Night of Error

TWO

I had no more dreams that night, but slept heavily and late. It was Geordie who woke me by shaking my shoulder – and incidentally hurting my arm once again. I groaned and turned away, but he persisted until I opened my eyes. ‘You’re wanted on the phone,’ he said. ‘It’s the Institute.’

I put on my dressing gown and was still thick-headed with sleep when I lifted the receiver. It was young Simms. ‘Dr Trevelyan, I’ve taken over your old office while you’re away and you’ve left something behind. I don’t know if it’s valuable or if you want it at all …’

I mumbled, ‘What is it?’

‘A manganese nodule.’

I was jolted wide awake. ‘Where did you find it?’

‘I didn’t. One of the cleaners found it under your desk and gave it to me. What should I do with it?’

‘Stick tight to it. I’ll pick it up this morning. It’s got some – relation to work I’m engaged on. Thanks for calling.’

I turned to Geordie. ‘All is not lost,’ I said, ‘we’ve got a nodule. You dropped some on the floor of my office, remember, and you left one under the desk.’

‘I don’t see what all the fuss is about. All along you’ve been insisting that the damn things are worthless. What’s so exciting about this one?’

I said, ‘There are too many mysteries connected with this particular lot to suit me. I’m going to take a closer look at this one.’

As I breakfasted on a cigarette and a cup of strong coffee I rang Helen and asked her to read out Mark’s death certificate. It was in French, of course, and she had some difficulties over the hand-written parts but we got it sorted out. I put down the phone and said to Geordie, ‘Now I want to talk to that doctor as well as Kane.’ I felt full of anger and frustration.

‘What was the cause of death?’

‘Peritonitis following an appendectomy. And that’s impossible. The doctor’s name is Hans Schouten. It was signed in Tanakabu, in the Tuamotus.’

‘He’s a hell of a long way from here.’

‘But Kane isn’t. Do your damndest to find him, Geordie.’

Geordie sighed. ‘I’ll do my best, but this is a bloody big city, and no one but you and Helen can identify him for sure.’

I dressed and drove down to the Institute, retrieved the nodule from Simms and then went down to the laboratories – I was going to analyse this lump of rock down to the last trace elements. First I photographed it in colour from several angles and took a casting of it in latex – that took care of the external record. Then I cut it in half with a diamond saw. Not entirely unexpectedly, in the centre was the white bone of a shark’s tooth, also neatly cut in two.

One of the pieces I put in the rock mill and, while it was being ground to the consistency of fine flour, I polished and etched the flat surface of the other piece. Then the real work began. By early afternoon everything was well under way and luckily I had had the place almost to myself the whole time, but then Jarvis walked in. He was surprised to see me.

‘You’re supposed to be on leave, Mike. What’s all this?’

He looked at the set-up on the bench. I had no worries about that – I could have been analysing anything, and the identifiable half-rock was out of sight. I said lightly, ‘Oh, just some homework I promised I’d do when I had the chance.’

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. ‘What have you been up to, young feller? Saw something about you in yesterday’s press, didn’t I? And I had a chap in from Scotland Yard asking questions about you – and about manganese nodules. And he said you’d killed someone?’

‘I had a burglary two nights ago and knocked a chap off the fire escape,’ I said. I hadn’t seen the papers myself and it hadn’t occurred to me that the story would be public. From Simms’ lack of reaction, however, it seemed not to be exactly front-page news.

‘Um’, said Jarvis. ‘Very unfortunate. Place is getting like Chicago. Nasty for you. But what’s it got to do with nodules?’

‘A couple were nicked from my place, with other stuff. I told him they weren’t of much value.’

‘I made that plain to the Inspector,’ growled Jarvis. ‘And I take it he’s now convinced that your burglars were surprised and took the first things that came to hand. I gave you a reasonable character, by the way.’

I had my doubts about the Yard’s acceptance of the front story. The Inspector had struck me as being full of deep suspicions.

‘Well, my boy, I’ll leave you to it. Anything interesting?’ He cast an inquisitive glance at the bench.

I smiled. ‘I don’t know yet.’

He nodded. ‘That’s the way it is,’ he said rather vaguely and wandered out. I looked at the bench and wondered if I was wasting my time. My own knowledge, backed by that of an expert like Jarvis, told me that this was just an ordinary Pacific nodule and nothing out of the ordinary. Still, I had gone so far, I might as well carry on. I left the glassware to bubble on its own for a while and went to take photomicrographs of the etched surface of the half-nodule.

I was busy for another couple of hours and having to use my bad arm didn’t help. Normally I would have used the services of a laboratory technician but this was one job I wanted to do myself. And it was fortunate that I had taken that precaution because what I finally found astounded me. I looked incredulously at the table of figures that was emerging, breathing heavily with excitement and with my mind full of conflicting conjectures.

