The Snow Tiger / Night of Error (40 page)

‘You’re the boss,’ I said. I wasn’t surprised.

He turned to Geordie. ‘Now, what kind of a ship have you, Captain?’

‘A brigantine,’ said Geordie. ‘About two hundred tons.’

Campbell’s jaw dropped. ‘But that’s a little sailing ship! This is supposed to be a serious project.’

‘Take it easy,’ I said, grinning at Geordie who was already bristling at any slight to
Esmerelda.
‘A lot of research vessels are sailing ships; there happen to be a number of sound reasons.’

‘All right. Let’s hear them.’

‘Some of the reasons are purely technical,’ I said. ‘For instance, it’s easier to make a sailing ship non-magnetic than a powered ship. Magnetism plays hell with all sorts of important readings. But the reasons you’ll appreciate are purely economic.’

‘If you’re talking economics you’re talking my language,’ he growled.

‘A research ship never knows exactly where it’s going. We might find ourselves dredging a thousand miles away from the nearest land. Station keeping and dredging take power and fuel, and an engine powered ship would need a hell of a lot of fuel to make the round trip.

‘But a sailing ship can make the journey and arrive on station with close on full tanks, given careful management. She can keep on station longer and no one need worry about whether there’ll be enough fuel to get back. You
could
use a powered ship to do the job but it would cost you – oh, a million pounds plus. Geordie’s boat will be fine.’

‘The day’s not been wasted,’ Campbell said. ‘I’ve learned something new. I reckon you know your job, Trevelyan. What will you need in the way of equipment?’

So we got down to it. The biggest item was the winch, which was to be installed amidships, and storage space for 30,000 feet of cable below it. There was also to be a laboratory for on-the-spot analysis and all the necessary equipment would take a lot of money, and a lot of refitting.

‘We’ll need a bloody big generator for this lot,’ said Geordie. ‘It looks as though it’ll take a diesel bigger than the main engine. Lucky, isn’t it, that charter tourists take up so much space with luxuries.’

Presently Campbell suggested lunch, so we went down to the dining room to do some more planning over grilled steaks. It was arranged that I should concentrate on collecting equipment while Geordie prepared
Esmerelda
and got his crew together. Very little was said concerning the location, or the availability, of the strange treasure we were after, and I knew that I alone could come up with anything of use there. I had some heavy studying ahead of me as well as all the rest.

‘If you take on Kane it’ll mean we’ve got him in our sights,’ said Campbell, harping back to his favourite subject. ‘Not that it makes any difference. Ramirez is sure to have other scouts out. I’ll be watching him too.’

I’d been thinking about Kane.

‘Your review of the situation was very well in its way, but it was wrong on one point.’

‘What’s that?’ said Campbell.

‘You said that Kane spun me a yarn as cover, and that it didn’t matter what it was. That’s not entirely so, you know – we have independent evidence. The death certificate states the cause of death as appendicitis. Kane and Schouten both told the same lie and I’d like to know why.’

‘By God, you’re right,’ said Campbell. ‘We’ll get it out of Kane as soon as he’s served his purpose.’

Geordie grunted. ‘We’re going into the Pacific,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’ll get it out of Schouten. At all events, we’ll be at the root of it.’

It was nearly three months before we got away. You can’t begin a scientific expedition as though you were going on a picnic. There were a million things to do and we were kept busy on a sixteen hour day, seven days a week. The first thing I did was to hand in my resignation from the Institute. Old Jarvis didn’t take it too well, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it so he accepted the situation with reluctance. I wished I could have told him what I was doing but that was impossible.

Geordie assiduously recruited his crew and soon they began to turn up. He had kept on four of his own lads and had of course taken on Kane in place of one of the men he let go. Of the other six that he added, all were faces that I hadn’t seen since I had been a boy during the war, tagging around after my dad’s gang.

Ian Lewis detached himself from his croft with alacrity and Geordie made him first mate; he’d had years under sail and was almost as good as a professional. Ex-corporal Taffy Morgan came along; one night during the war he had killed six Germans with a commando knife in utter silence, earning himself the M.M. Danny Williams had also won the M.M., although I never found out what for since he was reticent about it. There was the burly bulk of Nick Dugan, an Irishman from the Free State. Bill Hunter turned up – he
had made a name for himself as an underwater demolitions expert and was the only other regular sailing man among the team. And there was Jim Taylor, another explosives wizard – he had been very near my father when he was killed.

They were now all into their forties, like Geordie, but seemed as tough as ever. Not one had lost his fitness and there wasn’t a paunch among the lot of them. Geordie said he could have recruited twenty-five but he’d picked the best of them, and I almost believed him. I was confident that if we ran into trouble we could handle it.

