Cradle. Part 11

"Carol," Troy almost shouted. "Stop it. Stop right now. We can't just blissfully walk around here as if this is a typical afternoon stroll through a model house. We have to talk. Where are we? How are we going; to get out and go home? Home, remember the place? I guarantee you it's not under the ocean two hours away from sh.o.r.e." He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.

She started to snap out of her daze. She looked slowly around the entire room and then back at Troy. "Jesus," she said. "And s.h.i.t." He saw her tremble a little and stepped forward to hug her. She indicated for him to leave her alone. "I'm all right. At least almost." Carol took a couple of deep breaths and then smiled. "Anyway, I've sure got one h.e.l.l of a story here." She looked around the room again. "Uh Troy," she said with her brow wrinkled, "how did we get in here? I don't see a doorway or an opening or anything."

"Good question," Troy replied. "A very good question, to which I might have the answer. I think these crazy colored walls move around. I believe I saw the walls rolling into place when I was under the water. So all we have to do is push them aside and find our way out." He tried to wedge his hands into a crack that was a connection between a red and a blue piece of the wall structure. He was unsuccessful.

Carol left Troy and started to pace around the perimeter of the room in her ungainly diving apparatus. She quickly stopped and took off everything except her bathing suit. She seemed intent on both examining and photographing every single panel in the wall. Troy took off his own air tanks and buoyancy vest as well, dropping them on the light metal floor with a clank. He watched her for a minute.

"Carol, oh Carol," he said from across the room, a big fake grin spreading across his face. "Would you like to tell me what you're doing now? I mean, after all, angel, I may be able to help."

"I'm looking for something that says 'Eat Me' or 'Drink Me,' " she replied with a nervous laugh.

"Of course," Troy mumbled to himself, "that was absolutely obvious."

"Do you remember Alice in Wonderland?" Carol asked from the opposite side of the room. She had found a long, thin protuberance that looked like a handle sticking out from the center of one of the red panels. She waved and he came over. The two of them tried to twist and turn the handle. Nothing happened. Carol became frustrated struggling with it.

Troy thought he saw a first sign of panic in Carol as her eyes frantically scanned the rest of the room. He pulled himself up and stood at attention, military style. "Speak roughly to your little boy . . . And beat him when he sneezes . . . He only does it to annoy . . because he knows it teases."

The deep furrows in Carol's face showed that she thought Troy had temporarily lost his mind. "That was the Queen of Hearts, I think." Troy laughed. "I'm not sure exactly. But I had to learn it for a play when I was in the fifth grade." Carol had relaxed and was also laughing in spite of her fear. She reached up and gave Troy a kiss on the cheek. "Careful, now, careful," he said with a twinkle in his eye. "We black men are easily aroused."

Carol slid her arm through Troy's as they finished walking around the rest of the room, searching the walls for any sign of an exit Troy's banter made Carol feel comfortable. "When I was in the eighth grade a black teacher of mine told me that Alice was a racist story. He contended that it was very significant that it was a white rabbit that Alice followed. He said that no nice little white girl would ever have pursued a black rabbit down a hole." He stopped in front of another red panel. "Well, well," he said. "What have we here?"

This red panel looked just like the rest of the wall from a distance. But up close, within a range of a couple of feet or so, all kinds of patterns, made with small white dots, could be seen stippled on top of the red paint. An array of consecutive rectangular sections outlined by the white dots high-lighted the center of the panel "Hey, angel," Troy said, pushing on the sections at random, "don't you think this looks suspiciously like a keyboard?" Troy began to push on the keys at random. Carol joined him. It became a game. The two of them stood at the red panel for almost a minute, putting their fingers into every outlined section and pushing hard.

Suddenly Carol backed away from the panel, turned around, and started walking directly across the room. "Where are you going?" yelled Troy, as Carol, spinning around to answer, nearly stumbled over her diving gear on the floor.

"I have a crazy idea," called Carol. "Call it feminine intuition. Call it psychic if you will." She had reached the red panel where they had struggled with the handle. Now she pulled it down easily and immediately heard a creak. She jumped back, startled, as the entire panel folded back and away from her, revealing a dark opening large enough for a truck to enter. Troy came over beside her and the two of them stared into the void.

"Holy s.h.i.t," he said "Are we supposed to go in there?"

Carol nodded. "I'm certain we are."

Troy looked at her with a curious expression. "And just how do you know that?"

