Free The Watch Below by James White Page A

anything.

The doctor said, "Maybe the gas in these pockets is so concentrated that

it gives back a sound indistinguishable from that of water. If such is

the case this gas under pressure will be much heavier, volume for volume,

than air, so that we will not gain very much in buoyancy. Perhaps we

have sunk so deeply that water pressure has increased to the extent that

it will not allow the gas to expand. Or perhaps the gas is forcing the

water out, but at the same rate as the water forced its way in, which

was very gradually over the space of many days. If that is the case we

may not be able to regain our buoyancy in time -- "

"Doctor," said Dickson angrily, "don't be so blasted optimistic!"

It seemed that there were to be no helpful ideas from either of them,

and Wallis knew suddenly that it had been a mistake to stop and talk

like this, that anything which gave them time to think too deeply about

their predicament was a mistake. As the superior officer his display of

indecision had not helped things, either.

"We have seven more faucets and a practically unlimited supply of acetylene,"

he said firmly. "We must keep trying."

Sometime later -- the doctor estimated it at between twenty and thirty hours,

but Dickson, who had had nothing much to occupy him in his litter except

holding torches and occasionally talking to Jenny, insisted that it was

more like three days -- they had to stop trying through sheer fatigue.

Despite recent practice each installation had begun to take more time.

Radford fumbled his job with the plugs and staggered around the place as

if he were half-drunk, and Wallis, through sheer carelessness, neglected

to cover his face with the sacking mask and cowl, the result being a

scalded forehead. It wasn't a very serious injury, but the cold made

it sting.

Back in the sick bay they found the two girls asleep and Dickson wide awake,

his teeth clenched tightly, sweating and staring into the darkness above him.

He did not look at them or reply when they spoke. Radford shook two tablets

out of a bottle, hesitated, then made it four. He said, "You need to go

to sleep, Mr. Dickson."

To Wallis he said, "One good thing about all this is that we've been working

so hard that we are going to go to sleep warm for a change."

But Wallis did not go to sleep at once or, at first, completely. They had

closed all taps and disconnected all the acetylene tanks before returning

to the sick bay, but there was still an awful lot of bubbling and gurgling

going on all over the ship. Wallis tried to tell himself that this was

a good sign, but then he would contrast the total air space within the

tanks with the relatively tiny amount by which they hoped to increase

it and he would wonder if it was enough. He would argue then that the

tanker had been drifting close to the surface for more than a week and if

it was sinking only now, it must be sinking very slowly and that surely

a minute increase in over-all buoyancy would tip the balance.

But he did not know for certain, and while his mind argued wearily to

itself it began to drift more and more frequently into sleep -- a sleep

composed of a series of brief, terrifying nightmares in which his fear

became reality and where the bubbling and gurgling noises became the

sounds of their hull breaking up and a solid mass of water crashed down

on them and they tore at the metal walls around them and at each other

with their bare hands and screamed and screamed. . . .

Eventually his body's weariness would not let him wake himself from these

nightmares and somewhere along the way they changed. Wallis dreamed that

he was on the bridge of a destroyer somewhere in the Med, to judge by

the weather. It was a very pleasant dream, sheer wish-fulfillment. The

sky was blue and cloudless, the sea calm with a slight swell, the sun

was hot even through his whites, and a patch of sunburn on his forehead

itched slightly just to remind him that this wasn't