Cradle. Part 10

"GOOD morning, angel," Troy said with a grand smile as Carol approached the Florida Queen. "Ready to do some fis.h.i.+ng?" He hopped out of the boat and shouted at Nick, who was around at the back on the other side of the canopy. "She's here, Professor," he hollered "I'm going out to the parking lot to get her stuff." Carol gave Troy the keys to her car and he took off in the direction of the marina office.

Carol paced for a few moments on the jetty before Nick emerged from behind the canopy. "Come on down on the boat," he said, scowling a little as he wiped some heavy dredging chain with a dark cloth. Nick felt terrible. He had a nasty hangover. And he was still bothered by the events of the night before Carol didn't say anything at first. Nick stopped cleaning the chain and waited for her to speak.

"I don't know exactly how to say this," she began in a firm but pleasant voice, "but it's important to me that I say it before I get on the boat." Carol cleared her throat. "Nick," she said deliberately, "I don't want to dive with you today. I want to dive with Troy."

Nick gave her a quizzical look. He was standing in the sun and his head was aching. "But Troy - " he began.

"I know what you're going to say," she interrupted him. "He doesn't have much experience and it could be a dangerous dive." She stared directly at Nick. "That doesn't matter to me. I have enough diving experience for both of us. I prefer to dive with Troy." She waited a few seconds. "Now if you're not willing - "

This time it was Nick who interrupted Carol. "All right, all right," he said, turning away. He was surprised to find that he was both hurt and angry. This woman is still p.i.s.sed, he said to himself. And I thought maybe . . . Nick walked away from Carol and went back on the other side of the canopy to finish preparing the small rented salvage crane he and Troy had installed the night before. Since they had used this old equipment several times on other excursions, the installation had been straight forward and without major problems.

Carol climbed onto the boat and put her copy of the photos on top of the counter next to the steering wheel. "Where's the trident?" she called to Nick. "I thought I'd take another look at it this morning."

"Bottom left drawer, under the nav equipment," was his swift and sharp reply. She took the gray bag out of the drawer, opened it, and pulled out the golden trident. She held it by the long middle rod. It felt funny for some reason. Carol put the object back in the bag and pulled it out a second time. Again she held the heavy trident in her hands. It still didn't feel right. Carol remembered grasping the rod underneath the overhang in the water and wrapping her hand slowly around the central rod. That's it, she said to herself. It's thicker.

She turned the object over in her hands. What's the matter with me? she thought. Have I lost my mind? How could it he thicker? She examined it one more time with great care. This time she thought that the individual tines of the fork had lengthened and that she could detect a perceptible increase in the overall weight. Good grief. Can this be possible? she wondered.

Carol pulled out the photos she had brought along. All the images of the trident that she had with her had been taken underwater. But she was certain that she could discern two subtle changes since it was first photographed. The axis rod did appear to be thicker and the tines of the fork did indeed look longer.

"Nick," she said in a loud voice. "Nick, can you come here?"

"I'm right in the middle of something," an unfriendly voice responded from the other side of the canopy. "Is it important?"

"No. I mean yes," Carol answered. "But it can wait until your first available moment."

Carol's mind was racing. There are only two possibilities, she said to herself with logical precision, either it has changed or it hasn't. If it hasn't changed, then I must be spooked. For it definitely seems thicker. But how could it change? Either on its own or someone changed it. But who? Nick? But how could he . . . ?

Nick came up to her. "Yes?" he said in a distant, almost hostile tone. He was obviously annoyed.

Carol handed him the trident. "Well?" she said, smiling and looking at him expectantly.

"Well, what?" he answered, totally confused by what was happening and still angry about the earlier interaction.

"Can you tell the difference?" Carol continued, nodding at the trident in his hand.

Nick turned it upside down as she had done. The sunlight glinted off the golden surface and hurt his eyes. He squinted. Then he switched the object from hand to hand and looked at it from many different angles. "I think I'm lost," Nick said at length. "Are you trying to tell me that there's some change in this thing?"

He held it out between them. "Yes," she said. "Can't you feel it? The central rod's thicker than it was on Thursday and the tines or individual elements of that fork on one end are a little longer. And don't you think the whole thing is heavier?"

