Cradle

1

Nick Williams woke up at five o’clock in the morning and could not go back to sleep. His mind was too active, racing over and over the events of the day before and the possible outcomes of the day ahead. The same phenomenon had occurred often when he was in high school in Virginia and then a few times later, at Harvard, usually just before big swimming meets. If he had too much excitement running through his system, his brain would not turn off enough to let him sleep.

He lay in bed for almost another hour, alternately trying to coax himself back to sleep and indulging his fantasy that what he had found the day before was just the first item in a vast cache of valuable treasure. Nick loved to fantasize. It was always easy for him to see, in his mind’s eye, all the scenes in the novels that he loved so much to read. Now for a moment he imagined headlines in the Miami Herald announcing his discovery of a hoard of sunken gold off the coast of Key West.

Around six o’clock Nick gave up trying to sleep and climbed out of bed. The little exercise bag was next to the dresser. He pulled the golden trident out to look at it, as he had done four or five times the night before. What was this thing? he asked himself. It must have had some practical use for it’s too damn ugly to be ornamental. He shook his head. Amanda will know. If anyone can tell me where this thing came from, she can.

Nick walked across his bedroom to the sliding glass doors and opened the curtains. It was almost sunrise. Beyond the small balcony outside he could see the beach and the ocean. His condominium was on the third floor and had an unspoiled view of the quiet surf. Above the water a couple of brown pelicans soared in graceful formation, waiting for a chance to descend into the water and catch some unsuspecting fish swimming too close to the surface. Nick watched a couple in their seventies walking slowly along the beach. They were holding hands and talking quietly; a couple of times the woman broke away to pick up a shell or two and put it in a small Ziploc bag.

Nick turned away from the door and grabbed the jeans that he had dropped on the floor the night before. He pulled them on over his undershorts and walked into the living room carrying the bag with the trident. He put the golden object carefully on the table where he could study it, and then went back into the open kitchen to start the coffee maker and turn on the radio.

Except for the books, Nick’s living room was decorated just like hundreds of Florida seaside condominiums. The couch and easy chair were comfortable and bright, cream in color with a couple of light green ferns in the pattern for decoration. Two small paintings of water birds standing on an empty beach adorned the otherwise empty walls. Light beige drapes that matched the carpet framed the long sliding glass doors that led to the balcony with the rattan patio furniture.

It was the books that gave the apartment some individuality. Along the wall opposite the couch, between the living room and the bedroom, was the large wood bookcase. It stretched almost all the way from the sliding glass doors in front of the balcony to the bedroom door. Although the general appearance of the apartment was one of disarray (newspapers and sports magazines strewn about here and there on the coffee table, clothes and towels on the floor in the bedroom and the bathroom, dirty dishes in the sink, the dishwasher standing open half full of dishes), the bookcase area was clearly well maintained. Altogether there must have been four or five hundred books on the four shelves of the long bookcase, all paperbacks, virtually all novels, and all carefully filed according to category.

In front of each group of books, Scotch-taped to the outside of the bookshelf, was a sheet of paper identifying the category. Nick had finished A Fan’s Notes on the boat on Thursday and had already put it back in its proper place on the shelf (in the category of “American, 20th Century, A-G”) right next to a dozen or more books by William Faulkner. He had then selected for his bedtime reading a nineteenth-century French novel, Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. Nick had read the book once before, during his sophomore year at Harvard, and had not thought that much about it. However, he had been recently surprised to find the book on several lists of the ten finest novels of all time, ranking right up there with such masterpieces as Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. Hmm. Perhaps I missed something the first time, he had told himself the previous night before deciding to read it again.

But Nick had not been able to focus on the magnificently detailed descriptions of life in provincial France a hundred and fifty years earlier. As he had followed the story of the lovely Emma Bovary, a woman for whom the stultifying sameness of her life was cause enough to have affairs that would eventually scandalize her village, the excitement of Nick’s own life, for once, kept intruding. He was unable to suspend himself in the novel. His mind kept returning to the possibilities offered by the golden object in the exercise bag.

Nick turned the object over and over in his hands while he drank his morning coffee. Then he had an idea. He walked back to the second bedroom, just opposite the kitchen and next to the laundry room, and opened the closet door. Nick used most of this closet as a storage area. In the corner of the closet were four huge cardboard boxes of junk that he had brought with him when he had bought the condominium seven years earlier. He had never opened them even once in the intervening time. But he did remember that in one of those boxes were a bunch of photographs of the objects they had brought up from the Santa Rosa. Maybe if I look at those pictures, he thought to himself as he struggled to find the right container in the dimly lit closet, I will see something that looks like that thing.

He finally located the correct box and dragged it out into the middle of the living room. At one time its contents might have been well organized, for there were manila folders with filing labels inside. But almost all of the papers and photos and newspaper clippings had fallen out of their original places and were now scattered around the box in a loose jumble. Nick reached in and pulled out a clipping from the Miami Herald. It was yellow from age and had been crammed down into one of the corners. Five people, including Nick, were featured in a big photograph on the front page.

Nick stopped for a moment and looked at the photo and the caption. Has it really been that long? he wondered, Almost eight years since we found the Santa Rosa. The caption identified the five individuals in the photograph as the crew of the Neptune, a dive and salvage boat that had found an old Spanish ship named the Santa Rosa sunk in the Gulf of Mexico about fifteen miles north of the Dry Tortugas. Gold and silver objects worth more than two million dollars had been retrieved from the vessel and were piled in front of the happy smiling crew. From left to right they were Greta Erhard, Jake Lewis, Homer Ashford, Ellen Ashford, and Nick Williams.

That was before they started eating, Nick thought to himself. Ellen ate because of Greta, because it gave her an excuse in her own mind for what was happening with Homer. And Homer ate because he could afford it. Just like he does everything else. For some people constraints are the only thing that saves them. Give them freedom and they go berserk.

Nick dug deeper into the box, looking for a set of twenty or so photographs that showed most of the large gold items they had retrieved from the Santa Rosa. Eventually he started finding some of the pictures, in groups of four or five, in different parts of what was now becoming a hopeless pile at the bottom of the box. Each time he would find some more photos, he would pull them out, look at them carefully, and then shake his head to acknowledge that the golden trident did not look a thing like any of the objects from the Santa Rosa.

At the bottom of the box Nick encountered a yellow manila folder with a rubber band wrapped carefully around it. Thinking at first that this folder might contain the rest of the pictures from the Santa Rosa, Nick pulled out the folder and opened it hastily. An 8 x 11 picture of a beautiful woman in her early thirties slid out and fell on the living room floor. It was followed by handwritten notes, cards, a few letters in envelopes, and then about twenty sheets of bond paper covered with double-spaced typing. Nick sighed. How was it possible that he hadn’t recognized this folder?

The woman in the portrait had long black hair, lightly frosted in the front. She was wearing a dark red cotton blouse, slightly open at the top to show a triple strand of pearls just under the neck. In blue ink that contrasted with the red of the blouse, someone with magnificent, clearly artistic hand-writing had written, “Mon Cher—Je t’aime, Monique,” across the lower right portion of the photograph.

Nick bent down on his knees to pick up the scattered contents of the folder. He looked at the portrait carefully, his heart skipping a few beats as he remembered how beautiful she had been. He started to sort the typed pages together. At the top of one of the pages was written, in all capital letters, “MONIQUE,” and then underneath it, “by Nicholas C. Williams.” He started to read.

“The wonder of life lies in its unpredictability. Each of our lives is irrevocably changed by the things we cannot have possibly forecast. We walk out of the door every morning to go to work or to class or even to the grocery store, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred we return without anything having happened that we will remember even a month in the future. On those days our lives are swept up in the banality of living, in the basic humdrum cadence of everyday existence. It is the other day, the magic day, for which we live.

“On this magic day our character becomes defined, our growth is accelerated, our emotional transitions are made. Sometimes, maybe once in a lifetime, there will be a string of these magic days, one after another, so full of life and change and challenge that we are completely transformed by the experience and our souls become suffused with a boundless joy. During that time we are often overcome by the simple and incredible miracle of just being alive. This is the story of one such magic period.

“It was spring break in Fort Lauderdale. Our swimming season had just finished at Harvard and my uncle, as a present for my twenty-first birthday, offered to let me use his condominium in Florida for a couple of weeks so I could unwind from the twin rigors of studying and swimming practice…”

Nick had not looked at these pages for almost ten years. As he read the first few paragraphs he remembered, vividly, the ecstasy in which they were written. It was two nights before the party. She was at some social function that night, would be too late, would come by first thing in the morning. I couldn’t sleep. It was the first night in a week I had been away from her. He stopped for a moment, old emotions twisting around inside him, making him feel dizzy and slightly nauseous. He read the first paragraph again. It was also before the pain. Before the incredible goddamn pain.

For almost thirty minutes music had been playing on the radio. Nick had heard it, he knew it was there, but he could not have identified any of the songs. It had been background music. Now, just at the moment when his memories of Monique were the most poignant, the Miami “classic rock and roll station, WMIM, 99.9 on your FM dial,” played Cyndi Lauper’s haunting 1984 hit “Time After Time.” The music seemed to increase markedly in amplitude. Nick had to sit down and grab a breath. Until the song, he had been able to deal with his memories of Monique. But somehow that song, the one he had played on the cassette player in his car almost every night as he had made the drive from Fort Lauderdale to Palm Beach to see her, carried with it all the youthful love, joy, fear, and anger that had marked the entire affair. Nick was overwhelmed. As he sat on the couch and listened to the song, hot tears welled up in his eyes and then ran softly down his cheeks.

“…Lying in my bed, I hear the clock tick, and think of you… Caught up in circles, confusion is nothing new… Flashback, warm nights, almost left behind… Suitcase of memories… Time after Time.”

2

YOU say, go slow, I fall behind… The second hand unwinds…” Brenda leaned over and turned the volume down on the cassette player. “It’s me, Mr. Stubbs, honest. Brenda Goldfine. Don’t you recognize me?” She was shouting at an old man in a blue uniform who was sitting on a stool in a small circular tower in the middle of the road. “And that’s Teresa Silver in the back. She’s not feeling too well. Come on, open the gate and let us through.”

The security guard climbed down from his stool and slowly walked out in front of Nick’s old Pontiac. He wrote the license number down on a note pad and then came around to Brenda’s window. “All right this time, Brenda, but this is not according to the rules. All visitors coming into Windsor Cove after ten o’clock at night must be cleared ahead of time.”

At length the guard raised the gate and Nick moved his car forward again. “The guy’s really a pain in the ass,” Brenda said to Nick, smacking her gum as she talked, “Christ, you’d think he owned one of the places or something.” Nick had heard about Windsor Cove. Or rather had read about it. Once when he was over at his uncle’s home in Potomac, Maryland, there had been a copy of Town and Country magazine on the table and he had read about the “gracious life of Windsor Cove.” Now, as he drove past the estates in the most prestigious section of Palm Beach, he was awed by the personal wealth displayed.

“Over there. That’s Teresa’s house.” Brenda pointed at a colonial house set back about a hundred yards from the road. Nick drove into the long semicircular driveway and eventually stopped in front of a walkway leading to the front of the house. It was an imposing place. Two full floors, six white columns over twenty feet high, an opulent door whose top half was an arched, stained glass window of a white heron in flight against a blue sky filled with fleecy clouds.

Brenda looked in the back of the car where her friend was passed out. “Look, I’d better handle this. I’ll go up and talk to Mrs. Silver and explain what happened and everything. Otherwise you could be in deep shit. Sometimes she jumps to conclusions.”

By the time Brenda reached the front door to ring the bell, it had already opened. An attractive woman in a red silk blouse and a pair of chic black slacks was waiting. Nick guessed that she had probably been called by the security guard. He couldn’t tell much about the conversation, but he could see that Teresa’s mother was asking questions. After a couple of minutes, Brenda and the woman came back to the car. “You didn’t tell me she was still passed out,” Nick heard a surprisingly husky voice say. There was also some kind of accent, European perhaps. “You know, Brenda, this is absolutely the last time she can go anywhere with you. You just can’t control her. I’m not even sure that you try.” The voice was angry but not strident.

Nick opened his door and climbed out of the car. “This is the guy I was telling you about, Mrs. Silver,” Brenda said. “Without him Teresa might still be lying on the beach.”

Mrs. Silver extended her hand. Nick took it, feeling a little awkward. He didn’t know how to shake hands with a woman. “I understand that I’m in your debt, young man,” Mrs. Silver said graciously. “Brenda tells me that you rescued Teresa from all sorts of horrors.” The light from the street lamps played about her sculptured face. Her hand was soft, sensual. Nick smelled just a trace of perfume, something exotic. Her eyes were fixed on his, unwavering, inquisitive.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Nick said clumsily. “I mean, well, she had had too much to drink and I thought the crowd of teenagers she was with were a little bit out of control.” He stopped. She was still watching him, measuring him. He was becoming agitated and didn’t understand why. “Somebody had to help her and I just happened to be there…” He trailed off weakly.

Mrs. Silver thanked him again and turned to Brenda. “Your mother’s expecting you, dear. We’ll stay out front until you get home. Flash your lights to let us know you’re there.” Brenda looked happy to be dismissed. She scampered off into the night in the direction of the nearest house about a hundred yards away.

There was a momentary pause as they watched the sixteen-year-old disappear into the night. Nick found himself stealing furtive looks at Mrs. Silver’s profile. An inchoate awareness of what he was feeling made him more nervous. Jesus, she’s beautiful. And young. How could she be the girl’s mother? He was wrestling with a jumble of thoughts as he saw the lights flicker in the distance.

“Good,” she said, turning to Nick with a smile, “Brenda’s home. Now we can worry about Teresa.” She stopped for a moment and laughed. “Oh, I almost forgot. We haven’t been formally introduced. I’m Teresa’s mother, Monica Silver.”

“I’m Nick Williams,” he said in response. Her dark eyes were fixed on him again. In the reflected light the expression in her eyes seemed to vary. One moment she was a pixie, then a seductress, then a very proper Palm Beach society woman. Or was Nick imagining it? He couldn’t return her gaze anymore. He felt his cheeks flush as he averted his eyes.

“I had to carry her from the beach to the parking lot,” Nick said abruptly, as he went around to the back door of his car and opened it. The teenager had been leaning against the door and nearly fell out. She didn’t stir. He picked Teresa up and threw her over his shoulder. “So it’s no problem for me to carry her for you now. I’m used to it.”

They walked quietly down the path toward the house, Monica Silver leading by a few steps. Nick watched her walk in front of him. She moved effortlessly, like a dancer, with almost perfect posture. Her dark hair was wrapped up at the back in a chignon. It must be very long, he thought to himself with delight, imagining her hair flowing down her beautiful back.

It was a warm and humid Palm Beach evening. Nick was sweating by the time they reached the entrance. “Could you do me one more favor, Nick?” Mrs. Silver asked. “Could you carry her up to her room? My husband’s not here and the help has all gone to bed. And I doubt seriously if she’s going to get herself together well enough to climb the stairs, even with my help, in the near future.”

Nick followed Mrs. Silver’s instructions and carried Teresa through the atrium, into the living room, up the entry steps onto the platform, up the left flight to the second floor, and then into her bedroom. It was huge. In her room Teresa had a king-size bed with four posters, a giant television, an entire cabinet of movies for the VCR, and a sound system that would have been a credit to any rock and roll band. Bruce Springsteen posters and photos were all over the room. Nick laid Teresa gently on her bed. She murmured “Thank you,” indicating to him that at least she was semiconscious. Her mother bent over her and gave her a kiss.

Nick left the two of them alone and went back down the stairs into the living room. He could not believe that somebody really could live in a house like this. Why the living room alone was bigger than the house in Falls Church where he grew up. He wandered around the room after he came down the stairs. There were original paintings on the walls, crystal glass chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, and art objects and bric-a-brac both on the tables and in every nook and cranny. It was all too much for him. He was overwhelmed.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and involuntarily recoiled. Monica Silver chided him, “Goodness, you’re jumpy. It’s only me.” He turned around to look at her Was he imagining it or had she somehow combed her hair and put on fresh makeup in the few seconds they had been separated? For the first time he saw her in the full light. She was the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen. His breath was taken away and he felt giddy. Outside he had not been able to see her skin clearly. Now he found himself staring at her bare arms, following the elegant contours of her neck. Her skin had the smoothness of ivory. It called to him to touch it. Watch yourself, Williams, he heard a voice inside him say, Or you are going to be outrageous. He tried to calm himself.

But it was useless. He could not take his eyes off her. She was saying something. She had asked him a question. He had not even heard it, so dumbfounded was he by what was happening, by where he was. She was leading him somewhere in the house. His imagination was running wild. She took him into a small room with a table and told him to sit down.

“It’s the least I can do,” she was saying, “to repay you for what you did for Teresa. I know you must be hungry. And we still have some great food left over from the party tonight.”

Nick was in a breakfast nook just off the kitchen. To his left a door led to the patio and then outside, into the back yard. The lights around the huge swimming pool were still on. He could see manicured gardens with roses in bloom, chaise longues, colorful umbrellas, white iron tables with twisted, lacy legs—he could not believe that it was all real. He felt transported to another world, a world that existed only in books and movies.

Monica Silver laid out some food on the table. Smoked salmon, onions, capers, cream cheese, two different kinds of bread, plus a dish of some other kind of fish that Nick did not recognize. “That’s marinated herring,” she said with a smile, noticing Nick’s quizzical expression. She handed him a wine glass. He took it and unconsciously looked her straight in the eyes. He was transfixed. He felt weak and powerless, as if he were being drawn into her deep brown, bewitching eyes, into her world of richness and luxury and beauty. His knees were weak, his heart was racing, he could feel his fingers tingling.

She poured some white wine in his glass and then in her own. “This is a brilliant Burgundy, Clos des Mouches,” she said, touching her glass to his with a light tinkle. “Let’s make a toast.”

She was radiant. He was enthralled. “To happiness,” she said.

They talked for over three hours. Nick learned that Monica Silver had grown up in France, that her father had been a small, struggling fur merchant in Paris, and that she had met her husband, Aaron (the biggest of the big Montreal furriers), while helping her father at the shop. She had been seventeen at the time of the whirlwind courtship. Mr: Silver had proposed just seven days after they had met and she had accepted immediately even though her husband-to-be was twenty years older. She moved to Montreal and married him before she was eighteen. Teresa was born nine months later.

Nick told her that he was in his junior year at Harvard, majoring in English and French to get a good liberal arts education and prepare himself for either law school or graduate school. As soon as she found out that he was in his third year of French, she switched and spoke to him in her native language. Her name became Monique. He missed some of what she said, but it didn’t matter. He understood the gist of it. And her dramatic voice plus the sound of the foreign language only increased the power of the spell already cast by the wine and her beauty.

Nick also tried to speak French from time to time. Whatever self-consciousness he might have ordinarily felt was swept away by the magic of the setting and their growing rapport. They laughed together easily at his mistakes. She was gracious and charming when she corrected him, always adding “mais vous parlez fran,cais tres bien” in the early part of the evening. Later, as their conversation became more personal (Nick talked about his problems with his father; Monique wondered aloud if there was anything a mother could do with a teenage daughter except hope that some basic values had been learned), Monique changed to the more personal “tu” form in talking to him. This established an additional intimacy between them that deepened in the wee hours of the morning.

Monique talked about Paris, about the romance of the streets, the bistros, the museums, the history. Nick visualized it all and felt transported with her to the city of lights. She told about her dreams when she was growing up, about walking in the sixteenth arrondissement among the wealthy and promising herself that someday… He listened closely, enraptured, an almost beatific smile upon his face. In the end, Monique had to tell him that it was time to go because she had an early tennis lesson in the morning. It was after three o’clock. He apologized as they walked together to the door. She laughed and said that it had been fun. At the door she reached up and kissed him on the cheek. His heart soared out of his body at the touch of her lips. “Call me sometime,” she said with a playful smile, as she closed the door behind him.

For over thirty hours Nick thought of nothing but Monique. He talked to her in his mind during the day; she was his lover in dreams at night. He called her once, twice, three times, each time talking to her answering machine. The third time he left her his phone number and address and suggested that she try to get in touch with him when her schedule would permit.

