Southtrap

Wegger seemed undecided whether to go on or not.

I spotted a taxi. It slowed down, as if the driver were looking for a fare. I broke away from Wegger and flagged it.

A young man with cheeks bunkered by gingery sideburns lowered a rear window. 'The Quest…?'

'You're here,' I said, nodding towards the ship, 'and I'll take this cab. Dump your gear at the gangway and tell one of the crew to fetch it.'

'I'll see to it, Captain.'

Wegger was next to me again. Despite my hurry I could see that he was now falling over backwards to be obliging.

'You one of the meteorological team?' I asked the newcomer.

He opened the taxi door and got out carrying a couple of long cardboard cylinders.

'No. Volcanologist. I'm Eric Holdgate.'

'Look here, Mr Holdgate…'

'Doctor.'

'Sorry. I must get to the hospital — quick. There's been an accident. Captain Prestrud is injured.'

His sideburns champed unhappily. 'D'you mean we may not…?'

'I don't know what's happening yet.'

His voice was charged with feeling. 'But I've just got to go. It's the chance of a lifetime. How else can I get' to Prince Edward Island.' Holdgate seemed more interested in volcanoes than in people. I don't think he noticed how Wegger looked. He said, as if giving a lecture, There are two distinct stages of volcanic activity discernible on Prince Edward Island. The old grey trachybasalt from the great cave definitely belongs to the first volcanic stage…'

The taxi driver laughed, 'Jeez! I've never driven one like this before!'

Wegger remained staring fixedly at Holdgate. The two remaining fingers of his damaged hand worked inwards towards his thumb as if they were searching for the missing bones.

I wasn't in the frame of mind for puzzling.undercurrents. Turning to Holdgate, I snapped, 'We'd better shift your kit. Put it anywhere for now. If you want help from the ship, tell them I told you to ask.'

'Careful with those cylinders,' he replied. 'If those instruments get smashed I'm done for.'

The two of us humped the pile of luggage and parcels from the car. Wegger stood by, not doing a thing to help. When we had finished, Holdgate paid the driver and I got in.

Wegger seemed to snap out of his preoccupation. 'Eleven sharp then, Captain?'

'Yes. Ask for me on the bridge.' Addressing Holdgate, I said, 'I'll let you know about Captain Prestrud as soon as I get back.'

He replied as if making an affirmation, 'That cave on Prince Edward is my whole life, you see.'

I didn't see. But what I did see, as the taxi pulled away, was Wegger staring at Holdgate and clenching and re-clenching his fists.

CHAPTER TWO

The driver brought the taxi round in a sharp righthander so that we came close under Quest's bows. She might not have been new, but her fine-raked bow with its triple blue stripes on the white hull — typical of the Thor class of ships — gave her a timeless beauty, a look of seeking faraway seas.

The taxi driver gestured at her figurehead — however often their names may be changed, Thor vessels are always distinguishable by the emblem depicting the god Thor with his right hand raised to cast his magic hammer.

'You running another sideshow, Cap'n?'

I was sitting next to him in the front seat — I never sit behind in a taxi — and he glanced at me in a slightly derisive way.

'Come again?'

'You're in the same place as that old sailing ship — I thought maybe they kept the same spot for the nut-ships.'

'Quest isn't a nut-ship. Or a fun-ship. The ice isn't for that type.'

He pulled a crushed packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and offered me one, as if approving of my attitude. (You mean you didn't see that old sailer full of horrors?'

'No.'

A fortnight ago I'd been bringing the stout little store-ship Captain Cook in from a routine run from the Southern Ocean islands to Port Elizabeth, 700 kilometres to the east of Cape Town. I had had no idea then that soon I would be taking a ship-load of tourists and scientists the same way again. The Quest job was one of those things which come out of the blue, so easy that they seem pre-destined. Like a whirlwind romance. My comparison was spontaneous and bitter. Mine had finished in divorce.

'I thought everyone had seen it,' said the driver.

'I've only been here three or four days,' I replied. 'New job.'

'That explains it.' He shook his head and laughed. 'It was good for business. I taxied half Cape Town to the ship. But the show itself was enough to give anyone the shits.'

I remembered now. I'd seen the windjammer's picture in the paper carrying the advertisement which had brought me the Quest job. One long-distance call had practically clinched it. Captain Prestrud had told me to catch the next plane to Cape Town for a face-to-face interview. We had taken to one another at first sight. I had chucked my command of the Captain Cook and found myself first officer of the Quest in a matter of days. The windjammer the taxi driver was talking about was a modern replica of an old-time Australian convict hell-ship. She had called at the Cape on her way to Sydney.

'Botany Bay,' I said.

'Right, that was her name. I went for a look myself after a fare I'd brought to see her came back to the car and had hysterics.'

He chuckled and drew heavily on his cigarette without taking his hands off the wheel.

'My oath, you should have seen this doll! Well dressed, young — well, maybe not too young, but still making the running, if you know what I mean.' He leered at me. 'Comes back to this very car, flops down in the back, starts to gulp and sort of hiccup. Then she says, in a kind of high voice like I've never heard before. "They were cutting his balls off in there, that's what."

"Pull yourself together, lady," I says. "They're only wax figures like Madame Tussaud's in London — they're not real."

Then she looks at me and sort of gasps with the tears runnin' down her cheeks. "That's what's eating me," she kind of moans. "That it wasn't real."'

He took his eyes from the road. 'Women!'

He went on: 'So that's why I went and had a look-see myself. Of course, that doll was imagining things. What she saw was a kind of group — whadderyercallit?'

Tableau?'

That's it. Kind of tableau showing how the convicts were put in a salt bath when they first came aboard and were scrubbed with long brushes by the guards. The doll saw it her own way. My oath, she was carrying a load of sex!'

He shook his head again at the vagaries of the opposite sex.

'Was it as bad as that — the rest of the waxworks show, I mean?'

I'll say. It really gave you the heebie-jeebies seeing what they did to those convicts down under in the early days — guys wearing neck-irons, guys locked in tiny cells where they couldn't sit, stand or kneel. Floggings, torture — you name it, they did it in those old hell-ships. You could see it all the way it was in Botany Bay.'

'Now she's on her way to Australia?'

'Left just before your ship came in. That's why I asked, are you another nut-show? The showbiz guy who owns Botany Bay must have coined a packet.'

We were approaching the dock entrance gates and he waved towards Cape Town's main street running in the direction of Table Mountain.

The guide who showed us round the hell-ship said Cape Town just escaped being made a convict settlement and they named Adderley Street after the guy who had it stopped. Maybe that's why all the locals went to see what they'd escaped. Jeez, when I think what they did to those poor sods!'

I was interested in Botany Bay. I've sailed in all types of modern yachts and schooners, but never in a square-rigger.