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 latitudinal 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 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.
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 Tro
y?”
“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?”