Cradle (10 page)

‘Saint John and I became friends, at least sort of, for the few more weeks that I
stayed there. We were united by the deepest of bonds: we were both outsiders in that
strange social structure created by the employees of the Gulfport Inn. It was from
Saint John that I learned about the many misconceptions that Southern whites have
about blacks.’ Troy laughed. ‘You know, one night Saint John actually followed me
to the bathroom to verify with his own eyes that I was not significantly larger than
he was.’

Troy returned to his deck chair and looked at Carol. She was smiling. It was hard
not to enjoy Troy’s stories. He told them with such enthusiasm and self-involved charm.
Under the canopy Nick also had put his book aside and was listening to the conversation.

‘Then there was this giant Farrell, early twenties, who looked like Elvis Presley.
He supplied liquor to the guests at cut rates, operated an escort service on call,
and took excess hotel goods to sell at his sister’s market. He rented part of my room
to store some of the liquor. What a character. After big convention breakfasts Farrell
would pour the leftover orange juice in the pitchers into bottles and keep it for
resale. One morning the hotel manager found a case of the juice temporarily sitting
in a room off the lobby and demanded to know what was going on. Farrell grabbed me
and took me out front. He told me that he wanted to make a deal. If I would admit
that I had taken the juice, Farrell would pay me twenty dollars. He explained that
if I confessed, nothing would happen to me, because niggers were expected to steal.
But if he, Farrell, were caught, he would lose his job….’

Nick came out from under the canopy. ‘I hate to break this up,’ he said, a little
sarcastic edge in his voice, ‘but according to our computer navigator, we are now
at the south edge of the region on the map.’ He handed the map back to Carol.

‘Thanks, Professor,’ Troy laughed, ‘I believe you saved Carol from being talked to
death.’ He walked over to where all the monitoring equipment had been set up on the
footlocker next to the canopy. He turned on the power supply. ‘Hey, angel, you want
to tell me now how this all works.’

Dale Michaels’s ocean telescope was programmed to take three virtually simultaneous
pictures at each fixed setting. The first of the pictures was a normal visible image,
the second was the same field of view photographed at infrared wavelengths, and the
third was a composite sonar image of the same frame. The sonar subsystem did not produce
crisp pictures, only outlines of objects. However, it probed to greater depths than
either the visible or infrared elements of the telescope and could be used even when
the water underneath the boat was murky.

Affixed to the bottom of almost any boat, the compact telescope could be driven thirty
degrees back and forth about the vertical by a small internal motor. The observation
schedule for the telescope was usually defined by a preprogrammed protocol. The details
of this sequence as well as the critical optical parameters for the telescope were
all stored in the system microprocessor; however, everything in the software could
be changed in real-time by manual input if the operator desired.

Data from the telescope was carried to the rest of the electronic equipment on the
boat by means of very thin fibre optics. These cables were bracketed along the edge
of the boat. About ten percent of the pictures reconstructed from this data were then
displayed (after some very crude enhancements) on the boat’s monitor in real-time.
But all the data taken by the telescope was automatically recorded in the one hundred
gigabit memory unit that adjoined the monitor. Another set of fibre optics connected
the same memory unit with the boat’s central navigation system and the servomotor
actuators controlling the telescopes. These circuits were pulsed every ten milliseconds
so that the orientation of the telescope and the boat’s location at the time of each
telescope image could be stored together in the permanent file.

Next to the monitor on top of the footlocker, but on the other side from the memory
unit, was the system control panel. Dr. Dale Michaels and MOI were famous throughout
the world for the cleverness of their inventions; however, these ingenious creations
were not so easy to operate. Dale had tried to give Carol a crash course on the workings
of the system the night before she had driven down to Key West from Miami. It had
been almost useless. Eventually frustrated, Dale had simply programmed into the microprocessor
an easy sequence that mosaicked the area under the boat in regular patterns. He then
set the optical gains at normal default values, and instructed Carol not to change
anything
. ‘All you have to do,’ Dr. Michaels had said as he had carefully loaded the system
control panel into the station wagon, ‘is push this go button. Then cover the panel
to make certain that nobody inadvertently hits the wrong command.’

