“Say!” shouted Latzarel just as the bell edged free. “Stop! Wait!” But it was too late. They were off. He bent over, craning his neck, peering up through the port. Beyond three feet or so of radiance there was a black wall of ocean.
“What was it?” asked Edward.
“You won’t believe it.”
“Try me.”
“A piece of ivory about six feet long. Curved.”
“Whalebone,” said Edward, resuming his seat.
“Wooly mammoth tusk,” replied Latzarel. “I’m certain of it. We’ve got to hoist back up to that ledge and try to grapple it somehow.”
“On the return trip,” said Edward, “we’ll pass it again. We were lodged at almost exactly twenty fathoms, according to the gauge. A mammoth tusk, you say?”
“I’ll bet you a dinner. Better yet, a bottle of Laphroaig.” Latzarel hunkered down in his seat, spitting on his window and rubbing it with his index finger. The bell dropped and dropped. Latzarel felt both damp and elated. There was a sort of pervasive moisture in the bell. His hair hung limply across his forehead, one strand of it dangling over his left eye. And there was a musty, oceanic smell that reminded him of an unventilated room of rusted salt water aquaria. He pushed a button on the radio. “How deep are we?”
“One hundred-seventy-five feet,” came the response. Squires’ voice sounded weirdly distant to him — like it had come a long way down a speaking tube, perhaps through two hundred feet or so of plastic aquarium tubing. The idea of it struck him as wildly funny all of a sudden, and he turned to tell Edward about it, to let him in on the joke.
But Edward wasn’t interested. He was making hand signals at a squid who hovered beyond the glass, signaling back. Latzarel couldn’t see the squid, but he immediately caught the spirit of Edward’s histrionics and gestured widely, banging his left hand against a brass valve. A little stream of blood ran down the hand and into his shirt sleeve. “Can you beat that?” he said aloud. The blood in his sleeve reminded him of something he’d learned forty years earlier from his father. He fished in his pocket and hauled out a quarter. “Look here,” he said to Edward. “Lookee here.”
Edward grinned at him.
Latzarel waggled his hands, blood spraying off across the knee of his trousers. “Notice,” he said, “that my fingers do not leave my hands at any time.” And with an appropriate flourish, he held the quarter between the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, snapped his fingers, and cast Edward a satisfied smirk as the quarter shot up his coat sleeve, rolling out almost at once and clattering onto the deck.
Squires was saying something over the radio — mouthing some sort of warning. Latzarel interrupted him, shouting, “A nose by any other name!” then bursting into laughter. Edward went back to signaling the squid. He pointed out the wonderful signifying beast to Latzarel, who all of a sudden developed an inexplicable passion for dancing, such as it was, given the restrictions of the cramped bell.
William Ashbless hadn’t been paying any attention to the radio. His mind was on poetry. He wrestled with a complicated quatrain involving the sea, but the rhyme escaped him. He was vaguely irritated by the scratching of Spekowsky’s pen on paper, which, somehow, was about twice as maddening as was the voice of Russel Latzarel shouting his foolishness about noses. Of all the places to horse around. Whatever faith he’d had in Latzarel’s successfully penetrating the Earth was fast fading. He heard Spekowsky snicker. Over the radio came the words: “Blow ye hurricanoes! Blow-rowr-rowr! Yip and roar!” And there was the noise of someone — Latzarel likely — roaring and yipping. Then came a shout: “Smite flat the rotundity of my girth!” And a howl of laughter. “Singe my white head, all-shaking squid! Cast ye down ye poulpae, if ye will!”
Ashbless fiddled with the knobs. He looked across the hundred yards of ocean at the Gerhardi where Squires, hanging from a winch by his legs, wrenched at the workings of the hoses, both of which were stretched taut, apparently fully played out. Spekowsky had heard enough, or so he thought. A sudden gasp of surprise over the radio, however, surprised them both.
“I tell you I saw it again,” said Edward. A silence followed, echoing up out of the radio. Ashbless strained to hear. “What the devil was it? A cephalopod?” Latzarel laughed abruptly, then said, “Rumble thy bellyful, arquebus!”
“There!” shouted Edward. “There. Beyond that ledge!”
Latzarel began to sing foolishly, but abruptly shut it off. There was silence again. Ashbless could hear what sounded like the drip, drip, drip of water over the radio. Then Latzarel, in a stage whisper, said, “Plesiosaurus.”
‘Too big,” came the reply.
“Magnified by the water and window.”
“Still too big. It’s forty feet long.”
“Elasmosaurus. Erasmus, come from Baobel.” Latzarel snickered.
There was another long silence. “What’s he up to?” asked Edward.
“Studying us. By God! Why don’t we have cameras on this bell? Whoops! There he goes. Straight down.” Latzarel began to giggle, then sneezed voluminously.
A screech of steel followed, as if the diving bell were being dragged across a reef. “Hey!” someone shouted. There was another screech and a muffled, watery clang. “Christ!” Edward cried amid unidentifiable banging. “He’ll foul himself in the hoses! Haul away! Yank us up! Squires!” Then the radio, abruptly, went dead.
Ashbless was on his feet in an instant, hauling at a little wooden dingy that he’d dragged up the beach earlier. Spekowsky shook his head, as if to indicate that he, anyway, wasn’t being taken in by tomfoolery. Ashbless ignored him. He pushed the dingy out into the water, shoving it through a twelve-inch wave that broke across the prow when he was waist deep, and hauled himself into the precariously rocking boat, losing, his hat, fishing it out of the water, and rowing away finally in a mess of flailing oars toward the Gerhardi.
A humming and rumbling came from the listing boat. Cables scattering seawater wound up out of the ocean. Jim stood at the bulwark, watching the depths for some sign of the rising bell, but there was nothing but an eruption of bubbles.
Out of the corner of his eye Jim saw something approaching; it was Ashbless, hauling away on his oars. The little dingy scoured across the surface of the sea, Ashbless glancing now and again over his shoulder to correct his course. He was coming along quickly — so quickly that Jim looked around for something to prod the dingy away with when it came crunching in. Ashbless gave the oars one last heave, shipped them, and turned to find he’d given them one heave too many. He kneeled on the thwart, grappling with an oar in an attempt to yank it back out, dropped it, and thrust his foot out toward the Gerhardi across a rapidly diminishing few feet. Abruptly the ocean below glimmered into luminescence, and in a rush of bubbles and hissing there appeared the dark bulk of the diving bell, alien and cold, itself an opaque bubble ringed with feeble lamps. It rose right through Ashbless’ little dingy and out into the open air, streaming water like some impossible, globular, deep water monster. The cables squeaked through the winch behind Jim, howling with the effort it took to hoist the bell, free now of the ocean, up and onto the deck. It clanked down onto two of its feet and canted over toward the third, which had been bent and twisted back.
Ashbless splashed in the water. His dingy, a great chunk whacked out of the stern, floated an inch beneath the surface; Jim hung the portable ladder over the side and Ashbless clung to it for a moment before cursing his way up. Jim gave him a hasty hand over the side, then scrambled up to help Squires, yanking at the hatch. A moment later, Edward popped out, said something to Squires, and dropped again into the bell. Squires leaned in, got two hands under Latzarel’s armpits, and with Edward shoving from below, managed to haul Latzarel, bleeding from a long gash on his forehead, out onto the deck.