Cradle (50 page)

‘Hey,’ Nick replied, ‘I didn’t mean to start an argument. I was just suggesting—’

‘Okay, okay,’ Carol interrupted, loosening up a bit, ‘no harm done. I guess I am a
little quick on the trigger.’ She was quiet for a few seconds. ‘By the way, Nick,’
she remarked then, ‘there’s one part of this that I still don’t understand completely.
Why did Captain Homer go to such great lengths to hide the rest of the treasure all
this time? Why didn’t he just sell it off as soon as he could?’

‘Lots of reasons,’ Nick replied. ‘Not least of which was fear that he might somehow
be discovered and indicted for the perjury he committed during our trial. But this
way he also escapes the IRS, the value of the gold appreciates in time, and, most
importantly, Greta has to hang around if she wants her whole share. He almost certainly
converts some of it to cash from time to time, probably through a third party. But
never enough to call attention to the transaction.’

‘So you see, angel,’ Troy said, ‘that’s why there’s no way he can call the police.
Because he would have to admit everything. I bet he’s really pissed off.’

Troy pulled into a left-hand turn lane and waited for the signal to change. A car
pulled up beside them on the right, next to Carol, and she just happened to look idly
in that direction. It was a Mercedes.

Later, Carol would recall that time seemed to dilate for her. Each second of the next
minute was recorded in her memory in super slow motion, as if it were covering a much
longer period of time. Greta was driving Captain Homer’s car and was staring at Carol.
Homer was sitting beside her, waving his fists, shouting something that Carol couldn’t
hear through her closed window. Carol focused on Greta’s amazing eyes. Never had she
seen such hatred. For just an instant Carol looked away to alert Troy and Nick. When
she turned back she saw that Greta had a pistol pointed directly at her.

Three things happened almost simultaneously. Carol ducked, Troy pulled into the intersection
against the red light, barely missing a speeding car, and Greta fired the gun. The
bullet ripped through Carol’s window and crashed into Troy’s door, somehow miraculously
missing them both. Carol sat cringing under the dashboard in the front seat. She fought
against panic and tried to catch her breath.

The chase was on. It was after eleven-thirty on a Saturday night in Key West and the
traffic in the residential area was light. Troy’s Ford was no match for the Mercedes.
Twice more Greta manoeuvred into position and the Ford was sprayed with bullets. Windows
were broken and pitted but none of the occupants of the car was injured.

Nick was lying on the floor in the back seat. ‘Get downtown if you can,’ he shouted
at Troy. ‘Maybe we can lose them in the traffic.’

Troy was hunkered down behind the steering wheel as far as he could go. He could barely
see the roadway in front of them. He was driving like a lunatic, swerving across the
four-lane street into oncoming traffic, honking frantically, and making it impossible
for Greta to predict his next move. ‘Where are the cops when you really need them?’
he said out loud. ‘We have maniacs firing guns at us in the middle of Key West and
there are no men in blue anywhere in sight.’

After Nick’s suggestion Troy suddenly spun around in the middle of the street and
started heading in the opposite direction. Greta was not prepared. She hit the brakes
on the Mercedes, went into a skid, caromed off a parked car, and then resumed the
chase.

There were now no cars on the street in front of them and the Mercedes was closing
the gap. ‘Uh oh,’ said Troy, fearing another attack. He violently pulled the steering
wheel to the left, shot through an alley, into a car park, and back on to a narrow
street. A few moments later he made a quick turn into a driveway. The car became flooded
with light and Troy jammed on the brakes. ‘Everybody out,’ he yelled. While Nick and
Carol were trying to determine what was happening, Troy was giving his car keys to
a tall figure dressed in a red uniform.

‘We’re just having drinks,’ he said. They heard the screech of the brakes on the Mercedes.
‘And those people behind us,’ Troy said in a loud voice to the half dozen onlookers,
including two parking attendants, who were standing nearby, ‘have guns and are trying
to kill us.’

