Fear is the Key

NINE

It isn’t the fashion to design tombs in the form of two-hundred-foot-high metal cylinders, but if it were that pillar on the X 13 would have been a sensation. As a tomb, I mean. It had everything. It was cold and dank and dark, the gloom not so much relieved as accentuated by three tiny glow-worms of light at top, middle and bottom: it was eerie and sinister and terrifying and the hollow, reverberating echoing boom of a voice in those black and cavernous confines held all the dark resonance, the doom-filled apocalyptic finality of the dark angel calling your name on the day of judgement. It should have been, I thought bleakly, a place you went through after you died, not just before you died. Not that the question of precedence mattered at the end of the day.

As a tomb, fine: as a means of getting anywhere, terrible. The only connection between top and bottom lay in a succession of iron ladders welded on to the riveted sides of the pillar. There were twelve of those ladders, each with fifteen rungs, not one break or resting place between top and bottom. What with the weight of a heavy circuit-testing bridge Megger hanging down my back and the fact that the rungs were so wet and slippery that I had to grip them with considerable force to keep myself from falling off the ladder, the strain on forearm and shoulder muscles was severe; twice that distance and I wouldn’t have made it.

It is customary for the host to lead the way in strange surroundings but Vyland passed up his privilege. Maybe he was frightened that if he preceded me down the ladder I’d take the opportunity of kicking his head off and sending him a hundred and more feet to his death on the iron platform below. However it was, I went first, with Vyland and the two cold-eyed men we’d found waiting in the little steel room following close behind. That left Larry and the general up above, and no one was under the impression that Larry was fit to guard anyone. The general was free to move around as he wished, yet Vyland appeared to have no fears that the general might use his freedom to queer his pitch. This I had found inexplicable: but I knew the answer to it now. Or I thought I knew: if I were wrong, innocent people would surely die. I put the thought out of my mind.

‘Right, open it up, Cibatti,’ Vyland ordered.

The larger of the two men bent down and unscrewed the hatch, swinging it up and back on its hinges to lock into a standing catch. I peered down the narrow steel cylinder that led to the steel cabin beneath the bathyscaphe and said to Vyland: ‘I suppose you know you’ll have to flood this entrance chamber when you go looking for your Blackbeard’s treasure?’

‘What’s that?’ He looked at me narrowly, suspiciously. ‘Why?’

‘Were you thinking of leaving it unflooded?’ I asked incredulously. ‘This entrance chamber is usually flooded the minute you start descending — and that’s normally surface level, not a hundred and thirty feet down as you are here. Sure, sure, I know it looks solid, it might even hold at double this depth, I don’t know. But what I do know is that it is completely surrounded by your gasoline buoyancy tanks, about eight thousand gallons of it, and those are open to the sea at the bottom. The pressure inside those tanks corresponds exactly to the sea pressure outside — which is why only the thinnest sheet metal is required to hold the gasoline. But with only air inside your entrance chamber you’re going to have at least two hundred pounds to the square inch pressing on the outside of this entrance chamber. And it won’t stand that. It’ll burst inwards, your gasoline will escape, your positive buoyancy will be gone for ever and there you are, four hundred and eighty feet below the surface of the sea. And there you would remain until the end of time.’ It was hard to be positive in that thinly-lit gloom, but I could have sworn that the colour had drained from Vyland’s face.

‘Bryson never told me this.’ Vyland’s voice was a vicious whisper and there was a shake in it.

‘Bryson? Your engineering friend?’ There was no answer, so I went on: ‘No, I don’t suppose he would. He was no friend, was he, Vyland: he had a gun in his back, didn’t he, and he knew that when his usefulness was over someone was going to pull the trigger of that gun? Why the hell should he tell you?’ I looked away from him and shouldered the bridge Megger again. ‘No need for anyone to come down with me — it’ll only make me nervous.’

‘Think I’m going to let you go down there on your own?’ he asked coldly. ‘To get up to your tricks?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said wearily. ‘I could stand there in front of an electrical switchboard or fuse-box and sabotage the bathyscaphe so that it would never move again, and neither you nor your friends would ever know anything about it. It’s in my own interests to get this machine going and have the whole thing over as soon as possible. The quicker the better for me.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘Twenty to eleven. It’ll take me three hours to find out what’s wrong. At least. I’ll have a break at two. I’ll knock on the hatch so that you can let me out.’

‘No need.’ Vyland wasn’t happy, but as long as he couldn’t put his finger on any possibility of treachery he wasn’t going to deny me — he wasn’t in any position to. ‘There’s a microphone in the cabin, with its extension cable wound round a drum on the outside and a lead through a gland in the side of the leg that’s carried up to that room where we were. There’s a button call-up. Let us know when you’re ready.’

