Cradle

by Arthur C. Clarke

  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 p
ictures 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.’

  Carol was lost. She could see that the rocks on one reef structure were all chartreuse and that the opposite reef was yellow. But it didn’t mean anything to her. She shook her head. She needed more explanation.

  ‘Don’t you understand?’ Dale said with a final dramatic flourish. ‘If this data is right, then we have found something else of great importance. Either there is some source inside one of the reef structures that is making its surface uniformly warmer, or, and I admit this sounds truly incredible, one of the two is not a reef at all and is something else masquerading as a reef.’

  4

  It was almost always impossible to find a parking place in the middle of the working day near Amanda Winchester’s house in Key West. The Hemingway Marina had revitalized the old part of the city where she lived, but as usual everyone had underestimated the need for parking. All the repainted and renovated nineteenth-century mansions along Eaton and Caroline Streets had signs on the street saying such things as DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT PARKING HERE IF YOU’RE NOT A RESIDENT, but it was no use. People who worked in the retail shops around the marina parked where it was convenient for them and avoided the heavy parking fee at the marina.

  After searching fruitlessly for a parking place for fifteen minutes, Nick Williams decided to park outside a convenience store and walk the block or so to Amanda’s house. He was strangely anxious. Part of his nervousness was due to his excitement, but he was also feeling guilty. Amanda had been the major sponsor of the original Santa Rosa expedition and Nick had spent considerable time with her after they had found the treasure. Amanda and Nick and Jake Lewis had all three believed that Homer Ashford and his ménage à trois had somehow hidden part of the treasure and then cheated them out of their proper shares. Nick and Amanda worked together trying to find evidence that Homer had stolen from them, but they were never able to prove anything conclusively.

  During this period Amanda and Nick had become quite close. They had seen each other virtually every week and for a while he had thought of her as an aunt or grandmother. But after a year or so, Nick had stopped going to visit her. He hadn’t understood it at the time, but the real reason he began to avoid her was that Amanda was too intense for him. And she was always too personal. She asked him too many hard questions about what he was doing with his life.

  On this particular morning he had no real options. Amanda was widely recognized as the expert on sunken treasure in the Keys. There were two components in her life, treasure and the theatre, and her knowledge of each was encyclopedic. Nick had not called first because he didn’t want to discuss the trident unless she was willing to see him. So it was with some trepidation that he rang the doorbell on the front porch of her magnificent home.

  A young woman in her early twenties came to the door and opened it just a bit. ‘Yes?’ she said, her face wedging into the crack, her expression wary.

  ‘My name’s Nick Williams,’ he said. ‘I would like to see Mrs. Winchester if possible. Is she in?’ There was a pause. ‘I’m an old—’

  ‘My grandmother is very busy this morning,’ the girl curtly interrupted him. ‘Perhaps you can call and make an appointment.’ She started to close the door and leave Nick standing on the porch next to his exercise bag. Then Nick heard another voice, a muffled exchange, and the door swung open.

  ‘Well, for goodness’ sake,’ Amanda said, with her arms outstretched, ‘I have a young gentleman caller. Come here, Nikki, and give me a kiss.’ Nick was embarrassed. He walked forward and gave the elderly woman a perfunctory hug.

  As he withdrew from the embrace, he started to apologize. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been by to see you. I meant to, but somehow my schedule—’

  ‘It’s all right, Nikki, I understand.’ Amanda interrupted him pleasantly. Her eyes were so sharp they belied her age. ‘Come in and tell me what you’ve been up to. I haven’t seen you since, goodness, has it been a couple of years already since we shared that cognac after Streetcar?’ She led him into a combination study and living room and sat him down next to her on the sofa. ‘You know, Nikki, I thought your comments about the actress playing Blanche DuBois were the most observant ones I heard during the entire run. You were right about her. She couldn’t have played Blanche except as a total mental case. The woman simply had no concept of a feminine sexual appetite.’

  Nick looked around him. The room had hardly changed in the eight years sinc
e he had last visited it. The ceiling was very high, maybe fifteen feet. The walls were lined with bookcases whose full shelves extended all the way to the ceiling. Opposite the door a huge canvas painting of Amanda and her husband standing outside their home on Cape Cod dominated the room. A new 1955 Ford was partially visible in the background of the painting. She was radiantly beautiful in the picture, in her early thirties, dressed in a white evening gown with daring red trim both around the wrists and along the collar of the neck. Her husband was in black evening dress. He was mostly bald, with short fair hair greying at the temples. His eyes were warm and kindly.

  Amanda asked Nick if he wanted tea and he nodded. The granddaughter, Jennifer, disappeared into the hallway. Amanda turned and took Nick’s hands in hers. ‘I am glad you came, Nikki, I have missed you. From time to time I hear a snippet here or there about you or your boat, but often second-hand information is altogether wrong. What have you been doing? Still reading all the time? Do you have a girlfriend?’

  Nick laughed. Amanda had not changed. She had never been one for small talk. ‘No girlfriend,’ Nick said. ‘Same problem as always. The ones that are intelligent turn out to be either arrogant or emotionally inept or both; the ones that are sensitive and affectionate have never read a book.’ For some reason Carol Dawson jumped into Nick’s mind and he almost said, without thinking, ‘except for, maybe’, but he stopped himself. ‘What I need,’ he said instead, ‘is someone like you.’