The Ebb Tide Read Online Free PDF Page A

undersea craft set on stocks, one of them evidently half built. Roundabout them lay a litter of metal panels, casks of rivets, and heavy glass sheets in wooden racks. One of the ships was the length of a yacht, and might have been completely built for all I could see in that dim light, with a shape that reminded one of an oceangoing prehistoric monster—finny appendages and convex, eyelike portholes. The other vessel was smaller, just a shell, really, of a similar craft. Some distance away stood a third craft, exceedingly strange and unlikely, a sort of elongated orb standing on bent iron legs—apparently an underwater diving chamber. It had nothing of the diving bell about it, but was altogether more delicate, built of what appeared to be copper and glass, and probably capable of independent movement, if the jointed, stork-like legs and feet were any indication.
    A few feet beyond that lay a broad pool of dark water, the lamplight glinting off little eddies and swirls on its otherwise still surface, as if it were flowing eastward, perhaps a subterranean channel of the Thames, or a backwater of one of the underground rivers that transect the city—the Walbrook, perhaps, or a branch of the Fleet.
    The ceiling soared away overhead, supported by arches of heavy, cut stone. There were gaslight lamps some distance up the walls, with iron ladders leading up past them to a web of narrow walkways. The walkways ran hither and yon far above our heads, linking platforms on which lay what appeared to be tools and crates, perhaps shipbuilding paraphernalia, too dim in the gaslight to make out clearly from where we stood near the base of the stairs. The platforms, evidently, could be raised and lowered: they dangled from heavy chains that angled away in a complicated, block and tackle system. The boiler and coal oven of an immense steam engine hissed and glowed beyond.
    We were apparently alone in the room, and we descended the last few steps warily, the bottom stair-tread hanging a foot above the stone floor, held aloft by heavy chains suspended from above. The entire bottom flight shuddered with our movements like a ship in a cross sea. I was on the lookout for some sort of activity, and a little surprised (I speak for myself again) not to find any, especially with the boiler stoked and glowing. No one with legitimate business in this vast place would have any reason to hide. We were the intruders, after all, just as we had been intruders in the gin shop above.
    St. Ives, however, didn’t have the air of an intruder. He stepped down off the precarious stairway and walked eagerly to the half-built ship on the stocks. “A submarine vessel in the making!” he said, his mind instantly taken up with questions of science and engineering. He pointed at slabs of neatly stacked grey stone, weighted down by pigs of iron. The stone looked as if it had been cut out of blocks of sea foam. “Pumice,” he said. “Do you see this, Hasbro? They’ve cut it into slices and encased it within the aluminium shell. Ingenious.” He stood looking for a moment at a tub full of water nearby. Wires looped down into either end of the tub, dangling beneath floating rubber bladders with tubes running out of them. “They’re producing hydrogen gas,” he muttered, rubbing his chin. “I believe they’re pumping it into the shell of the craft to further increase buoyancy. But what motive power? Electricity, surely, but what source…?” He went on this way, peering into recesses of the craft, talking mainly to himself, pointing out incomprehensible odds and ends, apparently having forgotten what we’d come for.
    But what had we come for? If we were pursuing the simian man who had failed to steal Merton’s map, we hadn’t found any trace of him. Instead we had found a subterranean shipyard, very nice in its way, but another riddle, not a solution. I looked around warily, my mind far removed from questions of scientific arcana. I’ll admit, craven as it