Fear is the Key

Once more on the seaward side and pinned against the pillar by the pressure of the swell I started crabbing my way down below the surface. This time it was easy, for right away, by chance, my hand found a broad, deeply- and sharply-cut series of slightly curved grooves in the metal extending vertically downwards. I am no engineer, but I knew this must be the worm that engaged against the big motor-driven pinion which would be required to raise and lower those pillars. There must have been one on the last pillar also, but I'd missed it.

It was like going down a cliff with a series of rungs cut in the rock-face. I paused every other foot or so, reaching out on both sides, but there was nothing, no projection, no wire, just the smooth rather slimy surface. Steadily, painstakingly, I forced myself downwards, increasingly more conscious of the gripping pressure of the water, the difficulty of breathing. Somewhere close on forty feet I called it a day. Damaging my ear-drums or lungs or getting nitrogen into the bloodstream wasn't going to help anyone. I gave up. I went up.

Just below the surface I stopped to have a rest and clear my head. I felt bitterly disappointed, I had banked more heavily than I knew on this last chance. Wearily, I laid my head against the pillar and thought with a bleak hopelessness that I would have to start all over again. And I had no idea in the world where to start. I felt tired, dead tired. And then, in a moment, the tiredness left me as if it had never been.

That great steel pillar was alive with sound. There could be no doubt about it, instead of being silent and dead and full of water, it was alive with sound.

I ripped off my rubber helmet, coughed and gagged and spluttered as some water found its way in under the oxygen mask, then pressed my ear hard against the cold steel.

The pillar reverberated with a deep resonant vibration that jarred the side of my head. Water-filled pillars don't reverberate with sound, not with sound of any kind. But this one did, beyond all question. It wasn't water that was in that pillar, it was air. Air! All at once I identified that peculiar sound I was hearing; I should have identified it immediately. That rhythmical rising and falling of sound as a motor accelerated and slowed, accelerated and slowed, was a sound that had for many years been part and parcel of my professional Me. It was an air compressor, and a big one at that, hard at work inside that pillar. An air compressor deep down below water level inside one of the support legs of a mobile rig standing far out in the Gulf of Mexico. It didn't make sense, it didn't make any kind of sense at all. I leant my forehead against the metal, and it seemed as if the shuddering jarring vibration was an insistent clamorous voice trying to tell me something, something of urgency and vital importance, if only I would listen. I listened. For half a minute, perhaps a minute, I listened, and all of a sudden it made the very best kind of sense there Was. It was the answer I would never have dreamed of, it was the answer to many things. It took me time to guess this might be the answer, it took me time to realise this must be the answer, but when I did realise it I was left with no doubts in the world.

I gave three sharp tugs on the rope and within a minute was back aboard the Matapan. I was hauled aboard as quickly and with as little ceremony as if I had been a sack of coals and I was still stripping off oxygen cylinder and mask when Captain Zaimis barked for the mooring rope to be slipped, gunned the engine, scraped by the mooring pillar and put the rudder hard over. The Matapan yawed and rolled wickedly as she came broadside on to the troughs, shipping solid seas and flying clouds of spray over the starboard side, and then, stern to the wind and steady on course, headed for shore.

Ten minutes later, when I'd peeled off the diving-suit, dried off, dressed in shore clothes and was just finishing my second glass of brandy, Captain Zaimis came down to the cabin. He was smiling, whether with satisfaction or relief I couldn't guess, and seemed to regard all danger as being past: and true enough, riding before the seas, the Matapan was now almost rock-steady. He poured himself a thimble of brandy and spoke for the first time since I'd been dragged aboard.

"You were successful, no?"

"Yes." I thought the curt affirmative a bit ungracious. "Thanks to you, Captain Zaimis."

He beamed. "You are kind, Mr. Talbot, and I am delighted. But not thanks to me but to our good friend here who watches over us, over all those who gather sponges, over all who go to sea." He struck a match and put a light to a wick in an oil-filled boat-shaped pottery dish which stood in front of a glassed-in portrait of St. Nicholas.

I looked sourly at him. I respected his piety and appreciated his sentiments but I thought he was a bit late in striking the matches.

CHAPTER VI