'You're right, Boss—you said a mouthful,' Bozo came out of his coma and unexpectedly backed Nicky up. 'My folks was religious too—and what I've got to answer for's enough. Yes, Sir, I'm with you all the time.'
The McKay would have clung to his life like a limpet had there been the remotest hope of retaining it but, since they had to die, he preferred the Count's way out to the horror of madness and torture of suffocation. He too possessed deep religious convictions although he was not given to talking of them but the Doctor expressed his belief exactly when he said:
'I am no atheist. In fact I was educated for the Lutheran Church, ordained, and practised as a Minister until I was twenty-eight. Only my intense interest in archaeology and an offer of employment on an expedition to Assyria tempted me to resign from the Ministry; but I haf always believed that God's mercy has no limitations. I am unorthodox perhaps but I cannot think He would withhold his pardon from anyone who shortened their life by an hour or two when in such a hopeless predicament as ourselves.'
Camilla settled it. She began to scream and beg them frantically not to do anything—yet.
Vladimir declared jumpily that he would shoot anyone who attempted to go against Camilla's wishes, and they settled down again to wait for death in grim silence.
The atmosphere was so tense that they could almost feel each other thinking. Sally had not spoken for a long time now and a shivering fit took possession of her. The McKay felt her slim body trembling beneath his arm and once more he racked his brains for some way to comfort her.
'Look here,' he said suddenly. 'I'm no story teller but oxygen or no oxygen I'm going to tell you a story m'dear. It's the only one I can think of at the moment because my old brain's gone woolly, and you'll have heard it years ago but if you'll listen a bit maybe it will give you something to think about.'
The others turned towards him in the darkness and he began:
'Once upon a time there were three sisters, or rather two of them were sisters and the other was a stepsister if I remember. Anyhow two of them were much older than the other one and they were both very ugly, and lazy and bad tempered, while the youngest was a beautiful young girl like you.
Sally stopped shivering. Just those four first words: 'Once upon a time,* had caught her back from that maze of dread speculations; yet she was not listening to him as he went on; she was thinking of one thing only now. The full realisation that she loved him with all her heart and soul, had just come upon her. He might be nearly twice her age and grey haired, but he had all a young man's virility and in his heart lay youth tempered by a great gentleness. That his concern for her was so great that he could put aside the thought of his own approaching end in an endeavour to distract her, like a little child, with a fairy story touched her more deeply than any experience she had ever known. She lowered her head against his chest and burst into a violent storm of tears.
'What is it then. What is it Sally m'dear?' he asked tenderly as he stroked her hair. 'Listen to the story I'm telling you and try and forget everything else. Now these three sisters lived-'
'The fish!' exclaimed the Doctor suddenly. 'What is the matter with the fish?'
They all roused and stared out of the portholes. Something unusual was obviously happening outside. The lights had ceased to dance, every single one of them was streaming now in one direction, back from the open space, perhaps upon the western verge of the Atlantean city, where the bathysphere had fallen, towards the shelter of the ruins.
For a moment the prisoners in the bathysphere watched in wonder. Lights of every size and colour streaked by. There could be no doubt whatever that these creatures of the deep were fleeing in terror of their lives, just like animals before a forest fire, and the danger they feared was coming up out of the deeper waters to the westward.
The numbers of lights increased. The things outside dashed themselves against the fused' quartz windows in their frantic panic to escape. They seemed to burst, scattering clouds of luminous food and multitudes of coloured stars. The press became so great that, for the first time since the electric wires had broken, the group in the sphere could see each other's faces faintly illuminated in the unearthly radiance caused by this multitude of terrified creatures.
Then the lights dimmed, and the cataract of racing flashes ceased, yet a number of bright blotches hovered at the portholes bobbing feebly up and down as though their owners were caught in the crush and could not escape.
The Doctor switched on his torch and by it they saw that a solid writhing mass of fish and squids and prawns were now jammed up against the windows. Not an inch of water showed and the surface of each port was covered completely by wriggling tentacles and fins. Suddenly the bathysphere began to move.
'Gott in Himmel!' exclaimed the Doctor. 'What now!'
Slowly but surely the sphere moved sideways and was drawn along the surface of the ocean bed surrounded by the press of captive fish. The party sat tight and held their breath, utterly bewildered by this extraordinary phenomenon. They were dragged about a hundred yards, as far as they could judge, then the sphere tilted gently and fell over sideways.
Sally screamed—Camilla fainted—the others clutched wildly at each other as they were flung sprawling against the side of the sphere which held the searchlight and had now become its bottom. Yet there was no violent shock as they turned over. The sphere seemed to be sinking as though it had fallen over a cliff, and the second they had sorted themselves out the Doctor flashed his torch on the ports.
Nothing was to be seen. Only the mass of writhing creatures still pressed against the windows. For nearly fifteen minutes the feeling that they were sinking, first gently, then quite fast, then gently again, continued while they strove to revive Camilla and examined the damage which had been done. Fortunately the tanks were safe and still functioning, only the now useless lighting apparatus had been smashed. Camilla came round and went off again. Sally and Nicky were babbling half hysterically while the rest were wrought up to an almost unendurable pitch of excitement, although they were too staggered even to hazard an opinion as to what was going on outside.
