slid her hand under the overhang in the last direction of the tracks. Nothing. She would have to brace herself against the rocks and coral and stick her hand deeper into the area.
While Carol was trying to move herself into a better position, she momentarily lost her balance and felt the sting of coral on the back of her left thigh. Ouch, she thought as she put her right hand back under the overhang, that's one for me. One physical reminder of an amazing day. Weird even. Bizarre whales. Tank tracks on the bottom of the ocean ... what is this? Carol's hand closed around what felt like a metallic rod about an inch thick. It was such a surprising touch, she immediately withdrew her hand and a shudder raced down her spine. Her heart rate accelerated and she tried to breathe slowly to calm herself. Then she purposefully put her hand back and found the object again. Or was it another object? This time she felt something metallic all right, but it seemed to be wider and to have four tines like a fork. Carol slid her hand along the object and refound the rod portion.
From his vantage point above her, Nick could tell that Carol had discovered something. Now it was his turn to be excited. He swam down to her as she struggled unsuccessfully to retrieve the object. They changed positions and Nick reached under the projecting rock. He first touched something that felt like a smooth sphere about the size of the palm of his hand. Nick could tell that the bottom of the sphere rested on the sand and that the rod attached to it was elevated by several inches. Nick steadied himself and jerked on the rod. It moved a little. He moved his grip sideways on the rod and heaved again. Several more pulls and the object was out from under the overhang.
For almost a minute Nick and Carol hovered over the gold-metallic object lying beneath them on the sand. Its surface was smooth to the eye as well as to the touch and altogether it was about eighteen inches long. Nothing but the polished, reflecting surface could be seen, suggesting that the object was indeed made from some kind of metal. The long axis of the object was an inch-thick rod that was, at one end, tapered and worked into a kind of a hook. Four inches back from the hook was the center of a small sphere, symmetrically constructed around the rod, whose radius was a little over two inches. The larger sphere that Nick had felt when he first put his hand under the overhang had a radius of four inches or so and it was right in the middle of the rod. This sphere was also perfectly symmetric around the rod axis. Beyond the two spheres the object was unadorned until the rod broke into four smaller branches, the tines that Carol had felt, at its other end.
Carol carefully took photographs of the object as it lay exposed in front of the overhang. Before she was finished, Nick pointed at his watch. They had been underwater almost an hour. Carol checked her air gauge and found that she was almost into the red. She waved a sign at Nick and he swam down to pick up the object. It was extremely heavy, weighing an astonishing twenty pounds or so in Nick's estimation. Then it wasn't caught on anything when I was trying to pull it out, Nick thought, it's just that heavy.
The weight of the object only increased Nick's excitement that had begun when he had first seen the gold color. Although he had never seen anything quite like this hook and fork with spheres, he remembered that the heaviest pieces from the wreck of the Santa Rosa had all been made of gold. And this piece was far heavier than anything he had ever touched. Jesus, he thought to himself as he discarded some of the lead weights in his belt to make it easier for him to carry the object up to the boat, if there's even ten pounds of pure gold here, at current market value of a thousand dollars an ounce, that's $160,000, and this may just be the beginning. Wherever this thing came from, there must be more. All right, Williams. This may be your lucky day.
Carol's thoughts raced at a mile a minute as she swam in tandem with Nick toward the anchor