Cradle (25 page)

Nick took another drink. ‘Speaking of Greta,’ he continued, ‘I ran into her this morning—and
it wasn’t an accident. She was waiting for me while I was talking to Amanda. She knew
that we found something yesterday and wanted to talk about a partnership deal. Do
you know anything about this?’

‘Sure do,’ Troy answered easily. ‘Homer must have had her spying on us. When I finished
up with the boat last night, she was waiting to pump me for information. She watched
you leave with your exercise bag and either guessed or knew that we’d found something.
I didn’t tell her anything, although I didn’t deny it either. Remember, Ellen saw
Carol and me in the marina office with all that snazzy equipment.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ said Nick, ‘and I really didn’t expect to keep it entirely under wraps
forever. I just wish we could find more of the treasure, if it exists, before those
snoops start to follow our every move.’

The two men sat in silence, drinking their beer. ‘But you’ve managed to avoid my question,’
Troy said at length with a mischievous smile. ‘The subject was women. How come a guy
like you, handsome, educated, apparently not gay, does not have a steady woman?’

Nick thought for a moment. He studied Troy’s friendly, guileless face and decided
to take the plunge. ‘I’m not sure, Troy,’ he said seriously, ‘but I think maybe I
push them all away. I find something wrong with them so I have an excuse.’ A new idea
crept into Nick’s mind. ‘Maybe I’m getting even in a way. You asked about broken hearts?
The biggest one in the closet is my own. Mine was torn to shreds when I was a kid
by a woman who probably doesn’t even remember me.’

Troy rose from his chair and walked over to the disc player to change the music. ‘Listen
to us,’ he said lightly, ‘both struggling with the infinite complexity of the female
species. May they remain forever crazy and mysterious and wonderful. And by the way,
Professor,’ Troy’s characteristic grin had returned, ‘I brought this subject up to
warn you. Unless I miss my guess, that reporter lady has her sights set on you. She
likes challenges. And so far you have given off nothing but negative signals. To say
the least.’

Nick jumped up from his chair with a spurt of energy. ‘I’m going for another beer,
my good man. Until just this moment I had thought that I was talking to someone with
insight and understanding. Now I find that I’m talking instead to some stupid black
man who thinks “asshole” is a term of endearment.’ He paused briefly on his way to
the kitchen to pick up some crisps. ‘By the way,’ he shouted at Troy between crunches,
‘you said on the phone that you wanted to show me something. Was that the Angie Leatherwood
album or was it something else?’

Troy met him in the hall as Nick was returning with the beer. ‘No,’ he said earnestly,
‘it was something else. But I wanted to talk to you for a little first to make sure…
well, I’m not sure why, maybe to give me some confidence that you wouldn’t put me
down.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Nick said, a little confused.

‘It’s in here,’ Troy replied, knocking on a closed door off the hall in the opposite
direction from the living room. ‘It’s my baby. I’ve been working on it for over two
years now, alone most of the time—although Angie’s artistic kid brother Lanny has
helped me with some of it—and now I want you to try it out.’ He smiled. ‘You will
be my first alpha tester.’

‘What the hell… I’m lost. What’s an alpha tester?’ Nick’s brow furrowed as he tried
to follow the conversation. The two quick beers on an empty stomach had already given
him a small and unexpected buzz.

‘My invention,’ Troy said slowly, letting each word sink in, ‘is a computer game.
I’ve been working on it for almost two years. And you are going to be the first outsider
to play it.’

Nick screwed up his face as if he had just eaten a particularly tart piece of grapefruit.
‘
Moi?
’ he exclaimed. ‘You want me to play a computer game? You want me, whose hand-eye
coordination is almost nonexistent even when completely sober, to sit down and shoot
aliens, or dodge bombs, or roll marbles at a frenzied pace that only neo-adolescents
can enjoy? Jefferson, have you lost your mind? This is Nick Williams, the guy you
call the Professor, the man who sits and reads
books
for entertainment.’

