“Say, Mr. Headley,” said he one evening, when I was seated in the laboratory testing out the salinity of samples from our hydrographic soundings, “what d’you figure out that this guy has in his mind? What d’you reckon that he means to do?”
“I suppose,” said I, “that we shall do what the Challenger and a dozen other exploring ships have done before us, and add a few more species to the list of fish and a few more entries to the bathymetric chart.”
“Not on your life,” said he. “If that’s your opinion you’ve got to guess again. First of all, what am I here for, anyhow?”
“In case the machinery goes wrong,” I hazarded.
“Machinery nothing! The ship’s machinery is in charge of MacLaren, the Scotch engineer. No, sir, it wasn’t to run a donkey-engine that the Merribank folk sent out their star performer. If I pull down fifty bucks a week it’s not for nix. Come here, and I’ll make you wise to it..”
He took a key from his pocket and opened a door at the back of the laboratory which led us down a companion ladder to a section of the hold which was cleared right across save for four large glittering objects half-exposed amid the straw of their huge packing-cases. They were flat sheets of steel with elaborate bolts and rivets along the edges. Each sheet was about ten feet square and an inch and a half thick, with a circular gap of eighteen inches in the middle.
“What in thunder is it?” I asked.
Bill Scanlan’s queer face — he looks half-way between a vaudeville comic and a prize-fighter — broke into a grin at my astonishment.
“That’s my baby, sir,” he quoted. “Yes, Mr. Headley, that’s what I am here for. There is a steel bottom to the thing. It’s in that big case yonder. Then there is a top, kind of arched, and a great ring for a chain or rope. Now, look here at the bottom of the ship.”
There was a square wooden platform there, with projecting screws at each corner which showed that it was detachable.
“There is a double bottom,” said Scanlan. “It may be that this guy is clean loco, or it may be that he has more in his block than we know, but if I read him right he means to build up a kind of room — the windows are in storage here — and lower it through the bottom of the ship. He’s got electric searchlights here, and I allow that he plans to shine “em through the round portholes and see what’s goin” on around.”
“He could have put a crystal sheet into the ship, like the Catalina Island boats, if that was all that was in his mind,” said I.
“You’ve said a mouthful,” said Bill Scanlan, scratching his head. “I can’t figger it out nohow. The only one sure thing is, that I’ve been sent to be under his orders and to help him with the darn fool thing all I can. He has said nothin” up to now, so I’ve said the same, but I’ll just snoop around, and if I wait long enough I’ll learn all there is to know.”
So that was how I first got on to the edge of our mystery. We ran into some dirty weather after that, and then we got to work doing some deep-sea trawling north-west of Cape Juba, just outside the Continental Slope, and taking temperature readings and salinity records. It’s a sporting proposition, this deep-sea dragging with a Peterson otter trawl gaping twenty feet wide for everything that comes its way — sometimes down a quarter of a mile and bringing up one lot of fish, sometimes half a mile and quite a different lot, every stratum of ocean with its own inhabitants as separate as so many continents. Sometimes from the bottom we would just bring up half a ton of clear pink jelly, the raw material of life, or, maybe, it would be a scoop of pteropod ooze, breaking up under the microscope into millions of tiny round reticulated balls with amorphous mud between. I won’t bore you with all the brotulids and macrurids, the ascidians and holothurians and polyzoa and echinoderms — anyhow, you can reckon that there is a great harvest in the sea, and that we have been diligent reapers. But always I had the same feeling that the heart of Maracot was not in the job, and that other plans were in that queer high, narrow Egyptian mummy of a head. It all seemed to me to be a try-out of men and things until the real business got going.
I had got as far as this in my letter when I went ashore to have a last stretch, for we sail in the early morning. It’s as well, perhaps, that I did go, for there was no end of a barney going on upon the pier, with Maracot and Bill Scanlan right in the heart of it. Bill is a bit of a scrapper, and has what he calls a mean wallop in both mitts, but with half a dozen Dagoes with knives all round them things looked ugly, and it was time that I butted in. It seems that the Doctor had hired one of the things they call cabs, and had driven half over the island inspecting the geology, but had clean forgotten that he had no money on him. When it came to paying, he could not make these country hicks understand, and the cabman had grabbed his watch so as to make sure. That brought Bill Scanlan into action, and they would have both been on the floor with their backs like pin-cushions if I had not squared the matter up, with a dollar or two over for the driver and a five-dollar bonus for the chap with the mouse under his eye. So all ended well, and Maracot was more human than ever I saw him yet. When we got to the ship he called me into the little cabin which he reserves for himself and he thanked me.
“By the way, Mr. Headley,” he said, “I understand that you are not a married man?”
“No,” said I, “I am not.”
“No one depending upon you?”
“No.”
“Good!” said he. “I have not spoken of the object of this voyage because I have, for my own reasons, desired it to be secret. One of those reasons was that I feared to be forestalled. When scientific plans get about one may be served as Scott was served by Amundsen. Had Scott kept his counsel as I have done, it would be he and not Amundsen who would have been the first at the South Pole. For my part, I have quite as important a destination as the South Pole, and so I have been silent. But now we are on the eve of our great adventure and no rival has time to steal my plans. Tomorrow we start for our real goal.”
“And what is that?” I asked.
He leaned forward, his ascetic face all lit up with the enthusiasm of the fanatic.
“Our goal,” said he, “is the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.”
And right here I ought to stop, for I expect it has taken away your breath as it did mine. If I were a story-writer, I guess I should leave it at that. But as I am just a chronicler of what occurred, I may tell you that I stayed another hour in the cabin of old man Maracot, and that I learned a lot, which there is still just time for me to tell you before the last shore boat leaves.
“Yes, young man,” said he, “you may write freely now, for by the time your letter reaches England we shall have made the plunge.”
This started him sniggering, for he has a queer dry sense of humour of his own.
“Yes, sir, the plunge is the right word on this occasion, a plunge which will be historic in the annals of Science. Let me tell you, in the first place, that I am well convinced that the current doctrine as to the extreme pressure of the ocean at great depths is entirely misleading. It is perfectly clear that other factors exist which neutralize the effect, though I am not yet prepared to say what those factors may be. That is one of the problems which we may settle. Now, what pressure, may I ask, have you been led to expect under a mile of water?” He glowered at me through his big horn spectacles.
“Not less than a ton to the square inch,” I answered. “Surely that has been clearly shown.”
“The task of the pioneer has always been to disprove the thing which has been clearly shown. Use your brains, young man. You have been for the last month fishing up some of the most delicate Bathic forms of life, creatures so delicate that you could hardly transfer them from the net to the tank without marring their sensitive shapes. Did you find that there was evidence upon them of this extreme pressure?”