Part 17 (1/2)
”Well,” said Phyllis, 'stopping icebergs is probably pretty difficult-”
”I don't mean stopping icebergs, I mean stopping the Russians from making icebergs.”
”Oh,” said Phyllis, ”are they?-making them, I mean?”
”But of course I just look at it logically,” Tuny told her. ”You don't get things like this suddenly happening for no reason at all. The Russians always seem to think they have more rights in the Arctic than anyone else although they were years after other people in getting to the North Pole, and I expect they're now claiming that they discovered it some time in the nineteenth century because they don't seem to be able to bear the thought that anybody else ever discovered anything, and-where was I?”
”I was wondering why they should be making icebergs,” Phyllis said.
”Oh, yes. Well, that's all part of their general policy. I mean, everyone knows that their idea is to make trouble everywhere they can. And look at the wretched summer we've been having; things cancelled one after another, and now they're saying that Wimbledon may have to be washed out altogether. And the whole thing is due to these icebergs they keep on sending into our Gulf Stream. The scientists all know that, but n.o.body does anything about it. People are beginning to get fed-up with evasiveness, I can tell you. They want a strong line, and a clean-out that will stop this kind of thing. It's been allowed to go on much too long already. Surely they can blow them up, or something.”
”The Russians, or the icebergs?” asked Phyllis.
”Well, I meant the icebergs. If they just blow them up and show the Russians it isn't going to work, they'll probably stop it.”
”But-er-are you quite sure the Russians are responsible for them?” Phyllis said.
Tuny regarded her closely.
”I must say,” she remarked, ”it seems to me very odd indeed how concerned some people seem to be to justify the Russians on every possible occasion.” And shortly afterwards they parted.
Meanwhile, the interchange of Notes across the North Pole continued. Neither side particularised on the steps taken to deal with the offence in its own area, but the State Department admitted that its area of fog was, when undisturbed by wind, now greater than before; the Kremlin was less committal, but claimed no resounding successes.
The dreary summer pa.s.sed into a drearier autumn. There seemed to be nothing anybody could do about it but accept it with a grumbling philosophy.
At the other end of the world spring came. Then summer, and the whaling season started-in so far as it could be called a season at all when the owners who would risk s.h.i.+ps were so few, and the crews ready to risk their lives fewer still. Nevertheless, some could be found ready to d.a.m.n the bathies, along with all other perils of the deep, and set out. At the end of the Antarctic summer came news, via New Zealand, of glaciers in Victoria Land shedding huge quant.i.ties of bergs into the Ross Sea, and suggestions that the great Ross Ice-Barrier itself might be beginning to break up. Within a week came similar news from the Weddell Sea. The Filcher Barrier there, and the La.r.s.en Ice-Shelf were both said to be calving bergs in fantastic numbers. A series of reconnaissance flights brought in reports which read almost exactly like those from Baffin Bay, and photographs which might have come from the same region. Again the more sober ill.u.s.trated weeklies ran rotogravure views of great ma.s.ses plunging into seas already dotted for miles with gleaming bergs, and produced studies of individual bergs above such captions as ”Nature's Majesty: With Gothic pinnacles aspiring, a new Everest of the sea sets out upon her lonely voyage. The menacing beauty of this berg freshly calved by the David Glacier in the Ross Sea, is romantically caught by the camera. In many parts of the Antarctic coastline the production of such bergs has been so extensive that ice-shelves. .h.i.therto regarded as permanent have been shattered by their fall, and open water now replaces the frozen sea.”
The att.i.tude of polite patronage towards Nature, and the reception, with well-bred congratulatory restraint, of the clever turns she put on to edify and amuse the human race might have continued unruffled for some months longer than it did, but for the urchin quality of Dr Bocker.
The Sunday Tidings, which had for some years been pursuing a policy of intellectual sensationalism, had never found it easy to maintain its supply of material. The stuff of mere emotional sensationalism, as used by its cheaper and less dignified contemporaries, lay thickly all around, easily malleable into shapes attractive to the constant human pa.s.sions. Intellectual sensationalism, however, was a much more tricky business. In addition to avoiding the suggestion of sensationalism for sensationalism's sake, it required knowledge, research, careful timing, and, if possible, some literary ability. Inevitably, therefore, its policy was subject to lamentable gaps during which it could find nothing topical on its chosen level to disclose. It must, one fancies, have been a council of desperation over a prolonged hiatus of the kind which induced it to open its columns to Bocker.