"Because it's the only way out of here," Carol replied.

Troy cast one final glance around the strange room with the curved and colored walls. There was an indisputable logic to what Carol had said. He took a deep breath, held Carol's hand, and walked into the black tunnel.

Behind them they could barely see the small shaft of light coming from the room where they had left their diving gear. Inside the pitch-black hallway they moved very slowly, cautiously. Troy kept one hand on the wall and the other clenched around Carol's. The sound of their labored breathing, heightened by the constant fear and apprehension, reverberated off the rounded walls. They didn't talk. Twice Troy had started to sing a few lines from a popular song, to a.s.suage his own disquiet, but both times Carol stopped him. She wanted to be able to hear in case there were any other noises.

At one point she squeezed his hand and stopped. "Listen," she said in a whisper. Troy held his breath. There was utter silence, except for something very soft that he couldn't quite identify, way off in the distance. "Music," Carol said. "I think I hear music."

Troy strained to identify the sound just below the threshold of his hearing. It was useless. He pulled on Carol's hand. "It's probably inside your head," he said. "Let's go."

They had made a turn and the light behind them had disappeared. Altogether they had been in the tunnel for about ten minutes. Carol was becoming despondent. "What if this doesn't go anywhere?" she asked Troy.

"That doesn't make any sense," he replied quickly. "Somebody built it for some purpose. It's obviously a connecting pa.s.sageway." He fell silent.

"Who built it?" Carol asked the question that had been troubling both of them during the long tense walk down the dark hallway.

"Another good question," Troy replied. He hesitated just a minute before continuing with his answer. "My guess is the United States Navy. I think we're in some kind of top-secret underwater laboratory that n.o.body knows about." Of course, he thought, not saying it out loud because he didn't want to disturb Carol, it could also be Russian. In which case we are in deep s.h.i.t. If the Russians have a large, secret laboratory this close to Key West, they are not going to be happy . . .

"Look, Troy," Carol said excitedly. "I see a light. There is somebody here after all." The tunnel was about to split into two pans. At the end of one of the two forks, the one sharply to the left, a patch of illumination could clearly be seen. Still holding hands, Troy and Carol walked briskly toward the light. Troy was aware that his heart was beating very rapidly Carol almost raced into the new room. She had expected that they were about to be found, that this mysterious adventure was now going to end and everything would be explained. Instead, as she looked around her in a small, oval chamber with the same bizarre panels for walls (except these were colored brown and white, instead of red and blue as in the previous room), she felt a tremendous confusion. "What is this place?" she asked Troy. "And how are we going to get out?"

Troy was standing in the center of the room with his head tilted back as far as it would go. He was staring up at a vast arched ceiling some thirty to thirty-five feet above them. "Wow," he exclaimed, "this is one huge place." The muted light illuminating the room was coming from slabs of partially translucent material, possibly gla.s.s crystals, that were embedded in the ceiling.

The brown and white panels forming the walls for the particular room they had entered were only ten feet high, but they were high enough to prevent Carol and Troy from seeing out. They had a strange sense of both freedom and confinement. On the one hand, first the tunnel and now this small room, the size of a child's bedroom in a small house, had made them feel claustrophobic; however, the sense of s.p.a.ce conveyed by the cathedral ceilings was liberating.

"Well?" asked Carol, somewhat impatiently, after waiting a few moments while Troy walked around and surveyed the room. He was observing that the brown and white wall panels were only slightly curved and were thus much closer to normal walls than those in the initial room had been.

"I'm sorry, angel," he replied, "I forgot the question."

She shook her head. "There is only one question, Mr. Jefferson. I believe that you asked it of me on our last tour stop." She looked at her watch. "In about fifteen minutes, we will have exceeded the maximum time for our air supply. Unless I miss my guess, our friend Nick is probably starting to worry right now. But we still have no idea . . . What are you doing?"

She interrupted herself when Troy bent down to pull a small k.n.o.b on one of the brown panels in the corner of the room. "These are drawers, angel," he said, as the bottom part of the panel came out several inches from the wall. "Like a dresser." He opened a second drawer above the first. "And they have something in them."

