Frantic with excitement the Doctor came forward to report his news; and his enthusiasm was so infectious that it galvanised the despondent prisoners into some display of interest.
He said that he was going down at once since he could suffer not a moment's delay in making the first trip to the ocean bottom in this area that had so long held his imagination. That it was over 800 fathoms down and nearly twice the depth that any human being had ever been before troubled him not at all. If any of the others wished to accompany him Slinger had no objection to their doing so, he said; but they must make up their minds and be quick about it.
Camilla jumped up without the slightest hesitation. Her previous experience of the marvels to be seen on a deep sea dive had whetted her appetite for more. Count Axel stepped quickly to her side.
'Come on Sally—why don't you,' Camilla cried. 'It's so 122
utterly thrilling to see all the wonderful things down there that one just forgets to be frightened the second the ball's beneath the surface.'
'All right,' Sally stood up a little slowly. 'I'll come.'
Vladimir shrugged his broad shoulders. 'If we are to stand twiddling our toes instead of combating our distresses we can do it as well under sea, so I join you.'
'What about you, Nicky?' Camilla glanced at the slim handsome young man who was wearing again his startling sky blue flannel suit.
'No thanks.' Nicky shook his head. 'If we're going to start playing games again just as though we had no cause to worry ourselves sick I'd rather take on the McKay at deck tennis—if he still doesn't care for the idea of going down.'
'I'm your man Nicky,' replied the McKay promptly. 'Let's go and see all these folk safely locked into their padded cell, then we'll amuse ourselves by chucking bits of rope at each other—it's less dangerous.'
'Come please,' said the Doctor impatiently.
Ten minutes later the two girls, Axel, Vladimir, the Doctor and his little seedy-looking telephonist Oscar were inside the bathysphere and the bolts which secured the heavy door were being hammered home.
The McKay and Nicky had been allowed aft by the gunmen for the purpose of seeing the others off, and now they were leaning side by side over the rail. No one else was near them and under cover of the din Nicky said suddenly:
'Look here. I'm worried stiff over this hold up. What d'you think the chances are of that bird Kate slipping up over the will?'
'Not a hope in hell,' replied the McKay tersely. He was not feeling too civil at the moment having just failed in an attempt to dissuade Sally from going down in the bathysphere.
'Wish to God we could figure out some way of fixing Slinger,' Nicky went on meditatively.
'So do I, but as long as he always moves round with those two toughs in tow how the deuce can we get at him?'
'We've darn well got to start something before the week's out. I got all the dope I could about these Falklands from a book in the ship's library last night and it sounds just one hell of a place to me.'
'It is,' agreed the McKay. 'Still I'd rather sit on the rocks there for six months than go down in that bathysphere.'
'Would you? By jingo I wouldn't. The risk isn't all that great.'
'I mean go down in it regularly as the Doctor, Axel, and Camilla propose to do. I wouldn't jib at a single trip if I thought it would get us out of the clutches of these toughs. But sooner or later there's going to be a hitch somewhere, it will bust or they won't be able to get it up and I'd rather be smoking dried seaweed in the Falklands than in it when that happens.'
'Well—there she goes.' Nicky waved his hand as the great crane rattled and the bathysphere sank under the surface, 'What about that game of deck tennis?'
The McKay grinned. 'Right-ho! m'lad, such simple sports are infinitely preferable to an old man like me.'
Inside the sphere, Sally clenched her hands and held her breath for ten seconds as the circular chamber slid under water. Staring upwards through one of the portholes she caught a glimpse of the surface from below. It looked infinitely calmer seen thus than from above where the wavelets chopped and splashed even on this calm day—just a quilted canopy of palish green dappled by constantly shifting patches of bright sunshine—then they slid downwards halting for the first tie to be made, attaching the hose containing the electric wires to the cables, at fifty feet.
The silence seemed uncanny. Somehow she had expected to hear the constant rippling and splashing of the waves down there but there was not a sound. Strange as she felt it to be, too, the water did not seem to be wet any more. It was just as though she was staring into a solid block of pale greeny blue glass. Not a ripple or refraction gave the faintest suggestion of moisture and it was diamond clear instead of cloudy as she had imagined it to be.
Suddenly a three foot barracuda, that devil of the shallows, for whose attacks on bathers sharks are so often blamed, swam into the orbit of her vision. He paused for a moment to stare at the bathysphere and not the faintest movement except the slow champing of his horrid hinged jaws showed that he was alive instead of frozen into a great block of transparent, light greeny-blue ice. One flick of his tail and he was gone, yet no tremor of the water that he thrust from him with such vigour disturbed the glassy blankness in his wake.
Just as the bathysphere moved again two green moray eels slid by, then they passed a cloud of sea snails and a big jelly. As Camilla had done before her Sally forgot her fears and sat, her eyes rivetted on the window, enthralled by this ever-changing panorama of life and colour.
The red and orange had faded from the light. Only a palish tinge of yellow now suggested the sunshine above the surface and the green was already being displaced by the vivid brilliant blue. After their third stop, at 450 feet no colour remained but the unearthly bluish radiance which filled them all with a strange feeling of vitality and lent their senses abnormal powers of vivid perception.
The Doctor adjusted the oxygen flow a trifle, to exactly six litres a minute, a litre per head for each person in the bathysphere. The weedy telephonist muttered into his instrument keeping in constant touch with his opposite number above in the ship.
As they descended a constant procession of living creatures seemed to be sailing upward before the windows; prawns, squids, clouds of fry, jellies, strings of syphono-phores, shrimps, sea snails and beautifully coloured fish of every size and variety.
Gradually the intense blue light darkened to violet, then a deep navy blue, blue black, and black only tinged with grey. Fish, jellies and squids carrying their own illuminations made the portholes like the eye of a kaleidoscope at the end of which were constantly shifting dots of many colours. At 1,200 feet the Doctor switched on the searchlight. Its powerful beam cut an arc of weak yellow light through the dark waters and at its extremity there seemed to be a turquoise coloured cap. A scimitar mouth was outlined in the very centre of the beam, it remained there absolutely immobile, as though it was only a painted plaster cast, showing as little reaction to the sudden blinding light as if it had no consciousness of it.
When the bathysphere hung steady at 1,850 feet for one of the ties to be attached above, a school of Rainbow Gars came swimming by. They were small slim fish no more than four inches from nose to tail with long snapper-like jaws. Their elongated heads were a brilliant scarlet, behind the gills their bodies turned to a bright blue which merged through a suggestion of green into clear yelow at the tail. No cloud of brilliant hued butterflies fluttering through a tropical forest could have been more beautiful.
At 2,050 feet the Doctor switched out the light. 'We enter now,' he said, 'the region where it is forever night.'
Not the faintest suspicion of greyness now lightened the appalling blackness of the waters. It was night indeed, but night such as they had never known. They felt that never again would the darkness of the upper world be real darkness as they understood it now. This was the utter solid blackness of the pit; that final blotting out of the life rays without which every plant and tree and animal and human must surely die.