‘But our scene does not work right now because nobody watching it will recognize what you two are doing as foreplay. Now, I can change the movement to make it easier—putting Shannon already on the bed when he discovers Charlotte behind the door would be one way—and I can change Charlotte’s clothing so that she looks less like a little girl, but there’s one thing that I cannot do….’ Melvin stopped and looked back and forth from Tiffani to Winters. They were both staring blankly at him.
‘Come here, come here, both of you,’ Melvin said, gesturing impatiently with his right hand. He dropped his voice again. He took Tiffani’s hand with his left and Commander Winters’s with his right. ‘You two are lovers for one night in this play. It is essential that the audience believe this or they will not understand completely why Shannon is at the end of his rope, like the iguana. Shannon is desperate because he was originally locked out of his church for giving in to the same lust….’
They were both listening, but Melvin’s director’s intuition told him he was not reaching them. He had another idea. He took Tiffani’s hand and put it into the commander’s, closing his own hand over theirs for emphasis. ‘Look at each other for a moment. That’s right.’ He turned to Winters. ‘She’s a beautiful young woman, isn’t she, Commander?’
Their eyes were in contact. ‘And he’s a handsome man, isn’t he, Tiffani? I want you to imagine that you have an uncontrollable desire to touch him, to kiss him, to be naked with him.’ Tiffani blushed. Winters fidgeted. Melvin was fairly certain that he saw a spark, albeit a fleeting one.
‘Now tomorrow night,’ he continued, looking at Tiffani and taking his hand off theirs, ‘I want you to capture that feeling when you’re hiding in his room. I want it to explode out of you when he notices that you are there. And you, Commander’—he looked back at the middle-aged naval officer—‘you are torn between an overpowering passion to possess this young girl physically and the almost certain knowledge that it will be the final ruination of both your life and your soul. You are hopelessly trapped. Remember, you fear that God has already forsaken you for your past sins. But, despite that, you finally relinquish yourself to your lust and commit another unpardonable sin.’
Tiffani and Commander Winters both realized at virtually the same time that their hands were still intertwined. They looked at each other for a moment and then, embarrassed, awkwardly separated them. Melvin Burton slipped between his players and put his arms around their shoulders. ‘So go on home now and think about what I’ve said. And come back tomorrow and really break a leg.’
Vernon Winters drove the Pontiac into his driveway in suburban Key West just before eleven o’clock. The house was quiet, the only lights were in the garage and the kitchen. As regular as the stars, Vernon thought, Hap to bed at ten, Betty to bed at ten-thirty. In his mind’s eye he saw his wife go into his son’s bedroom, as she did every night, and fiddle briefly with his sheets and coverlet. ‘Did you say your prayers?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Hap always answered.
Then she would kiss him good night on the forehead, turn out his light as she left the room, and go into her bedroom. Within ten minutes she would have changed into her pyjamas, brushed her teeth, and washed her face. She would then kneel beside her bed, her elbows on the top of the blanket and her hands clasped right in front of her face. ‘Dear God,’ she would say aloud, and then she would pray until exactly ten-thirty, moving her lips silently with her eyes closed. Five minutes later she would be asleep.
Vernon was aware of a vague disquiet as he walked through the living room toward the three bedrooms on the opposite side of the house from the garage. There was something stirring in him, something that he could not identify exactly, but he assumed it was associated with either the nervousness of opening night or the sudden return of Randy Hilliard to his life. He wanted to talk to someone.
He stopped at Hap’s bedroom first. Commander Winters walked in quietly in the dark and sat on the side of his son’s bed. Hap was fast asleep, lying on his side. A tiny nightlight beside his bed illuminated his profile. How like your mother you look, Winters thought. And act. You two are so close. I’m almost a trespasser in my own home. He put his hand gently against Hap’s cheek. The boy did not stir. How can I make up for all the time I was gone?
Winters gently nudged his son awake. ‘Hap,’ he said softly, ‘it’s your dad.’ Henry Allen Pendleton Winters rubbed his eyes and then sat up quickly in bed. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, ‘is anything wrong? Is Mom all right?’
