“The sea’s so damn big,” complained Nicky as one who has discovered a profound truth, “people don’t realise just how vast it is until they get stuck on it in some place like this.”
“Oh, think of something do,” Sally implored glancing round. “I simply couldn’t sleep a wink last night for thinking what that man Kate may do to us when he gets back.”
“He won’t come back m’dear,” the McKay tried to comfort her. “We went into all that yesterday. If the will goes through he’ll collect the cash and if it doesn’t he’s got nothing to gain by returning here, so try to put that out of your mind.”
“He won’t get the cash because I’m certain there’ll be a hitch, and directly he learns of that through the clerk they’ve bribed in Simon John’s office he will come back I tell you,” Sally persisted. “He’ll be so livid that he’ll kill the lot of us I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“Well m’dear, it’s no good anticipating things like that. We must just try to think of some way to get the better of these scoundrels before they send us to the Falklands.”
For about three minutes nobody spoke at all. Then Camilla broke the silence by exclaiming sharply: “Have none of you men any brains?”
Nicky tentatively resurrected his first idea: “We’ve got to get Slinger somehow in the next five days and prevent him from quitting this ship.”
“But how?” Camilla shot at him angrily. “That’s what I want to know?”
A miserable wrangle ensued during which wild schemes were produced by both Vladimir and Nicky only to be torn to shreds by the cold logic of Count Axel, whom in retaliation they accused of lack of endeavour to help by putting up any suggestions himself. The McKay sat all through it, placidly smoking his after-dinner cigar and watching their faces from under his beetling grey eyebrows; unable to give his support to the hot-headed proposals of the younger men or rescue the Count by putting up some new proposition. He had squeezed his wits until he was half stupid with bumping up against the succession of cul-de-sacs in which Kate’s perfectly planned coup had left them and had not the ghost of a new idea to offer.
Their anxiety had shortened all their tempers to such an extent that they were being openly rude to each other without having advanced one step nearer to a practical solution of their problem when Slinger arrived with his two attendant gunmen.
He rubbed his knobbly hands together and smiled round at them. “Well, I hope you’ve all had a nice day. I’ve been able to turn in a report of real first class interest over the ether of your dive in the bathysphere.”
“Oh, go to hell!” said Nicky rudely.
“No, only to bed when I’ve seen you all safely locked up for the night,” beamed Slinger. “But the account of the Mermaid was great—just the stuff to catch public interest. Camilla and her party will be front page news all over the world to-morrow. We couldn’t have had a finer story for our purpose if I’d thought it up myself.”
“What the devil d’you want to go and tell him about that for” the McKay snapped turning suddenly on Doctor Tisch.
The little man spread out his hands and was about to reply when Slinger answered for him.
“That’s the price the Doctor has to pay for being allowed to go down in his ball, so you mustn’t blame him for it. No stories no diving—that’s the order, and if he didn’t care to play I’d just have to fake the reports. Now drink up your drinks and off you go to bed.”
They knew from the previous night that nothing was to be gained by argument so with sullen faces they did as they were told.
Tuesday dawned bright and clear again. At nine o’clock the party gathered at the stern of the ship and the McKay duly saw them off. Despite the desperate plight they were in these excursions under water seemed to hold such a fascination for them that once any member of the party had been down nothing short of an immediate prospect of escape would have tempted them to forego a repetition of the experience. Camilla had persuaded Nicky into going with them now but Sally failed in her attempt to make the McKay change his mind.
“Besides,” he had told her, “even if I wanted to I wouldn’t. Someone must stay on deck to keep a look out in case a passing ship does come near enough for us to flag her, and I’m probably the only one among you who can semaphore,” so he had to spend the best part of the day on his own.
When the bathysphere had reached bottom it was hauled up again for two hundred feet and trawled by the ship a quarter of a mile to the south-eastward, then let down again. In that manner they cruised for nearly three hours but covered no great distance. Each halt with the raising and lowering of the sphere occupied about ten minutes since they remained for a couple of minutes at the bottom every time they settled on it. The McKay estimated the ship’s total movement to be roughly four miles. At two o’clock they asked to be drawn up to the surface, and by four were safely on board again.
“Any luck?” asked the McKay as Sally scrambled up the ladder.
She shook her head and they walked forward together without waiting for the silent, watchful gunmen to give them any order.
“It was just as wonderful as ever,” she said. “Every sort of beautiful thing that you can imagine and more. That brilliant blue light too, that I’ve told you about, that one sees going down and coming up between 100 and 800 feet, gives ten times the kick that one can get out of a couple of absinthe cocktails, but we didn’t find any traces of Atlantis. The sea floor is nearly all hard volcanic rock except for the valley of white shells that we landed on yesterday, and a nasty patch of oozy mud that we struck on our last two dips.”
“Any Mermaids to-day?” the McKay enquired.
“Yes, they seem to frequent that valley of shells, we didn’t see one anywhere else. I think it was the shock of having a living thing like that come and stare in at the window which scared us all so yesterday. They are very horrible, of course, but I wasn’t a bit frightened of them to-day. They became rather a nuisance though and so many of them came crowding round the ports at one time we couldn’t see anything else so the Doctor had to drive them off.”
