Okay, now he lost me. What was he doing? I gave him one of the two purple sleds and he tied the other end of the vine that was holding the pants together to the handles. There was now about a three-foot length of vine between the water sled and the pants full of fruit.
“You gonna tell me what you’re doing?”
“We’ve got to swim out of here,” he explained. “Put on fins. We’ll use the air globes to breathe. We’re only about sixty feet down. There should be a skimmer waiting for us on the surface.”
“A skimmer?”
“It’s like a speedboat. Very fast. Easy to maneuver. You’ll love it.”
“Courtesy of the acolytes?”
“Exactly.”
“What’s with the fruity pants?”
“No big deal. Just a little quig bait.”
Uh-oh. That was it. Fun time was over. He punctuated this last comment by digging down under the rest of the Cloral clothes and pulling out a nasty-looking speargun. I knew this was going too well. There were quigs lurking outside. If you remember, quigs were the nasty beasties that Saint Dane used to guard the gates to the flumes. On Second Earth they were wild dogs. On Denduron they were prehistoric, cannibal bears with spiny backs. On Cloral they could only be . . .
“Sharks,” I said flatly. “You’re saying there are giant sharks swimming around out there waiting for us to pop out in our spiffy new rubber outfits?”
“You saw one yourself, on Denduron.”
I did. In the mine shaft flume on Denduron. I still remember its demonic, yellow quig-eyes as it rode the wave of water toward us. The memory made my knees buckle. The tropical vacation was over.
“Don’t worry,” said Uncle Press. “I’ll send the water sled out first. Our smell is already on these pants. If there are any quigs around, and I’m not saying there are, mind you, they’ll chase the smell.”
“You think they’ll be dumb enough to go for it?”
“They’re vicious, not bright,” he answered with confidence. “We’ll have plenty of time to get to the surface and find the skimmer.”
He handed me the speargun, which I took gingerly.
“You don’t expect me to use this, do you?”
“Just hold it,” he said. He then took another small piece of vine and looped it through the handle of the water sled. With a quick tug, he tightened it down so that it pulled the trigger, then tied a knot to keep it in place. The trigger supposedly kicked over the engine, but it wasn’t making any noise.
“Why didn’t it turn on?” I asked.
“I told you, it needs water for power.”
Uncle Press knelt down next to the pool. He first placed the loaded pants into the water. They floated off to the length of the vine that was attached to the sled. Then with both hands on the sled, he lowered the purple engine underwater as well. As soon as the slits were underwater, I could hear the low whine of its motor kick to life. The trigger was pulled all the way so it was on full power. The little sled nearly yanked Uncle Press off the ledge. He had to struggle just to hang on to it.
“Told you,” he said with a laugh. “This thing has some giddyap.”
He was enjoying this way too much. He then released his grip and the sled jumped out of his hands. The vine attached to the pants snapped tight, and it was gone in an instant, dragging the pants o’ fruit after it.
Uncle Press then sat down to put on his swim fins. I put the speargun down and did the same, quickly. I wanted to be up and out of the water before any quigs realized they were on a wild-fruit chase and came back looking for meat. Uncle Press then picked up one of the clear globes and tossed it to me.
“Let’s go,” he said with a smile.
I think he was actually looking forward to this. He was crazy. I put the globe over my head and it immediately began changing into the shape of my face. I developed instant claustrophobia and had to tell myself that it was going to be okay. It worked for Uncle Press. It’ll work for me. Either that or it will smother me and I’ll die right here in this fruit-filled underwater cavern. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. It would definitely be better than getting chomped on by Jaws.
“Breathe normally,” instructed Uncle Press. “It’s easier than using a regulator from a scuba tank.”
Breathe normally. Yeah, right. We were about to dip into shark-infested waters and he wanted me to breathe normally. Maybe I should try and stop my heart from pounding out 180 beats a minute while I was at it.
“I’ll use the water sled,” he said. “It’ll be faster than swimming. When we go under, get on my back and hold on to my belt with your left hand, tight.”
