“You’re very preoccupied, Mr Tombs.”
Vogel’s insinuating accents slurred into his reverie, with a hint of malicious irony, and Simon looked up with unruffled nonchalance.
“I was just thinking what a sensation it must be for the fish when the Professor goes wading about among them,” he murmured. “It ought to make life seem pretty flat for the soles when he goes home.”
3
There were two oxygen cylinders, of the same alloy as the bathystol, unpacked from their case and being passed out on to the deck as Yule wriggled into a moth-eaten grey sweater in preparation for his descent. He tested the automatic valves himself before he shook hands all round and climbed up on to the deckhouse roof to lower himself into his armour. The door in the top of the bathystol was only just large enough to let him through, but presently he was inside, peering out of one of the portholes, exactly like a small brat at a window with his nose flattened against the pane. Then the oxygen cylinders were passed in to him, and fitted into the clamps provided for them on the interior of the sphere. After which the door was lowered into place by two men, and the clang of hammer and wrench rattled over the sea as the bolts which secured it were tightened up. To the submarine pioneer imprisoned inside the echoing globe of metal, the terrific din must have been one of the worst ordeals he had to suffer: they could see his face, through one of the quartz lenses, wrinkled in a comical contortion of agony, while he squeezed his fingers ineffectually into his ears.
Then it was finished, and the hammerers climbed down.
The Professor fitted a pair of earphones over his head and adjusted the horn-shaped transmitter on his chest, and his voice, curiously shrill and metallic, clattered suddenly out of a small loud speaker standing on a table by the rail.
“Can you hear me?”
“Perfectly. Can you hear us?”
Vogel had settled the loop of a similar transmitter round his neck, and it was he who checked up the telephone communication. The Professor grinned through his window.
“Fine! But I shall have to get this thing soundproofed if I’m going to use it much. I wish you knew what the noise was like!”
His hands moved over the racks of curious instruments with which he was surrounded, testing them one by one. Under one of the windows, on his right, there was a block of paper on a small flat shelf, for notes and sketches, with a pencil dangling over it on a length of ridiculously commonplace string. On his left, mounted on a sort of lazy-tongs on which it could be pulled out from its bracket, was a small camera. He touched a switch, and the interior of the globe was illuminated by a dim light over his notebook; at the touch of another switch, a dazzlingly powerful shaft of luminance beamed out from a quartz lens set in the upper part of the sphere like the headlight of a streamlined car. Then he slipped his arms into the sleeves of the apparatus, moved them about, and opened and closed the pincer hands. He bent his knees, and lifted first one leg and then the other in their ponderous harness. At last his voice came through the loud speaker again.
“Right! Let her go!”
“Good luck,” said Vogel, and the bathystol lifted and swung out over the side as the winch whined under the engineer’s movement of the control lever.
Peering over the side into the blue water beneath which the bathystol had disappeared, Simon Templar found himself forgetting the implications of the experiment he was watching, the circumstances in which he was there, and the menace that hung over the whole expedition. There was a quiet potency of drama in the plunge of that human sounding-line to the bottom of the sea which neutralised all the cruder theatricalities of battle, murder, and sudden death. Granted that this, according to Yule, was hardly even a preliminary canter, and that enough water did not exist under their keel to provide the makings of any sort of record—there was still the breathtaking comprehension of what should follow from this trial descent. It was the opening of a field of scientific exploration which had baffled adventurers far longer than the conquest of the air, a victory over physical limitations more spellbindingly sensational than any ascent into the stratosphere. The precarious thread of chance on which hung his own life and Loretta’s seemed temporarily of slight importance beside the steel cable which was sliding down into the depths through the concentric ripples dilating out from it across the surface.
After fifteen minutes which might have been an hour, the cable swayed with the first trace of slackness and the loud speaker suddenly squeaked: “Whoa!” The burring of the winch died away, and the man who was chalking the cable in ten-foot lengths as it slipped over the boom looked at his figures and called a guttural “Five hundred seventy-five.”
