As Carol, deep in her thoughts, turned right over the main trench after leaving the side path that had led to the overhang, she was careless and brushed ever so slightly against a crop of coral that was extending outward from the reef. She felt a sting on her hand. She looked down and saw that she was bleeding. That’s funny, she thought, I just barely touched it. Her mind flashed back to ten minutes before, when she had been roughly pushing the coral and kelp aside in search of the fissure. And I wasn’t even scratched . . .
A wild, inchoate idea started forming in her mind. Excited now, she intensified her swimming down the long trench where the fissure had been. Troy could not keep up with her. It was a long swim but Carol completed it in about four or five minutes. She checked her regulator pressure as she waited for her diving partner. They exchanged the thumbs-up sign when he arrived and Carol tried. without success, to explain her idea to Troy using hand signals. Finally, she bravely reached out and grabbed a piece of coral with her hand. Carol saw Troy’s eyes open wide and his face grimace behind his mask. She opened her hard. There were no cuts, no scrapes, no blood. Astounded, Troy swam over beside her to look at the coral colony she had just disturbed. He too could touch and even hold this strange coral without cutting his hand. What was going on?
Carol was now pulling the coral and kelp away from the reef. Troy watched in amazement as a huge segment of the reef structure seemed to peel off, almost like a blanket . . .
They heard the great WHOOSH only milliseconds before they felt the pull. A giant chasm opened in the reef behind them and everything in the area, Troy, Carol, schools of fish, plants of all kinds, and an enormous volume of water, was swept into the hole. The current was very swift but the channel was not too large, for Carol and Troy bounced against what felt like metallic sides a couple of times. There was no time to think. They were carried along, as if on a water slide, and simply had to wait for the ride to be over.
The dark gave way to a deep dusk and the current slowed markedly. Separated by about twenty feet, Carol and Troy each tried to gather his wits and figure out what was happening. They appeared to be in the outer annulus of a large circular tank and were going around and around, passing gates of some kind after every ninety degrees of revolution. The water in the tank was about ten feet deep. Carol rolled on her back and looked up. She could see a lot of large structures above her, some of them moving, that seemed to be made out of metal or plastic. She could not see Troy anywhere. She tried to grab the sides of the tank so she could stop and look for him. It was useless. She could not resist the motion of the current.
They made three or four trips around the circle without seeing each other. Troy noticed that all the fish and plants had slowly disappeared from their annulus, suggesting that some kind of sorting process was underway. Suddenly the current increased and he was pitched forward and down, under the water and then through a half-open gate, into darkness again. Just as a trace of light appeared above the water and the rate of flow again slowed, he felt something clamp on to his right arm.
Troy was lifted out of the water a foot or so. In the dim light he couldn’t see exactly what it was that had caught him, but it felt very strong. It held him without additional movement. Troy looked behind him in the current, where he had been, and he saw Carol’s tumbling body approaching. With his free left arm he grabbed at her. She felt his arm and immediately wrapped herself around it. She composed herself, lifted her head out of the water, and struggled to reach the trunk of Troy’s body. She succeeded in holding tight to him as the current rushed past. She caught her breath and for just a moment their eyes met behind their diving masks.
Then, inexplicably, the clamp released. When they were back in the water, the current did not seem so strong. They were able to hold on to each other without much difficulty. After about fifteen seconds, the flow of the water slowed down altogether. They had been deposited in a pool in what appeared to be a large room and the water was draining out, running into some unseen orifice at the far end of the room. The last of the water disappeared. Shaken and exhausted Carol and Troy started to stand up in their diving gear.
Carol had great difficulty getting to her feet. Troy helped her up and then pointed to his regulator. Ever so slowly, he slipped out of his mouthpiece and sampled the ambient environment. One breath, then another. As far as he could tell, he was breathing normal air. He shrugged his shoulders at Carol and, in a fit of bravado, took off his mask as well. “Hellooo,” he shouted nervously, “Anybody there? You have guests out here.”
