16 The Saint Overboard

indefensible appre­hension stayed with him through the theatrically perfect service of luncheon, to sour the lobster cocktail and embitter the exqui­sitely 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 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 motheaten 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 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.

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 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