“Five hundred and seventy-five feet,” Vogel relayed impassively over the phone.
“Splendid. I’m on the bottom.” It was indescribably eerie to listen to Yule’s matter-of fact voice speaking from the eternal windless night of the sea bed. “Everything’s working perfectly. The heating arrangement makes a lot of difference—I’m not a bit cold.”
“Can you move about?”
“Yes, I think so. This bathystol is a lot lighter than the last one.”
“Could you bend down to pick anything up in it?”
There was a brief pause. Glancing at Kurt Vogel in a moment’s recollection of what this preliminary experiment stood for besides its contribution to scientific knowledge, Simon saw that the man’s face was taut and shining with the same curiously waxen glaze which he had noticed on that hair-raising search of the Corsair.
Then the Professor’s voice came through again. “Yes—I got hold of a bit of rock. Quite easy…Phew! That was a small fish nosing the window, and I nearly caught him. A bit too quick for me, though…Now I’m going to try and walk a bit. Give me another twenty feet of cable.”
The winch thrummed again for a few seconds, and then there was absolute silence on deck. The engineer wiped his hands mechanically on a piece of cotton waste, and thrust it back in his pocket. The man who had been checking off the lengths of cable put away his chalk and pulled reflectively at his ear. The carpenter tied a last linking hitch between the cable and the telephone line, and clambered down from his perch. The other seamen drew together at the stern and stood in a taciturn and inexpressive group, oddly reminiscent of a knot of miners waiting at the pit-head after a colliery explosion.
There was the same sullen stoicism, the same brooding intensity of imagination. Simon felt his pulses beating and the palms of his hands turning moist. He flashed another glance at Vogel. The pirate was standing stiff and immobile, his head thrust a little forward so that he looked more than ever like a pallid vulture, his black eyes burning vacantly into space; his face might have been carved in ivory, a macabre mask of rapt attention.
The Saint’s gaze turned to catch Loretta’s, and he saw an infinitesimal tremor brush her shoulders—twin brother to the ballet of ghostly spiders that were curveting up his own spinal ganglions. He felt exactly as if he were waiting for the initial heart-releasing crash of a tropical thunderstorm, and he did not know why. Some faint whisper of warning was trying to get through, to his brain in that utter silence of nerve-pulping expectation, but all he could hear was the stertorous breathing of Otto Arnheim and the swish and gurgle of the swell under the counter…
“I can walk quite comfortably.” The sharp stridency of the loud speaker crackled abruptly into the stillness, somehow without breaking the suspense. “I’ve taken about thirty steps in two directions. It is a bit slow, but not excessively fatiguing. There is no sign of a leak, and the reading of the humidity recorder is still normal.”
One of the seamen spat a cud of tobacco over the side, and the engineer pulled out his cotton waste and rubbed introspectively at an invisible speck on a chromium-plated cleat. Vogel’s gaunt figure seemed to grow taller as he raised his head. His eyes swept round over Arnheim, Loretta, and the Saint, with a sudden blaze of triumph.
Then the loud speaker clattered again.
“Something seems to have gone wrong
with the oxygen supply. One of the cylinders has just fizzled out, although the gauge still shows it three-quarters full. The valve must have been damaged in packing and started a slow leak. I’m turning on the other cylinder. I think you might bring me up now.”
The slight fidgeting of the cluster of seamen stopped altogether. The engineer looked round.
“Up!” snapped Vogel.
Loretta was gripping the Saint’s arm. Simon was only numbly aware of the clutch of her fingers: for a perceptible space of time his mind was half deadened with incredulity. His reactions were momentarily out of control, while his brain reeled to encompass the terrific adjustment that Vogel had sprung on him. Even then he was uncertain, unconvinced by that horrible leap of foresight—until the rumble of the winch stopped again almost as soon as it had started, and left a frightful stillness to force its meaning back into his unbelieving ears.
Vogel was watching the engineer with a faint frown.
“What is the matter?”
“A fuse, I think.”
