Cradle (39 page)

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 assume 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 assessment
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.

Damn it
, 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 hell 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.

‘Where’s Troy?’ interrupted Nick, gesturing out at the ocean.

Carol took another step up the ladder. It was clear that she was exhausted. Nick took
her hand and she came into the boat. She stood up on her wobbly legs.

‘Where’s Troy?’ Nick asked again forcefully. He looked at Carol. ‘And what happened
to all your gear?’

Carol took a deep breath. ‘I… don’t know… where Troy is,’ she stammered. ‘We were
sucked down—’

‘You don’t
know
!’ shouted Nick, now frantically looking around on the ocean surface. ‘You go on a
dive, come up without your gear, and don’t know where your partner is. What kind—’

A small wave hit the boat. Carol had raised her hand to protest Nick’s diatribe, but
the motion of the boat knocked her feet out from under her. She fell hard on her knees
and winced at the pain. Nick was hovering over her, still shouting. ‘Well, Miss Perfect,
you better come up with some fucking answers fast. If we don’t find Troy soon, he’ll
be dead. And if he’s dead, it will be your goddamn fault.’

Carol instinctively cowered at the anger of the large man. Her knees hurt, she was
exhausted, and this man was yelling in her face. Suddenly her emotions gave way. ‘Shut
up,’ she shouted. ‘Shut up, you asshole. And get away from me.’ She was flailing with
her arms, hitting Nick on the legs and in the stomach. ‘You don’t know anything,’
she said after taking a quick breath. ‘You don’t know shit.’

Carol put her head in her hands and began to cry. In that instant, a long buried memory
burst upon her mind. Her five-year-old brother was sobbing hysterically and attacking
her, pummelling her with his fists. She had her hands up to protect herself. ‘It’s
your fault, Carol,’ he was screaming, ‘he left because of you.’ She remembered the
hot tears in her eyes. ‘It’s not true, Richie, it’s not true. It wasn’t my fault.’

On the boat Carol glanced up through her tears at Nick. He had backed away and was
looking sheepish. She wiped her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘It was
not
my fault,’ Carol said deliberately and emphatically. Nick stuck out his hand to help
her up and she smacked it away. He mumbled ‘I’m sorry’ as she rose to her feet. ‘Now
if you’ll just shut up and listen,’ she continued, ‘I’ll tell you what happened. The
reef under the boat wasn’t a reef at all… Oh, my God… It’s here.’

Nick saw a look of consternation break on Carol’s face. She pointed over behind him,
on the other side of the boat. He turned around to look. At first he didn’t notice
anything. Then he saw a strange flat object that looked like a piece of carpet, inching
along the boat toward the telescope monitor. He screwed up his face and turned back
to Carol with a puzzled expression.

While Carol had been talking, the carpet had somehow crawled up the side and then
flopped into the boat. By the time she started to explain, it was already standing
in front of the television monitor, looking at the images the telescope was taking
of the ocean floor beneath the boat. There was no time for lengthy explanations. ‘What
the fuck?’ Nick said, and walked over to apprehend the peculiar visitor. When his
hand was about an inch away from touching the carpet, he felt a strong electrical
discharge in the end of his fingers. ‘Ow!’ he said, jumping back. He shook his hand
and watched with amazement. The carpet continued to stand in front of the screen.

Nick looked at Carol as if he expected some assistance. But she was finding the whole
scene amusing. ‘
That
thing is just one of the reasons the dive was strange,’ she said, making no effort
to provide any help. ‘But I don’t think it will hurt you. It probably saved my life.’

Nick grabbed a small fishnet hanging on the side of the structure holding up the canopy
and slowly approached the carpet. As he drew near, it seemed to turn and look at him.
Nick lunged forward with the net. The carpet dodged deftly and Nick lost his balance.
He fell against the monitor with his arms akimbo. Carol laughed out loud, remembering
the first time they met. The carpet flipped over to the telescope data system and
wrapped itself tightly around the entire set of electronic equipment.

From the floor of the boat Nick watched the carpet investigating the data system and
shook his head in disbelief. ‘What the hell is that thing anyway?’ he shouted to Carol.

She came over and graciously offered a hand to help him up. It was her way of apologizing
for her earlier outburst. ‘I have no earthly idea,’ Carol replied. ‘At first I thought
it might be a sophisticated Navy robot. But it is much too advanced, too intelligent.’
She pointed at the sky with her free left hand. ‘
They
know,’ she said with a smile.

The comment reminded Carol of Troy and she became solemn. She walked over to the side
of the boat and stared at the ocean. Nick was now standing up next to the monitor
within an arm’s length of the carpet and the data system. It looked as if the carpet
had somehow extended part of itself into the internal electronics. Nick watched for
a few seconds, fascinated, as the various digital diagnostic readouts on the top of
the data system went crazy. ‘Hey, Carol,’ he said. ‘Come here and look at this. That
damn thing is plastic or something.’

She did not turn around at first. ‘Nick,’ Carol asked softly, finally facing him,
‘what are we going to do about Troy?’

‘As soon as we get this damn invader out of here,’ Nick replied from underneath the
canopy, where he was now looking through his kitchen implements, ‘we’ll do a systematic
search of the area. I may even dive and see if I can find him.’

