The Poseidon Adventure (22 page)

'I can't help it. We been together so long. Three years now. It seems like just a minute ago I was asking Sybil whether she was coming to dinner and she said, "Go away, you pig! I just want to die." See, she was still sick. So she died. And I suppose the jailer did too and all the rest who stayed in their cabins.'

'Who was the jailer?'

'Mrs Timker. She was in charge of our group, kept us up to scratch; practice; clean costumes; and snooped what time we came in. But Timmy was a good sort. She'd close an eye. She was one of us until she married Bert Timker, the Assistant Manager. Only thing she used to say was, "Have your fun, but put a bun in the oven, and out you go."'

'A bun in the . . .'

Nonnie gave a tiny tinkling laugh still close to his ear and whispered, 'Oh well, you know . . . What we was talking about before.'

Muller laughed too and pressed her nearer to his heart.

'Why are you squeezing me so?' she said.

He replied, 'Don't even ask.'

Out of tho stilly darkness and its silences, broken only by whisperings and an occasional snore, came a hard, cool impersonal voice and what it said was so astounding that none of them at first even identified it as coming from Scott.

'Take your hand away from there, or I'll break your arm.'

It was followed by a movement and a gasp from a woman. James Martin heard it with a shudder and thought to himself,
Holy Mackerel! Who's having a go at whom?
And then he thought of the soft, plump hand of Mrs Lewis.

To Susan Shelby came an instant vivid recollection. On the swing couch in the garden, behind the house back home and her saying sharply, 'Toby, take your hand away. That's enough!' But oddly her mind never turned to Herbert or what had happened to her.

Manny Rosen woke up and said, 'Somebody's broken an arm?'

It was Mike Rogo who turned on his torch and said, 'What the hell's goin' on here?'

Scott was lying down on his side, resting on an elbow, Linda Rogo was sitting up near by, her face flushed with fury. She pointed to Scott and said, 'That bastard was trying to give me a feel.'

Rogo said, 'What? Who was? Him?'

Scott interrupted him coolly, 'Work out the sequence for yourself, Rogo.'

What Rogo really hated Scott for at that moment was setting the minds of the others on to the same track. If it were true that the Minister had been trying to take liberties with his wife, why should he call attention to himself in that manner? Rogo knew all there was to know about guys and broads and the way they behaved and had been suspecting for some time that Linda had a yen for the preacher. Obviously in the dark she had been trying to have a go at him. And just as obviously it must be covered up.

He said in his loud copper's voice, 'Don't nobody try any funny business around here. Anybody tries to get fresh can collect a busted jaw. What are we gonna do, stick around here all night? I thought the idea was to get up to the top somewhere so they can hear us.'

Scott rose to his feet. 'Yes,' he said, 'you're right. It's time we were moving on. If three of you will throw your lights up along this side, I think I can show you the way we have to go.'

CHAPTER XVII

Mount Poseidon

The engine room of a great quadruple-screw ocean liner consists of a series of platforms, some five decks high, connected by ladder-type stairs leading to open-work steel flooring or catwalks. These platforms are built around the huge central steam turbines and reduction gear housings. The auxiliary machinery, such as turbo generators, condensers, compressors, emergency compressors and a whole battery of pumps are ranged around the four sides, joined by what seems to be completely helter-skelter coils of pipes and wiring to feed steam under various degrees of pressure, oil, lubricating materials and electrical power.

All this is attached to the double-bottomed fuel and ballast tanks which constitute the floor of the vessel, planned for maximum stresses of a 45° roll. Cross beams of heavy girders support the platforms, catwalks and conduits.

When the Poseidon turned over, almost everything but the main propeller shafts was twisted, shaken or torn away, either plummeting directly into the sea through the open well of the engine-room shaft, or tumbling down the sides in a cascade of tangled metal. Dynamos had plunged through their housings, shearing the steel as though it had been paper, leaving wedge or spear-shaped pieces razor sharp, thrust upward in menacing pinnacles like miniature Dolomites.

Mingled with these were curling sections of the platforms, reversed ladders with a half-dozen steps smashed out of their centres, and the curved surfaces of the larger pipes, some of them crumpled, others cut open lengthwise, the way one slits a sausage skin. Everything was covered with a film of oil released from the bottom tanks when the heavy turbines had ripped loose from the floor plating.

At one point a giant reduction gear and its housing had broken completely away from its turbine unit, but instead of falling through to the sea, had been slammed against the sides of the engine room by the centrifugal force of the capsizing and locked there, with the gear wheel jammed at an angle and held aloft by the crumpled housing. Scott's probing lantern showed up the square edges of the finely milled teeth curving outwards for several yards in an overhang, before receding into the general tangle of battered steel.

Fragments of this jumbled mountain reached to within a foot of the platform on which they had been resting. Their lights showed up a similar range across the stygian lake.

Scott studied the outcroppings on the far side. Had he judged it an easier climb, he would have been prepared to have got himself and his party across the water. But it was, if anything, more formidable-looking and there was an overhang of metal pushed out at a thirty-degree angle, some eight feet from the edge which made it an impossible task.