Nick's headache continued to throb. He looked back and forth between the trident and Carol. As far as he could tell, the object had not changed. "No, I don't," he said. "It seems the same to me."

"You're just being difficult," Carol persisted, grabbing the trident back. "Here, look at the pictures. Check out the length of the fork there compared to the overall rod and then look at it now. It's different."

There was something in Carol's general att.i.tude that really irritated Nick. She always seemed to a.s.sume that she was right and everyone else was wrong. "This is absurd," Nick nearly shouted in reply, "and I have a lot of work to do." He paused for a moment and then continued. "How the h.e.l.l could it change? It's a metal object, for Christ's sake. What do you think? That somehow it grew? s.h.i.+t."

He shook his head and started to walk away. After a couple of steps, he turned around. "You can't trust the pictures anyway, " he said in more measured tones . "Underwater photos always distort the objects . . ."

Troy was approaching with both the cart and Carol's equipment. He could tell from the body positions, even without hearing the words, that his two boatmates were at it again. "My, my," he said as he walked up, "I can't leave you two alone for a minute. What are you fighting about this morning, Professor?"

"This supposedly intelligent reporter friend of yours," Nick replied, looking at Carol and speaking in a patronizing manner, "insists that our trident has changed shape. Overnight I guess. Although she has not yet begun to explain how. Will you please, since she won't believe me, explain to her about the index of refraction or whatever it is that fouls up underwater pictures."

Carol appealed to Troy. "But it has changed. Honest. I remember clearly what it felt like at first and now it feels different."

Troy was unloading the cart and putting the ocean telescope system on the Florida Queen. "Angel," Troy said, stopping to check the trident that she was extending toward him with both hands, "I can't tell whether it has changed or not, but I can tell you one thing. You were very excited when you found it the first time and you were also underwater. With that combination I wouldn't trust my own memory of how something felt."

Carol looked at the two men. She was going to pursue the discussion but Nick abruptly changed the subject. "Did you know, Mr. Jefferson, that our client Miss Dawson has requested your services as a diving partner today? She doesn't want to dive with me." His tone was now acerbic.

Troy looked at Carol with surprise. "That's real nice, angel," he said quietly, "but Nick is really the expert. I'm just a little more than a beginner."

"I know that," Carol responded brusquely, still chafing from the outcome of the previous conversation. "But I want to dive with someone I can trust. Someone who behaves responsibly. I know enough about diving for both of us."

Nick gave Carol an angry look and then turned and walked away. He was p.i.s.sed. "Come on, Jefferson," he said. "I've already agreed to let Miss High and Mighty have her way. This time. Let's get the boat ready and finish setting up that telescope thing of hers again."

"My father finally divorced my mother when I was ten," Carol was saying to Troy. They were sitting together in the deck chairs at the front of the boat. After they had gone over the procedures for the dive a couple of times, Carol had mentioned something about her first boating experience, a birthday on a fis.h.i.+ng boat with her father when she was six, and the two of them had moved comfortably into a discussion of their childhood. "The breakup was awful." She handed the can of c.o.ke back to Troy. "I think you might have been luckier, in some ways, never to have known your father."

"I doubt it," Troy replied seriously. "From my earliest days, I resented the fact that some of the kids had two parents. My brother, Jamie, tried to help, of course, but there was only so much he could do. I purposely chose friends who had fathers living at home." He laughed. "I remember one dark black kid named Willie Adams. His dad was at home all right, but he was an embarra.s.sment to the family. He was an older man, nearing sixty at the time, and he didn't work. He just sat on the front porch in his rocking chair all day and drank beer.

"Whenever I went over to Willie's house to play, I would always find some excuse to spend a little time on the porch sitting next to Mr. Adams. Willie would fidget uncomfortably, unable to understand why I wanted to listen to his father tell his old, supposedly boring stories. Mr. Adams had been in the Korean War and he loved to tell about his friends and the battles and, particularly, the Korean women and what he called their tricks.