Carol slowly removed both her mask and her regulator. She had a dazed look on her face. The two of them looked around. The ceiling was about ten feet above them. Overall the dimensions of the chamber were roughly equivalent to a large living room in a nice suburban home. The walls, however, were quite unusual. Instead of being flat and forming nice right-angle joints at each of the intersections, the walls were made of large, curved surfaces, some concave and some convex, that were alternately colored red and blue. Without thinking, Carol began walking around, slowly of course because of the bulky diving gear, and taking photographs.
“Uh, just a moment, Miss Dawson,” Troy said with a hesitant smile. He pulled off his flippers and followed her. “Before you take any more pictures, angel, would you kindly tell this unsophisticated black boy just where in the fuck he is? I mean, last I knew, I was going down under the boat to look for a hole. I think I found it, but I must say it’s a trifle unnerving to be visiting someone and not know just who it is. So could you stop with the journalism bit for just a minute and tell me why you are so calm.”
Carol was right in front of one of the concave blue wall panels. There were two or three indentations in the wall structure, at about eye level, that formed circles or ellipses. “Now what do you suppose this is?” Carol wondered aloud. Her voice sounded flat, as if she were far away.
“Carol,” Troy almost shouted. “Stop it. Stop right now. We can’t just blissfully walk around here as if this is a typical afternoon stroll through a model house. We have to talk. Where are we? How are we going; to get out and go home? Home, remember the place? I guarantee you it’s not under the ocean two hours away from shore.” He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.
She started to snap out of her daze. She looked slowly around the entire room and then back at Troy. “Jesus,” she said. “And shit.” He saw her tremble a little and stepped forward to hug her. She indicated for him to leave her alone. “I’m all right. At least almost.” Carol took a couple of deep breaths and then smiled. “Anyway, I’ve sure got one hell of a story here.” She looked around the room again. “Uh Troy,” she said with her brow wrinkled, “how did we get in here? I don’t see a doorway or an opening or anything.”
“Good question,” Troy replied. “A very good question, to which I might have the answer. I think these crazy colored walls move around. I believe I saw the walls rolling into place when I was under the water. So all we have to do is push them aside and find our way out.” He tried to wedge his hands into a crack that was a connection between a red and a blue piece of the wall structure. He was unsuccessful.
Carol left Troy and started to pace around the perimeter of the room in her ungainly diving apparatus. She quickly stopped and took off everything except her bathing suit. She seemed intent on both examining and photographing every single panel in the wall. Troy took off his own air tanks and buoyancy vest as well, dropping them on the light metal floor with a clank. He watched her for a minute.
“Carol, oh Carol,” he said from across the room, a big fake grin spreading across his face. “Would you like to tell me what you’re doing now? I mean, after all, angel, I may be able to help.”
“I’m looking for something that says ‘Eat Me’ or ‘Drink Me,’ “ she replied with a nervous laugh.
“Of course,” Troy mumbled to himself, “that was absolutely obvious.”
“Do you remember Alice in Wonderland?” Carol asked from the opposite side of the room.
She had found a long, thin protuberance that looked like a handle sticking out from the center of one of the red panels. She waved and he came over. The two of them tried to twist and turn the handle. Nothing happened. Carol became frustrated struggling with it.
Troy thought he saw a first sign of panic in Carol as her eyes frantically scanned the rest of the room. He pulled himself up and stood at attention, military style. “Speak roughly to your little boy . . . And beat him when he sneezes . . . He only does it to annoy . . because he knows it teases.”
The deep furrows in Carol’s face showed that she thought Troy had temporarily lost his mind. “That was the Queen of Hearts, I think.” Troy laughed. “I’m not sure exactly. But I had to learn it for a play when I was in the fifth grade.” Carol had relaxed and was also laughing in spite of her fear. She reached up and gave Troy a kiss on the cheek. “Careful, now, careful,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “We black men are easily aroused.”