I nodded and started down the rungs welded into the side of the cylinder, unscrewed the upper hatch of the bathyscaphe’s flooding and entrance chamber, managed to wriggle down past it — the downward projecting cylinder which encompassed the top of the entrance chamber was only a few inches wider and didn’t give enough room to open the hatch fully — felt for the rungs below, pulled down the hatch, clamped it shut and then worked my way down the constricting narrowness of that chamber to the cabin below. The last few feet involved an almost right-angle bend, but I managed to ease myself and the Megger round it. I opened the heavy steel door to the cabin, wriggled through the tiny entrance, then closed and locked the door behind me.

Nothing had changed, it was as I had remembered it. The cabin was considerably bigger than that of the earlier FRNS from which it had been developed, and slightly oval in shape instead of round: but what was lost in structural power was more than compensated for in the scope and ease of movement inside, and as it was only intended for salvage operations up to about 2,500 feet, the relative loss in strength was unimportant. There were three windows, one set in the floor, cone-shaped inwards as was the entrance door, so that sea pressure only tightened them in their seats: they looked fragile, those windows, but I knew that the specially constructed Plexiglas in the largest of them — and that was no more than a foot in its external diameter — could take a pressure of 250 tons without fracturing, many times the strain it would ever be required to withstand in the depths in which that bathyscaphe would operate.

The cabin itself was a masterpiece of design. One wall — if approximately one-sixth on the surface area of the inside of a sphere could be called a wall — was covered with instruments, dial, fuse-boxes, switchboards and a variety of scientific equipment which we would not be called upon to use: set to one side were the controls for engine starting, engine speed, advance and reverse, for the searchlights, remote-controlled grabs, the dangling guiderope which could hold the bathyscaphe stable near the bottom by resting part of its length on the sea-bed and so relieving the scaphe of that tiny percentage of weight which was sufficient to hold it in perfect equilibrium; and, finally, there were the fine adjustments for the device for absorbing exhaled carbon dioxide and regenerating oxygen.

One control there was that I hadn’t seen before, and it puzzled me for some time. It was a rheostat with advance and retard positions graded on either side of the central knob and below this was the brass legend ‘Tow-rope control’. I had no idea what this could be for, but after a couple of minutes I could make a pretty sure guess. Vyland — or rather, Bryson on Vyland’s orders — must have fitted a power-operated drum to the top, and almost certainly the rear, of the bathyscaphe, the wire of which would have been attached, before the leg had been lowered into the water, to some heavy bolt or ring secured near the base of the leg. The idea, I now saw, was not that they could thereby haul the bathyscaphe back to the rig if anything went wrong — it would have required many more times the power that was available in the bathyscaphe’s engines to haul that big machine along the ocean bed — but purely to overcome the very tricky navigational problem of finding their way back to the leg. I switched on a searchlight, adjusted the beam and stared down through the window at my feet. The deep circular ring in the ocean floor where the leg had originally been bedded was still there, a trench over a foot in depth: with that to guide, re-engaging the top of the entrance chamber in the cylinder inside leg shouldn’t be too difficult.

At least I understood now why Vyland hadn’t objected too strongly to my being left by myself inside the scaphe: by flooding the entrance chamber and rocking the scaphe to and fro if and when Igot the engines started, I might easily have managed to tear clear of the rubber seal and sail the bathyscaphe away to freedom and safety: but I wouldn’t get very far with a heavy cable attaching me to the leg of the X 13. Vyland might be a phoney in the ways of dress, mannerisms and speech, but that didn’t alter the fact that he was a very smart boy indeed.

Apart from the instruments on that one wall, the rest of the cabin was practically bare except for three small canvas seats that hinged on the outer wall and a rack where there was stored a variety of cameras and photo-flood equipment.

My initial comprehensive look round the interior didn’t take long. The first thing that called for attention was the control box of the hand microphone by one of the canvas seats. Vyland was just the sort of person who would want to check whether I really was working, and I wouldn’t have put it past him to change over wires in the control box so that when the switch was in the off position the microphone would be continuously live and so let him know that I was at least working, even if he didn’t know what kind of work it was. But I’d misjudged or over-rated him, the wiring was as it should have been.

In the next five minutes or so I tested every item of equipment inside that cabin except the engine controls — should I have been able to start them anyone still waiting on the bottom floor of that leg would have been sure to feel the vibration.