‘No,’ his father answered, and then laughed. ‘I mean yes. Mom’s all right. Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to talk.’
Hap looked at the clock beside his bed. ‘Ummm, well, Dad. What do you want to talk about?’
Winters was quiet for a moment. ‘Hap, did you ever read the copy of the script that I got for you and your mother, the one from my play?’
‘No, sir. Not much,’ Hap replied. ‘I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t get into it. I think maybe it’s above my head.’ He brightened. ‘But I’m looking forward to seeing you in it tomorrow night.’ There was a long pause. ‘Umm, what’s it about anyway?’
Winters stood up and looked out of the open window. Beyond the screen he could hear the gentle susurration of the crickets. ‘It’s about a man who loses his place with God because he can’t or won’t control his actions. It’s about….’ Winters turned his head around quickly and caught his son eyeing the clock. A sharp emotional pain raced through him. He waited until it had abated and then drew a breath. ‘Well, we can talk about it some other time, son. I just realized how late it is.’
He walked to the door. ‘Good night, Hap,’ he said.
‘Good night, sir.’
Vernon Winters walked past his wife’s room to the third bedroom at the end of the hall. He undressed slowly, now even more aware than before of an unfulfilled longing. He thought for a fleeting second about waking Betty up to talk and maybe… But he knew better. That’s not her style, he said to himself, never was. Even before when we slept together. And after Libya and the dreams and tears at night who could blame her for wanting her own bedroom.
He slipped into his bed in his underpants. The soothing melody of the crickets enveloped him. And besides. She has her God and I have my despair. There is nothing left between us except Hap. We couple as strangers, both fearing any discovery.
10
‘The communication room will close in five minutes. The communication room will close in five minutes.’ The disembodied recorded voice sounded tired. Carol Dawson was weary herself. She was talking to Dale Michaels on the videophone. Photographs were strewn all over the desk underneath the screen and the video camera.
‘All right,’ Carol was saying, ‘I guess I agree with you. The only possible way for me to decipher this puzzle is to bring all the photos and the telescope recording unit back to Miami.’ She sighed and then yawned. ‘I’ll come up there first thing in the morning, on the flight that arrives at seven-thirty, so that IPL can get an early shot at the recorded data. But remember, I must be back here in time to pick up the golden trident at four. Can the lab process all the data in a couple of hours?’
‘That’s not the hard part. Trying to analyse the data and piece together a coherent story in an hour or two will be the tough job.’ Dr. Dale was sitting on the couch in the living room of his spacious flat in Key Biscayne. In front of him, on the coffee table, was a magnificent jade chess board with green and white squares. Six carved chess pieces were still on the board: the two opposing kings and four pawns, two from each side. Dale Michaels paused and looked meaningfully at the camera. ‘I know how important this is to you. I’ve cancelled my eleven o’clock meeting so I can help you.’
‘Thanks,’ Carol said automatically. She felt a trickle of irritation. Why is it, she thought while Dale talked about one of his new projects at MOI, that men always demand gratitude for every little sacrifice. If a woman changes her schedule to accommodate a man, it’s expected. But if a man re
vises his precious schedule it’s a big fucking deal.
Dale droned on. Now he was enthusiastically telling her about a new Institute effort to survey the underwater volcanoes around Papua New Guinea. Whew, Carol smiled to herself when she realized that Dale’s self-centred focus was bothering her, I must really be beat. I believe I’m on the verge of being bitchy.
‘Hey,’ Carol interrupted him. She stood up and started to pick up the scattered photographs. ‘Sorry to bring a halt to this party, but they’re closing the room and I’m exhausted. I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘Aren’t you going to make a move?’ Dale replied, pointing at the chess board.
‘No, I’m not,’ Carol said, showing just a trace of anger. ‘And I may not ever. Any reasonable player would have accepted the draw that I offered you last weekend and gone on to more important things. Your damn ego just can’t deal with the idea that one game out of five I can battle you to a tie.’
