Seven-Tenths Read online

  Elsewhere on Farnella are reminders that intellectual lives are being lived and thoughts thought. I am tackled at breakfast by Stuart, an electronics technician from Burbank who, over scrambled eggs, wants my opinion on Sacheverell Sitwell, Proust and Herman Wouk. He is also a musician. ‘Dinu Lipatti. God, nobody will ever play the B flat Partita like Lipatti. Not ever. And what about Earl Wild? Fantastic technique. Do you know his recording of Liszt’s Don Juan fantasy? Isn’t it great? And there’s an incredible track on the same disc, another Liszt fantasy. It’s on a Meyerbeer opera. … No, it’s gone. I get really mad when I can’t remember … Robert le Diable, that’s it.’ Stuart is in his mid-fifties, looks twenty years younger. He has a wife and houses in California. He is no stranger to life at sea, having spent several years in the US Navy. ‘But I’ve got to get out of this business. I always fall foul of hierarchies. I never can get the politics right. I can’t work out why people so much my junior always seem to wind up calling the shots. Maybe I’ll start a business repairing all those videos people just junk because there’s nobody to fix them. Easy money. The rest of the time I can read and play music.’

  Strange shipboard rituals, too. The sea has always presented itself as a collection of symptoms while denying itself the status of a disease. Every evening before supper (‘tea’, between 5 and 6 pm) the ‘Oily-Boily Bar’ is convened. The name refers to oily boilersuits and means that anyone is free to come and drink in the democratic surroundings of an engineer’s cabin. That is, a scientific engineer, not a crew member. (‘Them and Us?’ repeats one of the cooks thoughtfully. It seems to strike him as a pithy, even novel, concept. ‘Yes. Them and Us. I reckon you could say that.’) The demarcation is not at all snobbish. Many of both crew and scientists are veteran shipmates of several cruises and greet each other amicably when they meet in passage and companionway. I simply record that I never saw a crewman at an Oily-Boily Bar session.

  Another semi-ritual is ‘Hump Day’, the cruise’s halfway point ‘from where it’s all downhill,’ as somebody says. I had always associated the expression with old hands of the Far North – whalers, Yukon trappers, Arctic explorers – as meaning the moment when the endless winter reaches its shortest day and the light at last begins to lengthen. Hints of desperation, too, in ‘Gangplank Trials’, when in the last week of a long cruise the gangway is reportedly laid out flat on deck while scientists in full shore gear run along it carrying suitcases. ‘It’s a rehearsal, isn’t it? Helps the spirits. Tells you it’s not long now.’ The echo is of the ‘Channel Fever’ which returning British sailors used to contract on first glimpsing the south coast, knowing they were still a couple of days or more out of Liverpool or Glasgow.

  Belatedly it becomes clear. Probably none of the younger scientists on Farnella has been to a boarding school, in the military, or even to prison, and they lack a way of measuring time internally. They are mainly family people, not seafarers at all. Their business happens to be oceanography rather than metallurgy. Somewhere in Surrey and San Diego are office doors with their names on them, lockers and lab smocks belonging to them, named spaces for their cars outside, a house within easy commuting distance. They are not gypsies or nomads.

  *

  The days pass, the ship goes back and forth along its lines, the shaded portion of the circle grows. No disasters, only the single hitch of the weather. The wind is stiff, the waves high, as if we were perpetually on the edge of a storm system 500 miles away. The seas hit us at an angle, nudging the bows off course. There are worries about possible damage to GLORIA’s cable which thrums like a steel bar over the stern, slackening in troughs and then tautening with a snap. The scientists confer with the Captain and agree to knock a knot off the speed. This means computer work so the scans are not distorted. A new seamount is discovered whose foothills were first spotted on the previous leg while travelling in the opposite direction.

  ‘I don’t know what the hell that is,’ says Mike, pointing at a gravelly looking portion of a gravelly looking picture. Doctors poring over an X-ray.

  ‘I reckon it’s a nodule field,’ says Roger. ‘I’ve seen something just like it elsewhere. Those are really sheer cliffs,’ (rock faces of 3,000 feet which the world’s mountaineering community would race to get their pitons into were they on dry land) ‘and there’s less sedimentation here so we’re in the lee of the local current system. That means this stuff – a chewed ballpoint taps the picture – is boulders. Detritus that’s fallen over the edge or sheared from the face. Doesn’t look like any new activity here, so these’ll be nodules, half buried by the debris and extending out to – wow, it may be off this leg too so it’s a big field. Anyway, bet you anything that’s what it is. I feel it in my bones.’

  ‘And can Roger’s famous bones be wrong?’ murmurs Mike.

