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 Troy?”
“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?”