“What do I do with my right hand?”
“That’s for the speargun.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m not taking that responsibility. No way.”
“Just hang on to it,” he said, trying to reassure me. “Nothing’s going to happen. But on the off chance it does, we’ll stop and you can give the gun to me. Okay?”
I guess that made sense. If the choice was between having a speargun and not having it, I’d certainly rather have it. So I reluctantly reached down and picked up the weapon. The gun was made of what looked like bright green plastic. The spear that was loaded in the gun was actually clear, like glass. But it looked pretty lethal just the same. I’m guessing it was made from the same hard material as our air-globe helmets. I felt the tip. Oh, yeah, it was sharp. I had held a speargun once before, in Florida. So I knew how to be safe with it. But to be honest, I never shot anything. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I never even liked fishing with a rod and reel, let alone a high-powered weapon. Okay, so I’m a wuss.
“Once we submerge,” Uncle Press instructed, “we have to swim under the rock ledge for about thirty yards. We won’t use the water sled until we get out from under the ledge. Then we’ve got to travel about a hundred yards along the reef to where the skimmer is anchored. Understand?”
I understood all right. I understood that I didn’t like Cloral anymore, no matter how nice and warm the water was. But I didn’t say that. Time was wasting. Uncle Press grabbed the other water sled and slipped into the pool. I jumped in too and immediately felt the belt tighten around my waist. This thing really did work automatically. I found that I didn’t have to tread water to stay afloat. The belt had compensated for my weight and kept me hovering in the water comfortably. I would have been really impressed, if I wasn’t ready to puke out of fear.
“Is that decoy really going to lure the quigs away?” I asked hopefully.
“In theory.”
“Theory! Don’t give me theory! I want guarantees!”
“The sooner we go, the sooner we’ll be safe,” he replied calmly.
“Then let’s get out of here!” I shouted.
With a wink and a quick swing of his arms, Uncle Press sank underwater. I took one last look around the cavern and spotted the mouth of the flume far overhead. I was sorely tempted to shout out “Second Earth!” so the flume would suck me up and bring me home. But I didn’t. I was here now and I had to go forward, not back. Actually, I had to go down. Underwater. With a sweep of my arms and a kick of my legs, I thrust up out of the water, then sank back down below the surface. We were on our way. Hopefully it wouldn’t be a short and painful trip.
JOURNAL #5
(CONTINUED)
CLORAL
Swimming underwater is a very cool thing.
My parents taught me how to snorkel in Long Island Sound when I was a kid and Uncle Press, as I told you, took me to get my diving certification. I never liked regular old swimming much. To me, doing laps in a pool was like jogging on a treadmill. There was nothing interesting to look at. But diving below the surface was a whole other story. That was like dropping in to a different world.
Of course, I had been dropping in to a few too many different worlds lately, so I wasn’t as psyched about this dive as usual.
Once I sank below the surface, I was afraid to take a breath. I was used to breathing
through a mouthpiece connected to a hose that was connected to a scuba tank. But there was no mouthpiece in this weird head-bubble thing. And there was no tank of compressed air strapped to my back either. All I had was a stupid little harmonica-looking doo-dad stuck near the back of my head that was supposed to take oxygen out of water. Suddenly the whole thing sounded pretty impossible. Even though I knew I was underwater and my head was still completely dry, I couldn’t bring myself to let go and . . .
“Breathe!” commanded Uncle Press.
I spun around and saw that he was floating right next to me. How weird was that? I could hear him even though we were underwater with our heads encased in clear plastic. His voice sounded kind of high and thin, like the treble knob on my stereo was cranked all the way to ten and the bass was backed off to zero, but I could hear him as plain as if, well, as if we weren’t underwater.
“Trust me, Bobby,” he said. “Look at me. I’m breathing. It works.”
