Southtrap

CHAPTER TWO

The driver brought the taxi round in a sharp righthander so that we came close under Quest's bows. She might not have been new, but her fine-raked bow with its triple blue stripes on the white hull — typical of the Thor class of ships — gave her a timeless beauty, a look of seeking faraway seas.

The taxi driver gestured at her figurehead — however often their names may be changed, Thor vessels are always distinguishable by the emblem depicting the god Thor with his right hand raised to cast his magic hammer.

'You running another sideshow, Cap'n?'

I was sitting next to him in the front seat — I never sit behind in a taxi — and he glanced at me in a slightly derisive way.

'Come again?'

'You're in the same place as that old sailing ship — I thought maybe they kept the same spot for the nut-ships.'

'Quest isn't a nut-ship. Or a fun-ship. The ice isn't for that type.'

He pulled a crushed packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and offered me one, as if approving of my attitude. (You mean you didn't see that old sailer full of horrors?'

'No.'

A fortnight ago I'd been bringing the stout little store-ship Captain Cook in from a routine run from the Southern Ocean islands to Port Elizabeth, 700 kilometres to the east of Cape Town. I had had no idea then that soon I would be taking a ship-load of tourists and scientists the same way again. The Quest job was one of those things which come out of the blue, so easy that they seem pre-destined. Like a whirlwind romance. My comparison was spontaneous and bitter. Mine had finished in divorce.

'I thought everyone had seen it,' said the driver.

'I've only been here three or four days,' I replied. 'New job.'

'That explains it.' He shook his head and laughed. 'It was good for business. I taxied half Cape Town to the ship. But the show itself was enough to give anyone the shits.'

I remembered now. I'd seen the windjammer's picture in the paper carrying the advertisement which had brought me the Quest job. One long-distance call had practically clinched it. Captain Prestrud had told me to catch the next plane to Cape Town for a face-to-face interview. We had taken to one another at first sight. I had chucked my command of the Captain Cook and found myself first officer of the Quest in a matter of days. The windjammer the taxi driver was talking about was a modern replica of an old-time Australian convict hell-ship. She had called at the Cape on her way to Sydney.

'Botany Bay,' I said.

'Right, that was her name. I went for a look myself after a fare I'd brought to see her came back to the car and had hysterics.'

He chuckled and drew heavily on his cigarette without taking his hands off the wheel.

'My oath, you should have seen this doll! Well dressed, young — well, maybe not too young, but still making the running, if you know what I mean.' He leered at me. 'Comes back to this very car, flops down in the back, starts to gulp and sort of hiccup. Then she says, in a kind of high voice like I've never heard before. "They were cutting his balls off in there, that's what."

"Pull yourself together, lady," I says. "They're only wax figures like Madame Tussaud's in London — they're not real."

Then she looks at me and sort of gasps with the tears runnin' down her cheeks. "That's what's eating me," she kind of moans. "That it wasn't real."'

He took his eyes from the road. 'Women!'

He went on: 'So that's why I went and had a look-see myself. Of course, that doll was imagining things. What she saw was a kind of group — whadderyercallit?'

Tableau?'

That's it. Kind of tableau showing how the convicts were put in a salt bath when they first came aboard and were scrubbed with long brushes by the guards. The doll saw it her own way. My oath, she was carrying a load of sex!'

He shook his head again at the vagaries of the opposite sex.

'Was it as bad as that — the rest of the waxworks show, I mean?'

I'll say. It really gave you the heebie-jeebies seeing what they did to those convicts down under in the early days — guys wearing neck-irons, guys locked in tiny cells where they couldn't sit, stand or kneel. Floggings, torture — you name it, they did it in those old hell-ships. You could see it all the way it was in Botany Bay.'

'Now she's on her way to Australia?'

'Left just before your ship came in. That's why I asked, are you another nut-show? The showbiz guy who owns Botany Bay must have coined a packet.'

We were approaching the dock entrance gates and he waved towards Cape Town's main street running in the direction of Table Mountain.

The guide who showed us round the hell-ship said Cape Town just escaped being made a convict settlement and they named Adderley Street after the guy who had it stopped. Maybe that's why all the locals went to see what they'd escaped. Jeez, when I think what they did to those poor sods!'

I was interested in Botany Bay. I've sailed in all types of modern yachts and schooners, but never in a square-rigger.

The owner — did he intend to sail her to Australia?'

'Not him. The show loaded him with dollars. He's still living it up at the Mount Nelson Hotel. He'll fly to Australia, and pick up another packet when Botany Bay goes on show there. He's got a crew do the dirty work of shifting the ship. Young guys. A dozen or so.

'That day I went to see for myself I heard one of 'em talking to the skipper. "Tom," he says, "the sooner we get to sea, the better. I can't take this circus much longer."

