Saint Overboard (27 page)

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 communica
tion. 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 move
ment 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 breath-taking 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 impas
sively 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 mo
ment’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 me
chanically 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
bis ear. The carpen
ter 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 inten
sity 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 ex
pectation;
but all he could hear was the stentorous 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 with
out 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 alto
gether. 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 en
compass 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 cun
ning
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 im
pressive 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 incon
trovertible
accident—an automatic provision for fatalistic obit
uaries 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
an
swered 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 emp
tied 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 intolera
ble 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?