By noon on the second day after his evening at the Silvers’ Palm Beach mansion, he started to calm down, to realize that there was no sense in his continuing to worship the image of a woman he had met for a single evening. Especially a woman who was married to someone else. In the late afternoon he went out on the beach to play volleyball with some of the other college students he had met during his first days in Florida. He had just served an ace when he thought he heard his name being called by a husky, accented voice that was absolutely unmistakable.

He thought for a moment he was dreaming. Standing in the sand not ten yards away was Monique. She was wearing a bright red and white striped bikini and her long black hair hung down her back to just above her waist. The volleyball game stopped. His friends whistled. He walked over to her his heart pounding in his temples and his breath struggling to find its way out of his constricted chest. Monique smiled and slid her arm through his. She explained that she had brought Teresa into Lauderdale for a small high school party and since it was so hot…

They walked along, the beach and talked as the sun set behind the condominiums. They were oblivious to the young people all around them. The gentle waves washed their feet with warm water as they walked. Monique insisted that they eat in Nick’s condo, so they stopped for tuna fish, tomatoes, onions, and mayonnaise to put on their sandwiches. Cold beer, potato chips, and sandwiches on a bare formica table was the dinner. Lovemaking was the dessert. Nick almost had an orgasm on their first kiss and his passion made him klutzy and funny in trying to remove her bikini. Monique slowed him down, smiled softly, neatly folded her bikini and his bathing suit (while he of course was going wild), and then came to join him on the bed. After two kisses naked on the bed, Nick was seized by a paroxysm of lust. He rolled roughly on top of Monique and began gyrating with his hips. At first a bit alarmed, Monique slowed him just a bit and guided him gently into her.

Monique’s body was nearly perfect. Nice, full, upright breasts (they had been reconstructed of course after she had nursed Teresa but how could Nick have known or cared?) slim waist, rounded, feminine ass (not one of those boyish asses that really skinny women have), taut muscled legs kept in shape with lots of exercise. But it was her skin, that magnificent ivory skin, that sent Nick into ecstasy. It was so soft and easy to the touch.

Her mouth seemed to fit his perfectly. Nick had been with two women before, a high-priced call girl given to him as a Christmas present after the Harvard swimming team had discovered he was still a virgin at the end of his freshman year and Jennifer Barnes from Radcliffe, his sometimes steady date during most of his sophomore year. Jennifer’s teeth always clanged against his when they kissed. But that had not been the only difficulty in his relationship with Jennifer. She was a physicist and her approach to sex had been almost clinical. She measured sizes and durations and frequencies and even quantities of ejaculant. After three “scheduled performances” with Jenny Nick had decided it wasn’t worth it.

Nick gasped as he slid into Monique. Both of them knew it would be over soon. Ten seconds later Nick finished his climax and started to withdraw. But Monique held his rear firmly in her hands, keeping him in place, and deftly (how did she do it?) rolled over so that she was on top. Nick was now out of his element. In his limited experience, withdrawal was the next step after orgasm. He didn’t know what Monique was doing. Ever so slowly, her eyes half closed as she hummed a piece of classical music to herself, Monique rocked back and forth on top of him, her vaginal walls holding tightly to his now flaccid penis. After a couple of minutes she began to grind her pelvis forward as she rocked and, much to Nick’s amazement, as her breath shortened he found himself becoming aroused again. Now her eyes closed altogether and her rhythm became stronger, the thrusts of her forward motion grinding with a little pain into his bones. Nick was now definitely erect and he started following her motion, lightly gyrating in pattern with her.

Monique leaned forward, concentrating but smiling with her eyes closed, preparing for her own orgasm. She was acutely aware and delighted that Nick was up again. Timing her own progress perfectly (and in complete control of the situation), she adroitly and softly reached down and began titillating Nick’s nipples in rhythm with her forward thrusts. Nick had never had his breasts touched in lovemaking before and was shocked. But the raw excitement was overwhelming. She increased her play, even pinching him when she saw (and felt) his response. As wave after wave of delightful release coursed through her body, Nick uttered a loud, wailing scream and had his second orgasm in fifteen minutes. At the end of the climax he was completely given over to pleasure and made animal sounds and shook involuntarily from exhausted satiety.

Nick was a little embarrassed by his noisy and uncontrolled response, but Monique’s playful and friendly afterplay assured him that everything was all right. She went to his closet, pulled out one of his three dress shirts, and put it on. The tails came almost down to her knees (Monique was only five feet five and Nick was a shade less than six two) and she looked positively gamine with her pixie smile, long hair, and man’s shirt. Nick began to declare his love but Monique came forward and put her finger to his lips. Then she kissed him lovingly, told him that she needed to pick up Teresa, jumped in the shower for what could not have been more than a minute, dressed, kissed him again, and walked out the door. Nick did not move during this entire time. After she left he fell asleep contentedly. He did not dream.

For the next eight days Nick was on top of the world. He saw Monique every day, most of the time at her Palm Beach mansion, but sometimes at his uncle’s condominium. They made love at every opportunity and it was always different. Monique was full of surprises. The second time Nick went to her house, for example, he found her in the back, swimming naked in the pool. She told him that she had given all the servants the day off. Within minutes they were frolicking and laughing on the grass between the garden and the pool.

Their affair was conducted in French. Monique taught him about food and wine. They shared their knowledge of French literature. One passionate night they argued about Andre Gide’s La Symphonie Pastorale both before and after lovemaking. Monique defended the pastor and laughed at Nick’s insistence that the blind Gertrude was “an innocent.” Another evening, when Monique demanded that Nick wear a black Halloween mask and a pair of white leotards throughout their long French dinner, they read Jean Genet’s Le Balcon together as a prelude to sex.

The days raced by relentlessly, clothed in the magic of love and intimacy. Once Nick showed up at the mansion and Monique greeted him dressed in an incredible coat, a full-length Alaskan seal fur with indigo fox trim around the collars as well as down the lapels and framing the sleeves from the shoulders to the wrists. The coat was the softest thing Nick had ever touched, even softer than her tantalizing skin. His playful paramour had turned the air conditioning up as high as it would go so that she could wear her favorite coat. She was wearing nothing underneath it. After lovemaking that evening she dressed Nick’s naked body in one of her husband’s beaver coats, explaining the presence of half a dozen fur coats in Palm Beach with a simple “it’s our business and we like to have some things to show our friends and acquaintances in case they are interested.”

Nick professed his love with increasing zeal each time they met anew. Monique responded with her usual “je t’aime,” but would not reply to Nick’s insistent questions about the future. She avoided all questions about her relationship with Mr. Silver, except to say that he was a workaholic and that he stayed in Montreal most of the year. He had bought the place in Palm Beach primarily because Monique did not like the cold and wanted a more active social life than the one they had in Montreal. Monique usually spent the period from Christmas to Easter in Palm Beach; Teresa, who had just finished her spring break from her exclusive private school and had returned to Canada, came down as often as possible so that she could be with her mother.

Monique gave short, terse answers about her present life. But she waxed rhapsodic about her childhood in Paris. She never criticized her husband or complained about her married life. Yet she did tell Nick that her days with him had been the happiest time of her life. She also talked about some of her friends, but Nick never met any of them. They were always alone.

One day she picked him up in her Cadillac and they headed toward Key Largo so that he could do some diving at the Pennekamp Recreation Area. As always, she was wearing her wedding ring. On this particular day Nick had vowed to himself that he would get some answers about the future, and the constant presence of her wedding ring pissed him off. He asked her to remove it. She politely refused, then grew angry when he pressed her. She pulled the car off the highway in the marshland north of the Keys and stopped the engine.

“It is a fact that I am married,” she said resolutely, “and taking the ring off is not going to change anything. I am in love with you, without doubt, but you have understood my situation from the beginning. If you cannot deal with it anymore, then perhaps we should just call it quits.”

Nick was shocked by her response. The thought of being without her terrified him. He apologized and professed his love. He began kissing her passionately and then jumped in the back seat. He told her that he needed her right then, that moment. She somewhat reluctantly joined him and they had intercourse on the back seat of her Cadillac. Monique was quiet and pensive most of the rest of the day.

On Friday, exactly a week after they had met, Monique took Nick to a tuxedo shop to have him fitted for a black tie dinner with some friends that she was having on Saturday night in her home. So finally he was going to be seen with her. “And,” Nick thought, “now she will talk about our future.” Nick was supposed to be in Boston on Monday morning and his parents were expecting him Saturday night in Falls Church, but he assured himself that he could drive all day (and all night if necessary, so pumped up was he in his love for Monique) to get to classes on Monday morning.

Nick was full of hope and dreams when he showed up at the Silver mansion on Saturday night. He looked elegant in his summer tux, and the smile with which he greeted Monique at the door could have won a prize. Even with the doorman standing by, he handed her a dozen red roses, gave her a kiss, and told her that he loved her. “Of course you do,” she said lightly, “doesn’t everybody?” She took him inside and introduced him to the four other people who had also come early as the “young man who saved our Teresa one day in Lauderdale.” Then Monique excused herself. It was her fashion, Nick later learned, to ask a few select friends to come early to a party, to greet them in casual attire, and then to return an hour or so later, when everyone had arrived, with a grand entrance. As Monique gracefully walked up the stairs of the mansion, Nick’s eyes followed her with an unmistakable look of adoration.

“Isn’t she magnificent?” Nick was asked by a relaxed, tanned man of about fifty who offered him a martini. His name was Clayton. “Once I was with her all weekend on their yacht, while Aaron was in Montreal. I thought she had invited me for a little diversion.” He laughed. “But I was wrong. She just wanted some company and I could talk about France and Europe. Come with me (he slipped his arm through Nick’s) and I’ll introduce you to the select group that was invited early today.”

Nick was treated with extreme courtesy by the other favored guests, but he was wary of their questions about Monique. He was, after all, a Southern boy, and if there was something to say about their relationship, it was her place to say it. So he answered politely but modestly and didn’t elaborate at all.

One of the two women at the bar, who introduced herself as Jane Somebody, said that she was Monica’s oldest friend in Palm Beach. (They all called her Monica. It was impossible for Nick to call her anything but Monique. Nick wondered if they could guess what was going on or if Monique had told them.) Jane was in her late thirties, plump and raucous, a heavy drinker and a chain smoker. She had once been fairly attractive but had lived too hard too soon. She was one of those people who touch everybody during a conversation. She made Nick nervous.

The other guests began to arrive. Jane and Clayton (as in Clayton Poindexter III of Newport and Palm Beach. Clayton, when asked by Nick what he did, answered, “NVMS.” Nick of course had absolutely no idea what that meant. Clayton laughed. “NVMS—No visible means of support—a term used to cover all bums.”) seemed to be acting as hostess and host in Monique’s absence. They introduced him to everybody. Nick had three or four martinis and told the Teresa story at least seven times during the first hour that he was in the Silver mansion.

Nick was becoming fairly spiffed by this time. He sang to himself as he took another martini off the cocktail tray being proffered by one of the servants. The alcohol had buoyed his spirits and made him feel somehow temporarily suave and debonair. Nick was on the patio talking to Monique’s “riding partner,” a lovely woman in her mid-twenties named Anne, when he heard scattered applause from the living room. “It’s Monica,” Anne said. “Let’s go see.”

The grand stairway in the Silvers’ colonial mansion rose to a platform maybe six feet above the living room floor and then split, with two different sets of stairs then continuing up to the second floor. Monique was standing on the platform, acknowledging the applause. dressed in a simple navy blue knit dress that seemed form-fitted to her perfect body. The back was cut way down, almost to the bottom of her spectacular hair (she turned around to please the forty or so guests), and, in the front, two thin pieces of cloth ran from her shoulders to her waist, covering each breast adequately but leaving plenty of cleavage to be admired. Entranced by the vision of his queen, Nick cheered lustily, a little too loud, “Bravo. Bravo.” Monique seemed not to hear his cheer. She had turned and was looking up the stairs.

It probably took an entire minute for Nick to comprehend the sight he was seeing. A man, a distinguished-looking man in his early fifties, wearing a custom-made tan tuxedo and sporting an amazing sapphire ring on his little finger, came down the staircase and put his arms around Monique’s waist. She reached up and kissed him. He smiled and waved at the crowd as they politely applauded. They walked down the stairs together to the living room.

Who is that? Nick thought to himself and even through the gin and the vermouth and all the incredible feelings the answer came back, That is her husband, Aaron. What is he doing here? Why didn’t she tell me? And then, following very swiftly, How could she do this to me? I love her and she loves me and there is something very very wrong. This cannot be happening.

Nick tried to breathe but felt as if a large piece of earth-moving machinery were pressed against his chest. Instinctively he turned away from the sight of Monique and Aaron walking down the stairs arm in arm. As he did he spilled part of a martini on Anne’s shoulder. His apology was very clumsy. Now completely discombobulated, he stumbled over to the bar, trying desperately to breathe and to stop the pounding in his chest. No. No. She can’t be doing this. There must be some mistake. His mind could not read the message that his eyes were transmitting. He drank another martini swiftly, barely aware of his surroundings or the jumbled feelings torturing his soul.

“There he is.” He heard her voice behind him, the voice that had come to signify everything that was valuable and important in life, the voice of love. But this time he was terrified. Nick turned and Monique and Aaron were standing right in front of him.

“So finally I get to meet this young man I’ve heard so much about,” he said. Aaron was pleasant, friendly, without a trace of anything but gratitude in his voice. Aaron Silver was holding out his hand. Monique was smiling. God, she’s so beautiful. Even now, when I should hate her. Nick mechanically shook Aaron’s hand and quietly accepted his thanks for “helping Teresa at a difficult time.” Nick said nothing. He turned to look at Monique. She reached up and kissed him on the cheek. Oh those lips. How I long still for those lips. Why? Why? What happens to us now?

Nick suddenly realized that there were tears in his eyes. Ohmygod. I’m going to cry. Embarrassed beyond measure, Nick abruptly excused himself and walked out onto the patio. Now the tears were running down his cheeks. He was afraid he was going to sit down on the grass and start bawling like a baby Confused, puzzled, he walked around the garden with his head down and tried, without success, to draw a regular breath.

He felt a hand on his elbow. It was Jane, the last person on Earth that Nick wanted to see at this moment. “She’ll be out to see you in a few minutes. First she and Aaron have to make the rounds, you know how it is at parties when you’re the hostess.” Jane lit a cigarette. Nick was certain he was going to puke. He turned quickly to ask her to put out the cigarette and he lost his equilibrium.

Maybe it was the drink, maybe the adrenaline, maybe it was just too much. Nick’s head was spinning around and around. He inadvertently leaned against Jane for support. She misunderstood, and then pulled his head to her shoulder. “There, there,” she said. “Don’t take it so hard. You and Monique will still be able to have some time together. Aaron will only be here for a couple of days and then he’ll go back to Montreal to work. Besides,” she said with gusto, “if you’re anywhere near as good as Monica says you are, I’d be delighted to take care of you when she’s with Aaron.”

Nick pushed her away and staggered back. He felt as if he had just been hit in the face with a sledgehammer. The full impact of Jane’s comment sunk in slowly and an uncontrollable mixture of anger and hurt surged to the surface. What? What? She knows. This cloying bitch knows. Maybe they all know. What? Fuck. Fuck this altogether. And then, almost immediately, as his mind began to take the measure of the evening’s events, How do I get out of here? Where is the exit? As he walked around the house to the front (he was not about to go inside again), from deep inside Nick there now came a sound, a sound that welled up to the surface and could not be contained. This was the wail of pain, the unmitigated and ineluctable cry of the animal in total despair. Millennia of acculturation have made it rare to hear such cries from human beings. But this loud and untoward scream, which rose into the Palm Beach night like a siren from a police car, gave Nick his first comfort. While the partygoers were trying to decide what they had heard, Nick climbed into his 1977 Pontiac and drove away.

He drove south toward Fort Lauderdale, his heart still pumping like crazy and his body trembling from adrenaline. He didn’t think about anything coherently. The pictures in his mind seemed to come at random, without any clear connection between them. Monique was the focus of all the pictures in the montage. Monique in her Alaskan seal coat, Monique in her red and white bathing suit, Monique in her dress tonight (Nick winced, for just off-screen left in his mind’s eye, he could see Aaron coming down the stairs). Had it all been meaningless? Was it just a game? Nick was too young to know about the grays of life. For him it was a simple question of black or white. It was either wonderful or it was shit. Monique either loved him passionately and wanted to give up her luxurious life to marry him, or she was just using him to satisfy her sexual needs and her ego. So, he concluded, as he arrived at his uncle’s condominium in Fort Lauderdale, I was another of her toys. I was like her furs and horses and yachts and clothes. I made her feel good.

Disgusted with himself, depressed beyond belief, a headache starting to tear his brain apart from the martinis, Nick rapidly packed his clothes. He didn’t bathe or eat. He took his two suitcases down to the car, left the rented tuxedo with the managers of the complex, and drove out toward Interstate 95. A couple of miles before he reached the freeway, Nick pulled the car off on the shoulder and allowed himself a few tears. That was all. The external hardness that would characterize the next ten years of his life began at that moment. Never again, he said to himself. I will never again let some bitch make a fool of me. No way, Jose`.

Ten years later, early on a March morning in his condominium in Key West, Nick Williams would idly play with a metallic golden object sitting on his coffee table and experience again the terrible pain of seeing Monique with her husband at that party. Wistfully, with some mature chagrin, he would remember also how, when he reached 1-95, he turned left and south toward Miami and the Keys instead of right and north toward Boston. He couldn’t have explained why at the time. He might have said that Harvard was trivial after Monique or that he wanted to study life and not books. He didn’t understand that his need to start absolutely fresh came from the fact that he could not face himself.

He had not played the memory of Monique through from start to finish for five years. This morning, for the first time, Nick had been able to distance himself from the recalled emotions, ever so slightly, and to see the entire affair with a tiny bit of perspective. He recognized that his blind youthful passion had set him up for the anguish, but he was still reluctant to find Monique faultless. At least the memory no longer destroyed him. He picked up the trident and walked to the window. Maybe it’s all coming together now, he said to himself. A new treasure. A final molting of the last adolescent angst. He thought about Carol Dawson. She was vexing but her intensity fascinated him. Always the dreamer, Nick visualized Carol in his arms and imagined the warmth and softness of her kiss.

3

Carol watched in fascination as the octopus captured its prey with its long tentacles. “Imagine what it would be like to have eight arms,” Oscar Burcham said. “Just think of the brain architecture necessary to separate all the inputs, to identify which stimulus was coming from which limb, to coordinate all the tentacles in defense or acquisition of food.”

Carol laughed and turned to her companion. They were standing in front of a large. translucent glass window inside a dimly lit building. “Oh, Oscar,” she said to the old man with the bright eyes, “you never change. Only you can think of all these living creatures as biological systems with architectures. Don’t you ever wonder about their feelings, their dreams while they are sleeping, their concepts of death?”

“Aye, well I do,” Oscar replied with a twinkle in his eye. “But it’s virtually impossible for human beings, even with a common language and developed communications skills, to truly describe their feelings. How could we even know or appreciate, for example, a dolphin’s sense of loneliness? In our maudlin way we ascribe to them human emotions, which is ridiculous.” He paused for a moment to think. “No,” he continued, “it’s more fruitful to conduct scientific inquiry at levels where we can understand the answers. In the long run, I believe that knowing how these creatures function, in the scientific sense, is more likely to lead us to their emotional quotients than conducting psychological experiments whose outcomes cannot be interpreted.”

Carol reached over and kissed him fondly. “You take everything I say so seriously, Oscar. Even when I’m kidding, you always pay attention to my comments.” She stopped and looked away. “You’re the only one who does.”

Oscar pulled back dramatically and put both his hands on Carol’s right shoulder. “Somewhere here there’s a chip… I know it for a fact… It’s almost always here… Ah, I found it.” He looked at her knowingly. “It’s not becoming, you know. Here you are, a successful, even celebrated reporter, still suffering from what could only be described as terminal insecurity. What’s this about? Did you and the boss have a big fight this morning?”