‘People have been known to make mistakes in the endgame,’ Dale answered, avoiding altogether the emotional content in her remark. ‘But I know you’re tired. I’ll meet you at the airport and take you to breakfast.’
‘Okay. Good night.’ Carol hung up the videophone a little brusquely and packed all the photographs in her briefcase. As soon as she had left the marina, she had taken her camera and film straight to the darkroom at the Key West Independent, where she had spent an hour developing and studying the prints. The results were intriguing, particularly a couple of the blowups. In one of them she could clearly see four separate tracks converging to a spot just under the fissure. In another photo the bodies of the three whales were caught in a pose that looked as if they were in the middle of a deep conversation.
Carol walked through the spacious lobby in the Marriott Hotel. The piano bar was almost deserted. The lithe black pianist was playing an old Carpenters song, ‘Goodbye to Love’. A handsome man in his late thirties or early forties was kissing a flashy young blonde in a nook off to the right. Carol bridled. The bimbo must be all of twenty-three, she said to herself, probably his secretary or something equally important.
As she wound her way down the long corridor toward her room, Carol thought about her conversation with Dale. He had told her that the Navy had small robot vehicles, some of them derived from original MOI designs, that could easily have made the tracks. So it was virtually certain that the Russians had similar vehicles. He had dismissed the whales’ behaviour as irrelevant but had thought that her failure to find out if anything else was under the overhang had been a serious mistake. Of course, Carol had realized when he had said it, I should have spent another minute looking. Nuts. I hope I didn’t blow it. In her mind’s eye she had then carefully revisited the entire scenario at the overhang to see if there were any clues that something else may have been hidden there.
The biggest surprise in the discussion with Dale had come when Carol, in passing, had praised the way the new alarm algorithm had worked. Dale suddenly had become very interested. ‘So the alert code definitely read 101?’ he had said.
‘Yes,’ she had answered, ‘that’s why I wasn’t that astonished when we found the object.’
‘No way,’ he had said emphatically. ‘The trident could not have caused the alert code. Even if it was at the edge of the field of view of the telescope, and that seems unlikely given how far you followed the trench, it’s too small to trigger the foreign object alarm. And how could it have been seen under the overhang anyway?’ Dale had paused for a few seconds. ‘You didn’t look at any of the infrared images in realtime, did you? Well, we can process them tomorrow and see if we can figure out what triggered the alarm.’
Carol felt strangely defeated as she opened the door to her motel room. It’s just fatigue, she said to herself, not wanting to admit that her conversation with Dale had made her feel inadequate. She put her briefcase on a chair and walked wearily to the bathroom to wash her face. Two minutes later she was asleep on the bed in her underclothes. Her slacks, blouse, shoes, and socks were all stacked together in the corner.
She is a little girl again in her dream, wearing the blue-and-yellow striped dress that her parents gave her for her seventh birthday. Carol is walking around with her father in the Northridge Mall on a busy Saturday morning. They pass a large candy store. She lets go of his hand and runs into the store and stares through the glass case at all the chocolates. Carol points at some milk chocolate turtles when the big big man behind the display case asks her what she wants.
In the dream Carol cannot reach the counter and doesn’t have any money. ‘Where is your mother, little girl?’ the candy store man asks. Carol shakes her head and the man repeats the question. She stands on her tiptoes and tells the man in a confidential whisper that her mother drinks too much, but that her father always buys her candy.
The man smiles but he still won’t give her the chocolates. ‘And where is your father, little girl?’ the candy store man now asks. In the case Carol can see the reflection of a kindly, smiling man standing behind her, framed between two piles of chocolates. She wheels around, expecting to see her father. But the man behind her is not her father. This man’s face is grotesque, disfigured. Frightened, she turns back around to the chocolates. The man in the store is now taking the candy away. It is closing time. Carol starts to cry.
‘Where is your father, little girl…? Where is your father?’ The little girl in the dream is sobbing. She is surrounded by big people, all of them asking questions. She puts her hands over her ears.
