" Drake Passage!"

I shook my head. Sailhardy was wrong. The thin, sharp stiletto of wind did not even ruffle the surface of the sea, it was slight. It was there, though. Sailhardy unlashed the mainsail's crude fastening. His hands were as rough as the knotted wood of the whaleboat's ribs. The boom carrying the sail slatted untidily. Way dropped off the deep, thirty-foot craft. She settled into her own reflection, yellow to yellow, blue to blue white to white. The islanders' garish sense of paint did nothing to conceal the sweet lines of the boat.

" South Shetlands," I countered.

Sailhardy didn't seem to hear me. He crooked a knee into the starboard forward rowlock. His action was unstudied, but there was a pointer's tenseness in it. I found another lead sinker for my special net among the long oars on the gratings. I knotted it lazily to a hundred-fathom line coiled on the bottomboards. Sailhardy's taut caution seemed out of place. I suppose fishermen are fishermen the world over, and my enjoyment in sending down my special nylon net to the depths of the ocean here on the fringes of the Southern Ice Continent for tiny plankton sea-creatures was as keen as it would have been in casting a fly six thousand miles away in Scotland. Sailhardy's lean shoulders shrugged under the faded red-orange windbreaker. His was the inborn alertness which made a man survive the sea-enemy, in these Antarctic waters more pitiless than anywhere else in the world. I was fishing, and it lulled me out of feeling that I was a man with a mission, let alone a scientist of the Royal Society of London.

" No, Bruce…" he began.

I grinned at him as I dropped the heavy lead sinker over the side. The use of my Christian name still came a little hard off his tongue. After all, a lower-deck man does not call his captain by his Christian name. Not in the Royal Navy anyway. For two long, bitter years Sailhardy had been my leading torpedoman aboard H.M.S. Scott during the war. My job, as commander of His Majesty's South Shetlands Naval