obtain this picture.’

In the new image there were ten different colours. It was much harder to see individual
features, and spurious data points made the picture extremely difficult to interpret.
A portion of the front of one of the whales was now a different colour from the rest
of the animal.

‘The limit of accuracy of the equipment, by the time the raw spectral data is converted
to temperatures, is about one degree. If we show another stretch of the same picture,
with the connected isothermal regions now only covering a total range of one degree
each, then the picture almost becomes gibberish. Now, there are twenty different colours
for the isothermal regions and, because the noise or error in each data point is of
the same magnitude as the spread in the isothermal region, it is virtually impossible
to see the figures of known objects like the three whales. I tell you all this up
front to make certain you realize that what I am about to show you may be completely
wrong. It is, nevertheless, absolutely fascinating.’

The next image projected on the screen was a close-up down on the floor of the ocean,
just above the trench that Carol had followed when backtracking to find the origin
of the tracks. The familiar parallel lines barely showed up in the infrared image.
The fissure was almost off the left side of the image. On either side of the trench,
blue colour broken with some occasional green marked the two reefs. Carol looked at
Dale with a puzzled expression on her face.

‘This close-up has the same five-degree granularity as the big reference image. There
is nothing of note here.’ He flashed another picture. ‘Nor here, where we have increased
the number of colours to ten again. But look at this.’ One more image went up on the
screen. The picture was very difficult to follow, much less interpret. As many as
twenty different colours connected odd regions in what appeared to be random patterns.
About the only things that were regular in the picture were the background rocks on
which the coral and other sea life were living. And it was those background rocks
that had Dale so excited.

‘This is what I wanted you to see,’ he said, waving his hand at the rocks on the two
sides of the trench. ‘The two reef structures do not have the same colour. For some
unknown and absolutely inexplicable reason, every background rock area on
this
reef is coded chartreuse. On the opposite reef, just across the trench a few feet
away, all the background rock is yellow. A one-degree difference. Now if some of the
yellow pieces were interspersed with the chartreuse, and
vice versa
, then I would say that the data clearly has no significance and that what we are
seeing are noise signatures. But this pattern is compelling.’