'You're going to have trouble with Jack,' said Harris. 'He doesn't give up easily.' He nodded to the prints on the table. 'Where did you have those made?'
'I have an interest in an engineering company in Tampico. I had the use of a metallurgical X-ray outfit.'
'I'd better check up on that,' said Harris. 'Gatt might get on to it.'
'But I've got me negatives here.'
Harris looked at him pityingly. 'What makes you think those are the only negatives? I doubt if they'd get it right first time -- they'd give you the best of a series. I want to see what has happened to the others and have them destroyed before Gatt starts spreading palm-oil among your ill-paid technicians.' Harris was a professional and never gave up. He had a total disbelief in the goodness of human nature.
II
Fallon's way of organizing an archeological expedition was to treat it like a military operation -- something on the same scale as the landing on Omaha Beach, This was no penurious egghead scratching along on a foundation grant and stretching every dollar to cover the work of two. Fallon was a multimillionaire with a bee in his bonnet and he could, and did, spend money as though he had a personal pipeline to Fort Knox. The money he spent to find Uaxuanoc would have been enough to build the damn place.
His first idea was to go in by sea, but the coast of Quintana Roo is cluttered up with islands and uncharted shoals and he saw the difficulties looming ahead so he abandoned the idea. He wasn't troubled about it; he merely chartered a small fleet of air freighters and flew his supplies in. To do this he had to send in a construction crew to build an airstrip at the head of Ascension Bay. This eventually became his base camp.
As soon as the airstrip was usable he sent in a photographic reconnaissance aircraft which operated from the base and which did an aerial survey, not only of the area in which Uaxuanoc was suspected to be. but of the entire provinces of Quintana Roo and Yucatan. This seemed a bit extravagant so I asked him why he did it. His answer was simple: he was co-operating with the Mexican Government in return for certain favours -- it seemed that the cartographic department of the State Survey was very short on information about those areas and Fallon had agreed to supply a photo-mosaic.
'The only person who ever took aerial photographs of Quintana Roo was Lindbergh.' he said. 'And that was a long time ago. It will all come in very useful professionally.'
From Ascension Bay helicopters set up Camp Two in the interior. Fallon and Halstead spent quite a lot of time debating where to set up Camp Two. They measured the X-ray prints to the last millimetre and transferred reading to Fallon's big map and eventually came to a decision. Theoretically, Camp Two should have been set up smack on the top of the temple of Yum Chac in Uaxuanoc. It wasn't, of course; but that surprised nobody.
Halstead favoured me with one of his rare smiles, but there didn't seem to be much real humour in it. 'A field trip is Like being in the army,' he said. 'You can use all the mechanization you like, but the job gets done by guys using their own feet. You're still going to regret coming on this jaunt, Wheale.'
I had the distinct impression that he was waiting for me to fall flat on my face when we got out in the field. He was the kind of man who would laugh himself silly at someone slipping on a banana skin and breaking his leg. A primitive sense of humour! Also, he didn't like me very much.
While all this was going on we stayed at Fallon's place outside Mexico City. The Halsteads had given up their own place and had moved in, so we were all together. Pat Harris was around from time to time. He departed upon mysterious trips without warning and came back just as unexpectedly. I suppose he reported to Fallon but he said nothing to the rest of us for the quite simple reason that everyone was too busy to ask him.
Fallon came to me one day, and said, 'About your skin-diving experience. Were you serious?'
'Quite serious. I've done a lot of it.'
'Good,' he said. 'When we find Uaxuanoc we'll want to investigate the cenote.'
'I'll need more equipment,' I said. 'The stuff I have is good enough for an amateur within reach of civilization but not for the middle of Quintana Roo.'
'What kind of equipment?'
'Oh, an air compressor for recharging bottles is one of the biggest items.' I paused. 'If the dives are more than a hundred and fifty feet I'd like a stand-by recompression chamber in case anyone gets into trouble.'
He nodded. 'Okay; get your equipment.'
He turned away and I said gently, 'What do I use in place of money?'
He stopped. 'Oh, yes. I'll ask my secretary to arrange all that. See him tomorrow.'
'Who is going down with me?'
'You need someone else?' he asked in surprise.
That's a cardinal rule -- you don't dive alone. Especially into the murky depths of a hole in the ground. Too many things can go wrong underwater.'
'Well, hire somebody.' he said a little irritably. This was a minor part of the main problem and he was only too eager to get rid of it.
So I went shopping and bought some lovely expensive equipment. Most of it was available locally, but the recompression chamber was more difficult. I saw Fallon's secretary about that and a few telephone calls to the States produced a minor flap in the far-flung Fallon empire; it also produced a recompression chamber on the first available air freighter. Maybe that piece of equipment was an extravagance, but it's one thing getting the bends in England where the port hospitals are equipped to handle it and where the Navy will give a hand in an emergency, and it's quite another thing to have nitrogen bubbling in your blood like champagne in the middle of a blasted wilderness. I preferred to play safe. Besides, Fallon could afford it I ended up with enough gear to outfit an average aqualung club, and normally I should have been full of gloating at the opportunity to handle and use all those efficient and well-designed tools of the diver's trade -- but I wasn't. It had come too easy. This wasn't something I'd sweated for, something I'd saved up to buy, and I began to see why rich people became bored so easily and began to indulge in way-out entertainments. Not that Fallon was like that, to give him his due; he was all archaeologist and very professional. Then I rounded up Katherine Halstead and took her down to the pool. 'All right,' I said. 'Show me.' She looked at me in surprise. 'Show you what?'
