2010: Odyssey Two

  "You see?" said the technician. "She knows perfectly well what's going on. She's a lot brighter than she pretends to be, most of the time."

  "And she's the first?"

  "Yes. All the others believe that really is Nurse Williams, bringing their meals."

  "Well, I don't think it matters. Look how pleased she is, just because she's outsmarted us. She's eating her food, which is the purpose of the exercise. But we must warn the nurses - all of them, not just Williams."

  "Why - oh, of course. The next time it may not be a hologram - and then think of the lawsuits we'll be facing from our battered staff."

  32

  Crystal Spring

  The Indians, and the Cajun settlers who had moved here from Louisiana, said that Crystal Spring was bottomless. That, of course, was nonsense, and surely even they could not believe it. One had only to put on a face mask and swim out a few strokes - and there, clearly visible, was the little cave from which the incredibly pure water flowed with the slender green weeds undulating around it. And peering up through them, the eyes of the Monster.

  Two dark circles, side by side - even though they never moved, what else could they be? That lurking presence gave an added excitement to every swim; one day the Monster would come rushing up from its lair, scattering the fish in its hunt for larger prey. Never would Bobby or David admit that nothing more dangerous than an abandoned, and doubtless stolen, bicycle lay half buried among the water weeds, a hundred metres down.

  That depth was hard to believe, even after line and sinker had established it beyond argument. Bobby, the older and better diver, had been perhaps a tenth of the way down, and had reported that the bottom looked just as far away as ever.

  But now the Crystal Spring was about to reveal its secrets; perhaps the legend of the Confederate treasure was true, despite the scorn of all the local historians. At the very least, they might endear themselves to the chief of police - always excellent policy - by recovering a few handguns deposited after recent crimes.

  The little air compressor that Bobby had found in the garage junk heap was now chugging healthily away, after their initial problems of starting it. Every few seconds it would cough and emit a cloud of blue smoke, but it showed no sign of stopping. "And even if it does," said Bobby, "so what? If the girls in the Underwater Theatre can swim up from fifty metres without their air hoses, so can we. It's perfectly safe."

  In that case, thought Dave fleetingly, why didn't we tell Ma what we were doing, and why did we wait until Dad had gone back to the Cape for the next shuttle launch? But he did not have any real qualms: Bobby always knew best. It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything. Though he wished he wouldn't spend quite so much time now with that stupid Betty Schultz. True, she was very pretty - but, dammit, she was a girl! It was only with the greatest difficulty that they had been able to get rid of her this morning.

  Dave was used to being a guinea pig; that was what younger brothers were for. He adjusted his face mask, put on his flippers, and slid into the crystalline water.

  Bobby handed him the air hose with the old scuba mouthpiece they had taped to it. Dave took a breath, and grimaced.

  "It tastes horrible."

  "You'll get used to it. In you go - no deeper than that ledge. That's where I'll start adjusting the pressure valve so we don't waste too much air. Come up when I tug the hose."

  Dave slid gently beneath the surface, and into wonderland. It was a peaceful, monochrome world, so different from the coral reefs of the Keys. There were none of the garish colours of the marine environment, where life - animal and vegetable - flaunted itself with all the hues of the rainbow. Here were only delicate shades of blue and green, and fish that looked like fish, not like butterflies.

  He flippered slowly down, dragging the hose behind him, pausing to drink from its stream of bubbles whenever he felt the need. The sensation of freedom was so wonderful that he almost forgot the horrible oily taste in his mouth. When he reached the ledge - actually an ancient, waterlogged tree trunk, so overgrown with weeds that it was unrecognizable - he sat down and looked around him.

  He could see right across the spring, to the green slopes at the far side of the flooded crater, at least a hundred metres away. There were not many fish around, but a small school went twinkling past like a shower of silver coins in the sunlight streaming down from above.

  There was also an old friend stationed, as usual, at the gap where the waters of the spring began their journey to the sea. A small alligator ("but large enough," Bobby had once said cheerfully. "He's bigger than I am.") was hanging vertically, without visible means of support, only his nose above the surface. They had never bothered him, and he had never bothered them.

  The air hose gave an impatient tug. Dave was happy to go; he had not realized how cold it could get at that hitherto unattainable depth - and he was also feeling distinctly sick. But the hot sunlight soon revived his spirits.

  "No problems," said Bobby expansively. "Just keep unscrewing the valve so the pressure gauge doesn't drop below the red line."

  "How deep are you going?"

  "All the way, if I feel like it."

  Dave did not take that seriously; they both knew about rapture of the depths and nitrogen narcosis. And in any case, the old garden hose was only thirty metres long. That would be plenty for this first experiment.

  As he had done so many times before, he watched with envious admiration as his beloved elder brother accepted a new challenge. Swimming as effortlessly as the fish around him, Bobby glided downward into that blue, mysterious universe. He turned once and pointed vigorously to the air hose, making it unmistakably clear that he needed an increased air flow.

  Despite the splitting headache that had suddenly come upon him, Dave remembered his duty. He hurried back to the ancient compressor, and opened the control valve to its deadly maximum - fifty parts per million of carbon monoxide.

