И'3fг'3fо'3fр'3fь'3f Х'3fо'3fх'3fл'3fо'3fв'3f: CONTENTS

Davy shook his head.

Ben wished he could do more for the boy, but it was too late by many years. When he was away flying (which had been most of the time since Davy was born and since he was a baby, and now when he was growing into his teens) he had never had contact with him. In Colorado, in Florida, in Canada, in Iraq, in Bahrein, and here in Egypt: it should have been his wife's work, Joannie's work, to keep the boy lively and happy.

In the early days he had tried himself to make friends with the boy. But he was very rarely at home, and the "home" was some outlandish place of Arabia which Joannie had hated and had continually compared with the clear summer evenings and cold sparkling winters and quiet college streets of that New England town. She had found nothing interesting in the mud houses of Bahrein at 110 degrees with 100 degrees humidity; nor in the iron encampments of oilfields, nor even in the dusty streets of Cairo. But all that apathy, (which had increased until it had beaten her) should be disappearing, now when she was at home. He would take the boy back to her, and hope that she would begin to take some interest in him now when she was where she wanted to be. Butshe hadn't shown much interest yet, and she'd left three months ago.

"Fix that strap between my legs," he told Davy.

He had the heavy aqualung on his back. Its two cylinders of compressed air, 56 lbs in weight, would give him the possibility to be thirty feet below for more than an hour. There was no need to go deeper. The sharks didn't.

"And don't throw any stones in the water," his father said, picking up the cylindrical watertight camera box.

"It frightens everything in sight. Even the sharks. Give me the mask."

Davy handed him the glass-fronted mask for his face. "I'll be down there about twenty minutes," Ben told him. “Then I'll come up and have lunch because the sun is already too high. You can put some stones on each side of the plane's wheels, and then sit under the wing out of the sun. Do you get that?”

"Yes," Davy said.

Davy watched the sea swallow his father and sat down to watch for a moment, as if there was something to see.But there was nothing at all, except the air-bubble breaking the surface from time to time.

There was nothing on the surface of the sea, which disappeared in the far horizon; and when he climbed up the hot sand-hill to the highest side of the sand bay, he could see nothing but the bare desert behind him.

Below, there was only the aeroplane, the little silver Auster. He felt free enough now, with no one in sight for a hundred miles, to sit inside the plane and study it. But the smell of it began to make him sick again, so he got out and poured a bucket of water around the sand where the lunch was, and then sat down to see if he could watch the sharks his father was photographing. He could see nothing below surface at all; and in the hot silence and loneliness he wondered what would happen if his father didn't come up again.

Ben was having trouble with the valve' that gave the right amount of air. He wasn't deep, only twenty feet, but the valve worked irregularly.

The sharks were there, but at a distance, just out of camera range.

"This time," he told himself, "I'm going to get three thousand dollars."

He was paid by the Commercial Television Stock Company; a thousand dollars for every five hundred feet of shark film, and a special'thousand dollars for any shot of a hammerhead.

While they ate their silent lunch he changed the film in the French camera and fixed the valve of his aqualung, and it was only when he began to open one of the bottles of lager that he remembered that he had brought nothing lighter to drink for his son.

"Did you find something to drink?" he asked Davy.

"No," Davy told him. "There is no water…"

"You'll have to drink some of this," he told Davy. "Open a bottle and try it, but don't drink too much of it."

He did not like the idea of a ten-year-old drinking beer but there was nothing else. Davy opened a bottle, took a quick drink, but swallowed it with difficulty. He shook his head and gave the bottle back to his father.

"You had better open a can of peaches," Ben said.

A can of peaches was no good in this dry noonday heat, but there was nothing else to give him. Ben lay back when he had finished eating, covered the equipment carefully with a wet towel, looked at Davy to see that he was not ill or in the sun, and went to sleep.

"Does anyone know we are here?" Davy was asking him when he was getting into the water again after his sweaty rest.

"Why do you ask that? What's the matter?"

"I don't know. I just thought…"

"Nobody knows we're here," Ben said. "We get permission from the Egyptians to fly to Hurgada; but they don't know that we come down this far. They must not know either. Remember that!"

"Could they find us?"

Ben thought the boy was afraid that they would be caught for doing something wrong. "No, no one could ever reach us either by sea or by land."

"Doesn't anyone know?" the boy asked, still worried.

"I told you," Ben said irritably. But suddenly he realised and too late that Davy was afraid not of being caught, but of being left alone. "Don't worry about it," Ben said. "You'll be all right."

"It's getting windy," Davy said in his quiet way.

"I know that. I'll be under water about half an hour. Then I'll come up and put in a new film and go down for another ten minutes. So find something to do while I'mgone. You should have brought a fishing line with you."

There were five of them now in the silver space where the coral joined the sand. He was right; The sharks came in almost immediately, smelling the blood of the meat, or feeling it somehow. He kept very still.

"Come on! Come on!" he said quietly.

They came straight for the piece of horsemeat, first the familiar tiger and then two or three smaller sharks of the same shape. They did not swim nor even propel their bodies. They simply moved forward like grey rockets. As they came to the meat they moved a little on one side and took passing bites at it.

He took films of all of it: the approach, the opening of their jaws as if they had tooth-ache, and the grabbing, messy bites that were as ugly a sight as he had seen in his life.

Like every underwater man, he hated and admired them on sight and was afraid of them.

They came back again, and his hundred feet of film was almost finished so he would have to leave all this, go up, reload, and return as quickly as he could. He looked down at the camera for a moment. When he looked up again he saw the unfriendly tiger coming at him.

"Git! Git! Git!"" he shouted through his mouthpiece.

The tiger simply rolled over in his approach, and Ben knew that he was being attacked.

The side-gashing teeth caught Ben's right arm in one sweep and passed across the other arm like a razor. Ben panicked, and in ten seconds he felt rather than saw the next attack. He felt the shark hit him along the legs, and even as he saw one of the smaller sharks come at him, he kicked out at in and rolled over backwards.

He had come to the surface ledge.

He rolled out of the water in a bleeding mess.

When he came to" he remembered at once what had happened, and he wondered how long he had been out – and what happened next.

"Davy!" he shouted.

He could hear his son's voice, but he could hardly see. He knew the physical shock had come upon him. But he saw the boy then, his terrified face looking down at him, and he realised he had only been out for a second, but he could hardly move.

"What shall I do?" Davy was crying. "Look what happened to you!"

Ben closed his eyes to think clearly for a moment. He – knew he could never fly that plane; his arms were like fire and lead, and his legs could not move, and he was not entirely conscious.