It was too late for Greta and Homer to escape. Troy had driven into the parking entrance
of the Miyako Gardens Hotel and already another car had come into the circular drive
behind the Mercedes. Greta threw the car in reverse, smashed against the grill and
bumper of the Jaguar behind her, and then tried to make a run for it by squeezing
around Troy’s Ford. Troy and the uniformed attendant dived for cover as Greta hit
the open door of the Ford, lost control of the Mercedes, and eventually crashed into
the parking kiosk in the middle of the driveway. As Nick and Carol stumbled out of
the car, four hotel security men surrounded Greta and Homer.

Troy walked over to join his friends. ‘Anybody hurt?’ Both Carol and Nick shook their
heads. Troy broke into a grand smile. ‘I guess that ought to take care of those characters,’
he said.

Carol gave him a hug. ‘It was a brilliant idea to drive here,’ she said. ‘What made
you think of it?’

‘Birds,’ Troy answered.

‘Birds?’
Nick responded. ‘What the fuck are you talking about, Jefferson?’

‘Well, Professor,’ said Troy, opening the door to the elegant hotel and following
his colleagues inside into the open atrium, ‘when they were about to catch us that
last time, I realized that they were probably going to kill us for stealing their
gold. And I wondered if there really were birds in heaven. My mother always told me
that there were.’

‘Troy,’ Carol said with a smile, ‘you are so full of shit. Come to the point.’

‘Exactly, angel,’ he answered. ‘Look around you.’ In the atrium of the Miyako Gardens
was a magnificent aviary whose tiny, threaded wire rose four storeys into the air
under a bank of skylights. Hundreds of colourful birds played among the vines and
palm trees and brought the real sound and feel of the tropics to the lobby of the
hotel.

‘When I thought about birds,’ Troy could no longer restrain a crazy laugh, ‘I realized
we were in the vicinity of this hotel and the plan sort of jumped into my mind.’

The three of them stood together and gazed up at the aviary. Carol was in the middle.
She reached out her hands to both men.

Beneath the emerald-green ocean the spacecraft rests quietly. Odd fishlike creatures
swim by, observe the visitor from the heavens, and then continue on their journey.
The final checkout before deployment is underway. When the checkout is completed,
a door near the bottom of the craft opens and a gold metallic sphere with a diameter
of about five inches appears. The sphere is tied down on top of a long, narrow platform.
The treads underneath the platform propel it down a small ramp and then across the
sandy ocean floor.

The flatbodied vehicle and its cargo disappear in the distance. After a long wait
the strange moving platform returns to the spaceship without the golden sphere. The
ramp slides back into the vehicle, the door closes, and the spacecraft is prepared
for launch. Soon thereafter the great ship eases forward in the water, rising until
it is just beneath the surface of the emerald ocean. It then reconfigures itself,
adds wings, steerable flaps, and other control devices, and breaks the water looking
temporarily like an airplane. Its ascent into the blue sky filled with light from
the twin suns is rapid and breathtaking. Orbital velocity is reached in almost no
time. Once in orbit above the atmosphere the aerodynamic surfaces are retracted and
the spaceship makes one final voyage around the planet Canthor. When it reaches the
proper true anomaly of its orbit, the craft accelerates quickly and hurtles again
toward the cold and dark of interstellar space. The third delivery has been completed;
nine more remain on its sixty millicycle mission.

Three millicycles pass. The next target planet is only six systems away, another oceanic
planet orbiting around a solitary yellow sun of unusual stability. The fourth cradle
will be deposited there, on the third body away from the star, a planet whose period
of motion about its central sun is so short that it makes fourteen revolutions in
one millicycle.

Before reaching the target, the spaceship makes a detour. It dives deep into the hydrogen-rich
atmosphere of the largest planet in the new system, thereby accomplishing two goals.
Its velocity with respect to the central star is significantly slowed through conversion
of kinetic energy to dissipated heat, and its reservoir of raw elements and primitive
chemical compounds, from which the on board manufacturing equipment creates all the
backup and replacement parts, is partially replenished. After exiting from the dive
into the thick atmosphere, the interstellar voyager covers the final distance to its
target in a leisurely six hundred nanocycles.

