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 assumed 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 passed 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 assume 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 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.
Damnit, 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, pummeling 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.