Then I became even busier, carefully dismantling the glassware and meticulously washing every piece. I wanted no evidence left of what I’d been up to. That done, I phoned the flat.

Geordie answered. ‘Where the devil have you been?’ he demanded. ‘We’ve had the cops, the press, the insurance people – the lot.’

‘Those are the last people I want to be bothered with right now. Is everything clear now?’

‘Aye.’

‘Good. I don’t suppose you found Kane.’

‘You suppose rightly. If you’re so suspicious of him why don’t you take what you’ve got to the police? They can do a better job of finding him than I can.’

‘I don’t want to do that right now. I’m coming home, Geordie. I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘Have you eaten, boy?’

I suddenly realized that I hadn’t eaten a mouthful all day. I felt very hungry. ‘I’ve been too busy,’ I said hopefully.

‘I thought so. I’ll tell you what; I’ll cook up something in this kitchen of yours – one of my slumgullions. Then we won’t have to go out and maybe get tagged by one of the newspaper blokes.’

‘Thanks. That’ll be fine.’

On the way home I bought some newspapers and found that the story had already sunk with no trace. A local shop produced me a copy of the previous day’s press and the story was a short one, buried in the body of the paper, lacking in detail and with no mention of what had been stolen, which suited me very well. I didn’t want to be questioned on anything concerning manganese nodules. I’m not naturally a good liar.

When I entered the flat I found Geordie busy in the kitchen surrounded by a mouth-watering aroma, and a remarkably well cleaned up living room. I made a mental note never to have glass-fronted bookshelves again – I didn’t much like them anyway. Geordie called out, ‘It’ll be ready in about an hour, so you can get your news off your chest before we eat. I’ll be out in two ticks.’

I went to the cabinet for the whisky bottle and two glasses, then picked my old school atlas off the bookshelf. Ink-blotted and politically out-of-date as it was, it would still suit my purpose. I put it on the table and turned to the pages which showed the Pacific.

Geordie came out of the kitchen and I said, ‘Sit here. I want to tell you something important.’

He saw the glint of excitement in my eye, smiled and sat down obediently. I poured out two whiskies and said, ‘I’m going to give you a little lecture on basic oceanography. I hope you won’t be bored.’

‘Go ahead, Mike.’

‘At the bottom of the oceans – particularly the Pacific – there is a fortune in metallic ores in the form of small lumps lying on the seabed.’ I took the half-nodule from my pocket and put it on the table. ‘Like this lump here. There’s no secret about this. Every oceanographer knows about them.’

Geordie picked it up and examined it. ‘What’s this white bit in the middle?’

‘A shark’s tooth.’

‘How the hell did that get in the middle of a piece of rock?’

‘That comes later,’ I said impatiently, ‘in the second lesson. Now, these lumps are composed mainly of manganese dioxide, iron oxide and traces of nickel, cobalt and copper, but to save time they’re usually referred to as manganese nodules. I won’t tell you how they got onto the seabed – that comes later too – but the sheer quantity is incredible.’

I turned to the atlas and moved my forefinger from south to north off the shoreline of the Americas, starting at Chile and moving towards Alaska. ‘Proved deposits here, at the average of one pound a square foot, cover an area of two million square miles and involve twenty-six billion tons of nodules.’

I swept my finger out to Hawaii. ‘This is the mid-Pacific Rise. Four million square miles – fifty-seven billion tons of nodules.’

‘Hell’s teeth,’ said Geordie. ‘You were right about incredible figures.’

I ignored this and moved my finger south again, to Tahiti. ‘Fourteen million square miles in central and south-eastern Pacific. Two hundred billion tons of nodules. Like grains of dust in the desert.’

‘Why haven’t I heard about this before? It sounds like front page news.’

‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have, but you won’t find it in the newspapers. It’s not very interesting. You’d have to read the right technical journals. There’s been no secret made of it; they were first discovered as far back as 1870 during the Challenger expedition.’

‘There must be a snag. Otherwise somebody would have done something about it before this.’

I smiled. ‘Oh yes, there are snags – as always. One of them is the depth of the water – the average depth at which these things lie is over fourteen thousand feet. That’s a good deal of water to go through to scoop up nodules, and the pressure on the bottom is terrific. But it could be done. An American engineer called John Mero did a post-graduate thesis on it. He proposed dropping a thing like a giant vacuum-cleaner and sucking the nodules to the surface. The capitalization on a scheme like that would run into millions and the profit would be marginal at one pound a square foot of ocean bed. It’s what we’d call a pretty lean ore if we found it on land.’