"Anyway, you could always tell when Mr. Adams was about to start one of his stories. His eyes would begin to stare in front of him, as if he were looking intently at something far off in the distance, and he would say, as much to himself as anybody, 'Tell the truth, Baby Ruth.' Then he would recite the story, almost as if he were quoting from a written book, 'We had driven the North Koreans back to the Yalu and our battalion commander told us they were ready to surrender,' he would say. "We were feeling good, talking about what we were all going to do when we got back to the States. But then the great yellow horde poured out of China . . .' "

Troy stopped. He stared out at the ocean. It was easy for Carol to see him as a young boy, sitting on a porch with his embarra.s.sed friend Willie and listening to stories told by a man who lived hopelessly in the past but who, nevertheless, represented the father that Troy had never had. She leaned over to Troy and touched his forearm. "It makes a pretty picture," she said. "You probably never knew how happy you made that man by listening to his stories."

Around on the other side of the canopy, Nick Williams was sitting by himself in another deck chair. He was reading Madame Bovary and trying without success to ignore both his residual hangover and the scattered tidbits of conversation he was overhearing. He had programmed the navigation system to return automatically to the dive site from Thursday, so there was nothing else he really needed to do to pilot the boat. Nick almost certainly would have enjoyed sharing the conversation with Carol and Troy, but after his earlier confrontation with her, in which he felt she had made it clear that she didn't want to a.s.sociate with him, he was not about to join them. It was now necessary that he ignore her. Otherwise she would conclude that he was just another wimp.

And besides, he liked his book. He was reading the part where Emma Bovary gives herself over completely to the affair with Rudolph Boulanger. Nick could see Emma sneaking away from her house in the small French provincial village and racing across the fields into the arms of her lover. Most of the time in the past, whenever Nick had read a novel about a beautiful, dark heroine, he had pictured Monique. But interestingly enough, the Emma Bovary that he was envisioning while he was reading on the boat was Carol Dawson. And more than once that morning, when Nick had read Flaubert's descriptions of the pa.s.sions of Emma and Rudolph, he had imagined himself in the role of the bachelor from the French landed gentry making love to Emma/Carol.

The automatic navigation system that guided the boat while Nick was reading consisted of a simple transmitter/receiver combination and a small miniprocessor. Taking advantage of a worldwide set of synchronous satellites, software in the processor established the boat's location very precisely and then followed a preprogrammed steering algorithm to the desired final site. Along the way, the two-way link with the satellite overhead provided the necessary information to up date the path through the ocean.

When the Florida Queen was within a mile of the dive site, the nav system sounded a tone. Nick then went to the controls and changed to manual guidance. Carol and Troy rose from their chairs. "Remember," she said, "the primary purpose of our dive is to photograph and salvage whatever it was that we saw down in that fissure on Thursday. If we have enough time afterward, we will go back to the overhang where we found the trident."

Carol walked over and switched on the monitor attached to the ocean telescope. She was standing only a few feet away from Nick. They had not exchanged any words since right after the boat left Key West. "Good luck," he said quietly.

She looked at him to see whether he was serious or was being sarcastic. She couldn't tell. "Thank you," she said evenly.

Troy joined Carol at the monitor. She pulled the photographs out of the envelope so they could be used to define the exact spot to anchor. For a couple of minutes she issued instructions to Nick, based on what she was seeing from the telescope, commanding small corrections to the boat's position. At last the ocean floor underneath them looked almost exactly as it had on Thursday when they had seen the whales. With one major difference.

"Now where's that hole in the reef?" Troy said innocently. "I don't seem to be able to find it on the monitor."

Carol's heart was speeding as she glanced back and forth from the telescope screen to the photographs. Where is that fissure? she thought, It can't have disappeared. The boat drifted away from the dive site and Nick steered it back. This time Troy dropped the anchor overboard. But Carol still could not see any sign of the fissure. She could not understand it.

"Nick," she said finally, "could you give us a hand? We were down there together and we both saw the hole. Are Troy and I just confused in some way?"

Nick came over from the steering wheel under the canopy and stared into the monitor. He too was puzzled. But he thought he saw other things on the bottom of the ocean that also looked a little different. "I don't see the hole either," he said, "but maybe it's just the lighting. We were here in the afternoon last time and now it's ten in the morning."

Troy turned to Carol. "Maybe Nick ought to dive with you. He was there before, has seen the fissure, and knows how to find the overhang. Everything I know is from the pictures."

"No," said Carol quickly. "I want to dive with you. Nick's probably right. We just can't see the fissure because of the different lighting." She picked up her underwater camera and walked around the canopy toward the back of the boat. "Let's get going," she said. "We'll do just fine."