Carol came over to see. She reached into the second drawer that Troy had opened and pulled out a rust-colored sphere about the size of a tennis ball. The surface of the ball was very curious. Instead of being smooth and regular, it had grooves cut into it, mostly on one side, and tiny b.u.mps, like those on the surface of a pickle, around and next to the grooves. In other places there were poorly defined indentations as well. Carol examined the sphere in the weak light. "I've seen something like this before," she said. "But where?" She thought for a few seconds. "I've got it," she announced, pleased that her memory had come through, "this looks exactly like the model of Mars in the National Air and s.p.a.ce Museum."

"Then I must have the Earth," Troy replied, showing her a mostly blue sphere the size of a softball that he had removed from the top drawer. The two of them stood together in the dim light, looking back and forth at the spheres they were holding in their hands. "s.h.i.t," Troy shouted eventually, spinning around and looking at the ceiling. "And double s.h.i.t. Whoever you are, we've had enough. Come out now and identify yourself."

A partial echo of his voice came back to them. Otherwise they heard nothing. Anxious to be doing something, Carol continued her search of the room. She found another group of three drawers in a nearby brown panel. While she was opening the first of these, Troy playfully hurled his blue ball at what appeared to be an exit, a dark opening between panels on the other side of the room. The sphere hit a white panel near the exit with a thunk and started to fall to the floor. However, just before it touched the ground, the sphere lifted up, as if pulled somehow from above, and stopped in the center of the room about five feet above the floor. It began to spin.

Troy's eyes opened wide. He walked over to the sphere and placed his hand between the ball and high ceiling, trying to find the strings. Nothing happened. The Earth sphere continued to spin slowly and inscribe a circle in the air in the middle of the room. Troy pushed the ball lightly. It moved in response to his push, but after his applied force was removed and the effect had dissipated, the sphere returned to its previous location and continued its earlier movement. Troy turned around. Carol had her back to him and was searching unsuccessfully for another set of drawers. The Mars ball was still in her left hand.

"Uh, Carol," Troy said slowly. "Would you mind coming over here a moment?"

"Certainly," she replied without looking. "Jesus, Troy, these drawers are full of all kinds . . ." She had turned around and now noticed the Earth sphere hovering in the air near the center of the room. Her brow knitted. "That's cute," she said tentatively, "real cute. I didn't know you were a magician as well." Her voice trailed off. She could see the perplexed expression on Troy's face. She walked over next to him to have a closer look.

The two of them stood silently for at least ten seconds as they watched the blue softball slowly spin in the air. Next Troy took the Mars sphere from Carol and tossed it, under-handed, up toward the high ceiling. It arched up and fell down normally, until it was just above the floor. Then, like the blue sphere before it, the Mars ball developed its own sense of direction and momentum. It floated up about five feet off the floor, began to spin slowly, and hovered in the air next to the blue sphere representing the Earth.

Carol grabbed Troy's hand. She shivered and then regained her composure. "There's something about this that gives me the w.i.l.l.i.e.s," she said. "All in all, I would deal better with a caterpillar asking me, 'Who are you?' At least in that case I would have some idea what I'm up against."

Troy turned around and led Carol back over to the partially opened drawers. "I ran into this old bearded dude once when I was. .h.i.tchhiking," he began, as he pulled out a basketball that was covered with lat.i.tudinal belts and bands in shades of red and orange. He aimlessly tossed the big Jupiter ball over his shoulder, using both hands. Carol watched it, still fascinated, as it joined the other two spheres...o...b..ting around an empty focus in the middle of the room.

"He was driving an old run-down pickup truck and smoking a joint. At first we talked a little. He would ask me questions and I would start to give an answer. But after a sentence or two, he would interrupt me and say, 'You don't know s.h.i.t, man.' That was his response to everything."

Troy methodically emptied all six of the drawers while he was telling his story. He threw all the objects he found into the center of the room. A few of them he watched, casually, as if he were witnessing an everyday occurrence. Each of the new spheres repeated the earlier pattern. A nearly complete working model of the solar system was forming about five feet above the f1oor.

"Finally I grew tired of his game and was quiet. We drove along for miles in silence. It was a clear and beautiful night and he kept hanging his head out the window to look at the stars. Once, when he pulled his head back in, he lit another joint, handed it to me, and pointed back out the window at the stars. 'They know, man, they know,' he said. Miles later, when he let me out of the truck, he leaned over and I could see the wildness in his eyes. 'Remember, man,' he whispered, 'you don't know s.h.i.t. But they know.' "

As Troy finished the tale, Carol came over beside him and pulled out two handfuls of tiny fragments from the final drawer. They were a little sticky to the touch. She shook them off her hands and they miraculously flew around the room and coalesced into the ring systems of Saturn and Ura.n.u.s. She looked at Troy in awe.