Carol slid her arm through Troy’s as they finished walking around the rest of the room, searching the walls for any sign of an exit Troy’s banter made Carol feel comfortable. “When I was in the eighth grade a black teacher of mine told me that Alice was a racist story. He contended that it was very significant that it was a white rabbit that Alice followed. He said that no nice little white girl would ever have pursued a black rabbit down a hole.” He stopped in front of another red panel. “Well, well,” he said. “What have we here?”
This red panel looked just like the rest of the wall from a distance. But up close, within a range of a couple of feet or so, all kinds of patterns, made with small white dots, could be seen stippled on top of the red paint. An array of consecutive rectangular sections outlined by the white dots high-lighted the center of the panel “Hey, angel,” Troy said, pushing on the sections at random, “don’t you think this looks suspiciously like a keyboard?” Troy began to push on the keys at random. Carol joined him. It became a game. The two of them stood at the red panel for almost a minute, putting their fingers into every outlined section and pushing hard.
Suddenly Carol backed away from the panel, turned around, and started walking directly across the room. “Where are you going?” yelled Troy, as Carol, spinning around to answer, nearly stumbled over her diving gear on the floor.
“I have a crazy idea,” called Carol. “Call it feminine intuition. Call it psychic if you will.” She had reached the red panel where they had struggled with the handle. Now she pulled it down easily and immediately heard a creak. She jumped back, startled, as the entire panel folded back and away from her, revealing a dark opening large enough for a truck to enter. Troy came over beside her and the two of them stared into the void.
“Holy shit,” he said “Are we supposed to go in there?”
Carol nodded. “I’m certain we are.”
Troy looked at her with a curious expression. “And just how do you know that?”
“Because it’s the only way out of here,” Carol replied.
Troy cast one final glance around the strange room with the curved and colored walls. There was an indisputable logic to what Carol had said. He took a deep breath, held Carol’s hand, and walked into the black tunnel.
Behind them they could barely see the small shaft of light coming from the room where they had left their diving gear. Inside the pitch-black hallway they moved very slowly, cautiously. Troy kept one hand on the wall and the other clenched around Carol’s. The sound of their labored breathing, heightened by the constant fear and apprehension, reverberated off the rounded walls. They didn’t talk. Twice Troy had started to sing a few lines from a popular song, to assuage his own disquiet, but both times Carol stopped him. She wanted to be able to hear in case there were any other noises.
At one point she squeezed his hand and stopped. “Listen,” she said in a whisper. Troy held his breath. There was utter silence, except for something very soft that he couldn’t quite identify, way off in the distance. “Music,” Carol said. “I think I hear music.”
Troy strained to identify the sound just below the threshold of his hearing. It was useless. He pulled on Carol’s hand. “It’s probably inside your head,” he said. “Let’s go.”
They had made a turn and the light behind them had disappeared. Altogether they had been in the tunnel for about ten minutes. Carol was becoming despondent. “What if this doesn’t go anywhere?” she asked Troy.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he replied quickly. “Somebody built it for some purpose. It’s obviously a connecting passageway.” He fell silent.
“Who built it?” Carol asked the question that had been troubling both of them during the long tense walk down the dark hallway.
“Another good question,” Troy replied. He hesitated just a minute before continuing with his answer. “My guess is the United States Navy. I think we’re in some kind of top-secret underwater laboratory that nobody knows about.” Of course, he thought, not saying it out loud because he didn’t want to disturb Carol, it could also be Russian. In which case we are in deep shit. If the Russians have a large, secret laboratory this close to Key West, they are not going to be happy . . .
