By Viking to Tierra del Fuego?

There was a stirring in the Conference Room on the fourth deck of the Trillium building in Farmer Tysons Corner.

There is a screen on the Socotra home page that appears after the “home” page with a global map covered with scrawls and lines. It is fairly comprehensive in the east-west direction, with occasional excursions due north over the Pole when somebody needed to get someplace important in a hurry.

There is a dense collection of lines through the Caribbean, down past Haiti and the Dominican Republic and onward toward Panama. There were multiple trips down that way.

But below them sits South America, curiously unadorned. No scarlet tracks. No evidence that anyone from the Creative Section ever got around to doing much about an entire continent.

There was general agreement around the Conference Table that somebody ought to fix that.

We might even change some of the red lines according to the fellow who sorted out the visible spectrum: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet, one color for each era of travel. Then the globe could show not simply where we went, but when.

That discussion was somewhere below the new economic sanctions announced against the Iranians and the muttering from The Boomers about how information warfare had arrived to turn the discomfort of a year-long naval deployment into something considerably more significant in media coverage.

Vic had something different for the morning meeting.

He had spoken with a smart and lovely woman who runs a travel business, whisking people by air to board plush ships bound for interesting places around the globe.

Vic is still recovering from heart surgery and feeling a little more expansive each day. He looked at that great unmarked continent on the map and asked a simple question:

“Is there anything interesting down there for a short trip?”

What came back was intriguing.

There was apparently a cabin still available for a December cruise around the massive hills of Tierra del Fuego and the literal bottom of the Western Hemisphere. Better still, there was the prospect of having a pint in a pub Vic remembered from the days when he was supporting the Royal Navy with intelligence and data during the Falklands War with the Argies in 1982.

“Time to finish it off?” Vic asked.

Miles observed that it might be useful if Vic could actually walk again first. There was also the small matter of making sure the passports were current before embarking on a December cruise.

And one cabin could get a little lonely if he went by himself.

So Vic suggested using one of the Dailies to float the proposition: perhaps this particular extravagance was worth considering before Christmas.

There is, after all, an irritating blank space on the map.

Deirdre shrugged and offered something that might go well with what she had planned for lunch.