Night Of Error

by Desmond Bagley

  One afternoon they both joined me in the laboratory, at my request, to learn a little more. A quiet word from Geordie to Ian made sure that we weren't going to be interrupted.

  Geordie picked up a nodule which I'd cut in half – I had brought a few on board to help my explanation along.

  He pointed to the white central core.

  'I suppose you'll tell me again that it's a shark's tooth in the middle of this rock. You never did get around to explaining that, did you?'

  I smiled and held up the stone. That's right, it is.'

  'You're kidding.'

  'No I'm not – it happens often. You see, a shark dies and its body drifts down; the flesh rots or is eaten, the bones dissolve – what bones a shark has, it's cartilage really – and by the time anything reaches the very bottom there's nothing left but the teeth. They are made of sodium triphosphate and insoluble in water. There are probably millions of them on any ocean bottom.'

  I opened a small box. 'Look here,' I said and gave him a larger white bone. It was as big as the palm of his hand and curiously convoluted.

  'What's this?'

  'It's a whale's earbone,' said Bill, looking over his shoulder. 'I've seem 'em before.'

  'Right, Bill. Also made of sodium triphosphate. We sometimes find them at the core of larger nodules – but more often it's a shark's tooth and most frequently a bit of clay.'

  'So the manganese sticks to the tooth. How long does it take to make a nodule?' Geordie asked.

  'Estimates vary from one millimetre each thousand years to one millimetre each million years. One chap estimated that it worked out to one layer of atoms a day – which makes it one of the slowest chemical reactions known. But I have my own ideas about that.'

  They both stared at me. 'Do you mean that if you find a nodule with a half-diameter often millimetres formed round a tooth that the shark lived ten million years ago? Were there sharks then?' Geordie asked in fascination.

  'Oh yes, the shark is one of our oldest inhabitants.'

  We talked a little more and then I dropped it. They had a lot to learn yet and it came best in small doses. And there was plenty of time for talk on this voyage. We headed south-south-west to cut through the Bahamas and the approach to the Windward Passage. Once in the Passage we kept as clear as possible of Cuba – once we came across an American destroyer on patrol, which did us the courtesy of dipping her flag, to which we reciprocated. Then there was the long leg across the Caribbean to Colon and the entrance to the Panama Canal.

  By then we had done our testing. There were minor problems, no more than teething troubles, and generally I was happy with the way things were going. Stopping to dredge a little, trying out the winch and working out on-station routines, was an interesting change from what we had been doing and everyone enjoyed it, and we remained lucky with the weather. I got some nodules up but there was a lot of other material, enough to cloud the issue for everyone but Geordie. Among the debris of ooze, red clay and deposits we found enough shark's teeth and whale's earbone to give everyone on board a handful of souvenirs.

  Both Geordie and Bill were becoming more and more interested in the nodules and wanted to know more about them, so I arranged for another lab. session with them one day. I'd been assaying, partly to keep my hand in and partly to check on the readiness of my equipment for the real thing.

  'How did the Atlantic nodules turn out?' Geordie asked. On the whole he did the talking – Bill watched, listened and absorbed.

  'Same old low quality stuff that's always pulled out in the Atlantic,' I said. 'Low manganese, low iron and hardly anything else except contaminants, clay and suchlike. That's the trouble in the Atlantic; there's too much sediment even on the Blake Plateau.'

  'Why does manganese behave this way – why does it lump together?'

  I laughed. 'You want me to give you a course of physical chemistry right now? All right, I'll explain it as simply as I can. Do you know what a colloid is?'

  Two headshakes.

  'Look. If you put a teaspoon of sugar into water you get a sugar solution – that is, the sugar breaks down right to the molecular level and mixes intimately with the water. In other words, it dissolves. Right?'

  'Right.'

  'Now what if you have a substance that won't dissolve in water but is divided into very fine particles, much smaller than can be seen in a regular microscope, and each particle is floating in the water? That's a colloid. I could whip you up a colloid which looks like a clear liquid, but it would be full of very small particles.'