Geordie was confident too, of welding them into a good sailing crew. What any of them lacked in knowledge they’d soon pick up and the enthusiasm was certainly there – although for the time being they knew nothing of the complications in which we were entangled. It was a straight research and survey trip to them all, including Kane, and any hints Geordie may have given his special team they kept strictly to themselves. As Campbell had predicted, Kane was sticking as close to us as a leech; Geordie had simply told him that there was a berth for him if he cared to cross the Atlantic with us, and Kane had jumped at the opportunity.

Campbell had gone back to Canada. Before he left he had a long talk with me. ‘I told you I had a good intelligence service,’ he said. ‘Well, so have Suarez-Navarro. You’ll be watched and they’ll know everything you do as soon as you do it, even apart from Kane’s spying. It can’t be helped. We’re deadlocked and we know it. So do they. It’s a case of we know that they know that we know, and so on. It’s a bastard of a position to be in.’

‘It’s like a game with perfect information – chess, for example. It’s the man who can manoeuvre best who wins.’

‘Not quite. Both sides have imperfect information,’ he corrected me patiently. ‘We don’t know how much they
really know. They might have the exact location of the nodules we’re after, and only have to drop a dredge to prove their case, but perhaps they’re behind us in planning and need to stop us somehow first. On the other hand, they don’t know how much
we
know. Which is precious little. Maybe as much as, or no more than them. Tricky, isn’t it?’

‘It would take a logician to sort it out. Talking of knowing, have you made any progress with the diary?’

Campbell snorted. ‘I gave it to a top-flight cipher expert and he’s having his troubles. He says it isn’t so much the peculiar shorthand as the sloppy way in which it’s written. But he says he can crack it, given time. What I wish I knew was how Suarez-Navarro got on to this in the first place?’

My own thoughts were that Mark, cheated out of Campbell’s involvement – I guessed that’s how he would see Campbell’s loss, only in terms of his own disappointment – had approached them himself. But I still didn’t know enough about how Campbell viewed Mark to say so. It hung between us, a touchy subject that we both carefully avoided.

So he went off to Canada to further his own progress, we speeded up ours as much as possible, and it was with great relief that I heard Geordie announce one day that we were at last ready for sea. All he needed to know was where to head for.

I said, ‘Do you know the Blake Plateau?’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘It’s just off the coast of Carolina. We’ll test the winch and the rest of our gear there, and it’s a long enough voyage for you to pull your crew together. I don’t want to go into the Pacific to find that anything doesn’t work for some reason or other. If there’s anything wrong we can get it fixed in Panama – they’ve got good engineering shops there.’

‘Okay. But why the Blake Plateau?’

‘There are nodules there. I’ve always wanted a closer look at Atlantic nodules.’

‘Is there any place where there aren’t any?’ he asked.

I nodded. ‘They won’t form where there’s heavy sedimentation, so that cuts out most of the Atlantic – but the Blake Plateau is scoured by the Gulf Stream and nodules do form. But they’re poor quality, not like the ones in the Pacific.’

‘How deep?’

‘Not more than three thousand feet – deep enough to test the winch.’

‘Right, boy. Let’s go and scoop up some poor quality wealth from the bottom of the sea. We should be away in a few days now.’

‘I can’t wait,’ I said. I was in fact boiling with impatience to be gone.

We made a fair and untroubled crossing of the Atlantic. Geordie and Ian, together with the regular crew members, soon got the others into a good working pattern and spirits ran high. Kane, we were pleased to notice, fitted in well and seemed as willing and above-board as the others. Knowing that they were all curious as to our purpose I gave occasional rather deliberately boring lectures on oceanography, touching on a number of possible research subjects so that the matter of manganese nodules got lost in the general subject. Only two people retained an interest in what I had to say, and to them, in semi-private, I spoke at greater length about our quarry. One was Geordie, of course, and the other, not too surprisingly and in fact to my satisfaction, was Bill Hunter. Already our diving expert, his interest and involvement might well be crucial.

One afternoon they both joined me in the laboratory, at my request, to learn a little more. A quiet word from Geordie to Ian made sure that we weren’t going to be interrupted.

Geordie picked up a nodule which I’d cut in half – I had brought a few on board to help my explanation along.

He pointed to the white central core.

‘I suppose you’ll tell me again that it’s a shark’s tooth in the middle of this rock. You never did get around to explaining that, did you?’

I smiled and held up the stone. ‘That’s right, it is.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘No I’m not – it happens often. You see, a shark dies and its body drifts down; the flesh rots or is eaten, the bones dissolve – what bones a shark has, it’s cartilage really – and by the time anything reaches the very bottom there’s nothing left but the teeth. They are made of sodium triphosphate and insoluble in water. There are probably millions of them on any ocean bottom.’

I opened a small box. ‘Look here,’ I said and gave him a larger white bone. It was as big as the palm of his hand and curiously convoluted.

‘What’s this?’

‘It’s a whale’s earbone,’ said Bill, looking over his shoulder. ‘I’ve seem ‘em before.’

‘Right, Bill. Also made of sodium triphosphate. We sometimes find them at the core of larger nodules – but more often it’s a shark’s tooth and most frequently a bit of clay.’

