Arthur Clarke - Cradle

Nick turned it upside down as she had done. The sunlight glinted off the golden surface and hurt his eyes. He squinted. Then he switched the object from hand to hand and looked at it from many different angles. “I think I’m lost,” Nick said at length. “Are you trying to tell me that there’s some change in this thing?”

He held it out between them. “Yes,” she said. “Can’t you feel it? The central rod’s thicker than it was on Thursday and the tines or individual elements of that fork on one end are a little longer. And don’t you think the whole thing is heavier?”

Nick’s headache continued to throb. He looked back and forth between the trident and Carol. As far as he could tell, the object had not changed. “No, I don’t,” he said. “It seems the same to me.”

“You’re just being difficult,” Carol persisted, grabbing the trident back. “Here, look at the pictures. Check out the length of the fork there compared to the overall rod and then look at it now. It’s different.”

There was something in Carol’s general attitude that really irritated Nick. She always seemed to assume that she was right and everyone else was wrong. “This is absurd,” Nick nearly shouted in reply, “and I have a lot of work to do.” He paused for a moment and then continued. “How the hell could it change? It’s a metal object, for Christ’s sake. What do you think? That somehow it grew? Shit.”

He shook his head and started to walk away. After a couple of steps, he turned around. “You can’t trust the pictures anyway,” he said in more measured tones. “Underwater photos always distort the objects…”

Troy was approaching with both the cart and Carol’s equipment. He could tell from the body positions, even without hearing the words, that his two boatmates were at it again. “My, my,” he said as he walked up, “I can’t leave you two alone for a minute. What are you fighting about this morning, Professor?”

“This supposedly intelligent reporter friend of yours,” Nick replied, looking at Carol and speaking in a patronizing manner, “insists that our trident has changed shape. Overnight I guess. Although she has not yet begun to explain how. Will you please, since she won’t believe me, explain to her about the index of refraction or whatever it is that fouls up underwater pictures.”

Carol appealed to Troy. “But it has changed. Honest. I remember clearly what it felt like at first and now it feels different.”

Troy was unloading the cart and putting the ocean telescope system on the Florida Queen. “Angel,” Troy said, stopping to check the trident that she was extending toward him with both hands, “I can’t tell whether it has changed or not, but I can tell you one thing. You were very excited when you found it the first time and you were also underwater. With that combination I wouldn’t trust my own memory of how something felt.”

Carol looked at the two men. She was going to pursue the discussion but Nick abruptly changed the subject. “Did you know, Mr. Jefferson, that our client Miss Dawson has requested your services as a diving partner today? She doesn’t want to dive with me.” His tone was now acerbic.

Troy looked at Carol with surprise. “That’s real nice, angel,” he said quietly, “but Nick is really the expert. I’m just a little more than a beginner.”

“I know that,” Carol responded brusquely, still chafing from the outcome of the previous conversation. “But I want to dive with someone I can trust. Someone who behaves responsibly. I know enough about diving for both of us.”

Nick gave Carol an angry look and then turned and walked away. He was pissed. “Come on, Jefferson,” he said. “I’ve already agreed to let Miss High and Mighty have her way. This time. Let’s get the boat ready and finish setting up that telescope thing of hers again.”

“My father finally divorced my mother when I was ten,” Carol was saying to Troy. They were sitting together in the deck chairs at the front of the boat. After they had gone over the procedures for the dive a couple of times, Carol had mentioned something about her first boating experience, a birthday on a fishing boat with her father when she was six, and the two of them had moved comfortably into a discussion of their childhood. “The breakup was awful.” She handed the can of Coke back to Troy. “I think you might have been luckier, in some ways, never to have known your father.”

“I doubt it,” Troy replied seriously. “From my earliest days, I resented the fact that some of the kids had two parents. My brother, Jamie, tried to help, of course, but there was only so much he could do. I purposely chose friends who had fathers living at home.” He laughed. “I remember one dark black kid named Willie Adams. His dad was at home all right, but he was an embarrassment to the family. He was an older man, nearing sixty at the time, and he didn’t work. He just sat on the front porch in his rocking chair all day and drank beer.

“Whenever I went over to Willie’s house to play, I would always find some excuse to spend a little time on the porch sitting next to Mr. Adams. Willie would fidget uncomfortably, unable to understand why I wanted to listen to his father tell his old, supposedly boring stories. Mr. Adams had been in the Korean War and he loved to tell about his friends and the battles and, particularly, the Korean women and what he called their tricks.

“Anyway, you could always tell when Mr. Adams was about to start one of his stories. His eyes would begin to stare in front of him, as if he were looking intently at something far off in the distance, and he would say, as much to himself as anybody, ‘Tell the truth, Baby Ruth.’ Then he would recite the story, almost as if he were quoting from a written book, ‘We had driven the North Koreans back to the Yalu and our battalion commander told us they were ready to surrender,’ he would say. “We were feeling good, talking about what we were all going to do when we got back to the States. But then the great yellow horde poured out of China…’ ”

Troy stopped. He stared out at the ocean. It was easy for Carol to see him as a young boy, sitting on a porch with his embarrassed friend Willie and listening to stories told by a man who lived hopelessly in the past but who, nevertheless, represented the father that Troy had never had. She leaned over to Troy and touched his forearm. “It makes a pretty picture,” she said. “You probably never knew how happy you made that man by listening to his stories.”

Around on the other side of the canopy, Nick Williams was sitting by himself in another deck chair. He was reading Madame Bovary and trying without success to ignore both his residual hangover and the scattered tidbits of conversation he was overhearing. He had programmed the navigation system to return automatically to the dive site from Thursday, so there was nothing else he really needed to do to pilot the boat. Nick almost certainly would have enjoyed sharing the conversation with Carol and Troy, but after his earlier confrontation with her, in which he felt she had made it clear that she didn’t want to associate with him, he was not about to join them. It was now necessary that he ignore her. Otherwise she would conclude that he was just another wimp.

And besides, he liked his book. He was reading the part where Emma Bovary gives herself over completely to the affair with Rudolph Boulanger. Nick could see Emma sneaking away from her house in the small French provincial village and racing across the fields into the arms of her lover. Most of the time in the past, whenever Nick had read a novel about a beautiful, dark heroine, he had pictured Monique. But interestingly enough, the Emma Bovary that he was envisioning while he was reading on the boat was Carol Dawson. And more than once that morning, when Nick had read Flaubert’s descriptions of the passions of Emma and Rudolph, he had imagined himself in the role of the bachelor from the French landed gentry making love to Emma/Carol.