Leslie Charteris - The Saint Overboard

"I'll try." She smiled back at him, and went on in her natural voice as they came within earshot of Vogel: "But it must be hard for the lighthouse-keeper's wife."

"I expect it is, if she's attractive."

Simon came to a lazy halt in front of the apparatus which three seamen were manoeuvring out on to the deck — a creation like some sort of weird Martian robot drawn by an imaginative artist. The upper part of it combined torso and head in one great sphere of shining metal, from the sides of which projected arms that looked like strings of huge gleaming beads socketing together and terminating in steel pincers. It balanced on two short bulbous legs of similar construction. The spherical trunk was studded with circular quartz windows like multiple eyes, and tubes of flexible metal coiled round it from various points and connected with a six-foot drum of insulated cable on the deck.

"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."

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.