During the approach, the automatic software in the central computer goes through a
well-tested sequence designed to discover whether any of the conditions on the target
planet have changed since the last complete set of systematic observations three cycles
ago. Since the contents of each cradle have been uniquely designed, based upon the
environment of the specific planet where the zygotes must grow and flourish, any major
change in that environment could drastically reduce the probability of survival for
the repatriated species. Upon command from the computer, a battery of advanced remote
sensing instruments is deployed to confirm the original design specifications for
the planet.

But the instruments do not, as planned, validate the set of design assumptions. The
environment has changed. Not markedly, not as if it had been reworked on a massive
scale by an advanced intelligence for some specific purpose. The initial data strongly
suggests instead that during the last cycle or two some indigenous intelligence has
emerged that has had a nontrivial impact on both the planet’s surface and its atmosphere.

As the remote sensing instruments continue their survey of the target planet, something
even more unusual is discovered. There are artificial satellites, thousands of them,
in orbit around the body. A spacefaring species now makes this planet its home. An
alarm is triggered in the central computer of the spaceship. The zygotes and the cradle
system destined for this planet were not designed to deal with any other advanced
species.

However, the brilliant engineers of the Colony had anticipated that at least one of
the dozen target planets might have changed significantly during the three cycles
since the last regular observations. A contingency protocol for handling new situations
has been programmed into the approach sequence. Essentially, this protocol calls for
careful analysis of the new conditions on the planet, assessment of the impact of
those conditions on the key probability of survival parameters, and then, assuming
that the impact assessment is not unsatisfactory, transfer, where possible, of new
information into the electronic infrastructure responsible for the education of the
repatriated species after cradle deployment.

One of the special subroutines in the contingency protocol handles the surprise emergence
of a new spacefaring species. The first action in the sequence is the examination
of one of the orbiting satellites to assess its technological sophistication. With
great care the interstellar spaceship eases into a rendezvous position with one of
the artificial satellites that remains mostly stationary above a single region on
the rotating planet below. Using superfast burst algorithms stored in the communications
macro, the spacecraft searches for and establishes the command and telemetry frequencies
of its neighbour. But attempts actually to command the satellite fail, suggesting
an elaborate protective code embedded in the receivers and/or a complicated redundant
command procedure.

Without being able to command the satellite and thus assess its capabilities, the
visiting spaceship cannot conclusively establish the technological stage of the new
spacefaring species. The contingency protocol calls, in this situation, for trying
to ‘capture’ the satellite to perform
in situ
analysis,
provided
there is no obvious danger from devices on board the satellite itself. This particular
branch in the software logic for the spaceship was the subject of intense debate by
the oversight board of the Committee of Engineers back during the design process several
cycles earlier. Many of the more experienced engineers thought that it was risky to
include such a logic loop, primarily because of the possibility that a paranoid emerging
culture might arm their satellites with destructive devices that could not be easily
recognized and disarmed.

However, it was argued, on the basis of historical evidence from throughout the galaxy,
that since most incipient civilizations abolish warfare and aggression before they
become spacefaring, absence of a clearly identifiable destruct or protective device
was sufficient additional evidence to allow the careful capturing and dismantling
of a satellite. And everyone agreed that the detailed information about the technological
status of the new species that would result from such ‘reverse engineering’ would
be extremely valuable in completing the assessment of the risk to the repatriated
species.

Great remote manipulator arms extend from the spacecraft, seize the surveillance satellite,
and pull it into a large room with vaulted ceilings. An army of small electronic robots
attacks it at once, scurrying all over its surface with probes and attachments. Trillions
of bits of data about the satellite are fed into the primary data storage device in
the spaceship computer. The new spacefarers are not very advanced technically. In
fact, the computer algorithm concludes, it is very surprising that they have even
mastered launching and maintaining so many satellites.