  'I see the difference,' Geordie said.

  'All right. Now, for reasons that I won't go into now, all colloidal particles must carry an electric charge. These charges make the colloidal particles of manganese dioxide clump together in larger and larger units. They also tend to be attracted to any electrically conductive surfaces such as a shark's tooth or a bit of clay. Hence the nodules.'

  'You mean,' said Bill slowly, 'that having broken down a long time before, the manganese is trying to get together again?'

  'Pretty well just that, yes.'

  'Where does the manganese come from in the first place -when it starts clumping, that is?'

  'From the rivers, from underground volcanic fissures, from the rocks of the sea bottom. Fellows, the sea out there is a big chemical broth. In certain localized conditions the sea becomes alkaline and the manganese in the rocks leaches out and dissolves in the water… .'

  'You said it doesn't dissolve.'

  'Pure metallic manganese will dissolve as long as the conditions are right, and that's what chemists call a "reducing atmosphere". Just believe me, Geordie. Currents carry the dissolved manganese into "oxidising atmospheres" where the water is more acid. The manganese combines with oxygen to form manganese dioxide which is insoluble and so forms a colloid – and then the process goes on as I've described.'

  He thought about that. 'What about the copper and nickel and cobalt and stuff that's in the nodules?'

  'How does the milk get into the coconut?'

  We all laughed, taking some of the schoolroom air out of the lab. 'Well, all these metals have certain affinities for each other. If you look at the table of elements you'll find they're grouped closely together by weight – from manganese, number twenty-five, to copper, number twenty-nine. What happens is that as the colloidal particles grow bigger they scavenge the other metals – entrap them. Of course, this is happening over a pretty long period of time.'

  'Say a hundred million years or so,' said Geordie ironically.

  'Ah well, that's the orthodox view.'

  'You think it can happen faster than that?'

  'I think it could happen fast,' 1 said slowly. 'Given the right conditions, though just what these conditions would be I'm not sure. Someone else doing research thought so too, though I haven't been able to follow his reasoning. And I have seen peculiarities that indicate rapid growth. Anyway that's one of the objects of this trip – to find out.'

  What I didn't say in Bill's hearing was that the 'somebody' was Mark, nor that the peculiarities I had seen were contained in the prize nodule left from his collection. And there was something else I didn't talk about; the peculiarities that led to high-cobalt assay. I was beginning to grope towards a theory of nodule formation which, though still vague, might ease the way ahead. I was becoming anxious to know how Campbell's cipher expert had made out in translating Mark's diary.* 3*

  Ten days after leaving the Blake Plateau we warped into the dockside at Panama. At last we were in the Pacific, all my goals a step nearer. Campbell was waiting for us, jumped spryly aboard and shook hands with me and Geordie, waving genially at the rest of the crew.

  'You made a good fast trip,' he said.

  'Not so bad,' said Geordie complacently.

  Campbell looked about the Esmerelda and at the crew who were busy stowing sail and clearing the decks. 'So this is your crew of cut-throats and desperadoes,' he said. He was in a jocular mood- a mercurial man. 'I hope we won't need
them.' He took my arm and walked me along the dock, amused at my wobbling land-legs.

  'I've booked you into my hotel for a night or so; there's no reason why you shouldn't have a last taste of luxury before the big job. Geordie too, if he wants it. I'll expect you both to dinner – you can't miss the hotel, it's the Colombo, right on the main street. You can tell me all about the trip then. Meantime I want to talk to you in private, now.' He steered me into one of the waterfront bars that always seem to be handy, and I sat down thankfully in front of a large glass of cold beer.

  Campbell wasted no time. He produced a biggish envelope from his jacket. 'I had photostats made of the diary pages,' he said. The original's in a bank vault in Montreal. You don't mind? You'll get it back one day.'

  'Not at all,' I said.

