16 The Saint Overboard Page 16

  "Is this the new regulation swim suit?" asked the Saint inter­estedly. "But it doesn't look as if you could move about in it."

  "It's fairly hard work," Yule admitted. "But it looks a great deal heavier than it is. Of course, the air inside helps to take off quite a lot of the weight when it's under water. And then, the whole value of the bathystol is its light construction. Dr Beebe went down more than three thousand feet in his bathysphere in 1934, but he was shut up in a steel ball that half a dozen men couldn't have lifted. I set out with the idea of achieving strength by internal bracing on scientific principles instead of solid bulk, and this new metal helped me by reducing the weight by nearly seventy-five per cent. You need something pretty strong for this job."

  "I suppose you do," said the Saint mildly. "I don't know what sort of pressures you meet down there——"

  "At three thousand feet it's more than half a ton to the square inch. If you lowered a man in an ordinary diving suit to that depth, he'd be crushed into a shapeless pulp—by nothing more solid than this water we've been cruising on." The Professor grinned cheerfully. "But in the bathystol I'm nearly as comforta­ble as I am now. You can go down in it yourself if you like, and prove it."

  The Saint shook his head.

  "Thanks very much," he murmured hastily. "But nothing could make me feel less like a hero. I'll take your word for it."

  He stood aside and watched the preparations for a shallow test dive. The ten-ton grab on the after deck, which he had dis­covered on his nocturnal exploration, had been stripped of its tarpaulin and telescoped out over the stern, but the claw mecha­nism had been dismantled and stowed away somewhere out of sight. All that was visible now was a sort of steel derrick with an ordinary hook dangling from its cable.

  The hook was hitched into a length of chain welded to what might have been the shoulders of the bathystol, the nuts were tightened up on the circular door through which Yule would lower himself into the apparatus when he went down in it, one of the engineers touched the controls of the electric winch, and the cumbersome contrivance dragged along the deck and rose slug­gishly towards the end of the boom. For a moment or two it hung there, turning slowly like a monstrous futuristic doll; and then it went down with the cable whirring and vanished under the water. Again the engineer checked it, while Yule fussed round like an excited urchin, and the telescopic boom shortened on its runners like the horn of a snail until the wire cable came within the grasp of a man stationed at the stern. Three other men picked up the insulated electric cable and passed it along as it unreeled from the drum, and the man at the stern fastened it to the supporting cable at intervals with a deft twist of rope as the bathystol descended.

  "That's enough."

  At last the Professor was satisfied. He stepped back, mopping his forehead like a temperamental impresario who has finally obtained a rehearsal to his satisfaction, with his hair and beard awry and his eyes gleaming happily. The engineer reversed the winch, and the cable spooled back on to the drum with a deepen­ing purr until the bathystol pushed its outlandish head above the surface and rose clear to swing again at the nose of the derrick.

  "Five hundred feet," muttered Yule proudly. "And I'd hardly even call that a trial run." He put his handkerchief away, and watched anxiously while the bathystol was lowered on to the deck and two men with wrenches and hammers stepped up to unfasten the door. As soon as it was open he pushed them away, climbed up on a chair, and hauled out the humidity recorder. He frowned at it for a moment, and looked up grinning. "Not a sign of a leak, either. Now if I can walk about in it better than I could in the old one——"

  "I take it there is no serious doubt of that?" said Vogel, with intent solicitude.

  "Bless you, no. I'm not in the least worried. But this new jointing system has got to be tested in practice. It ought to make walking much easier; unless the packing won't stand up to the job. But it will."

  "Then we shall have to try and find something special for lunch."

  Vogel took the Professor's arm, and Yule allowed himself to be torn reluctantly away from his toys. Simon caught Loretta's eye with a gaze of thoughtful consideration. It would have said all that he could find to say without the utterance of a single word; but as they strolled on he spoke without shaping his mouth.

  "A smile on the face of the tiger."

  She glanced over the turquoise spread of the water, and said: "After we've been to Madeira."

  "I suppose so."

