The dance continued. The music deepened as the boy began to pay attention to his partner and she began arranging her hair with his favorite flowers for their brief encounters. The body movements changed as well, the sprightly, exuberant bounces of the initial stages giving way to subtly suggestive motions designed to awaken and then tease the budding libido. The tiny dancers touched, moved away, and came back together in an embrace.
Carol was entranced. How would my life have been different, she wondered, if I had known all this at the age of five? She remembered her rich friend at soccer camp, Jessica from Laguna Beach, whom she had seen occasionally in subsequent years. Jessica was always ahead, always had to be first. She had had sex with boys before I even started my period. And look what happened to her. Three marriages, three divorces, just thirty years old.
Carol tried to stop her mind from drifting so that she could pay complete attention to the dance. Suddenly she remembered her camera. She had just taken her first pictures of the children when she heard a noise behind her. Nick was coming toward them through the corridor. And he was carrying the trident in his hand.
Nick started to say something but Troy hushed him by putting his finger against his own lips and pointing at the dance in progress. The tempo had now changed. The two mixed children had somehow put the music on automatic (it seemed to be repeating some of the early verses, but with additional instruments in a more complex pattern) and joined the blond boy and the Oriental girl in the dance. Carol’s first impression before Nick spoke out loud was that the dance was now exploring friendships between the paired couple and other people.
“What’s this all about?” Nick said. The moment he spoke the entire projected tableau vanished. All of the children, the dance, and the music disappeared in an instant. Carol was surprised to find that she was disappointed and even a little angry. “Now you’ve blown it,” she said.
Nick looked at his companions’ stern faces. “Jesus,” he said, holding up the cradle, “such a greeting. I bust my butt to go retrieve this damn thing and you guys are pissed when I come back because I interrupt a movie of some kind.”
“For your information, Mr. Williams,” Carol replied, “what we were watching was no ordinary movie. In fact, those kids in that dance are the same species as the ones in your trident.” Nick looked at her skeptically. “Tell him, Troy.”
“She’s right, Professor,” Troy said. “We just figured it out while you were gone. That thing you’re carrying is the seed package for Earth. Some of the zygotes in there are what Carol calls superhumans. Genetically engineered humans with more capability than you or me. Like the kids we just saw.”
Nick lifted the cradle to eye level. “I had figured out myself that this thing was a seed package. But what’s this shit about human seeds?” He glanced at Troy. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” Troy nodded his head. Troy nodded. All three of them stared intently at the object in front of them. Carol kept glancing back and forth from the trident to where the image of the superchildren had been. “It still doesn’t seem possible,” Nick added, “but then nothing else has for the last — ”
“So what did you forget, Nick?” Carol interrupted. “And why did you bring that thing back?” There was no immediate response from Nick. “By the way,” she smiled, “you missed the show of a lifetime.”
“The trident was what I forgot,” Nick answered. “It occurred to me, while I was studying the gold objects in the cylinder, that our trident might be a seed package. And I was worried that it might be dangerous . . .”
The sudden sound of organ music flooding down the corridor from the large room behind them stopped their conversation. Nick and Carol looked at Troy. He put the bracelet up to his ear as if he were listening to it and cracked a large grin. “I think that’s the five-minute warning,” Troy said. “We’d better make our last touchdown and clear out of here.”
The trio turned and walked back down the corridor to the room with the cylinder. When they arrived. Carol and Troy were astonished to see a figure in a blue and white wetsuit on the opposite side of the room. He was kneeling reverently right next to the cylinder.
“Oh, yeah.” said Nick with a nervous laugh, “I forgot to tell you. Commander Winters came back with me . . .”
Commander Winters had felt quite comfortable in the water even though he had not been down on a dive in five years. Nick had gone freestyle, swimming right beside the commander and using the emergency mouthpiece connected to the air supply on Winters’ back. Despite his sense of urgency, Nick had remembered that Winters was basically a novice again and had not rushed the first part of the dive. But when Winters had refused several times to follow Nick up close to the light in the ocean, Nick had become exasperated.
Nick had then taken a final deep breath from the ancillary mouthpiece and grabbed Winters by the shoulders. With gestures, he had explained to the commander that he, Nick, was going to go through the plastic stuff or whatever it was in front of the light and that Winters could either follow him or not. The commander had reluctantly given Nick his hand. Nick turned around immediately and pulled Winters into and through the membrane that separated the alien spaceship from the ocean.
Winters had been completely terrified during his tumble on the water slide inside the vehicle. As a result he had lost his bearings and had had great difficulty standing up after he landed in the splash pool. Nick was already out of the pool and anxious to find his friends. “Look,” Nick had said, as soon as he could get the commander’s attention, “I’m going to leave you now for a few minutes.” He had pointed at the exit on the opposite of the room. “We’ll be in the big room with the high ceilings just on the other side of that wall.” Then he had left carrying the strange golden object from the boat.