"Nor me," the skipper tells him. "But it'll all be different in the Roaring Forties. You'll get all the sailing you want there." Nice guy, I thought.'

I said, 'They'll get all the sailing they want in the Roaring Forties, all right.'

'Know those parts, Cap'n?'

Know them! I've seen the gale-gusts come through the channel between Prince Edward and Marion hitting one hundred and twenty knots, the sea a tormented hell of corrugated water with waves fifteen metres from trough to crest, and the ice spicules spraying like automatic fire on the wind.

'Yes, I know them.'

He glanced sharply at me, and slowed for the dock check-point.

'Something wrong, Cap'n?'

'I was thinking of Botany Bay down those parts. A sailer. It's a bastard. You have to be tough to survive.'

We halted at the entrance to have our papers cleared. Then the driver pulled away into the open street beyond, making for the big roundabout on the foreshore which would lead us to the hospital on the mountain slope dominating the city.

'That guy was — the one you were speaking to by the ship.'

The driver was not unobservant, 'for all his blabbermouth.

'You know him?'

'Not to say know exactly. But he's been hanging around ever since Quest came in — he must sleep on the docks.'

I had a sudden flash of insight. 'Do you always do the dock run?'

He was cautious. 'What makes you ask?'

'I wondered if you took Captain Prestrud anywhere last night. He finished up in hospital.'

The man's chumminess froze. I could have kicked myself for having mentioned it.

He lied sullenly. 'It was my night off last night.'

We drove on in silence.

I glanced up at the bulk of Table Mountain. A streamer or horn of cloud was starting to work its way round one side preliminary to forming the famous 'tablecloth'. It reminded me of Prince Edward Island. I'd seen the same thing happen there a score of times. A cloud horn suddenly appears against the windward quarter of the mountain peaks of the great western escarpment. Then it works round to the north, shrouding the black summits. I hoped Botany Bay would steer clear of Prince Edward. Too many fine ships have gone.missing without trace in its wild waters. Some last century and some this. Well-found vessels too, like the Danish training ship Kobenhavn perhaps.

Prince Edward Island. I'd be back there again within the week if the cruise was still on. But in what capacity? That depended on what I was going to find at the hospital. 'Severe head injuries but not a car accident.' That's all the hospital had said. He wasn't the right type, nor the right age to have gone on a pre-sailing bender ashore and got mixed up in a brawl in some sleazy joint. Could he have been mugged?

I pulled upright in my seat as the thought struck me. How had Wegger known about Captain Prestrud? He'd seemed very anxious to address me as captain, to feel mat I was authorized to take him on in Quest. He'd also been hanging around the Quest ever since she docked…

I slammed on my mental brakes. I was being suspicous without reason. Maybe it was because the intensity of the man was still with me. I had made no secret of Captain Prestrud's injury around the ship — everyone had known within minutes of the hospital's telephone call. If Wegger had been anywhere close on the dock-side, he could have heard it from one of the crew. There was nothing to connect Wegger with Captain Prestrud. Nonetheless, I decided to ask Captain Prestrud about him if he were fit enough.

The taxi turned on to the De Waal Drive and picked up speed in the direction of Groote Schuur Hospital. The driver pretended he was too occupied with the road for any further talk.

If Captain Prestrud were too badly hurt to carry on with the cruise, what then? Had Quest's voyage simply been a tourist trip, it could have been called off. Linn Prestrud, Captain Prestrud's daughter, was due with the main party of passengers by jet from Europe that afternoon. They would be disappointed, but it was the scientists who were the real problem. The Quest had given a hard-and-fast commitment — no, it was more than that: it was a contract involving a time factor.

Quest was a key cog in an international meteorological project known as the Global Atmospheric Research Programme in which one hundred and forty-five nations were taking part. She had been commissioned to launch, in the seas of the Southern Ocean where ships hardly ever go, a sophisticated drifting instrumented buoy which would gather marine and weather information. This would be transmitted via satellite to the American National Center for Atmospheric Research at Boulder, Colorado.

Quest also had the task of releasing a special high-altitude stratosphere balloon which would supply similar automatic data. Captain Prestrud himself had informed me that this was the bread-and-butter which would finance the Quest's cruise — the passengers were secondary contributors. An intricate web of international communications — satellites, radio, telexes, computers — were already in operation in anticipation of Quest's lonely voyage.

I wondered for one brief moment if I should risk taking Captain Prestrud along, if he were not too seriously injured. I immediately discarded the idea. The Roaring Forties are no place for the unfit, let alone the injured. That meant I had to have another officer. Quest had got to sail tomorrow and that didn't leave much time to find one. But Wegger had turned up as if in answer to prayer. His papers had seemed in order. It looked as if I was going to have to take Wegger.

We turned into the hospital grounds.