"Does that bizarre story have a point?" Carol asked. "I must admit that I am amazed at how nonchalant you are about this whole d.a.m.n thing. For myself, I'm just about ready to freak out. Completely."

Troy pointed at the miniature planets floating in the air. "What we are seeing has no explanation in terms of our experience. We've either died together or transferred to a new dimension or someone is playing mind games with us." He smiled at Carol. "If you must know, angel, I'm scared absolutely s.h.i.tless. But like that old stoned hippie, I keep telling myself, 'They know.' Somehow it gives me comfort."

They heard a soft sliding sound and a shaft of bright light burst into the room from an opening that was forming between two panels, one brown and one white, just to the right of the exit. Carol recoiled automatically and covered her eyes for an instant. Troy also jumped back at first, but then shaded his eyes with his hands and watched. The panels continued to slide until an opening about two feet wide had developed. The room was beginning to fill with light. Troy saw a great illuminated ball coming slowly through the opening. "Here comes the Sun Doot-un-Doo-Doo Doo . . . Here comes the Sun," he sang anxiously, "And I say . . . it's all right . . ." He hummed a few more bars of the song as Carol opened her eyes.

"Jesus," she said. The bright orb, the size of a giant beach ball, lifted itself into its proper place in the orrery and flooded the entire room with its radiance. The spinning, orbiting planets shone with reflected light from their sides facing the Sun. Carol stood transfixed, silent tears running down her face. She could not speak or move. She was completely overwhelmed.

Troy was also frightened, but not yet so much that his ability to function was impaired. However, a moment later he saw something in the exit that sent a bolt of terror through his system. His heart surged into overdrive as he blinked and then squinted, making certain his mind was not playing tricks on him as he looked just around the bright light of the model Sun. Instinctively, he turned to protect Carol and shielded her from what he had just seen.

"Don't look now," he whispered, "but we have a visitor."

"What?" said Carol, confused and still stunned.

Troy held her by the arms and they moved together several steps to the right. He looked over his own shoulder and saw the thing again.

"Over by the exit," he said, turning around, unable any longer to hide his panic.

Carol's eyes indicated that she had found the source of Troy's terror. She had no idea what it was, but she could see that it was large, clearly threatening, and absolutely different from anything that she had ever seen or imagined. It had also moved into the room. She heard Troy's frantic, incoherent shouts, but their meaning didn't register. She looked at the thing again and her mind balked. She opened her mouth to scream. Nothing came out at first. She dropped to her knees on the floor. She heard the sound of screams in her ear, but they seemed far, far away. Her brain was sending a message that said, 'You're screaming,' but for some reason it didn't seem possible. It had to be someone else.

The thing was coming toward her Its main body was about eight feet tall at that moment, but it was continually changing its shape and size as it undulated across the room. Whatever it was, Troy and Carol could see into it and even through parts of its structure. A transparent external boundary membrane was wrapped around a permanently seething set of mostly clear fluid matter that ebbed and flowed with each movement. The thing moved like an amoeba, matter simply heading in the right direction, but with astonishing speed. Tiny black dots were scattered just behind all its external surfaces, darting in all directions, apparently supervising the continuous reconfigurations that gave it motion. A half dozen chunks of grayish, opaque matter, objects a foot or so square, were also embedded near the center of the primary body.

But it was not the main body of the thing that was so terrifying. Protruding from its upper portions was a frightening array of a dozen appendages, mostly long and slender in shape, that appeared to be stuck into the main body like sharp objects in a pin cushion. It looked as if the large, clear, amoebalike structure was a versatile transportation system that could carry virtually anything and that the payload, at least for this usage, was this family of constantly active rods, all of which were threatening because their end effectors resembled needles, hands, brushes, teeth, and even swords and guns. In Carol's mind, she was being attacked by a heavily armored tank that could change size in an instant and move on invisible treads in any direction.