‘So the manganese sticks to the tooth. How long does it take to make a nodule?’ Geordie asked.

‘Estimates vary from one millimetre each thousand years to one millimetre each million years. One chap estimated that it worked out to one layer of atoms a day – which makes it one of the slowest chemical reactions known. But I have my own ideas about that.’

They both stared at me. ‘Do you mean that if you find a nodule with a half-diameter of ten millimetres formed round a tooth that the shark lived ten million years ago? Were there sharks then?’ Geordie asked in fascination.

‘Oh yes, the shark is one of our oldest inhabitants.’

We talked a little more and then I dropped it. They had a lot to learn yet and it came best in small doses. And there was plenty of time for talk on this voyage. We headed south-south-west to cut through the Bahamas and the approach to the Windward Passage. Once in the Passage we kept as clear as possible of Cuba – once we came across an American destroyer on patrol, which did us the courtesy of dipping her flag, to which we reciprocated. Then there was the long leg across the Caribbean to Colon and the entrance to the Panama Canal.

By then we had done our testing. There were minor problems, no more than teething troubles, and generally I was happy with the way things were going. Stopping to dredge a little, trying out the winch and working out on-station routines, was an interesting change from what we had been doing and everyone enjoyed it, and we remained lucky with the weather. I got some nodules up but there was a lot of other material, enough to cloud the issue for everyone but Geordie. Among the debris of ooze, red clay and deposits we found enough shark’s teeth and whale’s earbone to give everyone on board a handful of souvenirs.

Both Geordie and Bill were becoming more and more interested in the nodules and wanted to know more about them, so I arranged for another lab. session with them one day. I’d been assaying, partly to keep my hand in and partly to check on the readiness of my equipment for the real thing.

‘How did the Atlantic nodules turn out?’ Geordie asked. On the whole he did the talking – Bill watched, listened and absorbed.

‘Same old low quality stuff that’s always pulled out in the Atlantic,’ I said. ‘Low manganese, low iron and hardly anything else except contaminants, clay and suchlike. That’s the trouble in the Atlantic; there’s too much sediment even on the Blake Plateau.’

‘Why does manganese behave this way – why does it lump together?’

I laughed. ‘You want me to give you a course of physical chemistry right now? All right, I’ll explain it as simply as I can. Do you know what a colloid is?’

Two headshakes.

‘Look. If you put a teaspoon of sugar into water you get a sugar solution – that is, the sugar breaks down right to the molecular level and mixes intimately with the water. In other words, it dissolves. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘Now what if you have a substance that won’t dissolve in water but is divided into very fine particles, much smaller than can be seen in a regular microscope, and each particle is floating in the water? That’s a colloid. I could whip you up a colloid which looks like a clear liquid, but it would be full of very small particles.’

‘I see the difference,’ Geordie said.

‘All right. Now, for reasons that I won’t go into now, all colloidal particles
must
carry an electric charge. These charges make the colloidal particles of manganese dioxide clump together in larger and larger units. They also tend to be attracted to any electrically conductive surfaces such as a shark’s tooth or a bit of clay. Hence the nodules.’

‘You mean,’ said Bill slowly, ‘that having broken down a long time before, the manganese is trying to get together again?’

‘Pretty well just that, yes.’

‘Where does the manganese come from in the first place – when it starts clumping, that is?’

‘From the rivers, from underground volcanic fissures, from the rocks of the sea bottom. Fellows, the sea out there is a big chemical broth. In certain localized conditions the sea becomes alkaline and the manganese in the rocks leaches out and dissolves in the water …’

‘You said it doesn’t dissolve.’

‘Pure metallic manganese
will
dissolve as long as the conditions are right, and that’s what chemists call a “reducing atmosphere”. Just believe me, Geordie. Currents carry the dissolved manganese into “oxidizing atmospheres” where the water is more acid. The manganese combines with oxygen to form manganese dioxide which
is
insoluble and so forms a colloid – and then the process goes on as I’ve described.’

He thought about that. ‘What about the copper and nickel and cobalt and stuff that’s in the nodules?’

‘How does the milk get into the coconut?’

We all laughed, taking some of the schoolroom air out of the lab. ‘Well, all these metals have certain affinities for each other. If you look at the table of elements you’ll find they’re grouped closely together by weight – from manganese, number twenty-five, to copper, number twenty-nine. What happens is that as the colloidal particles grow bigger they scavenge the other metals – entrap them. Of course, this is happening over a pretty long period of time.’

‘Say a hundred million years or so,’ said Geordie ironically.

‘Ah well, that’s the orthodox view.’

‘You think it can happen faster than that?’

‘I think it could happen fast,’ I said slowly. ‘Given the right conditions, though just what these conditions would be I’m not sure. Someone else doing research thought so too, though I haven’t been able to follow his reasoning. And I have seen peculiarities that indicate rapid growth. Anyway that’s one of the objects of this trip – to find out.’