wiring might have made it possible to cut off the Professor's voice, while one of Vogel's crew somewhere on the ship spoke through it instead?
'The cylinder has just given out.'
Yule's voice came through again unfalteringly, almost casually. The Saint saw that Loretta's eyes were also fixed on the loud speaker: her chest was scarcely moving, as if her own breathing had stopped in sympathy with what those six words must have meant to the man helplessly imprisoned in his grotesque armour five hundred feet below the bountiful air.
'Can't you put the cable on to another winch?' asked the Saint, and hardly recognised his own voice.
'There's no other winch on the ship that would take the load.'
'We can rig up a tackle if you've got a couple of large blocks.'
'It takes more than twenty minutes to raise the bathystol from this depth,' Vogel said flatly. 'With a block and tackle it would take over an hour.'
Simon knew that he was right. And his brain worked on, mechanically, with its grim computation. In that confined space it would take no more than a few minutes to consume all the oxygen left in the air. And then, with the percentage of carbon dioxide leaping towards its maximum ...
'I'm getting very weak and giddy.' The Professor's voice was fainter, but it was still steady and unflinching. 'You will have to be very quick now, or it will be no use.'
Something about the scene was trying to force itself into the Saint's attention. Was he involuntarily measuring his distances and marking down positions, with the instinct of a seasoned fighter? The group of seamen at the stern. One of them by the drum of insulated cable, further up the deck. Vogel at the head of the companion. Arnheim . . . Why had Arnheim moved across to stand in front of the winch controls, so that his broad squat bulk hid them completely?
There was another sound trying to break through the silence— a queer jerky gasping sound. A second or two went by before the Saint traced it to its source and identified it. The terrible throaty sound of a man battling for breath, relayed like every other sound from the bathystol by the impersonal instrument on the table . . .
In some way it wiped out the last of his indecision. He was prepared to be wrong; prepared also not to care. Any violence, whatever it might bring, was better than waiting for his nerves to be slowly racked to pieces by that devilish inquisition.
He moved slowly forwards—towards the bulkhead where the winch controls were. Towards Arnheim. And Arnheim did not move. The Saint smiled for the first time since the Professor had gone down, and altered his course a couple of points to pass round him. Arnheim shifted himself also, and still blocked the way. His round pouting mouth with the bruise under it opened like a trout's.
'It isn't easy to wait, is it?' he said.
'It isn't,' agreed the Saint, with a cold and murderous precision; and the automatic flashed from his pocket to grind its muzzle into the other's yielding belly. 'So we'll stop waiting. Walk backwards a little way, Otto.'
Arnheim's jowl dropped. He looked down at the gun in his stomach, and looked up again with his eyes round as saucers and his wet mouth sagging wider. He coughed.
'Really, Mr Tombs——'
'Have you gone mad?'
Vogel's dry monotone lanced across the feeble protest with calculated contempt. And the Saint grinned mirthlessly.
'Not yet. But I'm liable to if Otto doesn't get out of my way in the next two seconds. And then you're liable to lose Otto.'
'I know this is a ghastly situation.' Vogel was still speaking calmly, with the soothing and rather patronising urbanity with which he might have tried to snub a drunkard or a lunatic. 'But you won't help it by going into hysterics. Everything possible is being done.'
'One thing isn't being done,' answered the Saint, in the same bleak voice, 'and I'm going to do it. Get away from those controls, Otto, and watch me start that winch!'
'My dear Mr Tombs——'