Troy moved to the side, trying to calm his fear and catch his breath, as he watched the thing zero in on Carol. Its longest attachment, a reddish plastic implement which split into two short tines about a foot away from the primary body, suddenly extended itself outward an additional three feet and stopped just six inches in front of Carol's eyes. She screamed and pushed it away, forcefully, but it popped right back into position. Troy plucked the Jupiter ball out of the air and, with all his might, hurled the sphere at the center of the thing. The shapeless ma.s.s fell back on impact and immediately retracted its extended appendages. But in an instant the thing reconfigured itself somehow and adjusted its matter to let the ball pa.s.s completely through. Before it hit the floor on the other side, Jupiter rose into the air and came back to take its proper position in the solar system model.

The thing had now stopped advancing toward Carol. It was sitting in the middle of the room, its spindly appendages flailing around in all directions. It seemed to be making a decision. Troy bravely grabbed a rod with an end effector like a brush and tried to pull it away from the main structure. Instantly, core clear material flowed into the joint where that particular rod was attached, strengthening the connection. But Troy's action definitely caused a change in its pattern. The thing started after him. Ever so carefully, making sure it would follow him while watching out for another quick extension of the red implement with the two tines, Troy edged toward the exit. As the thing continued to move toward him, Troy motioned for Carol to get back. Then he broke for the door, tripping slightly over an extended rod on his way out.

It hardly hesitated. With surprising celerity the thing made itself short and squat. A maximum amount of exposed surface was now on the floor and it could move more quickly and efficiently. The deployed group of attachments were placed into some kind of compact traveling configuration and the thing hustled out the door.

Carol was left alone on her knees on the floor. The solar system model was above her and to the right. For over a minute she didn't move. She just watched the spinning planets abstractedly and listened for the occasional sound of Troy's footfalls in the distance. At length there was a long period of silence and Carol rose to her feet. She took several small, slow steps, rea.s.suring herself that she was all right, and then walked over to the exit opening between the panels. The exit opened onto a corridor that ran in both directions.

Troy had gone to the right when he had left the room. After remembering her camera and going back to take a few quick photographs of the suspended planets, Carol followed Troy's path, also taking the corridor to the right. She walked slowly down the black hall, turning around frequently to locate the light coming from the room that she had just left. There was now a close ceiling over her head. The hall next split into two forks; both directions were dark. Carol listened for sounds. Again she thought she heard music, but she couldn't begin to identify where it was coming from.

This time she chose the left fork in the hallway. Soon it narrowed and seemed to be circling back in the direction from which she had just come. She was just about to turn around and retrace her steps when she distinctly heard two noises, something like a thud followed by a sc.r.a.ping sound, off to the right in front of her. Drawing her breath slowly and struggling to conquer her fear, Carol moved forward in the dark. After about twenty more feet she came upon a low door that opened to the right. She bent down slightly and peered in. In the dusky light she saw unusual shapes and structures in another small room with walls made of the now familiar curved and colored panels. She crawled through the doorway and stood up.

Soft local lights located in a few of the wall panels came on as soon as Carol's feet contacted the floor in the room. Her arrival also triggered two or three notes from some kind of musical instrument. It sounded like an organ and was apparently way off in the distance in another part of the cathedral area enclosed by the vast arched ceilings that were again above her. She stopped, surprised. She stood still for several seconds. Then, without moving, Carol carefully surveyed her new surroundings.

In this room the wall panels were very bright, alternating between purple and gold, and they were extremely curved. Along with Carol in the room there were three objects of unknown purpose. One looked like a writing table, a second like a long, low bench that was wide at one end and tapered to a point at the other, and the third resembled a very tall telephone pole whose top and bottom were connected by sixteen thin strings stretched out and around a broad ring about one third of the way down the pole.

Carol could walk between the thin strings. The ring, made out of a gold metallic material, was a couple of feet above her head, almost at the level of the top of the wall panels. She grabbed one of the strings and felt it vibrate. It made a m.u.f.fled, flat sound. She backed away from the string and tried to pluck it. A note sounded, very lyrical, like a heavy harp. Carol realized she was standing inside a musical instrument. But how to play it? She spent a few minutes wandering around the room, trying without success to find the equivalent of a bow. She knew it would be impossible to play the harp if she had to run around and pluck each individual string herself.

She walked over to the writing table. She quickly figured out that it was also a musical instrument. It looked much more promising. There were indentations in the table, sixty-four altogether, set up in eight rows and eight columns. Pressing each key produced a different sound. Although Carol had taken five years of piano lessons as a small child, it was a difficult ch.o.r.e, at first, for her even to play "Silent Night" on the strange writing table. She had to correlate the sounds made by pressing the individual keys with the notes and chords that she remembered from her childhood. While she was teaching herself to play the instrument, she stopped often to listen to the delicate, crystal sound that it made. It reminded her mostly of a xylophone.