After that I unscrewed the cover of the largest of the circuit boxes, removed almost twenty coloured wires from their sockets and let them hang down in the wildest confusion and disorder. I attached a lead from the Megger to one of those wires, opened the covers of another two circuits and fuse-boxes and emptied most of my tools on to the small work-bench beneath. The impression of honest toil was highly convincing.

So small was the floor area of that steel cabin that there was no room for me to stretch out my length on the narrow mesh duckboard but I didn’t care. I hadn’t slept at all the previous night, I’d been through a great deal in the past twelve hours and I felt very tired indeed. I’d sleep all right.

I slept. My last impression before drifting off was that the wind and the seas must be really acting up. At depths of a hundred feet or over, wave-motion is rarely or never felt: but the rocking of that bathyscaphe was unmistakable, though very gentle indeed. It rocked me to sleep.

My watch said half-past two when I awoke. For me, this was most unusual: I’d normally the ability to set a mental alarm-clock and wake up almost to the pre-selected moment. This time I’d slipped, but I was hardly surprised. My head ached fiercely, the air in that tiny cabin was foul. It was my own fault, I’d been careless. I reached for the switch controlling carbon dioxide absorption and turned it up to maximum. After five minutes, when my head began to clear, I switched on the microphone and asked for someone to loosen the hatch-cover set into the floor of the leg. The man they called Cibatti came down and let me out and three minutes later I was up again in that little steel room.

‘Late, aren’t you?’ Vyland snapped. He and Royale — the helicopter must have made the double trip safely — were the only people there, apart from Cibatti who had just closed the trunking door behind me.

‘You want the damn thing to go sometime, don’t you?’ I said irritably. ‘I’m not in this for the fun of the thing, Vyland.’

‘That’s so.’ The top executive criminal, he wasn’t going to antagonize anyone unnecessarily. He peered closely at me. ‘Anything the matter with you?’

‘Working for hours on end in a cramped coffin is the matter with me,’ I said sourly. ‘That and the fact that the air purifier was maladjusted. But it’s OK now.’

‘Progress?’

‘Damn little.’ I lifted my hand as the eyebrow went up and the face began to darken in a scowl. ‘It’s not for want of trying. I’ve tested every single contact and circuit in the scaphe and it’s only in the past twenty minutes that I began to find out what’s the matter with it.’

‘Well, what was the matter with it?’

‘Your late engineer friend Bryson was the matter with it, that’s what.’ I looked at him speculatively. ‘Had you intended taking Bryson with you when you were going to recover this stuff? Or were you going to go it alone?’

‘Just Royale and myself. We thought—’

‘Yes, I know. Not much point in taking him along with you. A dead man can’t accomplish much. Either you dropped a hint that he wouldn’t be coming along and he knew why he wouldn’t be coming along so he’d fixed it so that he’d get a nice little posthumous revenge, or he hated you so much that if he had to go along he was determined that he was going to take you with him. Out of this world, I mean. Your friend had made a very clever little fix indeed, only he hadn’t quite time to finish it before the bends knocked him off — which is why the engines are still out of commission. He’d fixed it so that the bathyscaphe would have operated perfectly; would have gone backwards and forwards, up and down, anything you liked — until you had taken it down to a depth of just over three hundred feet. Then he had fixed that certain hydro-static cut-outs would come into operation. A beautiful job.’ I wasn’t gambling much, I knew their ignorance of those matters was profound.

‘And then what?’ Vyland asked tightly.

‘Then nothing. The bathyscaphe would never have been able to get above three hundred feet again. When either the batteries had been exhausted or the oxygen regenerating unit had failed, as it would have to in a few hours — well, you’d have died of suffocation.’ I looked at him consideringly. ‘After, that is, you had screamed your way into madness.’

On a previous occasion I had thought I had seen Vyland losing some colour from his rather ruddy cheeks, but on this occasion there was no doubt: he turned white and to conceal his agitation fumbled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit a cigarette with hands whose tremor he could not conceal. Royale, sitting on the table, just smiled his little secret smile and went on unconcernedly swinging his foot. That didn’t make Royale any braver than Vyland, maybe it only meant he was less imaginative. The last thing a professional killer could ever afford was imagination; he had to live with himself and the ghosts of all his victims. I looked at Royale again. I swore to myself that one day I would see that face the mask and mirror of fear, as Royale himself had seen so many other faces the masks and mirrors of fear in that last second of awareness and knowingness before he pulled the trigger of his deadly little gun.

‘Neat, eh?’ Vyland said harshly. He had regained a measure of composure.