  The last he saw of Bobby was that confidently descending, sunlight-dappled figure passing forever beyond his reach. The wax statue in the funeral parlour was a total stranger, who had nothing to do with Robert Bowman.

  33

  Betty

  Why had he come here, returning like an unquiet ghost to the scene of ancient anguish? He had no idea; indeed, he had not been conscious of his destination, until the round eye of Crystal Spring had gazed up at him from the forest below.

  He was master of the world, yet he was paralysed by a sense of devastating grief he had not known for years. Time had healed the wound, as it always does; yet it seemed only yesterday that he had stood weeping beside the emerald mirror, seeing only the reflections of the surrounding cypresses with their burden of Spanish moss. What was happening to him?

  And now, still without deliberate volition, but as if swept by some gentle current, he was drifting northward, toward the state capital. He was looking for something; what it was, he would not know until he found it.

  No one, and no instrument, detected his passage. He was no longer radiating wastefully, but had almost mastered his control of energy, as once he had mastered lost though not forgotten limbs. He sank like a mist into the earthquakeproof vaults, until he found himself among billions of stored memories, and dazzling, flickering networks of electronic thoughts.

  This task was more complex than the triggering of a crude nuclear bomb, and took him a little longer. Before he found the information he was seeking, he made one trivial slip, but did not bother to correct it. No one ever understood why, the next month, three hundred Florida taxpayers, all of whose names began with F, received cheques for precisely one dollar. It cost many times the overpayment to straighten matters out, and the baffled computer engineers finally put the blame on a cosmic-ray shower. Which, on the whole, was not so very far from the truth.

  In a few milliseconds, he had moved from Tallahassee to 634 South Magnolia Street, Tampa. It was still the same address; he need not have wasted time looking it up.

  But then, he had
never intended to look it up, until the very moment when he had done so.

  After three births and two abortions, Betty Fernandez (née Schultz) was still a beautiful woman. At the moment she was also a very thoughtful one; she was watching a TV programme that brought back memories, bitter and sweet.

  It was a News Special, triggered by the mysterious events of the preceding twelve hours, beginning with the warning that Leonov had beamed back from the moons of Jupiter. Something was heading for Earth; something had - harmlessly - detonated an orbiting nuclear bomb which no one had come forward to claim. That was all, but it was quite enough.

  The news commentators had dredged up all the old videotapes - and some of them really were tapes - going back to the once top-secret records showing the discovery of TMA-l on the Moon. For the fiftieth time, at least, she heard that eerie radio shriek as the monolith greeted the lunar dawn and hurled its message toward Jupiter. And once again she watched the familiar scenes and listened to the old interviews aboard Discovery.

  Why was she watching? It was all stored somewhere in the home archives (though she never played it back when José was around). Perhaps she was expecting some newsflash; she did not like to admit, even to herself, how much power the past still held over her emotions.

  And there was Dave, as she had expected. It was an old BBC interview, of which she knew almost every word. He was talking about Hal, trying to decide whether the computer was self-conscious or not.

  How young he looked - how different from those last blurred images from the doomed Discovery! And how much like Bobby as she remembered him.

  The image wavered as her eyes filled with tears. No - something was wrong with the set, or the channel. Both sound and image were behaving erratically.

  Dave's lips were moving, but she could hear nothing. Then his face seemed to dissolve, to melt into blocks of colour. It reformed, blurred again, and then was steady once more. But there was still no sound.

  Where had they got this picture! This was not Dave as a man, but as a boy - as she had known him first. He was looking out of the screen almost as if he could see her across the gulf of years.

  He smiled; his lips moved.

  "Hello, Betty," he said.

  It was not hard to form the words, and to impose them on the currents pulsing in the audio circuits. The real difficulty was to slow down his thoughts to the glacial tempo of the human brain. And then to have to wait an eternity for the answer.

  Betty Fernandez was tough; she was also intelligent, and though she had been a housewife for a dozen years, she had not forgotten her training as an electronics serviceperson. This was just another of the medium's countless miracles of simulation; she would accept it now, and worry about the details later.

  "Dave," she answered. "Dave - is that really you?"

  "I am not sure," replied the image on the screen, in a curiously toneless voice. "But I remember Dave Bowman, and everything about him."

  "Is he dead?"

  Now that was another difficult question.

  "His body - yes. But that is no longer important. All that Dave Bowman really was, is still part of me."

  Betty crossed herself - that was a gesture she had learned from José - and whispered:

  "You mean - you're a spirit?"

  "I do not know a better word."

  "Why have you returned?"

  "Ah! Betty - why indeed! I wish you could tell me."

  Yet he knew one answer, for it was appearing on the TV screen. The divorce between body and mind was still far from complete, and not even the most complaisant of the cable networks would have transmitted the blatantly sexual images that were forming there now.

  Betty watched for a little while, sometimes smiling, sometimes shocked. Then she turned away, not through shame but sadness - regret for lost delights.

  "So it's not true," she said, "what they always told us about angels."

