Wake of the Perdido Star (27 page)

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Authors: Gene Hackman

BOOK: Wake of the Perdido Star
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“Well, at least there's no fear of that here,” Coop said. “It's warmer'n a lady's muff in these waters.”
Quen-Li's gong sounded behind them. The men trooped to dinner, Jack and Quince bringing up the rear. Neither spoke, but Jack knew what was in the mate's mind.
The pain in his ears was unbearable. If it kept up he would have to drop the steel ball hanging from the lanyard around his wrist and bolt for the surface. From where he was, he could dimly see the top of the bell, beckoning to him from fathoms below. He kept trying to relieve the pain the way the natives had showed him, by wrapping his left arm around the hemp line tied to the bell, and using his right to pinch his nostrils and blow out. When his best efforts failed, he pulled himself several feet toward the surface and was about to release the weight and scramble for the sun when his ears suddenly responded. There was a screeching sound and the agony in his head disappeared, leaving his ears sore but unburdened with the weight of the sea.
Now Jack had to decide whether he could make it to the bell or head for the surface. He was almost out of the air in his lungs. Suddenly, the grip on the line with his left hand came loose and the steel ball started pulling him down. He could have let go but it was almost easier to let the weight make the decision for him. He saw the bell getting closer and felt the pain starting to build again in his ears.
He became panicky from his need to breathe but fought the urge to lunge for the surface. Suddenly, he was there. The top of the cask was a familiar friend in an alien world, and he let himself slide down the smooth wooden shape with which he had become so familiar in the days spent helping Coopie construct the marvel.
He grabbed the rim of the barrel and tried to pull himself under it and up into the life-giving air. Then, to his horror, he was dragged several feet below the rim to the seabed. He seemed trapped. Looking up now he could see the barrel suspended only a body length above him.
It was his subconscious that told him he wasn't stuck; he was simply holding the weight in a death grip. He relaxed his hand as if in a dream and kicked upward with his last ounce of energy. Suddenly, he was inside the bell, and he breathed in a huge wheezing gasp of air. Unbelieving, he sucked in the sweet vapor, stolen from the world above. Somehow, his ears in all this had once again released, and he realized that he was now ten fathoms deep and still functioning.
For the first moment, all he could think of was to catch his breath enough to bolt to the surface and never again attempt such foolishness with his God-given life. But his head cleared, his wits returned, and with it, his courage. He took stock of his surroundings in the artificial air pocket formed by the barrel. It was dark, but light reflected from the coral provided dim illumination to the interior. He could make out the form of an axe and a lever bar still hanging from the makeshift racks where they had been placed before submersion. He reached tentatively toward the lever and it came off easily in his hands.
He braced his feet on the bell's rim below him and, pushing lightly with his back, secured himself with no effort in his new confines. Here was an advantage to being underwater he hadn't thought of—as long as he didn't fully rise out of the water, his body had hardly any weight. Soon, he had almost completely caught his breath and his mood swung to euphoria. He was safe, and he was going to give it a try.
Jack took a deep breath and ventured a body's length from the barrel. Everything was blurry but there was plenty of light and he happened almost immediately upon a sea chest, probably from the fo'c'sle. After several excursions he noticed he could hold his breath longer when diving from the barrel than when diving from the surface. The experiment was a success; he grabbed a cutlass and a bolt of cloth, the most valuable items in easy reach, tucked them under his arm, and pulled hand over hand for the surface.
The whole village crowded the shallows around the diving operation. It seemed to Jack that whatever wonders the Americans had so far demonstrated, none matched in the Belaurans' eyes the ability to stay so long in the depths. The Belaurans lived their lives with the pulse of the tides; they were part of the sea, which made the white men's apparent mastery even more astounding.
Jack, Paul, Coop, and Mentor labored like men obsessed. Quince was nominally in charge, but gave Jack room to pursue his tack. Since the first attempt, the system had been modified: a regular hogshead-size cask now hung at five fathoms, rigged similarly to the giant one at ten fathoms. It was a place to stop and breathe if one's ear pain became unbearable or if one ran out of wind, as Jack almost had on his first plunge. Still, only Jack and one other sailor, Klett, would attempt the dives. Paul had volunteered and had even tried, but his indomitable spirit fell prisoner to his weak flesh. Shram and Maril, the best of the native divers, would assist in the deeper forays.
