Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

I screwed home the last lead, shut the box covers and started to test all the circuits. Vyland watched me impatiently; Royale was watching me with a face, which, in its expressionlessness and battered appearance, was a fair match for the great Sphinx of Giza; but I remained unmoved by Vyland’s anxiety for haste – I was in this bathyscaphe too and I was in no mind to take chances. Then I turned on the control rheostats for the two battery-powered engines, turned to Vyland and pointed at a pair of flickering dials.

‘The engines. You can hardly hear them in here but they’re running just as they should. Ready to go?’

‘Yes.’ He licked his lips. ‘Ready when you are.’

I nodded, turned the valve control to flood the entrance chamber, pointed to the microphone which rested on a bracket at the head-height between Royale and myself and turned the wall-switch to the ‘on’ position. ‘Maybe you’d like to give the word to blow the air from the retaining rubber ring?’

He nodded, gave the necessary order and replaced the microphone. I switched it off and waited.

The bathyscaphe had been rocking gently, through maybe a three-or four-degree arc in a fore-and-aft line when suddenly the movement ceased altogether. I glanced at the depth gauge. It had been registering erratically, we were close enough to the surface for it to be affected by the great deep-troughed waves rolling by overhead, but even so there could be no doubt that the average depths of the readings had perceptibly increased.

‘We’ve dropped clear of the leg,’ I told Vyland. I switched on the vertical searchlight and pointed through the Plexiglas window at our feet. The sandy bottom was now only a fathom away. ‘What direction, quick – I don’t want to settle in that.’

‘Straight ahead, just how you’re pointing.’

I made the interlock switch for the two engines, advanced to half-speed and adjusted the planes to give us the maximum forward lift. It was little enough, not more than two degrees: unlike the lateral rudder the depth planes on the bathyscaphe gave the bare minimum of control, being quite secondary for the purpose of surfacing and diving. I slowly advanced the engines to maximum.

‘Almost due south-west.’ Vyland was consulting a slip of paper he had brought from his pocket. ‘Course 222º.’

‘True?’

‘What do you mean “true”,’ he snapped angrily. Now that he had his wishes answered and the bathyscaphe a going concern Vyland didn’t like it at all. Claustrophobic, at a guess.

‘Is that the true direction or is it for this compass?’ I asked patiently.

‘For this compass.’

‘Has it been corrected for deviation?’

He consulted his slip of paper again. ‘Yes. And Bryson said that as long as we took off straight in this direction the metal in the rig’s legs wouldn’t affect us.’

I said nothing. Bryson, the engineer who had died from the bends, where was he now? Not a couple of hundred feet away, I felt pretty certain. To drill an oil well maybe two and a half miles deep they’d have needed at least six thousand bags of cement and the two bucketsful of that needed to ensure that Bryson would remain at the bottom of the ocean until long after he was an unidentifiable skeleton wouldn’t even have been missed.

‘Five hundred and twenty metres,’ Vyland was saying. ‘From the leg we’ve left to the plane.’ The first mention ever of a plane. ‘Horizontal distance, that is. Allowing for the drop to the bottom of the deep, about six hundred and twenty metres. Or so Bryson said.’

‘Where does this deep begin?’

‘About two-thirds of the distance from here. At a hundred and forty feet – almost the same depth as the rig is standing in. Then it goes down about thirty degrees to four hundred and eighty feet.’

I nodded, but said nothing. I had always heard that you couldn’t feel two major sources of pain at the same time but people were wrong. You could. My arm, shoulder and back were a wide sea of pain, a pain punctuated by jolting stabbing spear-points of agony from my upper jaw. I didn’t feel like conversation, I didn’t feel like anything at all. I tried to forget the pain by concentrating on the job on hand.

The tow-rope attaching us to the pillar was, I had discovered, wound round an electrically driven power drum. But the power was unidirectional only, for reeling in the wire on the return journey. As we were moving just then it was being paid out against a weak spring carrying with it the insulated phone cable which ran through the centre of the wire, and the number of revolutions made by the drum showed on a counter inside the observation chamber, giving us a fairly accurate idea of the distance covered. It also gave us an idea of our speed. The maximum the bathyscaphe could do was two knots, but even the slight drag offered by the tow-cable paying out behind reduced this to one knot. But it was fast enough. We hadn’t far to go.

Vyland seemed more than content to leave the running of the bathyscaphe to me. He spent most of his time peering rather apprehensively out of a side window. Royale’s one good cold unwinking eye never left me; he watched every separate tiny movement and adjustment I made but it was only pure habit; I think his ignorance of the principles and controls of the bathyscaphe were pretty well complete. They must have been: even when I turned the intake control of the carbon dioxide absorption apparatus right down to its minimum operating figure it meant nothing to him.

We were drifting slowly along about ten feet above the floor of the sea, nose tilted slightly upwards by the drag of the wire, our guide-rope dangling down below the observation chamber and just brushing the rock and the coral formations or dragging over a sponge-bar. The darkness of the water was absolute, but our two searchlights and the light streaming out through the Plexiglas windows gave us light enough to see by. One or two groupers loafed lazily by the windows, absentmindedly intent on their own business; a snake-bodied barracuda writhed its lean grey body towards us, thrust its evil head against a side window and stared in unblinkingly for almost a minute; a school of what looked like Spanish mackerel kept us company for some time, then abruptly vanished in an exploding flurry of motion as a bottle-nosed shark cruised majestically into view, propelling itself along with a barely perceptible motion of its long powerful tail. But, for the most part, the sea floor seemed deserted; perhaps the storm raging above had sent most fish off to seek deeper waters.

Exactly ten minutes after we had left, the sea-floor abruptly dropped away beneath us in what seemed, in the sudden yawning darkness that our searchlight could not penetrate, an almost vertical cliff-face. I knew this to be only illusion; Vyland would have surveyed the ocean bed a dozen times and if he said the angle was only 30° it was almost certainly so, but nevertheless the impression of a sudden bottomless chasm was overwhelming.

‘This is it,’ Vyland said in a low voice. On his smooth polished face I could make out the faint sheen of sweat. ‘Take her down, Talbot.’

‘Later.’ I shook my head. ‘If we start descending now that tow-rope we’re trailing is going to pull our tail right up. Our searchlights can’t shine ahead, only vertically downwards. Want that we should crash our nose into some outcrop of rock that we can’t see? Want to rupture the for’ard gasoline tank? – don’t forget the shell of those tanks is only thin sheet metal. It only needs one split tank and we’ll have so much negative buoyancy that we can never rise again. You appreciate that, don’t you, Vyland?’

His face gleamed with sweat. He wet his lips again and said: ‘Do it your way, Talbot.’

I did it my way. I kept on course 222° until the tow-wire recorder showed 600 metres, stopped the engine and let our slight preponderance of negative buoyancy, which our forward movement and angled planes had so far overcome, take over. We settled gradually, in a maddeningly deliberate slow motion, the fathometer needle hardly appearing to move. The hanging weight of the tow-wire aft tended to pull us astern, and at every ten fathoms, between thirty and seventy, I had to ease ahead on the motors and pay out a little more wire.