  Am I an angel? he wondered. But at least he understood what he was doing there, swept back by the tides of sorrow and desire to a rendezvous with his past. The most powerful emotion he had ever known had been his passion for Betty; the elements of grief and guilt it contained only made it stronger.

  She had never told him if he was a better lover than Bobby; that was one question he had never asked, for that would have broken the spell. They had clung to the same illusion, sought in each other's arms (and how young he had been - still only seventeen when it had started, barely two years after the funeral!) a balm for the same wound.

  Of course, it could not last, but the experience had left him irrevocably changed. For more than a decade, all his autoerotic fantasies had centred upon Betty; he had never found another woman to compare with her, and long ago had realized that he never would. No one else was haunted by the same beloved ghost.

  The images of desire faded from the screen; for a moment, the regular programme broke through, with an incongruous shot of Leonov hanging above Io. Then Dave Bowman's face reappeared. He seemed to be losing control, for its lineaments were wildly unstable. Sometimes he would seem only ten years old - then twenty or thirty -then, incredibly, a wizened mummy whose wrinkled features were a parody of the man she had once known.

  "I have one more question before I go. Carlos - you always said he was Jose's son, and I always wondered. What was the truth?"

  Betty Fernandez stared for one long, last time into the eyes of the boy she had once loved (he was eighteen again, and for a moment she wished she could see his entire body, not merely his face).

  "He was your son, David," she whispered.

  The image faded; the normal service resumed. When, almost an hour later, José Fernandez came quietly into the room, Betty was still staring at the screen.

  She did not turn around as he kissed her on the back of the neck.

  "You'll never believe this, José."

  "Try me."

  "I've just lied to a ghost."

  34

  Valediction

  When the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics published its controversial summary Fifty Years of UFOs in 1997, many critics pointed out that unidentified flying objects had been observed for centuries, and that Kenneth Arnold's 'Flying Saucer' sighting of 1947 had countless precedents. People had been seeing strange things in the sky since the dawn of history; but until the mid-twentieth century, UFOs were a random phenomenon of no general interest. After that date, they became a matter of public and scientific concern, and the basis for what could only be called religious beliefs.

  The reason was not far to seek; the arrival of the giant rocket and the dawn of the Space Age had turned men's minds to other worlds. Realization that the human race would soon be able to leave the planet of its birth prompted the inevitable questions: Where's everyone, and when may we expect visitors? There was also the hope, though it was seldom spelled out in as many words, that benevolent creatures from the stars might help mankind heal its numerous self-inflicted wounds and save it from future disasters.

  Any student of psychology could have predicted that so profound a need would be swiftly satisfied. During the last half of the twentieth century, there were literally thousands of reports of spacecraft sightings from every part of the globe. More than that, there were hundreds of reports of 'close encounters' - actual meetings with extraterrestrial visitors, frequently embellished by tales of celestial joyrides, abductions, and even honeymoons in space. The fact that, over and over again, these were demonstrated to be lies or hallucinations did nothing to deter the faithful. Men who had been shown cities on the far side of the Moon lost little credibility even when Orbiter surveys and Apollo revealed no artifacts of any kind; ladies who married Venusians were still believed when that planet, sadly, turned out to be hotter than molten lead.

  By the time the ALAA published its report no reputable scientist - even among those few who had once espoused the idea - believed that UFOs had any connection with extraterrestrial life or intelligence. Of course, it would never be possibl
e to prove that; any one of those myriad sightings, over the last thousand years, might have been the real thing. But as time went by, and satellite cameras and radars scanning the entire heavens produced no concrete evidence, the general public lost interest in the idea. The cultists, of course, were not discouraged, but kept the faith with their newsletters and books, most of them regurgitating and embellishing old reports long after they had been discredited or exposed.

  When the discovery of the Tycho monolith - TMA-I - was finally announced, there was a chorus of 'I told you so's!' It could no longer be denied that there had been visitors to the Moon - and presumably to the Earth as well - a little matter of three million years ago. At once, UFOs infested the heavens again; though it was odd that the three independent national tracking systems, which could locate anything in space larger than a ballpoint pen, were still unable to find them.

  Rather quickly, the number of reports dropped down to the 'noise level' once more - the figure that would be expected, merely as a result of the many astronomical, meteorological, and aeronautical phenomena constantly occurring in the skies.

  But now it had started all over again. This time, there was no mistake; it was official. A genuine UFO was on its way to Earth.

  Sightings were reported within minutes of the warning from Leonov; the first close encounters were only a few hours later. A retired stockbroker, walking his bulldog on the Yorkshire Moors, was astonished when a disk-shaped craft landed beside him and the occupant - quite human, except for the pointed ears - asked the way to Downing Street. The contactee was so surprised that he was only able to wave his stick in the general direction of Whitehall; conclusive proof of the meeting was provided by the fact that the bulldog now refused to take his food.

  Although the stockbroker had no previous history of mental illness, even those who believed him had some difficulty in accepting the next report. This time it was a Basque shepherd on a traditional mission; he was greatly relieved when what he had feared to be border guards turned out to be a couple of cloaked men with piercing eyes, who wanted to know the way to the United Nations Headquarters.