The man left his controls and vanished down a companion, and Vogel spoke into the telephone mouthpiece in his clear flat voice.
“They’re just fixing the winch, Professor. We’ll have you up in a few minutes.” There was a short interval before Yule’s calm reply.
“I hope it isn’t anything serious. The reserve cylinder seems to be worse than the first.
The pressure is falling very rapidly. Please don’t be long.”
The Saint’s eyes were freezing into chips of ultramarine. Every instinct he possessed was shrieking at him for action, and yet he was actually afraid to move. He had straightened up off the rail, and yet some twisted doubt within him still held him from taking the first step forward. So successfully had the cunning of Kurt Vogel insinuated itself into his mind.
Professor Yule had made his descent, established the safety and mobility of the new bathystol, stooped down and picked up rocks and walked in it—proved practically everything that Vogel needed to know. True, the tests had not been made at any impressive depth, but Vogel’s previous experience of the invention might have satisfied him to dispense with that. And yet Simon was still trying to make himself believe that he was standing by, watching in silence, while Yule was being murdered in cold blood.
He saw it at once as the practically perfect crime, the incontrovertible accident—an automatic provision for fatalistic obituaries and a crop of leading articles on the martyrs of science. And yet the nerveless audacity of the conception, in the circumstances in which he was seeing it, had to fight its way up to the barricades of his reason. The inward struggle was tearing him apart, but while it went on he was gripped in a paralysis more maddening than any physical restraint. The torturing question drummed sickeningly through his brain and rooted him to the deck: Was this only another of Vogel’s satanically deep-laid traps?
Vogel had walked across to the companion down which the engineer had disappeared. He was standing there, looking down, tapping his fingers quietly on the rail. He hadn’t even seemed to look at the Saint.
“Can’t we do anything?” Loretta was pleading. Vogel glanced at her with a shrug.
“I know nothing about machinery,” he said, and then he stepped back to make way for the returning engineer.
The man’s face was perfectly wooden. His gaze flickered over the circle of expectant faces turned towards him, and he answered their unspoken questions in a blunt staccato like a rolling drum.
“I think one of the armature windings has burnt out. They’re working on it.”
Another hush fell after his words, in which Otto Arnheim emptied his lungs with a gusty sigh. Loretta was staring at the taut cable swaying slightly from the nose of the boom as the Falkenberg tilted in the swell, and her face had gone paler under the golden tan. A gull turned in the bright sky and went gliding soundlessly down a long air-slope towards the east.
Simon’s fists were clenched till the nails bit into his palms, and there was a kind of dull nausea in his stomach. And the loud speaker clacked through the silence.
“The reserve cylinder seems to be worse than the first. I don’t think it will last much longer. What is the matter?”
“We are trying to repair the winch,” Vogel said quietly.
Then he looked at the Saint. Was that intended to be a tragic appeal, or was it derision and sinister watchfulness in the black eyes? Simon felt his self-command snapping under the intolerable strain. He turned to the loud speaker and stared at it in the most vivid torment of mind that he had ever known. Was it possible that some expert manipulation of the wiring might have made it possible to cut off the Professor’s voice, while one of Vogel’s crew somewhere on the ship spoke through it instead?
“The cylinder has just given out.”
Yule’s voice came through again unfalteringly, almost casually. The Saint saw that Loretta’s eyes were also fixed on the loud speaker: her chest was scarcely moving, as if her own breathing had stopped in sympathy with what those six words must have meant to the man helplessly imprisoned in his grotesque armour five hundred feet below the bountiful air.
“Can’t you put the cable on to another winch?” asked the Saint, and hardly recognised his own voice.
“There’s no other winch on the ship that would take the load.”
“We can rig up a tackle if you’ve got a couple of large blocks.”
“It takes more than twenty minutes to raise the bathystol from this depth,” Vogel said flatly. “With a block and tackle it would take over an hour.”
