Carol recognized that Nick was trying to be diplomatic. It even flashed through her mind that he looked sort of cute standing there in front of her in his diving gear. She decided to be gracious. “Agreed,” she said. “But one thing before we descend. Remember that I’m a reporter. I will have a camera with me and may want you to move from time to time. So don’t get angry if I motion you out of the way.”
Nick smiled. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll try to remember.”
Carol put on her flippers and mask. Then she picked up her underwater camera by the strap and threw it over her neck and shoulder. Troy helped her tighten the strap in the back. Nick was sitting on the side of the boat at a break in the railing, right next to a crude ladder that Troy had just dropped overboard. “I’ve checked the water already,” Nick said, “and there’s quite a current up here. Let’s go down the anchor rope until we reach the ocean floor. Then you can pick the direction from there.”
Nick rolled backward off the boat. In a moment he surfaced, treading water. Carol returned his thumbs-up sign (the signal between divers that everything’s all right) and sat down herself on the side of the boat. Troy helped her make one last comfort adjustment to her vest. “Good luck, angel,” Troy said. “I hope you find what you’re looking for. And be careful.”
Carol put the regulator in her mouth, took a breath, and then repeated Nick’s backward roll maneuver. The ocean water felt cool against her sunbaked back. In a few seconds she joined Nick over at the anchor rope and the two of them repeated the thumbs up sign. Nick led the way down. He went hand over hand, cautiously, never completely releasing the rope. Carol followed carefully. She could feel the strong current that Nick had mentioned. It pulled at her, trying to take her away from the rope, but she managed to hold on. Every six to eight feet in the descent, Nick stopped to equalize the pressure in his ears and looked up to see both that Carol was following and that she was all right. Then he continued his descent.
There was nothing much to see until they reached the reef beneath them. The telescope pictures had been so sharp that they had been misleading. The reef with its riot of color and its surfeit of plant and animal life had seemed to be right underneath them because of the automatic focusing action of the optical system. But thirty-five feet is a long way down. Any normal three-story building could have been sitting on the ocean floor underneath the Florida Queen and it would not have touched her hull.
When they finally reached the top of the reef where the anchor was implanted, Carol realized she had made a mistake. She did not recognize her surroundings and therefore did not know which direction to take to find the whales. She reproached herself briefly for not having spent a few more moments studying the monitor to make sure that she knew where all the landmarks were. Oh well, Carol then thought, It’s too late for that now. I’ll just pick a direction and go. Besides, I don’t have any idea where the alarm object is anyway.
Visibility in the water was fair to good, maybe fifty to sixty feet in all directions. Carol adjusted her buoyancy slightly and then pointed to a gap between two reef structures, both of which were covered with kelp, sea anemones, and the ubiquitous coral. Nick nodded his head. Tucking her arms to her side to streamline her movement, Carol kicked up and down with her flippers and swam toward the gap.
Behind her, Nick watched Carol swim with appreciation and admiration. She moved through the water as gracefully as the school of yellow and black angelfish beside her. Nick had not interrogated Carol very much about her diving experience and had not known exactly what to expect. He had suspected from her ease and familiarity with the equipment that she was a seasoned diver; but he had not prepared himself for an underwater peer. Except for Greta, Nick had not encountered a woman before who was as comfortable under the water as he was.
Nick absolutely loved the peace and serenity of the rich and vibrant world beneath the ocean surface. The only sound he ever heard down there was his own breathing. All around him the coral reefs teemed with life of unimaginable beauty and complexity. There, underneath him now, was a grouper taking a bath by sitting at the bottom of a natural hole and letting dozens of tiny cleaner fish eat away all the accumulated parasites. A moment earlier, Nick’s downward excursion toward the ocean floor had scared up a manta ray hidden in the sand. This large ray, called a devilfish by the cognoscenti, had undulated out of its hiding place at the last moment and just missed Nick with its powerful and dangerous tail.
Nick Williams felt at home down in this watery world at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. It was his recreation and his refuge. Whenever he was distressed or disturbed by events on the surface, he knew that he could dive and find relaxation and escape. Except on this particular dive he was aware of an ineffable emotion, a beginning perhaps, a longing that was barely defined, possibly mixed up with a memory of years ago. He was following a beautiful mermaid as she swam along the reef and the sight stirred him. I have acted like a schoolboy, he thought, and a bore. Or worse. And why? Because she is pretty? No. Because she is so alive. So much more alive than I am.
Carol and Nick made two different excursions, each time starting from the anchor rope, without finding the whales or anything else unusual. When they returned to the anchor after the second unsuccessful foray, Nick pointed at his watch. They had been under the water for almost half an hour already. Carol wagged her head up and down and then held up her index finger, indicating that she would try one more direction.
They found the whales right after they crossed over a big upward bulge in the reef that came within fifteen feet of the surface. Nick saw them first and pointed down. The three whales were about twenty feet below them and maybe thirty yards ahead. They were still swimming slowly, more or less together, in the same directionless, near circular pattern that Nick and Carol had watched on the screen. Carol waved Nick out of the way and pointed at her camera. She then swam toward the whales, taking pictures as she approached them while carefully monitoring her depth and equalizing the pressure in her ears.
Nick swam down beside her. He was certain the whales had seen the two of them, but for some reason they had made no attempt to flee. In all his years as a diver, Nick had only once seen a whale in the open ocean accept the nearby presence of a human. And that had been a calfing mother, in a Pacific Ocean lagoon off of Baja California, whose birth pangs were a more powerful force than her instinctive fear of humans. Here even when Carol approached to within twenty feet or so the whales continued their indolent drift. They appeared to be lost, or maybe even drugged.
Carol slowed her approach when the whales made no attempt to get away. She took some more photographs. Close-up pictures of whales in their natural habitat were still uncommon, so her trip had already been a journalistic success. But she too was puzzled by their behavior. Why were they ignoring her presence? And what were they doing hanging around this particular spot? She remembered being surprised by the solitary whale during her morning swim and wondered again if somehow all these strange events were related.
Nick was off to her right, about twenty yards away. He was pointing at something on the other side of the whales and gesturing for Carol to come toward him. She swam away from the great mammals and headed in Nick’s direction. She saw immediately what had attracted his attention. Below the whales, just above the ocean floor, there was a large dark hole in the bottom of an imposing reef structure. At first glance it appeared to be the entrance to an underground cave of some kind. But Carol’s sharp eyes noticed that the lip-shaped fissure was extremely smooth and symmetric, almost suggesting to her that it was an engineering construction of some kind. She laughed at herself as she swam up beside Nick. The amazing underwater world and the bizarre behavior of these whales were playing tricks with her mind.