Suddenly they knew that they had ceased moving yet their downward motion had been checked so gently that it was almost as though they were attached to the cable and only halting for one of the hose ties to be put on. There was a pause of about two minutes then, whatever held them pressed in the mass of fish, began to haul them in a fresh direction.
They started to bump a little and the Doctor cast anxious 209
eyes on the tanks where the spotlight of the torch showed them tilted at an angle. The sphere rolled over again, but not very much this time, only sufficient to make it necessary for them to change the place where they were crouching to a few feet nearer the door. The jolting ceased and they were sinking once more—still further into the abyss.
'What the thunderin' blazes is happening,' growled the McKay. It was the first coherent remark which emerged from the almost perpetual cries of fear and astonishment following their upset.
'We have been swallowed with these many fish,' said Vladimir. 'We are now as that poor Joshua in the belly of a whale.
'I do not think so,' the Doctor shook his head. 'We know little yet about life in the great deeps but it is quite unreasonable to suppose the existence of any such gigantic species. A swallow large enough to pass the bathysphere as part of a single gulp would need a submarine monster as great as a two-thousand-ton ship—I do not believe it possible.
'Besides,' Count Axel added, 'we were dragged along the sea door, sank several hundred feet, were dragged again, and are now sinking once more. Our movements would be quite different if we were in the stomach of some undreamed of Leviathan.'
As he ceased speaking they came to rest as gently as before. There was another pause then, for the third time the sphere was dragged sideways. They had to move again. The door was now almost at the bottom of the sphere, the ports were tilted upward at an angle in the slope of what was now the ceiling. For ten mi
nutes the sphere moved forward, jerkily at times, while they lay or crouched among the broken canvas chairs and debris in its bottom.
It halted again and remained quite still. Then the blotches of light at the portholes began to move more freely. The Doctor lifted the beam of his torch from the cylinders to the ports and they saw that the pressure upon the great shoal of living creatures outside had been released. They were no longer jammed tight, but a seething mass leaping and thrashing in the water. After a moment bubbles appeared then foam and a little wavelet splashed against the fused quartz. The fish slid downwards and disappeared.
A water line now showed in the top sections of the ports then sank jerkily until that too was gone.
The Doctor stumbled to his feet and held his big torch close to one of the windows, the others craned their necks, standing on the broken chairs, to peer out over his shoulders.
Outside it was pitch dark and the beam did not carry to any roof above them, but in front and a little higher than the level of the sphere they could just make out a wall that had a flat even surface and seemed like the side of a stone quay. All about them were a solid mass of squirming fish and squids of every colour and variety which stretched right up to the wall and on either side of them as far as they could see. The bathysphere was half buried in them right up to the lower edges of its ports which were now almost at the top of the sphere.
'Where in heaven's name are we?' gasped Nicky.
'I don't know and I don't care!' exclaimed the McKay with sudden excitement, 'but there's air outside—air. Come on! We've got to get out of here.'
Count Axel sighed, then he said slowly, 'I'm afraid you've forgotten my friend that we are bolted in. Our two ton door is screwed down from outside. Escape is quite impossible and our oxygen will only last us just over another hour.'
Trapped in the Sphere
Count Axel's sober statement brought them crashing down from wild heights of excitement to a new level of despair. It was true. They were still sealed in the sphere and any attempt to break out of it must prove as hopeless as if they had been locked into the strongest vault under the Bank of England.
For a moment they were frozen into silence then Nicky cried: 'Look—look! There's something moving on that wall out there!'
As they stared a bulky greyish mass appeared out of the darkness and they saw they were right in supposing the wall to form a quay, for the mass came forward and it was recognisable as a solid block of countless human figures.
'Saved by Crikey!' exclaimed Vladimir. 'Camilla! We are saved I say 1'
She had come out of her faint again and, picking her up bodily, he held her so that she could see out of the port. A fresh wave of tremulous hope surged through the others. If these were human beings they would surely find some way to unscrew the door bolts of the sphere and let its occupants out.
But how could they be? In breathless silence Camilla and her friends pressed their faces to the windows and watched the advancing mob. They appeared human, yet they moved in darkness. No trace of light except the beam of the Doctor's torch and the luminosity of the creatures packed tight about the sphere, showed in this great undersea cavern; and the newcomers carried neither flares nor torches. Moreover, they wore no clothes or ornaments;
everyone of them was stark na ked and their bodies were an unhealthy greyish white.
'They're not human,' whispered Sally. 'And they are horrible—horrible.'
The McKay felt too that there was something utterly repulsive about that crowd of nude leprous looking bodies huddled on the quay, but he was not so ready to exclude them from the human race. They were a small people, the tallest among the males being only about five feet in height, but they certainly were not monkeys and each of them held a long spearlike weapon in his hand. Their bodies were hairless except for the pale, lank, almost white hair which grew sparsely on their narrow skulls. Their faces were curiously uniform with large parroty, wide nostrilled noses, heavy lidded, almost colourless eyes, large mouths filled with white even gleaming teeth, and weak underhung jaws, yet they had nothing of that savage look which had characterised the faces of the Mermen.
