A Twist of Sand

"I'll do it on an exchange basis," she smiled, and it flashed across my mind how wonderfully it lit up the muscles which seemed to be more in the power of pedantry or self-defence when in repose. She dug a hand into the pocket of her slacks. She took something out and held it behind her back. It was almost the teasing attitude of a small girl. I would have fallen for it right there, had I not been forewarned. "I'll show you what's in my hand if you'll go and get the dividers."

"Of course," I replied guardedly. "Stay here, and I'll slip below and get them."

"I couldn't run very far, could I ?" she responded lightly.

I took my time about going down the bridge ladder. She seemed such a mass of contradictions. I returned with the dividers.

She took the instrument from me and held it by the mother-of-pearl tip. She ran a finger down the ivory and stopped in surprise at the bottom.

"Why," she said, "they're so old that they haven't even got steel points. What is it ?"

"Porcupine quill," I replied.

She opened her own hand. There was a tiny Chinese figure of a water-carrier, done in ivory.   It was yellow and discoloured.  The water-jug was gone.

"Just as you carry your lucky hand, so I carry this round," she said. I couldn't fathom this unburdening. "See, the water-jug got broken. It was in a fire when the soldiers first burned down our home. We were always on the run after that for years."

With a deft movement she put the dividers in the empty socket of the little water-carrier and swung them round and round.

She eyed me.

"Measurement, calculation, plot. . . ." she murmured. "I suppose there comes a time when measurement becomes all-important, becomes an end in itself. The same with calculation."

I tried to laugh it down. I remembered the "keep-off-the-grass "sign.

"I'll bet the old John Company captain never thought his dividers would become part of a moral tale. Particularly in the abstract."

She didn't laugh.

"Calculation is important in your life, isn't it?" she said.

"If it weren't, you might be swimming for it now," I replied flippantly.

Her next remark came out of the blue.

"Have you killed many men, Captain Peace ?"

"Thanks for the memory," I said bitterly. The grey light, the mica dust-blinded evening, made it all grey. I needed a drink.

The wind flickered a wisp of hair across her face. The crumple of her eyelid was accentuated. Etosha creaked against the night swell.

"You can feed any sort of information into a calculating machine," she went on. She seemed to be weighing something almost judicially in her mind. "I remember seeing a ' Zebra.' computator, one of those electronic brain affairs, which could work out things to sixty-four decimal places. It also worked out how much a worker did or didn't do in a lifetime's employment. Equally, it gave the exact radius blast of a hydrogen bomb. It had all the answers, and it didn't matter to it whether it was people dying or people living. It didn't hear them scream. When you live close to a thing like that you begin to see things the way it does, only as a matter of computation, no other issues." She swivelled round on me.

"You've lived a long time with the Skeleton Coast, Captain Peace."

"Yes," I said, "a long time." My anger wouldn't ignite.

"Listen," I said, "I'll show you tomorrow. You ask about killing men. You'll see the corpses. Seventy-five in one beautiful steel coffin and twenty-seven in another."

"You -- were responsible?"

"The first lot," I said harshly, "I would do it again for the same reasons -- and the same consequences. Those seventy-five men had to die if thousands more wanted to live. That's fair enough. They took their chance, like I did. I won."

"But, from what I hear, the Royal Navy didn't seem to think so."

"No," I said shortly.

"But you had a defence?" she probed.

"For God's sake, yes," I burst out and I caught a glimpse of the helmsman's eyes flickering sideways at me. "I had a defence all right. It ... it lies out there."

I gestured to the north-east, to Curva dos Dunas.

She missed nothing.

"But you took the rap? And that's where we're going --  going ashore?"

I nodded.

"What does it matter?" I snapped, for she had brought pain from what I thought was a dead wound. "After all, what does an ultimate weapon matter now ? The dead men are history. Lieutenant-Commander Geoffrey Peace is history. Or maybe he's dead, too, in a sense."

She eyed me for a long time.

"Down in the Antarctic," she said, "on those little gale-lashed islands like Heard and Marion, the ordinary housefly has so adapted himself to conditions that he has shed his wings, so the continual gales can't blow him away. It's an entomological fact. You've become so part of the Skeleton Coast that you-are just pure computation, nothing else."

"A sort of living computing machine," I sneered. "Only I can't work out sixty-four decimal places."