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."