“Okay. But be careful of the surge as you’re going over, and once you start to run out of air, don’t screw around. Head for the boat.”
Seaward of the reef, the bottom looked like a trash heap. Pieces of wood, rusted iron, and coral-covered metal were scattered everywhere. From the sand Gail plucked a pewter cup. One side was caved in, and the handle was rippled with dents, but otherwise the cup was undamaged. At the foot of the reef, Sanders saw an impossibly round ring of coral. He picked it up, held it to his face, and smiled at Gail. It was the remains of a brass porthole. Gail dug in the area where she had found the cup, and soon she had amassed a small pile of flatware-forks and spoons and knives, all gnarled and scarred.
She swam over to Sanders, who was poking in the crannies of the reef. Near the bottom of the reef there was a coral overhang: the coral stopped two or three feet from the sand, and there seemed to be a small cave underneath. She tapped Sanders and pointed to the overhang. He shook his head-no-and held one hand with the other, telling her that something might be living in the cave, something that would grab a probing hand.
They separated. Gail swam back to the area where she had found the forks and spoons; Sanders continued to poke in the reef. He came to another cave, slightly larger than the one he had warned Gail away from. He bent down and peered beneath the coral overhang. It was forbiddingly dark inside, and he was about to turn away and look elsewhere when a glint, a tiny flicker of reflection, made him look again.
Holding a rock to steady himself, he stared at the shimmering object, trying to guess what it could be.
He looked at his rag-wrapped hand, and an image came to mind: a photograph he had seen of a man’s hand soon after it had been bitten by a moray eel. The flesh had been tattered, and the bone showed sickly white. He hesitated, hearing the pulse thumping in his temples, and he knew he was breathing too fast. He felt fear; he detested the feeling. He stared at his hand and willed it toward the mouth of the cave.
Taking a deep breath, he shot his hand forward to the glitter. His fingers closed on something small, fragile; he snapped his hand back out of the darkness.
In his palm was a glass container about three inches long, tapered at both ends. It was full of a clear, yellowish liquid.
As he backed away from the cave, Sanders noticed that drawing breath was becoming difficult. He swam over to Gail-stopping briefly to collect a few relics he had left at the base of the reef-and touched her. When she looked up, he drew a ringer across his throat. She nodded and repeated the gesture.
Sanders rose toward the surface. Gail lingered long enough to gather a handful of forks and spoons-already, after only a few minutes, the gentle current had covered one spoon with a patina of sand-then followed him. Together they crossed over the reef and swam to the boat.
“Beautiful!” Gail said, as she removed her weight belt and flippers. “That is fantastic.”
In the bottom of the boat, next to Gail’s forks, spoons, and pewter cup, were the items Sanders had collected: a chipped, but whole, butter plate; a rusted, dented flare pistol; a straight razor; and what looked like a pebbly lump of coal.
“What’s that?” she said, pointing to the lump.
“There could be metal in it. When they stay in sea water for a long time, some metals develop this black stuff around them. Later on, we’ll bang it open with a hammer and see if there’s anything inside.” Sanders opened his right hand and withdrew the ampule from beneath the rag wrapped around it. “Look,” he said, and passed it to Gail.
“What is it?”
“Medicine, I guess. It looks like the ends were meant to be broken off so a syringe could be stuck in to draw off the liquid.”
“I wonder if it’s still good.”
“Should be. It’s airtight, God knows.”
Sanders looked over the stern. “Tomorrow let’s bring a bag. I think there’s a lot more stuff down there.”
When they reached the beach, the lifeguard-blond, deeply tanned, wearing a white T-shirt with a red cross on the backwas waiting for them in hip-deep water. He grabbed the bow, eased the boat up onto the sand, and helped them unload their gear. “See you got some goodies,” he said to Gail as he watched her pile their finds on a towel and twist the ends of the towel together, fashioning a sack.
“Some,” Sanders answered. The lifeguard had annoyed him at their first meeting that morning, when Sanders had rented the Whaler from him. He was cocky and young, and Sanders was sure he was closer to Gail’s twenty-six years than to his own thirty-seven.
And when the lifeguard spoke-even in answer to a question asked by Sanders-he looked at Gail. Sanders was convinced that the lifeguard was more interested in the sway of Gail’s breasts as she bent over than in any relics they had brought from the wreck.
Sensing Sanders” pique, the lifeguard said to him, “You find any shells?”
“Shells?”
“Artillery shells. Depth charges. You know. Explosives.”
“Live explosives?”
“I’ve always heard Goliath had a bunch of munitions on board. Maybe it’s all talk.”
Sanders said, “We’ll look tomorrow. We’d like to use the boat again.”
“Sure, as long as the wind doesn’t go around to the south and start blowing. You don’t want to be on that reef in a strong south wind.”
“No. Neither did Goliath.”
Carrying their gear, Gail and David trudged up the beach. The sand was pink-tinted by millions of tiny hard-shelled sea animals, called Foraminifera-and so fine that walking in it was like shuffling through talc.
By the time they reached the base of the cliff, Sanders was sweating. His palms were wet, and he had difficulty holding the necks of the scuba tanks. He looked up at the cliff, one hundred feet of sheer coral and limestone. To the right was a narrow, twisting staircase that led to the top. To the left was an elevator-a four-foot-square cage that rode up and down on a steel pole embedded in a concrete base-installed decades earlier in a crevasse cut in the cliff.
On a control panel in the cage there were two buttons, marked “up” and “down.” If the elevator malfunctioned, there was no alarm bell, no emergency button: the passengers (three, at most) had no choice but to wait until someone spotted them and called for help. At breakfast the Sanderses had been told a story about an elderly couple who were trapped in the elevator as they rode up from the beach at twilight. They were the last to leave the beach, so there was no one below to see them. During the night, the wind swung around to the southwest and freshened into a moderate gale. The pole quivered in the wind, shaking the cage and the couple within, like a pocketful of loose change.
When in the morning they were finally found, the woman (so went the story) was dead from fright and ex-posure, and the man had gone mad. He babbled to his rescuers about devils who had called to him in the darkness, about birds that had tried to peck out his eyes.
On their way down to the beach, Gail had refused to ride in the elevator. “I get claustrophobia in office-building elevators,” she had said. “I’d be a basket case before I reached the bottom in that thing.”
Sanders had not argued, but he insisted on sending their air tanks down in the elevator, for, as he pointed out, “If we let one of them bong into the rocks and rupture, we’ll go up like a Roman candle.”
Now he had no intention of walking up the staircase. He turned left, toward the elevator. Gail turned right.
“You’re not going to walk up those stairs,” he said.
“I sure am. What about you? I thought you were afraid of heights.”
“I’m not afraid of heights, any more than I’m afraid of airplanes. I don’t like either one, but I’m not about to let them ruin my life.”