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 mourn 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, con-siderin 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 today 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 anc 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: