Cradle (54 page)

Troy walked over beside her. ‘Where’s Nick?’ he asked.
My God
, Carol thought as she turned around and looked back at the slide and splash pool.
I almost forgot
. She chastized herself for not having waited for Nick.
After all, he’s never been down here…
.

Nick’s big body careened out of control against the sides of the slide and he hurtled
into the splash pool. The heavy buoyancy bag came down behind him and hit him hard,
just above the kidneys. He stumbled to his feet, fell down in the pool, and then stood
up again. In his diving apparatus with the thin plastic material from the bag tied
around his wrist, it was he who looked like the visitor from outer space.

Carol and Troy were laughing as Nick climbed out of the splash pool. ‘All right, Professor!’
exclaimed Troy. He reached forward to give him a hand. ‘Good show. It’s a shame we
don’t have that entry on tape.’

Nick removed his mouthpiece. He was out of breath. ‘Thanks a lot for waiting, team,’
he stammered. He looked around him. ‘What is this place, anyway?’

The warden meanwhile had approached him from the side and was already tugging at the
bag with one of its appendages. ‘Just a minute, weirdo,’ Nick said, suppressing his
fright. ‘Let me get my bearings first.’

The warden didn’t stop. A knifelike appendage cut the bag below where it was attached
to Nick’s wrist. Next the warden took the entire bag, including its lead and gold
contents, and somehow pushed it through its own semipermeable outer skin. The bag
could be seen intact, adjacent to the rectangular control boxes, as the warden turned
and hurried across the floor. It went through the same exit that the carpet and platforms
had used earlier.

‘You’re welcome,’ Nick managed to say as he watched the strange creature disappear
with the loot. He finished taking off his diving gear and walked over to Troy. ‘Okay,
Jefferson, you’re the main man here. What do we do now?’

‘Well, Professor,’ he answered, ‘as far as I can tell, our job is finished. If you
guys want, we can suit up again and jump through that window wall over there. We’d
be back in the boat in less than five minutes. If I’ve read the messages right, these
alien dudes will be ready to leave very shortly.’

‘You mean that’s it? We’re done?’ Carol asked. Troy nodded. ‘This is the most overrated
experience since my first sexual encounter,’ Carol commented.

Nick was walking across the room, moving directly away from the splash pool and his
two friends. ‘Where are you going?’ Troy asked.

‘I paid a hefty admission price,’ Nick replied. ‘I’m at least entitled to a tour.’
Carol and Troy followed him. They crossed the empty room and walked through an exit
between two wall partitions on the opposite side. They entered a short, dark, covered
corridor. They could see light at the other end. They emerged into another room, this
one circular and significantly larger. It had the high cathedral ceilings that Carol
had liked so much on her last visit.

This room was not empty. Sitting in its middle facing them was a gigantic, enclosed,
translucent cylinder, about twenty five feet high altogether and ten feet in diameter
at its base. A horde of orange pipes and purple cable sheaths attached the cylinder
to a group of machines built into the wall behind it. There was a light green liquid
filling the inside of the cylinder and eight gold metallic objects floating at different
heights in the liquid. The objects were many different shapes. One looked like a starfish,
another like a box, a third like a derby hat; the only thing the objects had in common
was their gold metallic outer covering. Upon close inspection of the cylinder, thin
membranes could be seen inside the liquid. These surfaces effectively partitioned
the internal volume and gave each of the golden objects its own unique subvolume.

‘All right, genius,’ Nick said to Troy, after he stared at the cylinder for almost
a full minute. ‘Explain what this is all about.’ Carol was in a photographer’s paradise.
She had nearly finished recording all hundred and twenty-eight pictures that could
be stored on one minidisc. She had photographed the cylinder from all angles, including
a close-up of each of the objects suspended in the liquid, and was now working on
the machines behind it. She stopped taking pictures to listen to Troy’s reply.

‘Well, Professor…’ Troy started. His forehead was knitted as he tried to concentrate.
‘As far as I can make out from what they’ve been trying to tell me, this spaceship
is on a mission to a dozen planets that are scattered in this part of the galaxy.
On each planet the aliens leave one of those golden things you see in the cylinder.
They contain tiny embryos or seeds that have been genetically engineered for survival
on that specific planet.’