“No,” Carol replied, as they walked across the room to another part of the aquarium. “Well, sort of I guess. You know how he is. He takes over everything. I’m working on this big story down in Key West. Dale comes to the airport to pick me up, takes me out to breakfast, and proceeds to tell me exactly what I should be doing to cover my assignment. His suggestions are almost all good, and I appreciate his help on the technical issues, but it’s the way he talks to me. As if he thinks I’m stupid or something.”

Oscar looked at her intently. “Carol, my dear, he talks to everybody that way, including me. He doesn’t mean anything by it. He is absolutely convinced of his own superiority and nothing has ever happened in his life to change his mind. He was a millionaire from his own patents before he graduated from MIT.”

Carol was impatient and frustrated. “I know all that, Oscar, believe me, I know. But you’re protecting him again. Dale and I have been lovers for almost a year. He tells everybody how proud of me he is, how much he enjoys being stimulated by my mind. But when we’re together, he treats me like a fool. This morning he even argued with me about what I was having for breakfast. For Christ’s sake, I’ve been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize but the guy who wants to marry me doesn’t think I can order my own breakfast.”

They were standing in front of a large tank with crystal-clear water. About half a dozen small whales were swimming in circles around the tank, occasionally going to the surface for air. “You came and asked my opinion in the beginning, my young friend,” he said quietly. “And I told you that I thought your souls were not compatible. Do you remember what you said to me?”

“Yes,” she answered with a rueful smile. “I asked you what the chief scientist of MOI could possibly know about souls. I’m sorry, Oscar. I was sorry at the time. I was so headstrong. Dale looked great on paper and I wanted your approval—”

“Forget it,” he interrupted her. “You know how I feel about you. But never underestimate a scientist. Some of them,” he said abstractedly, “want to know facts and concepts so that ultimately they can understand the overall nature of everything. Including the putative soul.

“Now take these whales,” Oscar continued, increasing the tempo and adroitly changing the subject. “We have been mapping their brains for almost a decade now, isolating various kinds of functions in specific locations, and trying to correlate their brain structure with that of a human being. We have been reasonably successful. The language function that governs their singing has been separated and the location of the physical controls for all parts of the body have been identified. In fact, we have found an area in the whale brain that corresponds to the equivalent function for every major capability in the human brain. But there’s still a problem, a mystery if you will.”

One of the whales stopped in its normal circuit about the tank. It seemed to be watching them. “There’s a large section of their brain that we have been unable to allocate to any specific function. A brilliant scientist years ago, after listening to the whales’ songs while they were migrating and correlating those songs with the rest of their behavior, postulated that this large, unmapped portion of their brain was a multidimensional memory array. His hypothesis was that the whales store entire incidents in that array, including sights, sounds, and even feelings, and that they relive these incidents during migration to alleviate the boredom. Our tests are starting to confirm his theory.”

Carol was intrigued. “You mean, they might put in that array the entire set of sensory impressions from something important, like calving, and then have, in a sense, a full instant replay during a particularly boring part of the migration route? Wow. That’s fascinating. My memory irritates me all the time. It would be great if somehow I could go in there, in a directed sense, and pull out anything I want. Complete with feelings.” She laughed. “There have been times in the summers when I couldn’t remember exactly how great it felt to ski and I have almost panicked, worrying about whether or not that feeling might be gone the next winter.”

Oscar waved at the whale and it swam away. “Be careful,” he said. “Other people have also thought that it would be fantastic if our memories were more complete, like a computer’s. But suppose we did have a perfect, multidimensional memory like that hypothesized for the whale. And suppose we had the same lack of entry control that is characteristic of human memory as it now exists. You know, where what we remember and when we remember it are not under our individual control. Then there would be problems. We might even be nonfunctional as a species. A song, a picture, a smell, even the taste of a cake might suddenly force us to confront anew the full emotions associated with the death of a loved one. We might have to see again a painful fight between our parents. Or even the trauma of our own birth.”

Oscar was quiet for a moment. “No,” he said finally, “evolution has served us in good stead. It couldn’t develop an entry control mechanism for our memories. So to protect us, to keep us from being demolished by mistakes or past events, evolution built a natural fade process into our memories—”

“Carol Dawson. Carol Dawson. Report immediately to the audiovisual conference room adjacent to the director’s office.”

The loudspeaker interrupted the quiet in the MOI aquarium. Carol gave Oscar a hug. “It’s been great, Ozzie, as always,” she said, watching him wince as she used her pet name for him. “But it looks like they’ve finished developing the pictures. Incidentally, I think the whole business about the whales’ memories is fascinating. I want to come back and do a feature on it Maybe next week sometime. Give my love to your daughter and grandson.”

Carol had become so engrossed in the discussion with Oscar that she had momentarily forgotten why she had flown to Miami early that morning. Now she felt anew a keen sense of excitement as she drove back to the main MOI administrative building from the aquarium. Dale had been confident at breakfast that processing the infrared images would reveal something of interest. “After all,” he had said logically, “the foreign object alarm was triggered repeatedly And nothing could be seen in the visual images. Therefore, either the infrared observations caused the alarm or the algorithm did not work properly. The second possibility is very unlikely, since I designed the data flow myself and my best programmers tested it after it was coded.”

Dale was uncharacteristically excited when she walked into the conference room. Carol started to ask him a question but was silenced by a vigorous negative motion of the head that followed his smile of greeting. Dale was talking to two of the image-processing technicians. “Okay, then, we’re squared away? Display the images in this sequence. I’ll call for each one by using the pickle.” The technicians left the room.

Dale came over and grabbed Carol. “You are not going to believe this,” he said, “what a bonanza. What a fucking bonanza!” He settled down a little. “But first things first. I promised myself that I would not spoil it for you. “He showed her to a seat at the conference table in front of the large screen and then sat down beside her.

He pushed the remote-control switch. Up on the large screen came a still frame of the three whales in the reef area under the boat. The fissure could clearly be seen to the right and beneath the whales. Dale looked at Carol. “I see,” she shrugged, “but what’s the deal? I took pictures with my underwater camera that are just as good.”

Dale turned back to the screen and pushed thc remote several more times. The successive scenes zoomed in on the hole in the coral reef, eventually isolating and centering on a small glint in the lower left side of the fissure. Again Dale looked at Carol. “I have a similar blowup,” she said pensively. “But it’s impossible to tell if something is really there or if it’s an artifact of the photographic process. “She stopped herself. “Although the fact that two distinctly different techniques found the light in essentially the same place suggests that it might not be a processing distortion.” She leaned forward, interested. “So what’s next?”

There was no way he could contain himself Dale jumped up and started pacing around the room. “What’s next,” he began, “could be your ticket to the Pulitzer dinner in New York. Now I am going to show you exactly the same sequence of images, only these were taken in the infrared a fraction of a second later. Watch closely, especially in the center of the fissure.”

The first processed infrared image covered the same area underneath the boat that the first visual image had shown. In the infrared picture, however, what was shown were thermal variations in the scene. In the processing, each pixel (an individual picture element in the image) was given a specific temperature based on the infrared radiation observed from that portion of the frame. Similar temperatures were then grouped together by the computer processing and assigned the same color. This process created isothermal regions, or regions of roughly the same temperature, that were visually connected by color. The result was that in the first picture the whales stood out in red, most of the reef plants were blue, and the normalized water temperature formed a dusky gray background. It took Carol a moment to adjust to the display. Dale was smiling triumphantly. Before Carol had a chance to focus on two small regions, one red and another brown down in the center of the hole in the reef, the zoom process had begun. In a few seconds an infrared close-up of the fissure clearly demonstrated why Dale was so excited.

“I told you there was something under the boat,” he said, walking to the screen and pointing at a brown, elongated object. The object was cylindrical at one end and tapered to a point at the other. The fissure had been blown up by the zoom process so that it almost completely filled the screen. Even with all the magnification, the quality of the infrared image was superb. Inside the opening three or four different colors could be seen; however, only two, the brown and the red, were continuous over a significant number of pixels.

“Holy shit,” said Carol, involuntarily rising from her seat and walking over to join Dale, “that brown thing must be the lost missile. It was underneath us all the time.” She picked up the pointer and waved it at the screen. “But what’s this red area? It looks like the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland.”

“I’m not absolutely certain,” Dale replied, “and it’s probably not anything of major significance. But I do have a crazy idea. Actually it’s based on what you told me about the strange behavior of the whales down there. It may be the head of another whale, back away from the light, looking out of the cave. Or whatever the opening is. Here, look at this. By zooming out a little we obtain one single picture that shows both of the red isothermal regions. Look how the red region in the middle of the fissure and the red from your sentinel whales look the same. Even with additional stretching, the two regions remain comparable in temperature. Not a proof of any kind, but it certainly supports my proposition.”

Carol’s mind was racing ahead. She was already planning her next move. It was essential that she retrieve that missile before anybody knew it was there. She needed to return to Key West as soon as possible. She picked up her purse and her briefcase. “Can someone drive me to the airport, please, Dale? Right now. I want to call that Lieutenant Todd again and scare him a bit. You know, make him a little more cautious and buy some time for us.”

She paused, thinking of a million things at once. “But I can’t call him from here without making him suspicious… And I must make some arrangements for a boat for tomorrow… Oh, incidentally, I assume you have hard copy of those pictures available for me.”

Dale nodded his head. “I do,” he said. “But first sit down and relax for a second. I want to show you something else. I don’t yet know if it’s a real phenomenon, but if it is…” Carol started to protest but there was something in his manner that told her to acquiesce. She sat down. He launched into a discussion of enhancement algorithms, explaining how the information in pictures could be stretched to highlight special features and allow easier interpretation.

“Okay, Okay,” she said at length. “The bottom line is what I need. I know already how clever you and your engineers are.”

Dale put the first infrared image back on the screen, the one that showed the full view of the three whales underneath the boat. “This picture does not have much thermal granularity. Every pixel in the region colored red, for example, does not correspond to exactly the same temperature. In reality, the spread in temperatures for the same color is roughly five degrees. Now if we stretch the image, and make the isothermal regions only cover a total spread of two degrees each, we obtain this picture.”

In the new image there were ten different colors. It was much harder to see individual features, and spurious data points made the picture extremely difficult to interpret. A portion of the front of one of the whales was now a different color from the rest of the animal.

“The limit of accuracy of the equipment, by the time the raw spectral data is converted to temperatures, is about one degree. If we show another stretch of the same picture, with the connected isothermal regions now only covering a total range of one degree each, then the picture almost becomes gibberish. Now there are twenty different colors for the isothermal regions and, because the noise or error in each data point is of the same magnitude as the spread in the isothermal region, it is virtually impossible to see the figures of known objects like the three whales. I tell you all this up front to make certain you realize that what I am about to show you may be completely wrong. It is, nevertheless, absolutely fascinating.”

The next image projected on the screen was a close-up down on the floor of the ocean, just above the trench that Carol had followed when backtracking to find the origin of the tracks. The familiar parallel lines just barely showed up in the infrared image The fissure was almost off the left side of the image. On either side of the trench, blue color broken with some occasional green marked the two reefs. Carol looked at Dale with a puzzled expression on her face.

“This close-up has the same five-degree granularity as the big reference image. There is nothing of note here.” He flashed another picture. “Nor here, where we have increased the number of colors to ten again. But look at this.” One more image went up on the screen. The picture was very difficult to follow, much less interpret. As many as twenty different colors connected odd regions in what appeared to be random patterns. About the only thing that was regular in the picture were the background rocks on which the coral and other sea life were living. And it was those background rocks that had Dale so excited.

“This is what I wanted you to see,” he said, waving his hand at the rocks on the two sides of the trench. “The two reef structures do not have the same color. For some unknown and absolutely inexplicable reason, every background rock area on this reef is coded chartreuse. On the opposite reef, just across the trench a few feet away, all the background rock is yellow. A one-degree difference. Now if some of the yellow pieces were interspersed with the chartreuse, and vice versa, then I would say that the data clearly has no significance and that what we are seeing are noise signatures. But this pattern is compelling.”

Carol was lost. She could see that the rocks on one reef structure were all chartreuse and that the opposite reef was yellow. But it didn’t mean anything to her. She shook her head. She needed more explanation.

“Don’t you understand?” Dale said with a final dramatic flourish. “If this data is right, then we have found something else of great importance. Either there is some source inside one of the reef structures that is making its surface uniformly warmer, or, and I admit this sounds truly incredible, one of the two is not a reef at all and is something else masquerading as a reef.”

4

IT was almost always impossible to find a parking place in the middle of the working day near Amanda Winchester’s house in Key West. The Hemingway Marina had revitalized the old part of the city where she lived, but as usual everyone had underestimated the need for parking. All the repainted and renovated nineteenth-century mansions along Eaton and Caroline streets had signs on the street saying such things as DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT PARKING HERE IF YOU’RE NOT A RESIDENT, but it was no use. People who worked in the retail shops around the marina parked where it was convenient for them and avoided the heavy parking fee at the marina lot.

After searching fruitlessly for a parking place for fifteen minutes, Nick Williams decided to park outside of a convenience store and walk the block or so to Amanda’s house. He was strangely anxious. Part of his nervousness was due to his excitement, but he was also feeling a little guilty. Amanda had been the major sponsor of the original Santa Rosa expedition and Nick had spent considerable time with her after they had found the treasure. Amanda and Nick and Jake Lewis had all three believed that Homer Ashford and his menage a` trois had somehow hidden part of the treasure and then cheated them out of their proper shares. Nick and Amanda worked together trying to find evidence that Homer had stolen from them, but they were never able to prove anything conclusively.

During this period Amanda and Nick had become quite close. They had seen each other virtually every week and for a while he had thought of her as an aunt or grandmother. But after a year or so, Nick had stopped going by to visit her. He hadn’t understood it at the time, but the real reason he began to avoid her was that Amanda was too intense for him. And she was always too personal. She asked him too many hard questions about what he was doing with his life.

On this particular morning he had no real options. Amanda was widely recognized as the expert on sunken treasure in the Keys. There were two components in her life, treasure and the theater, and her knowledge of each was encyclopedic. Nick had not called first because he didn’t want to discuss the trident unless she was willing to see him. So it was with some trepidation that he rang the doorbell on the front porch of her magnificent home.

A young woman in her early twenties came to the door and opened it just a bit. “Yes?” she said, her face wedging into the crack, her expression wary.

“My name’s Nick Williams,” he said. “I would like to see Mrs. Winchester if possible. Is she in?” There was a pause. “I’m an old—”

“My grandmother is very busy this morning,” the girl curtly interrupted him. “Perhaps you can call and make an appointment.” She started to close the door and leave Nick standing on the porch next to his exercise bag. Then Nick heard another voice, a muffled exchange, and the door swung open.

“Well, for goodness sake,” Amanda said with her arms outstretched, “I have a young gentleman caller. Come here, Nikki, and give me a kiss.” Nick was embarrassed. He walked forward and gave the elderly woman a perfunctory hug.

As he withdrew from the embrace, he started to apologize. “I’m sorry I haven’t been by to see you. I mean to, but somehow my schedule—”

“It’s all right, Nikki, I understand.” Amanda interrupted him pleasantly. Her eyes were so sharp they belied her age. “Come in and tell me what you’ve been up to. I haven’t seen you since, goodness, has it been a couple of years already since we shared that cognac after Streetcar?” She led him into a combination study and living room and sat him down next to her on the couch. “You know, Nikki, I thought your comments about the actress playing Blanche DuBois were the most observant ones I heard during the entire run. You were right about her. She couldn’t have played Blanche except as a total mental case. The woman simply had no concept of a feminine sexual appetite.”

Nick looked around him. The room had hardly changed in the eight years since he had last visited it. The ceiling was very high, maybe fifteen feet. The walls were lined with bookcases whose full shelves extended all the way to the ceiling. Opposite the door a huge canvas painting of Amanda and her husband standing outside their home on Cape Cod dominated the room. A new 1955 Ford was partially visible in the background of the painting. She was radiantly beautiful in the picture, in her early thirties, dressed in a white evening gown with daring red trim both around the wrists and along the collar of the neck. Her husband was in a black tux. He was mostly bald, with short blond hair graying at the temples. His eyes were warm and kindly.

Amanda asked Nick if he wanted tea and he nodded. The granddaughter Jennifer disappeared into the hallway. Amanda turned and took Nick’s hands in hers. “I am glad you came, Nikki, I have missed you. From time to time I hear a snippet here or there about you or your boat, but often second-hand information is altogether wrong. What have you been doing? Still reading all the time? Do you have a girlfriend?”

Nick laughed. Amanda had not changed. She had never been one for small talk. “No girlfriend,” Nick said, “same problem as always. The ones that are intelligent turn out to be either arrogant or emotionally inept or both; the ones that are sensitive and affectionate have never read a book. “For some reason Carol Dawson jumped into Nick’s mind and he almost said, without thinking, “except for, maybe,” but he stopped himself. “What I need,” he said instead, “is someone like you.”

“No, Nikki,” Amanda replied, suddenly serious. She folded her hands in her lap and stared momentarily across the room. “No,” she repeated softly, her voice then gathering intensity as she turned back to look at him, “even I am not perfect enough for you. I remember well all your fantasy visions of gracious young goddesses. Somehow you had mixed the best parts of all the women in your favorite novels together with your teenage dreams. It always seemed to me that you had put women up on a pedestal; they had to be queens or princesses. But in the girls you actually dated, you looked for weaknesses, signs of ordinariness, and indications of common behavior. It was almost as if you were hoping to find them imperfect, to detect chinks in their armor so that you could justify your lack of interest.”

Jennifer arrived with the tea. Nick was uncomfortable. He had forgotten what it was like to talk to Amanda. Her emotional probing and her unsolicited observations were both extremely disquieting to him this morning. Nick had not come to see her to dissect his attitude toward women. He changed the subject.

“Speaking of treasure,” he said, bending down to pick up his bag, “I found something very interesting yesterday while I was out diving. I thought maybe you might have seen something like it before.” He pulled the trident out and handed it to Amanda. She almost dropped it because she was not prepared for its weight.

“Goodness,” she said, her skinny arm trembling under the strain of holding the golden trident out in front of her. “What could it possibly be made from? It’s too heavy to be gold!”

Nick leaned forward and took the object. He held it for her as she ran her fingers over its exceptionally smooth exterior. “I’ve never seen anything like this, Nikki. I don’t need to get out all the books and the photographs for comparison. The smoothness of the finish is inconsistent with the processing techniques in Europe during or after the galleon days. This must be modern. But I can’t tell you anything else. Where in the world did you find it?”

He told her just the outline of the story, careful as always not to give away key bits of information. It was not just the agreement he had made with Carol and Troy; treasure hunters never really trust anybody. But he did share with Amanda his idea that perhaps someone had cached this particular piece, as well as some others, for later retrieval. Nick insisted that this idea of his was a perfectly plausible explanation for the tracks on the ocean floor.

“Your scenario seems very unlikely to me,” Amanda said, “although I must admit that I am baffled and have no better explanation. Maybe Miss Dawson has some sources that can shed some light on the origin of this thing. But there is almost no chance that I am mistaken. I have personally seen or viewed close-up photographs of every significant piece of treasure recovered from the Keys in the past century. You could show me a new piece today and I could probably tell you in what European country it was made and in what decade. If this object comes from a sunken ship, it is a modern ship, almost certainly after World War II. Beyond that I can’t help you.”

Nick put the trident back in the bag and started to leave. “Wait just a minute before you go, Nikki,” Amanda said as he stood up. “Come over here for a minute.” She took him by the arm and led him over to a spot just in front of the large painting. “You would have liked Walter, Nikki. He was a dreamer also. He loved to look for treasure. Every year we would spend a week or two in the Caribbean on a yacht, ostensibly looking for treasure but just generally sharing each other’s dreams. From time to time we would find objects on the bottom of the ocean that we couldn’t understand and we would create fanciful conjectures to explain them. Almost always there was some prosaic explanation that was inferior to our fantasies.”

Nick was standing beside her with his bag in his right hand. Amanda turned to him and put her hand softly on his left forearm. “But it didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter that most of the years we came up empty-handed altogether. For we always found the real treasure, our love for each other. We always returned home renewed and laughing and thankful that life had allowed us to share another week or ten days in which we had imagined and fantasized and hunted for treasure together.”

