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the native huts to look for his son Philip.
Among the shanties, nothing moved. Just clear of the long breakers, a row of fishing boats lay on the
sand. An old woman sat against the elephant-grey bole of a palm, watching an array of jewfish drying
before her, too idle to brush the flies away from her eyelids. Nothing stirred but the unending Indian
Ocean. Even the cloud over distant Karavatti was anchored there. From the largest hut, which served
also as a store, came the thin music of a radio and a woman singing.Happiness, oh Happiness, It's what
you are, it's not Progress.
The same, Yale thought to himself dryly, applied to laziness, These people had the good life here, or
their version of it. They wanted to do nothing, and their wish was almost entirely ful-filled. Caterina also
liked the life. She could enjoy looking at the vacant horizon day after day;he had always to be doing. You
had to accept that people differed - but he had always accepted that, taken pleasure in it.
He ducked his head and went into the big hut. A genial and plump young Madrassi, all oiled and black
and shining, sat behind his counter picking his teeth. His name was over the door, painted painfully on a
board in English and Sanscrit, 'V. K. Vandranasis'. He rose and shook hands with Yale.
'You are glad to get back from the South Pole, I presume?'
'Pretty glad, Vandranasis.'
'Without doubt the South Pole is cold even in this warm weather?'
'Yes, but we've been on the move, you know - covered practically ten thousand nautical miles. We
didn't simply sit on the Pole and freeze! How's life with you? Making your for-tune?'
'Now, now, Mr. Yale, on Kalpeni are no fortunes to be made. That you surely know!' He beamed with
pleasure at Yale's joke. 'But life is not too bad here. Suddenly you know we got a swarm of fish here,
more than the men can catch. Kalpeni never before got so many fish!'
'What sort of fish? Jewfish?'
'Yes, yes, many many jewfish. Other fish not so plenty, but the jewfish are now in their millions.'
'And the whales still come?'
'Yes, yes, when it is full moon the big whales are coming.'
'I thought I saw their carcasses up by the old fort.'
'That is perfectly correct. Five carcasses. The last one last month and one the month before at the time
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of the full moon. I think maybe they come to eat the jewfish.'
'That can't be. The whales started visiting the Laccadives before we had a glut of jewfish. In any case,
blue whales don't eat jewfish.'
V. K. Vandranasis put his head cutely on one side and said, 'Many strange things happen you
science-wallahs and learned men don't know. There's always plenty change happening in the old world,
don't you know? Maybe this year the blue whales newly are learning to appreciate eating the jewfish. At
least, that is my theory.'
Just to keep the man in business, Yale bought a bottle of raspberryade and drank the warm scarlet liquid
as they chatted. The storekeeper was happy to give him the gossip of the island, which had about as
much flavour to it as the sugary mess Yale was drinking. In the end, Yale had to cut him short by asking if
he had seen Philip; but Philip had not been down this end of the island for a day or two, it appeared.
Yale thanked him, and started back along the strip of beach, past the old woman still motionless before
her drying fish.
He wanted to get back and think about the jewfish. Themonths-long survey of ocean currents he had
just completed, which had been backed by the British Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture and the
Smithsonian Oceanic Research Institute under the aegis of the World Waters Organization, had been
inspired by a glut of fish - in this case a superabundance of herring in the over-fished waters of the Baltic,
which had begun ten years ago and continued ever since. That superabundance was spreading slowly to
the herring banks of the North Sea; in the last two years, those once-vast reservoirs of fish had been
yielding and even surpassing their old abundance. He knew, too, from his Antarctic expedition, that the
Adelie penguins were also greatly on the increase. And there would be other creatures, also proliferating,
unrecorded as yet.
All these apparently random increases in animal population seemed not to have been made at the
expense of any other ani-mal - though obviously that state of affairs would not be main-tained if the
numbers multiplied to really abnormal proportions.
It was a coincidence that these increases came at a time when the human population explosion had tailed
off. Indeed, the ex-plosion had been more of a dread myth than an actuality; now it had turned into a
phantom or might-have-been, rather like the danger of uncontained nuclear war, which had also
van-ished in this last decade of the old twentieth century. Man had not been able voluntarily to curtail his
reproductive rate to any statistically significant extent, but the mere fact of overcrowding with all its
attendant physical discomforts and anti-familial pressures, and with its psychic pressures of neurosis,
sexual aberration and sterility operating exactly in the areas previously most fecund, had proved dynamic
enough to level off the accelerating birth spiral in the dense population centres. One result of this was a
time of tranquillity in international affairs such as the world had hardly known throughout the rest of the
century.
It was curious to think of such matters on Kalpeni. The Laccadives lay awash in ocean and sun; their
lazy peoples lived on a diet of dry fish and coconut, exporting nothing but dry fish and copra; they were
remote from the grave issues of the cen-tury - of any century. And yet, Yale reminded himself,
misquot-ing Donne, no island is an island. Already these shores were lapped by the waves of a new and
mysterious change that wasflooding the world for better or worse - a change over which man had
absolutely no command, any more than he could com-mand the flight of the lonely albatross through the
air above the southern oceans.
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II
Caterina came out of the coral-built house to meet her husband.
'Philip's home, Clem!' she said, taking his hand.
'Why the anxiety?' he asked, then saw his son emerge from the shade, ducking slightly to avoid the lintel
of the door. He came forward and put his hand out to his father. As they shook hands, Philip smiling and
blushing, Yale saw he had indeed grown adult.
This son by his first marriage - Yale had married Caterina only three and a half years ago - looked much
as Yale himself had done at seventeen, with his fair hair clipped short and a long mobile face that too
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