“Look, Troy,” Carol said excitedly. “I see a light. There is somebody here after all.” The tunnel was about to split into two pans. At the end of one of the two forks, the one sharply to the left, a patch of illumination could clearly be seen. Still holding hands, Troy and Carol walked briskly toward the light. Troy was aware that his heart was beating very rapidly
Carol almost raced into the new room. She had expected that they were about to be found, that this mysterious adventure was now going to end and everything would be explained. Instead, as she looked around her in a small, oval chamber with the same bizarre panels for walls (except these were colored brown and white, instead of red and blue as in the previous room), she felt a tremendous confusion. “What is this place?” she asked Troy. “And how are we going to get out?”
Troy was standing in the center of the room with his head tilted back as far as it would go. He was staring up at a vast arched ceiling some thirty to thirty-five feet above them. “Wow,” he exclaimed, “this is one huge place.” The muted light illuminating the room was coming from slabs of partially translucent material, possibly glass crystals, that were embedded in the ceiling.
The brown and white panels forming the walls for the particular room they had entered were only ten feet high, but they were high enough to prevent Carol and Troy from seeing out. They had a strange sense of both freedom and confinement. On the one hand, first the tunnel and now this small room, the size of a child’s bedroom in a small house, had made them feel claustrophobic; however, the sense of space conveyed by the cathedral ceilings was liberating.
“Well?” asked Carol, somewhat impatiently, after waiting a few moments while Troy walked around and surveyed the room. He was observing that the brown and white wall panels were only slightly curved and were thus much closer to normal walls than those in the initial room had been.
“I’m sorry, angel,” he replied, “I forgot the question.”
She shook her head. “There is only one question, Mr. Jefferson. I believe that you asked it of me on our last tour stop.” She looked at her watch. “In about fifteen minutes, we will have exceeded the maximum time for our air supply. Unless I miss my guess, our friend Nick is probably starting to worry right now. But we still have no idea . . . What are you doing?”
She interrupted herself when Troy bent down to pull a small knob on one of the brown panels in the corner of the room. “These are drawers, angel,” he said, as the bottom part of the panel came out several inches from the wall. “Like a dresser.” He opened a second drawer above the first. “And they have something in them.”
Carol came over to see. She reached into the second drawer that Troy had opened and pulled out a rust-colored sphere about the size of a tennis ball. The surface of the ball was very curious. Instead of being smooth and regular, it had grooves cut into it,
mostly on one side, and tiny bumps, like those on the surface of a pickle, around and next to the grooves. In other places there were poorly defined indentations as well. Carol examined the sphere in the weak light. “I’ve seen something like this before,” she said. “But where?” She thought for a few seconds. “I’ve got it,” she announced, pleased that her memory had come through, “this looks exactly like the model of Mars in the National Air and Space Museum.”
“Then I must have the Earth,” Troy replied, showing her a mostly blue sphere the size of a softball that he had removed from the top drawer. The two of them stood together in the dim light, looking back and forth at the spheres they were holding in their hands. “Shit,” Troy shouted eventually, spinning around and looking at the ceiling. “And double shit. Whoever you are, we’ve had enough. Come out now and identify yourself.”
A partial echo of his voice came back to them. Otherwise they heard nothing. Anxious to be doing something, Carol continued her search of the room. She found another group of three drawers in a nearby brown panel. While she was opening the first of these, Troy playfully hurled his blue ball at what appeared to be an exit, a dark opening between panels on the other side of the room. The sphere hit a white panel near the exit with a thunk and started to fall to the floor. However, just before it touched the ground, the sphere lifted up, as if pulled somehow from above, and stopped in the center of the room about five feet above the floor. It began to spin.
Troy’s eyes opened wide. He walked over to the sphere and placed his hand between the ball and high ceiling, trying to find the strings. Nothing happened. The Earth sphere continued to spin slowly and inscribe a circle in the air in the middle of the room. Troy pushed the ball lightly. It moved in response to his push, but after his applied force was removed and the effect had dissipated, the sphere returned to its previous location and continued its earlier movement. Troy turned around. Carol had her back to him and was searching unsuccessfully for another set of drawers. The Mars ball was still in her left hand.