‘It wasn’t bad,’ I admitted. ‘At least I sympathize with his outlook, the object he had in mind.’

‘Funny. Very funny indeed.’ There were times when Vyland forgot that the well-bred business tycoon never snarls. He looked at me with sudden speculation in his eyes. ‘You wouldn’t be thinking along the same lines yourself, Talbot? Of pulling a fast one like Bryson tried to pull?’

‘It’s an attractive idea,’ I grinned at him, ‘but you insult my intelligence. In the first place, had I had any ideas along those lines do you think I would have given you any hint of them? Besides, I intend to go along with you on this little trip. At least, hope to.’

‘You do, eh?’ Vyland was back on balance, his shrewd quick self again. ‘Getting suspiciously cooperative all of a sudden, aren’t you, Talbot?’

‘You can’t win,’ I sighed. ‘If I said I didn’t want to go, you’d think that a damn sight more suspicious. Be your age, Vyland. Things aren’t as they were a few hours ago. Remember the general’s speech about ensuring my continued well-being? He meant it all right, he meant every word of it. Try seeing me off and he’ll see you off. And you’re too much of a business man to make a bad deal like that. Royale here is going to be deprived of the pleasure of killing me.’

‘Killing gives me no pleasure,’ Royale put in softly. It was a simple statement of fact and I stared at him, temporarily off-balance by the preposterousness of it.

‘Did I hear what I thought I heard?’ I asked slowly.

‘Ever hear of a ditch-digger digging ditches for pleasure, Talbot?’

‘I think I see your point.’ I stared at him for a long moment, he was even more inhuman than I had ever imagined. ‘Anyway, Vyland, now that I’m going to live I have a different outlook on things. The sooner this business is over, the sooner I’ll be away from you and your cosy little pals. And then, I think, I could put the touch on the general for a few thousand. I hardly think he would like it known that he had been aiding and abetting criminal activities on a grand scale.’

‘You mean — you mean, you’d put the black on the man who saved your life?’ Apparently some things were still capable of astonishing Vyland. ‘God, you’re as bad as any of us. Worse.’

‘I never said I wasn’t,’ I said indifferently. ‘These are hard times, Vyland. A man must live. And I’m in a hurry. That’s why I suggest I come along. Oh, I admit a child could steer and lower and raise the bathyscaphe once he’d read the instructions, but salvage is no job for amateurs. Believe me, Vyland, I know, and it’s not. You’re amateurs. I’m an expert. It’s the one thing I’m really good at. So I come, eh?’

Vyland looked at me long and consideringly, then he said softly: ‘I just wouldn’t dream of going along without you, Talbot.’

He turned, opened the door and gestured to me to precede him. He and Royale came out behind me and as we walked along the passage we could hear Cibatti slamming home a heavy bolt and turning a key in the lock. Which made it as safe as the Bank of England, except for one thing: in the Bank of England a code knock does not automatically open the door to the vaults. But it opened doors here, and I had remembered it: and even had I forgotten it, it would have come back there and then for Vyland was using it again on a door about fifteen yards along the passage.

The door was opened by Cibatti’s opposite number. The compartment beyond wasn’t as bleakly furnished as the one we had just left, but it was a near thing. It had no wall coverings, no floor coverings, it didn’t even have a table: but it did have a padded bench along one wall, and on this the general and Mary were sitting. Kennedy was sitting very straight on a wooden chair in a corner and Larry, his big pistol out, his eyes twitching away feverishly as ever, was pacing up and down, doing his big watch-dog act. I scowled at them all impartially.

The general was his usual erect, impassive self, all his thoughts and emotions under the usual impeccable control; but there were dark half-moons under his eyes that hadn’t been there a couple of days ago. His daughter’s eyes, too, were smudged with blue, her face was pale and though it was composed enough she didn’t have the iron in her that her father had: the droop of the slender shoulders, slight though it was, was there for all to see. Myself, I didn’t go much for iron women at any time; there was nothing I would have liked better than to put an arm round those self-same shoulders, but the time and the place were wrong, the reactions anyway unpredictable. Kennedy was just Kennedy, his good-looking hard face a smooth brown mask, and he wasn’t worried about anything: I noticed that his maroon uniform fitted him better than ever; it wasn’t that he had been to see his tailor, someone had taken his gun from him and now there wasn’t even the suspicion of a bulge to mar the smooth perfection of the uniform.

As the door closed behind us, Mary Ruthven rose to her feet. There was an angry glint in her eye, maybe there was more iron to her than I had supposed. She gestured towards Larry without looking at him.