Her eyes were soft and loving. Her voice was low but full of passion. “I do not know when or if you will come again, Nikki, but there are some things that I have been wanting to say to you for some time. If you like, you can dismiss them as the ravings of a sententious old woman, but I may never have a chance to tell you these things again. You have all the attributes I loved in Walter, intelligence, imagination, sensitivity. But something is wrong. You are alone. By choice. Your dreams of treasure, your zest for life—you do not share these things. It is very sad for me to see this.” She stopped for a second and looked back at the painting. Then she completed her thought, almost as if she were talking to herself. “For when you are seventy years old and look back at what your life has meant, you will not focus on your solo activities. What you will remember are the incidents of touching, those times when your life was enriched by a moment of sharing with a friend or loved one. It is our mutual awareness of this miracle called life that allows us to accept our mortality.”

Nick had not been prepared for an emotional encounter with Amanda. He had thought that he would stop by to see her for a few moments, ask her about the trident, and then depart. In retrospect he realized that he had treated Amanda very callously over the years. She had offered genuine friendship and he had spurned it, taking her out of his life altogether when their interaction no longer suited him. He winced as he recognized how selfish he had been.

As he walked slowly down the street, idly looking at the gracious old houses built over a hundred years ago, Nick took a deep breath. He had experienced too many emotions for one morning. First Monique, then Amanda. And it looks as if the trident is not going to solve all my problems. Funny how things always come in groups.

He found himself musing that maybe there had been a lot of truth in what Amanda had said. He acknowledged that he had been feeling lonely lately. And he wondered if the vague loneliness was indeed coupled to a creeping awareness of his own mortality, to the passage of that phase of life enshrined by Thomas Wolfe with the phrase, “For we were young, and we knew that we could never die.” Nick was feeling very tired when he came to the end of the sidewalk and turned onto the pavement of the convenience store parking lot.

He saw her before she saw him. She was standing next to the driver’s side of her brand-new red Mercedes sports coupe. She had a small brown paper hag in her arm and was looking in the window of the car next to hers, Nick’s 1990 Pontiac Nick felt a quick rush of adrenaline followed by anger and distrust. She finally saw him just as he started to speak. “Why, Greta, what a surprise! I guess we just happened to be in this part of Key West today at exactly the same time.”

“Ya, Nick, I thought it was your car. How are you?” Greta put the paper bag on the hood of her car and approached him in a friendly manner. She had either missed or was ignoring the sarcasm in his greeting. She was wearing a sleeveless yellow tank top and a pair of tight blue shorts. Her blonde hair was pulled back in two short pigtails.

“Don’t play innocent with me, Fraulein,” Nick overreacted. “I know you didn’t come here to shop.” He was nearly shouting. He used his free arm to accentuate his comments and block Greta’s approach. “This is not one of the stops on your circuit. You came here to find me. Now what do you want?” Nick dropped his arm. A couple of passersby had stopped to watch the exchange.

Greta stared at him for a moment with those crystal-clear eyes. She was wearing no makeup. She looked like a little girl except for the wrinkles on her face. “Are you still so angry, Nick? After all these years?” She came up next to him and smiled knowingly into his eyes. “I remember one night, almost five years ago,” she said playfully, “when you were not so angry. You were glad to see me. You asked me if I would have you for one night, no questions asked, and I agreed. You were great.”

In a momentary flash Nick remembered the rainy night when he had stopped Greta just as she was leaving the pier. He recalled also how desperately he had needed to touch someone, anyone, on that particular night. “That was the day after my father’s funeral,” he said roughly, “and didn’t mean shit anyway.” He looked away. He did not want to return her piercing gaze.

“That wasn’t the impression I had,” Greta continued in the same playful but otherwise emotionless tone. “I felt you inside me, I tasted your kisses. You can’t tell me—”

“Look,” interrupted Nick, clearly irritated. “What do you want? I don’t want to stand here all morning arguing with you about some stupid night five years ago. Now I know that you’re here for a reason. What is it?”

Greta backed off a step and her face hardened. “You are a very difficult man, Nick. It could be such fun doing business together if you weren’t such a, how do you say, pain in the ass.” She stopped for a moment. “I have come from Homer. He has a proposition for you. He wants to see what you found yesterday in the ocean and maybe discuss a partnership.”

Nick laughed triumphantly. “So I was right all along. You were sent to find me. And now that bastard wants to discuss a partnership. Hah. Not a fucking chance. You won’t steal from me again. Tell your employer or lover or whatever he is to cram his proposition up his ass. Now if you’ll excuse me…”

He started to walk around Greta and open his car door. Her strong hand grabbed his forearm. “You’re making a mistake, Nick.” Her eyes bored into his again. “A big mistake. You can’t afford to do it on your own. What you found is probably worthless. If it is, let him spend the money.” Her chameleon eyes shifted one more time. “And it would be such fun to work together again.”

Nick climbed into his car and turned on the engine. “No dice, Greta. You’re wasting your time. Now I’ve got to go.” He backed out of the parking place and then drove into the narrow street. The treasure was front and center in his mind again. He had been momentarily depressed by what Amanda had told him about the trident, but the fact that Homer wanted to see it gave Nick a feeling of power. But, he asked himself, how does he know already? Who talked? Or could someone have seen us?

5

WHEN Commander Winters returned to his office after a scheduled meeting with the public relations department, his secretary, Dora, was conspicuously reading the Key West newspaper. “Ahem,” she said, deliberately attracting his attention. “Is the Vernon Winters starring in The Night of the Iguana at the Key West Playhouse tonight anyone I know? Or are there two of them in this town?”

He laughed. He liked Dora. She was almost sixty, black, a grandmother more than a dozen times, and one of the few secretaries on the base who actually had some pride in her work. She treated everybody, including Commander Winters, like one of her children. “So why didn’t you tell me?” she said with feigned outrage. “After all, what if I had missed it altogether? I told you last year to make certain that you always told us when you were performing.”

He took her hand and gave it a little squeeze. “I had intended to tell you, Dora, but somehow it just slipped my mind. And you know that my thespian activities are not exactly embraced by the Navy, so I don’t ballyhoo them about so much. But I’ll have some tickets for you and your husband in a couple of weeks.” He looked at the stack of message notes on her desk. “That many, huh? And I was only gone a little over two hours. It never rains but it pours.”

“Two of these are supposedly urgent.” Dora looked at her watch “A Miss Dawson from the Miami Herald will call back in about five minutes and that Lieutenant Todd has been calling all morning. He insists that he must see you before lunch or he can’t be properly prepared for the meeting this afternoon. Apparently he left a long, message on your Top Secret telemail sometime this morning. Right now he’s furious with me because I wouldn’t interrupt your meetings to tell you about his message. Is it really that important?”

Commander Winters shrugged his shoulders and opened the door to his office. I wonder what Todd wants, he thought. I guess I should have checked my telemail before running off to the meeting with the chief. “Did you put all the rest of the messages on the computer?” he asked Dora before he closed the door. She nodded. “Okay, I’ll talk to Miss Dawson when she calls. Tell Todd that I will see him in fifteen minutes.” He sat down at his desk and turned on his computer. He activated his telemail subdirectory and saw that he had three new entries already this morning, one in the TOP SECRET queue. Commander Winters identified himself, entered the top secret code word, and started to read Lieutenant Todd’s transmission.

The phone rang. After a few seconds Dora buzzed him and told him that it was Miss Dawson. Before they started, Commander Winters agreed that the interview could be on the videophone and that it could be taped. He recognized Carol immediately from her occasional appearances on television. She explained to him that she was using the communications facility at the Miami International Airport.

“Commander Winters,” she said, wasting no time, “we have an uncorroborated report that the Navy is engaged in a search for something important, and secret, in the Gulf of Mexico between Key West and the Everglades. Your press people and a Lieutenant Todd have both denied the report and referred all questions to you. Our source also told us, and we have subsequently verified both of these facts, that there are today a large number of technology ships sailing in the Gulf and that you have been trying to rent sophisticated ocean telescopes from the Miami Oceanographic Institute. Do you have any comment?”

“Certainly, Miss Dawson.” The commander wore his best acting smile. He had carefully rehearsed the response in his morning meeting with the admiral. “It’s really amazing how rumors fly, particularly when someone suspects the Navy of nefarious deeds.” He chuckled. “All the activity is just preparation for some routine maneuvers next week. A few of the sailors who man the technology ships are a little rusty and wanted some practice this week. As for the MOI telescopes, we intended to use them in our maneuvers to check their value in assessing underwater threats.” He looked directly at the camera. “That’s it, Miss Dawson. There’s nothing special going on.”

Carol watched the commander on the monitor at the airport. She had expected someone with an imposing air of authority. This man had a softness in his eyes, some kind of sensitivity that was unusual in a career military officer. Carol had a sudden idea. She walked up close to her own camera. “Commander Winters,” she said pleasantly, “let me ask you a hypothetical question. If the Navy were testing a new kind of missile and one test flight went astray, possibly even threatening population centers, wouldn’t it be likely that the Navy, claiming national security reasons as its defense, would deny that such a thing had happened?”

For a fleeting fraction of a second the expression in the eyes of Commander Winters wavered. He looked shocked. Then he regained control. “It is difficult to answer such a hypothetical question,” he intoned formally, “but I can tell you that it is Navy policy to keep the public informed about its activities. Only when the flow of information to the public could significantly undermine our national security would any kind of censorship take place.”

The interview wound up quickly. Carol had accomplished her objective. Damn, said Commander Winters to himself as Dora announced that Lieutenant Todd was waiting to see him. I should have expected that question. But how did she know that? Did she somehow trick Todd or one of the other officers? Or did someone in Washington spill the beans?

Winters opened the door to his office and Lieutenant Todd nearly stormed into the room. With him was another tall young lieutenant, thick shouldered with a bushy mustache whom Todd introduced as Lieutenant Ramirez of the Naval Intelligence Division. “Did you read my telemail message? What did you think? My God, it’s almost unbelievable what those Russians have done. I had no idea they could be so clever.” Todd was almost shouting as he paced excitedly around the office.

Winters watched Todd jumping around the room. This young lieutenant, he thought, is in a big hurry to get somewhere. His impatience is oozing out of every pore. But what in the world is he saying about the Russians? And why is this Mexican muscleman here with him?

“Sit down. please,” the commander replied, motioning at the two chairs opposite his desk. He looked sternly at Lieutenant Todd. “And start by explaining why Lieutenant Ramirez is here. You know the regulations; we were all briefed on them again last week. Only officers at the rank of commander or higher can authorize sharing information on a need-to-know basis.”

Todd immediately defended himself against the reproach. “Commander Winters, sir,” he replied, “I believe that what we have here is a major international incident, far too big to be handled by special projects and systems engineering alone. I left word on your telemail interrupt at 0830 this morning for you to contact me ASAP, that there was a significant new development in the Broken Arrow project. When I had not heard from you by 1000, even though I had tried several additional times to reach you by telephone, I became worried that we might be losing valuable time. I then contacted Ramirez so that he and his men could start their work.”

Todd stood up from his chair. “Sir,” he began again, the excitement rising in his voice, “maybe I didn’t make it clear enough in my telemail message. We have hard evidence that someone commanded the Panther to go astray, right after the APRS was activated. We have confirmed from a special manual search of the intermittent telemetry data that the command receipt counters went crazy during a two-second period just before the missile veered off course.”

“Calm down, Lieutenant Todd, and sit down again. “Winters was irritated, not just by Todd’s nonchalant dismissal of the regulations issue, but also by his undisguised accusation that Winters had been delinquent in responding to his messages. The commander’s day had begun with a meeting with the admiral who ran the air station. He had wanted a briefing on all this Broken Arrow business. So Winters had not even been in his office, except for a couple of minutes, until after he came back from the public relations department.

When Todd was again seated, Winters continued carefully, “Now spare me the hysteria and your personal conclusions. I want you to give me the facts, only the facts, slowly and without prejudice. The accusations you made a few moments ago are very very serious. In my eyes, if you have jumped to unsubstantiated conclusions too quickly, your fitness as an officer may be in doubt. So start at the beginning.”

There was a flash of anger in the lieutenant’s eyes and then he opened his notebook. When he spoke, his voice was a monotone, carefully modulated to be free of all emotion. “At precisely 0345 this morning,” he began, “I was awakened by Ensign Andrews, who had been working most of the night on the telemetry dumps that we recalled both from the Canaveral station and the tracking ship near Bimini. His assignment had been to go through the scheduled sequence of events onboard the Panther missile and determine, from the scattered telemetry if possible, if any anomalous events had occurred onboard just before the missile went off course. We thought that this way we might have a chance to isolate the cause of the problem.

“Basically Ensign Andrews was a detective As you know, the data system is quite constrained by the limited downlink bandwidth. So the packets of telemetry data come out in a somewhat artificial way, meaning that many of the data values governing the behavior of the bird at the time it changed direction would not have been sent to the Earth until several minutes later, after the missile had gone awry and the tracking stations had already dropped and regained lock a couple of times.

“Ensign Andrews showed me that in the intermittent data there were four discrete measurements taken from the command receipt counter, a simple buffer in the software that increments by one every time a new command message is correctly received by the missile. At first we did not believe what we were seeing. We thought perhaps someone had made an error or that the decommutation maps were wrong. But by 0700 we had both checked the values from the two tracking sites and verified that we were indeed looking at the correct channel. Commander, in the 1.7 seconds after the APRS was activated, the command receipt counter registered over three hundred new messages. And then the missile swerved away from its intended target.”

The commander was writing in a small spiral notebook while Todd was talking. It took him almost half a minute to finish his notes. Then he looked up at Todd and Ramirez. “Am I to believe then,” he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm, “that this is the entire data set upon which you wish to base your indictment of the Soviet Union and put our Navy intelligence community on alert? Or is there something else?”

Todd looked confused. “You think it’s more likely,” Commander Winters continued, his voice now rising, “that the Russians knew the code for the command test set and transmitted three hundred messages in less than two seconds, exactly at the right time and from somewhere off the Florida coast, than it is that somewhere in the 4.2 software system there is an error that is improperly incrementing the command receipt counter? My God, Lieutenant, use your head. Are you seeing bogeymen at night? This is 1994. There is virtually no tension on the international scene. You believe that the Russians are so colossally stupid that they would risk detente to command a Navy cruise missile off course while it is still under test? Even if they could somehow command the missile to a specific location and then recover it and understand it thoroughly by reverse engineering, why would they take such a horrendous chance for such a comparatively small return?”

Todd and Ramirez said nothing during the commander’s harangue. Ramirez was starting to look uncomfortably embarrassed toward the end. Todd’s boyish self-confidence had faded as well and he began to wring his hands and pop his knuckles absentmindedly. After a long pause Winters continued, firmly but without some of the exasperation of his initial speech.

“We assigned some specific work items yesterday, Lieutenant. They were supposed to be addressed by today. Look again at the 4.2 software, particularly to see if there were any errors in the interface with the command test set that showed up during module or integration testing. Maybe there was a bug in the command receipt counter subroutine that did not get corrected in the new release. And for the meeting this afternoon, I want you to show me a list of possible failure modes that would explain the telemetry data, other than commands being sent from a foreign power. And then show what you are planning to do to analyze each failure mode and reduce the length of the list.”

Ramirez stood up to leave. “Under the circumstances, Commander, I feel that my presence here is a little, uh, improper. I have briefed a couple of my men already and have kicked off some investigative work to see if there is now or has been recently any Russian military or civilian activity in the area. I had put a top priority on the effort. In view of this conversation, I feel I should suspend—”

“Not necessarily,” Commander Winters interrupted him. “It might be very difficult for you to explain at this juncture.” He looked at both of the squirming young lieutenants. “And it is not my wish to be vindictive and put you both on report, although I think you both acted hastily and outside regulations. No, Lieutenant, continue with the intelligence gathering, it may eventually be of some importance. Just don’t make a big deal out of it. I’ll accept the responsibility.”

Ramirez walked toward the door. He was clearly grateful. “Thank you, Commander,” he said sincerely, “for a minute there I thought maybe I had crapped in my mess kit. I’ve learned a very valuable lesson.”

Winters saluted the intelligence officer and motioned Todd, who was apparently also preparing to leave, back to his seat. The commander walked over in front of the Renoir painting and appeared to be studying it. He spoke quietly, without turning to face the junior lieutenant. “Did you say anything to that reporter Miss Dawson about a missile, or did she mention a missile to you while you were talking to her?”

“No, sir, there was nothing like that,” Todd asserted. “She was even vague when I asked her what she had heard.”

“She either has some inside information or is very very lucky,” the commander said abstractedly, almost to himself. He walked over closer to the painting and imagined that he could hear the piano being played by the younger of the two sisters. Today he heard a Mozart sonata. But it was not the right time to listen. This young man needs a good lesson out of all this, Winters thought as he turned around.

“Do you smoke. Lieutenant?” he asked, offering Todd a cigarette and placing one in his own mouth. The younger man shook his head. “I do,” said Winters, lighting his Pall Mall, “even though there are a thousand reasons why I shouldn’t. But I almost never smoke around people who don’t. It’s a question of consideration.”

Winters walked over to look out the window and blew the smoke slowly out his mouth. Todd looked puzzled. “And right now,” Winters continued, “I’m smoking, strangely enough, also out of consideration. For you. You see, Lieutenant Todd,” he said, wheeling around dramatically, “I’m calmer after I smoke. That means I can deal better with my anger.”

He walked directly over in front of the lieutenant. “Because I’m goddamn mad about this, young man. Make no mistake about that. There’s a part of me that wants to make an example of you, maybe even court martial you for not following regulations. You’re too cocky, too sure of your own conclusions. You’re dangerous. If you had slipped and made some of the comments you made in here to that woman reporter, then it would be Katie bar the door. But”—Winters walked around behind his desk and stubbed out his cigarette,—“it has always been my belief that people should not be crucified for a single mistake.”

The commander sat down and leaned back in his chair. “Just between us guys, Lieutenant, you’re on probation with me. I don’t want to hear any more nonsense about an international incident. This is a simple case of a malfunctioning test missile. Do your job thoroughly and carefully. Don’t worry, you’ll be noticed if the work is done properly. The system is not blind to your ambition or your talent. But if you run off half-cocked one more time on this problem, I will personally see to it that your personnel file is ruined.”

Todd could tell that he was being dismissed. He was still angry, now at himself mostly, but he knew better than to let any of it show. He considered Commander Winters to be a marginally competent old fart, and he hated being lectured by him. As of now, however, I have no choice but to accept it, he said to himself as he left the commander’s office.

6

NICK’S message light was blinking when he walked into his townhouse after the meeting with Amanda and the encounter with Greta. He put the bag with the trident back in the closet and turned on the answering machine. Julianne appeared on the small three-inch monitor. Nick smiled to himself. She always left all of his messages, no matter how small, in video.

“Sorry to tell you this, Nick, but your Tampa charter for tomorrow and Sunday just called up to cancel. They said they heard a weather forecast calling for thunderstorms. Anyway, all is not completely lost ‘cause you get to keep their deposit.” She paused a couple of seconds. “By the way, Linda and Cotinne and I are going to Sloppy Joe’s tonight to hear Angie Leatherwood. Why don’t you stop by and say hello? I might even buy you a drink.”

Shit, said Nick to himself. I needed the money. And Troy did too. He automatically entered Troy’s name on the small keyboard near the phone and waited for Troy to pick up the receiver and turn on the video switch.

“Why hello, Professor. What are you doing on such a beautiful day in the tropics?” Troy was in a good humor as usual. Nick could not understand how anyone could be in such a perpetually good mood.

“I have bad news and bad news, my friend,” Nick replied. “First, Amanda Winchester says our trident is modern and almost certainly not a part of any ancient treasure. For my part, I’m not completely convinced. But it doesn’t look promising. Second, and probably more important for the short term, our charter has cancelled. We have no work for the weekend.”

“Ouch,” Troy said, a frown sweeping over his face. “That do present some problems.” For a moment it seemed that Troy couldn’t figure out what to say. Then the normal Troy was back, smiling cheerfully, “Hey, Professor, I have an idea. Since we now both have nothing to do this afternoon, why don’t you come over here to the Jefferson sanitarium for some chips and beer? I want to show you something anyway.” His eyes were twinkling.

