outcroppings and tied their float lines, being careful
not to cut their hands. Rick suddenly wished they had brought canvas
gloves. Scotty still wore a single rubber one.

Then, with a few strong kicks to overcome their inertia, they started
down the face of the reef. It fell off sharply for about forty feet,
then more gradually until sand bottom was reached at about ninety feet.

Rick felt the sensation of thrusting his face into a wedge as the
pressure increased. He swallowed a couple of times and felt his ears
equalize, but his mask was beginning to hurt. He exhaled through his
nose and equalized the pressure inside the mask.

There were plenty of fish around now. A grouper saw them coming and
ducked into his hole in the coral. A fairly large moray eel, only his
head visible, watched their progress. Tiny demoiselles fluttered around
them, and a pair of red squirrelfish watched from the shelter of a
purple coral fan.

The coral growth was spectacular, with fantastic shapes and colors.
Then, as they went deeper, the colors gradually faded to a uniform
green. Rick knew from underwater flash photographs that the appearance
was deceptive. The colors remained, but the quality of light changed.

Scotty hooted four times, the signal for danger! Rick looked and saw a
barracuda hovering near by. He gulped. The fish was easily five feet
long. Both boys lifted their spear guns just in case the 'cuda attacked,
but the motion alarmed him and he was gone with one powerful flick of
his tail.

Rick consulted his wrist depth gauge, holding it close to his face
plate. They were at bottom at ninety feet, and the clean sand dropped
away at an angle of about thirty degrees. The boys planed downward, a
few feet above the sand until Rick's gauge read 120 feet. This was the
limit of their dive. Going deeper would mean stopping for decompression
on the way up.

He recalled that the waves came into the beach from a slightly northerly
direction and motioned to Scotty that they should turn north. Scotty
moved out to the limit of visibility, and they swam on a compass heading
of north, watching for any sign of a wreck. Now and then a coral shelf
extended out from the reef, but they saw nothing that could have been a
wreck. Once they swam over a patch of marine growth perhaps twenty feet
long and ten wide, and a huge eagle ray lifted from it and glided off
like a weird futuristic airplane.

It was quiet, except for the regular chuckle of