  He shook out the contents of the envelope. 'I got the translation done. My guy said it was a bastard of a job – he only hopes he's got the scientific bits right.'

  'We'll soon find out.' I was stiff with eagerness.

  Campbell handed me a neatly bound booklet which I flicked through. 'That's the stat of the original diary. This one's the translation. There are reproductions of all the drawings at the back. The whole thing looks screwy to me – it had better make sense to you or this whole thing is a bust already.' His good humour had already evaporated, but I was getting used to his changes of mood.

  I glanced through it all. 'This is going to be a long job,' I said. 'I'm not going to be able to make any snap judgements here and now; I'll look at this lot this afternoon, in the hotel room. Right now I want to go back to Esmerelda and sort out procedures with Geordie, pack my gear and go and take a shower and a clean-up.'

  If he was disappointed he didn't show it – clearly what I said made sense. And so it was not until I was lying, damp and half-naked in the blessedly cool hotel room a couple of hours later that I finally opened the envelope. The translation of the cipher was pretty well complete except for a few gaps here and there, but it didn't improve matters as much as I'd hoped. The thing was disappointingly written in a kind of telegraphese which didn't make for easy reading. It was a true diary and evidently covered the last few months of Mark's life, from about the time he left the IGY, although there were few dates and no place names written in clear at all.

  I wondered if he'd always kept such a diary, and decided that he must have done so – diary-keeping is a habit as hard to break as to develop. As to where the earlier volumes had got to, there was no guessing, nor did I think they would have helped me much anyway. This was the vital period.

  It was, on the whole, an ordinary enough diary; there were references to shore leave, films seen, people mentioned by initials only in the irritating way that people have when confiding to themselves, and all the other trivia of a man's life, all in brusque lack of detail. Mark had kept a brief record of his amours which wasn't pleasant to read, but otherwise it was fairly uninteresting on the surface.

  Then there were the entries made at sea. Here the diary turned professional with notes of observations, odd equations roughly jotted, analyses of bottom material, mostly sea ooze. Occasionally there were analyses of nodules – nothing very startling, just run of the sea stuff.

  I waded on feeling that I might be wasting my time, but towards the end I was pulled up with a start. I had run my eye down the typewritten sheet and was aware that I was at last looking at something remarkable. It was an analysis of a nodule, though it didn't specifically say so, and the figures were startling.

  Translated from symbols, they read: 'Manganese – 28%; iron – 32%; cobalt – 8%; copper – 4%; nickel – 6%; other 22%. Wow.!' 'Wow,' indeed.

  There followed analyses of four more nodules, all equally rich.

  I did some calculating and found the average cobalt in the five nodules to be a fraction under nine per cent. The copper and nickel weren't to be laughed away either. I didn't yet know much about the economics of recovery but it was evident that this might be a paying proposition even with relatively primitive methods of dredging, depending on the depth of water. And I had reason to believe that this was not too great to be worked in. With more sophisticated equipment it would be better than owning a gold mine.

  But there was always the snag – nowhere in the diary did Mark say where these riches were to be found. In the whole notebook there was not one place name mentioned. So we weren't really any better off than we were before, except that scattered through the typewritten pages was the phrase, 'Picture Here', with a number attached, and at the end was a sheaf of reproductions and a brief account by the cipher expert of these doodled drawings.

  It is possible and indeed probable that these drawings are of the nature of pictograms or rebuses. A study of the pictograms leads me to believe that they must indicate place names, and of the 32 drawings, I believe I have successfully identified 24.

  To illustrate: the rough sketch of the gas mantle with the word GRATIS beneath may well refer to the Australian town of Fremantle; the bearded man with the sword and the baby is probably Solomon, referring to the biblical story, and may indicate the Solomon Islands; the bearded man looking at a monkey may be a reference to Darwin in the Australian territory; the straight line neatly bisected may refer to either the Equator or Midway Island.

