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A jarring clang brought her head up. Tattinger had rapped on the Kamloops‘ hull with the butt of a diving knife. He was hovering near a porthole crooking an admonitory finger. Though she couldn’t see his face behind the rubber and plastic, she imagined his scowl.
Once again, she trained the light in his path and he swam on. The beam raked along the hull just ahead of him, across the portholes: blind eyes weeping rust. Between them, near where Tattinger had rapped the hull, something gleamed. A
Jim, losing the light, had returned and hung at her elbow. Pushing A
Monstrous and fish-eyed behind their masks, Jim and A
Jim tapped his watch. Seven minutes. A
A
Four minutes. With efficient haste, they started to swim back. At depth, exertion was a thing to be avoided lest one treble the effects of nitrogen narcosis.
The stern, with its tangle of pipe, rolled by beneath. A
One minute. Now that the time to ascend was near, A
Anxious thoughts began circling in A
As she counted her curses she became aware of a nonstop trickle of air through her regulator. It had frozen open. It had happened once before early in the season when she and Ralph dove the docks clearing out rubbish. Once open, it wouldn’t take long before the escaping air would fill her mouth with icy slush, numbing her lips with cold until she could no longer feel them to keep them on the mouthpiece.
“Come on, goddammit!” she demanded of Lucas.
Poking her light through the viscous twilight, she strained her eyes in the direction of the engine room. Twenty seconds bottom time left. The darker block that marked the doorway wavered, changed shape, then broke into two separate shadows. Ralph and Lucas swam toward the line. With them was De
Lucas took De
The currents caused by their flippers made De
Martini’s Law must have been coined before the advent of Timothy Leary, she thought. For her the experience was proving reminiscent of an acid trip threatening to go sour rather than a good honest drunk.
She glanced at her watch. Another thirty seconds to wait. She looked back at Castle’s body.
The dead eyes had not changed expression but the jaw was dropping. De
A
The phenomenon lasted only a few seconds. Ralph kicked once and floated up the line. Glad to be moving, A
Twenty minutes at twenty feet. As the silver of the promised sky grew closer so did A
The last wait, thirty-four minutes only ten feet below the surface, was provoking enough to amuse and A
Finally they reached the surface. Even Scotty’s cowboy countenance was a welcome sight. Jo Castle, wan and frightened, reaffirmed if only by way of pain that life went on. Thirty fathoms down, it had seemed a distant and fragile concept.
Jim Tattinger flippered over to the Lorelei’s water-level deck and was hauled over the stern like a landed fish by Jo and Officer Stanton. A
A
Either Jo was a complete psychotic, or she had not killed De
Awkwardly, Jo bent and kissed her husband. Faint bruises ringed De