“Theory! Don’t give me theory! I want guarantees!”
“The sooner we go, the sooner we’ll be safe,” he replied calmly.
“Then let’s get out of here!” I shouted.
With a wink and a quick swing of his arms, Uncle Press sank underwater. I took one last look around the cavern and spotted the mouth of the flume far overhead. I was sorely tempted to shout out”Second Earth!”so the flume would suck me up and bring me home. But I didn’t. I was here now and I had to go forward, not back. Actually, I had to go down. Underwater. With a sweep of my arms and a kick of my legs, I thrust up out of the water, then sank back down below the surface. We were on our way. Hopefully it wouldn’t be a short and painful trip.
(CONTINUED)
CLORAL
Swimming underwater is a very cool thing.
My parents taught me how to snorkel in Long Island Sound when I was a kid and Uncle Press, as I told you, took me to get my diving certification. I never liked regular old swimming much. To me, doing laps in a pool was like jogging on a treadmill. There was nothing interesting to look at. But diving below the surface was a whole other story. That was like dropping in to a different world.
Of course, I had been dropping in to a few too many different worlds lately, so I wasn’t as psyched about this dive as usual.
Once I sank below the surface, I was afraid to take a breath. I was used to breathing through a mouthpiece connected to a hose that was connected to a scuba tank. But there was no mouthpiece in this weird head-bubble thing. And there was no tank of compressed air strapped to my back either. All I had was a stupid little harmonica- looking doo-dad stuck near the back of my head that was supposed to take oxygen out of water. Suddenly the whole thing sounded pretty impossible. Even though I knew I was underwater and my head was still completely dry, I couldn’t bring myself to let go and…
“Breathe!” commanded Uncle Press.
I spun around and saw that he was floating right next to me. How weird was that? I could hear him even though we were underwater with our heads encased in clear plastic. His voice sounded kind of high and thin, like the treble knob on my stereo was cranked all the way to ten and the bass was backed off to zero, but I could hear him as plain as if, well, as if we weren’t underwater.
“Trust me, Bobby,” he said. “Look at me. I’m breathing. It works.”
I wanted to trust him. I also wanted to shoot back to the surface and breathe real air. But my lungs were starting to hurt. I didn’t have any choice. I had to breathe. I exhaled what little air I had left in my lungs, then took in a tentative breath, to discover it worked. I had no idea how, but that little harmonica gizmo was letting me breathe. It was even better than using a mouthpiece and a scuba tank because there were no hoses to deal with. And because there was no mouthpiece, I could talk. We could communicate underwater!
“That’s better,” Uncle Press said reassuringly. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “How come we can talk?”
“It’s the re-breather,” he said, tapping the silver device on the back of his globe. “It carries sound waves, too. Cool, aye?”
Cool was the word.
“Let’s go,” he ordered.
With a kick of his fins Uncle Press took off swimming. He left a trail of carbon dioxide bubbles that came from the re-breathing device as he exhaled. Now that I was getting used to breathing in the air globe, I took a quick look around to get oriented. The pool of water we had flumed into turned out to be the opening to a passageway underneath a huge overhang of rock. Uncle Press was now slowly swimming toward a ribbon of light about thirty yards away that I could tell was the end of the rock ceiling, just as he had described. Behind me I saw that the ceiling only went back a few more feet before ending at a craggy wall. This was a pretty out-of-the-way place for a gate to be hidden. But I guess that was the idea. The gates wereallhidden in remote places so ordinary people from the territories wouldn’t accidentally find them.
Uncle Press was already several yards ahead of me and I didn’t want to be left here alone, so I kicked off and started after him. The BC belt was doing a perfect job of keeping me neutrally buoyant. I kicked easily and swam perfectly level. I didn’t have to worry about banging my head on the rock ceiling above or crashing into the sand below. Excellent. If only I weren’t so worried about a quig sneaking up on us, it would have been perfect. I gripped the speargun and did a quick look right and left to make sure no bogey had wandered under the rock shelf to join us. The water was incredibly clear. I’m guessing I had about a hundred feet of visibility, which is amazing. If there were any quigs headed for us, at least we’d have a little bit of warning before we got chewed on.
Uncle Press stopped when he got to the end of the overhang. The ceiling was lower there, so the distance from the rock overhead down to the sandy bottom was now about five feet. Uncle Press swam a few yards out into open water then motioned for me to look at something. I joined him outside and saw that he was pointing back to the lip of the rock where we had just come out. There, carved into the stone, was the familiar star symbol that designated this as a gate to the flumes. I gave him an okay sign, which is the universal signal you use underwater that means you understand.
Uncle Press returned the okay sign, which is custom, then smiled and said, “We can talk, remember?”
Oh, right. We didn’t have to use hand signals. I’d forgotten. Habit, I guess. I looked up and saw a wall of rock we’d been swimming under that extended straight up. This was the formation that housed the cavern and the flume.
“Now check this out,” he added, and pointed behind me.
I turned around and was confronted with one of the most breathtaking sights I had ever seen. Beyond us was open, green-blue sea. The sandy bottom turned into a coral reef that spread out before us like a colorful blanket. It was awesome. I had been on tropical reefs before and seen all sorts of tropical fish and unique coral formations, but I had never seen anything like this. The colors of this reef were nearly as vibrant as the flowers in the cavern we had just left. There were intense blue fans the size of umbrellas that waved lazily in the soft current. Dotted around them were giant chunks of brain coral, which are called that because they look like, well, like brains. At home brain coral is kind of brownish and dull. Here on Cloral, it was bright yellow. Yellow! I told you before that water filters out red and yellow at this depth, but not here on Cloral. Every color of the spectrum could be seen. There was vibrant green vegetation growing all over the reef. Off to our left was a thick forest of kelp. The vines started on the reef and floated all the way to the surface like leafy ropes — and they were bright red! Other coral had grown up out of the rock bed and formed shapes that looked like a green topiary garden. If you used your imagination, they seemed like a herd of small animals grazing on the rocks. But they weren’t; they were coral. Amazing.
Swimming among all this splendor were the most incredible fish I had ever seen. They traveled in schools, each seeming to know exactly what the others were thinking as they all changed direction at the exact same time. It always amazed me how there could be a hundred fish in a school, but none of them ever made a wrong turn or bumped into one another. One school looked like silver flutes with long delicate fins that fluttered quickly like the wings of a hummingbird. Another school of fish were perfectly round and thin, like a CD. Only they were bright pink! Still another school looked exactly like small bluebirds with beaks and feathers. I know they were swimming, but with each flap of their fins it sure seemed like they were flying. It was all a perfectly orchestrated ballet, and it was beautiful to watch them swim about the colorful reef, lazily enjoying their day.
I was totally in awe of the spectacular scene. The water was as clear as air. It was even more special because the air globes allowed me to look all around. Unlike diving goggles where you pretty much had to look straight ahead, the air globe gave me a perfect view of everything — and, man, it was worth it!
That is, until something happened that caught my eye.
“Uh-oh,” said Uncle Press.
He had seen it too. One second there were hundreds of these weird fish gently dancing through the currents. The very next moment they all scattered. It happened so fast that if I had blinked I would have missed it. Every
