'Pity you didn't bring her up to meet us,' Nicky suggested still obviously disbelieving Sally's story.
'You would jolly soon have asked us to send her back again if we had. Her face—well you'd never believe that anything so hideous could ever have been created. She had hardly any nose, just two holes instead of nostrils, a receding head and jaw with two rows of sharp teeth that stuck out a couple of inches beyond her bared gums. Her eyes were the worst though, they were round and unblinking and full of sheer vicious murder.'
'Had she any hair?' the McKay asked. He spoke quite seriously now and a queer look had come into his eyes. 'Fair straight bristly stuff almost like the quills on a young porcupine.'
'That's right—that's what it was like exactly but—' Sally paused and stared at him. 'How in the world did you guess?'
'By Jove! Jefferson wasn't pulling my leg after all,' the McKay exclaimed softly.
The others had arrived on deck and the gunmen now insisted on shepherding them all forward to the lounge, so Sally had to stifle her impatience to hear the McKay's explanation.
'Goodness I'm hungry,' Camilla cried as the gunmen left them. 'D'you realise people that it's getting on for five o'clock and we've had no lunch.'
'I thought of that,' Nicky told her, 'and asked them to 134
start preparing something for you when you were about half way up.'
'Nicky—you're a thoughtful darling,' she cooed taking his arm as they walked down the companion-way. 'You shall sit next to me while we eat. I suppose you fed ages ago yourself?'
'Yes, the McKay gave me a first-class licking at deck tennis and then we lunched as usual. It's amazing how agile the old boy is; I'm a pretty fit man—have to be for my job —but he can knock spots off me where hopping round's concerned.'
'He's not so old my dear, only forty something, and look at the life he's led with the battles and bad weather he's been through. It's that and his grey hair which gave him such a dried-up appearance, but he laughs as much as anybody and his "imperial carcass" as he calls it is beautifully lean and muscular—I noticed it when he was swimming the other day.'
Over their meal they talked again of the sub-human monster. It was the one enthralling topic which stood out from all the other weird and unusual sights which they had seen on their dive and the discussion of it even took their thoughts for the time being, from the fact that they were still prisoners, sentenced to exile upon a barren frozen rock.
The moment they had finished Sally cornered the McKay and carried him off to a quiet corner of the foredeck.
'Now Nelson Andy McKay,' she said, 'you're going to tell me just what you know about these extraordinary creatures.'
'Well,' he smiled, 'it's like this. When I was on leave in England I used to be very fond of running down to Brighton for the week-end. D'you know it—no, I see you don't. Brighton's a fine place, a few days there in the winter makes you feel twice your own man and then a bit more. I'd like to take you down for a couple of nights at the Magnificent—I—er beg your pardon. I suppose I shouldn't have said that.'
'You certainly should not unless your intentions are honourable.' Sally chuckled to cover her momentary confusion and added: 'I'm a nice girl and don't go away with young men for the week-end.'
'Pity—sorry I mean,' murmured the McKay. 'Anyhow, 135
thank you for the young man part. However I'm a reasonably respectable person- myself really and usually stay at the Royal Albion. That place has atmosphere and they always greet me as though I were their long lost son, besides Harry Preston who runs it is a great personality and has the biggest heart of-'
'Now, now,' Sally interrupted, 'I've heard of him even in the States—who hasn't? Let's get back to the Mermaid.'
'Oh! Ah! the Mermaid. Well there is—or was—a fish and oyster shop just round the corner from the front, in West Street, and for years, up to about nineteen-twenty-nine, if I remember, they had a strange looking brute in a glass case always on show in the window. I often used to go and look at it on different leaves and it was only about three feet long but exactly like this monster that you say you've seen today.'
'The thing we saw was only about four feet from head to tail as far as I could judge, not more than four foot six at the outside. But how amazing that they should have caught one. Were the people in the shop able to tell you anything about it?'
'Not much. It was said to have been caught in African waters and brought home by an old sea captain about a hundred years ago. When I last went to look at it a waiter in the restaurant told me that it had been sold to some doctor who has a private museum of curiosities—at Arundel I think—and it's probably there now. Of course I always looked on it as a fake, a baby seal perhaps that had been tampered with—they are round headed you know, or perhaps the forepart of a monkey grafted on to a fish's tail. But the strange thing is that I did once meet a man who said he'd seen another like it.'
