Fear is the Key (26 page)

Kennedy didn't look scared and shaken, he
didn't look anything at all except the perfect
chauffeur. But Royale wasn't any more fooled
than I was. He turned to Cibatti and his side-kick
and said: ‘Just go over this bird here, will you,
and see that he's not wearing anything that he
shouldn't be wearing.'

Vyland gave him a questioning look.

‘He may be as harmless as he looks – but I doubt
it,' Royale explained. ‘He's had the run of the rig
this afternoon. He might just possibly have picked
up a gun and if he has he might just possibly get
the drop on Cibatti and the others when they
weren't looking.' Royale nodded to the door in
the convex wall. ‘I just wouldn't fancy climbing
a hundred feet up an iron ladder with Kennedy
pointing a gun down the way all the time.'

They searched Kennedy and found nothing.
Royale was smart all right, you could have put in
your eye all the bits he missed. But he just wasn't
smart enough. He should have searched me.

‘We don't want to hurry you, Talbot,' Vyland
said with elaborate sarcasm.

‘Right away,' I said. I sent down the last of
the anaesthetic, frowned owlishly at the notes
in my hand, folded them away in a pocket and
turned towards the entrance door to the pillar. I
carefully avoided looking at Mary, the general or
Kennedy.

Vyland touched me on my bad shoulder and if
it hadn't been for the anaesthetic I'd have gone
through the deckhead. As it was I jumped a couple
of inches and the two lumberjacks on my shoulder
started up again, sawing away more industriously
than ever.

‘Getting nervous, aren't we?' Vyland sneered.
He nodded at a mechanism on the table, a simple
solenoid switch that I'd brought up from the
scaphe. ‘Forgotten something, haven't you?'

‘No. We won't be needing that any more.'

‘Right, on your way. You first … Watch them
real close, Cibatti, won't you?'

‘I'll watch them, boss,' Cibatti assured him. He
would, too, he'd bend his gun over the head
of the first person to breathe too deeply. The
general and Kennedy weren't going to pull any
fast ones when Vyland and Royale were down
there with me in the bathyscaphe, they'd stay
there under gun-point until we returned. I was
sure that Vyland would even have preferred to
have the general with us in the bathyscaphe as
extra security, but apart from the fact that the
scaphe held only three in comfort and Vyland
would never move into the least danger without
his hatchetman by his side, that 180-rung descent
was far too much for the old general to look at.

It almost proved too much for me, too. Before
I was halfway down, my shoulder, arm and neck
felt as if they were bathed in a mould of molten
lead, and the waves of fiery pain were shooting
up into my head and there the fire turned to
darkness, and down into my chest and stomach
and there they turned to nausea. Several times
the pain and the darkness and the nausea all but
engulfed me. I had to cling on desperately with my
good hand until the waves subsided and full consciousness
returned. With every rung descended
the periods of darkness grew longer and awareness
shorter, and I must have descended the last thirty
or forty rungs like an automaton, from instinct and
memory and some strange sort of subconscious
willpower. The only point in my favour was that,
courteous as ever, they had sent me down first
so that I wouldn't have to fight the temptation of
dropping something heavy on their heads, and so
they weren't able to see how I was suffering. By
the time I had reached the platform at the bottom
and the last of them – Cibatti's friend, who was
to close the platform hatch – had arrived, I was at
least able to stand up without swaying. My face,
I think, must have been the colour of paper and
it was bathed in sweat, but the illumination from
the tiny lamp at the foot of the cylindrical tomb
was so faint, that there was little danger of Vyland
or Royale detecting anything unusual. I suspected
that Royale wouldn't be feeling so good after the
trip either, any man who has sustained a blow or
blows sufficient to put him away for half an hour
isn't going to be feeling on top of his form a mere
fifteen minutes after he recovers. As for Vyland,
I had a faint suspicion that he was more than a
little scared and that his primary concern, at the
moment, would be himself and the journey that
lay ahead of us.