‘Very, very good,’ Troy replied, laughing heartily at Nick’s outburst. ‘You’re perfect
as an alpha tester. My game is not one of those arcade games that test your reflexes,
although there are a few places in the game where the pace is fairly fast. My creation
is an adventure game. It’s a little like a novel, except that the player defines the
outcome of the game. I’m aiming at a wide audience and I’m including a lot of unusual
technological wrinkles. I would love to see how you respond.’

Troy took Nick’s shrug as grudging assent and opened the door to what should have
been the master bedroom in the duplex unit. Instead, what greeted Nick’s eyes was
an almost phantasmagoric collection of electronic equipment filling every nook and
cranny of a fairly large room. His first impression was one of total chaos. But after
shaking his head and blinking a couple of times, Nick could make out some order in
the jumble of scopes, monitors, cables, computers, and sundry unattached parts. On
one side of the room was a chair about ten feet in front of a giant screen. Between
this chair and the screen was a low table with a keyboard on it. Troy motioned to
Nick to sit down.

‘My game is called
Alien Adventure
, Troy said excitedly, ‘and it will start as soon as I boot the discs and you’re ready
at the keyboard. But there are some things that I must tell you first, before you
start.’ He knelt beside Nick and pointed at the keyboard. ‘There are three critical
keys for you to remember while you are playing the game. First, the X key stops the
clock. From the moment you start the game, the clock continues to run. While the clock
is running you are consuming vital resources. There is only this one way to stop the
clock and gather your wits without paying a penalty. Hitting the X key allows you
to stop and think.

‘Even more important than the X is the S key. The S allows you to checkpoint or, as
you would say, save the game. Right now you can’t understand what I’m telling you,
because you haven’t played complicated computer games before, but believe me, you
must learn to save the game regularly. When you hit the S key, all the parameters
of the game you are playing are written into a special data base that has a unique
identifier. Then, at any time in the future, you can call that identifier and the
game will restart in exactly the place where you saved it. This feature can be a life
saver. If you take a risky route in the game and your character ends up dying, it’s
the save game feature that keeps you from having to start all over again.’

Nick was amazed. This was a different Troy than he had ever seen before. True, he
had been a little surprised and considerably impressed by his first mate’s ability
to fix virtually any piece of electronic gear on the boat, but never in his wildest
dreams had he imagined that Troy left the boat and went home to work with similar
parts in a much more creative way. Now this same smiling black man had him sitting
in a chair in front of a giant screen and was lecturing him patiently like a child.
Nick could hardly wait to see what would happen next.

‘Finally,’ Troy said, asking with his eyes if Nick was still following him, ‘there’s
the H or help key. When you’ve simply run out of imagination and don’t know what to
do, you can push H. The game will then give you some hints on how you might proceed.
But I must warn you of one thing. The clock continues to run while you are being helped.
And there are some places in the game, during a battle for instance, where pushing
the H key can be disastrous, because you are essentially defenceless during the time
that the game processes your request for help. H is most useful when you are in a
benign spot and trying to figure out your overall strategy.’

Still squatting beside him, Troy handed Nick a small spiral notebook and motioned
him to open it. The first page said ‘Command Dictionary’. On each page was a separate
entry, legibly written by hand, which explained the game command that would result
from hitting the key listed at the top of the page. ‘Here are the rest of your commands,
fifty in all,’ Troy said. ‘But you don’t need to memorize them. I’ll help you. You’ll
learn some of them yourself after you play the game for a while. Most of the important
commands are activated by a single stroke on the keyboard, but some of the commands
require two entries.’

Nick flipped through the notebook. He noted that the key L prompted the command ‘Look’.
But another entry was necessary to identify
what
instrument was being used to look. L followed by a 1, for example, meant to look
with your eyes. L8 meant to look with an ultraviolet spectrometer, whatever that was.
Nick was already overwhelmed. He looked over at his friend, who was busy making final
checks on some equipment.

Troy came back to the chair and looked down at Nick. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I think you’re
ready. Any questions?’

‘Just one, my lord and guide,’ Nick replied with mock meekness. ‘May I please have
another beer before I risk my manhood in some weird world of your creation?’

