“No, no,” she cried, shuddering in Vladimir’s embrace. “No! I can’t bear to die!”
“I had already thought of the Herr Count’s suggestion,” announced the Doctor heavily.
“Sally m’dear,” questioned the McKay, “it’s a rotten business I know—but what about it?”
“We’re going to die,” repeated Sally with rising hysteria. “We’re going to die! We’re going to die!”
He pressed her hand and let his head sway from side to side a little with the intensity of his frustration.
“Please,” he murmured, “now or later?”
She did not reply and the sudden impression reached him that she was going off her head with shock and fear already. Camilla’s terrified outbursts were more normal than this dreadful repetition of the one hopeless phrase. He shook her roughly.
“Sally d’you hear me—did you hear what I said?”
“What is it?” she asked vaguely and then, as though waking from a dream: “Oh God! What are we going to do?”
“Listen m’dear,” he said gently, “we’re trapped here. The cable’s snapped—get that? And there’s no way out. We haven’t a hope in Hades so it’s a choice if we hang on for about six hours—then suffocate, or if we take it now—standing up as it were—since the Doctor can black us out in about a minute.”
“I don’t care,” her voice was dull—apathetic. “We’re going to die—that’s what it is. We’re going to die and we just can’t do anything to stop it.”
A groan came up from the darkness in their rear. At first they thought it to be Nicky, but it was Bozo coming round. Axel and Vladimir fumbled about until they could haul him into a sitting position. The Doctor flashed his torch to help them, but when they had propped him up his head sagged forward and he apparently passed out again.
Then Nicky, who had come to as his body was lifted from on top of the gunman’s sniffed, choked on a sob and muttered. “Undo the door—can’t you. Let’s take a sporting chance that the air bubble from this thing carries us to the surface.”
They could not see the Doctor’s eloquent shrug but he spoke a moment later. “The door has been riveted down from the outside, we could not open it even if our lives depended on it and we were in the air above. Here, even if we had the power to do so, which we have not, the in-rush of water would compress the air to a bubble no larger than a football and crush us flat.”
Camilla was crying quietly on Vladimir’s broad chest. “I don’t want to die,” she sobbed, “I don’t want to—something may happen—it must.”
Nothing could happen. Count Axel on her other side, the Doctor, Vladimir, the McKay all knew that.
“Who’s snatched my rod?” A gruff voice came from by the doorway. It was Bozo whose wits were slowly returning to him. “Put on the light damn you—the boss’ll grill you all for this when we get back on deck.”
“I’m afraid there’s been an accident,” Count Axel told him quietly. “Your friends were careless in reversing the crane after they had let us come down with a rush.”
“Is—that—so? Playin’ a joke on me eh—I’ll learn them plenty when we hit the surface.”
“I only wish you might have the opportunity, but unfortunately the cable’s broken and we’re on the bottom here—stuck.”
“The hell we are!” Bozo lurched drunkenly to his feet, hit his head on the roof of the sphere and swore profanely—then bellowed: “Where’s that lousy Doctor. Come on—get busy. You’ve got to get us up.”
“I—I wish with all my heart I could,” Doctor Tisch stammered, “but the Herr Count is quite correct. The cable has broken and we are at rest on the sea bottom—I can do nothing and no help can reach us here.”
“Hi! Quit bluffin’ Doctor.” Bozo’s voice had suddenly gone scared. “That’s not straight—is it?”
“I speak quite truthfully,” the Doctor assured him. “We face death. There is no alternative. At most we shall all be dead in seven hours.”
“An’ you’ve let me in fer this—have you? All right! I’ll mince you first a piece if I’ve got to die like a rat in a trap.”
The gunman threw his heavy body in the direction from which the Doctor’s voice had come. Camilla and Sally clutched nervously at the McKay. This fighting in the pitchy blackness distracted their thoughts for a moment yet added to the macabre horror of their situation.
The Doctor grunted as Bozo landed on him, but he still held his torch and switched it on. Vladimir gripped the big gunman by the scruff of the neck and with his tremendous strength hauled him off as if he were only a puppy. Then flung him to the floor.