So Carol certainly could not explain to Troy how anything worked. She walked over
beside him on the boat, put her arm on his shoulder, and grinned sheepishly. ‘I hate
to disappoint you, my inquisitive friend, but I don’t know any more about how this
thing works than I told you when we were setting up all the equipment. To operate
it, all we have to do is turn on the power supply, which you have already done, and
then push this button.’ She pushed the go button on the panel. A picture of the clear
ocean about fifty feet underneath the boat appeared immediately on the colour monitor.
The picture was amazingly sharp. The threesome watched in wonder as a hammerhead shark
swam through a school of small grey fish, swallowing hundreds of them in his awesome
rush.

‘As I understand it,’ Carol continued as both men stayed glued in fascination to the
monitor, ‘the telescope system then does the rest, following a planned set of observations
stored in its software. Obviously we see what it sees here on this monitor. At least
we see the visual image. The simultaneous infrared and sonar pictures are stored on
the recorder. My friend at MOI’ (she didn’t want to alert them even more by using
Dale’s name) ‘tried to explain how I could change between the visual and infrared
and sonar images, but it wasn’t simple. You’d think it would be as easy as pushing
an “I” for infrared or an “S” for sonar. Nope. You have to input as many as a dozen
commands just to change which output signal is fed into the monitor.’

Troy was impressed. Not just by the ocean telescope system, but also by the way Carol,
a woman admittedly not educated in engineering or electronics, had clearly grasped
the essentials of it. ‘The infrared part of the telescope must measure thermal radiation,’
he said slowly, ‘if I remember my high school physics correctly. But how would underwater
thermal variations tell you anything about whales?’

At this point Nick Williams shook his head and turned away from the screen. He recognized
that he was hopelessly out of his intellectual element with all these engineering
terms and he was more than a little embarrassed to admit his total ignorance in front
of Carol and Troy. Nick also didn’t believe for an instant that Carol had brought
all this electronic wizardry on board to find whales that had strayed from their migration
route. He walked over to the small refrigerator and pulled out another beer. ‘And
what we’re going to do for the next two hours, if I understand it correctly, is ride
around in the boat while you look for whales on that screen?’.

Nick’s derisive comment carried with it an unmistakable challenge. It intruded upon
the warm and friendly rapport that had been created between Carol and Troy. She allowed
herself to become irritated again by Nick’s attitude and fired back her own verbal
fusillade. ‘That
was
the plan, Mister Williams, as I told you when we left Key West. But Troy tells me
that you’re something of a treasure hunter. Or at least
were
some years ago. And since you seem to have convinced yourself that treasure is really
what I’m after, perhaps you’d like to sit here next to me and look at the same pictures
to make sure I don’t miss any whales. Or treasure, as the case may be.’

Nick and Carol glared at each other for a few moments. Then Troy stepped between them.
‘Look, Professor… and you too, angel… I don’t pretend to understand why you two insist
on pissing each other off. But it’s a pain in the ass for me. Can’t you just cool
it for a while? After all,’ Troy added, looking first at Nick and then at Carol, ‘if
you two go for a dive, you’re partners. Your lives may depend on one another. So knock
it off.’

Carol shrugged her shoulders and nodded. ‘Okay by me,’ she said. But seeing no immediate
response from Nick, she couldn’t resist another shot. ‘Provided that Mr. Williams
recognizes his responsibility as a PADI member and stays sober enough to dive.’

Nick’s eyes flashed angrily. Then he walked over to the deck railing and dramatically
poured his new beer into the ocean. ‘Don’t worry about me, sweetheart,’ he said, forcing
a smile, ‘I can take care of myself. You just worry about what you do.’