Carol walked over beside them. ‘So the ship goes from planet to planet, dropping off
these packages containing seeds of some kind?’

‘Sort of, angel, except that there are both animal and plant seeds inside the container.
Plus advanced robots that nurture and educate the growing things until they reach
maturity. Then the creatures can flourish on their own without help.’

‘All in that one little package?’ Nick asked. He looked again at the fascinating objects
floating in the liquid in the cylinder. He loved the golden colour. All of a sudden
he thought of the trident. He imagined thousands of tiny swarming embryos inside its
outer golden surface and in his mind’s eye he projected the growth of the swarm into
the future. There was something fearsome about creatures genetically engineered to
survive on the planet Earth.
What if they are not friendly?

Nick’s heart sped up as he realized what had been bothering him, partly subconsciously,
since he started believing Troy’s story about the aliens.
Why did they stop on the Earth in the first place? What do they really want from us?
His mind raced on.
And if that trident contains beings destined for Earth that are extremely advanced
, he thought,
then it doesn’t matter if they are friendly. We will be finished sooner or later anyway
.

Carol and Troy were talking in general terms about the way an advanced civilization
might use seeds to colonize other planets. Nick wasn’t listening carefully.
I can’t tell Troy or even Carol. If the aliens know what I’m thinking they will stop
me. I’d better do it soon
.

‘Troy,’ he heard Carol say as she began to take another set of pictures of the objects
in the cylinder, ‘is it just coincidence that the trident we found on Thursday looked
so much like one of these seed packages?’

Nick did not wait for Troy to answer. ‘Excuse me,’ he interrupted in a loud voice.
‘I forgot something very important. I must go back to the boat. Stay here and wait
for me. I’ll be right back.’

He burst out of the room, down the corridor, and across the room with the low ceiling
and the window on the ocean.
Good
, he said to himself.
Nothing is going to stop me
. Without even pausing to put on his diving gear, Nick took a huge breath and dived
through the window. He was afraid that his lungs were going to explode before he reached
the surface. But he made it. He climbed up the ladder and on to the boat.

Nick went immediately to the bottom drawer underneath the racks of electronic equipment.
He reached in and grabbed the golden trident. He could feel that the axis rod had
thickened considerably. It was now nearly twice as thick as it had been the first
time that he held it.
Carol was right. Damn it, why didn’t I listen to her at the time?
He pulled the object completely out of the drawer. The sun was just about to come
up behind him. In the dawn light Nick could see that the trident had changed in several
other ways. It was heavier. The individual tines on the fork end were much thicker
and had almost grown together. In addition, there was an open hole into a soft, gooey
interior on the north pole of the larger of the two spheres.

Nick examined it carefully. Suddenly he felt powerful arms wrap themselves around
his chest and upper body, forcing him to drop the trident on the floor of the boat.
‘Now just hold steady,’ he heard a lightly accented voice say, ‘and turn around slowly.
We won’t hurt you if you cooperate.’

Nick turned around. Commander Winters and a tall, fat seaman whom Nick had never seen
before were standing in front of him in wetsuits. Lieutenant Ramirez was still holding
him from behind. Ramirez gradually released Nick and bent down to pick up the trident.
He handed it to Winters. ‘Thank you, Lieutenant,’ Winters said. ‘Where are your companions,
Williams?’ he then asked Nick. ‘Down there with my missile?’

Nick didn’t say anything at first. Too much was happening too fast. He was having
difficulty integrating Winters into his scenario for returning the trident to the
spaceship. As soon as Nick had felt the changes in its outer surface, he had known
for certain that the trident was one of the seed packages.

Winters was studying the trident. ‘And what’s the significance of this thing?’ he
said. ‘You guys have taken enough photographs of it.’

Nick was doing some calculations.
If I am delayed here very long, then Carol and Troy will undoubtedly leave the ship.
And the aliens will launch
. He took a deep breath.
My only chance is the truth
.

