Leslie Charteris - The Saint Overboard

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 surrounded, 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.