"Cradle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clarke Arthur C., Lee Gentry)

10

“THE communication room will close in five minutes. The communication room will close in five minutes.” The disembodied, recorded voice sounded tired. Carol Dawson was weary herself. She was talking to Dale Michaels on the videophone. Photographs were strewn all over the desk underneath the screen and the video camera.

“All right,” Carol was saying, “I guess I agree with you. The only possible way for me to decipher this puzzle is to bring all the photos and the telescope recording unit back to Miami. “She sighed and then yawned. “I’ll come up there first thing in the morning, on the flight that arrives at seven-thirty, so that IPL can get an early shot at the recorded data. But remember, I must be back here in time to pick up the golden trident at four. Can the lab process all the data in a couple of hours?”

“That’s not the hard part. Trying to analyze the data and piece together a coherent story in an hour or two will be the tough job. “Dr. Dale was sitting on the couch in the living room of his spacious condominium in Key Biscayne. In front of him, on the coffee table, was a magnificent jade chess board with green and white squares. Six carved chess pieces were still on the board, the two opposing queens and four pawns, two from each side. Dale Michaels paused and looked meaningfully at the camera. “I know how important this is to you. I’ve cancelled my eleven o’clock meeting so I can help you.”

“Thanks,” Carol said automatically. She felt a trickle of irritation. Why is it, she thought while Dale talked about one of his new projects at MOI, that men always demand gratitude for every little sacrifice? If a woman changes her schedule to accommodate a man, it’s expected. But if a man revises his precious schedule it’s a big fucking deal.

Dale droned on. Now he was enthusiastically telling her about a new Institute effort to survey the underwater volcanoes around Papua, New Guinea. Whew, Carol smiled to herself when she realized that Dale’s self-centered focus was bothering her, I must really be beat. I believe I’m on the verge of being bitchy.

“Hey,” Carol interrupted him. She stood up and started to pick up the scattered photographs. “Sorry to bring a halt to this party, but they’re closing the room and I’m exhausted. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Aren’t you going to make a move?” Dale replied, pointing at the chess board.

“No, I’m not,” Carol said, showing just a trace of anger. “And I may not ever. Any reasonable player would have accepted the draw that I offered you last weekend and gone on to more important things. Your damn ego just can’t deal with the idea that one game out of five I can battle you to a tie.”

“People have been known to make mistakes in the end-game,” Dale answered, avoiding altogether the emotional content in her remark. “But I know you’re tired. I’ll meet you at the airport and take you to breakfast.”

“Okay. Good night.” Carol hung up the videophone a little brusquely and packed all the photographs in her briefcase. As soon as she had left the marina, she had taken her camera and film straight to the darkroom at the Key West Independent, where she had spent an hour developing and studying the prints. The results were intriguing, particularly a couple of the blowups. In one of them she could clearly see four separate tracks converging to a spot just under the fissure. In another photo the bodies of the three whales were caught in a pose that looked as if they were in the middle of a deep conversation.

Carol walked through the spacious lobby in the Marriott Hotel. The piano bar was almost deserted. The lithe black pianist was playing an old Karen Carpenter song, “Good-bye to Love.” A handsome man in his late thirties or early forties was kissing a Rashy young blonde in a nook off to the right. Carol bridled. The bimbo must be all of twenty-three, she said to herself, probably his secretary or something equally important.

As she wound her way down the long corridor toward her room, Carol thought about her conversation with Dale. He had told her that the Navy had small robot vehicles, some of them derived from original MOI designs, that could easily have made the tracks. So it was virtually certain that the Russians had similar vehicles. He had dismissed the whales’ behavior as irrelevant but had thought that her failure to find out if anything else was under the overhang had been a serious mistake. Of course, Carol had realized when he had said it, I should have spent another minute looking. Nuts. I hope I didn’t blow it. In her mind’s eye she then had carefully revisited the entire scenario at the overhang to see if there were any clues that something else may have been hidden there.

The biggest surprise in the discussion with Dale had come when Carol, in passing, had praised the way the new alarm algorithm had worked. Dale suddenly had become very interested. “So the alert code definitely read 101?” he had said.

“Yes,” she had answered, “that’s why I wasn’t that astonished when we found the object.”

“No way,” he had said emphatically. “The trident could not have caused the alert code. Even if it was at the edge of the field of view of the telescope, and that seems unlikely given how far you followed the trench, it’s too small to trigger the foreign object alarm. And how could it have been seen under the overhang anyway?” Dale had paused for a few seconds. “You didn’t look at any of the infrared images in realtime, did you? Well, we can process them tomorrow and see if we can figure out what triggered the alarm.”

Carol felt strangely defeated as she opened the door to her motel room. It’s just fatigue, she said to herself, not wanting to admit that her conversation with Dale had made her feel inadequate. She put her briefcase on a chair and walked wearily to the bathroom to wash her face. Two minutes later she was asleep on the bed in her underclothes. Her slacks, blouse, shoes, and socks were all stacked together in the corner.

She is a little girl again in her dream, wearing the blue-and-yellow striped dress that her parents gave her for her seventh birthday. Carol is walking around with her father in the Northridge Mall on a busy Saturday morning. They pass a large candy store. She lets go of his hand and runs into the store and stares through the glass case at all the chocolates. Carol points at some milk chocolate turtles when the big man behind the display case asks her what she wants.

In the dream Carol cannot reach the counter and doesn’t have any money “Where is your mother, little girl?” the candy store man asks. Carol shakes her head and the man repeats the question. She stands on her tiptoes and tells the man in a confidential whisper that her mother drinks too much, but that her father always buys her candy.

The man smiles, but he still won’t give her the chocolates. “And where is your father, little girl?” the candy store man now asks. In the case Carol can see the reflection of a kindly, smiling man standing behind her, framed between two piles of chocolates. She wheels around, expecting to see her father. But the man behind her is not her father. This man’s face is grotesque, disfigured. Frightened, she turns back around to the chocolates. The man in the store is now taking the candy away. It is closing time. Carol starts to cry.

“Where is your father, little girl? Where is your father?” The little girl in the dream is sobbing. She is surrounded by big people, all of them asking questions. She puts her hands over her ears.

“He’s gone,” Carol finally shouts. “He’s gone. He left us and went away and now I’m all alone.”