losing a fraction of the dispassionate calm which laid its terrifying detachment on everything he did. He became a mere organising brain, motionless and almost disembodied himself, lashing the cogs of his machine to disciplined movement.
And as he finished, Ivaloff's voice came through again.
'We have made a large enough opening in the dome. Now we should come up.'
Vogel nodded, and a man stepped to the controls of the winch. And at last Vogel got up.
He got up, straightening his trousers and settling his jacket with the languid finickiness of a man who has nothing much to do and nothing of importance on his mind. And as casually and expressionlessly as the same man might have wandered towards an ashtray to dispose of an unconsidered cigarette-end, he strolled over the yard or two that separated him from the air pump, and bent over one of the rubber tubes.
His approach was so placid and unemotional that for a moment even Loretta, with her eyes riveted mutely on him, could not quite believe what she was seeing. Only for a moment she stared at him, wondering, unbelieving. And then, beyond any doubt, she knew. ...
Her eyes widened in a kind of blind horror. Why, she could never have said. She had seen death before, had faced it herself only a little while ago, had lived with it; had stood pale and silent on that same deck while Professor Yule died. But not until then had she felt the same frozen clutch on her heart, the same dumb stab of anguish, the same reckless annihilation of her restraint. She didn't know what she was doing, didn't think, made no conscious movement; and yet suddenly, somehow, in another instant of time, she was beside Vogel, grasping his wrist and arm, tearing his hand away. She heard someone sobbing: 'No! No! Not that!'—and realised in a dazed sort of way that she was hearing her own voice.
'No! No!'
'My dear Loretta!'
He had straightened up, was looking down at her with his hooked waxen face cold and contemptuously critical. She became aware that she was breathing as if she had just run to him from a great distance, that her heart was pounding against her ribs like a deliriously wielded hammer, that there must have been a wild stupidity in her gaze. And she realised at the same time that the winch had stopped again.
'Why have you done that?' she gasped.
'Done what?'
She was shaking his arm unconsciously.
'Stopped bringing them up.'
'My dear girl!' His tone was bland and patronising. 'That is the normal process. When a man has been working for three quarters of an hour at the depth where they have been, his blood becomes saturated with nitrogen. If he was brought up quickly and the pressure was suddenly taken off, the gas would form bubbles in his blood like it does in champagne when the cork is drawn. He would get a painful attack of diver's paralysis. The pressure has to be relieved gradually-—there is a regular timetable for it. Our divers have been stopped at thirty feet. They will rest there for five minutes; then for ten minutes at twenty feet; then for fifteen minutes——'
She knew that he was trying to make her feel foolish, but she was too sure of her knowledge to care.
'That's not all you were doing,' she said.
'What else?'
'You were going to take one of those airlines off the pump.'
'My dear——'
'Weren't you?'
He looked at her impassively, as if he was playing with the possible answers at his disposal, deliberating their probable effect on her rather than their accuracy. She shrugged bitterly.
'Oh, I know. You don't need to lie. You were going to kill him.'
A faint flicker of expression, the gleam of passionless calculating cruelty which she had seen before, passed over his face.
