Cradle (56 page)

‘So what did you forget, Nick?’ Carol interrupted. ‘And why did you bring that thing
back?’ There was no immediate response from Nick. ‘By the way,’ she smiled, ‘you missed
the show of a lifetime.’

‘The trident was what I forgot,’ Nick answered. ‘It occurred to me, while I was studying
the gold objects in the cylinder, that
our
trident might be a seed package. And I was worried that it might be dangerous….’

The sudden sound of organ music flooding down the corridor from the large room behind
them stopped their conversation. Nick and Carol looked at Troy. He put the bracelet
up to his ear as if he were listening to it and cracked a large grin. ‘I think that’s
the five-minute warning,’ Troy said. ‘We’d better make our last touchdown and clear
out of here.’

The trio turned and walked back down the corridor to the room with the cylinder. When
they arrived, Carol and Troy were astonished to see a figure in a blue and white wetsuit
on the opposite side of the room. He was kneeling reverently right next to the cylinder.

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Nick with a nervous laugh, ‘I forgot to tell you. Commander Winters
came back with me….’

Commander Winters had felt quite comfortable in the water, even though he had not
been down on a dive in five years. Nick had gone freestyle, swimming right beside
the commander and using the emergency mouthpiece connected to the air supply on Winters’s
back. Despite his sense of urgency, Nick had remembered that Winters was basically
a novice again and had not rushed the first part of the dive. But when Winters had
refused several times to follow Nick up close to the light in the ocean, Nick had
become exasperated.

Nick had then taken a final deep breath from the ancillary mouthpiece and grabbed
Winters by the shoulders. With gestures, he had explained to the commander that he,
Nick, was going to go through the plastic stuff or whatever it was in front of the
light and that Winters could either follow him or not. The commander had reluctantly
given Nick his hand. Nick turned around immediately and pulled Winters into and through
the membrane that separated the alien spaceship from the ocean.

Winters had been completely terrified during his tumble on the water slide inside
the vehicle. As a result he had lost his bearings and had had great difficulty standing
up after he landed in the splash pool. Nick was already out of the pool and anxious
to find his friends. ‘Look,’ Nick had said, as soon as he could get the commander’s
attention, ‘I’m going to leave you now for a few minutes.’ He had pointed at the exit
on the opposite side of the room. ‘We’ll be in the big room with the high ceilings
just on the other side of that wall.’ Then he had left, carrying the strange golden
object from the boat.

Winters was left alone. He carefully pulled himself out on the side of the splash
pool and methodically stacked his equipment alongside all the rest of the diving gear.
He looked around the room, noting the curves in the black and white partitions. He
too felt the closeness of the ceiling.
Now according to Williams
, the commander thought to himself,
I’m in part of an alien spaceship that has temporarily stopped on Earth. So far, except
for that clever one-way entrance that I did not have time to analyse, I see no evidence
of extraterrestrial origin…
.

Comforted by his logic, he eased across the room toward the opposite wall and into
the dark corridor. But his newfound sense of comfort was totally destroyed when he
walked into the room dominated by the enormous cylinder with the golden objects floating
in the light green liquid. He arched his back and stared at the vaulted, cathedral
ceilings far above his head. He then approached the cylinder.

For Winters, the connection between the trident that Nick had been holding and the
objects inside the cylinder was instantaneous.
Those must be more seed packages, destined for other worlds
, Winters thought, his crisp logic disappearing in a quick leap of faith.
With six-foot carrots and who knows what else to populate a few of the billions of
worlds in our galaxy alone
.

The commander walked around the cylinder as if he were in a dream. His mind continually
replayed both what Nick had told him right before they descended and the amazing scene
he had witnessed when the spider-like creature had shrunk and jumped into the golden
object.
So it’s all true. All those things the scientists have been saying about the possibility
of vast hordes of living creatures out there among the stars
. He stopped for a moment, partially listening to the strange noises behind the walls.
And we are only a few of God’s many many children
.