‘Is all this really necessary, Mr Vyland?’ she asked coldly. ‘Am I to assume that we have now arrived at the stage of being treated like criminals — like criminals under an armed guard?’

‘You don’t want to pay any attention to our little pal here,’ I put in soothingly. ‘The heater in his hand doesn’t mean a thing. He’s just whistling in the dark. All those snow-birds are as jittery and nervous as this, just looking at the gun gives him confidence: his next shot’s overdue, but when he gets it he’ll be ten feet tall.’

Larry took a couple of quick steps forward and jammed the gun into my stomach. He wasn’t any too gentle about it. His eyes were glazed, there were a couple of burning spots high up in the dead-white cheeks and his breath was a harsh and hissing half-whistle through bared and clenched teeth.

‘I told you, Talbot,’ he whispered. ‘I told you not to ride me any more. That’s the last time—’

I glanced over his shoulder then smiled at him.

‘Look behind you, sucker,’ I said softly. As I spoke I again shifted my gaze over his shoulder and nodded slightly.

He was too hopped up and unbalanced not to fall for it. So sure was I that he would fall for it that my right hand was reaching for his gun as he started to turn and by the time his head was twisted all the way round I had my hand locked over his and the gun pointing sideways and downwards where it would do no harm to anybody if it went off. No direct harm, that was: I couldn’t speak for the power and direction of the ricochet off steel decks and bulkheads.

Larry swung round, his face an ugly and contorted mask of fury and hate, swearing softly, vilely, continuously. He reached down with his free hand to try to wrench the pistol clear, but the hardest work Larry had ever done was pushing down the plunger of a hypodermic syringe and he was just wasting his time. I wrenched the gun away, stepped back, stiff-armed him joltingly with the heel of my palm as he tried to come after me, broke open the automatic, ejected the magazine and sent it clattering into one corner while the gun went into another. Larry half-stood, half-crouched against the far wall where my push had sent him, blood trickling from his nose and tears of rage and frustration and pain running down both cheeks. Just to look at him made me sick and cold.

‘All right, Royale,’ I said without turning my head. ‘You can put your gun away. The show’s over.’

But the show wasn’t over. A hard voice said: ‘Go pick up that gun, Talbot. And the clip. Put the clip in the gun and give it back to Larry.’

I turned round slowly. Vyland had a gun in his hand and I didn’t care very much for the whiteness of the knuckle of the trigger finger. He looked his usual polished urbane self, but the rigidity of his gun hand and the ever so slightly too fast rate of breathing gave him away. It didn’t make sense. Men like Vyland never allowed themselves to become emotionally involved, far less so concerned over what happened to a punk like Larry.

‘How would you like to go up top and take a walk over the side?’ I asked.

‘I’ll give you till I count five.’

‘And then what?’

‘Then I’ll shoot.’

‘You wouldn’t dare,’ I said contemptuously. ‘You’re not the type to pull triggers, Vyland. That’s why you employ this big bad hatchetman here. Besides, who would fix up the bathyscaphe then?’

‘I’m counting, Talbot.’ As far as I was concerned he’d gone nuts. ‘One … two—’

‘OK, OK,’ I interrupted, ‘so you can count. You’re a swell counter. I bet you can count up to ten. But I bet you can’t count up to all those millions you’re going to lose just because I don’t feel like picking up a gun.’

‘I can get other people to fix up that bathyscaphe.’

‘Not this side of the Atlantic, you won’t. And you haven’t got all that much time to play around with, have you, Vyland? What’s the betting a planeload of the FBI aren’t already on the way to Marble Springs to investigate that curious telegram Jablonsky sent? What’s the betting they aren’t already there? What’s the betting they aren’t knocking on the door of the general’s villa right now, saying, “Where’s the general?” and the butler saying, “Why the general’s just gone out to the rig gentlemen,” and then the FBI saying, “We must call upon the general immediately. We have important things to discuss with him.” And they will call, Vyland, just as soon as this storm blows over.’

‘I’m afraid he’s right, Mr Vyland.’ The unexpected help came from Royale. ‘We haven’t all that much time.’

For a long moment Vyland said nothing. Then he lowered his gun, turned and walked out of the room.

Royale, as always, showed no sign of strain or emotion whatever. He smiled and said: ‘Mr Vyland has gone to eat over on the other side. Lunch is ready for all of us,’ and stood to one side to let us out through the door.