They still hadn't devised a satisfactory solution for the vision problem. Everything was quite blurry, adversely affecting the operation's efficiency. Salt water burned the divers' eyes—particularly the Americans'. They tried a leather hood, with two pieces of carefully ground glass from the captain's window inserted as eyepieces. The first attempts leaked hopelessly. Then they tried a carved inset of wood, with a salvaged lens from a pair of broken spectacles in one side, and the other sealed over. Sort of like goggles for a oneeyed man, remarked Coop. It stayed dry and worked wonderfully for about two to three fathoms. But then Jack felt his eyeballs being sucked out of his head and had to abandon the invention to go any deeper.
Each success, however, spurred them on, and they found themselves able to venture greater distances from their bell and accomplish even more complex tasks. Eventually they decided that two men operating from the bell together could remove larger obstructions, hoist larger items, and help each other in emergencies.
Then the accidents began.
“
S
WEET JESUS, NOTAGAIN!” Quince dropped his pipe and splashed through the shallow patch of sand to help two Indians raise Jack from the water. His eyes were bugging out, slime running down his blue face. The Indians threw him over a barrel and started life-breathing him, pushing on his back and rolling him back and forth. He coughed almost immediately and began labored breathing, violently vomiting between breaths.
Later, Jack recounted to Paul what he could remember of his almost fatal accident. The support divers were hauling at least twice as much fresh air to the bell as they had in the past. That should have easily made up for Shram, the extra person they now had assigned to the diving. Why, then, the two incidents of severe dizziness and nausea in both men? The first had resulted in an emergency in which Shram had to be carried to the surface unconscious. And now it was Jack himself, though Klett above him had suffered no ill effects. Paul was totally baffled.
One factor had to be common to both—but what? If the gains weren't so important, they would have considered stopping because of the risks.
“Damn it, Jack. You had to have done something different this time, something that Shram did earlier this morning. What was it?” Paul was exasperated, obviously shaken at having almost lost his friend. “Tell me again exactly what happened, step by step.”
For the fourth or fifth time, Jack described his last dive, the arrival at the bottom, handing the pry-bar up to Klett, the taking of a series of deep breaths in what had now become a ritual exercise before the swimmers would exit the barrel on their mission. He stopped his recitation when he saw a change of expression on Paul's face. “What?”
“You said you took the pry bar from Shram on the first dive.”
“What in hell would it matter who handed who the lever?”
“You said he handed it
up
to you.”
“Of course he handed it up. I was sitting above him. He—” Jack stopped and absorbed the implication of Paul's question. “Well, it's true I suppose. The second time I was on the lower rest bar but . . . what could that have to do with it?” He reflected a moment more. “And it's true that Shram was on that bar the first dive, but really—”
“That's it! Shram was below you on the dive that almost killed him.”
Paul was right, but it only increased Jack's frustration. How the hell could it possibly matter?
“And where are you when you take your breaths? Still on the rest bar?”
“Yes.”
“You were lower than Klett, and Shram was lower than you when he took his breaths?”
“Yes . . . but . . .”
Paul began to pace. “That's it. Somehow the stale air must be collecting in the bottom of the barrel.”
Jack thought. “I believe you're right.”
Something else had happened on that last dive, something that Jack had thus far kept to himself. “I believe I saw your kit down there.” Paul looked as excited as Jack. The significance of this, they both knew, wasn't that Paul's bag was accessible but that Jack always kept his bag close to Paul's: unless some accident had separated them, the gun mechanisms were not far away.
They pondered the problem all the next day, discussing the issue with Quince, Coop, and Mentor. Paul summed up what they had learned.
“Before the troubles set in, we learned that the air squeezes down to about half its size from the weight of the ocean, somewhere around five fathoms. This makes the bell heavier at that depth, and it takes lots of work to keep the air resupplied with buckets from the surface.”
General nods all around.
“This reminds me of some of Robert Boyle's treatises on gas laws. He summed up the work of Galileo, Pascal, Torricelli, the Mediterranean crowd who—” Paul stopped as he met blank stares all around. “Anyway, the point is that the weight that all the air in the world exerts on you gets doubled when you go underwater, around five and a half fathoms.”
“Right,” Quince said. “So what?”
“Okay. We found out the thick air helps because it means the divers can stay longer if they breathe it from the barrel rather than taking a breath from the surface, right?” Nods again.
“All right. We know the divers must fill their lungs higher in the bell's air pocket. The question is, how do we get rid of the stale air? Do we winch the whole damn thing up and dump it every time it goes bad? Maybe we can make a hole with some device that lets us release the stale air?”

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