Winters was left alone. He carefully pulled himself out on the side of the splash pool and methodically stacked his equipment alongside all the rest of the diving gear. He looked around the room, noting the curves in the black and white partitions. He too felt the closeness of the ceiling. Now according to Williams, the commander thought to himself, I’m in part of an alien spaceship that has temporarily stopped on Earth. So far, except for that clever one-way entrance that I did not have time to analyze, I see no evidence of extraterrestrial origin . . .
Comforted by his logic, he eased across the room toward the opposite wall and into the dark corridor. But his newfound sense of comfort was totally destroyed when he walked into the room dominated by the enormous cylinder with the golden objects floating in the light green liquid. He arched his back and stared at the vaulted, cathedral ceilings far above his head. He then approached the cylinder.
For Winters, the connection between the trident that Nick had been holding and the objects inside the cylinder was instantaneous. Those must be more seed packages, destined for other worlds. Winters thought, his crisp logic disappearing in a quick leap of faith. With six-root carrots and who knows what else to populate a few of the billions of worlds in our galaxy alone.
The commander walked around the cylinder as if he were in a dream. His mind continually replayed both what Nick had told him right before they descended and the amazing scene he had witnessed when the spiderlike creature had shrunk up and jumped into the golden object. So it’s all true. All those things the scientists have been saying about the possibility of vast hordes of living creatures out there among the stars. He stopped for a moment, partially listening to the strange noises behind the walls. And we are only a few of God’s many many children.
Organ music, similar in timbre to that which Carol had heard when she had finished playing “Silent Night,” but with a different tune, began to sound in the distant reaches of the ceiling above him. It reminded Winters of church music. His reaction was instinctual . He knelt down in front of the cylinder and clasped his hands together in prayer.
The music swelled in the room. What Winters heard in his head was the introduction to the Doxology. the short hymn that he had heard every single Sunday for
eighteen years in the Presbyterian church in Columbus, Indiana. In his mind’s eye he was thirteen years old again and sitting next to Betty in his choir robes. He smiled at her and they stood up together.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
The choir sang the first phrase of the hymn and Winters’ brain was bombarded by a montage of memories from his early teens and before, a suite of epiphanic images of his innocent and unknowing closeness with a parental God, one who was in the wall behind his bed or just over his rooftop or at most in the summer afternoon clouds above Columbus. Here was an eight-year-old boy praying that his father would not find out that it was he who had set fire to the vacant lot across from the Smith mansion. Another time, at ten, the little Vernon wept bitter tears as he held his dead cocker spaniel Runtie in his arms and begged the omniscient God to accept his dead dog’s soul into heaven.
The night before the Easter pageant, the first time that Vernon had portrayed Him in His final hours, dragging the cross to Calvary, eleven-year-old Vernon had been unable to sleep. As the night was passing by the boy began to panic, began to fear that he would freeze up and forget his lines. But then he had known what to do. He had reached under his pillow and found the little New Testament that always stayed there, day and night. He had opened it to Matthew 28. “Go ye therefore,” it had said, “baptizing all nations . . .”
That had been enough. Then Vernon had prayed for sleep. His friendly, fatherly God had sent the little boy an image of himself delivering a spellbinding performance in the pageant the next day. Comforted by that picture, he had fallen asleep.
Praise Him all creatures here below.
With the second phrase of the hymn resounding in his ears the venue for Winters’ mental montage changed to Annapolis Maryland. He was a young man now, in the last two years of his university work at the Naval Academy. The pictures that flooded his brain were all taken at the same place, outside the beautiful little Protestant chapel in the middle of the campus. He was either walking in or walking out. He went in the snow, in the rain, and in the late summer heat. He would fulfill his pledge. He had made a bargain with God, a business deal as it were, you do your part and I’ll do mine. It was no longer a one-sided relationship. Now, life had taught the serious young midshipman from Indiana that it was necessary to offer this God something in order to guarantee His compliance with the deal.
For two years Vernon went regularly to the chapel, twice a week at least. He did not really worship there; he corresponded with a worldly God, one that read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. They discussed things. Vernon reminded Him that he was steadfastly upholding his end of the deal and thanked Him for keeping His part of the bargain. But never once did they talk about Joanna Carr. She didn’t matter. The whole affair was between Midshipman Vernon Winters and God.
Praise Him above ye heavenly host.
The commander had unconsciously bowed his head almost to the floor by the time he heard the third phrase of the hymn. In his heart he knew the next stops on this spiritual journey. He was off the coast of Libya first, praying those horrible words requesting death and destruction for Gaddafi’s family. God had changed as Lieutenant Winters had matured. He was now an executive, a president of something larger than a nation, an admiral, a judge, somewhat remote, but still accessible in time of real need.
However, he had lost his all-forgiving nature. He had become stern and judgmental. Killing a small Arab girl wasn’t like burning down the vacant lot across from the Smith mansion. Winters’ God now held him personally accountable for all his actions. And there were some sins almost beyond forgiveness, some deeds so heinous that one might wait for weeks, months, or even years in the anterooms of His court before He would consent to hear your plea for mercy and expiation.