‘Commander Winters,’ Nick began, ‘please listen very carefully to what I’m about to
say. It will sound fantastic, even preposterous, but it’s all true. And if you will
come with me, I can prove everything to you. The fate of the human race may well depend
on what we do in the next five minutes.’ He paused to organize his ideas.

For some reason Winters thought about the ridiculous carrot story that Todd had told
him. But the earnestness he was seeing in Nick’s face persuaded him to continue to
pay attention. ‘Go ahead, Williams,’ he said.

‘Carol Dawson and Troy Jefferson are right now on board a superadvanced extraterrestrial
spaceship that is directly under this boat. The alien vehicle is travelling from planet
to planet depositing packages of embryonic beings that are genetically designed to
survive on a particular planet. That golden thing in your hand is, in a sense, a cradle
for creatures that may later flourish on the Earth. I must return it to the aliens
before they leave or our descendants may not survive.’

Commander Winters looked at Nick as if he had lost his mind. The commander started
to say something. ‘No,’ Nick’ interrupted. ‘Hear me out. The spacecraft also stopped
here because it needed some repairs. At one time we thought it might have found your
missile. That’s partially how we got involved in the first place. We didn’t know about
the creatures in the cradle. So we were trying to help. One of the things the aliens
needed for their repairs was gold. You see, they only had three days—’

‘Jesus K. Christ!’ Winters shouted at Nick. ‘Do you really expect me to believe this
crap? This is the looniest, most farfetched story I have ever heard in my entire life.
You’re nuts. Cradles, aliens who need gold for repairs… I suppose next you’ll be telling
me that they are six feet tall and look like carrots—’

‘And have four vertical slits in their faces?’ Nick added.

Winters glanced around. ‘You told him?’ he said to Lieutenant Ramirez. Ramirez shook
his head back and forth.

‘No,’ Nick continued abruptly as the commander looked completely confused. ‘The carrot
thing wasn’t an alien, at least not one of the superaliens who made the ship. The
carrot was a holographic projection…’

The perplexed Commander Winters waved his hands. ‘I’m not listening to any more of
this nonsense, Williams. At least not here. What I want to know is what you and your
friends know about the location of the missile. Now will you come with us over to
our boat of your own free will, or do we have to tie you up?’

At that moment, six feet above them, a ten-legged, black, spiderlike creature with
a body about four inches in diameter walked unnoticed to the edge of the canopy. It
extended three antennae in their direction and then leaped off the side, landing on
the back of Lieutenant Ramirez’s neck. ‘Aieee,’ screamed the lieutenant during the
pause in the conversation. He fell down on his knees behind Nick and grasped at the
black thing that was trying to take a sample chunk out of his neck. For a second nobody
moved. Then Nick grabbed a large pair of pliers from the counter and thwacked the
black thing once, twice, and even a third time before it released its grip on Ramirez.

All four men watched it fall to the deck, scuttle rapidly over to the cradle that
Commander Winters had put down so that he could assist Ramirez, shrink its size by
a factor of ten, and disappear into the cradle through the soft gooey opening on the
top of the sphere. Within seconds the goo hardened and all the external surfaces of
the cradle were again rigid.

Winters was flabbergasted. Ramirez crossed himself. The seaman looked as if he were
about to faint. ‘I swear to you that my story is true, Commander,’ Nick said calmly.
‘All you have to do is come down with me and see for yourself. I left my diving gear
down there so that I could hurry up here to retrieve this thing. We can go together
with my last working tank and share the air supply.’

Winters’s head was spinning. The ten-legged spider was the straw that broke the camel’s
back. He felt that he had now entered the Twilight Zone.
I have never seen or heard anything even remotely like this before in my life
, Winters thought.
And only half an hour ago I had wild hallucinations with musical accompaniment. Maybe
I am the one losing touch with reality
. Lieutenant Ramirez was still on his knees. It looked as if he were praying.
Or maybe this is finally my sign from God
.

‘All right, Williams,’ the commander was surprised to hear himself say. ‘I’ll go with
you. But my men will wait here on your boat for our return.’