That the Editor felt some apprehension over the result was discernible from his italicised note preceding the article in which he disclaimed, on grounds of fairmindedness, any responsibility for what he was now printing in his own paper.
With this auspicious beginning, and under the heading: The Devil and the Deeps, Bocker led off: ”Never, since the days when Noah was building his Ark, has there been such a well-regimented turning of blind eyes as during the last year. It cannot go on. Soon, now, the long Arctic night will be over. Observation will again be possible. Then, the eyes that should never have been shut must open...”
That beginning I remember, but without references I can only give the gist and a few recollected phrases of the rest.
”This,” Bocker continued,” is the latest chapter in a long tale of futility and failure stretching back to the sinkings of the Yatsus.h.i.+ro, and the Keweenaw, and beyond. Failure which has already driven us from the seas, and now threatens us on the land. I repeat, failure.
”That is a word so little to our taste that many think it a virtue to claim that they never admit it. But blind stupidity is not one of the virtues; it is a weakness, and in this case it is a dangerous weakness, masked by a false optimism. All about us are unrest, inflating prices, whole economic structures changing-and, therefore, a way of life that is changing. All about us, too, are people who talk about our exclusion from the high seas as though it were some temporary inconvenience, soon to be corrected. To this smugness there is a reply; it is this: ”For over five years now the best, the most agile, the most inventive brains in the world have wrestled with the problem of coming to grips with our enemy and they are still no closer to a solution than when they began. There is, on their present findings, nothing at all to indicate that we shall ever be able to sail the seas in peace again...
”With the word 'failure' so wry in our mouths it has apparently been policy to discourage any expression of the connection between our maritime troubles and the recent developments in the Arctic and Antarctic. It is time for this att.i.tude of 'not before the children' to cease. I do not know, and I do not care, what kind of pressure has been preventing our more percipient men from pointing out this connection; there are always cliques and factions anxious to keep the public in the dark 'for its own good'-a 'good' that is seldom far from the interests of the faction advocating it.
”I do not suggest that the root problem is being neglected; far from it. There have been, and are, men wearing themselves out to find some means by which we can locate and destroy the enemy in our Deeps. What I do say is that with them still unable to find a way, we now face the most serious a.s.sault yet.
”It is an a.s.sault against which we have no defences. It is not susceptible of direct attack. It can be checked only by our discovery of some means of destroying its High Command, in the Deeps.
”And what is this weapon to which we can oppose no counter?
”It is the melting of the Arctic ice-and a great part of the Antarctic ice, too.
”You think that fantastic? Too colossal? It is not, it is a task which we could have undertaken ourselves, had we so wished, at any time since we released the power of the atom.
”Because of the winter darkness little has been heard lately of the patches of Arctic fog. It is not generally known that, though two of them existed in the Arctic spring, by the end of the Arctic summer there were eight, in widely separated areas. Now, fog is caused, as you know, by the meeting of hot and cold currents of either air or water. How does it happen that eight novel, independent warm currents can suddenly occur in the Arctic?
”And the results? Unprecedented flows of broken ice into the Bering Sea, and into the Greenland Sea. In these two areas particularly, the pack-ice is hundreds of miles north of its usual spring maximum. In other places, the north of Norway, for instance, it is further south. And we ourselves had an unusually cold, wet winter.
”And the icebergs? We have all read a lot about them and seen a lot of pictures of them lately. Why? Obviously because there are a great many more icebergs than usual, but the question that no one has publicly answered is, why should there be more icebergs?
”Everyone knows where they are coming from. Greenland is a large island greater than nine times the size of the British Isles. But it is more than that. It is also the last great bastion of the retreating ice-age.
