A Grue Of Ice (7 page)

Ocean matched his map: you don't pick up knowledge like

hers about the Wetherbys in the local library.

" Is guarana also something from the Spanish Main?" I couldn't keep the irony out of my voice.

" Not quite, but near enough," he replied. " In Bolivia the guarana drink is called white water." He held up what looked like a strip of dried meat—biltong, as they call it in South Africa. " This is dried dough made from a creeper which grows near the Amazon. It's about three times as strong as the strongest coffee. Wonderful stimulant. No hangover.

Leaves the mind clear. None of the deadening effects of

alcohol. Everything is brighter, better, bigger."

Brighter, better, bigger: that could sum up the man, I

thought.

" Walter will want to bring the catchers in," said Pirow. Who was Walter anyway, I wondered. It was all very well

to give this extroverted display for my benefit, but what did Upton want with me? Where did catcher skippers fit into

the picture? Tristan is far from the whale hunting-grounds. I suddenly distrusted the whole set-up.

Sailhardy turned from the gale-porthole. He was bristling

with suspicion. " I've never known catchers to meet at Tristan," he said.

Upton was on the defensive. " I'll rendezvous anywhere in the Southern Ocean I damn-well like."

" The toughest skippers in South Georgia would not come all this way for peanuts," Sailhardy retorted.

" Pirow," said Upton sharply. " Go and signal Walter. I want a definite time of arrival. Quick now."

The man's nervous tension permeated the room. What

was it all about? Why the urgency in a wind wild enough

to blow away an anemoneter?

" Plankton," he said briefly. " Tell me about plankton, Bruce."

He's been studying up on me, I thought. I didn't like it any more than Helen's knowledge of the Wetherby explorations. I wasn't going to be steamrollered. " All creatures 42

that in the Southern Ocean do dwell, sing to Bruce Wetherby with a cheerful voice," I came back.

Upton's face did not flush—it couldn't—but there was
a
pinky tinge to the pewter which made it look formidable. The eyes were unnaturally bright. Before he could reply,

however, the Norwegian sailor he had sent to the boat for

my charts and instruments came in and dumped the oilskin bag containing them on the desk. The interruption gave him time to control himself, and

he held his voice steady: " Plankton are like people in
a
crowd. They mill around like hell—within strict limits. Yet the general direction remains the same. Plankton might sing to you, but might they not also point to something?"

The inference was excellent. I was to know later that

guarana widens the associations. He had not had time to hear from the islanders about The Albatross' Foot. The Royal Society would certainly not have told him.

" Look," I said. " The Royal Society gave me a scholarship to investigate what I think
is
an unknown, major ocean current with certain odd characteristics."
I
told him about The Albatross' Foot. " It has no significance either commercially or militarily." Upton was as tense as a boxer coming out of his corner.

"The Albatross' Foot! What a name! Did you find it?"

" Yes," said Sailhardy. " Captain Wetherby found it all right."

" Just the beginnings—I should qualify that," I said. "I was starting to get the proof I wanted when the storm came. Nevertheless, I feel certain
I
found one prong."

" One prong?" he echoed. " What do you mean, one prong?"

I told him my theory of the two prongs of warm current

joining near Bouvet. Helen took no part in the conversation. She was fiddling with something on the map. He slapped his right fist into his left palm. " Plankton!

Current! Put these facts together, and my God! see what

they add up to!"

Sailhardy went back
to
his porthole. This sort of talk was beyond him. I wasn't sure whether it was not beyond

me, too.

"It has no significance ..." I began.

"Like to have a look at that other prong of The Albatross'

Foot?" He was tripping over his words, he was so excited.
43

" You can! Free ride in this ship! It's on the house. I'll take you to Bouvet !" He did not wait for me to reply. " K r i l l ! M y G o d ! K r i l l ! "

" Krill?" I wilted under his bulldozing speech. " That's whale's food."