Geordie said, ‘But you have a card up your sleeve.’

‘Let me put it this way. The information I’ve given you is based on the IGY surveys, and the one pound a square foot is a crude approximation.’

I stabbed my finger at the eastern Pacific. ‘Zenkevitch, of the Soviet Institute of Oceanology – the Russians are very interested, by the way – found 3.7 pounds a square foot right there. You see, the stuff lies in varying concentrations. Here they found five pounds a square foot, here they found eight, and here, seven.’

Geordie had been listening with keen interest. ‘That sounds as though it brings it back in line as an economic proposition.’

I shook my head tiredly. ‘No, it doesn’t. Manganese isn’t in short supply, and neither is iron. If you started picking up large quantities of nodules all that would happen is that you’d saturate the market, the price would slip accordingly, and you’d be back where you started – with a marginal profit. In fact, it would be worse than that. The big metals firms and mining houses – the only people with the massed capital to do anything about it – aren’t interested. They already run manganese mines on land, and if they started anything like this they’d end up by wrecking their own land-based investments.’

‘It seems that you’re running in circles,’ said Geordie acidly. ‘Where is all this getting us?’

‘Have patience. I’m making a point. Now, I said there are traces of other metals in these nodules – copper, nickel and cobalt. You can forget the copper. But here, in the southeast Pacific, the nodules run to about 1.6 per cent nickel and about .3 per cent cobalt. The Mid-Pacific Rise gives as much as 2 per cent cobalt. Keep that in mind, because I’m going to switch to something else.’

‘For God’s sake, Mike, don’t spin it out too long.’

I was and I knew it, and enjoyed teasing him. ‘I’m coming to it,’ I said. ‘All the figures I’ve given you are based on the IGY surveys.’ I leaned forward. ‘Guess how many sites they surveyed.’

‘I couldn’t begin to make a guess.’

I took a sip of whisky. ‘They dredged and photographed sixty sites. A lousy sixty sites in sixty-four million square miles of Pacific.’

Geordie stared at me. ‘Is that all? I wouldn’t hang a dog on evidence like that.’

‘The orthodox oceanographer says, “The ocean bed is pretty much of a piece – it doesn’t vary greatly from place to place – so what you find at site X, which you’ve checked, you’re pretty certain to find at site Y, which you haven’t checked.” ‘

I tapped the atlas. ‘I’ve always been suspicious of that kind of reasoning. Admittedly, the ocean bed is pretty much of a piece, but I don’t think we should rely on it sight unseen. And neither did Mark.’

‘Did Mark work together with you on this?’

‘We never worked together,’ I said shortly. ‘To continue. In 1955 the Scripps expedition fished up a nodule from about – here.’ I pointed to the spot. ‘It was two feet long, twenty inches thick and weighed a hundred and twenty-five pounds. In the same year a British cable ship was grappling for a broken cable here, in the Philippines Trench. They got the cable up, all right, from 17,000 feet, and in a loop of cable they found a nodule 4 feet long and 3 feet in diameter. That one weighed 1700 pounds.’

‘I begin to see what you’re getting at.’

‘I’m trying to put it plainly. The orthodox boys have sampled sixty spots in sixty-four million square miles and have the nerve to think they know all about it. I’m banking that there are places where nodules lie fifty pounds to the square foot – and Mark knew of such places, if I read enough of his notes correctly.’

‘I think you had a point to make about cobalt, Mike. Come across with it.’

I let my excitement show. ‘This is the clincher. The highest assay for cobalt in any nodule has been just over 2 per cent.’ I pushed the half-nodule on the table with my finger. ‘I assayed this one today. It checked out at ten per cent cobalt – and cobalt, Geordie, is worth more than all the rest put together and the rocket metallurgists can’t get enough of it!’

II

We ate Geordie’s stew and very good it was, and by midnight we had just about talked the subject to death. At one stage I said, returning to a sore point, ‘I wish I still had those notebooks. They were only rough working notes and Mark seemed to have gone up a lot of false trails – some of the assumptions seemed completely cockeyed – but I wish they hadn’t been pinched.’

Geordie sucked on his pipe, which gurgled. ‘I could do with knowing why they were pinched – and who pinched them.’

‘Then you agree that it has something to do with Mark’s death?’

‘It must do, boy. He got hold of something valuable …’

‘And was murdered for it,’ I finished. ‘But who killed him? Kane? That’s unlikely – it’s an odd murderer who travels halfway round the world to inform the family.’

That was a good conversation-stopper. We were quiet for some time, then I said tentatively, ‘If only we could get hold of Schouten.’

‘He’s on the other side of the world.’