No leader appeared to control or direct their movements. They pressed forward, then sideways, all together, like a herd which scents danger or fresh pasture, in a wind. One of them slipped and fell from the quayside into the mass of fish. A great squid reached out a tentacle and curled it, snake-like, round his neck.
The others made no attempt to help him but stood there gibbering and twitching their heads from side to side, as though they knew what had happened without glancing down, but were only concerned with acute anxiety for themselves.
The one who had fallen fought and struggled, striving to break the grasp of the tentacle with one stubby claw-like hand and stabbing frantically with his long sharp spear, but the squid reached up three more tentacles and, wrapping them round his arms and torso, dragged him down.
It was all over in a moment, almost before Nicky had time to gasp: 'Why don't they help him?' and Sally moaned.
Upon the quayside the great mob had steadied. The front rank threw themselves upon their knees, the others pressed up behind them leaning across their shoulders then, as though upon a common impulse rather than at any word of command, they all began to stab downward with their spears, striking again and again at the heaving fish below.
The torrent of blows was so fast and regular that nothing could live under it; the long spears reached right down to the bottom of the harbour and soon even the tentacles of the squids had ceased to wave, for every creature within six feet of the quay was dead—stabbed through and through a dozen times.
Suddenly, like a herd once more, the whole mob leapt from the quay wall into the slippery sea of carcasses and attacked the still living creatures further out with the same rhythmic stabbing. A spear struck the bathysphere, another and another. The party inside it could not hear the clang of the blows upon the metal but they realised then, that this strange race of half men was blind.
As the mob advanced, wading waist high in the slimy shoal of dead sea creatures, a small fat woman with enormous hanging breasts stumbled head first against the bathysphere. She opened her mouth in what appeared to be a scream and, almost instantly the mouths of all the others opened too, then, as one man, they turned and fled. Floundering, slipping, thrusting each other aside they fought their way back to the quayside, and scrambled on to it. There they turned again and crouched in a great huddle, their spears upraised, staring blindly out towards the sphere.
'We'll get no help from them,' declared the McKay bitterly. 'They're wild things and blind I think. Anyhow they wouldn't know a rivet from a cocoanut.'
'Is there no way we can get out ourselves,' Sally asked with sudden desperation.
'None I fear, Fraulein,' declared the Doctor gently. 'The door is riveted down and the bottom—well, that is impossible.'
'What's that 1' snapped the McKay. 'Is there an entrance in the bottom?'
'No entrance Herr Kapitan but the bottom of the sphere is not solid as the sides. It has four layers of steel plates with supports between which will resist equal pressure. Each can be unscrewed in turn to enable us to get at the machinery which operates the claws, the dredges, and the drill.'
'Why the hell didn't you tell us that before?' the McKay blazed out at him.
'I never thought to see the bathysphere upon its side 214
which alone makes such exit possible,' protested the Doctor, 'and, since our arrival here, our every moment has been taken by watching these strange people; besides it would take two men a whole day's hard work to remove enough of the machinery to get out that way and we have oxygen to last us now an hour and a half only.'
'Reduce the oxygen supply to half. Show a light on the bottom, and give me a screw driver,' ordered the McKay.
'It is useless, Herr Kapitan,' the Doctor's voice was apathetic. 'If we had six and a half hours oxygen as when we were first cut off it might be done. But now—no. Yo
u will tear your fingers for nothing. The hundreds of screws and joints to be-'
'Do as I tell you—I'm taking charge here now.' The McKay pulled another torch from his pocket and thrust it into Sally's hand. 'Take that. I brought it on the off chance the lights might fail. The more light we have now the better.
The Doctor shrugged. 'I have a dozen torches here in case of need but this attempt is useless. We shall be dead before-'
'Stop talking, damn you. It uses oxygen and every ounce of that is precious now. Issue four torches and keep the rest in reserve. Everyone's to remain silent till we're out. Nicky! Axel! Bozo! you're to remain in the back of the sphere, away from its bottom. You two girls hold the torches—give you something to think about. Vladimir, you're the strong man. Come and help move the plates as we get them up. Doctor, how many screwdrivers have you got in your chest?
'One large—one small.'
'Good, give me the large one then—thanks. Use the other yourself. You know the machinery. Silence now—get busy.'
They obeyed him without questioning his commands. He stripped off his coat, flung it down to kneel on and began to attack the screws in the sphere's wooden floor.
In five minutes they had torn away the central floor boards but it took ten to remove the first layer of steel plates which was immediately beneath and only then did the McKay realise that the Doctor had real reason for his pessimism. They were faced with literally hundreds of small girders and slender rods all criss-crossed and mixed up with wheels. It looked a sheer impossibility to get them out under two hours at least and there were two more similar barriers to cross before they could reach the outer air.
The Doctor had already produced his whole set of tools and spread them out on the underside of the sphere. With these and frantic fingers they attacked the jungle of steel mechanism.
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