It had been a strange off-beat episode. It didn’t make sense, it didn’t even begin to make any kind of sense at all. I pondered it, I tried to find a shadow of an explanation while Larry collected his gun and ammunition clip, but it was no good, I couldn’t find an explanation to fit the facts. Besides, I’d suddenly realized that I was very hungry indeed. I stood to one side to let all the others except Royale precede me, not so much out of courtesy as to ensure that Larry didn’t shoot me in the back, then hurried, without seeming to, to catch up on Mary and Kennedy.

To get to the other side of the rig we had to cross the hundred-foot width of the well-deck where I’d talked to Joe Curran, the roustabout foreman, in the early hours of that morning. It was by all odds the longest, wettest and windiest hundred feet that I’d ever walked.

They’d rigged up a couple of wire life-lines clear across to the other side. We could have done with a couple of dozen. The power of that wind was fantastic, it seemed to have redoubled in strength since we had arrived on the rig four hours previously and I knew now that we could expect no boat or helicopter to approach the rig until the storm had passed. We were completely cut off from the outer world.

At half-past two in the afternoon it was dark as twilight and out of the great black wall of cumulo-nimbus that all but surrounded us the wind flung itself upon the X 13, as if it were going to uproot it from its thirteen-leg foundation, topple it and drown it in the depths of the sea. It roared and howled across the deck of the oil rig in a maniacal fury of sound, and even at the distance of a couple of hundred feet we could plainly hear above the deep thunder of the storm the cacophonous obbligato, the screaming satanic music as the great wind whistled and shrieked its falsetto way through the hundreds of steel girders that went to make up the towering structure of the drilling derrick. We had to lean at an angle of almost forty-five degrees against the wind to keep our balance and at the same time hang on grimly to one of the life-lines. If you fell and started rolling along that deck you wouldn’t stop until the wind had pushed you clear over the side: it was as strong as that. It sucked the breath from your lungs and under its knife-edged hurricane lash the rain flailed and stung the exposed skin like an endless storm of tiny lead shot.

Mary led the way across this exposed storm-filled working platform, and right behind her came Kennedy, one hand sliding along the wire, his free arm tightly round the girl in front. At another time I might have been disposed to dwell on the subject of luck and how some people seemed to have all of it, but I had other much more urgent things on my mind. I came close up to him, actually treading on his heels, put my head close to his and shouted above the storm: ‘Any word come through yet?’

He was smart, all right, this chauffeur. He neither broke step nor turned round, but merely shook his head slightly.

‘Damn!’ I said, and meant it. This was awkward. ‘Have you phoned?’

Again the shake of the head. An impatient shake, this time, it looked like, and when I thought about it I couldn’t blame him. Much chance he’d had of either hearing or finding out anything with Larry dancing around flourishing his pistol, probably ever since he had come out to the rig.

‘I’ve got to talk to you, Kennedy.’ I shouted.

He heard me this time too; the nod was almost imperceptible but I caught it.

We reached the other side, passed through a heavy clipped door and at once found ourselves in another world. It wasn’t the sudden quiet, the warmth, the absence of wind and rain that caused the transformation, though those helped: compared to the other side of the rig from which we had just come, this side resembled a sumptuous hotel.

Instead of bleak steel bulkheads there was some form of polythene or Formica panelling painted in pleasing pastel shades. The floor was sheathed in deep sound-absorbing rubber and a strip of carpeting covered the length of the passageway stretching in front of us. Instead of harsh unshaded lighting falling from occasional overhead lamps, there was a warm diffused glow from concealed strip lighting. Doors lined the passage and the one or two that were open looked into rooms as finely furnished as the cabins you might find in the senior officer’s quarters aboard a battleship. Oil drilling might be a tough life, but the drillers obviously believed in doing themselves well in their off-duty hours. To find this comfort, luxury almost, in the Martian metal structure standing miles out to sea was somehow weird and altogether incongruous.

But what pleased me more than all those evidences of comfort was the fact that there were concealed loudspeakers at intervals along the passage. Those were playing music, soft music, but perhaps loud enough for my purpose. When the last of us had passed through the doorway, Kennedy turned and looked at Royale.

‘Where are we going, sir?’ The perfect chauffeur to the end, anyone who called Royale ‘sir’ deserved a medal.

‘The general’s stateroom. Lead the way.’

‘I usually eat in the drillers’ mess, sir,’ Kennedy said stiffly.

‘Not today. Hurry up, now.’

Kennedy took him at his word. Soon he had left most of them ten feet behind — all except me. And I knew I had very little time. I kept my voice low, head bent and talked without looking at him.

‘Can we put a phone call through to land?’

‘No. Not without clearance. One of Vyland’s men is with the switchboard operator. Checks everything, in and out.’

‘See the sheriff?’