“Rat is what you are,” declared the Prince contemptuously. “Open your face again and I will beat you to a pulping.”
Bozo squirmed into a sitting position and sat there hunched, staring with wide eyes into the terrifying darkness. He would have taken on the Prince for a tussle in free air but the appalling finality of the calamity was just beginning to penetrate his dull brain. They were to die then—all of them—like rats in a trap and there was nothing they could do about it—nothing at all. A sort of terrified coma gripped him as, for the first time in his animal existence, he began to visualise certain death in the agony of suffocation.
No one spoke then for a little and the silence was only broken by Camilla’s sobbing. She tried to stop but she could not. The great fear seemed to be there right inside her somewhere in the pit of her stomach reaching up and dragging at her very heart.
“It’s true you know—we’re going to die,” Sally murmured again almost as if talking to herself.
“Everyone’s got to die some time,” said the McKay soberly, “we’re only anticipating the natural course of things a bit m’dear—that’s all.”
Camilla heard them and shuddered. Everyone had to die some time of course but she had never paused to face the thought that death must come one day to herself; and here it was hovering over her, in that fearful darkness that could be felt, and seemed to press with the gentlest persistence on her skin. She had taken such a harmless joy in all the flattery and adulation, the handsome lovers and the lovely clothes. Perhaps she might have done more good if she had spent less time amusing herself, but a special department of the Hart estate gave away enormous sums each month in response to genuine appeals for charity which had been properly investigated, and she had never harmed anyone wilfully in all her life. Both she and Sally had been brought up very quietly, hardly allowed to see anyone or go out into the world at all, until they were twenty-one, in order to protect the young heiress from fortune hunters. They were only twenty-three now and so had had barely two years of glorious freedom.
It was unfair—unjust to be cut off like this when life was only starting, Camilla felt, and impotent rage momentarily conquered her fear. Never again to admire her own beauty in the dressing table-glass while the maid did her hair. Never again to be able to display her supple rounded limbs, while sunbathing, to the admiration of all beholders. No more laughter, no more flirtations, no more joyous passionate love-making, but darkness—death—and decay. She thought of her exquisite, so carefully tended body, wasted, useless, rotting there, turned to a mass of putrescent stinking carrion, and sobbed afresh.
Aeons of time seemed to drift by while they sat huddled together motionless, their brains racing madly towards the borderland of insanity, or steeped almost to numbness now in blank despair.
The McKay glanced at the luminous dial of his wrist watch and announced: “It’s ten past one. We’ve been down here just on an hour.”
Nicky laughed, unnaturally, shrilly: “It’s cocktail time—cocktail time up there,” and they knew him to be on the verge of a breakdown.
“I’ve got a flask of brandy,” the McKay offered. “I never go on any sort of risky business without one—here, have a pull at it if you like.” As he reached behind him in the darkness to hand over the flask he hoped that a good stiff peg might hold Nicky together for a little longer. He was dreading more than anything the
time which must inevitably come when someone’s nerve would snap.
“Thanks,” Nicky grabbed the flask gratefully and held it to his mouth.
“You poor dear,” Sally turned her head which was resting on the McKay’s shoulder. She spoke normally again now. “How right you were in trying to dissuade us from coming on these dives. You always foresaw that one of them would end in a tragedy. What rotten luck for you that just this one time you’re with us should be the time the cable breaks.”
He shrugged. “It can’t be helped m’dear. I’m lucky, considering what I’ve been through, to reach the age I have—and anyhow I’ve had a lot of fun. It’s yourself, and Camilla, and Vladimir and Nicky who’re hardest hit. You’re all young people who had a right to expect many happy years ahead.”
“You’re a dear,” she murmured and snuggled closer to him.
Another hour drifted by while the lights of the luminous fishes came and went with monotonous regularity outside the ports. Inside the sphere they sat cramped yet motionless sunk in a hopeless apathy.
