16 The Saint Overboard

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 cun­ning 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 im­pressive 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 incon­trovertible accident—an automatic provision for fatalistic obit­uaries 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 an­swered 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 emp­tied 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 intolera­ble 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