  The sunlight slanting across his face deepened the twin wrin­kles of cold contemplation above his nose. After the Falkenberg had been to Madeira . . . presumably. There was deep water there, within easy reach. The Monaco Deep, if Yule wanted a good preliminary canter. The Cape Verde Basin, which the Pro­fessor had already mentioned, if he felt ambitious and they cruised further south. Enough water, at any rate, to establish the potentialities of the bathystol beyond any shadow of doubt. Which was unquestionably what Vogel wanted. . . . But long before then, if the photographer in Dinard hadn't fogged his plates, and Vogel's intelligence service was anything like as efficient as his other departments, the Saint's own alibi of apologetically intruding innocence would have been blown sky-high, and there would be nothing to stop the joyride terminating ac­cording to the old Nigerian precedent. Unless Vogel himself had been disposed of by that time, which would have been the Saint's own optimistic prophecy. . . . And yet the indefensible appre­hension stayed with him through the theatrically perfect service of luncheon, to sour the lobster cocktail and embitter the exqui­sitely melting perfection of the quails in aspic.

  He put it aside—thrust it away into the remoter shelves of his mind. Just then there seemed to be more urgent dangers to be met halfway. It was one of those mental sideslips which taunt the fallibility of human concentration.

  "You're very preoccupied, Mr Tombs."

  Vogel's insinuating accents slurred into his reverie, with a hint of malicious irony; and Simon looked up with unruffled noncha­lance.

  "I was just thinking what a sensation it must be for the fish when the Professor goes wading about among them," he mur­mured. "It ought to make life seem pretty flat for the soles when he goes home."

  3

  There were two oxygen cylinders, of the same alloy as the bathystol, unpacked from their case and being passed out on to the deck as Yule wriggled into a motheaten grey sweater in preparation for his descent. He tested the automatic valves him­self before he shook hands all round and climbed up on to the deckhouse roof to lower himself into his armour. The door in the of the bathystol was only just large enough to let him through; but presently he was inside, peering out of one of the portholes, exactly like a small brat at a window with his nose flattened against the pane. Then the oxygen cylinders were passed in to him, and fitted into the clamps provided for them on the interior of the sphere. After which the door was lowered into place by two men, and the clang of hammer and wrench rattled over the sea as the bolts which secured it were tightened up. To the submarine pioneer imprisoned inside the echoing globe of metal, the terrific din must have been one of the worst ordeals he had to suffer: they could see his face, through one of the quartz lenses, wrinkled in a comical contortion of agony, while he squeezed his fingers ineffectually into Ms ears.

  Then it was finished, and the hammerers climbed down. The Professor fitted a pair of earphones over his head and adjusted the horn-shaped transmitter on his chest; and his voice, cu­riously shrill and metallic, clattered suddenly out of a small loud speaker standing on a table by the rail.

  "Can you hear me?"

  "Perfectly. Can you hear us?"

  Vogel had settled the loop of a similar transmitter round his neck, and it was he who checked up the telephone communica­tion. The Professor grinned through his window.

  "Fine! But I shall have to get this thing soundproofed if I'm going to use it much. I wish you knew what the noise was like!"

  His hands moved over the racks of curious instruments with which he was surroun
ded, testing them one by one. Under one of the windows, on his right, there was a block of paper on a small flat shelf, for notes and sketches, with a pencil dangling over it on a length of ridiculously commonplace string. On his left, mounted on a sort of lazy-tongs on which it could be pulled out from its bracket, was a small camera. He touched a switch, and the interior of the globe was illuminated by a dim light over his notebook; at the touch of another switch, a dazzlingly powerful shaft of luminance beamed out from a quartz lens set in the upper part of the sphere like the headlight of a streamlined car. Then he slipped his arms into the sleeves of the apparatus, moved them about, and opened and closed the pincer hands. He bent his knees, and lifted first one leg and then the other in their ponderous harness. At last his voice came through the loud speaker again.

  "Right! Let her go!"

  "Good luck," said Vogel; and the bathystol lifted and swung out over the side as the winch whined under the engineer's move­ment of the control lever.

