" Your eyes are as good as your boatmanship," she said. That's praise indeed from Helen Upton, I thought. She was as impersonal as the instruments around her.
" It must be one of them making for the rendezvous," said Pirow.
" See if you can get her on the blower, Carl," she said. " Ask where the others are."
To me, the horizon was blank. " I don't see a thing," I said.
She pulled my arm and pointed. Her heavy woollen sweater did not smell bitter of sheep grease, like a man's, but there was that curious, shut-off mustiness which all garments acquire in the South. The setting sun dyed the onrushing banks of cloud. Against them,, Inaccessible Island took on an even more sinister air. Its flat, black silhouette seemed to cower away from the coming onslaught. By contrast, Nightingale's cliffs were splashed with great patches of early summer pelargoniums, incongruously bright in the last light. I saw no ship. Then I caught what might have been the flash of a tunny's dorsal fin-or a catcher.
" It could be…" I said dubiously.
" Come, come, Captain Wetherby," she said. She might have said it the same way if one of the rotors had failed her. " Are you as sceptical about your oceanic discoveries?"
Captain Wetherby! Herr Kapitan! Oceanic discoveries!
She knew who I was, and she must have an idea of what I was doing off Tristan. My sarcasm bounced off her impersonal air, but it left me vaguely uneasy about how much she knew.
" I'm an expert on water-fleas," I said.
" Is that oceanography or limnology?" she asked.
Bruce Wetherby, ex-Royal Navy, holder of the Royal
Society's Travelling Studentship in Oceanology and Limnology 1 What was a whale-spotter doing out in weather like 30 this searching for someone whose interest was as abstruse as mine?
" Limnology," I replied, taken aback. " Water-fleas mean water is getting old. You never find them in young water. Oceanwise, too, there are water-fleas. It means seas are old." She started to shrug it off. As her left shoulder lifted and she moved slightly in her seat, a flicker of pain passed across her face. Her voice was toneless. " You're wasting your time in the Southern Ocean, then. It's old already. The Americans say it's a hundred million years old."
Rain drummed on the perspex like a Spanish dancer's heels. Her hand on the controls seemed to have the same economy of motion as Sailhardy's on the tiller ropes. " Carl," she said quickly, " get aft and lash that whaleboat securely. You, too, Captain Wetherby. Winch it right up so it's as high as it will go." She turned incisively to Sailhardy. " How deep is that boat of yours? I don't want it hanging below the undercart as I come in to land."
" Four feet-and some, maybe five," he replied.
" Might make it," she said, as if it didn't_ really matter. " If it comes to the worst, I'll dump it."
" No, ma'am!" Sailhardy burst out. " Not my boat!" She put on the instrument lights and ran her eyes over them carefully. She flicked a sharp glance at him. She had heard the protest in his voice. " Right, then, I'll try and land with that damn great thing hampering me. There'll be a heaving deck, and you've heard that the factory ship is rolling heavily. It won't be child's play."
I hesitated before going to the winches. The whaleboat seemed scarcely worth it, even if was everything in the way of riches that Sailhardy had.
" It's a captain's decision," I said to her. " If it's going to mean four people's lives, then jettison it."
The eyes seemed as uninviting as the cold sea. "I am the captain," she said curtly. "My decision has been made. I land with Sailhardy's boat lashed to the machine."
I started to reply. She overrode it. " Carl-get aft and lash the boat. This isn't a warship's bridge, Captain Wetherby, and I can't force you to help. But it does lessen the risk if you do."
" Thank you, ma'am," said Sailhardy softly. She would be his friend for life.
" Miss Upton," I said, " I have every faith in your ability after the way you rescued us."
" Then get aft and do what I ask," she snapped. " Carl!" She turned away as if I had been so much supercargo. " When you have done, tell my father I have Wetherby. In one piece. Uninjured. Ask him if I should try and find the other catchers and bring them in to the rendezvous."
" I don't know who your father is, or what he wants with me," I said angrily. ' Tell him I have Wetherby '. !"
She banked sharply and cut my words short. " Ask him yourself," she said. " He sent me to find you, and find you I did. My job is done when I deliver you to him aboard the Antarctica."
Pirow said, as if it were remarkable not to know: " Sir Frederick Upton is the biggest whaling man in the business. You must have heard of him."
"I haven't," I replied. " And I can't imagine why he should want to send his daughter out in one hell of a storm to bring in someone who was doing nothing more than look for plankton."
I almost missed her aside: " Water-fleas."
" Ma'am," said Sailhardy, " the storm will last for days. You must get back to your base, now. As hard as you can." She seemed disposed to listen to him. "Even if I located every catcher of the five, there's not much I could do to bring them to the anchorage," she pondered. " Tell my father, Carl, I'll be coming straight back. Ask him to have Captain Bjerko hold the factory ship as steady as he can in the anchorage."
I went aft with Pirow. The whaleboat was swinging from the two ropes and bumping against the fuselage. We drew the boat up as far as we could. It did not lie under the belly of the machine as the winches were higher up than the level of the landing wheels. I thought of the heaving deck of the factory ship anchored in Tristan's open roadstead and shuddered. It would need all Helen Upton's skill to land. As I saw it, she would have to come in keeping the starboard side, the side opposite the boat, lower than the port side so as not to smash the keel against the deck. At the same time she would have to hold the tail high and keep it so. I looped a length of rope round one of the rough thwarts and pulled the boat hard against the side of the machine. Pirow did the same. The boat's destiny had now become one with the helicopter-and ours.
Pirow went to the radio. I preferred to stay with him rather than go up forward into the unfriendly cockpit.
Whatever Sir Frederick Upton wanted, he had scarcely sent her on a social mission. I stood in the maroon-quilted cabin at a loss. Something gnawed at my subconscious. Pirow was talking to the catchers. I listened with half an ear, an ear grown weary over the years at Cape Town of the endless radio chatter of the ships far South. What was it? " Repeat," said one of the catchers Pirow was calling. " Repeat." Again,
" Repeat." His transmitting was excellent. If my mind had not been on the girl and the risk she was running, maybe I would have noticed. My subconscious told me that something was off-beat. Why did the catcher keep asking him to repeat? I parted the quilting into the cockpit. Helen Upton was talking to Sailhardy, while she held the bucking machine with a light snaffle. My undefined uneasiness about Pirow's signalling prickled my curiosity about the girl also. What had made her become a whale-spotter in the first place? Even the Russian ships down South never use women pilots. It is the hardest life, requiring a high degree of observation and skill, plus long hours of accurate searching. She had risked her life, apparently at her father's instruction, to find Sailhardy and myself. Why? I reckoned a factory ship must cost?5,000 a day to run, and to come to Tristan, far away from the whaling grounds, meant that Sir Frederick must really have burned money, apparently in order to find me.
Why? Hard-hearted whaling tycoons are not that interested in plankton.
" Keep well out as you come round the point before the roadstead," Sailhardy was telling her. " A sudden gust might throw us against the cliffs."