A Grue of Ice

3. The Secret of the Blue Whale

Incredulity, mixed with revulsion, stopped me as I saw the grey mask. The effect was more startling when he rose and the pewter crinkled into a smile. I could see the laughter-lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes. There seemed to be no division between the line of his strangely-coloured forehead and his short, curly grey hair. He was short and stocky, with a sailor's eyes. The change from what I thought would be a deadpan into a warm welcoming smile left me at a loss.

Helen kissed his cheek. " Well, Daddy, I found your man." He took my hand and shook it cordially. " I've spent a lot of time and money on you, Bruce. I'm glad to have you safely aboard."

His immediate use of my Christian name did not offend me, as it would have with almost anyone else.

" Your daughter did a magnificent piece of rescue work," I said. " I scarcely expected to see the inside of a warm ship's cabin to-night."

He glanced keenly at me. " From what I know, I don't think a night at sea in an open boat would hold much terror for you. Good girl, Helen. I knew you'd find him."

She did not seem to hear. The eyes, so filled with distress in the cockpit, were composed. They were even warm through taking on the colour of the cabin's panelling. Her unspoken attitude was that split-second timing and consummate skill were all in the day's work. It was clear that Upton expected little less than that.

I fumbled for something to say. The mask disconcerted me.

He laughed. " It gets you down the first time, doesn't it? I never notice it any more. Mine is no beauty, but you should have seen the chap with the silver pan! My God! He shone like a balloon-sputnik!"

" I'm afraid I don't understand…" I faltered. I looked to Helen for help. She was busy rubbing oil off the back of her left hand. She might as well not have been there, she was so remote from our conversation.

" Of course you don't," said Upton in his rapid-fire way. " You can have the medical term for it if you like-argyria. I got it from fooling around with rare metals in Sweden.

What happens is that the metal actually passes into your system. The doctor chappie with the silver face had been using silver nitrate. He was so self-conscious. We were in the same sanatorium in Stockholm."

My eyes had accustomed themselves to the light. The cabin was as distinctive as the man. One whole wall was taken up by a map of Antarctica, and no ordinary map.

It was in relief, and the land contours had been demarcated by intricately inlaid pieces of whalebone. The long spur of Graham Land, which juts out from the ice continent towards Cape Horn, was exquisitely fashioned.

As eye-catching as the map itself were scale models of the ships which had opened up the South. They had been carved by a master: replicas of clumsy eighteenth-century

British men-o'-war; of tough British sealers, the originals of which had oaken planks thick enough to withstand pack-ice and roundshot; of the finer-lined New Bedford whalers; of the first steamers, aided by sails; of the armoured icebreakers of to-day. They clustered mainly round where I had operated from during the war, for Graham Land was the first part of the continent proper to be found. Near my base at Deception was an old brig, and I could read her name Williams. It was in her that Captain William Smith discovered the South Shetlands in 1819. It was Captain Smith who raced to Chile to a British naval officer, Captain Shireff, who realised that the Drake Passage was the key to naval power between the Atlantic and the Pacific. It had been true in

Napoleon's time; it had been true in my lifetime, too. I had guarded that passage for two years.

Near my old base, too, was a tiny American brig named Hersilia. James P. Sheffield had sailed from Connecticut to look for a dream-the legendary, fabulous islands called the Auroras. He failed. But his young second mate, Nat Palmer, made history by being the first man to put a foot ashore on the Antarctic mainland. A Britisher, Captain Bransfield, holds the distinction-a few days only before Palmer-of being the first man to sight and chart the coast of the Antarctic mainland.

Clustered round the long peninsula, too, were other ships with strange names: Vostok and Morny, Russian, among the first ever in those waters; Captain Cook's immortal

H.M.S. Resolution which got nearer to the coast of West Antarctica than any ship since; Astrolabe and Zelee, French; 38

H.M.S. Erebus and Terror, British; Shackleton's Endurance, a pitiful wreck crushed in the ice.

In the Weddell Sea, that great bite out of Antarctica which adjoins Graham Land, was shown the epoch-making penetration a hundred and forty years ago by the British

Captain James Weddell in his little ship lane. No ship has ever navigated the Weddell Sea as far as Weddell in the same longitude. Weddell was amazed that there was no ice at all almost within sight of the ice continent. The intrepid captain turned back in clear seas; all subsequent attempts to pierce the thousands of square miles of solid ice have failed. The map showing Weddell's historic voyage-in clear seas which should have been ice-brought the reason home to me right then: The Albatross' Foot!

The storm made the factory ship lean at her anchors. Drake Passage! The Golden Hind, Sir Francis Drake's flagship, was on the map, fighting her way round Cape Horn. There was almost a physical resemblance between the man in front of me and the famous Elizabethan. I wondered if Drake had found his tiny cabin aboard the Golden Hind big enough for his spirit. This wasn't, for Upton's.

" Sit down," he said. He couldn't seem to get the words out quickly enough. " There's not another map like that anywhere. Are you wet? Get him a drink, Helen. She hauled you up out of the boat?"

I could go along with Upton, I thought. I didn't know what he wanted me for, but among the tough-charactered men the Antarctic throws up, Upton stood out.

Helen went across to the drinks cabinet. " Captain Wetherby believes it was luck. He had a strange bird with him. It hasn't got any wings, and he says Nightingale Island is the only place in the world where they're found. The rescue was a matter of luck."

There was an odd self-rejection about her. I interrupted. " It wasn't luck-it was spot-on, skilled judgment. She rescued the whole boat. What's more, her landing with it lashed to the side out there on the flensing platform was masterly. Lucky for me, since all my instruments and charts are in the boat."

