Saint Overboard (26 page)

“No. No. I’m afraid it’s just a
scientific toy.” Yule’s eyes wid
ened a little. “Are there any
commercial possibilities?”

The Saint hesitated. In the face of that
child-like unworldliness
he didn’t know where to begin. And he knew
that to be
caught
in the middle of an argument, into which Vogel or Arnheim
might be drawn, would be more surely fatal than
to keep
silence.

“I was only thinking——
” he began slowly; and
then he heard
footsteps behind him, and
turned his head to see Vogel and Loretta
coming out on to the deck. He shrugged vaguely, and said goodbye to the
lost chance with a grim question in his mind of
whether it had ever really come within his reach. “For instance,
could you take movies down there? They’d be
something quite
new in
travelogues.”

“I don’t know,” said Yule
seriously. “What do you think, Mr
Vogel?”

“We must ask someone with more
technical knowledge.” Vogel’s
bland glance touched on the Saint for
a moment with a
puzzling
dryness, and returned to his protegee. “Would you like
to check over the gear before lunch?”

The Professor knocked out his pipe, and they
moved aft. Arnheim
stayed in his chair in the shade, with his mouth half
open
and his hat tilted over his eyes.

Simon fell in beside Loretta and followed the
procession. It
was the first time that day that he had had a chance to
speak to her alone—Vogel had kept her close beside him from the mo
ment they left the harbour, and
Arnheim had gone puffing after
her with some
conversational excuse or other if she had ever
moved more than a couple of yards away. The Saint dropped his
cigarette, and glanced back as he picked it up. Arnheim
had not
moved, and his round stomach was distending and relaxing with
peaceful regularity … Simon rejoined the girl,
and slackened
his stride.

“Perhaps you heard how I’d been
thinking,” he said.

His hand brushed hers as they walked, and he
took her fingers
and held her back.

“Is this safe?” she asked, hardly
moving her lips.

“As safe as anything on this suicides’
picnic. It’d be more
suspicious if I didn’t try to speak to you
at all.” He pointed back
towards the turreted fortress of the Casquet lighthouse
rising
from its plinth of rocks to the south, as if he were making some
remark
about it, and said quietly: “There’s one person who may
be sitting
on the same volcano as we are; but he doesn’t know
it.”

“Professor Yule?”

“Yes. Have you thought about him?”

“Quite a lot.”

“It’s more than I’ve done. Until just now. Where does he come
in—or go out?”

“I’d like to know.”

“I wish I could tell you. We know Birdie isn’t interested in
scientific toys. When this new bathystol is passed okay, he’ll ‘ve
had all he wants out of Yule. Then he’ll get rid
of him. But how?
And how soon?”

He turned away from the lighthouse and they
walked on again. Vogel was watching them. The Saint laughed as if at some
trivial
flippancy, and said in the same sober undertone: “I’m worried.
You can’t
help liking the old boy. If anything sticky happened to
him, I’d
feel I had a share in it. If you got a chance you might
manage to
talk to him. God knows how.”

“I’ll try.” She smiled back at him, and went on in her
natural
voice as they came within earshot of
Vogel: “But it must be
hard for
the lighthouse-keeper’s wife.”

“I expect it is, if she’s
attractive.”

Simon came to a lazy halt in front of the
apparatus which
three
seamen were manoeuvring out on to the deck—a creation
like some sort of weird Martian robot drawn by an imaginative artist.
The upper part of it combined torso and head in one great
sphere of
shining metal, from the sides of which projected arms
that looked like strings of huge gleaming beads socketing to
gether
and terminating in steel pincers. It balanced on two short
bulbous legs of similar construction. The
spherical trunk was
studded with
circular quartz windows like multiple eyes, and
tubes of flexible metal coiled round it from various points and
connected with a six-foot drum of insulated cable on the deck.

“Is this the new regulation swim suit?” asked the Saint
inter
estedly. “But it doesn’t look as
if you could move about in it.”

“It’s fairly hard work,” Yule
admitted. “But it looks a great
deal heavier than it is. Of course,
the air inside helps to take off
quite a lot of the weight when it’s under
water. And then, the
whole value of the bathystol is its light
construction. Dr Beebe
went down more than three thousand feet in his bathysphere in
1934, but he was shut up in a steel ball
that half a dozen men
couldn’t have lifted. I set out with the idea of
achieving strength
by internal bracing on scientific principles instead
of solid bulk,
and this new metal helped me
by reducing the weight by nearly
seventy-five
per cent. You need something pretty strong for this
job.”

“I suppose you do,” said the Saint mildly. “I don’t
know what
sort of pressures you meet down
there——
”

“At three thousand feet it’s more than half a ton to the
square
inch. If you lowered a man in an
ordinary diving suit to that
depth, he’d be crushed into a shapeless
pulp—by nothing more
solid than this water
we’ve been cruising on.” The Professor
grinned cheerfully. “But
in the bathystol I’m nearly as comforta
ble
as I am now. You can go down in it yourself if you like, and
prove
it.”

