Leslie Charteris - The Saint Overboard

"They're just fixing the winch, Professor. We'll have you up in a few minutes."

There was a short interval before Yule's calm reply.

"I hope it isn't anything serious. The reserve cylinder seems to be worse than the first. The pressure is falling very rapidly. Please don't be long."

The Saint's eyes were freezing into chips of ultramarine. Every instinct he possessed was shrieking at him for action, and yet he was actually afraid to move. He had straightened up off the rail, and yet some twisted doubt within him still held him from taking the first step forward. So successfully had the cunning of Kurt Vogel insinuated itself into his mind.

Professor Yule had made his descent, established the safety and mobility of the new bathystol, stooped down and picked up rocks and walked in it — proved practically everything that Vogel needed to know. True, the tests had not been made at any impressive depth; but Vogel's previous experience of the invention might have satisfied him to dispense with that. And yet Simon was still trying to make himself believe that he was standing by, watching in silence, while Yule was being murdered in cold blood.

He saw it at once as the practically perfect crime, the incontrovertible accident — an automatic provision for fatalistic obituaries and a crop of leading articles on the martyrs of science. And yet the nerveless audacity of the conception, in the circumstances in which he was seeing it, had to fight its way up to the barricades of his reason. The inward struggle was tearing him apart, but while it went on he was gripped in a paralysis more maddening than any physical restraint. The torturing question drummed sickeningly through his brain and rooted him to the deck: Was this only another of Vogel's satanically deep-laid traps?

Vogel had walked across to the companion down which the engineer had disappeared. He was standing there, looking down, tapping his fingers quietly on the rail. He hadn't even seemed to look at the Saint.

"Can't we do anything?" Loretta was pleading.

Vogel glanced at her with a shrug.

"I know nothing about machinery," he said; and then he stepped back to make way for the returning engineer.

The man's face was perfectly wooden. His gaze flickered over the circle of expectant faces turned towards him, and he answered their unspoken questions in a blunt staccato like a rolling drum.

"I think one of the armature windings has burnt out. They're working on it."

Another hush fell after his words, in which Otto Arnheim emptied his lungs with a gusty sigh. Loretta was staring at the taut cable swaying slightly from the nose of the boom as the Falkenberg tilted in the swell, and her face had gone paler under the golden tan. A gull turned in the bright sky and went gliding soundlessly down a long air-slope towards the east.

Simon's fists were clenched till the nails bit into his palms, and there was a kind of dull nausea in his stomach. And the loud speaker clacked through the silence.

"The reserve cylinder seems to be worse than the first. I don't think it will last much longer. What is the matter?"

"We are trying to repair the winch," Vogel said quietly.

Then he looked at the Saint. Was that intended to be a tragic appeal, or was it derision and sinister watchfulness in the black eyes? Simon felt his self-command snapping under the intolerable strain. He turned to the loud speaker and stared at it in the most vivid torment of mind that he had ever known. Was it possible that some expert manipulation of the wiring might have made it possible to cut off the Professor's voice, while one of Vogel's crew somewhere on the ship spoke through it instead?

"The cylinder has just given out."

Yule's voice came through again unfalteringly, almost casually. The Saint saw that Loretta's eyes were also fixed on the loud speaker: her chest was scarcely moving, as if her own breathing had stopped in sympathy with what those six words must have meant to the man helplessly imprisoned in his grotesque armour five hundred feet below the bountiful air.

"Can't you put the cable on to another winch?" asked the Saint, and hardly recognised his own voice.

"There's no other winch on the ship that would take the load."

"We can rig up a tackle if you've got a couple of large blocks."

"It takes more than twenty minutes to raise the bathystol from this depth," Vogel said flatly. "With a block and tackle it would take over an hour."

Simon knew that he was right. And his brain worked on, mechanically, with its grim computation. In that confined space it would take no more than a few minutes to consume all the oxygen left in the air. And then, with the percentage of carbon dioxide leaping towards its maximum…

"I'm getting very weak and giddy." The Professor's voice was fainter, but it was still steady and unflinching. "You will have to be very quick now, or it will be no use."

Something about the scene was trying to force itself into the Saint's attention. Was he involuntarily measuring his distances and marking down positions, with the instinct of a seasoned fighter? The group of seamen at the stern. One of them by the drum of insulated cable, further up the deck. Vogel at the head of the companion. Arnheim… Why had Arnheim moved across to stand in front of the winch controls, so that his broad squat bulk hid them completely?

There was another sound trying to break through the silence — a queer jerky gasping sound. A second or two went by before the Saint traced it to its source and identified it. The terrible throaty sound of a man battling for breath, relayed like every other sound from the bathystol by the impersonal instrument on the table…

In some way it wiped out the last of his indecision. He was prepared to be wrong; prepared also not to care. Any violence, whatever it might bring, was better than waiting for his nerves to be slowly racked to pieces by that devilish inquisition.

He moved slowly forwards — towards the bulkhead where the winch controls were. Towards Arnheim. And Arnheim did not move. The Saint smiled for the first time since the Professor had gone down, and altered his course a couple of points to pass round him. Arnheim shifted himself also, and still blocked the way. His round pouting mouth with the bruise under it opened like a trout's.

"It isn't easy to wait, is it?" he said.

"It isn't," agreed the Saint, with a cold and murderous precision; and the automatic flashed from his pocket to grind its muzzle into the other's yielding belly. "So we'll stop waiting. Walk backwards a little way, Otto."

Arnheim's jowl dropped. He looked down at the gun in his stomach, and looked up again with his eyes round as saucers and his wet mouth sagging wider. He coughed.

"Really, Mr Tombs—"

"Have you gone mad?"

Vogel's dry monotone lanced across the feeble protest with calculated contempt. And the Saint grinned mirthlessly.

"Not yet. But I'm liable to if Otto doesn't get out of my way in the next two seconds. And then you're liable to lose Otto."

"I know this is a ghastly situation." Vogel was still speaking calmly, with the soothing and rather patronising urbanity with which he might have tried to snub a drunkard or a lunatic. "But you won't help it by going into hysterics. Everything possible is being done."

"One thing isn't being done," answered the Saint, in the same bleak voice, "and I'm going to do it. Get away from those controls, Otto, and watch me start that winch!"

"My dear Mr Tombs—"

"Behind you!"

Loretta's desperate cry pealed in the Saint's ears with a frantic urgency that spun him round with his back to the deckhouse. He had a glimpse of a man springing at him with an upraised belaying-pin; and his finger was tightening on the trigger when Arnheim dragged down his wrist and struck him a terrific left-handed blow with a rubber truncheon. There was an instant when his brain seemed to rock inside his skull. Then darkness.