Arthur Clarke - Cradle

“Good question,” Troy replied. “A very good question, to which I might have the answer. I think these crazy colored walls move around. I believe I saw the walls rolling into place when I was under the water. So all we have to do is push them aside and find our way out.” He tried to wedge his hands into a crack that was a connection between a red and a blue piece of the wall structure. He was unsuccessful.

Carol left Troy and started to pace around the perimeter of the room in her ungainly diving apparatus. She quickly stopped and took off everything except her bathing suit. She seemed intent on both examining and photographing every single panel in the wall. Troy took off his own air tanks and buoyancy vest as well, dropping them on the light metal floor with a clank. He watched her for a minute.

“Carol, oh Carol,” he said from across the room, a big fake grin spreading across his face. “Would you like to tell me what you’re doing now? I mean, after all, angel, I may be able to help.”

“I’m looking for something that says ‘Eat Me’ or ‘Drink Me,’ ” she replied with a nervous laugh.

“Of course,” Troy mumbled to himself, “that was absolutely obvious.”

“Do you remember Alice in Wonderland?” Carol asked from the opposite side of the room. She had found a long, thin protuberance that looked like a handle sticking out from the center of one of the red panels. She waved and he came over. The two of them tried to twist and turn the handle. Nothing happened. Carol became frustrated struggling with it.

Troy thought he saw a first sign of panic in Carol as her eyes frantically scanned the rest of the room. He pulled himself up and stood at attention, military style. “Speak roughly to your little boy… And beat him when he sneezes… He only does it to annoy… because he knows it teases.”

The deep furrows in Carol’s face showed that she thought Troy had temporarily lost his mind. “That was the Queen of Hearts, I think.” Troy laughed. “I’m not sure exactly. But I had to learn it for a play when I was in the fifth grade.” Carol had relaxed and was also laughing in spite of her fear. She reached up and gave Troy a kiss on the cheek. “Careful, now, careful,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “We black men are easily aroused.”

Carol slid her arm through Troy’s as they finished walking around the rest of the room, searching the walls for any sign of an exit Troy’s banter made Carol feel comfortable. “When I was in the eighth grade a black teacher of mine told me that Alice was a racist story. He contended that it was very significant that it was a white rabbit that Alice followed. He said that no nice little white girl would ever have pursued a black rabbit down a hole.” He stopped in front of another red panel. “Well, well,” he said. “What have we here?”

This red panel looked just like the rest of the wall from a distance. But up close, within a range of a couple of feet or so, all kinds of patterns, made with small white dots, could be seen stippled on top of the red paint. An array of consecutive rectangular sections outlined by the white dots high-lighted the center of the panel “Hey, angel,” Troy said, pushing on the sections at random, “don’t you think this looks suspiciously like a keyboard?” Troy began to push on the keys at random. Carol joined him. It became a game. The two of them stood at the red panel for almost a minute, putting their fingers into every outlined section and pushing hard.

Suddenly Carol backed away from the panel, turned around, and started walking directly across the room. “Where are you going?” yelled Troy, as Carol, spinning around to answer, nearly stumbled over her diving gear on the floor.

“I have a crazy idea,” called Carol. “Call it feminine intuition. Call it psychic if you will.” She had reached the red panel where they had struggled with the handle. Now she pulled it down easily and immediately heard a creak. She jumped back, startled, as the entire panel folded back and away from her, revealing a dark opening large enough for a truck to enter. Troy came over beside her and the two of them stared into the void.

“Holy shit,” he said “Are we supposed to go in there?”

Carol nodded. “I’m certain we are.”

Troy looked at her with a curious expression. “And just how do you know that?”

“Because it’s the only way out of here,” Carol replied.

Troy cast one final glance around the strange room with the curved and colored walls. There was an indisputable logic to what Carol had said. He took a deep breath, held Carol’s hand, and walked into the black tunnel.

Behind them they could barely see the small shaft of light coming from the room where they had left their diving gear. Inside the pitch-black hallway they moved very slowly, cautiously. Troy kept one hand on the wall and the other clenched around Carol’s. The sound of their labored breathing, heightened by the constant fear and apprehension, reverberated off the rounded walls. They didn’t talk. Twice Troy had started to sing a few lines from a popular song, to assuage his own disquiet, but both times Carol stopped him. She wanted to be able to hear in case there were any other noises.

At one point she squeezed his hand and stopped. “Listen,” she said in a whisper. Troy held his breath. There was utter silence, except for something very soft that he couldn’t quite identify, way off in the distance. “Music,” Carol said. “I think I hear music.”

Troy strained to identify the sound just below the threshold of his hearing. It was useless. He pulled on Carol’s hand. “It’s probably inside your head,” he said. “Let’s go.”

They had made a turn and the light behind them had disappeared. Altogether they had been in the tunnel for about ten minutes. Carol was becoming despondent. “What if this doesn’t go anywhere?” she asked Troy.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he replied quickly. “Somebody built it for some purpose. It’s obviously a connecting passageway.” He fell silent.

“Who built it?” Carol asked the question that had been troubling both of them during the long tense walk down the dark hallway.

“Another good question,” Troy replied. He hesitated just a minute before continuing with his answer. “My guess is the United States Navy. I think we’re in some kind of top-secret underwater laboratory that nobody knows about.” Of course, he thought, not saying it out loud because he didn’t want to disturb Carol, it could also be Russian. In which case we are in deep shit. If the Russians have a large, secret laboratory this close to Key West, they are not going to be happy…

“Look, Troy,” Carol said excitedly. “I see a light. There is somebody here after all.” The tunnel was about to split into two pans. At the end of one of the two forks, the one sharply to the left, a patch of illumination could clearly be seen. Still holding hands, Troy and Carol walked briskly toward the light. Troy was aware that his heart was beating very rapidly.

Carol almost raced into the new room. She had expected that they were about to be found, that this mysterious adventure was now going to end and everything would be explained. Instead, as she looked around her in a small, oval chamber with the same bizarre panels for walls (except these were colored brown and white, instead of red and blue as in the previous room), she felt a tremendous confusion. “What is this place?” she asked Troy. “And how are we going to get out?”

Troy was standing in the center of the room with his head tilted back as far as it would go. He was staring up at a vast arched ceiling some thirty to thirty-five feet above them. “Wow,” he exclaimed, “this is one huge place.” The muted light illuminating the room was coming from slabs of partially translucent material, possibly glass crystals, that were embedded in the ceiling.