Arthur Clarke - Cradle

During this period Amanda and Nick had become quite close. They had seen each other virtually every week and for a while he had thought of her as an aunt or grandmother. But after a year or so, Nick had stopped going by to visit her. He hadn’t understood it at the time, but the real reason he began to avoid her was that Amanda was too intense for him. And she was always too personal. She asked him too many hard questions about what he was doing with his life.

On this particular morning he had no real options. Amanda was widely recognized as the expert on sunken treasure in the Keys. There were two components in her life, treasure and the theater, and her knowledge of each was encyclopedic. Nick had not called first because he didn’t want to discuss the trident unless she was willing to see him. So it was with some trepidation that he rang the doorbell on the front porch of her magnificent home.

A young woman in her early twenties came to the door and opened it just a bit. “Yes?” she said, her face wedging into the crack, her expression wary.

“My name’s Nick Williams,” he said. “I would like to see Mrs. Winchester if possible. Is she in?” There was a pause. “I’m an old—”

“My grandmother is very busy this morning,” the girl curtly interrupted him. “Perhaps you can call and make an appointment.” She started to close the door and leave Nick standing on the porch next to his exercise bag. Then Nick heard another voice, a muffled exchange, and the door swung open.

“Well, for goodness sake,” Amanda said with her arms outstretched, “I have a young gentleman caller. Come here, Nikki, and give me a kiss.” Nick was embarrassed. He walked forward and gave the elderly woman a perfunctory hug.

As he withdrew from the embrace, he started to apologize. “I’m sorry I haven’t been by to see you. I mean to, but somehow my schedule—”

“It’s all right, Nikki, I understand.” Amanda interrupted him pleasantly. Her eyes were so sharp they belied her age. “Come in and tell me what you’ve been up to. I haven’t seen you since, goodness, has it been a couple of years already since we shared that cognac after Streetcar?” She led him into a combination study and living room and sat him down next to her on the couch. “You know, Nikki, I thought your comments about the actress playing Blanche DuBois were the most observant ones I heard during the entire run. You were right about her. She couldn’t have played Blanche except as a total mental case. The woman simply had no concept of a feminine sexual appetite.”

Nick looked around him. The room had hardly changed in the eight years since he had last visited it. The ceiling was very high, maybe fifteen feet. The walls were lined with bookcases whose full shelves extended all the way to the ceiling. Opposite the door a huge canvas painting of Amanda and her husband standing outside their home on Cape Cod dominated the room. A new 1955 Ford was partially visible in the background of the painting. She was radiantly beautiful in the picture, in her early thirties, dressed in a white evening gown with daring red trim both around the wrists and along the collar of the neck. Her husband was in a black tux. He was mostly bald, with short blond hair graying at the temples. His eyes were warm and kindly.

Amanda asked Nick if he wanted tea and he nodded. The granddaughter Jennifer disappeared into the hallway. Amanda turned and took Nick’s hands in hers. “I am glad you came, Nikki, I have missed you. From time to time I hear a snippet here or there about you or your boat, but often second-hand information is altogether wrong. What have you been doing? Still reading all the time? Do you have a girlfriend?”

Nick laughed. Amanda had not changed. She had never been one for small talk. “No girlfriend,” Nick said, “same problem as always. The ones that are intelligent turn out to be either arrogant or emotionally inept or both; the ones that are sensitive and affectionate have never read a book. “For some reason Carol Dawson jumped into Nick’s mind and he almost said, without thinking, “except for, maybe,” but he stopped himself. “What I need,” he said instead, “is someone like you.”

“No, Nikki,” Amanda replied, suddenly serious. She folded her hands in her lap and stared momentarily across the room. “No,” she repeated softly, her voice then gathering intensity as she turned back to look at him, “even I am not perfect enough for you. I remember well all your fantasy visions of gracious young goddesses. Somehow you had mixed the best parts of all the women in your favorite novels together with your teenage dreams. It always seemed to me that you had put women up on a pedestal; they had to be queens or princesses. But in the girls you actually dated, you looked for weaknesses, signs of ordinariness, and indications of common behavior. It was almost as if you were hoping to find them imperfect, to detect chinks in their armor so that you could justify your lack of interest.”

Jennifer arrived with the tea. Nick was uncomfortable. He had forgotten what it was like to talk to Amanda. Her emotional probing and her unsolicited observations were both extremely disquieting to him this morning. Nick had not come to see her to dissect his attitude toward women. He changed the subject.

“Speaking of treasure,” he said, bending down to pick up his bag, “I found something very interesting yesterday while I was out diving. I thought maybe you might have seen something like it before.” He pulled the trident out and handed it to Amanda. She almost dropped it because she was not prepared for its weight.

“Goodness,” she said, her skinny arm trembling under the strain of holding the golden trident out in front of her. “What could it possibly be made from? It’s too heavy to be gold!”

Nick leaned forward and took the object. He held it for her as she ran her fingers over its exceptionally smooth exterior. “I’ve never seen anything like this, Nikki. I don’t need to get out all the books and the photographs for comparison. The smoothness of the finish is inconsistent with the processing techniques in Europe during or after the galleon days. This must be modern. But I can’t tell you anything else. Where in the world did you find it?”

He told her just the outline of the story, careful as always not to give away key bits of information. It was not just the agreement he had made with Carol and Troy; treasure hunters never really trust anybody. But he did share with Amanda his idea that perhaps someone had cached this particular piece, as well as some others, for later retrieval. Nick insisted that this idea of his was a perfectly plausible explanation for the tracks on the ocean floor.

“Your scenario seems very unlikely to me,” Amanda said, “although I must admit that I am baffled and have no better explanation. Maybe Miss Dawson has some sources that can shed some light on the origin of this thing. But there is almost no chance that I am mistaken. I have personally seen or viewed close-up photographs of every significant piece of treasure recovered from the Keys in the past century. You could show me a new piece today and I could probably tell you in what European country it was made and in what decade. If this object comes from a sunken ship, it is a modern ship, almost certainly after World War II. Beyond that I can’t help you.”

Nick put the trident back in the bag and started to leave. “Wait just a minute before you go, Nikki,” Amanda said as he stood up. “Come over here for a minute.” She took him by the arm and led him over to a spot just in front of the large painting. “You would have liked Walter, Nikki. He was a dreamer also. He loved to look for treasure. Every year we would spend a week or two in the Caribbean on a yacht, ostensibly looking for treasure but just generally sharing each other’s dreams. From time to time we would find objects on the bottom of the ocean that we couldn’t understand and we would create fanciful conjectures to explain them. Almost always there was some prosaic explanation that was inferior to our fantasies.”