“I wonder,” said Count Axel meditatively, after he had asked, and been told, the time, “I wonder how long will elapse before they find our bodies here?”
“From now till doomsday,” replied the McKay briefly.
“Oh no, my dear Captain, you are quite wrong. I should say fifty years at the utmost and it is possible that our human remains may be brought to the surface long before that.”
“Why should you think so?”
“Remember that before our unfortunate descent to-day the Doctor had already proved his theory to be correct. Slinger, Ardow, the telephonist Oscar, who has had a most fortunate escape by the way, and doubtless all the members of the crew, know that the remains of the Atlantean capital do really lie beneath them. This great discovery is now the property of the whole world; other, greater, bathyspheres with stronger cables will be built and new expeditions will find ready financial backing since that is always forthcoming when there are definite prospects of finding gold. Then the advance of science is so rapid these days, that every ruin in these waters will be mapped and examined. They are bound to discover this rusty ball before they are done and it would not surprise me at all to learn—if I could see into the future—that before twenty years are past the sphere will be a greatly prized exhibit in some museum and our bodies buried with considerable honour in—”
“Stop!” cried Camilla wildly. “Stop! How can you!”
“I am sorry Madame,” he apologised turning his head to smile in the darkness. “I had hoped to distract your thoughts a little.”
“Don’t, please,” she begged. “It’s bad enough as things are but to hear you calmly speculating on what may happen to our corpses will drive me out of my mind. Besides—”
“Besides what, Madame?” he prompted her.
“I’ve just remembered,” her voice went tremulous again. “The Doctor warned us when we first went down that we should not talk too much, because the more we did the more—the more oxygen we used up.”
“I know, I hoped that you had forgotten that, because it had just occurred to me again. I was really trying to reduce our supply and, automatically, the time we still have to wait.”
“Camilla’s right!” snapped Nicky, “Camilla’s right! For God’s sake shut up.”
‘I will,” agreed the Count—“since it is her wish.”
The silence was longer this time, so long that they almost seemed to have been asleep and suffering in some fantastic nightmare when the Doctor spoke:
“Nine out of our twelve tanks are used now.”
“Would it not be better if we made an end then?” Count Axel suggested again.
“No,” cried Nicky promptly. “That’s suicide and I won’t have it. It may surprise you to know it but I’m religious in a kind of way. I don’t mind telling you now it—it can’t get any further but all that dope about my being an American and graduate of a swell college is sheer huey. I’m only half American through my mother and my father was North country English. I was born in a London slum. I ran away from home to better myself and I did by golly—but they were a religious pair and deep down in me their teaching stuck. We’ll all have to go before the Judge’s seat when the last trumpet sounds and that scares me more than the thought of death—I’ll not add suicide to all the lying and cheating I’ve had to do to get up to where I got.”
“You’re right, Boss—you said a mouthful,” Bozo came out of his coma and unexpectedly backed Nicky up. “My folks was religious too—and what I’ve got to answer for’s enough. Yes, Sir, I’m with you all the time.”
The McKay would have clung to his life like a limpet had there been the remotest hope of retaining it but, since they had to die, he preferred the Count’s way out to the horror of madness and torture of suffocation. He too possessed deep religious convictions although he was not given to talking of them but the Doctor expressed his belief exactly when he said:
“I am no atheist. In fact I was educated for the Lutheran Church, ordained, and practised as a Minister until I was twenty-eight. Only my intense interest in archaeology and an offer of employment on an expedition to Assyria tempted me to resign from the Ministry; but I haf always believed that God’s mercy has no limitations. I am unorthodox perhaps but I cannot think He would withhold his pardon from anyone who shortened their life by an hour or two when in such a hopeless predicament as ourselves.
Camilla settled it. She began to scream and beg them frantically not to do anything—yet.
Vladimir declared jumpily that he would shoot anyone who attempted to go against Camilla’s wishes, and they settled down again to wait for death in grim silence.
The atmosphere was so tense that they could almost feel each other thinking. Sally had not spoken for a long time now and a shivering fit took possession of her. The McKay felt her slim body trembling beneath his arm and once more he racked his brains for some way to comfort her.