The Saint shook his head.

“Thanks very much,” he murmured
hastily. “But nothing
could make me feel less like a hero. I’ll
take your word for it.”

He stood aside and watched the preparations
for a shallow test
dive. The ten-ton grab on the after deck, which he had dis
covered
on his nocturnal exploration, had been stripped of its tarpaulin and telescoped
out over the stern, but the claw mecha
nism had been dismantled and stowed away
somewhere out of
sight. All that was visible
now was a sort of steel derrick with an
ordinary hook dangling from its cable.

The hook was hitched into a length of chain welded to what
might have been the shoulders of the bathystol,
the nuts were
tightened up on the
circular door through which Yule would
lower
himself into the apparatus when he went down in it, one of
the engineers touched the controls of the
electric winch, and the
cumbersome
contrivance dragged along the deck and rose slug
gishly towards the end of the boom. For a moment or two it
hung
there, turning slowly like a monstrous futuristic doll; and
then it went down with the cable whirring and
vanished under
the water. Again the
engineer checked it, while Yule fussed
round like an excited urchin, and
the telescopic boom shortened
on its
runners like the horn of a snail until the wire cable came
within the grasp of a man stationed at the stern.
Three other
men picked up the insulated electric cable and passed it
along as
it unreeled from the drum, and the
man at the stern fastened it
to the
supporting cable at intervals with a deft twist of rope as
the bathystol descended.

“That’s enough.”

At last
the Professor was satisfied. He stepped back,
mopping his forehead like a temperamental impresario who has finally
obtained a rehearsal to his satisfaction, with his
hair and beard
awry and his eyes
gleaming happily. The engineer reversed the winch, and the cable spooled back
on to the drum with a deepening purr until the bathystol pushed its outlandish
head above the
surface and rose clear
to swing again at the nose of the derrick.

“Five hundred feet,” muttered Yule
proudly. “And I’d hardly even call that a trial run.” He put his
handkerchief away, and
watched anxiously while the bathystol was
lowered on to the
deck
and two men with wrenches and hammers stepped up to
unfasten the door. As soon as it was open he pushed them away, climbed
up on a chair, and hauled out the humidity recorder. He
frowned at it
for a moment, and looked up grinning. “Not a sign
of a leak, either. Now if I can walk about in it better than I
could in the old one——
”

“I take it there is no serious doubt of that?” said
Vogel, with
intent solicitude.

“Bless you, no. I’m not in the least
worried. But this new
jointing system has got to be tested in practice. It ought to make
walking much easier; unless the packing won’t
stand up to the
job. But it
will.”

“Then we shall have to try and find
something special for
lunch.”

Vogel took the Professor’s arm, and Yule
allowed himself to be torn reluctantly away from his toys. Simon caught
Loretta’s
eye with a gaze of thoughtful consideration. It would
have said
all that he could find to say without the utterance of a
single
word; but as they strolled on he spoke without shaping his
mouth.

“A smile on the face of the
tiger.”

She glanced over the turquoise spread of the
water, and said:
“After we’ve been to Madeira.”

“I suppose so.”

The sunlight slanting across his face deepened the twin wrin
kles of cold contemplation above his nose. After
the
Falkenberg
had been to
Madeira … presumably. There was deep water
there, within easy reach. The Monaco Deep, if Yule wanted a
good preliminary canter. The Cape Verde Basin,
which the Pro
fessor had already
mentioned, if he felt ambitious and they
cruised further south. Enough
water, at any rate, to establish the
potentialities
of the bathystol beyond any shadow of doubt.
Which was unquestionably what Vogel wanted… . But long
before then, if the photographer in Dinard hadn’t
fogged his
plates, and Vogel’s
intelligence service was anything like as
efficient as his other departments, the Saint’s own alibi of apolo
getically intruding innocence would have been
blown sky-high,
and there would be nothing to stop the joyride
terminating ac
cording to the old Nigerian
precedent. Unless Vogel himself had been disposed of by that time, which would
have been the Saint’s
own optimistic prophecy… . And yet the
indefensible appre
hension stayed with him
through the theatrically perfect service
of luncheon, to sour the lobster cocktail and embitter the exqui
sitely melting perfection of the quails in aspic.

He put it aside—thrust it away into the
remoter shelves of his
mind. Just then there seemed to be more
urgent dangers to be met halfway. It was one of those mental sideslips which
taunt
the fallibility of human concentration.

“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 noncha
lance.

“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 motheaten grey sweater
in preparation for his descent. He tested the automatic valves him
self before he shook hands all round and climbed
up on to the
deckhouse roof to lower
himself into his armour. The door in the
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
Ms ears.