The platform hatch was opened and we clambered
down through the entrance flooding chamber of the
bathyscaphe into the steel ball below. I took the
greatest care to favour my bad shoulder when I
was negotiating the sharp, almost right-angle bend
into the observation chamber and the journey
wasn't any more than agonizing. I switched on
the overhead light and made for the circuit boxes
leaving Vyland to secure the flooding-chamber
hatch. Half a minute later he wriggled into the
observation chamber and shut the heavy wedge-
shaped circular door behind him.

They were both suitably impressed by the profusion
and confusion of the wires dangling from the
circuit boxes and if they weren't equally impressed
by the speed and efficiency with which, barely
consulting my notes, I buttoned them all back in
place again, they ought to have been. Fortunately,
the circuit boxes were no higher than waist level,
my left arm was now so far gone that I could use
it only from the elbow downwards.

I screwed home the last lead, shut the box covers
and started to test all the circuits. Vyland watched
me impatiently; Royale was watching me with a
face, which, in its expressionlessness and battered
appearance, was a fair match for the great Sphinx
of Giza; but I remained unmoved by Vyland's
anxiety for haste – I was in this bathyscaphe too
and I was in no mind to take chances. Then
I turned on the control rheostats for the two
battery-powered engines, turned to Vyland and
pointed at a pair of flickering dials.

‘The engines. You can hardly hear them in here
but they're running just as they should. Ready
to go?'

‘Yes.' He licked his lips. ‘Ready when you are.'

I nodded, turned the valve control to flood the
entrance chamber, pointed to the microphone
which rested on a bracket at the head-height
between Royale and myself and turned the wall-
switch to the ‘on' position. ‘Maybe you'd like to
give the word to blow the air from the retaining
rubber ring?'

He nodded, gave the necessary order and replaced
the microphone. I switched it off and waited.

The bathyscaphe had been rocking gently, through
maybe a three-or four-degree arc in a fore-and-
aft line when suddenly the movement ceased
altogether. I glanced at the depth gauge. It had
been registering erratically, we were close enough
to the surface for it to be affected by the great
deep-troughed waves rolling by overhead, but
even so there could be no doubt that the average
depths of the readings had perceptibly increased.

‘We've dropped clear of the leg,' I told Vyland.
I switched on the vertical searchlight and pointed
through the Plexiglas window at our feet. The
sandy bottom was now only a fathom away. ‘What
direction, quick – I don't want to settle in that.'

‘Straight ahead, just how you're pointing.'

I made the interlock switch for the two engines,
advanced to half-speed and adjusted the planes to
give us the maximum forward lift. It was little
enough, not more than two degrees: unlike the
lateral rudder the depth planes on the bathyscaphe
gave the bare minimum of control, being quite
secondary for the purpose of surfacing and diving.
I slowly advanced the engines to maximum.

‘Almost due south-west.' Vyland was consulting
a slip of paper he had brought from his pocket.
‘Course 222°.'

‘True?'

‘What do you mean “true”, he snapped angrily.
Now that he had his wishes answered and the
bathyscaphe a going concern Vyland didn't like it
at all. Claustrophobic, at a guess.

‘Is that the true direction or is it for this compass?'
I asked patiently.

‘For this compass.'

‘Has it been corrected for deviation?'

He consulted his slip of paper again. ‘Yes. And
Bryson said that as long as we took off straight in
this direction the metal in the rig's legs wouldn't
affect us.'

I said nothing. Bryson, the engineer who had
died from the bends, where was he now? Not a
couple of hundred feet away, I felt pretty certain.
To drill an oil well maybe two and a half miles deep
they'd have needed at least six thousand bags of
cement and the two bucketsful of that needed to
ensure that Bryson would remain at the bottom of
the ocean until long after he was an unidentifiable
skeleton wouldn't even have been missed.

‘Five hundred and twenty metres,' Vyland was
saying. ‘From the leg we've left to the plane.' The
first mention ever of a plane. ‘Horizontal distance,
that is. Allowing for the drop to the bottom of the
deep, about six hundred and twenty metres. Or so
Bryson said.'

‘Where does this deep begin?'

‘About two-thirds of the distance from here. At
a hundred and forty feet – almost the same depth
as the rig is standing in. Then it goes down about
thirty degrees to four hundred and eighty feet.'

