"How much time have you got until your bomb goes off, boys?" he called down the tube, quietly and without any show of apprehension.
Jay eyed his watch for a second.
"Not more than five minutes," came Jay's even reply.
"There's only one thing to do," the Captain told him in reassuring tones. "Our pump has gone back on us and the steel cables have parted on us—a combination of hard luck that would not happen once in a thousand years. Can you get your bomb back in any way and detach it?"
Jay said they would try, and turned toward his chum. "It's our only chance now, Dick," he told him.
Together they flung back the aquascope to grapple for the bomb they had set under the deck of the coal barge. But to their horror and dismay they found that the tide had swung the Nautilus slightly away from the opening in the barge—at least three or four feet!
CHAPTER XVI An Explosion Impends
THERE was now no chance to avert the explosion of the time bomb within the coal barge. On the appointed time it would go off as arranged and unless the mechanism by some freak of luck refused to work; but the chances on this score were few indeed. The mechanism represented the very latest scientific thought and the bomb was essentially for submarine work of this character.