Arthur Clarke: Cradle

A tethered metallic basket about fifteen feet long and five feet wide descends in the eerie snowy light and comes to rest softly on the ground beside the three humans. The sides of the basket drop and metal belts extend themselves outward, wrapping around each of the people. They are pulled into the basket, the sides of the basket are closed, and the strange object then ascends into the snowy night. Seconds later the spotlight disappears and life returns to normal in the prehistoric forest.

Above the Earth the giant cylinder sits quietly, waiting for its messengers to return. The planet below is nearly cloudless and the great blue stretches of ocean tremble like jewels in the reflected sunlight. Near the evening terminator, the low sun angles show a vast expanse of ice extending down from the North Pole, covering almost all of a large continent. To the west, across a great ocean and an all white northern island, the midday sun shines on another large continent. It is also mostly covered by ice. Here the ice extends southward across two thirds of the land mass and only disappears completely as the continent begins to taper and the southern sea is reached.

The hunting shuttles sent out from the great cylinder return to their base and unload their prey. The father, injured mother, and teenage daughter are inside the small shuttle craft along with fifty to sixty other humans, obviously selected from disparate points around the world. None of the humans is moving. After the shuttle safely docks with the mother ship, all the prehistoric humans are moved in a large van to a receiving station. Here they are admitted and catalogued, and then taken inside a vast module that re-creates the environment of Earth.

Far above the Earth, the last of the drone scouts returns to the giant cylinder. There is a momentary pause, as if some unknown checklist were being verified, and then the cylindrical space vehicle disappears.

They were there on the beach at sunrise. Sometime during the night seven whales had run aground at Deer Key, five miles east of Key West. The powerful leviathans of the deep, ten to fifteen feet long, looked helpless as they lay floundering on the sand. Another half dozen members of this misguided pod of false killer whales were swimming in circles in the shallow lagoon just off the beach, obviously lost and confused.

By seven o’clock on the clear March morning, whale experts from Key West had arrived and were already beginning to coordinate what would later become a concerted effort by local fishermen and boating enthusiasts to push the beached animals back into the lagoon. Once the whales were off the beach, the next task would be to coax the entire pod into the Gulf of Mexico. There was little or no chance that the animals would survive unless they could be returned to open water.

Carol Dawson was the first reporter to arrive. She parked her sporty new Korean station wagon on the shoulder of the road, just off the beach, and jumped out to analyze the situation. The beach and lagoon at Deer Key formed a cove that was shaped like a half moon. An imaginary cord connecting the two points of land at the ends of the cove would extend almost half a mile across the water. Outside the cord was the Gulf of Mexico. The seven whales had penetrated the cove in the center and were beached at the point farthest from the open sea. They were about thirty feet apart and maybe twenty-five feet up on the sand. The rest of the whales were trapped in the shallows no more than a hundred feet offshore.

Carol walked around to the back of her station wagon. Before pulling out a large photographic case, she stopped to adjust the strings on her pants. (She had dressed quickly this morning when awakened in her Key West hotel room by the call from Miami. Her exercise sweat suit was hardly her usual working attire. The sweats hid the assets of a shapely, finely tuned body that looked more like twenty than thirty.) Inside the case was a collection of cameras, both still and video. She selected three of the cameras, popped a couple of M & Ms from an old package into her mouth, and approached the beach. As she walked across the sand toward the people and the beached whales, Carol stopped occasionally to photograph the scene.

Carol first approached a man wearing a uniform from the South Florida Marine Research Center. He was facing the ocean and talking to two Naval officers from the Marine Patrol section of the U.S. Naval Air Station in Key West. A dozen or so local volunteers were in close orbit around the speakers, keeping their distance but listening intently to the discussion. Carol walked up to the man from the research center and took him by the arm.

“Good morning, Jeff,” she said.

He turned to look at her. After a moment a vague smile of recognition crossed his face.

“Carol Dawson, Miami Herald,” she said quickly. “We met one night at MOI. I was with Dale Michaels.”

“Sure, I remember you,” he said. “How could I forget a gorgeous face like yours?” After a moment he continued, “But what are you doing here? As far as I know, nobody in the world knew these whales were here until an hour ago. And Miami is over a hundred miles away.”

Carol laughed, her eyes politely acknowledging and thanking Jeff for the compliment. She still didn’t like it but had grudgingly grown to accept the fact that people, men especially, remembered her for her looks.

“I was already in Key West on another story, Dale called me this morning as soon as he heard about the whales. Can I interrupt you for just a minute and get some expert comments? For the record, of course.”

As she was speaking, Carol reached down and picked up a video camera, one of the newest models, a 1993 SONY about the size of a small notebook, and began interviewing Dr. Jeff Marsden, “the leading authority on whales in the Florida Keys.” The interview was standard stuff, of course, and Carol could have herself supplied all the answers. But Ms. Dawson was a good reporter and knew the value of an expert in situations like this.

Dr. Marsden explained that marine biologists still did not understand the reasons for whale beachings, although their increased frequency in the late eighties and early nineties had provided ample opportunities for research. According to him, most experts blamed the beachings on infestations of parasites in the individual whales leading each of the unfortunate pods. The prevailing theory suggests that these parasites confuse the intricate navigation systems telling the whales where to go. In other words, the lead whale somehow thinks his migration path is onto the beach and across the land; the others follow because of the rigorous hierarchy in the pod.

“I’ve heard some people say, Dr. Marsden, that the increase in whale beachings is due to us and our pollution. Would you care to comment on the accusation that our wastes as well as our acoustic and electronic pollution have undermined the sensitive biosystems that the whales use to navigate?”

Carol used the zoom on her tiny video camera to record the furrowing of Jeff Marsden’s brow. He was clearly not expecting such a leading question from her this early in the morning.

After thinking for a moment, he answered. “There have been several attempts to explain why there are so many more beachings now than were recorded in the past. Most researchers come to the inescapable conclusion that something in the whales’ environment has changed in the last half-century. It is not too farfetched to imagine that we may well have been responsible for the changes.”

Carol knew she had the right quotes for a perfect short piece for television. She then quickly and professionally wrapped up the interview, thanked Dr. Marsden, and walked over to the onlookers. In a minute she had plenty of volunteers to take her out into the lagoon so that she could take some close-up photographs of the confused whales. Within five minutes not only had Carol finished several discs of still photographs, but she also had rigged up her video camera with a stabilizing tripod on one of the little boats and done a video clip of herself explaining the beachings.