'Really!' Sally exclaimed, 'tell me, do.'
'He was a chap called Jefferson, a Captain who was transferring from the West African Regiment to the West Indian Regiment after a spot of leave in England.
'When he was ordered to report for duty to his new headquarters in Jamaica, he had the sense to apply for one of these liaison trips whereby soldiers become the guests of the Navy. It's a chance for each side to swop ideas and talk a bit of shop you know, so as to have some sort of line on each other's functions and work together better in the event of war. Anyhow he was allotted to the hooker that I was taking out to the West India station and a very amusing fellow he proved to be. We were exchanging yarns one night where the talk turned to Loch Ness Monsters, and sea serpents and the like so I told him about this queer fish I'd seen at Brighton. He was mighty interested in that and told me at once that he felt certain it couldn't be a fake because he'd seen its twin in Africa—on the West Coast. It seems that he was miles from his base with a shooting party fairly near the coast and one day he went down to the shore—I've forgotten why now—and there he stumbled across one of these Mermaid things exactly the same in every particular as the one I had described. It was dead, of course, and must have been washed up in a storm. It was half rotten and stinking like blazes under the African sun when he found it but, despite that, he said that he would have given anything to have been able to take it back with him. As he tried to pick it up it fell to pieces in his hands and he was five days' march from any place where he! could have got a big jar of spirits to preserve the bits in so he just had to leave them there.'
'Why did you think he was pulling your leg though?' Sally asked.
The McKay closed one eye in a gentle wink. 'Jefferson was a decent enough fellow but he had a peculiar sense of humour and I had a sort of feeling at the time that he had invented his little story just to persuade me that the Brighton fish was not a fake after all.'
'What had he got to gain by doing that?'
'The chance that I might start airing a serious belief in Mermaids to my brother officers. He was the sort of man who would have got a lot of quiet fun out of seeing me do that and I wasn't having any. Still it seems as if he must have been telling the truth and that the Brighton beast was a genuine fish. I remember too how definitely we agreed that both these things were the most vicious looking brutes we'd ever seen.'
They remained together until cocktail time while Sally recounted, in what she felt to be totally inadequate words, her impressions of the marvellous things she had seen on her first dive. The others too had been busy discussing their experiences, comparing notes upon the wonders that they had glimpsed and persuading Nicky to accompany them on the next descent; for, having come to the conclusion that, evil as the fishmen appeared they could not possibly harm them in the bathysphere, they were all going down again the following day.
When they met for dinner, however, the topic of the wonder world that lay beneath their keel had been temporarily exhausted and the knowledge that they were still prisoners having again come uppermost in their minds, it irked an
d fretted them into stilted conversation punctuated by awkward silences.
'Well,' Camilla said the moment the stewards had left them. 'We were all pretty nervy yesterday, which was hardly to be wondered at after the shock we got in the early morning, and I think this undersea trip has at least helped to steady us up a bit, but time's passing. It's Monday evening now and on Saturday the balloon's due to go up—we've only five days left. Has anybody had any brain waves as to how we can turn the tables on these crooks?'
A gloomy silence was the only result of her enquiry.
'We've got to do something before the week is out,' Sally announced after a moment.
'You tell me what and I'll do it m'dear,' the McKay said quite seriously. 'The only thing I can think of is signalling a passing ship.'
'Admirable, my dear Captain,' smiled Count Axel, 'but, as you know the Azores he about four hundred miles to the south of the great shipping track between North Europe and New York, and we are at least seventy from Punta Delgada, the capital of these islands, where the smaller shipping calls.'
'True, O Count,' agreed the McKay, 'and although I've been keeping my weather eye on the horizon, as they say in the story books, I've raised nothing but a smudge of smoke and a couple of local fishing boats in these last two days.'
'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 138
round. 'I simply couldn't sleep a wink last night 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 139
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 tomorrow. 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 cliving—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 water1 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 forgo 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 today?' 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 today. 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 orij 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 gets 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 seperate 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 see and those 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.
They Found Atlantis lw-1 Page 15