Under almost any circumstances Nick would have declined Troy’s offer and spent the afternoon reading Madame Bovary. But the morning had already been heavy with emotion and Nick was acutely aware that he needed some levity. He smiled to himself. Troy was a very funny man. An afternoon of booze and mirth sounded appealing. Besides, Troy had been working for him for four months and they had not yet taken any time to socialize. Even though they had spent many hours working together on the boat, Nick had never once visited Troy’s apartment. “All right,” Nick heard himself respond, “you’re on. I’ll bring the food and you get the beer. I’ll see you in twenty to thirty minutes.”

When Nick stopped his car in front of the small frame duplex in one of Key West’s oldest sections, Troy was just arriving himself. He had apparently walked to a nearby store, for he was carrying a large brown paper bag containing three six-packs of beer. “This ought to hold us for the afternoon.” He winked as he greeted Nick and led him up the walkway to his front door. A paper sign was taped to the door. It said, PROF—BE BACK IN A JIFF—TROY. Troy took the sign down and reached up to a small ledge above the door to find a key.

Nick had never wondered what Troy’s apartment would be like. But he certainly would not have imagined the living room that he found when he followed Troy inside. The room was laid out neatly and furnished in what could only be called early grandmother style. The motley array of old couches and easy chairs purchased at neighborhood garage sales (none of which was the same color, which was of no importance to Troy—he thought of furniture in terms of functional units, not as pieces of decoration) were arranged in a rectangle with a long wooden coffee table in the middle. An assortment of electronics and video magazines were neatly stacked upon the table. Dominating the room was a state-of-the-art sound system whose four tall speakers were carefully placed in the corners so that all the sound was focused toward the center of the room. As soon as the two men were inside, Troy went over to the compact disc player on thc top of the stereo equipment rack and turned it on. A wonderfully rich, black, female voice backed by a piano and a guitar filled the room.

“This is Angie’s new album,” Troy said, handing Nick an open beer. He had been to the kitchen and the refrigerator while Nick was looking around the room. “Her agent thinks this one will go gold. Love Letters just barely missed, but she made more than a quarter of a million off it anyway. Not counting the money from the concert tour.”

“I remember your telling me that you knew her.” Nick said, taking a long drink from his beer. He had walked across the room to a box next to the stereo rack where sixty or seventy discs were neatly arranged. On the front of an open disc jacket on the top of the box was a beautiful young black woman, softly backlit. She was wearing a long dark cocktail dress. Memories of Enchanting Nights was the title of the album. “Is there more to the story of Miss Leatherwood?” Nick said, looking up at Troy. “This is one magnificent lady, if you ask me.”

Troy came over beside him. He programmed the disc player to cut eight on the album. “Thought you’d never ask,” he grinned expansively. “This song probably says it the best.” Nick sat down in one of the strange easy chairs and listened to a soft ballad with an easy beat in the background. The title of the song was “Let Me Take Care of You, Baby.” It told the story of a gifted lover who made the songstress laugh at home or in bed. They were compatible, they were friends. But he couldn’t talk commitment because he hadn’t made it yet. So in the last stanza the woman singing the song appeals to him to swallow his pride and let her make it easy for him.

Nick looked at Troy and rolled his eyes while he shook his head. “Jefferson,” he said, “you’re too much. I never know when you’re telling the truth and when you’re slinging bullshit with both arms.”

Troy laughed and stood up from the couch. “But, Professor,” he protested, “that’s what makes it more interesting.” He came over and took Nick’s empty beer can. “It’s hard for you to believe, isn’t it?” he said, still smiling while he looked directly at Nick, “that maybe your funny black first mate has a few dimensions you haven’t seen.”

Troy turned and walked toward the kitchen. Nick could hear him opening beer cans and putting the chips in a bowl. “So,” Nick hollered, “I’m waiting. What’s the scoop?”

“Angie and I have known each other for five years,” Troy said from the kitchen. “When we were first dating she was only nineteen and completely naive about life. One night we were over here, right after I first moved in, and we were listening to a Whitney Houston album. Angie started singing.”

Troy came back in the living room. He put the bowl of assorted chips on the little wood coffee table and sat down in a chair next to Nick. “The rest, as they say in Hollywood, is history.” He waved his arms. “I introduced her to the owner of a local night club. Within a year she had a recording contract and I had a problem. She was my woman. But I couldn’t afford to keep up with her.” Troy was uncharacteristically quiet for a few seconds. “It’s really shit when your pride stands in the way of your feelings for the only woman you’ve ever loved.”

Nick was surprised to discover that Troy’s intimate revelation had touched him. Nick leaned forward in his chair and dropped his hand lightly on Troy’s shoulder in a gesture of understanding. Troy changed the subject quickly. “And what about you, Professor? How many broken hearts are hanging in your closet? I’ve seen the way Julianne and Corinne and even Greta look at you. Why haven’t you ever married?”

Nick laughed and guzzled his beer. “Christ, this must be my lucky day. Do you know, Jefferson, that you’re the second person today to ask me about my love life? And the first one was a seventy-year-old woman.”

Nick took another drink. “Speaking of Greta,” he continued, “I ran into her this morning—and it wasn’t an accident. She was waiting for me while I was talking to Amanda. She knew that we found something yesterday and wanted to talk about a partnership deal. Do you know anything about this?”

“Sure do,” Troy answered easily. “Homer must have had her spying on us. When I finished up with the boat last night, she was waiting to pump me for information. She had watched you leave with your exercise bag and either guessed or knew that we had found something. I didn’t tell her anything, although I didn’t deny it either. Remember, Ellen saw Carol and me in the marina office with all that snazzy equipment.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Nick, “and I really didn’t expect to keep it entirely under wraps forever. I just wish we could find more of the treasure, if it exists, before those snoops start to follow our every move.”

The two men sat in silence, drinking their beer. “But you’ve managed to avoid my question,” Troy said at length with a mischievous smile. “The subject was women. How come a guy like you, handsome, educated, apparently not gay, does not have a steady woman?”

Nick thought for a moment. He studied Troy’s friendly, guileless face and decided to take the plunge. “I’m not sure, Troy,” he said seriously, “but I think maybe I push them all away. I find something wrong with them so I have an excuse.” A new idea crept into Nick’s mind. “Maybe I’m getting even in a way. You asked about broken hearts? The biggest one in the closet is my own. Mine was torn to shreds when I was a kid by a woman who probably doesn’t even remember me.”

Troy rose from his chair and walked over to the disc player to change the music. “Listen to us,” he said lightly, “both struggling with the infinite complexity of the female species. May they remain forever crazy and mysterious and wonderful. And by the way, Professor”—Troy’s characteristic grin had returned,—“I brought this subject up to warn you. Unless I miss my guess, that reporter lady has her sights set on you. She likes challenges. And so far you have given off nothing but negative signals. To say the least.”

Nick jumped up from his chair with a spurt of energy. “I’m going for another beer, my good man. Until just this moment I had thought that I was talking to someone with insight and understanding. Now I find that I’m talking instead to some stupid black man who thinks ‘asshole’ is a term of endearment.” He paused briefly on his way to the kitchen to pick up some potato chips. “By the way,” he shouted at Troy between crunches on his chips, “you said on the phone that you wanted to show me something. Was that the Angie Leatherwood album or was it something else?”

Troy met him in the hall as Nick was returning with the beer. “No,” he said earnestly, “it was something else. But I wanted to talk to you for a little first to make sure… well, I’m not sure why, maybe to give me some confidence that you wouldn’t put me down.”

“What are you talking about?” Nick said, a little confused.

“It’s in here,” Troy replied, knocking on a closed door off the hall in the opposite direction from the living room. “It’s my baby. I’ve been working on it for over two years now, alone most of the time—although Angie’s artistic kid brother Lanny has helped me with some of it—and now I want you to try it out.” He smiled. “You will be my first alpha tester.”

“What the hell… I’m lost. What’s an alpha tester?” Nick’s brow furrowed as he tried to follow the conversation. The two quick beers on an empty stomach had already given him a small and unexpected buzz.

“My invention,” Troy said slowly, letting each word sink in, “is a computer game. I’ve been working on it for almost two years. And you are going to be the first outsider to play it.”

Nick screwed up his face as if he had just eaten a particularly tart piece of grapefruit. “Moi?” he exclaimed. “You want me to play a computer game? You want me, whose hand-eye coordination is almost nonexistent even when completely sober, to sit down and shoot aliens, or dodge bombs, or roll marbles at a frenzied pace that only neo-adolescents can enjoy? Jefferson, have you lost your mind? This is Nick Williams, the guy you call the Professor, the man who sits and reads books for entertainment.”

“Very, very good,” Troy replied, laughing heartily at Nick’s outburst. “You’re perfect as an alpha tester. My game is not one of those arcade games that test your reflexes, although there are a few places in the game where the pace is fairly fast. My creation is an adventure game. It’s a little like a novel, except that the player defines the outcome of the game. I’m aiming at a wide audience and I’m including a lot of unusual technological wrinkles. I would love to see how you respond.”

Troy took Nick’s shrug as grudging assent and opened the door to what should have been the master bedroom in the duplex unit. Instead, what greeted Nick’s eyes was an almost phantasmagoric collection of electronic equipment filling every nook and cranny of a fairly large room. His first impression was one of total chaos. But after shaking his head and blinking a couple of times, Nick could make out some order in the jumble of scopes, monitors, cables, computers, and sundry unattached parts. On one side of the room was a chair about ten feet in front of a giant screen. Between this chair and the screen was a low table with a keyboard on it. Troy motioned to Nick to sit down.

“My game is called Alien Adventure,” Troy said excitedly, “and it will start as soon as I boot the discs and you are ready at the keyboard. But there are some things that I must tell you first, before you start.” He knelt beside Nick and pointed at the keyboard. “There are three critical keys for you to remember while you are playing the game. First, the X key stops the clock. From the moment you start the game, the clock continues to run. While the clock is running you are consuming vital resources. There is only this one way to stop the clock and gather your wits without paying a penalty. Hitting the X key allows you to stop and think.

“Even more important than the X is the S key. The S allows you to checkpoint or, as you would say, save the game. Right now you can’t understand what I’m telling you, because you haven’t played complicated computer games before, but believe me, you must learn regularly to save the game. When you hit the S key, all the parameters of the game you are playing are written into a special data base that has a unique identifier. Then, at any time in the future, you can call that identifier and the game will restart in exactly the place where you saved it. This feature can be a life saver. If you take a risky route in the game and your character ends up dying, it’s the save game feature that keeps you from having to start all over again.”

Nick was amazed. This was a different Troy than he had ever seen before. True, he had been a little surprised and considerably impressed by his first mate’s ability to fix virtually any piece of electronic gear on the boat, but never in his wildest dreams had he imagined that Troy left the boat and went home to work with similar parts in a much more creative way. Now this same smiling black man had him sitting in a chair in front of a giant screen and was lecturing him patiently like a child. Nick could hardly wait to see what would happen next.

“Finally,” Troy said, asking with his eyes if Nick was still following him, “there’s the H or help key. When you simply have run out of imagination and don’t know what to do, you can push H. The game will then give you some hints on how you might proceed. But I must warn you of one thing. The clock continues to run while you are being helped. And there are some places in the game, during a battle for instance where pushing the H key can be disastrous, because you are essentially defenseless during the time that the game processes your request for help. H is most useful when you are in a benign spot and trying to figure out your overall strategy.”

Still squatting beside him, Troy handed Nick a small spiral notebook and motioned for him to open it. The first page said “Command Dictionary.” On each page was a separate entry, legibly written by hand, that explained the game command that would result from hitting the key listed at the top of the page. “Here are the rest of your commands, fifty in all,” Troy said. “But you don’t need to memorize them. I’ll help you. You’ll learn some of them yourself after you play the game for a while. Most of the important commands are activated by a single stroke on the keyboard, but some of the commands require two entries.”

Nick flipped through the notebook. He noted that the key L prompted the command “Look.” But another entry was necessary to identify what instrument was being used to look. L followed by a 1, for example, meant to look with your eyes. L8 meant to look with an ultraviolet spectrometer, whatever that was. Nick was already overwhelmed. He looked over at his friend, who was busy making final checks on some equipment.

Troy came back to the chair and looked down at Nick. “Now,” he said, “I think you’re ready Any questions?”

“Just one, my lord and guide,” Nick replied with mock meekness. “May I please have another beer before I risk my manhood in some weird world of your creation?”

Actually Nick was not yet ready to play the game. Even after Troy booted three compact discs, there were more preliminary activities before Nick could begin the game itself. He had to enter his name, race, age, and sex in response to questions that appeared on the giant screen. Nick looked at Troy with a curious tilt of his head and a weird expression on his face. “Don’t ask questions at this point,” Troy told him, “it will all be clear soon enough.”

The screen next was filled with a beautiful ringed planet that looked like what an artist who favored purple might make out of Saturn. The perspective was from the pole of the planet; the rings were all displayed like the different sections of a dart target. Little flecks of light gleamed intermittently from the rings, indicating that the sun or star or whatever was the source for the reflected light was in the vicinity of the viewer. It was a lovely picture. A simple credit in block titles, Alien Adventure by Troy Jefferson, was superimposed on the ringed planet for three or four seconds and the sound of soft classical music could be heard in the room. Nick resisted an urge to chuckle when he heard Troy’s voice, clearly serious and selfconscious, coming from one of the speakers.

Troy’s recorded voice explained the initial conditions for the game. The adventurer was on a space station in polar orbit around Gunna, the largest planet belonging to another solar system whose central body was the G-type star that we call Tau Ceti, only ten light years or so away from the Earth. “Tau Ceti has eight primary bodies in its system,” Troy’s voice said, “including six planets and two moons.

“Maps of the system are available at the commissary on the space station,” Troy’s voice continued, “although some of the regions have been incompletely mapped. When your adventure begins, you are sleeping in your cabin onboard the station. An alarm sounds on your personal receiver…”

The voice faded and the sound of an alarm could be heard. The picture on the giant screen was the inside of a space cabin, almost certainly taken from one of the many successful science fiction movies. In the upper right hand corner of the screen was a game digital clock that was changing by one unit every four seconds or so. Nick looked helplessly at Troy. Troy suggested that he hit the L key. In a few seconds Nick learned that he could use the direction keys on the board to look at specific items in his cabin. Each time he hit a direction key, the picture on the screen changed to correspond to a different point of view. Nick noticed that there was a fuzzy picture on his small television and followed Troy’s suggestion to watch until it became clear.

When the focus on his cabin television sharpened, Nick could see a young woman wearing a long, full, richly red dress that dropped almost all the way to the floor. She was standing, somewhat incongruously, in a small, stark room furnished with a single bed, a little desk, and a straight chair. Some light was entering the room through the solitary window near the ceiling and behind the desk. Thick vertical bars were imbedded in the window glass.

The camera zoomed in on her face. Nick leaned forward in his chair in Troy’s apartment. “Why… why it’s Julianne,” Nick said in astonishment, just as the woman began to speak.

“Captain Nick Williams,” she said, much to his surprise, “you and I have never met, but your reputation for valor and justice is unequaled in the Federation. I am Princess Heather of Othen. While attending the great ball at the inauguration of the Viceroy of Toom, I was kidnapped by willens and taken to their stronghold on the planet Accutar. They have told my father, King Merson, that they will not release me unless he cedes to them all the ore-rich asteroids in the Endelva region.

“He must not do that, Nick,” the princess continued earnestly as the camera zoomed in on her face, “or he will deprive our people of their only source of hanna, the key to our immortality. My sources tell me that already my father wastes away, brooding over his impossible predicament. My sister Samantha has fled from Othen with a key division of our best soldiers and a huge store of hanna. It is not clear whether she intends to try to free me or to revolt against my father’s rule in the event that he should decide to give up the Endelva asteroids in exchange for my life. She has always been completely unpredictable.

“Yesterday the willens delivered an ultimatum to my father. He must make his decision in one month, or they will behead me. Captain Williams, please help me. I do not want to die. If you come and rescue me, I will share with you the Othen throne and the secret of our immortality. We can live forever as king and queen.”

The transmission stopped suddenly and the picture was gone. The screen again showed a picture of the inside of Nick’s cabin onboard the space station. Nick resisted an impulse to applaud and sat without moving. Somehow Troy had made Julianne into a very believable Princess Heather. But how did my name get into the script? he wondered. He wanted to ask questions but a warning message flashed on the giant screen, indicating that time was passing and the adventurer was not taking any action. Nick found the X key and the digital clock on the screen stopped. He turned to Troy. “So what do I do now?”

With Troy’s occasional help, Nick equipped himself for a journey, found his way to the spaceport, and climbed in a small shuttle craft. Despite Troy’s hints that his chances for survival in “open space” were small unless he spent more time examining the other facilities on the space station, Nick blasted off anyway. It was great fun. He used the commands on the keyboard to control his speed and direction. What he saw on the screen was perfectly matched with his commands, giving him the illusion that he was actually flying a vehicle through space. He saw many other vehicles on the monitor as he maneuvered toward his target, a planet named Gunna, but none of them approached his shuttle. Just outside the Gunna sphere of influence, however, a needle-nosed craft approached him quickly and then, without warning, blasted him with a battery of missiles. Nick was unable to escape. The screen filled with fire from the explosion that ripped through his shuttle. Then the monitor went blank and black except for the simple message “Game Over” in white letters in the middle of the screen.

“Time for another beer? Nick asked, surprised to discover that he was actually disappointed by the death of his character.

“Right on, Captain,” Troy replied.

They walked into the kitchen together. Troy opened the refrigerator and pulled out two more beers. He handed one to Nick. The professor was still absorbed in thinking about the game. “If I remember correctly, there were four sections marked on that map of the space station,” Nick said aloud. “And I only went in two of them. Would you mind telling me about the other two sections?”

“You missed the cafeteria and the library,” Troy said delighted that Nick was still interested. “The cafeteria is not all that important,” he added, laughing, “although I’ve never known you to go anywhere before without eating first. But the library—”

“Don’t tell me,” Nick said, interrupting him. “Let me figure it out. In the library I can learn about willens and the Otheners, or whatever they’re called, who can live forever and what exactly is a Viceroy of Toom.” He shook his head. “My, my, Troy. I must say that I am more than a little impressed. I have no idea how anyone could create something like this; And I have a feeling that I’ve just scratched the surface.”

“I take it you’re ready to continue, Professor?” Troy replied, acknowledging the praise with a huge grin. “One piece of advice. While you’re in the library, look in the Encyclopedia of Space Vehicles so you can at least tell a hostile ship when it appears. Otherwise you’re never going to reach the exciting parts of the game.”

The afternoon passed quickly Nick found that escape into the imaginative world of Troy’s game was magnificently relaxing, just the tonic that he needed after the morning memories of Monique. Troy knew that Nick was enjoying the playing and he was thrilled. He felt a surge of creative pride and his belief that Alien Adventure would be his ticket to success was reborn.

In his vain search for Princess Heather, Nick died a couple more times. Once, when he landed on the unmapped planet Thenia, a black man with a lizard head approached him and told him to leave, that there was nothing but trouble on Thenia. Nick ignored the warning and moved away from his shuttle in a land rover. He narrowly escaped a volcanic eruption only to be trapped and eaten by a gigantic slime mold that oozed out of the ground in the vicinity of his shuttle landing site.

In another reincarnation Nick encountered Samantha, Princcss Heather’s sister, played for a couple of scenes by Julianne’s buxom friend Corinne. Actually, Troy had made Corinne up to look like Susie Q, the famous porn queen of the early nineties, and most of the actual pictures that appeared on the game screen were taken from her ribald classic Pleasure Until Pain. Deft interleaving of new footage with the borrowed shots gave the illusion of being in the movie with Susie Q while she offered sexual delights beyond refusal.

Samantha alias Susie Q alias Corinne seduced Nick and then stabbed him to death with a small dagger while he was lying naked and expectant on the bed. By this point the two men were drinking their final six-pack of beer and the combination of the pornographic scenes and the alcohol had made their conversation coarse and degenerate. “Shit,” exclaimed Nick, entreating Troy to replay the scene where a naked Samantha/Susie Q comes up to the camera to take his erect penis in her mouth. “I have never, no never, even heard of a computer game where you almost get a blow job. Man, you are twisted. A genius, yes, I’ll agree. But absolutely fucking twisted. What on God’s earth induced you to put sex scenes in this game?”