" The staple diet of whales—krill!" he went on. " You tell me: a current appears. Plankton appear. Billions upon billions of them. Food for the little shrimplike things we call krill. Food for every living thing in the Southern Ocean."

" I've seen krill by the million fall like China tea-leaves out of a whale's guts when he was cut open," I managed to get in. " What this has to do with The Albatross' Foot, except in a general way, I wouldn't know."

" Krill live on them, don't they?" he raced on. " Things breed. Young must have food. The life-giving currents meet near Bouvet.. . ."

Bouvet was at the heart of the Wetherby story. Discovered by a Frenchman, it was lost sight of, its position uncertain in the wild seas, for nearly a century. An American sealing captain, Benjamin Morrell, made the first of the half-dozen known landings on its wild shores. Then, in 1825, John Wetherby sent Captain Norris to locate Bouvet. What Norris found near Bouvet has become one of the sea's great mysteries. Sometimes, they said, Old John Wetherby could be seen pacing the Thames by the Roaring Forties Wharf in a storm, calling Captain Norris to come back from the

sea-dead to tell the world what he had seen near Bouvet. ... Helen was watching me thoughtfully. " You look as if you had seen a ghost."

" Men have ghosts, and so have islands," I replied. " So have the Wetherbys."

I, the last of the Wetherbys, had also been drawn inexorably to the waters of Bouvet. Off the island I had sunk the notorious raider
Meteor.

I liked Upton, but everything was moving too fast for me. " I don't follow what you are saying about krill and whales, Sir Frederick," I said. " Your offer about Bouvet is all I could wish for. Why did you come looking for me at Tristan? Why
me?
You haven't come all this way just for the pleasure of indulging my oceanic whims. Time means money to you. What do you want from me?"

He grinned. " Even modern business pirates have their

quixotic moments."

44

" That's no answer, and you know it," I replied.

"
I
quote the Admiralty and the Royal Society," he went on. " Captain Wetherby is one of the most brilliant and experienced sailors the Antarctic has seen since Lars Christensen broke open the ice continent thirty years ago." He added crisply,
"I
want your knowledge of the Southern Ocean. I want your knowledge of its currents.
I
want your sailor's skill. I want Sailhardy's know-how."

" If you want seamanship, you can buy it a-plenty among the whalers in South Georgia," I replied. " You've refuted that argument yourself. You've got whaling skippers on their way here now."

" Shut that door, Helen," he said. " Turn the key." His movements were jerkier still. " What do you know about the Blue Whale?"

" It's the most profitable kind to hunt.
I
suppose
a
single one must weight a hundred and fifty tons and be every bit

of a hundred feet long."

He said rapidly, " The Blue Whale has been killed off

by the hundred thousand. You'd have expected that the most elementary fact about it would have been known by now—

where it breeds. The Norwegians, first under Lars

Christensen, have been searching for that for half a century. It's never been found."

" What has this to do with me?" I asked. " I'm not interested in whales, blue or otherwise."

He went on as if he had not heard me. " To any whaling concern the knowledge of the whereabouts of the breedingground of the Blue Whale would be the biggest break-through since the harpoon-gun." He faced me. " You told me to-night."

I
stared at him. " I have not even mentioned the Blue Whale, let alone its breeding-ground."

His words tumbled over each other like a pressure ridge

of ice building up. " South of Bouvet, where the two prongs of The Albatross' Foot join—that is where it is. You've put a million pounds in my pocket!"

" I still don't understand . . ." I said rather helplessly.

" The Albatross' Foot!" He turned the name over. " Don't you see—plankton means krill, and krill means food—food

for whales. Vast concentrations of krill, scores of square miles of them—food for young whales, Blue Whales!"

" You must know that you're over-simplifying, Sir Frederick,"
I
said. " A season's catch of Blue Whales is 45

limited by the International Whaling Association to about eighteen thousand. You can't hunt undersized whales, even if you knew their breeding-ground."