Simon knew that he was right. And his brain worked on, mechanically, with its grim computation. In that confined space it would take no more than a few minutes to consume all the oxygen left in the air. And then, with the percentage of carbon dioxide leaping towards its maximum…
“I’m getting very weak and giddy.” The Professor’s voice was fainter, but it was still steady and unflinching. “You will have to be very quick now, or it will be no use.”
Something about the scene was trying to force itself into the Saint’s attention. Was he involuntarily measuring his distances and marking down positions, with the instinct of a seasoned fighter? The group of seamen at the stern. One of them by the drum of insulated cable, further up the deck. Vogel at the head of the companion. Arnheim…Why had Arnheim moved across to stand in front of the winch controls, so that his broad squat bulk hid them completely?
There was another sound trying to break through the silence—a queer jerky gasping sound. A second or two went by before the Saint traced it to its source and identified it. The terrible throaty sound of a man battling for breath, relayed like every other sound from the bathystol by the impersonal instrument on the table…
In some way it wiped out the last of his indecision. He was prepared to be wrong, prepared also not to care. Any violence, whatever it might bring, was better than waiting for his nerves to be slowly racked to pieces by that devilish inquisition.
He moved slowly forwards—towards the bulkhead where the winch controls were.
Towards Arnheim. And Arnheim did not move. The Saint smiled for the first time since the Professor had gone down, and altered his course a couple of points to pass round him. Arnheim shifted himself also, and still blocked the way. His round pouting mouth with the bruise under it opened like a trout’s.
“It isn’t easy to wait, is it?” he said.
“It isn’t,” agreed the Saint, with a cold and murderous precision, and the automatic flashed from his pocket to grind its muzzle into the other’s yielding belly. “So we’ll stop waiting. Walk backwards a little way, Otto.”
Arnheim’s jowl dropped. He looked down at the gun in his stomach, and looked up again with his eyes round as saucers and his wet mouth sagging wider. He coughed. “Really, Mr Tombs—”
“Have you gone mad?”
Vogel’s dry monotone lanced across the feeble protest with calculated contempt. And the Saint grinned mirthlessly.
“Not yet. But
I’m liable to if Otto doesn’t get out of my way in the next two seconds. And then you’re liable to lose Otto.”
“I know this is a ghastly situation.” Vogel was still speaking calmly, with the soothing and rather patronising urbanity with which he might have tried to snub a drunkard or a lunatic. “But you won’t help it by going into hysterics. Everything possible is being done.”
“One thing isn’t being done,” answered the Saint, in the same bleak voice, “and I’m going to do it. Get away from those controls. Otto, and watch me start that winch!”
“My dear Mr Tombs—”
“Behind you!”
Loretta’s desperate cry pealed in the Saint’s ears with a frantic urgency that spun him round with his back to the deckhouse. He had a glimpse of a man springing at him with an upraised belaying-pin, and his finger was tightening on the trigger when Arnheim dragged down his wrist and struck him a terrific left-handed blow with a rubber truncheon. There was an instant when his brain seemed to rock inside his skull. Then darkness.
4
“I trust you are feeling better,” said Vogel.
“Much better,” said the Saint. “And full of admiration. Oh, it was smooth, very smooth, Birdie—you don’t mind if I call you Birdie, do you? It’s so whimsical.”
He sat in an armchair in the wheelhouse, with a brandy and soda in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Both of them had been provided by Kurt Vogel. He was not even tied up. But there the free hospitality ended, for Vogel kept one hand obtrusively in his jacket pocket, and so did Arnheim.
Simon Templar allowed himself a few more moments to digest the profound smoothness of the ambush. He had been fairly caught, and he admitted it—caught by a piece of machiavellian strategy that was ingenious enough to have netted even such a wary bird as himself without disgrace. Oh, it had been exceedingly smooth; a bait that flesh and blood and human feeling could scarcely have resisted. And the climax had supervened with an accuracy of co-ordination that could hardly have been slicker if it had been rehearsed—from which he deduced that it probably had. If he had been unprepared, the seaman with the belaying-pin would have got him; if he was warned, Arnheim had his chance…
Saint Overboard (The Saint Series) Page 17