Nick had picked up a large cooking fork with a plastic handle and was about to attempt
to pry the carpet off the data system. ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ admonished
Carol. ‘He’ll leave when he’s ready.’

But it was too late. Nick stuck the fork into and through the carpet and up against
the uppermost rack of electronic parts. There was a popping sound and a tiny blue
arc zapped down the fork, driving Nick backward with a powerful kick. Alarms went
off, the digital readout from the data system went blank, and the ocean telescope
monitor began to smoke. The carpet dropped down on the floor and began making the
little waves that it had showed to Carol in the large room with the window on the
ocean. A moment later, two alarms from the navigation system sounded, indicating not
only that the boat’s current location had been lost, but also that the nonvolatile
memory, where all the parameters that permitted satellite communication were stored,
had been erased.

In the middle of the noise and smoke, Nick stood with a puzzled expression on his
face. He was rubbing his right arm from his wrist to his shoulder. ‘I’m numb,’ he
said in astonishment. ‘I can’t feel anything in my arm.’

The carpet continued with its wave patterns on the floor of the boat while Carol picked
up a pail, leaned overboard for some water, and doused the monitor. Nick had not moved.
He was still standing there, looking helpless and pinching his arm. Carol threw the
rest of the water on Nick. ‘Shit,’ he sputtered, backing up involuntarily, ‘why did
you do that?’

‘Because we have to find Troy,’ she said, walking over to the boat’s controls. ‘And
we can’t wait all day. Ignore the damn carpet… and your arm. A man’s life is at stake.’

She increased the speed of the boat. As she did, the carpet stood up again, twisted
around, and hustled to the side. Nick tried to stop it but it was out of the boat
and into the water in a flash. As Carol steered the boat through circles of larger
and larger radius, Nick stood on the side of the
Florida Queen
and searched for Troy.

An hour later they both agreed there was no reason for them to continue the search.
Carol and Nick had been over the entire region of the ocean in the boat several times
(with some care and difficulty, because they no longer had a working navigation system)
and had found no trace of Troy. After he had convinced himself that his arm was all
right, Nick had even donned his diving equipment, as a last resort, and had retraced
the path from the fissure to the overhang and back. Still no sign of Troy. Nick had
been just slightly tempted to investigate the fissure, but Carol’s wild story seemed
remotely plausible, and Nick did not like the idea of being sucked into some bizarre
underground laboratory. And he knew that if he were to disappear, it would be virtually
impossible for Carol to guide the boat back to Key West without an active navigation
system.

Carol recounted the whole story of her dive while she and Nick were canvassing the
area. He was certain she was liberally embellishing the details, but he could see
no overarching logical flaws in her tale. And he himself had, after all, confronted
the carpet on the
Florida Queen
. So he acknowledged, in his own mind, that Carol and Troy had indeed had hair-raising
experiences in an underwater building of some type and that the technology they had
encountered was definitely more advanced than anything they had ever seen before.

But Nick was reluctant to accept Carol’s blithe explanation that the trio had met
some extraterrestrials. It didn’t seem likely to Nick that a first contact would be
made under such mundane circumstances. Although he readily admitted that the carpet
was a marvel of capability far beyond his ken, he did not think of himself as being
technologically sophisticated and therefore he could not state, categorically, that
human beings could not have created it.

In fact
, Nick thought to himself as he was carefully searching the horizon with his binoculars
for reference landmarks before beginning the trip back to Key West,
what a perfect deception. Suppose the Russians or even our own navy wanted to mislead
… He stopped himself in mid-thought and realized that if he were right, and their
encounter had been with a human creation, then they could very well still be in danger.
But why was Carol allowed to leave? And why didn’t they confiscate my boat?
Nick found a small island that he recognized off in the distance and changed the
orientation of the boat. He shook his head. It was all very confusing.

‘You don’t agree with me that we’ve just met some ETs?’ Carol came up beside Nick
and slightly teased him with her question.

‘I don’t know,’ he answered slowly. ‘It seems like quite a leap to make. After all,
if there is an extraterrestrial infestation in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, it
should have been found before now. Submarines and other boats with active sonar must
cross this region at least once or twice a year.’ He smiled at her. ‘You’ve been reading
too much science fiction.’

‘On the contrary,’ she responded, fixing him with her gaze, ‘my experience with state-of-the-art
technology is almost certainly more extensive than yours. I have done a series of
features on the Miami Oceanographic Institute and have seen what kind of ingenious
new concepts are being developed. And nothing, absolutely nothing, comes close to
the carpet or the giant amoeba thing. The likelihood that there is some nonfantastic
explanation for all this is very, very small.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Besides,’
she continued, ‘maybe the laboratory hasn’t been there for long. Maybe it was just
recently finished or even transported here.’

Nick had felt himself bridle when Carol had started her comment.
There she goes again
, he had thought.
So sure of herself. So cocky and competitive. Almost like a man
. He admitted to himself that he had also been known to make arguments from authority.
And she was certainly right in one respect. She had had much more exposure to high
technology than he had. Nick decided not to argue with her. This time.