“Hey, man.” Troy laughed, putting his arm around Nick as they half staggered into the living room, “the name of the game is sales. And right here, in Entertainment Software (he picked up a magazine from the table), it says that seventy-two percent, seventy-two fucking percent, my friend, of all the people who buy computer games are 16- to 24-year-old males. And do you know what that group likes in addition o computer games and science fiction? Sex, my man. Can’t you just see some teenage nerd retreating into his room to play this game and whack off? Eeee yaaa!” Troy fell down on one of the easy chairs and beat his chest.

“You’re crazy, Jefferson,” Nick said, watching Troy’s display. “I don’t know if I can ever again be alone with you on a boat. You are a certified nut case. I mean, just imagine the reviews. Alien Adventure features an encounter with Susie Q the queen of pornography, in an underground castle on the asteroid Vitt. Which reminds me, how in the world did you get all those movie pieces in there?”

“Lots of research and hard work, Professor,” Troy answered, starting to calm down a little. “Lanny and three of his friends have spent maybe a thousand hours watching film for me, trying to find exactly the right clips. And none of this would be possible, of course, without the new data storage methods. We can now store an excellent digital version of every movie ever made in the United States in a warehouse not much larger than this duplex. I’ve just used data base capabilities to the fullest.”

Nick crushed a beer can in his hands. “It’s fabulous. Really. But I don’t know about the sex business. And why do you have the player register his race at the beginning of the game? Don’t you think that will offend some people? I never saw anything in the game that was based on the racial information.”

Even though he was drunk, Troy became momentarily serious and almost somber. “Look, man,” he said firmly, “sex and race are both a part of life. It may be true that people play computer games primarily for entertainment, and that they would prefer not to be confronted by some topics when they are amusing themselves, but I must be allowed some creative license. Race is with us every day and ignoring it, it seems to me, only contributes to the problem.”

Troy brightened up. “Hey, Professor. That lizard-man who warned you on Thenia was black. You went ahead anyway despite his warning. What if he had been white? Would you have turned around and gone back to the shuttle? A black man playing the game encounters a white lizard-man on Thenia. It’s part of the show, man. There are twenty or so changes in the scenario that are based on racial input.”

Nick’s expression was clearly disbelieving. “Really,” Troy said, standing up to return to the room where they had played his game, “I’ll show you. Watch how the game starts if you register that you are a black male.”

Nick followed Troy back into the computer room. His curiosity was clearly piqued. Troy turned the game on and Nick entered the biographical data, changing his race to black. This time, when the television picture in his space station cabin came into focus, Princess Heather was black! The princess this time was, in fact, Angie Leatherwood. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Nick said, looking over at a beaming Troy. “You are one clever dude, Mr. Jefferson.” Nick walked out of the room whistling and shaking his head again. Troy turned off the game and followed.

“Okay,” Nick began, once they were back in Troy’s living room and seated on the couch, “one last question and then let’s forget the game for the time being. How did you get my name into it? I thought that was very impressive.”

“It was originally Lanny’s idea, based on a movie he watched about a speech therapist. Lanny had all the minor characters spend a day mouthing all the vowel and consonant sounds in a test session. Then we just put the sounds together with what are called audio analytic continuation techniques.” Troy laughed. He was feeling ebullient and basking in the compliments. “But it does have its drawbacks. Our interpreter only knows how to read simple English words. We may have to suppress that feature if we sell the game abroad.”

Nick stood up. “Well, I’ve run out of superlatives By the way, are there more of you, brothers, sisters, anything? I guess I’d like to warn the rest of the world.”

“Only me now,” Troy replied. a faraway look fleetingly crossing his face. “I had a brother, Jamie, six years older than me. We were very close. He died in an automobile accident when I was fourteen.”

There was an awkward silence. “I’m sorry,” Nick said, again touched by Troy’s openness. Troy shrugged his shoulders and struggled with the sudden memory.

Nick changed the subject. They talked about the boat and then about Homer and his crew for several minutes. Suddenly Nick looked at his watch. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “It’s after four o’clock. Weren’t we supposed to meet Carol Dawson at four?”

Troy jumped out of his chair. “We sure were. Some partners we turned out to be,” he was grinning again, “spending the entire afternoon drinking beer and playing games.” The two men shared a small hug, threw the empty beer cans in the trash, and went out the door toward Nick’s car.

7

Carol was clearly irritated as she sat in the communications room at the Marriott. She was drumming her fingers on the desk while she listened to the telephone ring. There was a click and then Nick’s voice said, “I am not at home at the present time. But if—” She flipped the switch off hastily and completed the sentence, her sardonic mimicry releasing some of her frustration, “But if you’ll leave your name, your number, and the time that you called, I’ll get back to you as soon as I return. S-h-i-t. Shit. I knew I should have called before I left Miami.”

She dialed another number. Bernice answered and put her right through (on video) to Dr. Dale Michaels. Carol did not bother with a greeting. “Can you believe that I can’t even find the stupid bastard? He’s not on his boat, he’s not at home. Nobody knows where he is. I could have stayed in Miami and taken a nap.”

Carol had not told Dr. Dale much about Nick and Troy. And what she had said about Nick had not been flattering.

“Well, what did you expect?” Dale responded. “You wanted to go out with amateurs as a cover. Why would you think that he would be easy to find before your appointment? That kind usually stays in bed with his dame of the day until he has some reason to greet the world.” Dale chuckled to himself.

Carol found herself strangely annoyed by Dale’s disdainful comment about Nick’s love life. She started to say something but decided against it. “Say, Dale,” she said instead, “is this phone line absolutely secure? I have a couple of sensitive items to discuss with you.”

He smiled. “Nothing to worry about. I have sensors that flash if there is the slightest unexplained break anywhere in the line. Even on your end.”

“Good,” Carol replied. She pulled out her notebook and scanned a handwritten list.” As far as Arnie Webber knows,” she said, looking up at the video camera, “there are no legal prohibitions against salvaging any U. S. government property, provided it is returned to its rightful owner very soon after its retrieval. So I wouldn’t technically be committing a crime if I pull the missile up.” She checked the first item off her list.

“But, Dale, I thought about something else on the flight down here from Miami. This thing is, after all, some kind of guided missile. What if it blows up? Am I crazy to worry about such a thing? Or is it somehow incapacitated or what-ever by sitting down there in the sand and salt water for several days?”

Dale laughed. “Sometimes, Carol, you’re divine. I am fairly confident that the new missile is designed to operate either in the air or in water. And I don’t think that the sand would be able to foul up its critical parts in a short period of time. However, the fact that it hasn’t exploded yet suggests to me that it probably wasn’t armed in the first place, except possibly for a small destruct device that may or may not have already failed. You are taking a calculated risk in retrieving that missile. I still strongly suggest that you make your dive, obtain the photographs, and then go public with the story. Dredging the missile up for display purposes seems to me to be more of a stunt than journalism. Besides, it’s dangerous.”

Carol was curt. “As I said in the car, you are entitled to your opinion. The Navy could make a case that I faked the pictures somehow. But they cannot argue with a missile that has physical presence and can clearly be seen by a nationwide television audience. I want maximum impact for the story.”

She checked another item off the list in her notebook. “Oh, yes, I forgot to mention this morning that I met another boat captain down here, a bit of a creep actually, an older fat man named Homer. He seemed to recognize me almost immediately. Wealthy, big yacht and all that. Strange crew—”

“Was his last name Ashford? Homer Ashford?” Dale interrupted her.

Carol nodded. “So you know him?” she asked.

“Certainly,” Dale replied. “He was the leader of the expedition that found the Santa Rosa treasure in 1986. You’ve met him too, although it’s obvious you’ve forgotten. He and his wife were guests at the MOI awards banquet early in 1993.” Dale stopped to think. “That’s right. I remember now, you were real late coming to the party because of that threat made against you by Juan Salvador. But I’m surprised you forgot them, the wife especially. She was a great big fat woman and she thought you were the cat’s pajamas.”

Slowly but surely it all clicked in Carol’s memory. She recalled a bizarre evening right after she first started going with Dale. She had run a piece in the Herald on cocaine trafficking and had suggested that the Cuban city councilman, Juan Salvador, was deliberately inhibiting the police investigations. At noon that day, a usually reliable source had called her editor at the paper and told him that Senor Salvador had just purchased a contract on Carol’s life. The Herald had assigned her a bodyguard and recommended that she alter her normal schedule so that her whereabouts would always be uncertain.

The evening of the MOI banquet Carol was in a fog. The bodyguard had been with her for only three hours and already she felt confined and restricted. But Carol had been genuinely frightened by the threat. At the banquet she had scrutinized every face, looking for an assassin, waiting for someone to make a move. As she sat in the hotel communications room fourteen months later, she did vaguely remember meeting Homer (he had been dressed in a tux) and some jolly fat woman who had followed her around for twenty minutes or so. Damnit, Carol thought. It’s my memory again. I should have recognized him immediately. How stupid of me.

“Okay,” Carol said to Dale, “I remember them now. But why were they at the MOI awards banquet?”

“We were honoring our leading benefactors that night,” Dale replied. “Homer and Ellen have been big supporters of our underwater sentry effort. In fact, he has field tested many of our prototypes at his facility there in Key West. Real solid test data too. Best compilation of sentry/intruder responses that anybody has catalogued. Why? it was Ashford who showed us how the MQ-6 could be fooled—”

“Okay, Okay,” Carol said, realizing that her tolerance threshold was still extremely low. “Thanks for the information. It’s now a quarter till four. I’m going to go down to the marina to meet Nick Williams and make arrangements for tomorrow. If anything new comes up, I’ll call you at home tonight.”

“Ciao,” said Dale Michaels. trying without success to sound sophisticated, “and please be careful.”

Carol hung up the phone with a sigh. She wondered if she should spend a minute or two figuring out where she and Dale were going. Or not going. As the case may be. She thought about all the things she needed to do. She closed her notebook and rose from her chair. Not right now, she thought I don’t have time now to think about Dale. But as soon as I have a break in this crazy life of mine.

Carol was really fuming when she walked back into the marina headquarters the second time. She approached the information desk with fire in her eyes. “Miss,” she said nastily to Julianne, “as I told you fifteen minutes ago, I had an appointment here at four o’clock with Nick Williams and Troy Jefferson. It is now, as you can see, after four-thirty.”

Carol pointed at the digital clock with an impatient, sweeping gesture that commanded Julianne to look. “We have both established independently that Mr. Williams is not home,” Carol continued. “Now ate you going to give me Mr. Jefterson’s phone number, or should I make a scene?”

Julianne did not like Carol or her obvious attitude of superiority. She held her ground. “As I told you, Miss Dawson,” she said politely but with a biting overtone, “marina policy prohibits our giving out the phone numbers of the independent boat owners or their crew members. It’s a question of privacy. Now if you had a formal charter through the marina,” Julianne continued, enjoying her moment of glory, “then it would be our job to assist you. But as I said earlier, we have no record—”

“Goddamn it, I know that,” replied Carol furiously. She slammed the envelope of photos that she was carrying down on Julianne’s counter. “I’m not an imbecile. We’ve been through this before. I told you I was supposed to meet them here at four o’clock. Now if you won’t help me, I want to talk to your superior, the assistant manager of whatever.”

“Fine,” said Julianne, her eyes firing darts of contempt at Carol. “If you will just take a seat over there, I will see if I can locate—”

“I will not take a seat,” shouted Carol in exasperation. “I want to see him now. This is an issue of extreme urgency. Now pick up the phone and—”

“Is something wrong here? Perhaps I can help.” Carol spun around. Homer Ashford was standing right behind her. Just to the right, toward the gate in the direction of the jetties, Greta and a big heavy woman (That’s Ellen. Now I remember her, Carol thought) were talking quietly. Ellen smiled at Carol. Greta looked right through her.

“Well, hello, Captain Homer,” Julianne said sweetly, “it’s nice of you to ask. But I think everything’s under control. Miss Dawson here has just indicated that she does not accept my explanation of marina policy. She is going to wait for—”

“Maybe you can help,” Carol interrupted Julianne defiantly. “I had an appointment here at four o’clock with Nick Williams and Troy Jefferson. They have not shown up. Do you by any chance happen to know Troy’s phone number?”

Captain Homer gave Carol a suspicious look and exchanged a knowing glance with Ellen and Greta. He turned back to Carol. “Well, it is certainly a surprise, Miss Dawson, to see you back here again. Why we were just talking about you this morning, saying that we hoped you had a good time on your free day in Key West.” He paused for effect. “Now I wonder why you’ve come back here again, the very next day. And did I hear correctly, you need to see Williams and Jefferson on an issue of extreme urgency? It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with all that equipment you brought in here yesterday, could it? Or the little gray bag that Williams has been guarding since last night?”

Uh oh, thought Carol, as Greta and Ellen moved in around her. I’m surrounded. Captain Homer started to pick up the sealed envelope on Julianne’s counter but Carol stopped him.

“If you don’t mind, Captain Ashford,” she said firmly, taking his hand off the envelope and putting the photos under her arm. She lowered her voice. “I would like to talk to you privately.” Carol nodded her head at the two women. “Can we go out in the parking lot together for a minute?”

Homer’s beady eyes squinted at her. Then his face broke into the same obnoxious, lecherous smile that Carol had seen on the Ambrosia. “Certainly, my dear,” he said. He shouted to Greta and Ellen as he walked out the door with Carol, “Wait here. I’ll only be a minute.”

Necessity is the mother of invention, Carol thought to herself as she led Homer Ashford out the door. So invent, bitch. And now. As in this moment.

They walked up the steps to the parking lot. Carol turned to Captain Homer at the top of the steps with a conspiratorial look on her face. “I can tell that you’ve figured out why I’m here,” she said. “I didn’t want it this way, I thought it would make a better story if nobody knew what I was doing. But you’re obviously too clever for me.” Homer grinned foolishly. “But I would ask you to tell as few people as possible. You can tell your wife and Greta, but please nobody else. The Herald wants it to be a surprise.”

Homer looked puzzled. Carol leaned over and almost whispered in his ear. “The entire Sunday magazine section the fourth week in April. Isn’t that unbelievable? Working title, ‘Dreams of Being Rich,’ stories about people like you, like Mel Fisher, like the four Floridians who have won over a million dollars each in the lottery. On how sudden income changes your life. I’m doing the whole piece. I’m starting with the treasure angle because of its general interest.”

Carol could see that Captain Homer was reeling. She knew she had him off guard. “Yesterday I just wanted to check your boat quickly, see how you lived, see how it would photograph. I freaked out a little when you recognized me so fast. But I had always planned to go out with Williams first.” Carol laughed. “My treasure-finding equipment from MOI faked him out. He still thinks I am a genuine treasure seeker. I almost completed my whole interview with him yesterday. I only came back today to finish a couple of small items.”

An alert went off in Homer Ashford’s system when Carol talked about faking out Nick Williams. Homer wasn’t certain he believed this smooth reporter’s story even now. He mused to himself that her story was plausible, but there was still one big unanswered question. “But what is Williams carrying around in that bag?” he asked.

“That,” said Carol, sensing his distrust, “is nothing.” She raised her eyebrows and laughed again. “Or almost anyway. We pulled up a worthless old trinket yesterday afternoon so I could photograph the salvage process for the story. I told him to have it appraised today. He thinks I’m an eccentric. He must be keeping it hidden in the bag because he’s embarrassed and doesn’t want anybody to see him with it.”

Carol lightly hit Captain Homer in the ribs with her elbow. He shook his head. Part of him realized he was being told a very clever lie. But somehow enough of it made sense that Homer couldn’t pierce the deception. His brow furrowed for a moment. “So I guess you’ll want to talk to us when you’re through with the other two…”

At just that moment, unbeknownst to Carol, Nick and Troy drove into the marina parking lot. They were still slightly drunk and silly. “Lawdy, lawdy,” said Troy, spotting Carol and Captain Homer in conversation, “I believe my eyes have screwed up. They’re sending a picture of a beauty and a beast to my brain. It’s Miss Carol Dawson together with our favorite fat captain. Now what do you suppose they’re talking about?”

“I don’t know,” said Nick, bridling instantly, “but I’m damn sure going to find out. If she’s double-crossing us…” He pulled the car quickly into a parking place and started to jump out. Troy reached across and restrained him.

“Now why don’t you let me handle this one?” Troy said. “Humor may be just the right ticket here.”

Nick thought for a moment. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “I’ll let you go first.”

Troy walked into view just as Carol and Captain Homer were finishing their conversation. “Helloooo, angel,” he said from forty yards away, “what’s happening?”

Carol held her hand up in acknowledgment but didn’t turn around to greet Troy. “So that’s 2748 Columbia, just beyond the Pelican Resort, at eight-thirty tomorrow night?”

“Right,” replied Homer Ashford. He nodded his head in Troy’s direction and started to leave. “We’ll be ready for you. Bring plenty of tape, for it’s a long story.” He made a peculiar clucking sound with his mouth. “And plan to stay for a little party afterward.”

Homer was already halfway down the steps when Troy walked up beside Carol. “Hello, Captain Homer. Good-bye, Captain Homer,” he said quietly, still playing the comic. He leaned over to kiss Carol on the cheek. “Hi there, angel…”

“Yuch,” Carol pulled her cheek away. “You smell like brewery. No wonder I’ve had to look all over town for you two.” She saw Nick coming toward them across the parking lot. He was carrying the exercise bag. She raised her voice. “Well, Mr. Williams, what a pleasant surprise. How nice that you and your brother here could climb down from your bar stools long enough to keep our appointment.” She looked at her watch. “My, my,” she said in her most sarcastic voice, “we are certainly fashionably late. Let’s see, if one waits fifteen minutes for a full professor, how long does one wait for a fake professor?”

“Knock off the bullshit, Miss High and Mighty,” Nick said, responding angrily to her barbs. He joined Carol and Troy and then caught his breath. “We have a few bones to pick with you as well,” he continued. “Just what were you doing talking to that asshole Ashford?”

Nick sounded threatening. Carol recoiled. “Listen to him,” she said, “the typical macho male. Always shifts the blame to the woman. ‘Hey bitch,’ he says, ‘forget I’m late, forget I’m an arrogant bastard, it was your fault anyway…’ ”

“Hey, hey… hey,” Troy interceded. Carol and Nick were glowering at each other. They both started to speak but Troy interrupted them again. “Children, children, please,” he continued, “I have something important to say.” They both looked at him. Troy raised his arms for quiet. Then he adopted a stiff pose and pretended to be reading. “ ‘Fourscore and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation…’ ”

Carol cracked up first. “Troy,” she said, smiling despite her anger,” you are something else. You are also ridiculous.”

A grinning Troy punched Nick on the shoulder. “How did I do, Professor? Would I make a good Lincoln? Could a nice young black boy play Lincoln for the white folks?”

Nick smiled reluctantly and looked down at the macadam while Troy jabbered. When Troy was finished, Nick’s tone to Carol was conciliatory. “I’m sorry we were late,” he said in measured tones, “we forgot what time it was. Here’s the trident.”

Carol recognized how difficult it had been for Nick to apologize. She accepted gracefully with a short smile and a gesture with her hands. “You keep the trident for a little while longer,” she said after a brief silence. “We have a lot of other things to talk about.” She looked around. “But this may be the wrong place and the wrong time.”

Both Nick and Troy were giving her questioning looks. “I have some very exciting news,” she explained, “some of which is here in your copy of the pictures that I developed this morning. Bottom line is that the telescope picked up an infrared signal coming out of the fissure from some kind of large object or objects.” She turned to Nick. “It may be more treasure. We can t be certain what it is based on the images.”

Nick reached for the envelope. Carol pulled it away. “Not here, not now. Too many eyes and ears. Take my word for it. What we have to do now is make plans. Can you two take me out again tomorrow morning early and be prepared to salvage objects possibly as big as two hundred pounds? Of course, I intend to pay for chartering the boat again.”