I said softly, ‘I think Mark came across a hell of a big deposit of high-cobalt nodules. He wasn’t a bad scientist but, being Mark, he was probably more interested in the worth of his discovery – to himself. His theories were a bit startling though, and they intrigue me.’

‘So?’

‘So I’d like to do something about it.’

‘You mean – organize an expedition?’

‘That’s right.’ Saying it aloud began to jell all the ideas that had been bubbling up in me since the assay.

Geordie knocked the dottle out of his pipe. ‘Tell me, Mike, what’s your interest in this – scientific or personal? You weren’t particularly friendly towards Mark. Is it that you feel that Trevelyans should be free to go about their business without being murdered, or is it something else?’

‘It’s that and a lot more. For one thing, someone is pushing me around and I don’t like it. I don’t like having my home burgled, being knifed, or having my friends shot at. And I don’t appreciate having my brother murdered, if that’s really what happened, no matter what I thought of him as a person. Then, of course, there’s the scientific interest – I’m fascinated. A find like this would hit oceanography like evolution hit biology. And then there’s the money.’

‘Yes,’ said Geordie. ‘I suppose there would be money in it.’

‘You suppose damn right. And if you’re thinking in millions, stop it, because you’re thinking small – it could be billions.’

He wasn’t ready to be enthusiastic. ‘So you think it’s as good as that?’

‘As good as that,’ I said firmly. ‘There’s enough at stake for quite a few murders.’

‘How much would such an expedition cost?’

I had already been thinking about that. ‘A ship – plus about fifty thousand for special equipment – plus stores and running expenses.’

‘Running expenses for how long?’

I smiled wryly. ‘That’s one of the jokers – who knows in a thing like this?’

‘It’s a lot of money. And there’s over sixty million square miles of Pacific, you said.’

‘I know my job,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t be going entirely blindfold. I know a hell of a lot of places where there aren’t any high-cobalt nodules. And there’s what I can recall of Mark’s theories – perhaps they’re not so fantastic after all. Plus there’s this – I’m sure we can make something of it.’ I held up Mark’s little diary, which I was keeping on my person.

Geordie slapped his hands together suddenly. ‘All right, boy. If you can find the capital and the running expenses – and God knows where you’ll find money like that – I can provide the ship. Would old Esmerelda do?’

‘My God, she’d be perfect for running on a small budget.’ I looked at him closely, trying not to show my excitement too much. ‘But why should you come into this? It’s a chancy business, you know.’

He laughed. ‘Well, you did mention a few billions of money. Besides, some little bastard shot off the top of my little finger. I’m not particularly interested in him, but I would like to get my hands round the neck of the man who paid him. And chartering tourists isn’t very much fun after a bit. I suppose you have some ideas about finance? I mean, without a tame banker it’s a non-starter.’

I had been thinking about it, for the last hour or two in between our bouts of conversation. The pieces seemed to be dropping into place nicely, so far.

I said musingly, ‘I saw Clare Campbell the other day – she’s in town with her father, attending some conference or other. He’s my goal.’

‘Who is Campbell?’

‘Jonathan Campbell – never known as J.C. A Scottish-Canadian mining man. Mark worked for him for a while after the IGY – something to do with a mining venture in South America …’ I trailed off and Geordie cocked his head enquiringly. Something about that statement teased at me but I couldn’t identify it and let it go with a shake of my head.

‘So he’s got money.’

‘He’s loaded with it,’ I said, back on the track. ‘He’s got the reputation of being a bit of a plunger, and this thing might appeal to him. He lost a packet in the South American business not long ago – something to do with mines being nationalized – but I think he’s got enough left to take a gamble on something new.’

‘How do you know all this about Campbell, Mike? I didn’t know you studied the financial pages.’

‘I was thinking of getting out of pure research after the IGY. The pay’s small compared with industry, so I thought I’d look about for a job compatible with my expensive tastes.’ I waved a hand around my modest flat. ‘Lots of other chaps did it – Mark was one – so I did a bit of investigating and Campbell cropped up.’

‘But you didn’t take the job.’

I shook my head. ‘He’d already signed Mark on, you see, and I didn’t fancy having Mark as a colleague. Anyway, I was asked to go to the Institute about that time – less pay, but a more interesting job. Mark left the IGY programme early and got out of pure research. I never actually met Campbell but I did once meet his daughter – in Vancouver. Mark had her in tow. They seemed to be pretty close – they would, she being the boss’s daughter.’

Geordie’s voice had become as cold as mine. ‘Poor stupid cow.’

I thought that she didn’t look like his description at all, and wondered how long it had taken for her to read Mark’s character. She hadn’t struck me then as the sort of girl to be taken in for long. But I hoped that nothing much had happened between them, lest it colour Campbell’s attitude towards me when I came to approach him.