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.
15
PROBLEMS
“SWEET 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?”
“But it seems like the problem we need to solve before knowing how to release the air is knowing when to release it,” offered Jack.
Quince lit a match and made a dramatic production of blowing it out. “Lads,” he looked pointedly at Jack and Paul, “what we need is a damn canary down there.”
“Aye, Skip, the mines, eh? That’s what yer thinkin’.” Mentor made the comment, leaving the lads unsure where their education had failed them.
“Canary?” Paul asked.
“Aye, these fellas as spent time in the isles around miners’ll tell ya. They takes a canary and keeps it down there to let you know when the air goes bad.”
“How do they do that?”
“Why, the little bleeders stop singin’ and lay down and die.”
“Presumably before the miners stop singin’ and lay down and die.”
“Exactly, Paul, they’re more sensitive—”
“But, Skipper.” Klett had warmed to the conversation. “Thars birds like ’em canaries ’ere in this island there is, but the little fellas would never make it down two fathom afore drownin’.”
“True enough. But maybe we can make our own canary,” said Paul, staring hard at Quince.
“Yer lookin at me wide-eyed as a hoot-owl, son. What’s your problem?”