Carol stood at the table for several minutes. Eventually she played an entire verse of "Silent Night" without making a single mistake. Carol smiled, pleased with herself, and relaxed momentarily. During this interlude the great organ in the distance (which she had heard briefly when she had entered the room and could now pinpoint as being somewhere in the upper reaches of the cathedral area) suddenly began to play. Carol felt goose b.u.mps rise on her arms, partially due to the beauty of the music and partially because it reminded her again of what a bizarre world she had entered. What is that organ playing? she thought to herself. It sounds like an overture. She listened for a few seconds. Why . . . that's an introduction. To "Silent Night"! It's very creative.

The organ sound was joined by several others, each emanating from somewhere in the ceiling. All the instruments together played a complex version of the "Silent Night" that Carol had so painstakingly pounded out on the writing table a few moments before. The beautiful music swelled throughout the cathedral. Carol looked up and then closed her eyes. She spun her body around and around in a little dance. When she opened her eyes again, each of them confronted what appeared to be a tiny optical instrument no more than an inch away. Carol froze in terror.

The thing had noiselessly come up behind her while she was playing music at the writing table and had waited patiently, while deploying its appendages, until she was ready to turn around. It was about her height now and the closest part of the translucent main body was only an arm's length away. As Carol stood there motionless, barely daring to breathe, five or six of the thing's attachments came forward to touch her. A small digging instrument sc.r.a.ped some skin off her bare shoulder. The sword cut off some of her hair. A tiny cord attached to one of the long rods wrapped around her wrist. A set of bristles the size of the head of a toothbrush traveled across her chest, tickling her nipples through her bathing suit and crossing over the camera that was draped around her neck. She was having so many feelings simultaneously that she had lost track of all the stimuli. Carol closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on something else. She felt a needle p.r.i.c.k her forehead.

It was over very fast, less than a minute altogether. The thing retracted its appendages, backed up a couple of feet and stood there, observing her from a distance. Carol waited. After another twenty seconds, the attachments were stowed, as they had been when the thing had gone after Troy, and it left the room.

Carol listened for sounds. It was totally quiet again. She backed up from the writing table and tried to organize her thoughts. After about a minute, the purple and gold wall panels began to move to the side on their own accord. They folded upon themselves and formed small stacks. Then the corridors around the music room collapsed and automatically organized their part.i.tions into neat piles. Carol found herself standing in one huge room under the cathedral ceilings. In the distance her weird antagonist with the flailing appendages pa.s.sed through a side door about twenty-five yards away and disappeared quickly from view.

She looked around. There was no sign of Troy. The walls were creamy white and nondescript, somewhat boring after the colored panels in the earlier rooms. There were two doors, opposite each other in the middle of the room. Except for the musical instruments, which now seemed completely out of place cl.u.s.tered together at one end of such a vast room, the only other object she could see was a small piece of carpet against thc wall to the left. In front of her against the far wall, about fifty yards away, there was what appeared to be a large window on the ocean. Even from a distance she could see and identify some of the fish swimming by.

At first Carol hurried toward the window. When she was about halfway there and even with the doors, she stopped a few seconds and took a few photographs of the rather bland room. Curiously, the small carpet was not where she remembered it. It had somehow been moved while she was walking. She approached the carpet very slowly. Her weird experiences since she and Troy had been sucked out of the ocean had made Carol understandably wary. As she drew closer, she saw that the flat object lying on the floor was definite]y not a carpet. From above she could see an intricate internal design, like a complex network of sophisticated electronic chips. There were strange whorls and geometric patterns on its surface; they had no specific meaning to Carol but they reminded her of the fractal designs Dr. Dale had shown her one night in his apartment. The symmetries of the object were readily apparent. In fact, each of the four quadrants of the carpet was identical.

It was about six feet long, three feet wide, and two inches thick. The dominant color was slate gray, although there were some significant color variations. Some of the larger individual components must have been color-coded according to some master plan. Carol could identify groupings of similar elements in red, yellow, blue, and white within the design. The overall harmony of the colors was striking, suggesting that some effort had been made by the designers to include aesthetic considerations.