I nodded, but said nothing. I had always heard
that you couldn't feel two major sources of pain
at the same time but people were wrong. You
could. My arm, shoulder and back were a wide
sea of pain, a pain punctuated by jolting stabbing
spear-points of agony from my upper jaw. I didn't
feel like conversation, I didn't feel like anything at
all. I tried to forget the pain by concentrating on
the job on hand.

The tow-rope attaching us to the pillar was, I
had discovered, wound round an electrically driven
power drum. But the power was unidirectional
only, for reeling in the wire on the return journey.
As we were moving just then it was being paid out
against a weak spring carrying with it the insulated
phone cable which ran through the centre of the
wire, and the number of revolutions made by the
drum showed on a counter inside the observation
chamber, giving us a fairly accurate idea of the
distance covered. It also gave us an idea of our
speed. The maximum the bathyscaphe could do
was two knots, but even the slight drag offered
by the tow-cable paying out behind reduced this
to one knot. But it was fast enough. We hadn't
far to go.

Vyland seemed more than content to leave the
running of the bathyscaphe to me. He spent most
of his time peering rather apprehensively out of a
side window. Royale's one good cold unwinking
eye never left me; he watched every separate tiny
movement and adjustment I made but it was only
pure habit; I think his ignorance of the principles
and controls of the bathyscaphe were pretty well
complete. They must have been: even when I
turned the intake control of the carbon dioxide
absorption apparatus right down to its minimum
operating figure it meant nothing to him.

We were drifting slowly along about ten feet
above the floor of the sea, nose tilted slightly
upwards by the drag of the wire, our guide-rope
dangling down below the observation chamber
and just brushing the rock and the coral formations
or dragging over a sponge-bar. The darkness of
the water was absolute, but our two searchlights
and the light streaming out through the Plexiglas
windows gave us light enough to see by. One
or two groupers loafed lazily by the windows,
absentmindedly intent on their own business; a
snake-bodied barracuda writhed its lean grey body
towards us, thrust its evil head against a side
window and stared in unblinkingly for almost
a minute; a school of what looked like Spanish
mackerel kept us company for some time, then
abruptly vanished in an exploding flurry of motion
as a bottle-nosed shark cruised majestically into
view, propelling itself along with a barely perceptible
motion of its long powerful tail. But, for the
most part, the sea floor seemed deserted; perhaps
the storm raging above had sent most fish off to
seek deeper waters.

Exactly ten minutes after we had left, the sea-floor
abruptly dropped away beneath us in what
seemed, in the sudden yawning darkness that our
searchlight could not penetrate, an almost vertical
cliff-face. I knew this to be only illusion; Vyland
would have surveyed the ocean bed a dozen times
and if he said the angle was only 30° it was almost
certainly so, but nevertheless the impression of a
sudden bottomless chasm was overwhelming.

‘This is it,' Vyland said in a low voice. On his
smooth polished face I could make out the faint
sheen of sweat. ‘Take her down, Talbot.'

‘Later.' I shook my head. ‘If we start descending
now that tow-rope we're trailing is going to
pull our tail right up. Our searchlights can't shine
ahead, only vertically downwards. Want that we
should crash our nose into some outcrop of rock
that we can't see? Want to rupture the for'ard
gasoline tank? – don't forget the shell of those
tanks is only thin sheet metal. It only needs one
split tank and we'll have so much negative buoyancy
that we can never rise again. You appreciate
that, don't you, Vyland?'

His face gleamed with sweat. He wet his lips
again and said: ‘Do it your way, Talbot.'

I did it my way. I kept on course 222° until the
tow-wire recorder showed 600 metres, stopped the
engine and let our slight preponderance of negative
buoyancy, which our forward movement and
angled planes had so far overcome, take over. We
settled gradually, in a maddeningly deliberate slow
motion, the fathometer needle hardly appearing
to move. The hanging weight of the tow-wire
aft tended to pull us astern, and at every ten
fathoms, between thirty and seventy, I had to
ease ahead on the motors and pay out a little
more wire.