Fear is the Key

It isn't the fashion to design tombs in the form of two-hundred-foot-high metal cylinders, but if it were that pillar on the X 13 would have been a sensation. As a tomb, I mean. It had everything. It was cold and dank and dark, the gloom not so much relieved as accentuated by three tiny glowworms of light at top, middle and bottom: it was eerie and sinister and terrifying and the hollow, reverberating echoing boom of a voice in those black and cavernous confines held all the dark resonance, the doom-filled apocalyptic finality of the dark angel calling your name on the day of judgment. It should have been, I thought bleakly, a place you went through after you died, not just before you died. Not that the question of precedence mattered at the end of the day.

As a tomb, fine: as a means of getting anywhere, terrible. The only connection between top and bottom lay in a succession of iron ladders welded on to the riveted sides of the pillar. There were twelve of those ladders, each with fifteen rungs, not one break or resting place between top and bottom. What with the weight of a heavy circuit-testing bridge megger hanging down my back and the fact that the rungs were so wet and slippery that I had to grip them with considerable force to keep myself from falling off the ladder, the strain on forearm and shoulder muscles was severe; twice that distance and I wouldn't have made it.

It is customary for the host to lead the way in strange surroundings but Vyland passed up his privilege. Maybe he was frightened that if he preceded me down the ladder I'd take the opportunity of kicking his head off and sending him a hundred and more feet to his death on the iron platform below. However it was, I went first, with Vyland and the two cold-eyed men we'd found waiting in the little steel room following close behind. That left Larry and the general up above, and no one was under the impression that Larry was fit to guard anyone. The general was free to move around as he wished, yet Vyland appeared to have no fears that the general might use his freedom to queer his pitch. This I had found inexplicable: but I knew the answer to it now. Or I thought I knew: if I were wrong, innocent people would surely die. I put the thought out of my mind.

"Right, open it up, Cibatti," Vyland ordered.

The larger of the two men 'bent down and unscrewed the hatch, swinging it up and back on its hinges to Sock, into a standing catch. I peered down the narrow steel cylinder that led to the steel cabin beneath 'the bathyscaphe and said to Vyland: "I suppose you know you'll have to flood this entrance chamber when you go looking for your Black-beard's treasure?"

"What's that?" He looked at me narrowly, suspiciously. "Why?"

"Were you thinking of leaving it unflooded?" I asked incredulously. "This entrance chamber is usually flooded the minute you start descending — and that's normally surface level, not a hundred and thirty feet down as you are here. Sure, sure, I know it looks solid, it might even hold at double this depth, I don't know. But what I do know is that it is completely surrounded by your gasoline buoyancy tanks, about eight thousand gallons of it, and those are open to the sea at the bottom. The pressure inside those tanks corresponds exactly to the sea pressure outside — which is why only the thinnest sheet metal is required to hold the gasoline. But with only air inside your entrance chamber you're going to have at least two hundred pounds to the square inch pressing on the outside of this entrance chamber. And it won't stand that. It'll burst inwards, your gasoline will escape, your positive buoyancy will be gone for ever and there you are, four hundred and eighty feet below the surface of the sea. And there you would remain until the end of time."

It was hard to be positive in that thinly-lit gloom, but I could have sworn that the colour had drained from Vyland's face.

"Bryson never told me this." Vyland's voice was a vicious whisper and there was a shake in it.

"Bryson? Your engineering friend?" There was no answer, so I went on: "No, I don't suppose he would. He was no friend, was he, Vyland: he had a gun in his back, didn't he, and he knew that when his usefulness was over someone was going to pull the trigger of that gun? Why the hell should he tell you?" I looked away from him and shouldered the bridge megger again. "No need for anyone to come down with me — it'll only make me nervous."

"Think I'm going to let you go down there on your own?" he asked coldly. "To get up to your tricks?"