  The tone of these conversations, the friendly offhand speculativeness, betrays like nothing else the distance travelled over the past 100 years by the Earth sciences, and particularly geology. The casual references to old and recent rock formations are maybe not novel, but the confidence belongs to an era which has an unassailable timescale fixed in its collective scientific head. The seabed we are mapping is not immeasurably ancient. The area we are in, not far from the Hawaiian Chain, is volcanically active and the seabed comparatively mobile. Johnston Atoll, for instance, is a ruin of its former self, far smaller and sinking steadily. (Its reefs show it is sinking just slowly enough for coral polyps to keep pace.) Even on dry land the most monolithic features often turn out to be quite recent affairs. Not far below the summit of Mount Everest are chunks of oceanic crust with fossil sea shells embedded in them, indicating that the entire Himalayas were a stretch of seabed until India banged into Asia and the impact pushed the rocks 5 miles straight up into the air. That was a mere 40 million years ago, in geological terms practically the other day.

  Aboard Farnella there is easy talk of subduction zones; any disputes arise over quite specific technical theories associated with them. Subduction zones (where the edge of one tectonic plate dives down beneath the edge of its neighbour) were not suspected until plate tectonic theory proposed them, and tectonic theory itself was a direct descendant of the theory of continental drift which the German, Alfred Wegener, had brilliantly proposed in 1915. Poor Wegener! In 1928 a panel of fourteen geologists was convened to vote on his theory and only five were fully in support. Two years later he vanished in a blizzard in the middle of Greenland and his theory suffered a similar fate until the 1950s. I myself can remember a geography lesson in early 1955 when the teacher, in response to a question from a boy who must either have been very studious or else a troublemaker, suddenly shouted: ‘Continental drift is bunk! It is loathsome bunk!’*

  And so, as the geologists speculate and tap their bitten ballpoints on computer printouts, I have to remind myself that not so long ago their conversation would have been pure heresy and have evoked tirades of condemnation, not only from other scientists but also from fully robed bishops. A bare hundred years before I was born William Buckland (who was both a geologist and the Dean of Westminster) wrote his Bridgewater Treatise in which he categorically affirmed that Noah’s Flood accounted for sedimentary rocks and fossils. To watch the endless scrolls of paper emerge jerkily from printers and plotters is to feel that this is not so much mapping a new world as burying an old, which in turn makes one wonder what fresh heresies the future holds.

  Meanwhile, the question of whether or not we have discovered a hitherto uncharted field of manganese nodules looks like having to remain undecided until a later cruise. The weather is now bad enough to make us abandon our course and begin a new set of legs on a different tack.

  ‘Not so nice for us, though. It’ll mean rolling instead of pitching. But kinder to the equipment.’

  ‘What does the forecast say?’

  ‘We are the weather forecast, that’s the trouble. The Farnella’s an official weather reporting ship when she’s on station, so the forecasts out here are simply base
d on our own data from yesterday.’

  I like the idea that we are helping invent the world’s weather but can see it is unhelpful having no higher authority on which to rely. Still, the measured tones of a radio weatherman repeating one’s own reports might well endow them with an official quality which would suddenly make them credible as predictions. Up on deck it is exhilarating as the ship buffets into the wind, shouldering clouds of water back over her superstructure. Another day denied the sunbathers, their towels unspread, their copies (courtesy of the Marine Society) of Tom Clancy, Len Deighton, Clive Cussler, Cruz Smith, unopened. The library contains dozens of these more or less identical Cold War what-ifs: unmemorabilia which after the past few years have suddenly come to seem like fossils, requiring of their readers a streak of the antiquarian, even of the geologist. By contrast, nothing could be more present than this ocean leaping past and over. It raises its crests to the horizon, empty and brisk, at once a locus of sublime vacancy and massive energy. When the tropic sun blazes through cracks in the scudding clouds a brilliant ultramarine floods back into the water. Simultaneously, its tusks of foam gleam white while peaks and crevasses wring colours from the constant motion. At these hot, radiant moments the sea is transformed into prodigious and arcane machinery, liquid clockwork glinting with moving parts. In the intermittent bursts of light it looks like what it is: the planet’s gearbox mediating and transmitting the motive power of the sun.

  In early afternoon the noise of lighter engines detaches itself from the background roar of the ship’s funnel. An unmarked grey P3 Orion flies past very low off the starboard bow, its two inboard propellers feathered. Ahead, it makes a wide sweep, banking so its wings flash against the storm clouds like a fulmar’s, then returns for another pass. Coming from in front, its crew will easily be able to read the great blue logo painted below Farnella’s bridge: a circle containing an anchor and the legend ‘US Geological Survey’. This identification will be superfluous since the aircraft is one of the US Navy’s long-range anti-submarine patrols and will automatically have dropped sonar buoys to learn what we are up to. They will already have heard our cacophony of pulses and identified GLORIA’s correlation signal. A hand is raised behind a cockpit window as the plane drones by. It climbs away to the west trailing dark exhaust and is soon lost in the cloudbase. The ocean feels momentarily emptier for its departure.

  There is a real oddness in all this watching and listening. Held firmly in the US Navy’s electronic gaze as we are, the Farnella is herself sizzling with codes which enable us to listen to the seabed and define it, while undoubtedly provoking the attention and maybe even aggression of untold creatures below. Nobody is listening out for them at the end of this bizarre acoustic chain, however, and they will only be heard if the wavelengths of their signals happen to coincide or interfere with those of the scientists’ finely tuned sensors. Certainly, no human ears are on the alert for them. In the meantime we are also listening to ourselves via our own weather reports. The ocean which surrounds and supports us manages not to impinge on our senses except to induce queasiness in one or two people.