The ocean telescope microprocessor contained a special alarm subroutine that sounded
a noise like a telephone ring whenever the programmed alarm conditions were triggered.
At Carol’s request, Dale Michaels had personally adapted the normal alarming algorithm
just before she left for Key West so that it would react to
either
a large creature moving across the field of view
or
a stationary unknown object of significant size. After he had finished the logic
design for the small change and sent it to his software department for top priority
coding and testing, Dale had smiled to himself. He was amused by his complicity with
Carol. This piece of technological subterfuge would certainly convince Carol’s companions,
whoever they might be, that she was earnest in her search for whales. At the same
time, the alarm would also sound if what Carol was really seeking, supposedly an errant
(and secret) Navy missile currently under development, appeared on the ocean floor
underneath the boat.

The basic structure for both alarm algorithms was easy to understand. To identify
a moving animal, it was sufficient to overlay two or three images taken less than
a second apart (at any wavelength, although there was greater accuracy in the process
with the sharper visual images), and then compare the data using the knowledge that
most of the scene should be unchanged. Significant miscompares (connected areas in
the overlay that differed from image to image) would suggest the presence of a large
moving creature.

To identify foreign objects in the field of view, the alarm algorithm took advantage
of the tremendous storage capacity of the memory unit in the telescope data processing
system. The near simultaneous infrared and visual images were fed into the memory
unit and then crudely analysed against a data set that contained chains of pattern
recognition parameters over both wavelength regions. These pattern parameters had
been developed through years of careful research and had been recently expanded by
MOI to include virtually everything normal (plants, animals, reef structures, etc.)
that might be seen on the ocean floor around the Florida Keys. Any large object that
didn’t correlate in real-time with this existing data base would be flagged and the
alarm would sound.

The alarms made it unnecessary to sit patiently in front of the screen and study the
thousands of frames of data as they were received on the boat. Even Troy, a confessed
‘knowledge junkie’ whose interest in everything was almost insatiable, grew tired
of staring at the monitor after about ten minutes, particularly when the boat entered
into deeper water and very little could be seen in the visual images.

A couple of solitary sharks triggered alarms and created momentary excitement about
twenty minutes after the telescope was activated, but a long period void of any discoveries
followed. As the afternoon waned Nick became more and more impatient. ‘I don’t know
why I allowed myself to be talked into this wild goose chase,’ he grumbled to nobody
in particular. ‘We could have been preparing the boat for the weekend charter.’

Carol ignored Nick’s comment and studied the map one more time. They had traversed
from south to north the region she and Dale had defined and were now moving slowly
east along the northern periphery. Dale had constructed the search area based upon
his own inferences from the questions asked him by the Navy. He could probably have
pinned down the area of interest with greater certainty with a few more questions
of his own, but he hadn’t wanted to arouse any suspicions.

Carol knew that the search was a little like finding a needle in a haystack, but she
had thought it would be worthwhile because of the potential payoff. If she could somehow
find and photograph a secret Navy missile that had crashed near a populated area…
What a scoop that would be! But now she too was growing a little impatient and it
was hard for her to revive her earlier excitement after the long afternoon in the
sun. They would have to head back to Key West soon to ensure arrival by nightfall.
Oh well
, she thought to herself with resignation,
at least I gave it a shot. And as my father used to say, nothing ventured, nothing
gained
.

She was standing at the prow of the boat when suddenly alarms started coming from
the memory unit next to the monitor. One ring, then two, followed by a brief silence.
A third ring then sounded and was rapidly joined by a fourth. Carol rushed excitedly
toward the monitor. ‘Stop the boat,’ she shouted imperiously at Nick. But she was
too late. By the time she reached the monitor, the alarms had stopped and she could
not see anything on the screen.

‘Turn around, turn around,’ a frustrated Carol hollered immediately, not noticing
that Nick was again glaring at her.

‘Aye, aye, Cap-i-tan,’ Nick said, jerking on the wheel with such force that Carol
lost her balance. The monitor and other electronic equipment started to slide off
their flimsy mountings on the top of the footlocker; they were rescued at the last
minute by Troy. The
Florida Queen
veered sharply in the water. Despite the quietness of the ocean, a small wave came
over the railing on the low side of the deck, catching Carol from the knees down.
The bottoms of her cotton slacks were left clinging to her calves. Her white tennis
shoes and socks were drenched. Nick made no effort to hide his amusement.