" Except Bouvet. I used to listen endlessly to the radio talk of the whalers down south. Then a year ago a short message from a Norwegian catcher to her factory ship told me what I wanted to hear."
" What did she say?" he asked.
" Her name was Kos 47," I said. " She was about two hundred miles south of Bouvet. She said: I have never seen anything like this. The ice is breaking up as far as the eye can see. It's exploding before our eyes.' I had waited all the years since the Meteor sank, for something like that, Sailhardy."
" Did the factory ship realise its significance?" Sailhardy asked excitedly.
" I thought it wise to suppress her reply to the skipper of Kos 47 when I flew back to London to try and persuade the Royal Society to give me the chance of investigating The
Albatross' Foot," I said wryly.
" What did she say?"
" Finsen,' said the factory ship, if you don't lay off the bloody booze before breakfast, I'll give you a shore job cutting up whale's guts,' " I replied.
He grinned. " The Royal Society wouldn't have cared for that."
" It was difficult enough to persuade them that there was any substance in the story of The Albatross' Foot. It took a hell of a lot of talk. This scholarship runs for one year, and it's not worth much-only a thousand pounds. I' ve already lost two and a half months getting to Tristan.
I was just plain lucky that the South Africans were sending out a relief ship to the radio station."
" But Bouvet…" Sailhardy demanded.
I shrugged. " But Bouvet!" I echoed. " They wouldn't hear of it. No ships go there. It would have meant a special charter, a special expedition. Neither the Royal Society nor myself could raise tens of thousands of pounds for anything on that scale. No, • Sailhardy, even if I prove the Tristan prong of The Albatross' Foot, I can't ever hope to prove the Bouvet one."
" You could try and collect reports from the catchers far south
…" he began rather helplessly.
" You can imagine the reaction of tough catcher captains, can't you?" I said. " It isn't practical. My theory is simple: two great warm currents strike down towards Bouvet, one from the Atlantic side and the other from the Indian Ocean side of Africa, and link up in the neighbourhood of Bouvet. The Atlantic one is ours here at Tristan. That's the theory, anyway. The combined warm currents then break open the pack-ice which forms in winter between Bouvet and the Antarctic mainland. It not only breaks it up-it clears the sea for four hundred and fifty miles. It is, in fact, the whole mechanism which holds the Antarctic ice at bay. It is as important to South America, South Africa and Australia as the Gulf Stream is to the United States. It's the most exciting thing that happens in the world's oceans, the most dramatic. It is completely unknown." I tugged at the line to my net. " A hell of a lot depends on this one little net. Otherwise, it is likely to remain completely unknown."
I started to haul in the deep-level net. It came up. Something kicked feebly. It must have been a fish, because it came out of the sea. It had a peculiar flat head and a protruding beak. The etiolated tail looked as if it had been put through a mangle. The underlying colour was lead, but near the surface the skin was a phosphorescent shocking pink. The eyes. !
My exclamation brought Sailhardy over. The fish's eyes pointed in one direction only-upwards. It was horrible. It gazed as if in supplication. It was about eighteen inches long. I held it at arm's length and I saw that the eyes were fixed to look permanently upwards.
Sailhardy stopped me from throwing it overboard. He took it and held it affectionately. The upturned, dying eyes winced in the sun.
" This is it, Bruce," he said quietly.
The thing writhed in his grip.
" This is an abyssal fish," he went on. " It comes from the deeps. He looks up-to see his food above him. He lives only on plankton."
" Plankton!" I exclaimed. " There wasn't a sign of plankton!" He went as taut as a jib sheet in a blow. His eyes were on something near the kelp barrier of Tristan.
" Longfin!" he said with satisfaction. " Longfin! And bluefin!"
There was nothing in sight except Tristan, which seemed hazier. Clouds were starting to lock round the old volcano. " What is it, man?" I exclaimed.
" Tunny," he replied. " Tunny."
There was a momentary flash from the surface of the sea near the kelp barrier.
" That was the forward fin of a tunny," he said crisply. " His aft dorsal fin stays erect, but the forward one he can fold and unfold at will. He does so when he wants to make a quick turn. He shoots it upright for a moment and swings round hard on it. The tunny wouldn't be doing it unless they were feeding-and feeding hard. That means. .."
" The Albatross' Foot," I said. " My God, Sailhardy!"
" Here it comes," he said excitedly. " Look, Bruce, look at the seals! They're grabbing the tunny!"
It was more dramatic than I had ever imagined it to be. As the warm current swept round the southern point of Tristan, the sea boiled with the commotion as the seals fought the longfin.
Sailhardy looked wistfully at the staccato glints. " If we had some Japanese longlines, we'd be able to bring them up from as deep as seventy fathoms," he said.
" I still want eighty-eight million plankton in my net," I grinned.
" You won't have to wait long," he replied. " Maybe half an hour. There's no hurry. It will go on like this for weeks."
" Weeks?"
" When I was twelve," he said, " we nearly all died of starvation on Tristan. You know how it is-without fish, we couldn't live. The kelp got some sort of disease and the crawfish disappeared."
The islanders rely on the inshore crawfish and deepwater
Blue Fish as a perennial source of food. With seabirds' eggs and mollymawk chicks, it is their main diet. I could imagine the week-by-week cutting of their starvation rations.
" We stuck it for a year," Sailhardy went on. " Then it. came-The Albatross' Foot. I was so weak I could scarcely pull an oar. We hauled in some of the biggest bluefin that day I have ever seen-some of them up to two hundred and fifty pounds."
We were standing with our backs to the west, watching the current and its creatures sweep towards us.
It hit us then. Sailhardy's guard was down. The Southern Ocean waits for that in a man. We had overlooked the unsleeping menace. Thank God Sailhardy had untied the mainsail halliard from the boat's ribs. The force of the wind seemed to pick up the light craft and toss it bodily sideways against the unyielding sea. I started to shout a warning. Sailhardy never heard. I swung to face it-a searing, breath-robbing mask of spindrift, salt and foam choked me. Something scaly hit me. It could have been a dead bird or fish. I spat out its briny clamminess. Tristan vanished. I could not see Sailhardy. The wind reached inside my windbreaker. I fought against being lifted. I tried to fall down, but the wind held me upright, like a man falling free in space. I hooked one foot under the tiller. The boat seemed to lift with me. I was torn loose. As I went over the side a noose and bowline slid over my chest. I found myself dragged against the daubed canvas side of the boat.
I still couldn't see Sailhardy. He was crouched away from the wind under the bulwarks. I grabbed the gunwale. Sailhardy's arm reached over and held me. A jerk, and the bowline was a steel band round my chest. Then I was gasping on the gratings.
Sailhardy knelt beside me. An inch of water sloshed in the bottom of the boat. It was useless trying to speak, even to shout. In the brief time it had taken him to get me aboard, his ocean-bred survival instincts were at work. The same titanic challenge of the storm had been thrown at the men of New England when they had broken open the ice continent in their clumsy, stinking New Bedford sealers a century and a half ago. On their way they had rested at Tristan and sired sea-chasteners like Sailhardy.