  Peering over the side into the blue water beneath which the bathystol had disappeared, Simon Templar found himself forget­ting the implications of the experiment he was watching, the circumstances in which he was there, and the menace that hung over the whole expedition. There was a quiet potency of drama in the plunge of that human sounding-line to the bottom of the sea which neutralised all the cruder theatricalities of battle, mur­der, and sudden death. Granted that this, according to Yule, was hardly even a preliminary canter, and that enough water did not exist under their keel to provide the makings of any sort of rec­ord—there was still the breath-taking comprehension of what should follow from this trial descent. It was the opening of a field of scientific exploration which had baffled adventurers far longer than the conquest of the air, a victory over physical lim­itations more spellbindingly sensational than any ascent into the stratosphere. The precarious thread of chance on which hung his own life and Loretta's seemed temporarily of slight importance beside the steel cable which was sliding down into the depths through the concentric ripples dilating out from it across the surface.

  After fifteen minutes which might have been an hour, the cable swayed with the first trace of slackness and the loud speaker suddenly squeaked: "Whoa!" The burring of the winch died away, and the man who was chalking the cable in ten-foot lengths as it slipped over the boom looked at his figures and called a guttural "Five hundred seventy-five."

  "Five hundred and seventy-five feet," Vogel relayed impas­sively over the phone.

  "Splendid. I'm on the bottom." It was indescribably eerie to listen to Yule's matter-of-fact voice speaking from the eternal windless night of the sea bed. "Everything's working perfectly. The heating arrangement makes a lot of difference—I'm not a bit cold."

  "Can you move about?"

  "Yes, I think so. This bathystol is a lot lighter than the last one."

  "Could you bend down to pick anything up in it?"

  There was a brief pause. Glancing at Kurt Vogel in a mo­ment's recollection of what this preliminary experiment stood for besides its contribution to scientific knowledge, Simon saw that the man's face was taut and shining with the same curiously waxen glaze which he had noticed on that hair-raising search of the Corsair.

  Then the Professor's voice came through again.

  "Yes—I got hold of a bit of rock. Quite easy. . . . Phew! That was a small fish nosing the window, and I nearly caught him. A bit too quick for me, though . . . Now I'm going to try and walk a bit. Give me another twenty feet of cable."

  The winch thrummed again for a few seconds; and then there was absolute silence on deck. The engineer wiped his hands me­chanically on a piece of cotton waste, and thrust it back, in his pocket. The man who had been checking off the lengths of cable put away his chalk and pulled reflectively at bis ear. The carpen­ter tied a last linking hitch between the cable and the telephone line, and clambered down from his perch. The other seamen drew together at the stern and stood in a taciturn and inexpressive group, oddly reminiscent of a knot of miners waiting at the pit­head after a colliery explosion.

  There was the same sullen stoicism, the same brooding inten­sity of imagination. Simon felt his pulses beating and the palms of his hands turning moist. He flashed another glance at Vogel. The pirate was standing stiff and immobile, his head thrust a little forward so that he looked more than ever like a pallid vul­ture, his black eyes burning vacantly into space; his face might have been carved in ivory, a macabre mask of rapt attention.

  The Saint's gaze turned to catch Loretta's, and he saw an infinitesimal tremor brush her shoulders—twin brother to the ballet of ghostly spiders that were curveting up his own spinal ganglions. He felt exactly as if he were waiting for the initial heart-releasing crash of a tropical thunderstorm, and he did not know why. Some faint whisper of warning was trying to get through to his brain in that utter silence of nerve-pulping ex­pectation; but all he could hear was the stentorous breathing of Otto Arnheim and the swish and gurgle of the swell under the counter. . . .

  "I can walk quite comfortably." The sharp stridency of the loud speaker crackled abruptly into the stillness, somehow with­out breaking the suspense. "I've taken about thirty steps in two directions. It is a bit slow, but not excessively fatiguing. There is no sign of a leak, and the reading of the humidity recorder is still normal."