“Wow,” whistled Nick, “two hundred pounds! I can hardly wait to see the pictures.” He was sobering up rapidly.” We’ll need to borrow a dredger and—”

“I still have the telescope so we can use it again,” Carol added. She looked at her watch. “It’s almost five o’clock now, how much preparation time do you need?”

“Three hours, four hours at the most,” Nick said, calculating swiftly. “With Troy’s help, of course,” he added.

“Gladly, my friends,” Troy replied. “And since Angie has reserved a special table for me at Sloppy Joe’s for her ten-thirty show tonight, why don’t we meet there and go over the details for tomorrow?”

“Angie Leatherwood is a friend of yours?” Carol said, obviously impressed. “I haven’t seen her since she made the big time.” She paused for a second and handed the envelope to Nick. “Look at these images in private. The whole set was taken just under the boat where we were diving. Some are obviously blowups of others. It may take a little time for your eyes to adjust to all the colors. But it’s the brown object or objects that we’re after.” Carol could tell that both of the men were eager to see the pictures. She walked with them toward Nick’s car. “So I’ll see both of you tonight at Sloppy Joe’s about ten-fifteen.” She turned to head for her own parking place.

“Uh, Carol, just a minute,” Nick stopped her. Carol waited while Nick, suddenly awkward, tried to figure out a nice way to ask his question. “Would you mind telling us why you were talking to Captain Homer?” he at last said tactfully.

Carol looked at Nick and Troy for a minute and then laughed. “I ran into him while I was in the office trying to call you guys. He wanted to know about the piece we retrieved yesterday. I put him off the track by telling him I was doing a feature article on all members of the crew that found the Santa Rosa treasure eight years ago.”

Nick glanced at Troy with mock disgust “You see, Jefferson,” he said with exaggerated emphasis. “I told you there was a legitimate explanation.” The two men waved at Carol as she headed for her car.

8

LIEUTENANT Todd,” the commander said with exasperation, “I am beginning to think that the U.S. Navy has overestimated your intelligence or experience or both. It is beyond me how you can continue even to consider the possibility that the Panther was commanded off course by the Russians, particularly in light of the new information you presented this afternoon.”

“But, sir,” the younger man answered stubbornly “it is still a viable hypothesis. And you yourself said in the meeting that a good failure analysis does not exclude any reasonable possibility.”

The two men were in Commander Winters’ office. The commander walked over to look out the window. It was almost dark outside. The air was heavy, still, and humid. Thunderstorms were building over the ocean to the south. The base was nearly empty. At length Winters looked at his watch, heaved a sigh, and came back across the room toward Lieutenant Todd. He was smiling only slightly.

“You listened well, Lieutenant. But the operative word here is ‘reasonable.’ Let’s review the facts. Did I or did I not hear correctly that your telemetry analysis unit found this afternoon that the commands rejected counter on the bird also incremented during the flight, beginning as early as off the coast of New Brunswick? And that, apparently, over one thousand command messages were rejected as the missile made its way down the Atlantic Coast? How do you propose to explain all this in terms of your scenario? Did the Russians deploy an entire fleet of ships along the flight path, just to confuse and capture one solitary Navy test missile?”

Commander Winters was now standing directly in front of the taller young lieutenant. “Or maybe you believe,” he continued sarcastically, before Todd could respond, “that the Russians have a new secret weapon that flies alongside a missile going at Mach 6 and talks to it en route. Come on, Lieutenant, on what reasonable grounds do you consider this bizarre Russian hypothesis of yours still viable?”

Lieutenant Todd did not yield. “Sir,” he answered, “none of the other possible explanations for the missile’s behavior makes any more sense at this stage. You now say that you believe it’s a software problem; however, our very brightest programmers cannot imagine how the only external indication of a major, system-level software malfunction could be that two, and only two, command counters go haywire. They have checked all the internal software diagnostic data that was telemetered to the ground and they can find no problems. Besides, the pre-release checkout indicates that all the software was working fine just seconds before the flight began.

“And we know something else. Ramirez has learned from Washington that there have been peculiar movements in the Russian submarine fleet off the Florida coast in the last forty-eight hours. I’m not saying that the Russian hypothesis, as you call it, is the answer. Just that until we have a more satisfactory explanation of a failure mechanism that could cause both command counters to increment, it makes sense to carry one option that assumes maybe the Panther was actually commanded.”

Winters shook his head “All right, Lieutenant,” he said finally. “I will not order you to take it off the list. But I will order you to concentrate this weekend on finding the missile in the ocean somewhere and identifying a hardware and/or software problem that could have caused either the command counter anomaly or the change in the flight path or both. There must be an explanation that does not involve operations on a massive scale by the Russians.”

Todd started to walk around Winters and leave. “Just a minute,” the commander said, his eyes narrowing. “I don’t believe it’s necessary, is it Lieutenant, to remind you of who will be held responsible if the outside world gets wind of this Russian business?”

“No, Commander… sir,” was the answer.

“Then carry on,” said Winters, “and let me know if there are any significant new developments.”

Commander Winters was in a hurry. He had called the theater right after Todd had left and told Melvin Burton that he was going to be late. He drove quickly into a hamburger stand, wolfed down a burger and fries, and headed for the marina area.

He arrived at the theater when most of the rest of the cast was already dressed. Melvin met him at the door. “Quickly now, Commander, we have no time to spare. The makeup must be correct the first time.” He looked nervously at his watch. “You’re in the pulpit in exactly forty-two minutes.” The commander entered the men’s dressing room, took off his Navy uniform, and put on the dour black and white regalia of an Episcopal priest. Outside the door to the dressing room Melvin paced back and forth, going through a final checklist in his mind.

Commander Winters was in the pulpit when the curtain rose. He had a strong case of normal opening-night jitters. He looked across the three rows of his stage congregation to the full audience in the theater. He saw his wife Betty and son Hap in the second row. Winters smiled at them quickly before the applause died down. Then his nervousness disappeared as he launched into Shannon’s sermon.

The short prologue sped by quickly. The lights dimmed another time for fifteen seconds, the set changed automatically, and he was in the final scene, walking into his hotel room in Mexico and still mumbling to himself phrases from his letter. Shannon/Winters sat down on his bed. He heard a noise in the corner of the room and looked up. It was Charlotte/Tiffani. Her gorgeous auburn hair was down over her shoulders. She was wearing a light blue silk nightshirt, cut low in the middle, which her ample and upright breasts filled completely. He heard her say, “Larry, oh Larry, finally we’re alone together,” and she came to sit beside him on the bed. Her perfume filled his nostrils. Her hand was behind his head. Her lips pressed against his, insistent, hard, searching. He pulled back. Her lips followed, then her body. He fell back on the bed. She crawled on top, her kisses continuing, her breasts pushed against his pounding chest. He put his arms around her, slowly at first, and then, lying on his back, he enveloped her with a deep embrace.

The lights flashed off and on for several seconds. Charlotte/Tiffani slid off of Winters and lay beside him on the bed. He could hear her labored breathing. A voice was heard, “Charlotte.” Then again, with a loud knock on the door, “Charlotte, I know you’re in there.” The door sprang open. The two lovers half sat up in bed. The lights went off and the curtain came down. The applause was loud and sustained.

Commander Vernon Winters pushed open the door and stumbled outside. He was at the alley entrance to the theater. The door, over which was a single light bulb covered with insects, opened onto a small wooden platform a few steps above the pavement. Winters walked down the three steps and stood beside the red brick wall of the theater. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

He watched the smoke curl upward against the red brick. In the distance there was a burst of lightning, then a pause before the sound of rolling thunder. He inhaled deeply again and tried to understand what he had been feeling during those five or ten seconds with Tiffani. I wonder if they could tell, he thought. I wonder if it was obvious to everyone. When he had changed clothes for the first full act of the play, he had noticed the telltale tracks on his undershorts. He expelled some more smoke and winced. And that little girl. My God. She knows for sure. She must have felt it when she was on top of me.

Despite himself, he recaptured for an instant his excitement when Tiffani had pressed herself against him. His breath shortened. A first tinge of guilt began to manifest itself. My God, he thought again. What am I? I’m a dirty old man. For some reason he found himself thinking of Joanna Carr, of a night almost twenty-five years ago. He remembered the moment when he took her…

“Commander,” he heard a voice say. He turned around. Tiffani was standing on the platform in her T-shirt and jeans, her long hair down over her shoulders. Now she was walking down the steps toward him. “Commander,” she said again with a mysterious smile, “may I have a cigarette?”

He was dumbfounded, stupefied. He said nothing. Winters automatically reached into his pocket and pulled out his pack of Pall Malls. The girl took one, packed it against her fingernail, and slid it into her mouth. She waited a second, maybe two. Then she gave him another smile. Winters at last woke up and produced his cheap supermarket lighter. She cupped his trembling hand and inhaled vigorously on the cigarette.

Winters watched her, fascinated, as she pulled the smoke into her lungs. He studied her mouth, her white neck, her uplifted chest as she caressed the smoke. With the same rapt attention, he watched her diaphragm subside and the smoke curl out of her pursed lips.

They stood there together, quietly smoking, neither speaking. Over the ocean there was another flash of lightning, another roll of thunder. Each time that Tiffani would put the cigarette in her mouth, the mesmerized Winters would follow her every move. She would inhale deeply, intently, pulling hard on the cigarette for the nicotine her body cherished. He was only vaguely aware of his jumbled thoughts.

She’s beautiful, so beautiful. Young and fresh and full of life. And that hair. How I would love to wrap it around my neck… but she’s not a little girl. She’s a young woman. She must sense what I’m feeling, my fascination for her… she smokes as I do. With complete concentration. She caresses…

“I love stormy nights,” Tiffani broke the silence as still another distant flash of lightning lit up the sky. She moved closer to him and then craned her neck to see around a group of trees that was blocking her view of the cloud formation where the lightning was occurring. She brushed against Commander Winters ever so slightly. He was electrified.

His mouth was dry. His body was suffused with desire, a desire he barely recognized. He could not answer her comment. Instead he stared off at the growing storm and took the final drag from his cigarette.

She too finished her cigarette and dropped it on the pavement. As she turned to face him and their eyes met, the last wisps of smoke were playfully wandering across her lips. She gave a quick, flirtatious blow with her mouth and Winters felt a burst of lust in his groin. He retained his self-control and they entered the theater in silence.

The applause continued. Commander Winters brought the women who had played Maxine and Hannah, one on either side of him, forward for their final bow, just as they had planned before the performance began. The applause intensified. Again he stared at the empty seats where Betty and Hap had been before the intermission. He heard a voice from the audience shout “Charlotte Goodall” and Winters improvised. He took the two ladies back to the line of the assembled cast and walked down the line to Tiffani. For a moment she did not understand. Then her face broke into a radiant smile and she took his hand.

He walked forward with her to the front of the stage. their hands wrapped together in a tight hold. This was her special moment. She was near tears as she heard the applause grow again. He stood aside and she bowed gracefully to the audience. She finished her bow, took his hand again with a delightful squeeze, and backed up into the line with the cast.

Melvin, Marc, and Amanda were all backstage while they were dressing. Enthusiastic congratulations were everywhere. Melvin particularly seemed ecstatic. He admitted that he had had some misgivings during rehearsals, but that everyone had been wonderful. The director confided to Winters that the bedroom scene with Tiffani had been “superb—couldn’t have been better,” as Melvin literally danced out the dressing room door.

Winters was overwhelmed with a myriad of emotions. He was pleased with his performance in the play and the audience reception, but other more personal things were on his mind. What had happened to Betty and Hap? Why had they left at intermission? In his mind’s eye, Winters imagined Betty watching his love scene with Tiffani. He had a momentary panic as he convinced himself that she had known, from out in the audience, that her husband was not acting at all, that he was every bit as aroused as the character he was playing.

What had occurred with Tiffani he could not begin to understand and could not even think about without starting to feel guilty. While he was putting back on his Navy uniform, he allowed himself to taste again her kisses on the bed in the play and to feel the sexual tension while they smoked together in the alley. But beyond his awareness of his arousal he would not go. Guilt was a depressing emotion, and on his successful opening night he did not want to be depressed.

When Commander Winters walked out of the men’s communal dressing room, Tiffani was waiting for him. Her hair was back in pigtails, her face scrubbed free of makeup. She looked again like a little girl. “Commander,” she said, almost with servility, “would you do me a favor, please?” He smiled his assent. She beckoned to him and he followed her out in the hall that was adjacent to the backstage quarters.

A red-haired man about the commander’s age was standing in the hall, nervously smoking a cigarette and pacing. It was obvious that he felt uncomfortable and out of place. Next to him was a tawdry brunette, early thirties perhaps, chewing gum and talking to the man in a whisper. The man noticeably relaxed when he saw the commander in his uniform.

“Well, sir,” he said to Winters when Tiffani introduced him as her father, “it’s good to meet you. I don’t know much about this acting business, but I worry that it’s unhealthy for my daughter sometimes.” He winked at his wife, Tiffani’s stepmother, and lowered his voice. “You know, sir, with all the wimps and fags and other weirdo actors, a man can’t be too careful. But Tiff told me there was a real Navy officer, a bona fide commander, as part of the cast. At first I didn’t believe her.”

Mr. Thomas was definitely getting signals both from Tiffani and his wife. He was talking too much. “I’m regular Navy myself,” he blurted out as Winters remained silent, “almost twenty-five years. Signed up when I was just a boy of eighteen. Met Tiff’s mother two years later—”

“Daddy,” Tiffani interrupted him, “you promised that you wouldn’t embarrass me. Please just ask him. He probably has things that he needs to do.”

The commander had certainly not been prepared to meet Tiffani’s father and stepmother. In fact, he had never for a moment even thought about her parents, although as he stood there, listening to Mr. Thomas, it all made sense. Tiffani was, after all, only a junior in high school. So of course she lives at home, he thought. With her parents. Mr. Thomas was looking very serious. For about a second Winters felt fear and the beginning of panic. No. No, he thought quickly, she can’t have told them anything. It’s all much too soon.

“My wife and I play bridge,” Mr. Thomas was saying, “duplicate bridge, in tournaments. And this weekend there’s a big sectional in Miami. We’ll be leaving tomorrow morning and coming back very late on Sunday night.”

Winters was puzzled. He was lost in this conversation. Why should he care about what the Thomases did with their free time? At length Mr. Thomas came to the point. “So we had called Mae’s cousin in Marathon and asked her if she would pick my daughter up after the show tomorrow night. But that would mean Tiff would have to miss the cast party. Tiff suggested that maybe you would be willing to see her home safely from the party and,” Mr. Thomas smiled pleasantly, “keep a fatherly eye on her while I’m off playing bridge.”

Winters instinctively glanced at Tiffani. For just a few milliseconds he saw a worldly look in her eyes that tore through him like a fireball. Then she was a little girl again, entreating her father to let her go to the party.

The commander played his role well. “All right, Mr. Thomas,” he replied, “I’ll be glad to help you out.” He patted Tiffani fondly. “She deserves to go to the party, she’s worked hard. “He paused for a moment. “But I have a couple of questions. There will certainly be champagne at the party and it will probably go real late. Does she have a curfew? How do you feel about—”

“Just use your own judgment, Commander,” Mr. Thomas cut him short. “Mae and I trust you completely.” The man reached over and shook Winters’ hand. “And thank you very much. By the way,” he added, as he turned around to leave, “you were great, although I must admit I was worried when you were necking with my daughter. The fag that wrote the play must have been one weird dude.”

Tiffani’s stepmother mumbled thanks over her chewing gum and the girl herself said “See ya tomorrow” as the three of them walked away. The commander reached in his pocket for another cigarette.

Betty and Hap were both asleep, as Commander Winters knew they would be, when he finally arrived home around eleven o’clock He walked softly past his son’s room but then stopped outside of Betty’s. Basically a considerate man, Winters spent a few seconds weighing Betty’s sleep against his need for an explanation. He decided to go in and wake her up. He was surprised to find that he was nervous when he sat down on the side of her bed in the dark.

She was sleeping on her back with a sheet and a very thin blanket both pulled up neatly to within about two inches of her shoulders. He shook her lightly. “Betty, dear,” he said. “I’m home. I’d like to talk to you.” She stirred. He shook her again. “It’s Vernon,” he said softly.

His wife sat up in bed and turned on the light on the end table. Underneath the light was a small picture of the face of Jesus, a man wise beyond his thirty or so years, with a full beard, a serious look, and a glow approximating a halo behind his head. “Goodness,” she said, frowning and rubbing her eyes, “What’s going on? Is everything all right?” Betty had never been particularly pretty. But in the last ten years she had ignored her looks altogether and had even put on twenty pounds of ungainly weight.

“Yes,” he answered. “I just wanted to talk. And to find out why you and Hap left the show just after the intermission.”

Betty looked him directly in the eyes. This was a woman without guile, even without nuance. Life was simple and straightforward for her. If you truly believed in God and Jesus Christ, then you had no doubts. About anything. “Vernon,” she began, “I have often wondered why you choose to perform in such strange plays. But I have never complained about it, particularly since it seems to be the only thing that has excited you in a good way since Libya and that awful beach incident.”

She frowned and a cloud seemed to cross her face momentarily. Then she continued in her matter-of-fact way. “But Hap is no longer a child. He is becoming a young man. And hearing his father, even in a play, refer to God as a ‘petulant old man’ and a ‘senile delinquent’ is not likely to strengthen his faith.” She looked away. “And I thought it was equally disturbing for him to watch you groping with that young girl. All in all,” she said, glancing back at her husband and summarizing the entire issue, “I thought the play had no values, no morals, and nothing worth staying for.”

Winters felt his anger building but struggled with it, as he always did. He envied Betty her steadfast faith, her ability to see God clearly in every daily activity. He himself felt disjoint from the God of his childhood and his fruitless personal searches had not yet resulted in a clearer perception of Him. But a couple of things Winters did know for certain. His God would laugh with and have compassion for Tennessee Williams’ characters. And He would not be pleased by bombs falling on little children.

The commander did not argue with Betty. He gave her a brotherly kiss on the cheek and she turned off the light. For just a moment he wondered. How long has it been? Three weeks? But he couldn’t remember the exact time. Or even whether or not it had been good. They “fooled around,” as Betty called it, whenever her awareness of his need overcame her general lack of interest. Probably about normal for couples our age, Winters thought, somewhat defensively, as he undressed in his room.

But he was not able to sleep as he lay quietly in the dark underneath the sheet. The feeling of arousal that had been so intense first during the play and then again out in the alley continued to call to him. With pictures. When he closed his eyes he could again see Tiffani’s soft and flirtatious lips blowing out the last of the smoke that had been deep within her lungs. His mouth could still taste those passionate kisses that she had forced upon him during the bedroom scene. And then there was that special look when her father had asked him to take care of her at the party. Had he imagined it?

Several times Commander Winters changed positions in his bed, trying to dispel the images in his mind and the nervousness that was keeping him awake. He was unsuccessful. Eventually, while he was lying on his back, he realized there was one possible release from this kind of tension. At first he felt guilty, even embarrassed, but the waves of images of Tiffani continued to flood into his brain.

He touched himself. The images from the day sharpened and began to expand into fantasies. She was lying on top of him on the bed, as she had been in the play, and he was responding to her kisses. For a brief second Winters became frightened and held himself in check. But a desperate surge of longing removed his last inhibition. He was again an adolescent, alone in his rich imagination.

The scene in his mind changed. He was lying naked on a huge king-size bed in an opulent room with high ceilings. Tiffani approached him from the lighted bathroom, also naked, her long auburn hair cascading over her shoulders and hiding the nipples of her breasts. She took a last languorous pull from her cigarette and put it out in the ashtray beside the bed, her eyes never leaving his as she slowly, almost lovingly, expelled the last of the smoke from her mouth. She climbed into the bed beside him. He could feel the softness of her skin, the tingle of her long hair against his neck and chest.

She kissed him gently but passionately, with her hands behind his head. He felt her tongue playing enticingly across his lips. She moved her body into position next to him and pressed her pelvis into his. He felt himself rising. She took his penis in her hand and squeezed lightly. He was completely erect. She squeezed again, then gracefully raised her body up and inserted him deep inside her. He felt a magical moist warmth and then exploded almost immediately.

