Free Exile-and Glory by Jerry Pournelle Page B

engineer wasn't listening, and Jellicic impatiently poked the supercargo in the ribs. "We're here, ye daft fool! Look!"
    Fifty-three degrees south latitude; the Falkland Islands were seven hundred miles due west, and another four hundred miles that way lay the entrance to the Straits of Magellan. The nearest land was two hundred and fifty miles southeast of the point Jellicic indicated. South Georgia Island, good for nothing, and owned by the British to boot.
    "Not for nothing," Alden said.
    Jellicic looked up, unaware that he'd been muttering. "Eh?"
    Alden's face was grim. A tinge of green was visible around his cheekbones. "South Georgia. Not good for nothing. They render whales there. They're good for exterminating whales."
    Jellicic shrugged. In his opinion anyone who sailed these Antarctic seas deserved whatever profit he could make; but Alden was a fanatic on that. There was no reasoning with him. "What have your lads found?" Jellicic asked.
    "Mass concentrations. Veining down there. Thick veins. Manganese nodules to the deep floor. Veins in the sides of the crevasse. Just what we were looking for, Captain. And we've found it." He listened again for a moment. "Can you bring her about and over the same course again?"
    Jellicic looked out at the crashing seas and thought of his little tug broad onto them. He pointed. Alden glanced up, then back at the chart. The captain shrugged and went back to the wheel. He wanted to be near the helm for this. As he watched the seas, waiting for a calm moment when he dared bring her around, he shook his head again. So they'd found metals. Copper, tin, gold perhaps. How could they bring anything up from fourteen hundred fathoms below the Southern Seas? The discoveries were of no value. He looked back at Alden's grim features and caught himself.
    Perhaps they'd do it at that. But how?
     
    It took Michael Alden two years. First he had to invent the technology to bring in mines for profit at two-thousand feet below the stormiest seas on earth, then he had to convince investors to put their money in it.
    Technology, he found, wasn't his problem. The investors were ready for that. Howard Hughes mined the seas for twenty years before, and Hughes hadn't risked money on vigia. Alden's techniques were new, but the concept wasn't; and he'd found the richest source of ores ever discovered.
    Economists waxed ecstatic over the potential markets: all of Latin America, and most of southern Africa. The minerals would come from the sea onto boats—onto the cheapest form of bulk transportation known. Given the minerals, Latin America was a fertile field for industries. Labor was cheap, investment costs low, taxes lower. The United States had become a horrible place for risk investment, with its unpopular governments, powerful unions, bad schools, and confiscatory taxes. U.S. investors were ready to move their capital.
    It wasn't technology or economics that frightened investors away from Alden's mineral finds. It was politics.
    Who owned the bottom of the sea?
    Eventually ways to avoid the legal problems were found. They always are when enough money is at stake.
    Ten years went by . . . .
     
    There was bright sunshine overhead and new powder beneath his skis. Mont Blanc rose above him, brilliant in the new-fallen stuff, untouched; and there weren't many people out. Superintendent Enoch Doyle released the tension on his poles and plunged forward, schussing down the fall line, waiting until he was moving dangerously fast before bringing his shoulders around in perfect form, turning again in a series of christies, then back to the fall line, wedeln down with wagging hips. There was a mogul ahead and he took it perfectly, lift, springiness in the knees. Who said he'd forgotten and he ought to take it easy his first time out after so long behind a desk?
    He had just cleared the mogul when the beeper screeched insistently. "No!" Doyle shouted into the rushing wind. He scrabbled at his parka, trying to