Troy gave Nick a silent shrug, as if to say "I tried," and followed her a few moments later.

3.

"BUT Richard," Ramirez said, "we could get into big trouble."

"I don't see how," Lieutenant Todd replied. "Or why anybody ever has to know. The Navy built the system, after all, primarily for its own s.h.i.+ps. We just allow everyone else to use it. All we have to do is interrogate the master register and get the Doppler and ranging time history for their particular identification code. Then we can figure out where they are. It's easy. We do it all the time for our own vessels."

"But we signed a maritime convention restricting our access to the private registers except in life-or-death or national security cases," Ramirez continued. "I can't just tap into the satellite files because you and I suspect a certain boat of being on an illegal mission. We need more authority."

"Look, Roberto," Todd argued vehemently, "who do you think is going to give us permission? We don't have the photographs. We only have your word for it. No. We must act on our own. If we're wrong, then n.o.body ever has to know about it. If we're right, we'll nail that b.a.s.t.a.r.d, we'll both be heroes, and n.o.body will give us a hard time about what we've done."

Ramirez was silent for a few seconds. "Don't you at least think we should inform Commander Winters? He is, after all, the officer in charge of this Panther investigation."

"Absolutely not," said Lieutenant Todd quickly. "You heard him at the meeting yesterday. He thinks we're out of line already. He'd like nothing better than to s.h.i.+t all over us. He's jealous." Todd saw that Ramirez was still undecided. "I'll tell you what," he said, "we'll call him after we find out where the vessel is."

Lieutenant Ramirez shook his head. "That won't make any difference. We still will have exceeded our authority."

"s.h.i.+t," said Todd in exasperation. "Tell me what has to be done and I'll do it. Without you. I'll take all the risk." He stopped and looked directly at Ramirez. "I can't f.u.c.king understand it. I guess you Mexicans really are gutless. You're the one who actually saw the missile in the photograph, but . . ."

Ramirez's eyes narrowed. His voice became hard. "That's enough, Todd. We'll get the data. But if this turns out to be a disaster, I will personally break your neck with my own hands."

"I knew you'd see it my way," Lieutenant Todd replied, smiling as he followed Ramirez to a command console.

Commander Winters put the extra six-pack of c.o.ke on the top of the ice and then closed the cooler. "Anything else," he shouted out the door at his wife and son, "before I haul this thing out to the car?"

"No, sir," was the reply from the driveway. The commander picked up the cooler and carried it through the screen door. "Whew," he said, as he loaded it in the open trunk of the car, "you have enough food and drink in here for a dozen people."

"I wish you were coming, sir," said Hap. "Most of the rest of the fathers will be there."

"I know. I know," answered Winters. "But your mother's going. And I need to do some private rehearsing for tonight." He gave his son a brief hug. "Besides, Hap, we've talked about this before. Lately I haven't felt comfortable at organized church activities. I believe that religion is between G.o.d and the individual."

"You haven't always felt that way," Betty interjected from the other side of the car. "In fact, you used to love church picnics. You'd play softball and swim and we would laugh all evening." There was just a trace of bitterness in her voice. "Come on, Hap." she said after a momentary pause "We don't want to be late. Thank your father for helping us pack."

"Thanks, Dad." Hap climbed into the car and Winters closed the door behind him. They waved to each other as the Pontiac backed out of the driveway into the street. As they drove away, Winters mused to himself, I must spend more time with him. He needs me now. If I don't it will soon be too late.

He turned around and walked back into the house. At the refrigerator he stopped and opened the door. He poured himself a gla.s.s of orange juice. While he was drinking it, he looked idly around the kitchen. Already Betty had cleaned up the breakfast dishes and put them in the dishwasher. The counters were scrubbed. The morning paper was neatly folded on the breakfast table. The kitchen was tidy, orderly. Like his wife. She abhorred messes of all kinds. Winters remembered one morning, back when Hap was still in diapers and they were living in Norfolk Virginia. The little boy had been exuberantly pounding the kitchen table and suddenly his arms had flailed out, knocking Betty's cup of coffee and the creamer onto the floor. They both broke and made quite a mess all over the kitchen. Betty had stopped her meal abruptly. By the time she had returned to her cold scrambled eggs, there was not the slightest indication anywhere, not on the floors, the lower cupboard, or even in the wastebasket (she packed all the broken pieces neatly in the basket liner and then removed the entire bag to the outside cans), that there had been an accident.