Carol bent down on her knees beside the carpet and studied it more intently. Its surface was densely packed. The closer she looked, the more detail she found. Extraordinary, she thought. But what in the world is it? And how did it move? Or could I possibly have imagined it? She put her hand on the exposed top surface. She felt a soft tingle, like a gentle electric shock. She slid one hand under the edge and lifted slightly. It was heavy. She removed her hand.

Her desire to escape from this strange world now overruled her curiosity. Carol took a photograph of the carpet from the top and started walking away in the direction of the window. After several strides, she turned quickly to her left to look at the carpet one more time. It had moved again and was still even with her in the room. Carol continued walking toward the window, now watching the carpet out of the corner of her eye. When she had walked another ten feet, her peripheral vision saw it arch up quickly along a line through its center, pulling the rear of its body in a forward direction. Half a second later the front end of the carpet scooted forward and the center fell flat against the floor again. This maneuver was repeated six or eight times in rapid succession as the carpet zipped up to a position even with Carol in the room.

Despite her situation, Carol laughed. She was still full of adrenaline and uptight, but there was definitely something humorous about a multicolored carpet that could crawl like an inchworm. "Ha," Carol said out loud, "I caught you. Now you owe me an explanation."

Carol certainly did not expect a reply to her comment. Nevertheless, after just a short delay, the behavior of the carpet was altered. First it began to generate small wave pulses along its surface, with four or five crests from front to back. After smartly reversing the direction of motion of the waves several times, the carpet's next trick was to keep its front end fixed on the floor, as if there were suction cups holding it down, and raise its back side entirely off the floor. In that mode it was about six feet tall. It seemed to be looking at Carol.

She was flabbergasted. "Well, I asked for it," she said out loud, still amused by the antics of the carpet. Now it seemed to be motioning for her to go toward the window. I have lost my mind, she thought to herself. Completely. Troy was right. Maybe we're dead. The carpet arched over on the floor and began to scamper toward the window, tumbling in somersaults like a slinky toy. Carol followed. This is nuts, she thought as she watched the carpet move somehow through the window and into the ocean. And Alice thought she was in Wonderland.

The carpet was playing in the water, dodging fish as they swam by in schools and teasing a sea urchin stuck fast against the reef. At length it came back into the room and stood upright. A little water dripped on the floor when the carpet set in motion a series of fast simultaneous waves, both lat.i.tudinal and longitudinal, that effectively shook the residual liquid from its surface. It then faced Carol and clearly beckoned for her to go through the window into the ocean "Look here, flat guy," she said, chuckling to herself as she tried to figure out what to say. Now I know I'm insane, she thought in a flash. I'm standing here talking to a carpet. Next thing I know it will talk back. "Now I'm not stupid," she continued. "I recognize that you're trying to get me to go into the ocean. But there are a few things that you don't - "

The carpet interrupted the conversation by going quickly through the window into the ocean again. It performed a couple of flips and came back into the room with Carol. Once more it shook itself and then stood rigidly, upright as before as if to say, "See, it's easy."

"As I was saying," Carol began again, "I have perhaps gone crazy, but I'm willing to trust that I can indeed go through that window in some magical way. My problem is that these is water out there. I can't breathe in water. Without my diving gear, which I left somewhere in this labyrinth, I will die "

The carpet didn't move. Carol repeated her statement, using elaborate hand gestures to make her key points. Then she fell silent. After a short wait the carpet began to move about actively. It then approached her carefully and amazingly stretched itself out in all directions so that it was almost double its original size. Carol wasn't significantly fazed. At this point she was almost incapable of being astonished again. Even by an elastic carpet that pulled its two top sides together, over her head, to form a cone.

Carol backed away a couple of steps from the now giant carpet. "Oh ho," she said, "I think I understand. You are going to form an air pocket for me so that I can breathe." She stood still for a moment, thinking and shaking her head. "Why not," she said at last, "it's no weirder than anything else that's happened."

With the carpet hovering over and around her head, Carol closed her eyes and walked directly toward the window. She took a deep breath when she felt a soft plastic touch on different parts of her body. Suddenly the water was all around her except for the small air pocket from the neck up. It was hard for Carol to keep her diving discipline, but she managed to equalize the pressure every six to eight feet during her ascent. She took one final breath and zoomed up to the surface. The carpet peeled off in the last foot before she broke water.