“Look here,” he said, suddenly, “I’m no story teller but oxygen or no oxygen I’m going to tell you a story m’dear. It’s the only one I can think of at the moment because my old brain’s gone woolly, and you’ll have heard it years ago but if you’ll listen a bit maybe it will give you something to think about.”
The others turned towards him in the darkness and he began:
“Once upon a time there were three sisters, or rather two of them were sisters and the other was a step-sister if I remember. Anyhow two of them were much older than the other one and they were both very ugly, and lazy and bad tempered, while the youngest was a beautiful young girl like you.”
Sally stopped shivering. Just those four first words: “Once upon a time,” had caught her back from that maze of dread speculations; yet she was not listening to him as he went on; she was thinking of one thing only now. The full realisation that she loved him with all her heart and soul, had just come upon her. He might be nearly twice her age and grey haired, but he had all a young man’s virility and in his heart lay youth tempered by a great gentleness. That his concern for her was so great that he could put aside the thought of his own approaching end in an endeavour to distract her, like a little child, with a fairy story, touched her more deeply than any experience she had ever known. She lowered her head against his chest and burst into a violent storm of tears.
“What is it then. What is it Sally m’dear?” he asked tenderly as he stroked her hair. “Listen to the story I’m telling you and try and forget everything else. Now these three sisters lived—”
“The fish!” exclaimed the Doctor suddenly. “What is the matter with the fish?”
They all roused and stared out of the portholes. Something unusual was obviously happening outside. The lights had ceased to dance, every single one of them was streaming now in one direction, back from the open space, perhaps upon the western verge of the Atlantean city, where the bathysphere had fallen, towards the shelter of the ruins.
For a moment the prisoners in the bathysphere wa
tched in wonder. Lights of every size and colour streaked by. There could be no doubt whatever that these creatures of the deep were fleeing in terror of their lives, just like animals before a forest fire, and the danger they feared was coming up out of the deeper waters to the westward.
The numbers of lights increased. The things outside dashed themselves against the fuzed quartz windows in their frantic panic to escape. They seemed to burst, scattering clouds of luminous food and multitudes of coloured stars. The press became so great that, for the first time since the electric wires had broken, the group in the sphere could see each other’s faces faintly illuminated in the unearthly radiance caused by this multitude of terrified creatures.
Then the lights dimmed, and the cataract of racing flashes ceased, yet a number of bright blotches hovered at the portholes bobbing feebly up and down as though their owners were caught in the crush and could not escape.
The Doctor switched on his torch and by it they saw that a solid writhing mass of fish and squids and prawns were now jammed up against the windows. Not an inch of water showed and the surface of each port was covered completely by wriggling tentacles and fins. Suddenly the bathysphere began to move.
“Gott in Himmel!” exclaimed the Doctor. “What now!”
Slowly but surely the sphere moved sideways and was drawn along the surface of the ocean bed surrounded by the press of captive fish. The party sat tight and held their breath, utterly bewildered by this extraordinary phenomenon. They were dragged about a hundred yards, as far as they could judge, then the sphere tilted gently and fell over sideways.
Sally screamed—Camilla fainted—the others clutched wildly at each other as they were flung sprawling against the side of the sphere which held the searchlight and had now become its bottom. Yet there was no violent shock as they turned over. The sphere seemed to be sinking as though it had fallen over a cliff, and the second they had sorted themselves out the Doctor flashed his torch on the ports.
Nothing was to be seen. Only the mass of writhing creatures still pressed against the windows. For nearly fifteen minutes the feeling that they were sinking, first gently, then quite fast, then gently again, continued while they strove to revive Camilla and examined the damage which had been done. Fortunately the tanks were safe and still functioning, only the now useless lighting apparatus had been smashed. Camilla came round and went off again. Sally and Nicky were babbling half hysterically while the rest were wrought up to an almost unendurable pitch of excitement, although they were too staggered even to hazard an opinion as to what was going on outside.
They Found Atlantis Page 23