Conrad moved up into the bows and switched on two of our powerful torches. Within two minutes I could see the sheer of dripping black cliffs less than a hundred yards ahead. I turned to starboard and paralleled the cliffs to the northwest. One minute later we had it-the eastward facing entrance to a tiny circular inlet. I throttled the motor right back and moved gingerly inside and almost at once we had it-a small semicircular opening at the base of the south cliff. It seemed impossibly small. We drifted towards it at less than one knot. Conrad looked back over his shoulder.
“I’m claustrophobic.”
“Me, too.”
“If we get stuck?”
“The sixteen-footer is bigger than this one.”
“If it was here. Ah, well, in for a penny, in for a pound.”
I crossed my mental fingers that Conrad would have cause to remember those words and eased the boat into the tunnel. It was bigger than it looked but not all that bigger. The waves and waters of countless aeons had worn the rock walls as smooth as alabaster. Although it held a remarkably true direction almost due south it was clear, because of the varying widths and the varying heights of the tunnel roof, that the band of man had never been near the Perleporten; then, suddenly, when Conrad called out and pointed ahead and to the right, that wasn’t so clear any more.
The opening in the wall, no more, really, than an indentation hardly distinguishable from one or two already passed, was, at its deepest, no more than six feel?, but it was bounded by an odd Hat shelf that varied from two to five feet in width. It looked as if it had been manmade but, then, there were so many curiously shaped rock formations in those parts that it might just possibly have resulted from natural causes. But there was one thing about that place that absolutely was in no way due to natural causes: a pile of grey-painted metal bars, neatly stacked in crisscross symmetry.
Neither of us spoke. Conrad switched on the other two torches, pivoted their heads until they were facing upwards and placed them all on the shelf, flooding the tiny area with light. Not without some difficulty we scrambled on to the shelf and looped the painter round one of the bars. Still without speaking I took the boat book and probed for bottom: it was less than five feet below the surface and a very odd kind of rock it felt, too. I guddled around some more, left the hook strike something at once hard and yielding and hauled it up. It was a half-inch chain, corroded in places, but still sound. I hauled some more and the end of another rectangular bar, identical in size to those on the shelf and secured to the chain by an eye bolt, came into sight. It was badly discoloured. I lowered chain and bar back to the bottom.
Still in this uncanny silence I took a knife from my pocket and tested the surface of one of the bars. The metal, almost certainly lead, was soft and yielding, but it was no more than a covering skin, there was something harder beneath. I dug the knife blade in hard and scraped away an inch of the lead. Something yellow glittered in the lamplight.
“Well, now,” Conrad said. “Jackpot, I believe, is the technical term.”
“Something like that.”
“And look at this.” Conrad reached behind the pile of bars and brought up a can of paint. It was labeled Instant Grey.”
“It seems to be very good stuff,” I said. I touched one of the bars. “Quite dry. And, you must admit, quite clever. You saw off. the eye bolt, paint the whole lot over and what do you have?”
“A ballast bar identical in size and colour to the ballast bars in the mock-up sub.”
“Ten out of ten,” I said. I hefted one of the bars. “Just right for easy handling. A forty-pound ingot.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s my Treasury training. Current value–say thirty thousand dollars. How many bars in that pile, would you say?”
“A hundred. More.”
“And that’s just for starters. Bulk is almost certainly still under water. Paint brushes there?”
“Yes.” Conrad reached behind the pile but I checked him.
“Please not,” I said. “Think of all those lovely fingerprints.”
Conrad said slowly: “My mind’s just engaged gear again.” He looked at the pile and said incredulously: “Three million dollars?”
“Give or take a few percent.”
I think we’d better leave,” Conrad said. “I’m coming all over avaricious.”
We left. As we emerged into the little circular bay we both looked back at the dark and menacing little tunnel. Conrad said: “Who discovered this?”
I have no idea.”
“Perleporten. What does that mean?”
“The Gates of Pearl.”
“They came pretty close at that.”
“It wasn’t a bad try.” The journey back was a great deal more unpleasant than the outward one had been, the seas were against us, the icy wind and the equally icy snow were in our faces and because of that same snow the visibility was drastically reduced. But we made it inside an hour. Almost literally frozen stiff but at the same time contradictorily shaking with the cold, we tied the boat up. Conrad clambered up on to the jetty. I passed him the black box, cut about thirty feet off. the boat’s anchor rope and followed. I built a rope cradle round the box, fumbled with a pair of catches and opened a hinged cover section which comprised a third of the top plate and two-thirds of a side plate. In the near total darkness switches and dials were less than half-seen blurs but I didn’t need light to operate this instrument which was a basically very simple affair anyway. I pulled out a manually operated telescopic aerial to its fullest extent and turned two switches. A dim green light glowed and a faint hum, that couldn’t have been heard a yard away, came from the box.
“I always think it’s so satisfactory when those little toys work,” Conrad said. “But won’t the snow gum up the works?”
“This little toy costs just over a thousand pounds. You can immerse it in acid, you can boil it in water, you can drop it from a four-story building. It still works. It’s got a little sister that can he fired from a naval gun. I don’t think a little snow will harm, do you?”
“I wouldn’t think so.” He watched in silence as I lowered the box, pilot light facing the stonework, over the south arm of the pier, secured the rope to a bollard, made it fast round its base and concealed it with a scattering of snow. “What’s the range?”
“Forty miles. It won’t require a quarter of that tonight.”
“And it’s transmitting now?”
“It’s transmitting now.”
We moved back to the main arm of the pier, brushing footmarks away with our gloves. I said: I wouldn’t think they would have heard us coming back, but no chances. A weather eye, if you please.”
I was down inside the hull of the mock-up sub and had rejoined Conrad inside two minutes. He said: “No trouble?”
“None. The two paints don’t quite match. But you’d never notice it unless you were looking for it.”
#
We were not greeted like returning heroes. It would not be true to say that our return, or our early return, was greeted with anything like disappointment, but there was definitely an anticlimactic Mr. to it, maybe they had already expended all their sympathies on Heissman, Jungbeck, and Goin, who had claimed, predictably enough, that their engine had broken down in the late afternoon. Heissman thanked us properly enough but there was a faint trace of amused condescension to his thanks that would normally have aroused a degree of antagonism in me were it not for the fact that my antagonism towards Heissman was already so total that any deepening of it would have been quite impossible. So Conrad and I contented ourselves with making a show of expressing our relief to find the three voyagers alive while not troubling very much to conceal our chagrin. Conrad, especially, was splendid at this: clearly, he had a considerable future as an actor.
The atmosphere in the cabin was almost unbearably funereal. I would have thought that the safe return of five of their company might have been cause for some subdued degree of rejoicing, but it may well have been that the very fact of our being alive only heightened the collective awareness of the dead woman lying in her cubicle. Heissman tried to tell us about the marvellous backgrounds he had found that day and I couldn’t help reflecting that he was going to have a most hellishly difficult job in setting up camera and sound crews within the extraordinarily restrictive confines of the Perleporten tunnel: Heissman desisted when it became clear that no one was listening to him. Otto made a half-hearted attempt to establish some kind of working relationship with me and even went to the length of pressing some Scotch upon me which I accepted without thanks but drank nevertheless. He tried to make some feebly jocular remark about open pores and it being obvious that I didn’t intend venturing forth again that night and I didn’t tell him, not just yet, that I did indeed intend to venture forth again that night but that as my proposed walk would take me no farther than the jetty it was unlikely that all the open pores in the world would incapacitate me.