I wanted to trust him. I also wanted to shoot back to the surface and breathe real air. But my lungs were starting to hurt. I didn’t have any choice. I had to breathe. I exhaled what little air I had left in my lungs, then took in a tentative breath, to discover it worked. I had no idea how, but that little harmonica gizmo was letting me breathe. It was even better than using a mouthpiece and a scuba tank because there were no hoses to deal with. And because there was no mouthpiece, I could talk. We could communicate underwater!
“That’s better,” Uncle Press said reassuringly. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “How come we can talk?”
“It’s the re-breather,” he said, tapping the silver device on the back of his globe. “It carries sound waves, too. Cool, aye?”
Cool was the word.
“Let’s go,” he ordered.
With a kick of his fins Uncle Press took off swimming. He left a trail of carbon dioxide bubbles that came from the re-breathing device as he exhaled. Now that I was getting used to breathing in the air globe, I took a quick look around to get oriented. The pool of water we had flumed into turned out to be the opening to a passageway underneath a huge overhang of rock. Uncle Press was now slowly swimming toward a ribbon of light about thirty yards away that I could tell was the end of the rock ceiling, just as he had described. Behind me I saw that the ceiling only went back a few more feet before ending at a craggy wall. This was a pretty out-of-the-way place for a gate to be hidden. But I guess that was the idea. The gates were all hidden in remote places so ordinary people from the territories wouldn’t accidentally find them.
Uncle Press was already several yards ahead of me and I didn’t want to be left here alone, so I kicked off and started after him. The BC belt was doing a perfect job of keeping me neutrally buoyant. I kicked easily and swam perfectly level. I didn’t have to worry about banging my head on the rock ceiling above or crashing into the sand below. Excellent. If only I weren’t so worried about a quig sneaking up on us, it would have been perfect. I gripped the speargun and did a quick look right and left to make sure no bogey had wandered under the rock shelf to join us. The water was incredibly clear. I’m guessing I had about a hundred feet of visibility, which is amazing. If there were any quigs headed for us, at least we’d have a little bit of warning before we got chewed on.
Uncle Press stopped when he got to the end of the overhang. The ceiling was lower there, so the distance from the rock overhead down to the sandy bottom was now about five feet. Uncle Press swam a few yards out into open water then motioned for me to look at something. I joined him outside and saw that he was pointing back to the lip of the rock where we had just come out. There, carved into the stone, was the familiar star symbol that designated this as a gate to the flumes. I gave him an okay sign, which is the universal signal you use underwater that means you understand.
Uncle Press returned the okay sign, which is custom, then smiled and said, “We can talk, remember?”
Oh, right. We didn’t have to use hand signals. I’d forgotten. Habit, I guess. I looked up and saw a wall of rock we’d been swimming under that extended straight up. This was the formation that housed the cavern and the flume.
“Now check this out,” he added, and pointed behind me.
I turned around and was confronted with one of the most breathtaking sights I had ever seen. Beyond us was open, green-blue sea. The sandy bottom turned into a coral reef that spread out before us like a colorful blanket. It was awesome. I had been on tropical reefs before and seen all sorts of tropical fish and unique coral formations, but I had never seen anything like this. The colors of this reef were nearly as vibrant as the flowers in the cavern we had just left. There were intense blue fans the size of umbrellas that waved lazily in the soft current. Dotted around them were giant chunks of brain coral, which are called that because they look like, well, like brains. At home brain coral is kind of brownish and dull. Here on Cloral, it was bright yellow. Yellow! I told you before that water filters out red and yellow at this depth, but not here on Cloral. Every color of the spectrum could be seen. There was vibrant green vegetation growing all over the reef. Off to our left was a thick forest of kelp. The vines started on the reef and floated all the way to the surface like leafy ropes—and they were bright red! Other coral had grown up out of the rock bed and formed shapes that looked like a green topiary garden. If you used your imagination, they seemed like a herd of small animals grazing on the rocks. But they weren’t; they were coral. Amazing.