Commander Winters was staggered by the power and the intensity of his fantasy. Somewhere inside him a voice cried for caution and warned of dire consequences if he let this fantasy become too real. But as he lay spent and alone in his suburban home, he pushed his guilt and fears aside and allowed himself the unrivaled bliss of post-orgasmic sleep.

9

SLOPPY Joe’s was an institution in Key West. The favorite bar of Hemingway and his motley crew had managed to adapt quickly to the multifaceted evolution of the city that it had come to symbolize. Many denizens of the old city had been almost apoplectic when the bar had forsaken its historic location downtown and moved into the vast shopping complex surrounding the new marina. But even they grudgingly admitted, after the club reopened in a well-ventilated large room complete with sound stage and excellent acoustics, that the Tiffany lamps, long wooden bars, narrow mirrors from ceiling to floor, and memorabilia from a hundred years in Key West had been tastefully rearranged in a way that retained the spirit of the old bar.

It was altogether fitting that Angie Leatherwood should perform as the headliner at Sloppy Joe’s during her brief and infrequent returns to the city of her birth. Troy’s glib tongue had originally talked the owner, a transplanted fifty-year-old New Yorker named Tony Palazzo, into giving her an audition when she was still nineteen. Tony had heard her sing for five minutes and then had exclaimed, punctuating his comments with wild hand gestures, “It’s not enough that you bring me a black girl who’s so beautiful she takes your breath away. No, you bring me one who also sings like a nightingale. Mama mia Life is not fair. My daughter Carla would kill to sound like that.” Tony had become Angie’s biggest fan and had unselfishly promoted her career. Angie never forgot what Tony had done for her and always sang at Sloppy Joe’s when she was in town. She was like that.

Troy’s table was front and center, about ten feet away from the edge of the stage. Nick and Troy were already seated at the small round table and had finished their first drinks when Carol arrived about five minutes before ten-thirty. She apologized and mumbled something about parking in Siberia. As soon as she arrived, Nick pulled out the envelope of images and both men told her that they had found the pictures fascinating. Nick began asking questions about the photographs while Troy summoned a waiter. Nick and Carol were involved in an earnest conversation about the objects in the fissure when the new drinks reached the table. Nick had just mentioned that one of them looked like a modern missile. It was ten thirty-five. The lights flashed off and on to announce that the show was beginning.

Angie Leatherwood was a consummate performer. Like many of the very best entertainers, she never forgot that it was the audience that was the customer, that it was they who both created her image and enhanced her mystique. She began with the title song from her new album, “Memories of Enchanting Nights,” and then sang a medley of Whitney Houston songs, according a tribute to that brilliant songstress whose talent had sparked Angie’s own desire to sing. Next she showed her versatility by blending a quartet of songs with different beats, a Jamaican reggae, a soft ballad from her first album, Love Letters, a nearly perfect Diana Ross imitation from an old Supremes song, “Where Did Our Love Go?” and an emotionally powerful, lilting encomium to her blind father entitled “The Man with Vision.”

Thunderous applause greeted the conclusion of each song. Sloppy Joe’s was sold out, including all the standing room along the hundred-foot bar. Seven different huge video screens scattered throughout the spacious club brought Angie home to those who were not close to the stage. This was her crowd, these were her friends. A couple of times Angie was almost embarrassed because the clapping and the bravos would not stop. At Troy’s table, very little was said during the show. The threesome pointed out songs they particularly liked (Carol’s favorite was the Whitney Houston song, “The Greatest Love of All”), but there was no time for conversation. Angie dedicated her penultimate song, “Let Me Take Care of You, Baby,” to her “dearest friend” (Nick kicked Troy under the table) and then finished with her most popular cut from Love Letters. The audience gave her a standing ovation and hooted noisily for an encore. Nick noticed while he was standing that he was a little woozy from the two strong drinks and was also feeling strangely emotional, possibly because of the subliminal associations created by the love songs that Angie was singing.

Angie returned to the stage. As the noise subsided, her soft and caressing voice could be heard. “You all know that Key West is a very special place for me. It was here that I was raised and went to school. Most of my memories bring me back here.” She paused and her eyes scanned the audience. “There are many songs that bring back memories and the emotions that go with them. But of all of them, my favorite is the theme song from the musical Cats. So, Key West, this is for you.”

There was scattered clapping as the music synthesizers accompanying her played the introduction to “Memories.” The audience remained standing as Angie’s mellifluous voice launched into the beautiful song. As soon as she began, Nick was instantly transported to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in June of 1984, where he was watching a production of Cats with his mother and father. He had finally come home to explain to them why he had been unable to return to Harvard after his spring break in Florida. But try as he might, he could not begin to tell the story to his disappointed father and brokenhearted mother. All he could say was, “It was a woman…” and then he would fall silent.

It had been a sad reunion. While he was visiting his home in Falls Church, the first malignant polyps had been discovered and removed from his father’s colon. The doctors had been optimistic about several more years of life, but they had stressed that colon cancer often recurred and metastasized to other parts of the body. In a long talk with his suddenly frail father, Nick had promised to finish his degree in Miami. But that was little solace to the older man; he had dreamed of seeing his son graduate from Harvard.

The performance of Cats at the Kennedy Center had been only mildly entertaining for Nick. In the middle he had found himself wondering how many people in the audience really knew the author of the source material for the songs, this poet T.S. Eliot, who not only admired and enjoyed feline idiosyncrasies, but also once began a poem by describing the evening “spread out against the sky, like a patient aetherized upon a table.” But when the old female cat walked to center stage, her beauty faded into wrinkles, and began her song of her “days in the sun,” Nick had been moved right along with the entire audience. For reasons he never understood, he had seen Monique singing the song, years in the future. And in Washington he had wept, silent tears hidden quickly from his parents, when the achingly pure soprano voice had reached the climax of the song…

“Touch me… It’s so easy to leave me… all alone with my memories… of my days in the sun… If you touch me… you’ll understand what happiness is…”

Angie’s voice at Sloppy Joe’s was not nearly as piercing as that soprano in Washington But she sang with the same intensity, evoking all the sadness of someone for whom all the joys of life are in the past. The corners of Nick’s eyes filled with tears and one of them brimmed out to run down his cheek.

From where Carol was standing, the lights from the stage reflected off Nick’s cheek. She saw the tear, the window of vulnerability, and was herself moved in return. For the first time she felt a deep stirring, almost an affection for this distant, solitary, but strangely attractive man.

Ah Carol, how different it might have been if, for once in your life, you had not acted impulsively. If you had just let the man have his moment of loneliness or heartbreak or tenderness or whatever he was feeling, then you might have mentioned it later, at a quieter time, to some advantage. The sharing of this moment might even have eventually been part of the bonding between you. But you had to tap Nick on the shoulder, before the song was through, before he even realized himself that he was tearful, and break his precious communion with his inner self. You were an interloper. Worse, as so often happens, he interpreted your smile as derision, not sympathy, and like a frightened turtle withdrew completely from the evening. It was guaranteed that he would reject as insincere any subsequent overtures of friendship.

Troy missed the interplay between Carol and Nick. So he was quite surprised, when he turned around and sat down after the final applause, to find Nick’s shoulders set in an unmistakable pose of hostility. “Wasn’t she wonderful, angel?” Troy said to Carol. “And how about you, Professor? Was this the first time you heard her sing?”

Nick nodded. “She was great,” he said, almost grudgingly. “And I am thirsty. Can a man get a drink in this place?”

Troy was slightly offended. “Well, pardon us,” he said. “So sorry that the entertainment lasted so long.” He tried to signal for the waiter. “What’s eating him, angel?” he said conversationally to Carol.

Carol shrugged her shoulders. Then, trying to lighten the atmosphere, she leaned toward Nick and tapped him on the forearm on top of the table. “Hey, Nick,” she said, “have you been taking angry pills?”

Nick quickly withdrew his arm and grumbled something inaudible as a reply. He turned away from the conversation and saw that Angie was approaching the table. He stood up automatically and both Carol and Troy joined him. “You were fantastic,” said Carol, a little too loud, just as soon as Angie was within earshot.

“Thanks… Hi,” replied Angie, as she walked up to the table and took the chair that Troy had pulled out for her. She spent a few moments graciously acknowledging the praise from people at the nearby tables. Then she sat down and smiled. “You must be Carol Dawson,” she said easily, leaning across the table toward the reporter.

Angie was even more beautiful in person than she had been in the picture on the disc jacket. Her coloring was a dark brown, not quite black. Her makeup, including the light pink lipstick, was muted to permit her natural assets, including virtually perfect white teeth on prominent display when she smiled, to draw the attention. But beyond the beauty was the woman herself. No still photograph could do justice to the natural warmth that radiated from Angie. You liked her immediately.

“And you must be Nick Williams,” Angie said, extending her hand to Nick. He was still standing, looking uncomfortable and uncertain, although Troy had already seated himself. “Troy has told me so many things about you in the past few days, I feel as if we’re already friends. He claims that you’ve read every novel ever written that’s worth reading.”

“That’s an exaggeration, of course,” Nick replied, obviously pleased to be recognized. He seemed to loosen up a little and finally sat down. He started to add another comment but Carol jumped into the conversation and cut him off.

“Did you write that beautiful song about the blind man yourself?” she asked, before Angie had really had time to sit down and collect herself. “It seemed to be a very personal statement.”

“Yes,” Angie answered Carol pleasantly, without a trace of irritation at Carol’s aggressive behavior. “Most of my material comes from other sources, but occasionally I write a song myself. When it is a very special subject for me.” She smiled briefly at Troy before continuing. “My father is a remarkable, loving man, blind from birth but with an uncanny comprehension of the world at all levels. Without his patience and guidance, I probably would never have had the courage to sing as a little girl. I was too shy and self-conscious. But my father convinced all of us when we were small that we were somehow special. He told us that God had given each of us something unusual, something uniquely ours, and that one of the great joys of life was discovering and then developing that special talent.”

“And that song, ‘Let Me Take Care of You, Baby,’ did you really write that for Troy?” Nick blurted out his question before Angie had finished her sentence. He thereby destroyed the soft mood created by Angie’s loving description of her father. Nick was on the edge of his chair and for some reason seemed agitated and unsettled. Troy wondered again what he had missed in the interaction between Carol and Nick that had caused his friend to become so tense.

Angie looked at Troy. “I guess so,” she said with a wistful smile, “although it was originally meant to be a playful tune, a light commentary on the game of love.” She stopped for a moment. “But it does talk about a real problem. It’s very hard sometimes being a successful women. It interferes—”

“Amen. Amen,” Carol interrupted while Angie was still developing her thought. This was one of Carol’s favorite subjects and she was ready to pounce on the opportunity. “Most men cannot deal with a woman who is the least bit successful, much less in the spotlight.” She looked directly at Nick and then continued, “Even now, in 1994, there are still unwritten rules that must be followed. If you want to have a permanent relationship with a man, there are three don’ts: Don’t let him think you’re smarter than he is, don’t suggest sex first, and, above all, don’t make more money than he does. These are the three key areas where their egos are extremely fragile And if you undermine the ego of any man, even when you’re just kidding with him, then it s a lost cause.”

“Sounds like you’re an expert,” Nick replied sarcastically. His hostility was obvious. “I wonder if it ever occurred to any of you liberated females that men are not put off by your success, but rather by the way you handle it. What you accomplish in life does not mean shit at the personal level. Most ambitious, aggressive women I have met (and now he was looking directly at Carol) go out of their way to make male-female relationships into some kind of competition. They will not let the man, even for a moment, have the illusion that he lives in a patriarchal society. I think some of them purposely emasculate—”

“There it is,” Carol jumped in triumphantly. She nudged Angie, who was smiling but still a little embarrassed at the rancor in this exchange. “That’s the magic word. Whenever a woman wants to argue and not accept as gospel some profound male truth, she is trying to ‘castrate’ or ‘emasculate’—”

“Okay, you guys,” Troy interjected firmly, shaking his head. “That’s enough. Let’s change the subject. I had thought that maybe you two could enjoy an evening together, but not if we’re going to start this way.”

“The problem,” Carol continued, now looking at Angie and ignoring Troy’s request, “is that men are frightened. Their hegemony in the Western world is threatened by the emergence of women who aren’t willing to be just barefoot and pregnant. Why, when I was at Stanford—”

She stopped and turned when she heard the legs of a chair scraping across the Roor. “With all due respect, Miss Leatherwood,” Nick was standing up again, holding the chair in his hand, “I believe I will excuse myself. I thoroughly enjoyed your music, but I do not wish to subject you to any more bad manners. I wish you continued good fortune in your career and I hope that someday you can spend some time on the boat with Troy and me.” Nick turned to Troy. “I’ll see you at the marina at eight o’clock in the morning.” Finally he looked at Carol. “You, too, if you still want to go. You can tell us about the wimps at Stanford while we’re out in the middle of the Gulf.”

Nick did not wait for a reply He picked up the envelope and walked back through the crowd toward the exit. As he was approaching the door he heard a voice calling him, “Nick. Oh, Nick. Over here.” It was Julianne, waving to him from a nearby table full of glasses and ashtrays. She and Corinne and Linda were surrounded by half a dozen men but Julianne was moving them all around and pulling up an empty chair. Nick walked over to her table.

Thirty minutes later Nick was very drunk. The combination of Julianne’s occasionally brushing his leg, Corinne’s gigantic breasts (they were covered now but he could remember them from Troy’s game in the afternoon), and intermittent glimpses of Carol through the cigarette smoke had made him very horny as well. God damn it, Williams, he had thought to himself when he first sat down with Julianne’s group. You blew it again. Here you had this perfect chance to charm her. Maybe even score. But half an hour later, after the drinks, his thoughts were more reminiscent of Aesop’s fox. She’s too aggressive for me anyway. Famous. Pushy. Probably too hard underneath And cold in bed. Another ballbuster. Yet still he watched her from across the room.

The extra chairs that had been brought in for Angie’s performance were cleared away to make room for dancing. A disc jockey orchestrated the rest of the evening from a booth next to the stage; one could dance to a variety of modern musical selections, watch the outrageously overproduced music videos on the big screens. or just talk, for the music was not overwhelmingly loud. Most of the people around Nick were from the marina. During a break in the music, just after Nick had downed another fast tequila, Linda Quinlan leaned across the table. “Come on, Nick,” she said, “let us in on your secret. What did you and Troy find yesterday?”

“Nothing special,” said Nick, remembering his agreement but surprised to discover that he did indeed want to talk about it.

“Rumor says different,” jumped in one of the men at the table. “Everybody knows that you took something to Amanda Winchester this morning. Come on, tell us what it was. Have you found a new treasure ship?”

“Maybe,” said Nick, a drunken grin on his face, “just maybe.” Another strong impulse pushed him to tell the story and show the pictures, but he stopped himself. “I can’t talk about it,” was all he would say.

At this moment two burly young men, short-haired Navy types wearing officer’s uniforms, were making a beeline for Nick’s table from the other side of the floor. One of them was dark, Hispanic. Their approach was confident, even arrogant, and their arrival at the table stopped all the conversation. The white lieutenant put his hand on Julianne’s shoulder. “All right, gorgeous,” he said boldly, “the Navy is here. Why don’t you and your friend there (he nodded at Corinne—Ramirez was standing behind her), come and dance with us?”

Julianne said, “No, thank you,” very politely and smiled. Todd looked down at her. He was weaving just a little and it was clear from his eyes that he had been drinking heavily.

“You mean to tell me,” he said, “that you would prefer to sit here with these local geeks rather than dance with future admirals?” Julianne felt his hand tighten on her shoulder. She looked around the table and tried to ignore him.

Todd did not like rejection. He took his hand off Julianne’s shoulder and pointed at Corinne’s breasts. “Christ, Ramirez, you were right. They are monsters. Wouldn’t you like to snarf one of those?” The two lieutenants laughed crudely. Corinne squirmed self-consciously.

Linda Quinlan’s steady boyfriend rose from his chair. Other than Nick, he was the only one of the men at the table who was approximately the same size as Todd and Ramirez. “Look, guys,” he said reasonably, “the lady said no very nicely. There is no need to insult her or her friends—”

“Listen to him, Ramirez,” Todd interrupted, “this character said we insulted someone. Since when is admiring the size of someone’s cachunga’s an insult?” He chuckled to himself at his cleverness. Ramirez made a sign to leave but Todd waved him off.

The drunken Nick had been ready to explode all night. “Get out of here, asshole,” he said, quietly but firmly. He was still sitting down next to Julianne.

“Who are you calling asshole, cocksucker?” the truculent Lieutenant Todd replied. He turned to Ramirez. “I do believe that I am going to be forced to strum the head of this impertinent bastard.”

But Nick was ahead of him. Rising swiftly, he uncoiled a vicious punch that struck Todd full in the face and sent him tumbling backwards, into another table covered with drinks. Todd and the table crashed to the floor and Nick went after him. Ramirez pulled Nick off his fellow officer and, when Nick turned and swung at him as well, Ramirez gave Nick a push that caused his unsteady legs to give way. Nick fell back over Julianne and another full table collapsed upon the floor.

From across the room Carol and Angie and Troy could see the fracas and recognize Nick in the middle of it. “Uh oh,” Troy said, jumping up to go to his friend’s aid. Carol was right behind him. When they reached the opposite side of the room, both club bouncers were already on top of the action. Meanwhile, Nick and Julianne were still trying to get unscrambled on the floor and Todd was slowly rising to his feet.

In the fight, the envelope of photos had been knocked free and a couple of them had fallen partially out. Ramirez had picked the envelope up off the floor and, because of the bright colors, was looking at the pictures. The close-up of the brown missile in the fissure was clearly visible in the top photo. “Hey,” he said to the shaken Todd, “look at this. What do you think this is all about?”

Carol acted instantly. She walked past Ramirez, grabbed the envelope and pictures, and before he could say anything, she screamed, “Not again, Nick, no, I don’t believe it. How could you be drunk again?” She knelt down beside Nick on the floor and cradled his head in her free hand. “Oh, darling,” she said, as he stared at her in complete disbelief, “you promised that you’d stop.”

The astonished crowd watched as Carol kissed Nick full on the mouth to prevent his saying anything. Troy was amazed. “Troy,” she shouted a moment later, while Nick was trying to gather his wits. “Troy, where are you? Here, give me a hand.” Troy rushed up and helped Nick to his feet. “We’re taking him home now,” she announced to the onlookers. She and Troy each took one arm and the three of them stumbled toward the door of the nightclub. They passed the manager in the doorway. Carol told him that she would come by the next day to settle accounts. She and Troy half carried Nick into the street.

As they walked away from Sloppy Joe’s, Carol turned around and saw that part of the crowd had followed them to the door. Ramirez and Todd, the latter still rubbing his cheek, were standing in front of the group with puzzled expressions on their faces. “Where are we taking him, angel?” Troy asked when they were out of earshot. “We don’t even know where he parked his car.

“It doesn’t matter,” Carol replied, “just as long as we are out of sight of the club.”

The awkward threesome turned right, down the same alley that ran behind the theater where The Night of the Iguana had finished an hour before. Just past the theater there was a small vacant lot on the left Carol stopped the trio at the edge of the lot, opposite a grove of trees, and looked back to make certain they were not being followed. She heaved a sigh and loosened her grip on Nick. She unconsciously fanned her sweating face with the envelope she had recovered from Ramirez.

Nick was now almost coherent. “I had no idea,” he mumbled to Carol, pulling his arm free from Troy and trying to embrace her, “that you felt that way about me.”

“I don’t,” Carol said emphatically. She pushed his arms away and backpedaled toward the vacant lot. Nick didn’t understand and continued his approach. “Stop,” she shouted angrily at him. “Stop, you drunken bastard.”

She tried to fend off his advance with her hands. But he kept coming. Just before Troy moved up to restrain him, Carol slapped Nick hard in the face with the hand that was not holding the envelope. Momentarily startled Nick lost his footing and fell into the grass on his stomach.

Still fuming, Carol bent down beside him and forcefully rolled him over on his back. “Don’t you ever, ever, use physical force with me,” she shouted at Nick. “Not under any circumstances.” She dropped the envelope on Nick’s stomach and stood up quickly. She looked at Troy, shook her head in disgust, and stalked off down the alley.