'That's just why,' I said. 'It's too big. Too big altogether. So was Caldwell's fate.'
9
There was a little vein by the bridge of her nose; it began to beat noticeably.
'My father!' she exclaimed. 'My father! It isn't possible.'
'It fits the facts. That is why they were at Strandloper's Water. A name like the Hottentots' Paradise was good enough to camouflage their real reason.'
We stood staring at one another, while the enormous implications of what I had said dawned upon us. The little vein pulsed again. I gathered up the clothes she had selected.
'Rhennin must know about this — at once.'
She nodded without speaking, and we set off down the damp, wet-slicked corridor towards his quarters. She stumbled over the high lintel of the first water-tight door we came to.
Breaking the seriousness of our mood, I said, 'That's almost a Mazy Zed in the minuet.'
She smiled and hummed softly: '"… for she is such a sweet little craft, such a neat little, sweet little craft, such a bright little, light little, trim little craft…"'
Despite my preoccupation with what was racing round in my mind, I found myself grinning, too..'Koeltas puts it much more forcibly than Gilbert and Sullivan.'
She wrinkled her nose at my closeness. 'Seal!'
'They were sort of kind to me.'
She said, 'I thank the seals, but I think it will be better for everyone if I keep your fresh clothes until… until…'
I laughed at her shyness. '… until I can sample the Mazy Zed's bathrooms.'
I knocked on Rhennin's door and he opened it quickly. The cabin was as bare as the desert: a big desk and some untidy chairs matching the battleship grey of the uncarpeted steel decking. Big-headed rivets marched in battalions along the overhead beams. An air conditioner whined softly against the heavy pulse of the diamond pumps. Fluorescent lighting robbed Mary's make-up of colour and left her lips and nails a weird violet-blue. The cabin was stacked with charts — old German and new British ones on easels as well as my detailed surveys; a blown-up version of Angras Juntas hung over the back of a Kennedy rocking-chair near the desk. On its surface lay a glass tube of sea-diamonds.
Rhennin opened his mouth to greet us, but it closed again in surprise at our air. For a moment I looked at Mary. She knew what was coming.
I said without preamble, 'Felix, you believe in sea-diamonds, don't you?'
He was puzzled, uneasy. He shrugged. 'You two are damnably serious about something. Is this a conspiracy?'
I waited, not sure where to begin. The idea was so big, so fantastic, I had to put it to Rhennin the right way.
He got up, considering, watching our faces, and poured three brandies. 'Naturally I believe in sea-diamonds, John. You remember that when we started the Mazy Zed project nearly four years ago now we thrashed out whether there could be such a thing. It was basic to the project. It seems the most reasonable thing geologically that there should be an extension of shoreline deposits such as were found at Oranjemund into and under the sea. We know marine terraces exist. There is no reason to say that just because the high-water mark is here or there, the shoreline deposits should end at that line. Of course they don't. And today we've proved it — the Mazy Zed became history when she took diamonds from the sea.'
I shook my head. 'It wasn't history, Felix. It was all known before. There was nothing original about it at all.'
He became puzzled and angry. 'What the hell has bitten you, John? For years you've planned and schemed with me, backing your hunches, and now today, when the Mazy Zed has proved herself, you change your mind. I don't understand. Has Shelborne's attempt against you given you cold feet?'
I went over to the porthole. All that the light had left of the implacable shore was a faint luminosity. There was a distant sound of an engine being revved up: Bob Sheriff was on the job.
Mary came across and looked at the faint coastline with me. Caldwell would have felt proud of her, as I did, when she spoke. 'Diamonds are travellers, you know. Like all travellers, they seem to head instinctively for the sea. They are tough voyagers, though. Look at today's stones — you can't find any wear on them to measure the length of their journey. If they did show it, what John is about to tell you would be easier to demonstrate. I just want you to remember that — the diamonds on the Sperrgebiet, washed as they are by the ocean currents, did not come far.'
Mary's was a true Caldwell analogy; Caldwell had been that above all, a traveller. He had the wanderlust.
Rhennin waited. Mary went on: 'Currents, waves — remember them also. They shift all sorts of material from place to place and sort it, tirelessly, twenty-four hours a day, and they have done so for thousands of years.'
We saw the iron-bound Sperrgebiet, the wind and the sea, as a gigantic sorting-jig; Shelborne saw them as symbols of life and death.
Mary had given me the opening, and I followed up quickly. 'Felix, Mary is right: diamonds are travellers. But travellers must come from somewhere, mustn't they?'
'What are you trying to say?'
'Stratton told the court…'
'Stratton was a bore.'
The words tumbled out, not the way I had meant to muster them, but with the same rush and thud as the water through the Mazy Zed's pumps.
'Stratton told how diamonds were washed down by the Orange River, or other unnamed prehistoric rivers, into the sea and were then thrown back along the coast by the action of the currents…'
'We went into all this at the outset, John.'
'What we didn't go into was where do they come from, Felix? Today's haul, for example?'
'From the sea.'
The sea didn't make them.'
'You mean, from what part of the sea-bed did they originally come?'
'Listen: I believe that under the sea off the Sperrgebiet coast somewhere lies a single volcanic pipe, a bigger and better source of diamonds than either Kimberley or Cullinan, from which diamonds are washed ashore today — as they have been washed ashore for a million years…'
Mary supplemented, 'We think there is a parent crater, an undersea fountainhead.'
'Shelborne knows where it is,' I resumed. 'Caldwell discovered it. Shelborne murdered Caldwell for his seabed concession. That's why he fought us in court. That is why he won't give in, even now. That is why he could afford to throw away a couple of big diamonds in a lodestone matrix to kill me. He knows the whereabouts of this fountainhead, but it is too big for him to tackle…'
Rhennin was on his feet: 'But not too big for the Mazy Zed}'
The Hottentots' Paradise was so much hooey. A man of Caldwell's integrity would not fall for that one. Nor would he abandon everything, including his wife and infant daughter…' I waved at Mary. '… for the sake of a pub tale like that. The parent crater under the sea from which all South-west Africa's fabulous diamonds have orginated — don't you see, man, how that discovery would have righted the balance, cancelled all Caldwell's previous monumental failures and ill luck? Oranjemund, the richest field in the world, is paltry compared to the fountainhead, because Oranjemund has only got in its terraces stones the parent rock can spare. Caldwell went after his big chance — his fate — but he missed again because Shelborne killed him at Strandloper's Water.'
Mary said quietly, 'I still don't believe that.'
Rhennin's voice trembled with excitement. 'By God, John! We've all become so bemused with the technical problems of mining diamonds — on land at Oranjemund or at sea in the Mazy Zed — that we've lost sight of the cardinal question of where they come from. We've had it so good that we never thought to look farther! We have been satisfied with the eighteen million pounds a year from diamonds that we can lay our hands on.'