Just to the right of the refrigerator in the Winterses' kitchen, hanging on the wall, there was a small plaque with simple lettering. "For G.o.d so loved the world," it said, "that He gave His only begotten son, that whosoever shall believe in Him shall have everlasting life . . . John 3:16." Vernon Winters saw this kitchen plaque every day, but he had not actually read the words for months, maybe even years. On this particular Sat.u.r.day morning he read them and was moved. He thought about Betty's G.o.d, a G.o.d very similar to the one he had wors.h.i.+pped in his childhood and adolescence in Indiana, a quiet, calm, wise old man who sat up in heaven somewhere, watching everything, knowing everything, waiting to receive and answer our prayers. It was such a simple, beautiful image. "Our Father, Who art in Heaven," he said, recalling the hundreds maybe thousands of times that he had prayed in church, "Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. On Earth as it is in Heaven . . ."

And what is Thy will for me, old man, Winters thought, a little taken aback by his own irreverence. For eight years You have let me drift. Ignored me. Tested me like Job. Or maybe punished me. He walked over to the kitchen table and sat down. He took another sip from his orange juice. But have I been forgiven? I don't yet know. Never once in all that time have You given me a definite sign. Despite my prayers and my tears. One time, he thought, right after Libya, I wondered if maybe . . .

He remembered being half asleep on the beach, lying on his back with his eyes closed on a big comfortable towel. In the distance he could hear the surf and children's voices, occasionally he could even distinguish Hap's voice or Betty's. The summer sun was warm, relaxing. A light began to dart about on the inside of his eyelids. Winters opened his eyes. He couldn't see much because the sunlight was too bright and there was also a glare, a metal glint of some kind, in his eyes. He shaded his forehead with his hand. A little girl with long hair, a year old perhaps, was standing just above him, staring at him. The glint was coming from the long metal comb in her hair.

Winters closed his eyes and opened them again. Now he could see her better. She had s.h.i.+fted her head just a little so the glare was gone. But she was still staring fixedly at him, with absolutely no expression on her face. She was wearing only diapers. He could tell that she was foreign. Arab perhaps, he had thought at the time, looking back into her deep brown, almond-shaped eyes. She didn't move or say anything. She just watched him, curious, relentless, without seeming to notice anything that he did.

"h.e.l.lo," Winters said quietly. "Who are you?"

The little Arab girl gave no sign that she had heard anything. After a few seconds, however, she suddenly pointed her finger at him and her face looked angry. Winters shuddered and sat up abruptly. His quick action frightened her and she began to cry He reached for her but she pulled away, slipped, lost her balance, and fell on the sand. Her head hit something sharp when she fell and blood started running down her scalp and onto her shoulder. Terrified, first by the fall and then by the sight of her own blood, the little girl began to wail.

Winters hovered over her, struggling with his own panic as he watched the blood splatter the sand. Something unrecognized flashed through his mind and he decided to pick the little Arab girl up to comfort her. She fought him violently, with the reckless abandon and surprising strength of the toddler, and struggled free. She fell again on the sand, on her side, the blood from her scalp injury scattering drops of red around the light brown sand. She was now completely hysterical, crying so hard she often could not catch her breath, her face suffused with fear and anger. She pointed again at Winters.

Within seconds a pair of dark brown arms swooped out of the sky and picked her up. For the first time Winters noticed that there were other people around, lots of them in fact. The little girl had been picked up by a man who must have been her father, a short, squat Arab man in his mid-twenties wearing a bright blue bathing suit. He was holding his daughter protectively, looking as if he were expecting a fight, and consoling his distraught young wife whose sobs intermingled with the little girl's frantic cries. Both the parents were looking at Winters accusingly. The mother daubed at the little girl's bleeding head with a towel.

"I didn't mean to hurt her," Winters said, recognizing as he spoke that what he said would be misinterpreted. "She fell and hit her head on something and I . . ." The Arab couple were backing away slowly. Winters turned to the others, maybe a dozen people who had come over in response to the little girl's cries. They also were looking at him strangely. "I didn't mean to hurt her," he repeated in a loud voice. "I was just . . ." He stopped himself. Big tears were falling off his face and onto the sand. My G.o.d, he thought, I'm crying. No wonder these people . . .

