16 The Saint Overboard

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 comforta­ble 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 dis­covered on his nocturnal exploration, had been stripped of its tarpaulin and telescoped out over the stern, but the claw mecha­nism 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 slug­gishly 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 wrin­kles 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 Pro­fessor 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 apologetically intruding innocence would have been blown sky-high, and there would be nothing to stop the joyride terminating ac­cording 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