The Florida Queen was about fifty yards away. "Nick," she shouted with all her might, "Nick, over here." She swam furiously toward the boat. A wave broke over her head. The boat was again visible, she could see a figure in profile. He was looking over the side of the boat. "Nick," Carol cried again when she had gathered her strength. This time he heard her and turned around. She waved her arms.

5.

NICK had followed Carol and Troy on the monitor right after their initial descent, when they were still directly under the boat searching for the fissure. But he had quickly tired of watching them swim around in circles and had returned to his deck chair to read his novel. Afterward he had walked over to the screen several more times to look for them and had seen nothing; Carol and Troy had already left to investigate the area under the overhang.

Nick had checked the monitor again after he had finished Madame Bovary. He had been a little surprised to discover that the fissure was again clearly visible underneath the Florida Queen. He next a.s.sumed that he must have been correct, that it had just been a case of bad lighting, since with the sun directly overhead, the hole in the reef looked much smaller to him than it had two days before. He had then busied himself about the boat until his wrist alarm went off, indicating that Carol and Troy had about five more minutes of air remaining.

Nick walked over and looked at the images being taken by the ocean telescope and placed in realtime on the screen. There was no sign of Carol and Troy under the boat. Nick started becoming restive. I hope they're paying attention, he thought. He realized that they had been gone from view for a long time and that he had never seen them actually explore the fissure, their primary goal. A creeping disquiet began to spread through him as the clock continued to run out.

There's only one explanation, he thought, fighting against the negative ideas that were filtering into his mind. They have been gone a long time, so they must have found something interesting at the overhang. Or somewhere else. For just a moment Nick imagined that Carol and Troy had found a lode of treasure, full of objects that looked like the strange trident they had retrieved on Thursday.

The second hand seemed to be racing on his watch. It was now one minute until they should run out of air. Nick nervously checked the monitor again. Nothing. He felt his heart speed up. They must be in the red, he thought. Even if they have carefully conserved the air, they must be in the red. Nick worried for a second about a gauge failure, but he quickly remembered checking both of them himself when he arrived at the boat that morning. Besides, it's terribly unlikely they would both fail . . . so there must be trouble.

Another minute pa.s.sed and Nick realized that he had not formulated a plan as to what he would do if they didn't show up. His mind raced swiftly through his options. There were two distinctly different action patterns he could follow. He could put on his diving gear and go look for them along the trench between the fissure and the overhang. Or he could a.s.sume that, in their excitement, Carol and Troy had simply neglected to check their air gauges regularly and as a result had been forced to surface wherever they were when they ran out of air.

If I go down after them, he thought, I probably won't reach them in time. Nick had a moment of self-recrimination because he had not properly prepared for this contingency. It would take him several valuable minutes to put on and check out his own diving apparatus. That settles it. I must a.s.sume they're around here somewhere. Floating on the surface. He looked briefly at the screen one more time and then walked over to the side of the boat. He scanned the ocean. It was a little choppy now. He didn't see any sign of them.

Nick turned on the engine and pulled in the anchor. He made a quick mental a.s.sessment of the general direction to the overhang and started steering with the engine at very low throttle. Unfortunately, he could not see the telescope monitor from the steering wheel, and the canopy blocked his vision behind him. Nick was in perpetual motion, back and forth from the wheel to the screen to the sides of the boat. As his fear and frustration began to build, so did his anger. It was now five minutes after the nominal time that their air supply would have been depleted.

d.a.m.nit, Nick thought, still not allowing his brain to nurture images of disaster, How could they be so careless? I knew I shouldn't have let them go as a pair. He continued to castigate himself and then turned on Carol. I let that woman push me around. I will sure as h.e.l.l straighten her out when I find them. Nick turned the boat sharply to the left.

He thought he heard a voice. Nick ran to the side of the boat. He had no sense of what direction the shout had come from. After two or three more seconds he heard it again. He turned and saw a figure wave. Nick waved back and went over to the steering wheel to change the direction of the boat. He pulled out a strong rope from the equipment drawer and tied it around one of the stanchions next to the ladder. He threw the line to Carol as the boat pulled up alongside her and then he cut the motor back to idle.

She had no trouble catching the line. As he was reeling her in, Nick's eyes searched the surrounding water for Troy. He could not see him. Carol had now reached the ladder. "You would not believe . . ." she started, trying to catch her breath as she put her first foot on the ladder.