Free A Grue Of Ice by Geoffrey Jenkins Page B

would yield new and invaluable operational information for atomic submarines guarding the vital sea route round the Cape of
    Good Hope.
    How else but through Upton would I ever get near Bouvet? It had been difficult enough to persuade scientists at the Royal Society to let me investigate the Tristan prong of The Albatross' Foot ; no government or scientific organisation
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    would be prepared to spend tens of thousands of pounds on an expedition to the wild waters of Bouvet merely to test
    an unsubstantiated theory. The answer was: Upton's expedition must not be located. To me that meant only one thing—I must take command. Sailhardy and I knew every trick of the Southern Ocean. We had learned it the hard way. I grinned a little wryly to myself now that the decision had been formulated: I was deliberately seeking out the worst seas in the world, among whose fogs I would hide the factory ship
    and catchers from whatever ships Norway might have there while I sought within my " circular area of probability " (
    as the missle-men say of the target at Cape Canaveral) the missing prong of The Albatross' Foot.
    Sailhardy moved away from the porthole when Upton
    tried again to press a drink on him, and came over to me, frowning deeply. " Bruce," he said, " we can get to Tristan, even in this gale. Let's get out—now."
    I submerged my own misgivings. " Why? This is a oncein-alifetime opportunity for me to get to Bouvet, as you know."
    " Look," replied the islander. " We've been shanghaied. Politely, but none the less shanghaied. Upton has sailed all the way from Cape Town to Tristan in order to tell you that your plankton discoveries will help him discover the breedingground of the Blue Whale. Fair enough—they probably will."
    "Then what are you objecting to?" I asked.
    " His methods, his timing, everything," he replied. " He could have written you a letter asking you to go to see him in England, or flown you there from Cape Town, for that matter. True, the letter might take six months to reach you, but six months are not important for something
    that has been searched for for half a century. It must have cost five thousand pounds a day to bring this ship to Tristan. When he gets here, he sends his daughter off into one hell of a storm to find you. It all points to one thing: you must be valuable—very valuable indeed—to him."
    " He told us, he could net a straight three million pounds." " It's a big expedition, isn't it?"
    Yes."
    " If he finds this breeding-ground, you'd expect this factory ship to be mightly busy, wouldn't you?"
    " Yes."
    " Pirow and I walked through the crew's quarters when
    we landed, to put his gear in his cabin," he said slowly. 57
    " There are only enough men to cope with a moderate catch. I smelt a rat at once, so I asked the chief flenser about biomycin. Biomycin is the latest American way of preserving a whale—you know, normally the meat and fat of a whale is quite useless about eighteen hours after the kill, unless preserved with biomycin. You can then keep them up to forty hours. You'd expect them to be cutting up whales on an assembly-line basis if Upton found the breeding-ground. Yet there's no biomycin aboard, and tiny, almost skeleton, flensing crews to cut them up."
    " Upton may be a bit old-fashioned in his methods . . ." I started to say.
    " What have you got in that bag of yours?" Sailhardy demanded, indicating the oilskin bag which the sailor had brought from the whaleboat.
    " Charts, sea-temperature readings—that sort of thing." " What charts?"
    " Admiralty charts of Tristan, Gough, the South Shetlands —
    you can buy them anywhere. Oh, and an old chart and log
    which came to me when Wetherbys folded up. It's about 1825. It's probably the first of the waters round Bouvet."
    "Bouvet!" breathed Sailhardy.
    The cabin door flew open, Pirow stood there, a radio message in his hand. It was the disciplined attitude of the man, his deference to Upton, his superior, and his taut bearing, that