He heard another cry. Betty and Hap had apparently just walked up behind him as the Arab couple had backed away with their bleeding daughter. Now, having seen the blood on his father's hands, five-year-old Hap had broken into tears and buried his face in his mother's hip. He sobbed and sobbed. Winters looked at his hands, then at the people standing around him. Impulsively he bent down and tried to clean his hands in the sand. The sound of his son's sobbing punctuated his vain attempt to wipe his hands free of the blood.

As he was kneeling in the sand, Commander Winters glanced at his wife Betty for the first time since the incident had started. What he saw on her face was abject horror. He entreated her for support with his eyes, but instead her eyes glazed over and she too fell to her knees, careful not to disturb her tearful son who was clinging to her side. And Betty began to pray. "Dear G.o.d," she said with her eyes closed.

The crowd dispersed slowly, several of them going over to the Arab family to see if they could be of any help. Winters stayed on his knees in the sand, shaken by his own actions.

At length Betty stood up. "There, there," she consoled her son Hap, "everything will be all right." Without saying another word, she carefully picked up the beach bag and towels and started walking toward the parking lot. The commander followed.

They left the beach and drove back to Norfolk where they were living. And she never asked about it, Winters thought, as he sat at his kitchen table eight years later. She wouldn't even let me talk about it. For at least three years. It was as if it had never happened. Now she mentions it once in a blue moon. But we still have never discussed it.

He finished his orange juice and lit a cigarette. As he did so, he thought immediately of Tiffani and the night before. Fear and arousal simultaneously stirred in Winters when he thought of the coming evening. He also found that he had a curious desire to pray. And now dear G.o.d, he said tentatively, are You testing me again? He was suddenly aware of his own anger. Or are You laughing at me? Maybe it wasn't enough for You to forsake me, to leave me adrift. Maybe You won't he satisfied until I am humiliated.

Again he felt like crying. But he resisted. Winters crushed out his cigarette and stood up from the table. He walked over to the side of the refrigerator and pulled the plaque containing the Bible verse off the wall. He started to throw it in the trash but, after hesitating for a second, he changed his mind and put it in one of the kitchen drawers.

4.

CAROL was swimming rapidly about six feet above the trench as they approached the final turn. She took a few photographs while she waited for Troy to catch up, pointed down below her to where the tracks turned to the left, and then started swimming again, more slowly this time, following the tracks in the narrow crevice toward the overhang. Nothing here had changed. She motioned for Troy to stay back and swam down into the trench, carefully, as she had done before when she was with Nick. Her search of the area under the overhang was very thorough. She did not find anything.

She gestured to Troy that nothing was there, and then, after another quick sequence of photographs, the two divers began retracing their path, going back along the tracks toward the area under the boat where they had already spent fifteen minutes earlier searching fruitlessly for the fissure they had seen on Thursday. It had mysteriously vanished. All the tracks, although somewhat eroded, still converged in front of the reef structure where the hole had been just two days before. Carol had poked and prodded, even damaged the reef in several places (which, as an environmentalist, she hated to do, but she was certain the hole had to be there), but had not found the fissure. If Troy had not seen it so clearly, first on the ocean telescope monitor and then in the pictures, he would have thought that it was just a figment of Nick and Carol's collective imagination.

As Carol, deep in her thoughts, turned right over the main trench after leaving the side path that had led to the overhang, she was careless and brushed ever so slightly against a crop of coral that was extending outward from the reef. She felt a sting on her hand. She looked down and saw that she was bleeding. That's funny, she thought, I just barely touched it. Her mind flashed back to ten minutes before, when she had been roughly pus.h.i.+ng the coral and kelp aside in search of the fissure. And I wasn't even scratched . . .

A wild, inchoate idea started forming in her mind. Excited now, she intensified her swimming down the long trench where the fissure had been. Troy could not keep up with her. It was a long swim but Carol completed it in about four or five minutes. She checked her regulator pressure as she waited for her diving partner. They exchanged the thumbs-up sign when he arrived and Carol tried. without success, to explain her idea to Troy using hand signals. Finally, she bravely reached out and grabbed a piece of coral with her hand. Carol saw Troy's eyes open wide and his face grimace behind his mask. She opened her hard. There were no cuts, no sc.r.a.pes, no blood. Astounded, Troy swam over beside her to look at the coral colony she had just disturbed. He too could touch and even hold this strange coral without cutting his hand. What was going on?

