Angelo hooked the harness of the extra scuba set for Sherry on to my belt, then he passed me the ten-foot spear and I prayed that I would not drop it.
“You go get Miss. Sherry out of there,” said Chubby, and I rolled over in a clumsy one-legged duck dive and went down.
Even in the cramping agony of the bends my first concern was to search for the sinister gliding shapes of the white deaths. I saw one of them, but he was deep down, amongst the pack of lumbering Albacore sharks. Cliriging to the shelter of the reef, I kicked and wriggled downwards like a maimed water beetle. Thirty feet under the surface the pain began to recede. Renewed pressure of water was reducing the size of the bubbles in my bloodstream, MY limbs straightened and I had use of them.
I went down faster, and the relief was swift and blessed. I felt new courage and confidence flooding away my earlier despair. I had air and a weapon. I had a fighting chance now.
I was ninety feet down, in clear sight of the bottom. I could see Sherry’s bubbles rising from the smoky blue depths, and the sight cheered me. She was still breathing, and I had a fully charged extra scuba set for her. All I had to do was get it to her.
One of the fat ugly Albacore sharks saw me as I slid down the dark cliff face, and he swerved towards me. Already gorged with food, but endlessly hungry, he came in at me grinning horribly and paddling his wide tail.
I backed up and hung in the water against the cliff, -facing him.
I had the spear with its explosive head extended towards him, and as I finned gently to hold myself ready the streamers of bright blue dye from the shark repellent tablets smoked out in a cloud around me.
The shark came on in, and I lined up to hit him fairly on the snout, but the instant his head and gills encountered clouds of blue dye he spun away, flapping his tail in shock and dismay. The copper acetate had burned his gills and eyes, and he retreated hurriedly.
“Eat your liver, Chubby Andrews,” I thought. “They work!” Down again I went, almost to the tops of the bamboo finest, seeing Sherry still crouched in the gunport thirty feet away watching me. She had exhausted her own air bottles and was using mine - but I could tell by the volume and scanty rate of flow of bubbles that she had only seconds of breathing time left to her.
, I started towards her, leaving the cliff - and only her frantic hand signals alerted me. I turned and saw the white death coming like a long blue torpedo” He was skimming the tops of the bamboo, and from one corner of his jaws hung a tattered streamer of flesh. He opened that wide maw to gulp, down the morsel, and the rows of fangs gleamed whitely, like the petals of some obscene flower.
I faced him as he charged, but at the same time I fell back kicking my fins in his direction and laying a thick smoke-screen of blue dye between us.
With hard slashing strokes of his tail, he arrowed in the last few yards, but then he hit the blue dye and swirled, altering the direction of his charge as he sheered away.
He passed me so close that his tail struck me a heavy blow on the shoulder, sending me tumbling end over end. For seconds I lost my bearings, but as I recovered my balance and looked wildly about me I found the great shark circling.
He swept around me, forty feet away, and in his full length he seemed to my heated eye as long as a battleship and as blue and as vast as a summer sky. It seemed impossible to believe that these fish grew to almost twice this size. This one was still a baby - I was thankful for that.
Suddenly the slim steel spear in which I had placed so much faith seemed futile, and the shark regarded me with a cold yellow eye across which the pale nictitating membrane flicked occasionally in a sardonic wink, and once he opened his jaws in a convulsive gulp, as though in anticipation of the taste of my flesh.
He continued in those wide racing circles, with myself always at the centre, turning with him and paddling frantically with my fins to match his smooth unforced speedas I turned, I unhooked the spare lung from my back and slung it by the harness on my left shoulder like the shield of a Roman legionary, and I tucked the hilt of the spear under my arm and kept the head pointed at the circling monster.
My whole body tingled with the warm flush of adrenalin in the bloodstream, and my senses were enhanced and sharpened by the adrenalin high - the intensely pleasurable sensation of acute fear to which a man can become an addict.
Each detail of the deadly fish was etched indelibly on my memory, from the gentle pulsing of the multiple gill behind the head to the long trailing ribbons of the remora fish holding by their suckers to the smooth snowy expanse of his belly. With a fish of this size, it would only infuriate him further if I went for a hit with the explosive spear on his snout. My only chance was for a hit on the brain.
I recognized the moment when the shark’s distaste for the blue mist of repellent was overcome by his hunger and his anger. His tail seemed to stiffen and it gave a series of rapid strokes, driving his speed up sharply.
I braced myself, lifting the spare scuba protectively, and the shark turned hard and fast, breaking the wide circle and coming in directly at me.
I saw the jaws open like a pit, lined with the wedgeshaped fangs, and at the moment of strike I dintst the twin steel bottles of the scuba into it.
The shark closed its jaws on the decoy and it was torn from my grasp, while the impact of the attack tossed me aside like a floating leaf. When I had gathered myself again I looked around ftantically and found the white death was twenty feet away, moving only slowly but worrying the steel bottles the way a puppy chews a slipper.
It was shaking its head in the instinctive reaction which tears lumps of flesh from a victim - but which was now inflicting only deep scratches on the painted metal of the scuba.
This was my chance, my one and only chance. Kicking hard, I spurted above the broad blue back, brushing the tall dorsal fin and I sank down over him, coming in on his blind spot like an attacking fighter pilot from high astern.
I reached out with the steel spear and pressed the tip of it firmly on to the curved blue skull, directly between those cold and deadly yellow eyes - and I squeezed the springloaded trigger on the hilt of the spear.
The shot fired with a crack that beat in upon my eardrums, and the spear jumped heavily in my grip.
The white death shark reared on its tail like a startled horse, and once again I was. tossed lightly aside by his careless bulk, but I recovered to watch him go into a terrible frenzy. The muscles beneath the smooth skin twitched and rippled at random impulse from the damaged brain, and the shark spun and dived, rolling wildly on its back, arrowing downwards to crash snout first into the rocky bottom of the pool, then it stood on its tail and scooted in aimless parabolas through the pale blue waters.
Still watching it, and keeping a respecthil distance, I unscrewed the exploded head off the spear and replaced it with a fresh charge.
The white death still had Sherry’s air supply clamped in his jaws.
I could not leave it. I trailed his violent, unpredictable manoeuvres warily, and when at last he hung stationary for a moment nose down, suspended on the wide flukes of his tail, I shot in again and once more pressed the explosive charge to his skull, holding it firmly against the cartilaginous dome, so that the full shock of the charge would be transmitted directly to the tiny brain.
I fired the shot, cracking painfully in my own ears, and the shark froze rigidly. It never moved again but still in that frozen rigour it rolled over slowly and began to sink towards the floor of the pool. I darted in and wrested the damaged scuba from his jaws.
I saw immediately the air hoses had been torn and shredded by the shark’s teeth, but the bottles were only extensively scratched.
Carrying the lung with me I sprinted across the tops of the bamboo towards the wreck. There were no longer air bubbles rising from the gunport, and as I came in sight of her I saw that Sherry had discarded the last empty scuba set. They were empty, and she was dying slowly.
Yet even in the extremes of slow suffocation she had not made the suicidal attempt to rise to the surface. She was waiting for me, dying slowly, but trusting me.
As I came down beside her, I pulled out my own mouthpiece and offered it to. her. Her movements were slow and uncoordinated. The mouthpiece slipped from her grasp and floated upwards, spewing out a torrent of air. I grabbed it and forced it into her mouth, holding it there while lowering myself slightly below her level to induce a readier flow of air.
She began to breathe. Her chest rose and fell in long deep draughts of the precious stuff, and almost
