Alistair MacLean - Fear is the Key

"I'll watch them, boss," Cibatti assured him. He would, too, he'd bend his gun over the head of the first person to breathe too deeply. The general and Kennedy weren't going to pull any fast ones when Vyland and Royale were down there with me in the bathyscaphe, they'd stay there under gun-point until we returned. I was sure that Vyland would even have preferred to have the general with us in the bathyscaphe as extra security, but apart from the fact that the scaphe held only three in comfort and Vyland would never move into the least danger without his hatchetman by his side, that 180-rung descent was far too much for the old general to look at.

It almost proved too much for me, too. Before I was halfway down, my shoulder, arm and neck felt as if they were bathed in a mould of molten lead, and the waves of fiery pain were shooting up into my head and there the fire turned to darkness, and down into my chest and stomach and there they turned to nausea. Several times the pain and the darkness and the nausea all but engulfed me. I had to cling on desperately with my one good hand until the waves subsided and full consciousness returned. With every rung descended the periods of darkness grew longer and awareness shorter, and I must have descended the last thirty or forty rungs like an automaton, from instinct and memory and some strange sort of sub-conscious willpower. The only point in my favour was that, courteous as ever, they had sent me down first so that I wouldn't have to fight the temptation of dropping something heavy on their heads, and so they weren't able to see how I was suffering. By the time I had reached the platform at the bottom and the last of them — Cibatti's friend, who was to close the platform hatch — had arrived, I was at least able to stand up without swaying. My face, I think, must have been the colour of paper and it was bathed in sweat, but the illumination from the tiny lamp at the foot of that cylindrical tomb was so faint that there was little danger of Vyland or Royale detecting anything unusual. I suspected that Royale wouldn't be feeling so good after the trip either, any man who has sustained a blow or blows sufficient to put him away for half an hour isn't going to be feeling on top of his form a mere fifteen minutes after he recovers. As for Vyland, I had a faint suspicion that he was more than a little scared and that his primary concern, at the moment, would be himself and the journey that lay ahead of us.

The platform hatch was opened and we clambered down through the entrance flooding chamber of the bathyscaphe into the steel ball below. I took the greatest care to favour my bad shoulder when I was negotiating the sharp, almost right-angle bend into the observation chamber and the journey wasn't any more than agonising. I switched on the overhead light and made for the circuit boxes leaving Vyland to secure the flooding-chamber hatch. Half a minute later he wriggled into the observation chamber and shut the heavy wedge-shaped circular door behind him.

They were both suitably impressed by the profusion and confusion of the wires dangling from the circuit boxes and if they weren't equally impressed by the speed and efficiency with which, barely consulting my notes, I buttoned them all back in place again, they ought to have been. Fortunately, the circuit boxes were no higher than waist level, my left arm was now so far gone that I could use it only from the elbow downwards.

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 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 222°."

"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 fed 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.