Organ music, similar in timbre to that which Carol had heard when she had finished
playing ‘Silent Night’, but with a different tune, began to sound in the distant reaches
of the ceiling above him. It reminded Winters of church music. His reaction was instinctual.
He knelt down in front of the cylinder and clasped his hands together in prayer.

The music swelled in the room. What Winters heard in his head was the introduction
to the Doxology, the short hymn that he had heard every single Sunday for eighteen
years in the Presbyterian church in Columbus, Indiana. In his mind’s eye he was thirteen
years old again and sitting next to Betty in their choir robes. He smiled at her and
they stood up together.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow
.

The choir sang the first phrase of the hymn and Winters’ brain was bombarded by a
montage of memories from his early teens and before, a suite of epiphanic images of
his innocent and unknowing closeness with a parental God, one who was in the wall
behind his bed or just over his rooftop or at most in the summer afternoon clouds
above Columbus. Here was an eight-year-old boy praying that his father would not find
out that it was he who had set fire to the waste ground across the street from the
Smith mansion. Another time, at ten, the little Vernon wept bitter tears as he held
his dead cocker spaniel Runtie in his arms and begged the omniscient God to accept
his dead dog’s soul into heaven.

The night before the Easter pageant, the first time that Vernon had portrayed Him
in His final hours, dragging the cross to Calvary, eleven-year-old Vernon had been
unable to sleep. As the night was passing by the boy began to panic, began to fear
that he would freeze up and forget his lines. But then he had known what to do. He
had reached under his pillow and found the little New Testament that always stayed
there, day and night. He had opened it to Matthew 28. ‘Go ye therefore,’ it had said,
‘baptizing all nations….’

That had been enough. Then Vernon had prayed for sleep. His friendly, fatherly God
had sent the little boy an image of himself delivering a spellbinding performance
in the pageant the next day. Comforted by that picture, he had fallen asleep.

Praise Him all creatures here below
.

With the second phrase of the hymn resounding in his ears, the venue for Winters’s
mental montage changed to Annapolis, Maryland. He was a young man now, in the last
two years of his university work at the Naval Academy. The pictures that flooded his
brain were all taken at the same place outside the beautiful little Protestant chapel
in the middle of the campus. He was either walking in or walking out. He went in the
snow, in the rain, and in the late summer heat. He would fulfil his pledge. He had
made a bargain with God, a business deal as it were, You do your part and I’ll do
mine. It was no longer a one-sided relationship. Now, life had taught the serious
young midshipman from Indiana that it was necessary to offer this God something in
order to guarantee His compliance with the deal.

For two years Vernon went regularly to the chapel, twice a week at least. He did not
really worship there; he corresponded with a worldly God, one that read the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
. They discussed things. Vernon reminded Him that he was steadfastly upholding his
end of the deal and thanked Him for keeping His part of the bargain. But never once
did they talk about Joanna Carr. She didn’t matter. The whole affair was between Midshipman
Vernon Winters and God.

Praise Him above, ye heavenly host
.

The commander had unconsciously bowed his head almost to the floor by the time he
heard the third phrase of the hymn. In his heart he knew the next stops on this spiritual
journey. He was off the coast of Libya first, praying those horrible words requesting
death and destruction for Gaddafi’s family. God had changed as Lieutenant Winters
had matured. He was now an executive, a president of something larger than a nation,
an admiral, a judge, somewhat remote, but still accessible in time of real need.

However, He had lost His all-forgiving nature. He had become stern and judgmental.
Killing a small Arab girl wasn’t like burning down the vacant lot across from the
Smith mansion. Winters’s God now held him personally accountable for all his actions.
And there were some sins almost beyond forgiveness, some deeds so heinous that you
might wait for weeks, months, or even years in the anterooms of His court before He
would consent to hear your plea for mercy and expiation.

