Iain Pears - Stone's Fall

At least? Yes. I had been a little hasty in my desire to force Macintyre to get on with the business of testing. I should have made sure there was nothing in the way first of all.

'Oh, my God,' Bartoli said as he looked out appalled. The torpedo, still clearly visible, was now at maximum speed, all five hundred pounds of it, travelling a few inches underwater, heading straight for a felucca, one of the little vessels used often enough for fishing, or transporting food around the lagoon. The crew could be seen quite clearly, sitting in the stern by the rudder, or leaning on the side, admiring the view as the sail billowed in the light wind.

A peaceful scene; one that painters travelled many hundreds of miles to capture on canvas, to sell to romantically inclined northerners desperate for a bit of Venice on their walls.

'Look out!' Macintyre screamed in horror, and we all joined in, jumping up and down and waving. The sailors on the felucca looked up, grinned, and waved back. Crazy foreigners. Still, a pleasant morning, why not be friendly?

'How much gunpowder is in that thing?' I asked as I jumped up and down.

'None. I put fifty-four pounds of clay in the head instead. And it won't use gunpowder. It will use guncotton.'

'Yes, you told me.'

'Well, remember it. Anyway, I can't afford to waste it.'

'hat's lucky.'

The felucca kept going, the torpedo as well; it was going to be a close-run thing. Another quarter of a knot and the boat would pass over the torpedo's course entirely and it would miss. All would be well, if only the boat would go faster or the torpedo would slow down.

Neither obliged. It could have been worse, so I assured Macintyre later. Had the torpedo hit amidships, then something of that weight and that speed would undoubtedly have stove a hole right through the thin planking, and it would have been hard to pretend that a fourteen-foot steel tube wedged in their boat was nothing to do with us.

But we were lucky. The boat was almost out of the torpedo's path; almost but not quite. Macintyre's invention clipped the end of it; even at a distance of four hundred yards, we heard the cracking, breaking sound as the rudder gave way, and the boat lurched under the impact. The sails lost the wind and began flapping wildly, and the crew, a moment ago waving cheerfully and idling their time away, launched into stunned action, trying to bring their vessel back under control and work out what on earth had happened. The torpedo, meanwhile, went silently on its way, and it was clear no one on the felucca had seen it.

Bartoli was brilliant, I must say. Naturally, we steered towards the stricken boat, and he had a quick word with the crew. 'Never seen anything like that before,' Bartoli called in Venetian. 'Amazing.'

'What was it? What happened?'

'A shark,' he replied sagely. 'Really big one, travelling fast. I saw it clearly. It must have clipped the end of your boat, bitten the rudder off. Never seen a beast like that in the lagoon before.'

The crew was delighted; this was much better than rotten wood or some ordinary accident. They would dine out on this for weeks. Bartoli, after expressing surprise that they hadn't noticed the fin sticking out of the water, offered assistance, which made Macintyre fretful. He wanted to go and get his torpedo back; he had no real idea what its range was, and it could be anywhere by now. It was his most treasured possession, and he did not want it to fall into the hands of some spy or rival, for he was convinced that all the governments and companies of the world were desperately trying to steal his secrets.

He need not have worried; Bartoli was too skilled for that. He knew quite well that no Venetian sailor would submit to being towed ignominiously into harbour by a bunch of foreigners. They were duly grateful, but turned the offer down. Then they rigged up a makeshift rudder from an oar, poking over the back rather as on a gondola, and after half an hour of enjoyable conversation, they set off again.

We all – and Macintyre in particular – breathed a sigh of relief when the felucca disappeared into the early morning mist; then we turned to the business of recovering his invention. I thought that the time had come to apologise.

'I think I had better find some way of compensating those sailors as well,' I ended. 'I imagine repairing that rudder will cost something.'

But no apologies were really necessary; Macintyre was transformed. From the anxiety-ridden fusspot of an hour or so ago, he was like a man who had just been told he had inherited a fortune. He positively beamed at me, his eyes sparkling with excitement.

'Did you see it?' he exclaimed. 'Did you see it? Straight as an arrow. It works, Stone! It works! Exactly as I said. If there'd only been some explosives in the nose I could have blown that boat to kingdom come. I could have sunk a battleship.'

'It would have been difficult to blame that on a shark,' I pointed out. But Macintyre waved my objections aside and ran up to the prow of the boat with a pair of field glasses.

We searched for about an hour for, although Macintyre was convinced it had gone as straight as an arrow, in fact it had a tendency to veer to the left a little. Not by much, but over several hundred yards, this made quite a difference. Also it had settled low in the water, only just visible on the surface, and that also made the search more difficult.

But we tracked it down eventually, embedded in a mudbank in water too shallow for us to approach in the boat.

'Now what do we do?' I asked as we gazed at it, some twenty yards away from us off our starboard bow, not daring to go any closer lest our boat also got wedged in the mud.

We spent half an hour throwing a hook tied to a rope towards it, hoping to hook the thing and then drag it towards us, but with no luck whatsoever. There was no point waiting for the tide to change, as there was none.

'Can anyone swim?' I asked.

A general shaking of heads, which I found extraordinary. It didn't surprise me that Macintyre couldn't, but I was amazed that none of his employees – brought up surrounded by water as they were – could either. I wondered how many Venetians drowned every year if this was normal amongst them.

'Why?'

'Well,' I said, now suddenly reluctant, 'I thought – just an idea, you know – that one of us could try to swim over to it. The water might be deep enough.'

'If you got stuck in the mud you'd never get out again,' Bartoli said. I didn't like that 'you'.

'Good point,' I said.

But Macintyre thought my untimely death would be a worthwhile price to pay. 'Take two ropes,' he said. 'One for the torpedo and another for you. Then we could pull both out. You can swim, can't you?'

'Me?' I said, wondering whether my father would have considered lying justifiable in these particular circumstances. On the whole he disapproved strongly of the practice. 'Well, a little.'

'Excellent,' Macintyre said, his worries all over. 'And I am deeply grateful to you, my dear sir. Deeply grateful. Although as it's your fault that the torpedo is there in the first place . . .'

Point taken. Very reluctantly I began to take off my clothes and peered over the side. I would have to let myself into the water very slowly, for fear of sinking down and becoming embedded in mud before I even started. It was cold and the water looked even colder.

Bartoli tied two ropes around my waist and grinned at me. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'We will not leave you there.'

And then I lowered myself gently into the water. It was even colder than I had feared, and I began shivering immediately. But, nothing to be done now; using a gentle breast stroke, I set off for the torpedo, trying to keep my legs as high in the water as possible.

The only danger came when I got close to the torpedo and had to stop. Then the water was only about three feet deep and my feet had slid across the mud several times; as I manoeuvred into position, I had to push down and I felt them slip into the mud properly. When I tried to hang onto the torpedo and drag them out, I realised they were stuck hard.