”Several times the ice has come south, grinding and scouring, smoothing the mountains, scooping the valleys on its way until it stood in huge ramparts, dizzy cliffs of gla.s.s-green ice, vast slow-crawling glaciers, across half of Europe. Then it went back, gradually, over centuries, back and back. The huge cliffs and mountains of ice dwindled away, melted, and were known no more-except in one place. Only in Greenland does that immemorial ice still tower nine thousand feet high, unconquered yet. And down its sides slide the glaciers which sp.a.w.n the icebergs. They have been scattering their icebergs into the sea, season after season, since before there were men to know of it; but why, in this year, should they suddenly sp.a.w.n ten, twenty times as many? There must be a reason for this. There is.
”If some means, or some several means, of melting the Arctic ice were put into operation, a little time would have to pa.s.s before its effects became mensurable. Moreover, the effects would be progressive; first a trickle, then a gush, then a torrent.
”I have seen 'estimates' which suggest that if the polar ice were melted the sea-level would rise by one hundred feet. To call that an 'estimate' is a shocking imposition. It is no more than a round-figure guess. It may be a good guess, or it may be widely wrong, on either side. The only certainty is that the sea-level would indeed rise.
”In this connection I draw attention to the fact that in January of this year the mean sea-level at Newlyn, where it is customarily measured, was reported to have risen by two and a half inches.”
”Oh, dear!” said Phyllis, when she had read this. ”Of all the pertinacious stickers-out-of-necks! We'd better go and see him.”
It did not entirely surprise us when we telephoned the next morning to find that his number was not available. When we called, however, we were admitted. Bocker got up from a desk littered with mail, to greet us.
”No earthly good your coming here,” he told us. ”There isn't a sponsor that'd touch me with a forty-foot pole.”
”Oh, I'd not say that, A. B.” Phyllis told him. ”You will very likely find yourself immensely popular with the sellers of sand-bags and makers of earth-s.h.i.+fting machinery before long.”
He took no notice of that. ”You'll probably be contaminated if you a.s.sociate with me. In most countries I'd be under arrest by now.”
”Terribly disappointing for you. This has always been discouraging territory for ambitious martyrs. But you do try, don't you?” she responded. ”Now, look, A. B.,” she went on, ”do you really like to have people throwing things at you, or what is it?”
”I get impatient,” explained Bocker.
”So do other people. But n.o.body I know has quite your gift for going just beyond what people are willing to take at any given moment. One day you'll get hurt. Not this time because, luckily, you've messed it up, but one time certainly.”
”If not this time, then probably not at all,” he said. He bent a thoughtful, disapproving look on her. ”Just what do you mean, young woman, by coming here and telling me I 'messed it up'?”
”The anti-climax. First you sounded as if you were on the point of great revelations, but then that was followed by a rather vague suggestion that somebody or something must be causing the Arctic changes-and without any specific explanation of how it could be done. And then your grand finale was that the tide is two and a half inches higher.”
Bocker continued to regard her. ”Well, so it is. I don't see what's wrong with that. Two and a half inches is a colossal amount of water when it's spread over a hundred and forty-one million square miles. If you reckon it up in tons-”
”I never do reckon water in tons-and that's part of the point. To ordinary people two and a half inches just means a very slightly higher mark on a post. After your build-up it sounded so tiddly that everyone feels annoyed with you for alarming them those that don't just laugh, and say: ”Hal ha! These professors!”-”
Bocker waved his hand at the desk with its load of mad.
”Quite a lot of people have been alarmed or at least indignant,” he said. He lit a cigarette. ”That was what I wanted. You know well enough how it has been since the beginning of this business. At every stage the great majority, and particularly the authorities, have resisted the evidence as long as they could. This is a scientific age-in the more educated strata. It will therefore almost fall over backwards in disregarding the abnormal, and it has developed a deep suspicion of its own senses. Vast quant.i.ties of evidence are required before a theory based on scanty knowledge can be dislodged. Very reluctantly the existence of something in the Deeps was belatedly conceded. There has been equal reluctance to admit all the succeeding manifestations until they couldn't be dodged. And now here we are again, baulking at the newest hurdle.
”Ever since this business in the Arctic began, a number of people have been well aware of what must be going on-though not, of course, of how it is being done but for one reason or another, not excluding Governmental pressure, they have been keeping quiet about it. I have myself.”