Again the commander remembered his desperate search for Him after that awful evening
when he had sat on the couch beside his wife and watched the videotaped newsreels
of the Libya bombing. She had been so proud of him. She had taped every segment of
CBS news that had covered the North African engagement and then surprised him with
a complete showing the day after he returned to Norfolk. It was only then that the
full horror of what he had done had struck Winters. Struggling not to vomit as the
camera had shown the gruesome result of those missiles that had been fired from
his
planes, Winters had stumbled out into the night air, alone, and wandered until daybreak.

He had been looking for Him. A dozen times in the next three years this rite would
repeat itself and he would wander again, all night, alternately praying and walking,
hoping for some sign that He had listened to the commander’s prayers. The stars and
moon above him on those nights had been magnificent. But they could not grant forgiveness,
could not give surcease to his troubled soul.

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
.

And so God became blackness, a void, for Commander Winters. On those rare occasions
afterward when he would pray, there was no longer any mental image of God, no picture
of Him at all in his mind. There was just blackness, darkness, emptiness. Until this
moment. As he knelt there outside the cylinder, heard the final phrase of the Doxology,
and prayed to God to forgive him his doubts, his longings for Tiffani Thomas, and
his general lack of direction, there was an explosion of light in Winters’s mind’s
eye. God was speaking to him! God had at last given him a sign!

It was not the sign that Winters had been seeking, not evidence that He had finally
forgiven the commander and accepted his penance, but something much, much better.
The explosion of light in Winters’s mind was a star, a solar furnace forging helium
out of hydrogen. As his mental camera backed away rapidly, Winters could see planets
around that star and signs of intelligence on a few of the planets. There were other
stars and other planets in the distance. Billions of stars in this galaxy alone and,
after the mammoth voids between the galaxies, more huge collections of stars and planets
and living creatures stretching incomprehensible distances in all directions.

Winters’s body shook with joy and his eyes flooded with tears when he realized how
completely God had answered his prayers. It would have been enough for Him to simply
reveal to Winters that he was forgiven. No, this Lord of everything imaginable, whose
domain embraced chemicals risen to consciousness on millions of worlds in a vast and
uncountable universe, this God who was truly omnipotent and ubiquitous, had gone way
beyond his prayers. He had shown Winters the unity in everything. He had not limited
Himself just to the affairs of one individual on a small and insignificant blue planet
orbiting an ordinary yellow sun in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy;
he had also shown Winters how that species and its pool of intelligence and spirituality
was connected to every part of every atom in His grand dominion.

As Nick walked across the room toward Commander Winters, the intermittent noises behind
the walls increased in amplitude and frequency. Around on the far side of the cylinder,
next to one of the larger support machines, a door opened and two carpets, moving
like inch worms, came into the room. They were immediately followed by two wardens
and four platforms on treads. The platforms were carrying stacks of building materials.
Each of the wardens led two platforms to a corner of the room, where they started
constructing secure anchor stanchions for the cylinder.

The two carpets confronted Nick in the centre of the room. They stood up on end and
leaned in the direction of the exit toward the ocean. ‘They’re telling us it’s time
to go,’ Carol said as she and Troy came up beside Nick.

‘I understand that,’ Nick replied. ‘But I’m not yet ready to leave.’ He turned to
Troy. ‘Does this game have an X key at all?’ he asked. ‘I could use a time out.’

Troy laughed. ‘I don’t think so, Professor. And there’s no way we can save the game
and try again.’

Nick looked as if he were in deep thought. The carpets continued to beckon. ‘Come
on, Nick,’ Carol grabbed him by the arm. ‘Let’s go before they get angry.’

Suddenly Nick advanced toward one of the carpets and extended the golden cradle. ‘Here,’
he said, ‘take this and put it with the rest of them, up there, in the cylinder where
it belongs.’ The carpet recoiled and twisted its top from side to side. Then it pulled
its two vertical sides together and pointed at Nick.