Swimming among all this splendor were the most incredible fish I had ever seen. They traveled in schools, each seeming to know exactly what the others were thinking as they all changed direction at the exact same time. It always amazed me how there could be a hundred fish in a school, but none of them ever made a wrong turn or bumped into one another. One school looked like silver flutes with long delicate fins that fluttered quickly like the wings of a hummingbird. Another school of fish were perfectly round and thin, like a CD. Only they were bright pink! Still another school looked exactly like small bluebirds with beaks and feathers. I know they were swimming, but with each flap of their fins it sure seemed like they were flying. It was all a perfectly orchestrated ballet, and it was beautiful to watch them swim about the colorful reef, lazily enjoying their day.
I was totally in awe of the spectacular scene. The water was as clear as air. It was even more special because the air globes allowed me to look all around. Unlike diving goggles where you pretty much had to look straight ahead, the air globe gave me a perfect view of everything—and, man, it was worth it!
That is, until something happened that caught my eye.
“Uh-oh,” said Uncle Press.
He had seen it too. One second there were hundreds of these weird fish gently dancing through the currents. The very next moment they all scattered. It happened so fast that if I had blinked I would have missed it. Every single last fish in my view had suddenly darted off in a different direction. There’s a better word for it. They had fled. Something had scared them. And if they were scared, I was too.
“What’s going on?” I asked, not really wanting to hear the answer.
“Something just spooked the fish.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” I said. “What do you think—”
“Look out!”
Uncle Press grabbed my arm and pulled me back down under the rock ledge. A second later I saw what caused the fish panic. Yup, it was a shark. A quig shark. It wasn’t in a hurry though. The big beast drifted past us as we cowered back in the shadow of the ledge. It used no effort to propel itself along.
It was beautiful and horrifying at the same time. Most of its body was battleship gray, but its underbelly was jet black. And it was big. We’re talking Jaws big. It was way bigger than the shark Saint Dane had sent back at us through the flume. One thing was the same though. Its eyes. The beast had the cold, yellow eyes that told me it was no ordinary shark. It was a quig, no doubt about it. The monster glided past, turned away from the rock, and star
ted swimming directly away from us.
“Maybe it didn’t see us,” I said hopefully.
“It saw us,” came the flat response. “It’s just taking its time to—here we go!”
I quickly looked back outside and saw in horror that the shark had done a complete 180 and was now swimming directly at us! It had moved away from the rock overhang so it could get up a good head of steam to make its kill run at us. There was nowhere to run, or should I say, swim. We were trapped and this thing had us in its sights.
Uncle Press grabbed the speargun away from me, planted his feet, and took aim. The quig kept coming. It was almost on us. Its jaws were already open in anticipation of the big bad bite.
“Shoot!” I yelled. “Get him!”
Uncle Press waited to make sure he wouldn’t miss. I hoped he was as good with this speargun as he was with the spears on Denduron. His finger tightened on the trigger, but he didn’t fire.
Believe it or not, the shark being so big turned out to be a good thing. Its head slid underneath the ledge, but its dorsal fin hit the rock above. Yes! It was too big to fit under the ledge. It couldn’t get to us! Uncle Press lowered the speargun because the immediate danger was gone. That is, unless the quig could figure out how to squeeze in sideways. I didn’t think that would happen. Fish don’t swim sideways.
“So much for your decoy theory,” I said.
“It worked,” replied Uncle Press. “But this bad boy was quicker than I thought. Look.”
I saw that stuck in the shark’s teeth was the decoy water sled, completely tangled up in pants and vines. The quig went for the bait all right, but it was just an appetizer. It now wanted the main course. Us.
The huge quig wriggled and squirmed, trying to force its way under the rock shelf. If it’s possible for a fish to look angry, this thing looked major-league ticked. It writhed its body, swung its tail and gnashed its jaws, desperately trying to get at us. We were just out of its reach by a few yards. Too close, in my book, but no matter how furiously the quig pushed, its body was too big to squeeze any closer. Phew!