Again the commander remembered his desperate search for Him after that awful evening when he had sat on the couch beside his wife and watched the videotaped newsreels of the Libya bombing. She had been so proud of him. She had taped every segment of CBS news that had covered the North African engagement and then surprised him with a complete showing the day after he returned to Norfolk. It was only then that the full horror of what he had done had struck Winters. Struggling not to vomit as the camera had shown the gruesome result of those missiles that had been fired from his planes, Winters had stumbled out into the night air, alone, and wandered until daybreak.
He had been looking for Him. A dozen times in the next three years this rite would repeat itself and he would wander again, all night, alternately praying and walking, hoping for some sign that He had listened to the commander’s prayers. The stars and moon above him on those nights had been magnificent. But they could not grant forgiveness, could not give surcease to his troubled soul.
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
And so God became blackness, a void, for Commander Winters. On those rare occasions afterward when he would pray, there was no longer any mental image of God, no picture of Him at all in his mind. There was just blackness, darkness, emptiness. Until this moment. As he knelt there outside the cylinder, heard the final phrase of the Doxology, and prayed to God to forgive him his doubts, his longings for Tiffani Thomas, and his general lack of direction, there was an explosion of light in Winters mind’s eye. God was speaking to him! God had at last given him a sign!
It was not the sign that Winters had been seeking, not evidence that He had finally forgiven the commander and accepted his penance, but something much much better. The explosion of light in Winter’s mind was a star, a solar furnace forging helium out of hydrogen. As his mental camera backed away rapidly, Winters could see planets around that star and signs of intelligence on a few of the planets. There were other stars and other planets in the distance. Billions of stars in this galaxy alone and, after the mammoth voids between the galaxies, more huge collections of stars and planets and living creatures stretching incomprehensible distances in all directions.
Winters’ body shook with joy and his eyes flooded with tears when he realized how completely God had answered his prayers. It would not have been enough for Him to simply reveal to Winters that he was forgiven. No, this Lord of everything imaginable, whose domain embraced chemicals risen to consciousness on millions of worlds in a vast and uncountable universe, this God who was truly omnipotent and ubiquitous, had gone way beyond his prayers. He had shown Winters the unity in everything. He had not limited Himself just to the affairs of one individual on a small and insignificant blue planet orbiting an ordinary yellow sun in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy; he had also shown Winters how that species and its pool of intelligence and spirituality was connected to every part of every atom in His grand dominion.
As Nick walked across the room toward Commander Winters, the intermittent noises behind the walls increased in amplitude and frequency. Around on the far side of the cylinder, next to one of the larger support machines, a door opened and two carpets, moving inchworm style, came into the room. They were immediately followed by two wardens and four platforms on treads. The platforms were carrying stacks of building materials. Each of the wardens led two platforms to a corner of the room, where they started constructing secure anchor stanchions for the cylinder.
The two carpets confronted Nick in the center of the room. They stood up on end and leaned in the direction of the exit toward the ocean. “They’re telling us it’s time to go,” Carol said as she and Troy came up beside Nick.
“I understand that,” Nick replied. “But I’m not yet ready to leave.” He turned to Troy. “Does this game have an X key at all?” he asked. “I could use a time out.”
Troy laughed. “I don’t think so, Professor. And there’s no way we can save the game and try again.”
Nick looked as if he were in deep thought. The carpets continued to beckon. “Come on, Nick,” Carol grabbed him by the arm. “Let’s go before they get angry.”
Suddenly Nick advanced toward one of the carpets and extended the golden cradl
e. “Here,” he said, “take this and put it with the rest of them, up there, in the cylinder where it belongs.” The carpet recoiled and twisted its top from side to side. Then it pulled its two vertical sides together and pointed at Nick.
“I don’t need a bracelet to interpret that gesture,” Troy remarked. “The carpet is plainly telling you to take the trident back to your boat.”
Nick nodded his head and was quiet for a moment. “Is this the only one?” he asked Troy. Troy didn’t understand the question. “Is this the only seed package for Earth?”
“I think so,” Troy answered after a moment’s hesitation. He looked at Nick with a puzzled expression.
Meanwhile the activity level in the room had increased substantially. As Commander Winters ambled toward the trio in the middle of the hubbub, the wardens and platforms were actively building in the corners, moving equipment could be heard behind the walls, and the organ music was growing louder and slightly ominous. In addition, a giant sock or cover of some kind, lined with a soft, pliant material, had unfurled above them in the ceiling and was descending slowly over the cylinder. Commander Winters stared around the room with undisguised astonishment. Still serenely content in his heart from the beauty and intensity of his epiphany, he was not paying much attention to the conversation beside him.
“They must take this thing with them,” Nick was saying earnestly to Carol and Troy. “Don’t you see? It’s even more important now that I know there are human seedlings inside. Our children won’t have a chance.”
“But they were so beautiful, so smart,” Carol said. “You didn’t see them like we did. I can’t believe those children would ever hurt anybody or anything.”
They wouldn’t mean to destroy us,” Nick argued. “It would just happen.”