‘A deputy. He got the message.’

‘How are they going to let us know if they had any success?’

‘A message. To the general. Saying that you — or a man like you — had been arrested at Jacksonville, travelling north.’

I should have loved to curse out loud but I contented myself with cursing inwardly. Maybe it had been the best they could think up at short notice, but it was weak, with a big chance of failure. The regular switchboard operator might indeed have passed the message on to the general and there would be no chance that I might be in the vicinity at the time: but Vyland’s creature supervising the operator would know the message to be false and wouldn’t bother passing it on, except perhaps hours later, by way of a joke: nor was there any certainty that even then the news would reach my ears. Everything, just everything could fail and men might die because I couldn’t get the news I wanted. It was galling. The frustration I felt, and the chagrin, were as deep as the urgency was desperate.

The music suddenly stopped, but we were rounding a corner which cuts off momentarily from the others, and I took a long chance.

‘The short-wave radio operator. Is he on constant duty?’

Kennedy hesitated. ‘Don’t know. Call-up bell, I think.’

I knew what he meant. Where, for various reasons, a radio post can’t be continuously manned, there is a device that triggers a distant alarm bell when a call comes through on the post’s listening frequency.

‘Can you operate a short-wave transmitter?’ I murmured.

He shook his head.

‘You’ve got to help me. It’s essential that—’

‘Talbot!’

It was Royale’s voice. He’d heard me, I was sure he’d heard me, and this was it, if he’d the slightest suspicion, then I knew Kennedy and I had exchanged our last words and that I was through. But I passed up the guilty starts and breaking of steps in mid-stride, instead I slowed down gradually, looked round mildly and inquiringly. Royale was about eight feet behind and there were no signs of suspicion or hostility in his face. But then there never were. Royale had given up using expressions years ago.

‘Wait here,’ he said curtly. He moved ahead of us, opened a door, peered in, had a good look round, then beckoned. ‘All right. In.’

We went in. The room was big, over twenty feet long, and luxuriously furnished. Red carpet from wall to wall, red drapes framing square rain-blurred windows, green and red chintz-covered armchairs, a cocktail bar lined with red leather-covered stools in one corner, a Formica-topped table to seat eight near the door: in the corner opposite the bar, a curtained-off alcove. The dining-room of the suite — internal doors opened off right-and left-hand walls — where the general roughed it when he came out to the oil rig.

Vyland was there, waiting for us. He seemed to have recovered his equanimity, and I had to admit that that smooth urbane face with its neatly trimmed moustache and distinguished sprinkling of iron-grey at the temples belonged right there in that room.

‘Close the door,’ he said to Larry, then turned to me and nodded towards the curtained alcove. ‘You eat there, Talbot.’

‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘The hired help. I eat in the kitchen.’

‘You eat there for the same reason that you saw no one on your way through the corridors coming here. Think we want the drilling-rig crew running around shouting that they’ve just seen Talbot, the wanted murderer? Don’t forget they have radios here and the chopper delivers papers every day … I think we might have the steward in now, General, don’t you?’

I went quickly to my seat at the tiny table behind the curtain and sat down. I felt shaken. I should have felt relieved to know that Royale had not been suspicious, that he’d merely been checking to see that the coast was clear before we went into the general’s room, but I was more concerned about my own slip-up. My attention was so taken up with immediate problems that I had forgotten that I was playing the part of a murderer. Had I been a genuine and wanted killer, I’d have kept my face hidden, walked in the middle of the group and peered fearfully round every corner we’d come to. I had done none of those things. How long would it be before it occurred to Royale to wonder why I had done none of those things?

The outside door opened and someone, a steward, I assumed, entered. Once again it was the general who was the host, the man in charge, with Vyland his employee and guest: the general’s ability to switch roles, his unfailing command of himself in all circumstances, impressed me more every time I noticed it. I was beginning to hope that perhaps it might be a good thing to let the general in on something of what was happening, to seek his help in a certain matter, I was certain now he could carry off any deception, any duplicity where the situation demanded it. But he might as well have been a thousand miles away for any hope I had of contacting him.

The general finished giving his orders for lunch, the door closed behind the departing steward and for perhaps a minute there was complete silence. Then someone rose to his feet and crossed the room and the next I heard was the sound of bottles and glasses clinking. Trifles like murder and forcible coercion and underwater recovery of millions weren’t going to get in the way of the observance of the customs of the old Southern hospitality. I would have taken long odds that it was the general himself who was acting as barman, and I was right: I would have taken even longer odds that he would pass up Talbot the murderer, and I was wrong. The alcove curtain was pushed back and the general himself set down a glass before me: he remained bent over my tiny table for a couple of seconds, and the look he gave me wasn’t the look you give a known murderer who has at one time kidnapped your daughter and threatened her with death. It was a long, slow, considering, speculative look: and then incredibly, but unmistakably, the corner of his mouth twitched in a smile and his eye closed in a wink. Next moment he was gone, the curtain falling into place and shutting me off from the company.

