every detail from the cable tensions of the tow and power settings of
Warlock's engines, to the riding lights on both ships and the last log
entry.
Mr. Graham/ he said, and the young officer stiffened to attention like
the victim before a firing squad, I will stand this watch - you may go
and get some dinner. The Third Officer was so thunderstruck that he
needed a large gin before he could bring himself to tell the wardroom of
his good fortune.
Samantha did not look up from the board but moved a bishop flauntingly
across the front of David Allen's queen, and when David pounced on it
with a gurgle of glee, she unleashed her rook from the rear file and
said, Mate in three, David. One more, Sam, give me my revenge/ pleaded
David, but she shook her head and slipped out of the wardroom.
Nicholas became aware of the waft of her perfume. it was an inexpensive
but exuberant fragrance -'Babe', that was it, the one advertised by
Hemingway's granddaughter.
It suited Samantha perfectly. He turned to her, and it was only then
that he was honest enough to admit to himself that he had relieved his
Third Officer with the express intention of luring the girl up to the
bridge.
There are whales ahead/ he told her, and smiled one of those rare,
irresistible smiles that she had come to treasure. I hoped you might
come up.
Where? Where are they? she asked with unfeigned excitement, and then
they both saw the spout, a golden feather of spray in the low night
sunlight two miles ahead.
Balaenoptera musculus! she exclaimed.
I'll take your word for it, Doctor Silver, but to me it's still a blue
whale. Nick was still smiling, and she looked abashed for a moment.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to dazzle you with science. Then she looked back
at the humpy, uninviting cold sea as the whale blew again, a far and
ethereal column of lonely spray.
/one/ she said, only one. And the excitement in her voice cooled. There
are so few of them left now - that might be the last one we will ever
see. So few that they cannot find each other in the vastness of the
ocean to breed. Nick's smile was gone also, and again they talked of
the sea, of their own involvement with it, their mutual concern at what
man had done to it, and what he was still doing to it.
When the Marxist government of Mozambique took over from the Portuguese
colonists, it allowed the Soviets to send in dredges - not trawlers, but
dredges - and they dredged the weed beds of Delagoa Bay. They actually
dredged the breeding grounds of the Mozambique prawn.
They took out a thousand tons of prawn, and destroyed the grounds for
ever - and they drove an entire species into extinction in six short
months. Her outrage was in her voice as she told it.
Two months ago the Australians arrested a Japanese trawler in their
territorial waters. She had in her freezers the meat of 120,000 giant
clams that her crew had torn from the barrier reef with crow bars. The
clam population of a single coral reef would not exceed 20,000. That
means they had denuded six oceanic reefs in one expedition - and they
