"Enjoy yourself in the Antarctic?" he asked in his flat Yorkshire voice when they'd shaken hands.
"You know about that?"
"Oh, I keep in touch. I saw your name mentioned in
Chase grinned weakly. "Actually, sir, it was Guinness."
"Was it? I never knew that. There you are, none of us can be right all the time." He began stuffing black twist tobacco into a meerschaum pipe. "What is it, career problem? Advice you want?"
Chase went over it briefly, mentioning the Russian found on the ice, the scrawled chemical equation, his death at the McMurdo Station, all the while conscious that he was wasting Sir Fred's time. Here and now, in this comfortable lounge with its easy chairs and potted shrubbery, the whole thing seemed preposterous. He cursed himself for being so stupid. Then nearly forgot to add the bit about the Russian scientist who was to be one of the speakers at the conference in Geneva.
Sir Fred didn't see the connection, and Chase went on to explain:
"The Russian--that is, the man we found on the ice--kept repeating something that sounded like Stanovnik. We thought it was a word, or words, but it could have been a name. Maybe of the man who's going to be in Geneva. Have you heard of him?"
"I've met him, two or three times. Boris Stanovnik. He's a microbiologist with the Hydro-Meteorological Service in Moscow. Good chap." Sir Fred sucked on his pipe and observed Chase through the billowing smoke. "Have you still got the paper with the equation on it?"
Chase took the slip of paper from his diary and handed it over. After a minute's scrutiny Sir Fred raised his eyes and gave Chase a skeptical stare.
"Is this another leg-pull?" he asked bluntly.
"No--no, sir, really. This time it's genuine."
"This is the formula for the dissolution of C02 in seawater."
Chase nodded. "Why go to the trouble of writing it down? A perfectly ordinary chemical interaction? He couldn't speak a word of English, either, and yet he was able to use our chemical symbols."
Sir Fred wafted smoke away. "That's not unusual. Many foreign scientists use them. No, the odd thing, as you say, is why bother in the first place? He must have been trying to tell you
"No. Perhaps the Americans did."
"Didn't you ask them?"
"It didn't occur to me," Chase confessed. "But he should never have been moved. They could have flown a medical team in--or even waited till he was stronger. I got the impression that Professor Banting was afraid of offending the Americans by refusing."
"Professor Banting is afraid of offending his own shadow," Sir Fred commented dryly.
Chase wondered whether Ivor Banting and Sir Fred Cole had ever crossed swords. It would have made for an interesting contest. Banting, an establishment drone down to his black woolen socks, versus Firebrand Fred, maverick of the British scientific cabal. It must have really peeved Banting when Fred Cole got his knighthood. All that toadying and nothing to show for it!
"Can you make anything of it?" Chase said.
Sir Fred rubbed the side of his nose with a stubby forefinger. "The last time I met Stanovnik--when would it be?--about two years ago-- he was working on a climatic project. He wouldn't say what exactly, but that's the Russians for you."
"I thought you said he was a microbiologist?" Chase frowned.
"He was investigating the effects of pollutants and chemical runoff on the microorganisms in seawater. You're familiar with eutrophica-tion, I take it?"
Chase nodded. When a river or lake received an overabundance of nutrients--usually caused by the runoff of farm fertilizers with a high nitrogen content--it encouraged the growth of algae blooms, which as they decayed and died consumed all the oxygen in the water. Deprived of oxygen, other plants and animals also died, with the result that the water became biologically dead. That was the process of eutrophica-tion; quite simply, overfertilization. It had the effect of speeding up the natural evolutionary cycle. Lake Erie in the United States and the landlocked Mediterranean were often-cited examples, where the natural organic processes had been accelerated by some two hundred years.
"We had a long chat about it. His main interest was how eutrophica-tion on a large scale might affect the climate. When a lake dies and becomes stagnant and eventually turns into swampland, it alters the local weather in the same way that clearing a forest can either increase or decrease rainfall. The Russians are keen to find out everything they can about what affects the climate because of their grandiose geoengineering schemes. They imagine they can move mountains in more than just the metaphorical sense."