Upton strode angrily across towards the map, but before he got there, turned on his heel and tore open a drawer. He threw a pile of papers on the desk. " Somewhere there," he said thickly, " is a copy of the Laws of Oleron." The wicked pink tinge across the pewter skin was the most ominous dangersign I have ever seen in a man.

" I have never heard of the Laws of Oleron," I said. Sailhardy looked confused.

" I don't give a damn that you haven't," he went on thickly. " I quote: ' Through the inspiration of these ancient laws and the common brotherhood of mariners

throughout the world, men are able safely to pass on their lawful occasions.' That was said eight centuries ago. Nowhere have more men died or come to a violent end than on the sea. Brotherhood—bah!"

" I simply do not know what you are talking about," I said.

" Listen!" he said, cocking his head. " That's a Southern Ocean gale outside and these bloody fools . . ." he slapped his hand down on the papers—" are trying to put a halter round its neck."

A flicker of a smile passed across Helen's face. Her controlled voice showed nothing of it. " What my father has got there, Captain Wetherby, is a copy of the new Antarctic Treaty. He's trying to tell you he doesn't like it."

"There is only one unexplored continent left," he said. " That is Antarctica. It was discovered by individualists. It is as big as the United States and Europe together. It is the one continent left for man's free spirit to break open. What happens?" He banged the papers again. " Government committees sit ten thousand miles away and decide its future."

" It is not as bad as that," I interjected.

" Listen!" he said. " Antarctica has a population of about four hundred men—all of them governmental-committee

stooges with not a drop of red blood among them. They live in pre-heated, pre-fabricated, pre-lined huts and take the predetermined, sissy readings they're so bloody proud of !"

" What has this to do with the breeding-ground of the

Blue Whale?" I asked.

46

He brushed my question aside. " Because they haven't got the guts of an ice algae, twelve of these nations have got together and signed this shameful thing called the Antarctic Treaty, banning all activity but scientific investigation for peaceful purposes and---God's death ! —the possibility of opening up a tourist trade to the South Pole!" He tossed off his guarana drink at a gulp. " It's the negation of the human spirit, Bruce! Every one of those four hundred men scattered about Antarctica is a stooge. He's part of a committee, a weather organisation, or ... Listen! This is how they spend their time." He read out from random papers which he snatched up: " ' Directional sensitivity of neutron monitors '; '

short-term decreases in cosmic ray east-west asymmetry decreases at high Southern latitude' ; glacio-geomorphological features .

" He threw it down on the floor in disgust.

I picked it up. It was something about a scientific

symposium on the Antarctic, held in Buenos Aires.

Upton pulled himself together. He picked up a long ruler and went across to the map. Suddenly he grinned. I could not help warming to the man. " It's a funny thing to be in love with a continent. Anything one loves must be different. That's the way it is with me. Some bright lad in the U.S. Navy has worked out a formula to predict the number of icebergs you will find in the North Atlantic in summer. There aren't any formulas in the Antarctic. You can put a halter and bridle on the Arctic, but not, thank God, on the Antarctic!"

I too went across to the map. I picked out Bouvet. The cut of the jib of the two models given pride of place in the island's discovery, the
Lively
and the
Sprightly,
was unmistakable to my sailor's eves.

" You may well look," Upton said bitterly. " In this treaty the Norwegians have inserted a clause laying down a ban of

two hundred miles on hunting whales round Bouvet." He snatched up a pair of dividers, placed one point on Bouvet, and sketched a circle. " See? The ice mainland opposite Bouvet is also Norwegian. It's about four hundred and fifty miles from the island. So with a territorial limit of two hundred stretching towards Bouvet from the mainland, and also stretching from Bouvet towards the ice, it means that there's only fifty miles in which you can legally hunt a whale. Put simply, Norway has closed one-quarter of the entire ocean between Antarctica and South Africa to whaling. Why? Lars