‘He’s gone,’ Carol finally shouts. ‘He’s gone. He left us and went away and now I’m all alone.’
CYCLE 447
1
Against the deep black background of scattered stars, the filaments of the Milky Way Galaxy seem like thin wisps of light added by a master artist. Here, at the far edge of the Outer Shell, near the beginning of what the Colonists call the Gap, there is no suggestion of the teeming activity of the Colony, some twenty-four light millicycles away. An awesome, unbroken quiet is the background for the breathtaking beauty of a black sky studded with twinkling stars.
Suddenly out of the void comes a small interstellar messenger robot. It seeks and finally finds a dark spherical satellite about three miles in diameter that is easily overlooked in the great panorama of the celestial sky. Time passes. A close-up reveals activity on the satellite. Soft artificial lights now illuminate portions of the surface. Automated vehicles are working on the periphery of the object, apparently changing its shape. External structures are dismantled and taken off to a temporary storage area in the distance. At length the original satellite disappears altogether and what is left are two long parallel rails of metal alloy, built in sections of about two hundred yards apiece from the spare parts of the now vanished satellite. Each rail is ten yards across and separated from its matched partner by about a hundred yards.
Regular sorties to the storage area continue until the useful supplies of material are depleted and the tracks extend for a distance of almost ten miles. Then activity stops. The rails from nowhere to nowhere in space stand as mute reminders of some major engineering activity suddenly abandoned. Or was it? From just below a prominent binary pair, the two brightest lights in the eastern sky, a speck emerges. The speck grows until it dominates the eastern quadrant of the sky. A dozen, no, sixteen great interstellar cargo ships with bright, flashing red lights lead a procession of robot vehicles into the region. The ghostly rails to nowhere are surrounded by the new arrivals. The first cargo ship opens and eight small shuttles emerge, each one moving back down the line toward another of the great cargo containers. The shuttles wait silently outside the huge ships while the entourage completes its arrival.
The final vehicle to arrive is a tiny space tug pulling a long slender object that looks like two folded Japanese fans joined together end to end. It is encased in a transparent and protective sheath of very thin material. Eight small, darting vehicles dance like hummingbirds along its entire length, as
if they were somehow guiding it, guarding it, and checking out its health all at the same time.
The large cargo ships shaped like ancient blimps now open and reveal their contents. Most of them are carrying rail sections stacked in enormous piles. The small shuttles unload the sections, leaving them stacked, and set them in groups stretching for miles in both directions from the existing rails. When the rail sections are almost all unloaded, four of the shuttles approach the side of one of the remaining giant cargo ships and wait for the bay doors to swing open. From the inside of this cargo ship come eight machines that attack each of the four shuttles in pairs, breaking them carefully into pieces and taking the parts back into the dark of the cargo bay. A few moments later, an elongated complex of articulated machinery emerges from this great ship. Once released from the confines of the cargo carrier, it stretches itself into a long bench reaching almost a mile in length. Every hundred yards or so along the central platform of this bench, a smaller set of coordinated components form into highly organized local groups.
This is the automated, multipurpose construction system, one of the technological treasures of the Colonists. The entire system moves into place at the end of the tracks and its many remote manipulators begin to pull rail sections from the various stacks. Its sophisticated local hands and fingers deftly put the new sections in place and attach them with atomic welds. The speed is astonishing. An entire mile of new track is finished within minutes and the great builder moves to another group of rail section piles. The completed tracks extend for almost a hundred miles in space.
Having finished with one task, the construction system undergoes its next metamorphosis. Tearing itself into pieces starting from the two ends of the long bench, the monolithic structure disappears and is reorganized into thousands of separate but similar components. These little antlike contraptions attach themselves in groups to individual rail sections. They measure carefully all the dimensions and check all the welds between adjacent sections. Then, as if on cue, the rails on the four ends of the track segments begin to bend and elevate, lifted by the antlike components. The rails twist upward, upward, bringing the rest of the track with them. The two long parallel lines are eventually transformed into a giant double hoop, over ten miles in radius, that looks like a fun-fair big wheel suspended in space.
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