The Golden Age of Pulp Fiction MEGAPACK ™, Vol. 1: George Allan England. George Allan England

the air hose firmly to the plate, he led it under Spurling’s left arm and fastened it in front.

      “Ready for the helmet, now?”

      “Yep!” And Spurling, with a final eruption of smoke, threw the cigarette away. “Get ready to start the poison, there. Take it easy, boys, but keep goin’. Start twistin’, now!”

      As the huge round helmet closed over his head, and with a quarter-turn was screwed home and fastened, he became wholly unreal. His eyes peered dimly from those cross-barred windows, as though from another world.

      Two men at the handles of the ponderous wheels, began slowly and steadily turning. Mac tapped his “O.K.” on the helmet. Spurling dragged himself to the ladder. Clumsily he wallowed down it.

      Now his suit began puffing with air. As the water took him, he moved more easily. Down, down he sagged; then with a crab-like, sidewise motion, slid off the ladder. McTaggart, at the edge of the float, held the lifeline and air hose in careful, experienced hands.

      As Spurling sank, the line still partly supported him. Cameras did their best. Pencils leaped. Boats crowded in, despite Mac’s snarled warnings to stand clear. With a swirling twist, Spurling wavered down into the lake. His vast eyes of glass and metal blurred away into the cold green deeps. They faded, vanished. A line of bubbles rose and broke, flinging fine spray into the summer air.

      Water eddied round the float. Steadily the line and hose, paid out by the watchful Mac, ran away.

      Already far below, the diver was sinking down and down, into regions of unreality and dream.

      *****

      SPURLING FELT not the slightest uneasiness, so far as just the diving itself was concerned. Hundreds of times he had been down, often in swift rivers or in the sea itself, far deeper than this. Many a time he had risked his life exploring perilous wrecks where rotten timbers might have fallen and jammed, where octopuses and sharks might have lurked. This job, now, in a sheltered lake was different.

      “Cinch!” thought he. “If it wasn’t for bein’ a stiff that I’m after, it’d be a cinch!”

      How he hated diving and groping for stiffs!

      Oh, yes, he’d recovered not a few, in his time, from wrecks. But they made bad salvage. They were liable to do such singular and gruesome things. Under the compelling urge of water, they sometimes moved so convincingly, in ghastly imitation of life.

      Once, he remembered, he had been fairly terrified away from a job by a body that had refused to be salvaged; a body that, three separate times, had jerked itself free from his grasp. Spurling had had to come up, take off his suit, and gulp nearly a pint of raw liquor before he’d been able to go down again and discover that the body—an old sea captain—had been caught in a loose bight of rope.

      And Spurling had never forgotten that nerve-tingling experience. It had made him corpse shy. But as for the mere diving, itself—why, nothing to it!

      “It’s only the damn stiff I don’t like,” thought he, as he slid down, ever down into the darkening waters. “That’s all, just the stiff. How I hate to handle ’em! But two hundred smackers a day—”

      Looking out through the thick glass, he perceived a vague greenish light, still faintly shot through by slanting sun rays. A certain uneasiness had begun to develop in the hinges of his jaw. He opened his mouth, shut it, to loosen the pressure on his eardrums; and constantly he swallowed.

      “Oughta have a wad o’ gum to chaw,” he reflected. That always helped. Too bad he’d forgotten the gum. But never mind; he’d get by without it. Only the lack of it somehow disconcerted him.

      His ears commenced to feel as if he had a cold. But that was nothing. Many a time, diving, he’d suffered real pain, especially on top of his head. When that grew too severe it meant coming up. But as yet, nothing bothered Tim Spurling; nothing but his grim errand.

      All sensations of weight were vanishing now; strangely fading away. Gravitation claimed hardly more than thirty pounds, from his hundred and eighty of bone and muscle, from his ponderous gear, lead weights and all. Never did a human being move, atop the earth, as lightly as now Spurling when he set foot on the hard, rock-tossed floor of Crystal Lake.

      “Gee! Well, I’m down, anyhow!” he said to himself, as he gave Mac the “on bottom” and the “O.K.” signal. Dimly an unreal, isolated, mysterious world surrounded him. Everything had grown eerie and unnatural.

      A sense of utter isolation, of supreme unreality possessed the diver. He was only about seventy feet away from other men, but he might have been a million miles. Far from imaginative though he was, still he sensed this extraordinary unreality which always took place in every dive.

      Startled fishes flicked away; or, growing bolder, circled, backed, and nosed waveringly about him. One bumped the glass of his helmet. It sounded like a small volcanic explosion. Regularly, tunk-tunk-tunk, something pulsated in his crackling ears. That slight noise of the pump was comforting. Yes, after all there must be another world; a world of reality, where men dwelt. A world in which McTaggart was keenly watching; in which the diver’s wife was waiting; in which Bill, their son—

      Thoughts of the boy stabbed Spurling. For a time he had forgotten the boy, the doctor, the verdict of T.B. Now all this surged back sickeningly. Spurling remembered why he was here, what he had come for.

      “Hell of a job!” he growled, inside his goggle-eyed helmet. “But I gotta do it. We need the money, and I gotta go through!”

      He stood on the bottom of the lake, peering about him in that unreal and ghostly dimness. Off at his right he could just make out the grate bars that anchored his diving float, and beyond them two immense cubes of concrete with ring bolts, that held the swimming raft. Vague ropes led upward. Muted though all illumination now was, his vision was growing used to it. He perceived this watery world in hues of green gloom. Sinuous plants waved mysteriously beckoning arms. Off at one side lay a jet-black patch—the shadow of his diving float, far above.

      “Where the devil an’ all, now, is that stiff?”

      Vainly he looked. Nothing at all in guise of a drowned body was visible. He felt his air pressure rising a bit too high. To lower it, he slightly cracked his petcock valve. Crowding upward, bubbles chased one another toward the surface.

      The job he had to do, Spurling realized, might be long. Had currents drifted the body, the raft would have to be moved. No telling how much time it might take.

      “But it’s a hundred and eighty-five bucks a day, clear, for me,” he thought. “And we gotta have at least five hundred, to save Bill. Three days’ll give us the five, and a little over. I only wisht it would take three days!”

      Then, almost before this desire had registered, he saw the object of his search.

      Yes, there it lay, hardly twenty feet from one of the big concrete cubes. Dim though the down-filtering light was, none the less that light revealed the son of Eccles, the millionaire, sunk in a hollow amid plant-grown boulders.

      The boy lay on his right side, clad in a blue bathing suit. The face was averted; one arm outstretched as if in final, agonized protest against death.

      Spurling’s first reaction was an exultant: “Found him, by gosh!”

      But on the instant a devastating thought surged through his brain:

      “One day’s work—only a hundred and eighty-five bucks. And—and how about my kid?”

      A little dazed, groping more perhaps in mind than in body, he started toward the other man’s son. Against smothering resistance at that great depth, he walked with circumspect caution, lest he lose his footing. Once that should happen, quick as a flash he might turn topsy-turvy, hang upside down, helpless and imperiled. His own life—no, he mustn’t lose that, now!

      Almost weightless, he moved. His heart was pounding thickly as an overtaxed pump.

      “Our Bill! What about our Bill, I’d like