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mouth in the face said. Don tried to say something positive, but could not speak at all. Her beauty had
been destroyed, and she had been made ludicrous. It might as well have been a robot talking to him.
Caspar righted his bicycle. "Ready to go," he said. "We shouldn't use up the batteries unnecessarily."
Then, after a pause: "Oh."
"Oh," Melanie echoed tonelessly.
"I wasn't paying much attention when it counted, it seems," Caspar said. "Disease? Radiation therapy?"
"Genetic, from birth," she said.
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"Why show us?"
"Because Don was starting to like me."
He nodded. "Hair is superficial. We know it. Now all we have to do is believe it."
Melanie put her wig back on, and pressed it carefully into place. It was evident that it had some kind of
adhesive, and would not come loose unless subject to fair stress. She resumed her former appearance.
But now, to Don's eyes, she looked like a bald doll with a hairpiece. She had set out to disabuse him of
his notions of her attractiveness, and had succeeded. Evidently she didn't want to be liked ignorantly.
They resumed travel without further comment. The coordinates were 24020/-82°302 . Forty minutes west
of their rendezvous, ten south. Depth was one hundred fathoms. They must have been traveling well,
indeed, downhill, before starting the laborious climb. Don was amazed to realize that they were now
beyond their target, and he had never been aware of their passing it. They had time, plenty of time, thank
the god of the sea.
They had climbed six hundred feet in the past two miles, and it didn't look steep, but it was grueling on a
bicycle. Now he was glad for the continued struggle, because it gave him something other to think about
than Melanie's hair. She had figured him exactly: he was getting to like her, because she was pretty and
she talked to him. And now his building illusion had been shattered. He should have known that there
would be something like this.
Twenty miles and seventy fathoms east and up, with a break for another bicycle malfunction this time
Don's, whose seat had come loose and twisted sideways the way abruptly became steep. Gaspar, in the
lead, dismounted and walked his bike up the slope. Don and Melanie were glad to do the same; it was a
relief to change the motion.
Suddenly Don saw a rough wall, almost overhanging. Jagged white outcroppings and brown recesses
made this a formidable barrier, and it extended almost up to the surface of the sea.
"This is it," Caspar said with satisfaction as they drew beside him.
"But how can we pass?" Don asked. "What is it, anyway?"
Caspar smiled. "Coral reef. Isn't she a beauty!" Don, not wanting to admit that he had never seen a coral
reef before, and had had a mental picture of a rather pretty plastered wall with brightly colored fish
hovering near, merely nodded. It looked ugly to him, because he couldn't see how they were going to get
across it. There might be a hundred feet of climbing to do, scaling that treacherous cliff and how were
they going to haul up the bicycles?
He glanced at Melanie, who had not spoken since her revelation. Could she be likened to a coral reef?
His mental image suddenly disabused by the reality? Unfortunately, it was the reality that counted.
They did not have to scale the reef. Caspar merely showed the way east, coasting down the bumpy slope
to deeper water. This was why they had come this way: to go around the reef instead of across it. Don
was now increasingly thankful for Caspar's knowledge of the geography of the sea. When they struck
reasonably level sand they picked up speed. They went another ten miles before he called a halt.
"We're within a dozen miles," Caspar said, breaking out the rations. "I guess we'd better get inside the
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reefs, next chance. Rendezvous is only a couple miles out of Key West."
"Get inside the reefs?" Don asked, dismayed. "I thought we already went around them."
"No, only part way. But this is a better place to cross them, I think."
"Why is the rendezvous so close to civilization?" Don mused. "Can this next person know even less
about the ocean than I do?"
Melanie remained silent, and Caspar discreetly avoided the implication. "The reefs are rough literally.
The edges can cut like knives, and the wounds are slow to heal. It's no place to learn to swim, or ride. So
we'll have to guide him through with kid gloves. He probably does know less than you now."
A left-footed compliment! "So how do we get through?"
"Oh, the reefs are discontinuous. We'll use a channel and get into shallow water. Have to watch out for
boats, though; we'll be plainly visible in twenty foot depth." He considered briefly. "In fact, as I recall,
there's a lot of two fathom water in the area. Twelve feet from wave to shell in mean low water, which
means barely six feet over our heads. That's too much visibility."
Don agreed. He would now feel naked with that thin a covering of water. He was tired, and wanted
neither to admit it nor to hold up progress, but here was a valid pretext to wait. On the other hand, he
was increasingly curious about this close-to-land member of the expedition. If the man were not
knowledgeable about the marine world, why was he needed at all?
But Melanie wasn't knowledgeable either. What was her purpose here? Unless this really was a testing
situation, a maze for average white rats. How would those rats find their way through? How well would
they cooperate with each other? He remembered reading about a test in which a rat could get a pellet of
food by striking a button. Then the button was placed on the opposite side of the chamber from the
pellet dispenser. Then two rats were put in the same chamber. When one punched the button, the other
got the pellet. That was testing something other than wit or mechanical dexterity. Could this be that sort
of test?
They cut into the reef. This time Don observed the myriad creatures of this specific locale, and the reef
began to align better with his former mental image. The elements were there, just not quite the way he
had pictured them. The fish in the open waters had generally stayed clear of the odd bicycle party,
probably frightened by the lights and machinery, so that he had ignored them with impunity. But this
stony wall was well populated. Yellow-eyed snakes peeped from crevices, teeth showing beneath their
nostrils, watching, waiting.
Beside him, Melanie seemed no more at ease. She tried to keep as far from the reef as possible without
separating from the human party.
Caspar saw their glances. "Moray eels," he said. "No danger to us, phased but if we were diving, I'd
never put hand or foot near any of these holes. Most sea creatures are basically shy, or even friendly, and
some of the morays arc too. But they can be vicious. I've seen one tackle an octopus. The devilfish tried
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