A perfect example of what happens when frontierism is embraced without constraint can be seen in the events of the last thirty cycles that led to the receipt of the message from Power #2 in the middle of Cycle 444.  The Boundary Decree initiated the process by establishing, in effect, a new Jurisdictional domain for the Colonists.  The old central Colony had no rigorous boundary.  Significant development extended out to only two light millicycles distance from the administrative center.  The outermost permanently maintained station was at that time a mere ten light millicycles away.  The Decree of Cycle 416 regularized the nearby universe, creating four concentric worlds and expanding the central Colony itself to a radius of three light millicycles.  Three specific Shells were also created, with the Outer Shell defined to be the entire region between twelve and twenty-four light millicycles away from the administrative center.

      This Outer Shell contained fifty thousand unexplored star systems in a volume a thousand times greater than that of the old central Colony.  During the period between Cycles 425 and 430, almost half of the major initiatives identified in the cyclical proclamations were involved, in one way or another, with the exploration of the Outer Shell.  (It should be pointed out that during those five cycles there was also documented speculation that such a rapid expansion in our knowledge base might have unforeseen ramifications, but the negativists, as they were called, were drowned out by the collective fascination with the exploratory binge.) men, in Cycle 433, our new class of interstellar drones, specifically designed to study and categorize the many worlds of the Outer Shell, encountered a large, quiescent spacecraft of unknown origin.  Careful in situ investigations were unsuccsssful in their attempts to correlate the engineering components of the spaceship with any known technological base for a spacefaring species.

      Eschewing the caution suggested by many of the Committees, the Council of Leaders had the enigmatic spaceship towed back to one of the developed cities of the Inner Shell.  There it was placed on display and analyzed in detail.  The initial conclusion of the drones was validated.  The spacecraft had not come from anywhere inside the domain of the Colony.  The Council of Engineers concluded that the technological capabillty of this builders was roughly equivalent to that of the Colonists in the early Era of Genius.  But when had it been made?  And where did it come from?  And most importantly, who had made it?

      By deciding to bring the dead spaceship back to civilization, the Council of Leaders basically guaranteed that the unsettling question of its origin would remain uppermost in the minds of the Colonists.  This unbridled quest for any and all information again worked to destabilize the culture.  The entire society was rife with rumored explanations to the unanswered and disquieting questions raised by the spaceship.  The dominant opinion was that the craft had been a Colonial prototype, never put into production, that had somehow been omitted from the official Encyclopedia of Space Vehicles.  This opinion was consistent with the general tendency of the Colonists to believe they were innately superior to all other life forms.

      It might have been possible to let the doubts and fears about the unknown spacecraft diminish to nothing, but the Council of Leaders resuscitated the collective anxieties by announcing, in the Cycle 434 Proclamation, that the largest new project of the Colony would be the design and eventual deployment of a new generation of receiver arrays in the Outer Shell.  The purpose of these arrays would be to intercept and decode any coherent radio messages that might be emanating from inside the Gap.  It was a clear indication that the leadership believed the silent spaceship to be of extracolonial origin.

      In Cycles 435 and 436 wave after wave of disturbing information staggered the Colony.  First there was the premature announcement that many extracolonial messages had been decoded.  This disclosure supported the widespread rumor of multiple Powers in the galaxy, some of them far more evolved than the Colony.  This frightening concept lingered for half a cycle before the Council of Astronomers, responding to these proliferating half-truths, finally announced that all but a handful of the messages could be ascribed to a single power, Power #2, whose center of activity appeared to be about two hundred light millicycles away.  Shortly thereafter their next astonishing announcement unambiguously identified Power #2 transmissions coming from sources as far as one hundred and fifty light millicycles apart, or more than three times the diameter across the entire Colony Jurisdiction!

      Between Cycle 438 and the receipt of the message, the Council of Leaders ignored advice that the Colony should carefully husband its resources while analyzing the impact of the discovery of the strange spaceship.  Crash programs were instituted in advanced encryption, it is true, primarily to allay concerns that Power #2 might be monitoring all our transmissions.  This action was widely hailed as a step in the right direction.  However, at the same time the exploration of the Outer Shell was intensified, leading to the identification of the new Type E life forms and the subsequent, thinly disguised endangered species roundup.  All suggestions to retrench and slow down the exploration program were ignored.  In Cycle 442, in fact, the Zoo Complex created several artificial planets just for the conduct of genetic capabilities experiments with the Type E species.

      Then came the Message from Power #2.  So simple, so straightforward, so terrifying.  It was coded in our most advanced encryption algorithm.  It acknowledged our mutual awareness of one another and suggested opening up bilateral communications.  Nothing else.  End of Message.  .  .  .

      .  .  .  It is not fear of hostility from Power #2 that motivates our objection to continued exploration in the Outer Shell.  On the contrary.  We as historians think the nascent concern about the possible aggressiveness of Power #2 is unfounded.  Study after study has shown that there is a significant positive correlation between high aggression coefficient and inability to evolve into a society with a purview greater than a single solar system.  In fact, the probability that a society as advanced as ours could have retained aggression and territoriality as constituents in its overall psychological makeup is vanishingly small.

      Nevertheless, such monumental events as the receipt of the message from Power #2 call for reflection and synthesis, not additional exploratory activities.  We should be using our resources to study and understand the entire range of impacts that the message will have on our society, not squandering them on bold repatriation schemes.  It is a question of priorities and once again the advocates of frontierism, exalting new information and technological development over the stability of the society, are blind to the downside risks of their endeavors.  .  .  .

FRIDAY

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.”