I hadn’t imagined it, I knew I hadn’t imagined it. The general was on to me. How much he was on to me I couldn’t guess, any more than I could guess at the reasons that had led to the discovery of what he knew or suspected. One thing I was sure of, he hadn’t learned from his daughter, I’d impressed her enough with the necessity for complete secrecy.

There was a rumble of conversation in the room and I became aware that it was General Ruthven himself who held the floor.

‘It’s damnably insulting and utterly ridiculous,’ he was saying in a voice that I’d never heard before. A dry, icy voice that I could just see being brought to bear for maximum effect in quelling an unruly board of directors. ‘I don’t blame Talbot, murderer though he is. This gun-waving, this guarding has got to stop. I insist on it, Vyland. Good God, man, it’s so utterly unnecessary and I don’t think a man like you would go in for cheaply melodramatic stuff like this.’ The general was warming to his theme of making a stand against being shepherded around at pistol point, or at least against constant surveillance. ‘Look at the weather, man — no one can move from here in the next twelve hours at least. We’re not in the position to make any trouble — and you know I’m the last man in the world to want to. I can vouch personally for my daughter and Kennedy.’

The general was sharp, sharp as a needle, sharper than either Vyland or Royale. He was a bit late in the day in making his stand against surveillance, I guessed what he was really after was the power of freedom of movement — possibly for himself, even more possibly for his chauffeur. And, what was more, he was getting it. Vyland was agreeing, with the reservation that when he and Royale went in the bathyscaphe the general, his chauffeur and Mary should remain in the room above the pillar along with the rest of Vyland’s men. I still had no idea how many men Vyland actually had aboard the rig, but it seemed likely that apart from Larry, Cibatti and his friend there were at least three others. And they would be men in the mould of Cibatti.

Conversation broke off short as a knock came again to the door. A steward — or stewards — set down covers, made to serve but were told by the general to go. As the door closed he said: ‘Mary, I wonder if you would take something to Talbot?’

There came the soft sound of the rubbing of chair legs on the carpet, then Kennedy’s voice, saying: ‘If I might be permitted, sir?’

‘Thank you, Kennedy. Just a minute while my daughter serves it out.’ By and by the curtain was pushed to one side and Kennedy carefully laid a plate in front of me. Beside the plate he laid a small blue leather-covered book, straightened, looked at me expressionlessly and left.

He was gone before I had realized the significance of what he had done. He knew very well that whatever concessions in freedom of movement the general had gained did not apply to me, I was going to be under eye and gun for sixty seconds every minute, sixty minutes every hour and that our last chance for talking was gone. But not our last chance for communication, not with that little book lying around.

It wasn’t strictly a book, it was that cross between a diary and an account book, with a tiny pencil stuck in the loop of leather, which garages and car-dealers dole out in hundreds of thousands, usually at Christmas time, to the more solvent of their customers. Nearly all chauffeurs carried one for entering up in the appropriate spaces the cost of petrol, oil, services, repairs, mileage and fuel consumption. None of those things interested me: all that interested me was the empty spaces in the diary pages and the little blue pencil.

With one eye on the book and one on the curtain and both ears attuned to the voices and sounds beyond that curtain I wrote steadily for the better part of five minutes, feeding myself blindly with fork in the left hand while with my right I tried to set down in the briefest time and the shortest compass everything I wanted to tell Kennedy. When I was finished I felt reasonably satisfied: there was still a great deal left to chance but it was the best I could do. Accepting of chances was the essence of this game.

Perhaps ten minutes after I had finished writing Kennedy brought me in a cup of coffee. The book was nowhere to be seen, but he didn’t hesitate, his hand went straight under the crumpled napkin in front of me, closed over the little book and slid it smoothly inside his tunic. I was beginning to have a great deal of confidence indeed in Simon Kennedy.

Five minutes later Vyland and Royale marched me back to the other side of the rig. Negotiating the hurricane blast that swept across the open well-deck was no easier this time than it had been the last, and in the intervening half-hour the darkness had deepened until it was almost as black as night.

At twenty past three I dropped once more down into the bathyscaphe and pulled the hatch cover tight behind me.