Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

The cabin itself was a masterpiece of design. One wall – if approximately one-sixth on the surface area of the inside of a sphere could be called a wall – was covered with instruments, dial, fuse-boxes, switchboards and a variety of scientific equipment which we would not be called upon to use: set to one side were the controls for engine starting, engine speed, advance and reverse, for the searchlights, remote-controlled grabs, the dangling guiderope which could hold the bathyscaphe stable near the bottom by resting part of its length on the sea-bed and so relieving the scaphe of that tiny percentage of weight which was sufficient to hold it in perfect equilibrium; and, finally, there were the fine adjustments for the device for absorbing exhaled carbon dioxide and regenerating oxygen.

One control there was that I hadn’t seen before, and it puzzled me for some time. It was a rheostat with advance and retard positions graded on either side of the central knob and below this was the brass legend ‘Tow-rope control’. I had no idea what this could be for, but after a couple of minutes I could make a pretty sure guess. Vyland – or rather, Bryson on Vyland’s orders – must have fitted a power-operated drum to the top, and almost certainly the rear, of the bathyscaphe, the wire of which would have been attached, before the leg had been lowered into the water, to some heavy bolt or ring secured near the base of the leg. The idea, I now saw, was not that they could thereby haul the bathyscaphe back to the rig if anything went wrong – it would have required many more times the power that was available in the bathyscaphe’s engines to haul that big machine along the ocean bed – but purely to overcome the very tricky navigational problem of finding their way back to the leg. I switched on a searchlight, adjusted the beam and stared down through the window at my feet. The deep circular ring in the ocean floor where the leg had originally been bedded was still there, a trench over a foot in depth: with that to guide, re-engaging the top of the entrance chamber in the cylinder inside leg shouldn’t be too difficult.

At least I understood now why Vyland hadn’t objected too strongly to my being left by myself inside the scaphe: by flooding the entrance chamber and rocking the scaphe to and fro if and when I got the engines started, I might easily have managed to tear clear of the rubber seal and sail the bathyscaphe away to freedom and safety: but I wouldn’t get very far with a heavy cable attaching me to the leg of the X 13. Vyland might be a phoney in the ways of dress, mannerisms and speech, but that didn’t alter the fact that he was a very smart boy indeed.

Apart from the instruments on that one wall, the rest of the cabin was practically bare except for three small canvas seats that hinged on the outer wall and a rack where there was stored a variety of cameras and photo-flood equipment.

My initial comprehensive look round the interior didn’t take long. The first thing that called for attention was the control box of the hand microphone by one of the canvas seats. Vyland was just the sort of person who would want to check whether I really was working, and I wouldn’t have put it past him to change over wires in the control box so that when the switch was in the off position the microphone would be continuously live and so let him know that I was at least working, even if he didn’t know what kind of work it was. But I’d misjudged or over-rated him, the wiring was as it should have been.

In the next five minutes or so I tested every item of equipment inside that cabin except the engine controls – should I have been able to start them anyone still waiting on the bottom floor of that leg would have been sure to feel the vibration.

After that I unscrewed the cover of the largest of the circuit boxes, removed almost twenty coloured wires from their sockets and let them hang down in the wildest confusion and disorder. I attached a lead from the Megger to one of those wires, opened the covers of another two circuits and fuse-boxes and emptied most of my tools on to the small work-bench beneath. The impression of honest toil was highly convincing.

So small was the floor area of that steel cabin that there was no room for me to stretch out my length on the narrow mesh duckboard but I didn’t care. I hadn’t slept at all the previous night, I’d been through a great deal in the past twelve hours and I felt very tired indeed. I’d sleep all right.

I slept. My last impression before drifting off was that the wind and the seas must be really acting up. At depths of a hundred feet or over, wave-motion is rarely or never felt: but the rocking of that bathyscaphe was unmistakable, though very gentle indeed. It rocked me to sleep.

My watch said half-past two when I awoke. For me, this was most unusual: I’d normally the ability to set a mental alarm-clock and wake up almost to the pre-selected moment. This time I’d slipped, but I was hardly surprised. My head ached fiercely, the air in that tiny cabin was foul. It was my own fault, I’d been careless. I reached for the switch controlling carbon dioxide absorption and turned it up to maximum. After five minutes, when my head began to clear, I switched on the microphone and asked for someone to loosen the hatch-cover set into the floor of the leg. The man they called Cibatti came down and let me out and three minutes later I was up again in that little steel room.

‘Late, aren’t you?’ Vyland snapped. He and Royale – the helicopter must have made the double trip safely – were the only people there, apart from Cibatti who had just closed the trunking door behind me.

‘You want the damn thing to go sometime, don’t you?’ I said irritably. ‘I’m not in this for the fun of the thing, Vyland.’

‘That’s so.’ The top executive criminal, he wasn’t going to antagonize anyone unnecessarily. He peered closely at me. ‘Anything the matter with you?’

‘Working for hours on end in a cramped coffin is the matter with me,’ I said sourly. ‘That and the fact that the air purifier was maladjusted. But it’s OK now.’

‘Progress?’

‘Damn little.’ I lifted my hand as the eyebrow went up and the face began to darken in a scowl. ‘It’s not for want of trying. I’ve tested every single contact and circuit in the scaphe and it’s only in the past twenty minutes that I began to find out what’s the matter with it.’

‘Well, what was the matter with it?’

‘Your late engineer friend Bryson was the matter with it, that’s what.’ I looked at him speculatively. ‘Had you intended taking Bryson with you when you were going to recover this stuff? Or were you going to go it alone?’

‘Just Royale and myself. We thought–’

‘Yes, I know. Not much point in taking him along with you. A dead man can’t accomplish much. Either you dropped a hint that he wouldn’t be coming along and he knew why he wouldn’t be coming along so he’d fixed it so that he’d get a nice little posthumous revenge, or he hated you so much that if he had to go along he was determined that he was going to take you with him. Out of this world, I mean. Your friend had made a very clever little fix indeed, only he hadn’t quite time to finish it before the bends knocked him off – which is why the engines are still out of commission. He’d fixed it so that the bathyscaphe would have operated perfectly; would have gone backwards and forwards, up and down, anything you liked – until you had taken it down to a depth of just over three hundred feet. Then he had fixed that certain hydro-static cut-outs would come into operation. A beautiful job.’ I wasn’t gambling much, I knew their ignorance of those matters was profound.

‘And then what?’ Vyland asked tightly.