He looked at me keenly. " They're safe, these things of yours?"

" Y e s, " I r e p l i e d. " I w e n t b a c k t o s e e a f t e r w e h a d landed."

Helen stood with the drink in her hand, her eyes fixed on me. They were alive with distress. She was begging me not to say what happened.

" It's a strange bird," she said in an even voice. " It makes little appeal at first. It has no flight." She splashed more spirits into the glass without taking her eyes from me. " I don't expect it sings. Perhaps somewhere there is a message in its disdain and isolation."

I could not fathom her. " Ask Sailhardy," I said. " I'll go and fetch my things from the boat."

Upton shook his head. He pressed a button on his desk. A sailor came in. He spoke rapidly to the man in Norwegian. " Can't lose personal property," he said. In the same jerky way, he clicked off the desk lamp and put on the general cabin lights. It was all Southern Ocean and luxury. A chunk of baleen held down the charts he had been studying; the central chandelier was made of four seal skulls skilfully matched and joined; his chair was sealskin stretched over dark timber.

Pirow came in with Sailhardy. Upton nodded perfunctorily at the islander. " When will the gunner-captain boys be here?" he asked Pirow.

Pirow grinned. " All of them in time for a drink. You can bet on that. They're about as tough a bunch as you could hope to meet in a month's sail round South Georgia." Helen stood with the drink she was pouring for me in her hand. Upton went across to the cabinet. A heavy gust of wind shook the factory ship. I felt uncomfortable. She just stood there with the drink. " I'm glad we got in before that started," I said.

" I had a good pilot," she addressed herself to Sailhardy.

" Sailhardy?" asked Upton, his hand on a glass. The islander did not seem to hear him. He was as far away as Helen. I think he half regretted not being out in the gale. Upton repeated the invitation. Sailhardy shook his head. " I like a drink, but food is more important on Tristan. One is only tantalised by alcohol."

Upton shrugged. He took my drink from Helen. " Water in your brandy? I've just come from the Cape. Full cellar of your national drink."

" For the record, I'm not a South African," I said. " I've lived there for the past three years. I was born within sight of the English Channel. Last of a long line of Wetherbyssailors, explorers, hopeless businessmen." 40

Helen pointed to a group of islands on the map near Graham Land, and to a model ship. " The Wetherbys did more than any private firm in the history of the exploration of the Southern Continent. I would like to know what drove t h e m t o i t " S h e j a b b e d a f i n g e r a t t h e m o d e l. " T h e Sprightly!" She lingered over the name. " The first Wetherby's favourite ship."

It slipped out-harmlessly, I thought then. " There was another, and their names are always linked," I said. " The Lively and the Sprightly."

" Yes," she said. " The Lively and the Sprightly! You can find them at any place between the Drake Passage and…" " Bouvet," I said.

Upton's keen glance seemed more than to study my appreciation of the fine brandy he had handed me. He slapped together a double dry martini for Helen. He took a beautifully blown bottle from the cabinet. In everything he did, Upton was the supreme showman. The bottle contained no liquid. He shook out of it a couple of long, pretzel-like sticks. He took a tiny coffee spoon from a drawer and carefully scraped it full, put the softish scrapings into a glass, and added iced water. He took a metal decanter and put it next to the glass, pouring in a stiff slug of brandy. He set it alight, blew out the spurt of blue flame, raised the decanter, and sipped quickly first from the iced water and then from the hot brandy.

" I've been around," I said, " but I've never seen a drink like that before."

Upton laughed. "I must do this at some place in the Antarctic where they'll find a name for it. The ingredients are scarcely usual."

" Erebus and Terror," I interjected. " You know, the two volcanic peaks in the Ross Sea-belching fire and smoke from the ice."

He roared with laughter. " God, Bruce, what a name for guarana and buccaneers' brandy-Erebus and Terror it shall be!"

Pirow sipped his schnapps reflectively. Sailhardy's thoughts were still outside in the storm.

It was the calm, self-possessed way Helen said it that made me wonder if she was not anything more than a cog in the whirring personal machine which was Upton, overshadowed by him, integrated, whether she liked it or not, in his pursuits. " I don't think Daddy ever got over playing pirates," she said.

" Flaming brandy-buccaneers' brandy they called it on the Spanish Main. Morgan drank it."

Daughter filling in the gaps, I thought. That wasn't the whole answer, though. No daughter tortures herself with a bullet in her hip, nor develops such flying skill, just because Daddy says so. Yet her knowledge of the Southern

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 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."

" 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.

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 Christensen surmised, and I know now, that somewhere in that wild waste of waters is the breeding-ground of the Blue Whale."

" Is a territorial limit of two hundred miles usual for this sort of thing?" I asked.

" There was damn near a war when Iceland imposed a mere twelve-mile territorial limit ban on ordinary fishing," he answered.

Upton made the whole thing sound plausible. He was going after the Blue Whale because I had pointed the way to the goal that whalermen had dreamed of for centuries.

And I wanted to go after that other prong of The Albatross'

Foot.

I said slowly: " If The Albatross' Foot is within twelve miles of Bouvet, I want nothing to do with your operation. If it is outside the twelve-mile limit, which I consider fair for any territorial-waters claim, then we'll pool ideas. Fair enough?"

He shook my hand. "That's the spirit of the Sprightly!" he exclaimed.

Helen turned to Sailhardy. "Are you coming, sailor?" He did not look at her. " I shall go with Captain

Wetherby."

The eyes became luminous for a moment. "'That is a very neat distinction."

There was a knock at the door, and she unlocked it to Pirow.

" Walter signals he's just coming round the point into the anchorage," he said. " He'll be alongside any minute in the Aurora."