  One of the seamen spat a cud of tobacco over the side, and the engineer pulled out his cotton waste and rubbed introspectively at an invisible speck on a chromium-plated cleat. Vogel's gaunt figure seemed to grow taller as he raised his head. His eyes swept round over Arnheim, Loretta, and the Saint, with a sudden blaze of triumph.

  Then the loud speaker clattered again.

  "Something seems to have gone wrong with the oxygen supply. One of the cylinders has just fizzled out, although the gauge still shows it three-quarters full. The valve must have been damaged in packing and started a slow leak. I'm turning on the other cyl­inder. I think you might bring me up now."

  The slight fidgeting of the cluster of seamen stopped alto­gether. The engineer looked round.

  "Up!" snapped Vogel.

  Loretta was gripping the Saint's arm. Simon was only numbly aware of the clutch of her fingers: for a perceptible space of time his mind was half deadened with incredulity. His reactions were momentarily out of control, while his brain reeled to en­compass the terrific adjustment that Vogel had sprung on him. Even then he was uncertain, unconvinced by that horrible leap of foresight—until the rumble of the winch stopped again almost as soon as it had started, and left a frightful stillness to force its meaning back into his unbelieving ears.

  Vogel was watching the engineer with a faint frown.

  "What is the matter?"

  "A fuse, I think."

  The man left his controls and vanished down a companion, and Vogel spoke into the telephone mouthpiece in his clear flat voice.

  "They're just fixing the winch, Professor. We'll have you up in a few minutes."

  There was a short interval before Yule's calm reply.

  "I hope it isn't anything serious. The reserve cylinder seems to be worse than the first. The pressure is falling very rapidly. Please don't be long."

  The Saint's eyes were freezing into chips of ultramarine. Every instinct he possessed was shrieking at him for action, and yet he was actually afraid to move. He had straightened up off the rail, and yet some twisted doubt within him still held him from taking the first step forward. So successfully had the cun­ning of Kurt Vogel insinuated itself into his mind.

  Professor Yule had made his descent, established the safety and mobility of the new bathystol, stooped down and picked up rocks and walked in it—proved practically everything that Vogel needed to know. True, the tests had not been made at any im­pressive depth; but Vogel's previous experience of the invention might have satisfied him to dispense with that. And yet Simon was still trying to make himself believe that he was standing by, watching in silence, while Yule was being murdered in cold blood.


  He saw it at once as the practically perfect crime, the incon­trovertible accident—an automatic provision for fatalistic obit­uaries and a crop of leading articles on the martyrs of science. And yet the nerveless audacity of the conception, in the circum­stances in which he was seeing it, had to fight its way up to the barricades of his reason. The inward struggle was tearing him apart, but while it went on he was gripped in a paralysis more maddening than any physical restraint. The torturing question drummed sickeningly through his brain and rooted him to the deck: Was this only another of Vogel's satanically deep-laid traps?

  Vogel had walked across to the companion down which the engineer had disappeared. He was standing there, looking down, tapping his fingers quietly on the rail. He hadn't even seemed to look at the Saint.

  "Can't we do anything?" Loretta was pleading.

  Vogel glanced at her with a shrug.

  "I know nothing about machinery," he said; and then he stepped back to make way for the returning engineer.

  The man's face was perfectly wooden. His gaze flickered over the circle of expectant faces turned towards him, and he an­swered their unspoken questions in a blunt staccato like a rolling drum.

  "I think one of the armature windings has burnt out. They're working on it."

  Another hush fell after his words, in which Otto Arnheim emp­tied his lungs with a gusty sigh. Loretta was staring at the taut cable swaying slightly from the nose of the boom as the Falkenberg tilted in the swell, and her face had gone paler under the golden tan. A gull turned in the bright sky and went gliding soundlessly down a long air-slope towards the east.

  Simon's fists were clenched till the nails bit into his palms, and there was a kind of dull nausea in his stomach. And the loud speaker clacked through the silence.

  "The reserve cylinder seems to be worse than the first. I don't think it will last much longer. What is the matter?"

  "We are trying to repair the winch," Vogel said quietly.