Three things happened almost simultaneously. Carol ducked, Troy pulled into the intersection against the red light, barely missing a speeding car, and Greta fired the gun. The bullet ripped through Carol’s window and crashed into Troy’s door, somehow miraculously missing them both. Carol sat cringing under the dashboard in the front seat. She fought against panic and tried to catch her breath.
The chase was on. It was after eleven-thirty on a Saturday night in Key West and the traffic in the residential area was light. Troy’s Ford was no match for the Mercedes. Twice more Greta maneuvered into position and the Ford was sprayed with bullets. Windows were broken and pitted but none of the occupants of the car was injured.
Nick was lying on the floor in the back seat. “Get down-town if you can,” he shouted at Troy. “Maybe we can lose them in the traffic.”
Troy was hunkered down behind the steering wheel as far as he could go. He could barely see the roadway in front of them. He was driving like a lunatic, swerving across the four-lane street into oncoming traffic, honking frantically, and making it impossible for Greta to predict his next move. “Where are the cops when you really need them?” he said out loud. “We have maniacs firing guns at us in the middle of Key West and there are no men of blue anywhere in sight.”
After Nick’s suggestion Troy suddenly spun around in the middle of the street and started heading in the opposite direction. Greta was not prepared. She hit the brakes on the Mercedes, went into a skid, caromed off a parked car, and then resumed the chase.
There were now no cars on the street in front of them and the Mercedes was closing the gap. “Uh oh,” said Troy, fearing another attack. He violently pulled the steering wheel to the left, shot through an alley, into a parking lot, and back onto a narrow street. A few moments later he made a quick turn into a driveway. The car became flooded with light and Troy jammed on the brakes. “Everybody out,” he hollered. While Nick and Carol were trying to determine what the hell was happening, Troy was giving his car keys to a tall figure dressed in a red uniform.
“We’re just having drinks,” he said. They heard the screech of the brakes on the Mercedes. “And those people behind us,” Troy said in a loud voice to the half dozen onlookers, including two parking attendants, who were standing nearby, “have guns and are trying to kill us.”
It was too late for Greta and Homer to escape. Troy had driven into the parking entrance of the Miyako Gardens Hotel and already another car had come into the circular drive behind the Mercedes. Greta threw the car in reverse, smashed against the grill and bumper of the Jaguar behind her, and then tried to make a run for it by squeezing around Troy’s Ford. Troy and the uniformed attendant dove for cover as Greta hit the open door of the Ford, lost control of the Mercedes, and eventually crashed into the parking kiosk in the middle of the driveway. As Nick and Carol stumbled out of the car, four hotel security men surrounded Greta and Homer.
Troy walked over to join his friends. “Anybody hurt?” Both Carol and Nick shook their heads. Troy broke into a grand smile. “I guess that ought to take care of those characters,” he said.
Carol gave him a hug. “It was a brilliant idea to drive here,” she said. “What made you think of it?”
“Birds,” Troy answered.
“Birds?” Nick responded. “What the fuck are you talking about, Jefferson?”
“Well, Professor,” said Troy, opening the door to the elegant hotel and following his colleagues inside into the open atrium, “when they were about to catch us that last time, I realized that they were probably going to kill us for stealing their gold. And I wondered if there really were birds in heaven. My mother always told me that there were.”
“Troy,” Carol said with a smile, “you are so full of shit. Come to the point.”
“Exactly, angel,” he answered. “Look around you.” In the atrium of the Miyako Gardens was a magnificent aviary whose tiny, threaded wire rose four stories into the air under a bank of skylights. Hundreds of colored birds played among the vines and palm trees and brought the real sound and feel of the tropics to the lobby of the hotel.
“When I thought about birds,” Troy could no longer restrain a crazy laugh, “I realized we were in the vicinity of this hotel and the plan sort of jumped into my mind.”
The three of them stood together and gazed up at the aviary. Carol was in the middle. She reached out her hands to both men.
REPATRIATION
BENEATH the emerald-green ocean the spacecraft rests quietly. Odd fishlike creatures swim by, observe the visitor from the heavens, and then continue on their journey. The final checkout before deployment is underway. When the checkout is completed, a door near the bottom of the craft opens and a gold metallic sphere with a diameter of about five inches appears. The sphere is tied down on top of a long, narrow platform. The treads underneath the platform propel it down a small ramp and then across the sandy ocean floor.
The flatbodied vehicle and its cargo disappear in the distance. After a long wait the strange moving platform returns to the spaceship without the golden sphere. The ramp slides back into the vehicle, the door closes, and the spacecraft is prepared for launch. Soon thereafter the great ship eases forward in the water, rising until it is just beneath the surface of the emerald ocean. It then reconfigures itself, adds wings, steerable flaps, and other control devices, and breaks the water looking temporarily like an airplane. Its ascent into the blue sky filled with light from the twin suns is rapid and breathtaking. Orbital velocity is reached in almost no time. Once in orbit above the atmosphere the aerodynamic surfaces are retracted and the spaceship makes one final voyage around the planet Canthor. When it reaches the proper true anomaly of its orbit, the craft accelerates quickly and hurtles again toward the cold and dark of interstellar space. The third delivery has been completed; nine more remain on its sixty-millicycle mission.
Three millicycles pass. The next target planet is only six systems away, another oceanic planet orbiting around a solitary yellow sun of unusual stability. The fourth cradle will be deposited there, on the third body away from the star, a planet whose period of motion about its central sun is so short that it makes fourteen revolutions in one millicycle.
Before reaching the target, the spaceship makes a detour. It dives deep into the hydrogen-rich atmosphere of the largest planet in the new system, thereby accomplishing two goals. Its velocity with respect to the central star is significantly slowed through conversion of kinetic energy to dissipated heat, and its reservoir of raw elements and primitive chemical compounds, from which the onboard manufacturing equipment creates all the backup and replacement parts, is partially replenished. After exiting from the dive into the thick atmosphere. the interstellar voyager covers the final distance to its target in a leisurely six hundred nanocycles.
During the approach, the automatic software in the central computer goes through a well-tested sequence designed to discover whether any of the conditions on the target planet have changed since the last complete set of systematic observations three cycles ago since the contents of each cradle have been uniquely designed, based upon the environment of the specific planet where the zygotes must grow and flourish, any major change in that environment could drastically reduce the probability of survival for the repatriated species. Upon command from the computer, a battery of advanced remote sensing instruments is deployed to confirm the original design specifications for the planet.
But the instruments do not, as planned, validate the set of design assumptions. The environment has changed. Not markedly, not as if it had been reworked on a massive scale by an advanced intelligence for some specific purpose. The initial data strongly suggests instead that during the last cycle or two some indigenous intelligence has emerged that has had a nontrivial impact on both the planet’s surface and its atmosphere.