Fear is the Key

They searched Kennedy and found nothing. Royale was smart all right, you could have put in your eye all the bits he missed. But he just wasn't smart enough. He should have searched me.

"We don't want to hurry you, Talbot," Vyland said with elaborate sarcasm.

"Right away," I said. I sent down the last of the anaesthetic, frowned owlishly at the notes in my hand, folded them away in a pocket and turned towards the entrance door to the pillar. I carefully avoided looking at Mary, the general or Kennedy.

Vyland touched me on my bad shoulder and if it hadn't been for the anaesthetic I'd have gone through the deckhead. As it was I jumped a couple of inches and the two lumberjacks on my shoulder started up again, sawing away more industriously than ever.

"Getting nervous, aren't we? "Vyland sneered. He nodded at a mechanism on the table, a simple solenoid switch that I'd brought up from the scaphe. "Forgotten something, haven't you?"

"No. We won't be needing that any more."

"Right, on your way. You first… Watch them real close, Cibatti, won't you?"

"I'll watch them, boss," Cibatti assured him. He would, too, he'd bend his gun over the head of the first person to breathe too deeply. The general and Kennedy weren't going to pull any fast ones when Vyland and Royale were down there with me in the bathyscaphe, they'd stay there under gun-point until we returned. I was sure that Vyland would even have preferred to have the general with us in the bathyscaphe as extra security, but apart from the fact that the scaphe held only three in comfort and Vyland would never move into the least danger without his hatchetman by his side, that 180-rung descent was far too much for the old general to look at.

It almost proved too much for me, too. Before I was halfway down, my shoulder, arm and neck felt as if they were bathed in a mould of molten lead, and the waves of fiery pain were shooting up into my head and there the fire turned to darkness, and down into my chest and stomach and there they turned to nausea. Several times the pain and the darkness and the nausea all but engulfed me. I had to cling on desperately with my one good hand until the waves subsided and full consciousness returned. With every rung descended the periods of darkness grew longer and awareness shorter, and I must have descended the last thirty or forty rungs like an automaton, from instinct and memory and some strange sort of sub-conscious willpower. The only point in my favour was that, courteous as ever, they had sent me down first so that I wouldn't have to fight the temptation of dropping something heavy oa their heads, and so they weren't able to see how I was suffering. By the time I had reached the platform at the bottom and the last of them — Cibatti's friend, who was to close the platform hatch — had arrived, I was at least able to stand up without swaying. My face, I think, must have been the colour of paper and it was bathed in sweat, but the illumination from the tiny lamp at the foot of that cylindrical tomb was so faint that there was little danger of Vyland or Royale detecting anything unusual. I suspected that Royale wouldn't be feeling so good after the trip either, any man who has sustained a blow or blows sufficient to put him away for half an hour isn't going to be feeling on top of his form a mere fifteen minutes after he recovers. As for Vyland, I had a faint suspicion that he was more than a little scared and that his primary concern, at the moment, would be himself and the journey that lay ahead of us.

The platform hatch was opened and we clambered down through the entrance flooding chamber of the bathyscaphe into the steel ball below. I took the greatest care to favour my bad shoulder when I was negotiating the sharp, almost right-angle bend into the observation chamber and the journey wasn't any more than agonising. I switched on the overhead light and made for the circuit boxes leaving Vyland to secure the flooding-chamber hatch. Half a minute later he wriggled into the observation chamber and shut the heavy wedge-shaped circular door behind him.

They were both suitably impressed by the profusion and confusion of the wires dangling from the circuit boxes and if they weren't equally impressed by the speed and efficiency with which, barely consulting my notes, I buttoned them all back in place again, they ought to have been. Fortunately, the circuit boxes were no higher than waist level, my left arm was now so far gone that I could use it only from the elbow downwards.