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

3

Carol watched in fascination as the octopus captured its prey with its long tentacles. “Imagine what it would be like to have eight arms,” Oscar Burcham said. “Just think of the brain architecture necessary to separate all the inputs, to identify which stimulus was coming from which limb, to coordinate all the tentacles in defense or acquisition of food.”

Carol laughed and turned to her companion. They were standing in front of a large. translucent glass window inside a dimly lit building. “Oh, Oscar,” she said to the old man with the bright eyes, “you never change. Only you can think of all these living creatures as biological systems with architectures. Don’t you ever wonder about their feelings, their dreams while they are sleeping, their concepts of death?”

“Aye, well I do,” Oscar replied with a twinkle in his eye. “But it’s virtually impossible for human beings, even with a common language and developed communications skills, to truly describe their feelings. How could we even know or appreciate, for example, a dolphin’s sense of loneliness? In our maudlin way we ascribe to them human emotions, which is ridiculous.” He paused for a moment to think. “No,” he continued, “it’s more fruitful to conduct scientific inquiry at levels where we can understand the answers. In the long run, I believe that knowing how these creatures function, in the scientific sense, is more likely to lead us to their emotional quotients than conducting psychological experiments whose outcomes cannot be interpreted.”

Carol reached over and kissed him fondly. “You take everything I say so seriously, Oscar. Even when I’m kidding, you always pay attention to my comments.” She stopped and looked away. “You’re the only one who does.”

Oscar pulled back dramatically and put both his hands on Carol’s right shoulder. “Somewhere here there’s a chip… I know it for a fact… It’s almost always here… Ah, I found it.” He looked at her knowingly. “It’s not becoming, you know. Here you are, a successful, even celebrated reporter, still suffering from what could only be described as terminal insecurity. What’s this about? Did you and the boss have a big fight this morning?”

“No,” Carol replied, as they walked across the room to another part of the aquarium. “Well, sort of I guess. You know how he is. He takes over everything. I’m working on this big story down in Key West. Dale comes to the airport to pick me up, takes me out to breakfast, and proceeds to tell me exactly what I should be doing to cover my assignment. His suggestions are almost all good, and I appreciate his help on the technical issues, but it’s the way he talks to me. As if he thinks I’m stupid or something.”

Oscar looked at her intently. “Carol, my dear, he talks to everybody that way, including me. He doesn’t mean anything by it. He is absolutely convinced of his own superiority and nothing has ever happened in his life to change his mind. He was a millionaire from his own patents before he graduated from MIT.”

Carol was impatient and frustrated. “I know all that, Oscar, believe me, I know. But you’re protecting him again. Dale and I have been lovers for almost a year. He tells everybody how proud of me he is, how much he enjoys being stimulated by my mind. But when we’re together, he treats me like a fool. This morning he even argued with me about what I was having for breakfast. For Christ’s sake, I’ve been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize but the guy who wants to marry me doesn’t think I can order my own breakfast.”

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 everything. 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 behavior, 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 I have 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 would not 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 thc remote several more times. The successive scenes zoomed in on the hole in the coral reef, eventually isolating and centering 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 center of the fissure.”

The first processed infrared image covered the same area underneath the boat that 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 color. This process created isothermal regions, or regions of roughly the same temperature, that were visually connected by color. 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 gray 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 center 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 colors 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 behavior 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 colored red, for example, does not correspond to exactly the same temperature. In reality, the spread in temperatures for the same color 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 colors. 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 color 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 colors 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 just 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 color 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 colors 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 colors connected odd regions in what appeared to be random patterns. About the only thing that was 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 color. 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.”