Easy is the descent into the dark deeps!

But to retrace your way and issue into space-there is the toil and there is the task!

Virgil, Aeneid

COMMANDER GEOFFREY PEACE R. N.

Geoffrey Peace was dead.

I could not believe it. For three days, ever since a naval officer had enquired ' Mr. John Garland?' and handed me that agonizing message from the flagship, I had not believed it. Even when the ominous shape, covered by a tarpaulin, had been brought alongside in a launch by a naval party, my mind rejected the thought. But now there could be no doubt: I stood looking through the glass trap in the coffin lid into the hard face of the man who had been so much a part of my life: Commander Geoffrey Peace, Royal Navy, D.S.O. and two Bars.

Death had not softened the clean-shaven face; the strong jaw with the cruel line of the mouth was held shut by the black rubber diving-cap he had worn at the time of his death. They had dressed the body again in the underwater suit. Its cowled effect brought no feeling of sanctity but rather one of evil, or-I told myself in hurried excuse for the dead-the desperate rejection of any hope of afterlife, like the wild keen of a piper's lament in the Outer Isles.

Geoffrey Peace should not have died like this, I thought angrily-to be hauled from a few feet of water with heart failure. Automatically my eyes sought the hands which had sent so many other men to their deaths, but they were hidden. All the Peaces had died hard. A strange resentment welled inside me that this one should have met his end so tamely after so violent a life. Simon Peace, his grandfather, had gone to meet his Maker with the cry of the sea and England on his lips; old Sir John Peace, his piratical ancestor who had terrorized the Indian Ocean, had been cut in half on his own quarterdeck by a triple-shotted broadside. But Geoffrey Peace, who was in the full glare of the public spotlight in Britain and America because of his part in the controversial American Navy missile project, had died no more excitingly than an overfed businessman who drops dead after a dip at Ramsgate.