“And how the devil did he do that may it please your Majesty—make a rude face at them?”
“No, stupid. The bathysphere is a wonderful piece of work you know and there are electric rods on hinges in its outer surface that can be made to stick out like the spines on a sea urchin when the current is turned on from inside.”
“I see, same principle as a diver’s electric knife that they tackle sharks and conger eels with?”
“That’s it. You can’t stab fish with these but anything that touches them get a nasty shock. They were fitted originally in case some giant squid tried to wrap its tentacles round the sphere and made it difficult to pull up.’
“How did the Mermen take this unusual treatment?”
“They simply hated it. If they had been above water and had voices I’m certain that they would have been absolutely screaming with rage. One was knocked right out and the others swam off with his body. That shows that they are not quite brute beasts or like other fish otherwise they would have eaten him I think.”
“They’ll eat you all right if anything goes wrong with that sphere, but I wouldn’t mind having a cut at that meself.”
“Nelson—Andy—McKay!”
“Did you see any more curiosities?”
“The biggest squid the Doctor’s seen so far. An awful brute, its tentacles must have been at least forty feet long—but nothing really new. Oh, except that the Mermen have horses.”
“Now come on,” he smiled at her quizzically. “You must save that for the marines!”
“Well, not horses exactly, but they ride on other fish. At least that’s what we imagine. On three separate occasions we saw one of them go by in the distance with its body lying along the top of a thing rather like a small shark and their claws dug into the back of its neck. They may have just been attacking it to kill and eat, of course, but it didn’t look like that. They don’t swim very fast themselves you se
e and these fish they perch on just stream through the water like a flash.”
“They say wonders will never cease—so I’ll take your word for it. Now what about a swim before the cocktails come round?”
“Love to,” said Sally. “I missed my dip this morning.”
“Right, skip to it m’dear, and I’ll meet you at the pool in five minutes.”
At dinner that night it was Nicky who kept the conversation going. He had fallen utterly and completely for this new world which his trip in the bathysphere had opened up to him. Towards the end of the meal he had talked himself almost into a state of artistic inspiration and suddenly announced a marvellous idea which had just entered his mind. Here was ideal material for a new super-film. A spot of drama in the bathysphere perhaps, then all the underwater stuff with squids and scenes of the Mermen. One of the Mermaids would have to be lovely, of course, a swan among the ducks, actually she’d be a star with a first class voice so that she could come up to the surface and sing opposite him, just as they’d done in the old stories about their luring sailors to their deaths. It could all be filmed by back projection except the above water level scenes, and those of the interior of the bathysphere could be shot in the studio easily enough against the background of a half sphere made of wood.
Everybody thought it was a fine idea until the McKay remarked that Nicky would have plenty of time to practice crooning his theme song to the Mermaid—in the Falklands.
An angry silence ensued after this piece of acidity and, when coffee had been served they commenced their gloomy speculations once again.
The McKay was asked if he had seen any shipping during the day, and he replied abruptly.
“You would have heard about it before this if I had—I didn’t set eyes on a masthead and I’m beginning to doubt if anything will ever come near enough to us in these unfrequented waters to be any good.”
“Oh dear, oh dear,” Sally looked across at him despairingly. “What are we going to do—we can’t just sit still and let things take their course.”
“ ’Fraid there’s no alternative m’dear until these gunmen get fed up with their job and slacken off. There’s no sign of that yet though. A better disciplined set of men I’ve never seen. I tried to speak to one this afternoon but he just quietly pointed his pistol at me and he would have used it too, I believe, if I hadn’t stopped.”
“Oh, they’re well disciplined I admit,” Camilla conceded. “Quiet as mice although they’re always close at hand. It’s extraordinary how polite they are too in stepping aside and that sort of thing when we go aft to the bathysphere, despite the fact they never open their mouths. They’re nothing like I’ve always pictured gangsters and hoodlums to be at all.”
“They are not like ordinary gangsters,” said Count Axel with conviction. “But neither is their Chief like any ordinary boss racketeer.”
Nicky nodded. “If he cleans up on Camilla’s packet he’ll be the biggest shot since Al Capone was put behind the bars.”
“He won’t—but he’ll come back,” Sally insisted, “and we’ve just got to think of some way to save ourselves before he turns up.”
The now sickening subject was miserably debated again but by the time Slinger arrived with his guards to see them to bed they had only become exceedingly irritable without having produced a single new idea.
On Wednesday all of them except the McKay went down again in the bathysphere at nine o’clock, taking with them a picnic luncheon. The ship covered about six miles in a new direction with continual stops to haul them up 200 feet before proceeding and then lowering them to the bottom again; it was nearly six o’clock when they returned to the surface but, despite the usual excitement which always seemed to possess them for an hour or two after each dive, they had nothing startling to report.