Muller asked, 'What are you looking for?'

Scott replied, 'Path!' and then removing the light beam from across the lake, added, 'Well, that leaves us no choice.' He studied the precipice of metal on their own side.

Rogo said, 'Where do you think you're going now?'

Scott replied simply, 'Up there.'

Shelby was horrified and cried, 'Frank, you must be out of your mind! It's impossible. My family could never . . .'

The fanatic look was back in the Minister's eyes and his voice suddenly filled the vast cavern, 'We're being tested. You believe in God; worship him by being worthy!'

The echo repeated, 'Worthy' and died away. In a quite normal tone he said, 'Don't think of it as you're seeing it, but simply as a mountain to be climbed. It's everything you find on a mountainside: crevices, projections, buttresses, pinnacles, clefts, foot and handholds. There's hardly a single peak left in the world that someone hasn't managed to climb.'

Martin muttered under his breath, 'Someone!' and Muller said, 'The Mount Poseidon Expedition.'

'Exactly,' Scott continued. 'You've all seen photographs of mountain climbers roped together. The line is so arranged that the entire weight never falls upon one person, but is distributed. Is that clear? It's actually much simpler for us. We've only an ascent of fifty feet to make. There are . . .' he made a quick count as though he had forgotten -- 'thirteen of us. We'll be double roped at say a distance of three or four feet apart.'

'My God,' Hubie Muller muttered, 'you'd think he was preparing to take an alpine tourist party up the Jungfrau for an outing.'

Scott looked the group over. 'I'll lead, followed by Miss Kinsale. Nothing seems to worry her. Then I think Martin, Susan and you, Dick, followed by Jane and Kemal. Then Mrs Rosen, Manny, Nonnie and Hubie; Mrs Rogo and her husband. Rogo, I'm afraid I'm putting you last as usual because you're not likely to lose your head if something goes wrong.'

Rogo said, 'Thanks!'

'The success or failure of any climb depends upon two things; the leader and the manner in which he is followed,' Scott explained. 'The leader maps out the route; the others follow in his footsteps. In fact it goes right back to that childhood game you've all played, "Follow My Leader," in which you must do everything exactly as he does, or you're "Out." Remember, if he wiggled his fingers to his ears or something else crazy, you had to do the same thing.'

'Manny, do you understand any of this talk?' Belle Rosen asked. 'All I heard is we was thirteen and thirteen I don't like. I always said we were thirteen.'

'He's telling us how we got to going next,' Manny said.

'How, I'm not interested in, but where.' She was still lying down. Her triumphant underwater swim ought to have elated and stimulated her. On the contrary, oddly, it seemed to have taken everything out of her that she had left. Perhaps as much as fatigue to an unaccustomed heart and set of muscles, it was the transition mentally she had made backwards and forwards over a span of forty years.

'Each step, I take, each place I put my hand or foot, each thing I do, one at a time will be observed by the climber behind me,' Scott went on, 'and copied exactly. That will be you, Miss Kinsale. In turn, Martin will copy you, then Susan and so on. Get it, everybody?'

Martin asked, 'You really mean you think we can make it?'

Scott replied, 'Yes, or at any rate that we must try. It's simply a matter of imitating the one ahead of you. If you'll stick to that we'll reach the top safely.'

'Reach where?' asked Belle Rosen.

Manny replied, 'Look! Up there!'

Belle Rosen dragged herself to her knees and for the first time looked to where the beams of light were fingering the greasy surface of the distant propellor shaft. 'I couldn't do it,' she declared. 'Not in a thousand million years for a thousand million dollars.'

'Belle, look. Like Frank says, we'll all be tied together so . . .'

'So one falls, all fall. That ain't for me.'

Scott promised, 'You'll be as safe as walking upstairs in your own home.'

'When I'm going upstairs in my own home, I go in the elevator.' She looked upwards once more. 'No not in a thousand billion years. You couldn't talk me into it.'

'But, Mamma, you can't stay here. Look, I'll be right behind you.'

'Yes, I can. Go on, Manny. Go on everyone. Leave me. Can't you see I'm tired, that I ain't got any more strength?'

'But, Mamma, you'd die. We'd both die. You think I'd leave you?'

'Or that we would, Mrs Rosen?' cried Nonnie.

Belle gazed at them out of dark eyes, heavy lidded and filled with fatigue, despair and memories. 'Is living so wonderful?' she asked.

Her husband said, 'I'm surprised at you, Mamma. Do you want to die?'

'I don't want to have to climb any more. My feet are killing me from all those pipes. I'm old. I'm too heavy to lift myself up there.'

Susan Shelby bent over Belle and took her hand, suddenly filled with a tenderness she had not known that she possessed. 'Dear Mrs Rosen,' she begged, 'do please try. We . . .' She had been about to say, 'love you,' but suddenly felt embarrassed. 'We think you're a wonderful person. Look how you went through that awful tunnel by yourself, where nobody else really dared. We never would have got here if it hadn't been for you.'