  The fact that all these names occur in the same quarter of the globe is a further indication that one may be on the right track in such surmising. Other names tentatively identified are also to be found in the same geographical area.

  Tracings of the drawings, together with possible identifications are attached. Of the eight drawings unidentified all I can say is that to solve these one would need to have a more precise knowledge of these geographical areas, together with the need to know a great deal more about the 'artist', since it is obvious that an idiosyncratic mode of thought is here employed, involving a person's training, experience and interior feelings; in fact, a total life.

  I looked up the analyses of the two non-standard nodules again. Coming immediately after them were two of the drawings, numbers 28 and 29. I checked them against the tracings. One was of a busty wench wearing a Phyrgian cap with underneath it the words, 'The Fair Goddess'. The other was a rather bedraggled-looking American eagle with the inscription, 'The Disappearing Trick'. Neither was identified.

  I leaned back and thought about it all. I knew that Mark's ship had been based on Australia during the IGY – hence, possibly, the Australian references. Mark had probably been in the Solomons and might well have gone as far as Midway -he would certainly have crossed the Equator anyway. Did he go as far as Easter Island? I checked the tracings and found it -a rabbit apparently trying to hatch an egg, the traditional fertility symbols of Easter. That was one the expert had spotted too.

  It was a hell of a big area in which to find The Fair Goddess or The Disappearing Trick. I thought about Mark and his 'idiosyncratic mode of thought'. The expert had been dead right there; Mark's mode of thought had been so damned idiosyncratic that there had been times when I thought it wasn't human. He had a strangely twisted, involute mind which delighted in complexity and deception, never taking a straight course but always heading ultimately for one goal – the eventual well-being of Mark Trevelyan.

  All my life I had watched him cheat and scheme his way towards the things he wanted, never realizing that if he'd gone about his business in a straightforward way it would have been more efficient. He had a first-class brain, but he was lazy and always looking for short cuts – but you don't find many short cuts in science and thus he tended to lag behind in his work.

  I think he was envious of me for some odd reason of his own. I was two years older than he and when we were children he nearly beat himself to death trying to keep up, physically and mentally. The psycho boys have a term for it in their tasteless jargon – 'sibling rivalry' – but with Mark it took an unhealthy turn. He seemed to see his whole life in terms of competition with me, even inventing apparent parental favouritism towards me where I could see none. The only
reason that I know for his having elected to study oceanogra phy was because I had done so and not, like me, out of any burning interest in the subject. He once said that he would be famous when I had been forgotten.

  It was ironic in a way that he should have said that, because he had the makings of a first rate scientist with a theoretical bent and if he'd lived I'm sure he could have surprised us all -provided he wasn't looking for a short cut at the time.

  For years I'd avoided him, physically and professionally, but now I had to match my mind against his. I had to ferret out the meanings of his cryptic scrawls and it wasn't going to be easy. Mark had almost certainly been up to something fishy -no high-cobalt results had come out of the IGY investigations, and Mark had such results. I thought about what Jarvis had said about Mark faking figures during that period, and about Mark trying to persuade Campbell into an expedition to look for nodules. It was beginning to add up.

  I was interrupted by Geordie, banging at my bedroom door.

  'Aren't you ready yet?' he demanded. 'We've got a dinner date with the boss.'

  'My God, the time's slipped away.'

  'Found anything?'

  I looked up wryly. 'Yes, I've found something but I'm damned if I know what it is. It looks as though we still have to play children's games against Mark's tortuous mind. I'll tell you about it when we're all together. Give me ten minutes to get dressed.'

  There's just one thing first,' Geordie said, hovering in the doorway. 'Kane went ashore and sent a cable.'

  'Where to?'

  'We were lucky. I detailed Danny Williams to trail him -don't worry, he'll keep it dark – and he managed to hear Kane asking about cable rates to Rabaul.'

  'Rabaul! But that's in New Britain – in the Bismarck Archipelago. Why in hell would he send a cable clear across the Pacific? Do you know who he sent it to?'