Several new varieties of deep sea creatures had appeared in the beam and they had seen more Mermen apparently riding their swift fish horses to unknown destinations, but the bottom they had traversed was all bare volcanic rock with the exception of two new shell strewn valleys, and there was nothing to indicate the presence of the lost city for which they were searching.
“D’you know you’ve been cooped up in that thing for close on nine hours,” the McKay asked Sally as they went in for their belated evening swim.
“Really,” she replied casually. “It doesn’t seem as though we had been down half that time to me. Every second of it is so vitally interesting, I even forgot to eat more than one of the sandwiches we took down so I’m just dying for dinner now.”
“But isn’t there a most appalling fug—I wonder you haven’t all got splitting headaches in spite of the oxygen that keeps you from passing out.”
“No, it’s amazing really. The air in the sphere was as fresh when we came out of it just now, as when we climbed in at nine o’clock. The Doctor allows one litre of oxygen per person per minute to escape from the tanks and that seems to do the trick.”
“How about the temperature though—isn’t it darn near freezing?”
“Not inside. It drops about six degrees in the first two-thousand feet, but after that you don’t get the benefit of the sun anyhow and it doesn’t alter so quickly, two degrees in the next thousand and only one degree for the last two-thousand to the bottom if I remember right. It was never lower than sixty-six degrees to-day, the Doctor said so as we were coming up, although outside it’s ever so much colder and if you touch the walls of the sphere they feel like ice.”
After dinner the McKay was asked if he had sighted any ships during the day and he informed his fellow prisoners that at about two o’clock a fishing boat had tried to come alongside—probably in the hope of selling some of its catch.
“I’ve had this all packed up ever since Sunday,” he added producing a flat tobacco tin from his pocket. “It contains a full report of our situation and a request for immediate assistance addressed to the Chief of Police in the Azores, also a fair sized bank note to ensure its delivery and a promise of more substantial reward to follow if help is secured for us without delay. I meant to chuck it down to one of the fishermen if such a chance occurred but unfortunately Captain Ardow was on the bridge and he ordered this little craft to sheer off through his megaphone before it was anywhere near the distance I could throw the tin.”
Sally was cheered a little to think that although he had said nothing of this idea he was exercising his wits to plan such measures which might yet lead to their release, but she started in on her old cry that Kate would return with diabolical intent in a few days time and that they had simply got to do something definite before he put in an appearance.
“Yes,” Camilla sighed, “do you realise that four whole days have gone and we haven’t thought of a single practical idea between us. In three days now my death will be announced and then we shall be really up against it. Oh, what are we going to do?”
CHAPTER XII
COUNT AXEL WINS A TRICK
The nightly gloom would have descended on them all again had not the McKay made a determined stand against it. He was utterly sick of the topic of their captivity and these endless discussions as to whether the faked will would be successfully contested and whether or no Oxford Kate would return to perpetrate some new villainy. They had, he felt, exhausted every possible avenue of speculation and now their only chance lay in waiting, with as much patience as they could muster, for some opportunity such as he had only missed by a narrow margin when the fishing boat had endeavoured to come alongside that afternoon.
Despite the fact that their uncertain future was dominating all their thoughts once more, he insisted on discussing the search for Atlantis which was now actually in progress.
Doctor Tisch rose readily enough to the bait and, after a few moments, Count Axel, guessing the McKay’s purpose, loyally came to his assistance. In a quarter of an hour the others too found themselves examining the contour chart, plotted by the Doctor, of the ocean bottom from the dives they had already made, and listening to him wit
h a revival of keenness as he poured out a mass of geological information.
He maintained that the sea floor was exactly as he had expected to find it and that he was not in the least discouraged by their lack of immediate success in locating the Atlantean city. In the cataclysm it might well have slipped laterally with the whole surface of the land a mile or so one way or another just as it had sunk downward at least a mile below its original level, but wherever it was all the buildings would have slid in the same direction and if they could sight one they would find all the others piled up as a great mass of monoliths and boulders in that immediate area.
“What proof have you got geologically that the sea bed here was ever dry land at all?” the McKay enquired.
The Doctor placed his stubby forefinger on an irregular patch of lightish blue in the centre of his map of the North Atlantic. The Azores were well inside it and it ran down towards the northern coastline of Brazil:
“Here,” he said, “is the Dolphin ridge. The whole of that must once haf been land. All geologists are agreed on that. The inequalities of its surface—mountains—valleys—could not haf been made by deposit of sediment or submarine elevation according to the known laws. They could only haf been carved by agencies acting above the water level—rain—rivers and so on.”
The McKay studied the contour chart based on the bathysphere’s dives again. “There don’t seem to be many mountains and valleys here,” he said.
“That Herr Kapitan, is local only. Here we are, as I anticipated, above a rolling plain.”
“In that case surely there’s an easier method for you to conduct your search than by bobbing up and down in the bathysphere every quarter of a mile. The range of vision from that thing must be very limited. You might be within fifty yards of a great group of stones and never suspect their existence. In fact you might criss-cross this area every day for months without actually landing on the place you’re looking for. There is an electric sounding machine fitted in this ship—why in the world don’t you make use of it?”
They Found Atlantis Page 16
