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 whit I said made sense.
And so it was not until I was lying, damp an 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 I.G.Y, 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 and 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 percent. 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 NNIL_ 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 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 I.G.Y – 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 oceanography 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 I.G.Y 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