  ‘I’ll never go on another geophysical cruise, I swear it,’ Pattiann says next morning. ‘They’re so boring. A sampling cruise is much more interesting. The dredge brings up lovely great chunks of stuff. At least it’s something to paw over and get your hands mucky on. All these computers – that’s not my idea of geology.’

  She assumes I am as bored as she, but I deny this.

  ‘Still, next time I’d go on one of our sampling trips,’ she recommends. ‘Or a JOIDES drilling and coring cruise where you get to see real stuff from below the bottom. Bits of the living planet, you know. This electronic surveying’s too hands-off for people like us.’

  Pattiann, who must be somewhere in her forties and hence among the older of the scientists aboard, may be making a rhetorical gesture implying a companionable solidarity, or else the more radical point that scientists’ differing views of the technology at their disposal might have much to do with their age. Pattiann’s lineage is from the nineteenth-century oceanographers who were excited by touching and smelling and tasting whatever they studied. In fact, a certain scepticism about modern high technology, not least its prohibitive cost, is detectable in all but the youngest scientists at one time or another. Obviously there is no cheap way to map a seabed accurately from a distance of 5 kilometres; yet an elusive feeling of there being a discrepancy somewhere lies on the printouts like a glaze. It is as though discovering what there is beneath the sea, learning about places on Earth which no one has ever seen, ought to be momentous, even personal. Yet it is largely automatic, done even as we sleep. Machines make the signals, listen for their return, gather navigational data, juggle it around in digitised fashion, convert the digits to a visual analogue and produce an image for a geologist to tap his teeth over. All well and good; but to requote Roger’s maxim: in science, as elsewhere, you can’t get something for nothing. At some point there is always a debt, a deficit, a loss. A law suggests itself, to the effect that the way any data is read is a function of the way it has been gathered.

  *

  This cruise is unusually short, a mere fortnight at sea. It has been timed so people will be able to fly home for Christmas. The mosaics of the GLORIA and air-gun prints grow on the chart table. The sweet, hot-blanket smell of popcorn drifts from the other end of the lab where a machine is anchored by Velcro strips near the swaying gravimeter. Katie stands her watch in the bay which houses the electronics for the two midships sonars. Or rather, she mostly sits. Only occasionally does she need to get up and jot some figures with a felt-tip pen on the printouts inching their way from the plotters. She clicks a switch or two, changes a stylus, checks the course, goes back to her book.

  It is pleasing to think that most of the ocean bed never will be seen directly by mortal eye. In comparison to that vast area the ground which might be covered (at such prodigious expense) by manned submersibles is virtually nil. One might compare it to travelling across Asia by oil-lit hansom cab with the conditions of a Dickensian fog outside and then claiming to have seen the world. At the same time, sitting in Farnella’s lab and looking at the banks of instruments, computers, screens, laser printers, plotters, popcorn poppers and their umbilical harness of cables, all of it sailing steadily along a knife-edge course 5 kilometres above the Late Cretaceous seabed, one cannot help reflecting on Homo’s fierce if limited intelligence. The remorseless taxonomy of a century ago, using primitive but ingenious measuring devices as well as guns and nets and killing bottles, seems far distant now; yet even that distance is as nothing compared with the exponentially opening gap which separates Homo from the rest of Earth’s organisms.

  Katie is doing her watch early because 18 December is her birthday. Since she is known to be fond of rabbits there are celebrations tonight with rabbits as the theme. We have already signed a joint card and are encouraged to cut loose with the fancy dress. ‘Rabbits, you guys. Anything goes. Raid the hold.’ Not for the first time a deep current of hysteria is apparent and in these final three days of the cruise becomes a good deal closer to the surface. Katie’s colleague Sue is for this trip the scientist nominally in charge of representing the US government’s interests. Despite the protestations of power-sharing, democracy and cooperation, somehow or other it is Sue’s judgements alone which have been prevailing this last week. She has a career and a CV to think of. A failure to complete a geophysical survey for which she was responsible will be remembered, if not held against her. Unknown to the rest of us she has taken a chance. Despite the weather and Farnella’s reduced speed. Sue has insisted we complete our allotted task even if it means cutting things fine.

  At tea next evening the news reaches us from the bridge. There is now no way the ship can arrive back in Honolulu on the Friday morning as planned. Indeed, if the weather gets any worse we could be anything up to twenty-four hours late. Suddenly, there is a possibility that everyone may miss their flights home. C
hristmas Day is on the following Tuesday and the flights had anyway been hard enough to book. Over peaches and custard and the remains of Katie’s birthday cake all pretence of the cool, scientific approach evaporates. Hard words are spoken about stubborn and cocksure youngsters whose inexperience jeopardises decent folks’ family lives. The scientist who so recently stood her GLORIA watch, slightly the worse for drink and wearing a long pair of cardboard rabbit ears, puts down her spoonful of custard and stares at her plate, cheeks crimson. It is pure boarding school. Then the US government’s geologist bursts into tears and runs from the room.