Those who thought of Jason Bradley as a tough, no-nonsense roughneck would have been surprised at his next action. He pressed a button on his desk console, lay back in his partially reclining chair, and closed his eyes. To all outward appearances, he was asleep.
It had been years before he discovered the identity of the haunting music that had ebbed and flowed across Glomar Explorer’s deck, almost half a lifetime ago. Even then, he had known it must have been inspired by the sea; the slow rhythm of the waves was unmistakable. And how appropriate that the composer was Russian — the most underrated of his country’s three titans, seldom mentioned in the same breath as Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky . . .
As Sergey Rachmaninoff himself had done long ago, Jason Bradley had stood transfixed before Arnold Boecklin’s ‘Isle of the Dead,’ and now he was seeing it again in his mind’s eye. Sometimes he identified himself with the mysterious, shrouded figure standing in the boat; sometimes he was the oarsman (Charon?); and sometimes he was the sinister cargo, being carried to its last resting place beneath the cypresses.
It was a secret ritual that had somehow evolved over the years, and which he believed had saved his life more than once. For while he was engrossed in the music, his subconscious mind — which apparently had no interest in such trivialities — was very busy indeed, analyzing the job that lay ahead, and foreseeing problems that might arise. At least that was Bradley’s more-than-half-seriously-held theory, which he never intended to disprove by too close an examination.
Presently he sat up, switched off the music module, and swung his seat around to one of his half-dozen keyboards. The NeXT Mark 4 which stored most of his files and information was hardly the last word in computers, but Bradley’s business had grown up with it and he had resisted all updates, on the sound principle ‘If it works, don’t fix it.’
‘I thought so,’ he muttered, as he scanned the encyclopedia entry ‘Octopus.’ ‘Maximum size when fully extended may be as much as ten meters. Weight fifty to one hundred kilograms.’
Bradley had never seen an octopus even approaching this size, and like most divers he knew considered them charming and inoffensive creatures. That they could be aggressive, much less dangerous, was an idea he had never taken seriously.
‘See also entry on ‘Sports, Underwater.’ ‘
He blinked twice at this last reference, instantly accessed it, and read it with a mixture of amusement and surprise. Although he had often tried his hand at sports diving, he had the typical professional’s disdain for amateur scubanauts. Too many of them had approached him looking for jobs, blissfully unaware of the fact that most of his work was in water too deep for unprotected humans, often with zero light and even zero visibility.
But he had to admire the intrepid divers of Puget Sound, who wrestled with opponents heavier than themselves and with four times as many arms — and brought them back to the surface without injuring them. (That, it seemed, was one of the rules of the game; if you hurt your octopus before you put it back in the sea, you were disqualified.)
The encyclopedia’s brief video sequence was the stuff of nightmares: Bradley wondered how well the Puget Sounders slept. But it gave him one vital piece of information.
How did these crazy sportsmen — and sportswomen, there were plenty of them as well — persuade a peaceable mollusk to emerge from its lair and indulge in hand-to-tentacle combat? He could hardly believe that the answer was so simple.
Pausing only to place a couple of unusual orders with his regular supplier, he grabbed his travel kit and headed for the airport.
‘Easiest hundred K I ever earned,’ Jason Bradley told himself.
11 ADA
A child with two brilliant parents has a double handicap, and the Craigs had made life even more difficult for their daughter by naming her Ada. This well-advertised tribute to the world’s first computer theorist perfectly summed up their ambitions for the child’s future; it would, they devoutly hoped, be happier than that of Lord Byron’s tragic daughter: Ada, Lady Lovelace.
It was a great disappointment, therefore, when Ada showed no particular talent for mathematics. By the age of six, the Craigs’ friends had joked, ‘She should at least have discovered the binomial theorem.’ As it was, she used her computer without showing any real interest in its operation; it was just another of the household gadgets, like vidphones, remote controllers, voice-operated systems, wall TV, colorfax . . .
Ada even seemed to have difficulty with simple logic, finding AND, NOR, and NAND gates quite baffling. She took an instant dislike to Boolean operators, and had been known to burst into tears at the sight of an IF/THEN statement.
‘Give her time,’ Donald pleaded to the often impatient Edith. ‘There’s nothing wrong with her intelligence. I was at least ten before I understood recursive loops. Maybe she’s going to be an artist. Her last report gave her straight A’s in painting, clay modeling — ‘
‘And a D in arithmetic. What’s worse, she doesn’t seem to care! That’s what I find so disturbing.’
Donald did not agree, but he knew that it would only start another fight if he said so. He loved Ada too much to see any faults in her; as long as she was happy, and did reasonably well at school, that was all that mattered to him now. Sometimes he wished that they had not saddled her with that evocative name, but Edith still seemed determined to have a genius-type daughter. That was now the least of their disagreements. Indeed, if it had not been for Ada, they would have separated long ago.
‘What are we going to do about the puppy?’ he asked, eager to change the subject. ‘It’s only three weeks to her birthday — and we promised.’
‘Well,’ said Edith, softening for a moment, ‘she still hasn’t made up her mind. I only hope she doesn’t choose something enormous — like a Great Dane. Anyway, it wasn’t a promise. We told her it would depend on her next school test.’
You told her, Donald thought. Whatever the result, Ada’s going to get that puppy. Even if she wants an Irish wolfhound — which, after all, would be the appropriate dog for this huge estate.
Donald was still not sure if it was a good idea, but they could easily afford it, and he had long since given up arguing with Edith once she had made up her mind. She had been born and reared in Ireland, and she was determined that Ada should have the same advantage.
Conroy Castle had been neglected for over half a century, and some portions were now almost in ruins. But what was left was more than ample for a modern family, and the stables were in particularly good shape, having been maintained by a local riding school. After vigorous scrubbing and extensive chemical warfare, they provided excellent accommodation for computers and communications equipment. The local residents thought it was a very poor exchange.
On the whole, however, the locals were friendly enough. After all, Edith was an Irish girl who had made good, even if she had married an Englishman. And they heartily approved of the Craigs’ efforts to restore the famous gardens to at least some vestige of their nineteenth-century glory.
One of Donald’s first moves, after they had made the west-wing ground floor livable, was to repair the camera obscura whose dome was a late-Victorian afterthought (some said excrescence) on the castle battlements. It had been installed by Lord Francis Conroy, a keen amateur astronomer and telescope maker, during the last decade of his life; when he was paralyzed, but too proud to be pushed around the estate in a wheelchair, he had spent hours surveying his empire from this vantage point — and issuing instructions to his army of gardeners by semaphore.
The century-old optics were still in surprisingly good condition, and threw a brilliant image of the outside world on to the horizontal viewing table. Ada was fascinated by the instrument and the sense of power it gave her as she scanned the castle grounds. It was, she declared, much better than TV — or the boring old movies her parents were always screening.
And up here on the battlements, she could not hear the sound of their angry voices.
12 A MOLLUSK OF UNUSUAL SIZE
The first bad news came soon after Bradley had settled down to his belated lunch. Chevron Canada fed its VIPs well, and Jason knew that as soon as he hit St. John’s he’d have little time for leisurely, regular meals.
‘Sorry to bother you, Mr. Bradley,’ said the steward, ‘but there’s an urgent call from Head Office.’
‘Can’t I take it from here?’
‘I’m afraid not — there’s video as well. You’ll have to go back.’