'So where are we?' said Belle. 'I appreciate your remarks, but swimming ain't climbing. You want I should swim across there for you, okay. But up any more, never! Anyway, my heart is hurting me.' Then to her husband, 'I'm surprised at you, Manny, when you know about my heart . . .'

'Belle, Belle, your heart always!' said Manny, and it was apparent that this had been a longtime family affair. 'Look, Mamma. You know there's nothing the matter with you. The last time we saw Dr Metzger and he listened, he said you should live so long before a heart like yours gave out.'

'Dr Metzger don't know what I'm feeling. It kills me if I climb, it kills me if I stay here. Here it's easier.'

Linda turned on her. 'Oh, for Chrice sakes stay, then!' she shouted, and then to the others, 'If she chooses to sit here and die, let her. But she has no right to keep us back.'

Belle said gravely, 'Nobody chooses to die, Mrs Rogo. When it comes, it comes and then you go. I'm sixty-four years old. You're young. I understand how you feel. Nobody should stay here with me, please. I never thought anything like this could happen to us but when it does, you got to look at it from how you are.'

'Mamma,' Manny pleaded, 'how can you say such things? With sixty-four you are nothing. Look how you still can swim like a champion. Don't you want to see Irving again? And Sol and Sylvia? And Hy and Myra, your own children and grandchildren?'

Both Shelby and Muller noted a small bit of starch enter the limp, surrendered backbone of Mrs Rosen. 'Sol and Sylvia I could do without,' she said. 'All those years they been chiselling from the store. Tongue or pastrami ain't good enough for them. No, it's lox and sturgeon every time. Or like she's saying, "Belle, I am just happening to be hungry, maybe a little caviar on a piece of white bread would be good."'

Tubby little Rosen in his shorts began to look like a burt child. 'Aw, now, Mamma. Don't go picking on my relatives again. We had that all explained. Sol has been a good brother to me, he put money in the shop when . . .'

'Yeah, and Sylvia ate it all up, twice over,' Belle interrupted. 'An appetite she had, like a horse. So she's my sister-in-law, but she used to be worse than cops for free handouts. Every day, every day, a sandwich here, a dill pickle there, I'm all out of mustard, at home, Belle, could I borrow a jar. Mmmmmm, does that herring salad look good, you mind if I taste? Don't give me Sylvia.'

'Belle, Belle, you mustn't talk like this. Not in front of strangers.' He was worried about what Mike Rogo might do or say at the allusion to cops, or Linda. And the others standing there embarrassed, trying to pretend they weren't listening.

Rogo surprised him, however. He said, 'Let her get it out of her system, Manny. She'll feel better afterwards.'

'Like a larder they used to use our shop,' Belle went on, 'and Sol was as bad as she. The half of it you don't even know because when I was a kid in Wadleigh High, one of the things I learned was not to snitch. You know where half the stuff comes from the time their Simon went Bar Mitzvah? Our stock room. Only I covered it up, you shouldn't find out such no-goods should be your family. And what did they ever do for us? You know what Sylvia gave our kids for last Christmas? Each a handkerchief with an initial on from Woolworth's. Big deal, when Sol sells cut his business for half a million. If I'm not saving every penny, where do you think we would be today?'

Rosen with a sheepish and unhappy little smile looked around at the others. It was an old story to him, but to have people like the Shelbys and Scott and Muller let into the privacy of family squabbles! With her expression Jane Shelby tried to message him,
It's all right, Mr Rosen, we understand.

And Rosen's eyes almost popped from his head. Had or hadn't Scott tipped him a wink? Feeling a sudden flood of relief he said, 'Mamma, Mamma, I'm sorry. Like you say, half of it I didn't know, otherwise . . .'

'Sorry, sorry. Now you're sorry, when it's too late and we're retired.'

'You're right, Mamma. But we got plenty for ourselves. We got a lot yet to look forward to.' Rosen hesitated and then decided to risk it. Maybe Rogo was right. What she needed was to get it off her chest again. 'Could you come now, maybe, Mamma. See, we've been holding up Mr Scott and everybody.'

She looked up at him. Her expression had changed to something almost half humorous, but the liquid, dark eyes were affectionate, as she sighed and said, 'I suppose so, Emmanuel Rosen, like I always said, you're a terrible man. What is it I got to do now?' She rose to her feet. It was Martin who raised the cheer: 'Atta girl, Belle! To hell with Sol and Sylvia,' and sent a ripple of laughter through the party, and felt embarrassed at the attention he had drawn and apologized, 'Oh, I'm sorry, Mrs Rosen, I didn't mean . . .'

'Never mind,' she said, 'so I talked my head off like an old fool. So show me, and I try.'

Carefully Scott explained the roping which, because of the brevity and steepness of the climb plus the size of the party, would have to be different from ordinary alpine practice. There would be two ropes, one attaching the members of the party to one another, and the other a guide-rope, which would be alternately fastened and shifted by Scott as he progressed to the top.

Muller asked, 'How do we get the Turk to capisco all this? I wouldn't care to have him down on top of me.'