Fear is the Key

Vyland seemed more than content to leave the running of the bathyscaphe to me. He spent most of his time peering rather apprehensively out of a side window. Royale's one good cold unwinking eye never left me; he watched every separate tiny movement and adjustment I made but it was only pure habit; I think his ignorance of the principles and controls of the bathyscaphe were pretty weE complete. They must have been: even when I turned the intake control of the carbon dioxide absorption apparatus right down to its minimum operating figure it meant nothing to him.

We were drifting slowly along about ten feet above the floor of the sea, nose tilted slightly upwards by the drag of the wire, our guide-rope dangling down below the observation chamber and just brushing the rock and coral formations or dragging over a sponge-bar. The darkness of the water was absolute, but our two searchlights and 'the light streaming out through the Plexiglas windows gave us light enough to see by. One or two groupers loafed lazily by the windows, absent-mindedly intent on their own business; a snake-bodied barracuda writhed its lean grey body towards us, thrust its evil head against a side window and stared in unblinkingly for almost a minute; a school of what looked like Spanish mackerel kept us company for some time, then abruptly vanished in an exploding flurry of motion as a bottle-nosed shark cruised majestically into view, propelling itself along with a barely perceptible motion of its long powerful tail. But, for the most part, the sea-floor seemed deserted; perhaps the storm raging above had sent most fish off to seek deeper waters.

Exactly ten minutes after we had left, the sea-floor abruptly dropped away beneath us in what seemed, in the sudden yawning darkness that our searchlight could not penetrate, an almost vertical cliff-face. I knew this to be only illusion; Vyland would have surveyed the ocean bed a dozen times and if he said the angle was only 30? it was almost certainly so, but nevertheless the impression of a sudden bottomless chasm was overwhelming.

"This is it," Vyland said in a low voice. On his smooth polished face I could make out the faint sheen of sweat. "Take her down, Talbot."

"Later." I shook my head. "If we start descending now that tow-rope we're trailing is going to pull our tail right up. Our searchlights can't shine ahead, only vertically downwards. Want that we should crash our nose into some outcrop of rock that we can't see? Want to rupture the for'ard gasoline tank? — don't forget the shell of those tanks is only thin sheet metal. It only needs one split tank and we'll have so much negative buoyancy that we can never rise again. You appreciate that, don't you, Vyland?"

His face gleamed with sweat. He wet his lips again and said: "Do it your way, Talbot."

I did it my way. I kept on course 222? until the tow-wire recorder showed 600 metres, stopped the engine and let our slight preponderance of negative buoyancy, which our forward movement and angled planes had so far overcome, take over. We settled gradually, in a maddeningly deliberate slow motion, the fathometer needle hardly appearing to move. The hanging weight of the tow-wire aft tended to pull us astern, and at every ten fathoms, between thirty and seventy, I had to ease ahead on the motors and pay out a little more wire.

At exactly seventy-six fathoms our searchlights picked up the bed of the sea. No rock or coral or sponge bars here, just little patches of greyish sand and long black stretches of mud. I started the two motors again, advanced them almost to half-speed, trimmed the planes and began to creep forward very slowly indeed. We had to move only five yards. Bryson's estimate had been almost exactly right; with 625 metres showing on the tow-wire indicator I caught a glimpse of something thrusting up from the bed of the sea, almost out of our line of vision to the left. It was the tail-plane of an aircraft, we had overshot our target to the right, the nose of the plane was pointing back in the direction from which we had come… I put the motors in reverse, started up the tow-wire drum, backed about twenty yards then came forward again, angling to the left. Arrived at what I judged to be the right spot, I put the motors momentarily into reverse, then cut them out altogether. Slowly, surely, the bathyscaphe began to sink: the dangling guide rope touched bottom, but this lessening of weight failed to overcome the slight degree of negative buoyancy as it should have done, and the base of the observation chamber sank heavily into the black mud of the ocean floor.