“Okay,” Ann said. “Have some caffeine ready when I get down there. Otherwise, I may have to kill you.”
“Will do.” He reached for the doorknob.
“Sheldon?”
He paused. “Yeah?”
“Did you look at my butt when my back was turned?”
“Ah … no. I thought about it, but it didn’t seem polite.”
Ann threw a pillow at him. “You’re too freaking nice for your own good. Now, get the hell out of my room and let me get dressed.”
Sheldon laughed. “Meet you downstairs.”
Thirty minutes later, Ann walked through the front door of the coffee shop. The lighted plastic sign by the entrance identified the shop as
The interior decor of the coffee shop followed the retro-science fiction theme. The walls were airbrushed with cartoon murals of alien lunarscapes, dotted with improbable-looking domed cities in which the buildings all resembled old-school jukeboxes.
Sheldon was seated at a small round table that had been silk-screened to look like the planet Saturn. As promised, he had a cup of coffee waiting on the table in front of Ann’s chair.
He was looking the other way as she approached, and humming a strange little tune — bouncy, but with an odd rhythm.
Ann sat down and started doctoring the coffee with sugar and powdered creamer. “Do you really have to make that much noise this early in the morning?”
“It’s stuck in my head,” Sheldon said. “From a Japanese commercial.”
He hummed the tune again, and used his spoon to gently tap out the notes against the rim of his coffee cup. The musical clink of the metal on porcelain seemed to goad him into song. “Kitty paws,” he sang. “Like Santa
Ann snorted, and had to grab a napkin to keep from spewing coffee. “Kitty paws? What were they advertising?”
Sheldon took his own swallow of coffee. “Have you ever watched Japanese commercials?”
“No.”
“You can never tell what they’re advertising,” Sheldon said. “At least
“I don’t care what language it’s in,” Ann said. “How can you watch a commercial and not know what they’re advertising?”
“The language isn’t the problem,” Sheldon said. “It’s the cultural subtext. The Japanese contextual cues are totally alien to me. They go right over my head.”
Ann snorted again. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” She set down her coffee cup. “I don’t claim to understand people, but I
Sheldon leaned back in his seat. “Okay … Let’s see … It starts out with a view of the earth, seen from outer space. The camera zooms in closer, until you see the Japanese islands, from great altitude and through cloud cover. Then the camera drops through the clouds, and you’re looking down on a major city — Tokyo, maybe. It zooms in even closer, past the tops of the buildings, and then down to a beautiful little Japanese tea garden, sandwiched between two enormous glass skyscrapers. In the middle of the tea garden is a black European sports sedan. Something really sharp looking. Maybe a Saab. I don’t remember. And draped across the hood of the sports sedan is a tall dark haired woman, European or American, with legs that go on forever. She’s wearing a strapless black evening gown, slit way up the thigh to show plenty of leg, a pair of black stiletto heals, and a little headband with black Cat Woman ears attached. The narrator is talking a mile-a-minute in Japanese, while an off-camera choir of little Japanese girls sing the jingle in English. “Kitty paws … Like Santa
Sheldon sat up, and took another sip of coffee. “Then the camera pulls in tight on the tall woman’s face. She does sort of a sexy-pouty thing with her lips, raises an eyebrow, and says, “
Sheldon looked at Ann. “So, what do you think they’re selling? Japanese tea gardens? European sports cars? Evening wear and sexy shoes? For all I know, they were selling those little Cat Woman ears.”
Ann glared at him. “You just made that whole thing up. Nobody would shoot a commercial like that.”
“I
He set down his coffee cup. “When we get back to the States, I’ll find that commercial on the Internet, and download it for you. I’m really not joking.” He laughed, and started singing again. “Kitty paws … Like Santa
He chopped off in mid-note. His cell phone was ringing. He flipped it open and held it to his ear. “Sheldon Miggs.”
He listened for a second. “Thanks. We’ll be right out.”
Sheldon closed his phone, and took a final gulp of coffee. “Grab your bags. The excitement has arrived. In this particular case, the excitement takes the form of a U.S. Air Force van, with a government-issue driver.”
He pushed back his chair and stood up. “How about it, Cat Woman? Ready to go rescue mankind from certain destruction?”
CHAPTER 34
The titanium cylinder hung suspended in the water 100 meters below the ice, at the end of a Kevlar-jacketed cable. The cylinder was anodized in a flat gray color, the precise shade of which had been calculated by marine biologists to resemble neither food, nor predator. The protective Kevlar cable jacket had been molded in the exact same color, for the same reason.
The sea creatures inhabiting the strange twilight world beneath the ice pack were ravenously hungry, and the more predatory species guarded their territories with jealousy. Although the Kevlar and titanium were tough enough to resist easy damage, it was important that they not invite attacks by any fish or mammal that might mistake them for an enemy, or for an easy meal.
This last was particularly critical, because the titanium cylinder was an acoustic transducer. It transmitted and received audio signals underwater, and those signals were modulated to closely simulate the noises produced by the shrimp-like krill that lived under the ice pack in teaming schools.
When it was broadcasting, the transducer made the same frying bacon hiss produced by swarms of krill as they fed on ice-algae and phytoplankton. Because the krill themselves were a major source of nutrition for many of the fish and sea creatures living in the water beneath the ice pack, that meant that the transducer’s signals sounded like food. And — the durability of titanium and Kevlar aside — a piece of equipment that
Apart from the obvious drawbacks inherent in making sounds like an easy meal, the feeding noise of the krill was nearly perfect for masking a digital audio signal. The crackling hiss was rich with white noise, a jumble of high and low frequencies into which binary information could be encoded with ease.
