16 The Saint Overboard

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 impas­sively 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 mo­ment'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 me­chanically 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 carpen­ter 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 pit­head after a colliery explosion.

There was the same sullen stoicism, the same brooding inten­sity 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 ex­pectation; 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 with­out 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 alto­gether. 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 en­compass the terrific adjustment that Vogel had sprung on him. Even then he was