Carol was now pulling the coral and kelp away from the reef. Troy watched in amazement as a huge segment of the reef structure seemed to peel off, almost like a blanket . . .

They heard the great WHOOSH only milliseconds before they felt the pull. A giant chasm opened in the reef behind them and everything in the area, Troy, Carol, schools of fish, plants of all kinds, and an enormous volume of water, was swept into the hole. The current was very swift but the channel was not too large, for Carol and Troy bounced against what felt like metallic sides a couple of times. There was no time to think. They were carried along, as if on a water slide, and simply had to wait for the ride to be over.

The dark gave way to a deep dusk and the current slowed markedly. Separated by about twenty feet, Carol and Troy each tried to gather his wits and figure out what was happening. They appeared to be in the outer annulus of a large circular tank and were going around and around, pa.s.sing gates of some kind after every ninety degrees of revolution. The water in the tank was about ten feet deep. Carol rolled on her back and looked up. She could see a lot of large structures above her, some of them moving, that seemed to be made out of metal or plastic. She could not see Troy anywhere. She tried to grab the sides of the tank so she could stop and look for him. It was useless. She could not resist the motion of the current.

They made three or four trips around the circle without seeing each other. Troy noticed that all the fish and plants had slowly disappeared from their annulus, suggesting that some kind of sorting process was underway. Suddenly the current increased and he was pitched forward and down, under the water and then through a half-open gate, into darkness again. Just as a trace of light appeared above the water and the rate of flow again slowed, he felt something clamp on to his right arm.

Troy was lifted out of the water a foot or so. In the dim light he couldn't see exactly what it was that had caught him, but it felt very strong. It held him without additional movement. Troy looked behind him in the current, where he had been, and he saw Carol's tumbling body approaching. With his free left arm he grabbed at her. She felt his arm and immediately wrapped herself around it. She composed herself, lifted her head out of the water, and struggled to reach the trunk of Troy's body. She succeeded in holding tight to him as the current rushed past. She caught her breath and for just a moment their eyes met behind their diving masks.

Then, inexplicably, the clamp released. When they were back in the water, the current did not seem so strong. They were able to hold on to each other without much difficulty. After about fifteen seconds, the flow of the water slowed down altogether. They had been deposited in a pool in what appeared to be a large room and the water was draining out, running into some unseen orifice at the far end of the room. The last of the water disappeared. Shaken and exhausted Carol and Troy started to stand up in their diving gear.

Carol had great difficulty getting to her feet. Troy helped her up and then pointed to his regulator. Ever so slowly, he slipped out of his mouthpiece and sampled the ambient environment. One breath, then another. As far as he could tell, he was breathing normal air. He shrugged his shoulders at Carol and, in a fit of bravado, took off his mask as well. "h.e.l.looo," he shouted nervously, "Anybody there? You have guests out here."

Carol slowly removed both her mask and her regulator. She had a dazed look on her face. The two of them looked around. The ceiling was about ten feet above them. Overall the dimensions of the chamber were roughly equivalent to a large living room in a nice suburban home. The walls, however, were quite unusual. Instead of being flat and forming nice right-angle joints at each of the intersections, the walls were made of large, curved surfaces, some concave and some convex, that were alternately colored red and blue. Without thinking, Carol began walking around, slowly of course because of the bulky diving gear, and taking photographs.

"Uh, just a moment, Miss Dawson," Troy said with a hesitant smile. He pulled off his flippers and followed her. "Before you take any more pictures, angel, would you kindly tell this unsophisticated black boy just where in the f.u.c.k he is? I mean, last I knew, I was going down under the boat to look for a hole. I think I found it, but I must say it's a trifle unnerving to be visiting someone and not know just who it is. So could you stop with the journalism bit for just a minute and tell me why you are so calm."

Carol was right in front of one of the concave blue wall panels. There were two or three indentations in the wall structure, at about eye level, that formed circles or ellipses. "Now what do you suppose this is?" Carol wondered aloud. Her voice sounded flat, as if she were far away.