Actually Nick was not yet ready to play. Even after Troy booted three compact discs,
there were more preliminary activities before Nick could begin the game itself. He
had to enter his name, race, age, and sex in response to questions that appeared on
the giant screen. Nick looked at Troy with a curious tilt of his head and a weird
expression on his face. ‘Don’t ask questions at this point,’ Troy told him, ‘it will
all be clear soon enough.’

The screen was next filled with a beautiful ringed planet which looked like what an
artist who favoured purple might make out of Saturn. The perspective was from the
pole of the planet; the rings were all displayed like the different sections of an
archery target. Little flecks of light gleamed intermittently from the rings, indicating
that the sun or star or whatever was the source for the reflected light was in the
vicinity of the viewer. It was a lovely picture. A simple credit in block titles,
ALIEN ADVENTURE BY TROY JEFFERSON
, was superimposed on the ringed planet for three or four seconds and the sound of
soft classical music could be heard in the room. Nick resisted an urge to chuckle
when he heard Troy’s voice, clearly serious and self-conscious, coming from one of
the speakers.

Troy’s recorded voice explained the initial conditions for the game. The adventurer
was on a space station in polar orbit around Gunna, the largest planet belonging to
another solar system whose central body was the G-type star that we call Tau Ceti,
only ten light years or so away from the Earth. ‘Tau Ceti has eight primary bodies
in its system,’ Troy’s voice said, ‘including six planets and two moons.

‘Maps of the system are available at the commissary on the space station,’ Troy’s
voice continued, ‘although some of the regions have been incompletely mapped. When
your adventure begins, you are sleeping in your cabin on board the station. An alarm
sounds on your personal receiver….’

The voice faded and the sound of an alarm could be heard. The picture on the giant
screen was the inside of a space cabin, almost certainly taken from one of the many
successful science fiction movies. In the upper right-hand corner of the screen was
a game digital clock that was changing by one unit every four seconds or so. Nick
looked helplessly at Troy. Troy suggested that he hit the L key. In a few seconds
Nick learned that he could use the direction keys on the board to look at specific
items in his cabin. Each time he hit a direction key, the picture on the screen changed
to correspond to a different point of view. Nick noticed that there was a fuzzy picture
on his small television and followed Troy’s suggestion to watch until it became clear.

When the focus on his cabin television sharpened, Nick could see a young woman wearing
a long, full, richly red dress that dropped almost all the way to the floor. She was
standing, somewhat incongruously, in a small, stark room furnished with a single bed,
a little desk, and a straight chair. Some light was entering the room through the
solitary window near the ceiling and behind the desk. Thick vertical bars were embedded
in the window glass.

The camera zoomed in on her face. Nick leaned forward in his chair in Troy’s apartment.
‘Why… why, it’s Julianne,’ Nick said in astonishment, just as the woman began to speak.

‘Captain Nick Williams,’ she said, much to his surprise, ‘you and I have never met,
but your reputation for valour and justice is unequalled in the Federation. I am Princess
Heather of Othen. While attending the great ball at the inauguration of the Viceroy
of Toom, I was kidnapped by willens and taken to their stronghold on the planet Accutar.
They have told my father, King Merson, that they will not release me unless he cedes
to them all the ore-rich asteroids in the Endelva region.

‘He must not do that, Nick,’ the princess continued earnestly as the camera zoomed
in on her face, ‘or he will deprive our people of their only source of hanna, the
key to our immortality. My sources tell me that already my father wastes away, brooding
over his impossible predicament. My sister Samantha has fled from Othen with a key
division of our best soldiers and a huge store of hanna. It is not clear whether she
intends to try to free me or to revolt against my father’s rule in the event that
he should decide to give up the Endelva asteroids in exchange for my life. She has
always been completely unpredictable.

‘Yesterday the willens delivered an ultimatum to my father. He must make his decision
in one month, or they will behead me. Captain Williams, please help me. I do not want
to die. If you come and rescue me, I will share with you the Othen throne and the
secret of our immortality. We can live forever as king and queen.’