Last Gasp

'What's going to happen to him?' Chase wanted to know.

Banting breathed out slowly, controlling his annoyance. 'They're sending a Hercules from McMurdo Sound. So now you know. All right?'

'The Americans?' Chase said. 'Why inform them?'

'Because they have the facilities and we haven't,' said Banting shortly. Professor Ivor Banting was project leader at the station and head of the British Section Antarctic Research Program. More administrator than serious scientist, he commanded little respect from the British contingent. He seemed to be more interested in keeping an eye on the stores' inventory than in conducting research experiments and collecting important data. Chase thought him a typical careerist petty-minded bureaucrat, but just as long as Banting kept out of his way and didn't interfere he was prepared to tolerate the man.

Banting cleared his throat, as he might have done before commencing to lecture to a group of rather obtuse students. 'There's also the matter of security, which I doubt would have occurred to you. The Americans want to know what he was doing here.'

'They don't think he's a spy,' Chase said incredulously, not sure whether he ought to laugh or not. 'We find a man with a broken back on the ice, two thousand miles from nowhere, and the Americans regard him as a security risk!'

But Professor Banting was clearly not in the mood to debate the point. He said crisply, 'As head of the station, Dr. Chase, this is my responsibility. And my decision. The Americans are the right people to deal with it.' He stuck both hands into the pockets of his shapeless tweed jacket in the pose of someone whose patience was rapidly evaporating. 'Now, if you and Dr. Power would be so good as to leave.'

At the door Chase paused and glanced back at the figure on the bed, the black beard enclosing the soundlessly miming lips. Even now a reflex part of his brain was striving to communicate . . . what? What could be so vitally important to him? A simple chemical equation? Chase curled his hand around the piece of paper in his pocket.

'I just hope you know what you're doing, Professor.' His jaw hardened. 'This man is gravely ill. Moving him could be a fatal mistake.'

'Quite so.' Banting turned his back. 'But if so it will be mine and not yours, Dr. Chase.'

Wearing only ragged shorts and a pair of canvas shoes with holes in them, Theo Detrick sat in the stern of a small wooden rowboat in the middle of a placid lagoon, surrounded by a bracelet of dazzling pink coral. He was a shortish, robust man with a boxer's torso and shoulders burned a deep mahogany, and whereas many men his age had thickened and grown slothful, Theo kept to a strict regimen: The discipline of his scientific calling extended into every area of his hermetic life. Beneath a spiky crew cut of snow-white hair his face was grizzled and etched with lines, his eyes of transparent blue screwed up against the brilliant mirror of the lagoon.

Canton Island is the tiniest of a loosely scattered group, the Phoenix Islands, fractionally below the equator, which seem no more than flyblown specks in the vast blue expanse of the tropical Pacific. For Theo Detrick, Canton Island was important precisely because of its location. Nearly twenty years before, at the age of forty, he had come to the island and stayed here, its sole inhabitant. What had begun as a routine research project in marine biology, sponsored by a two-year Scripps Fellowship, had turned into his life work.

Behind the boat trailed a surface-skimming net. Its fine silk mesh had captured a kind of greenish goo, which he was careful not to disturb as he hauled the net over the stern. Later, in his laboratory in the single-story clapboard house, Theo would cut the silk into ten-centimeter squares and examine each one patiently and painstakingly under the microscope. But even with the naked eye the evidence was plain enough--to his practiced eye at any rate. The phytoplankton index was in decline. It was a trend that had been noted in all the oceans of the world, but never plotted so carefully, so thoroughly, over such a long period of time.

The scientist shielded his eyes and looked beyond the coral reef to the open sea, a thousand glittering facets in the unbroken arc of blue.

It was out there, in the narrow belt along the equator, that the upwelling of colder water brought with it a rich soup of microorganisms from the ocean depths. These were the countless billions of minute unicellular planktonic algae that formed the staple diet of most fish. Important too in that a significant proportion of the world's constantly replenished oxygen supply came from these tiny free-floating plants.

Like all green plants they absorbed the energy of the sun and by means of photosynthesis converted water into its constituent parts of hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen they used to produce carbohydrates for their own needs, dumping the oxygen as a waste product into the atmosphere.

But what was 'waste' to the plants was vital to all animal life on the planet.

There wasn't any man living who knew as much about this microscopic form of marine life as he did. His book on the subject, nine years in the writing and published a decade ago, was now regarded as the standard text. From the royalties and the grant he still received from Scripps, he was able to continue his research--though he guessed that at the institute he existed merely as an entry on the accounts department balance sheet. 'Old Theo? Thought he was dead.' He visited the mainland once, at the most twice, a year, so he couldn't blame them. His wife had died fourteen years ago. His daughter, Cheryl, herself a postgraduate at the institute, must have felt she was corresponding with a distant relative--a stranger even--when they exchanged their brief, polite letters.

He rowed back to the jetty, the oars smooth in his leathery palms. The years of isolation had bred in him a fear and distrust of the outside world. By choice he would have preferred to be left alone on his island. He wanted nothing more than to work at what he knew best, at the subject to which he had devoted the greater part of his working life.

But--the question--what good was that work, that research, all that dedication, if not used for the benefit of mankind? He had a duty not only to himself. He was a forgotten man, wouldn't have had it any other way, but the time had come to consider other things. For the past two years, he realized, he had tried to deny the truth. Yet daily he saw the truth, and it was inescapable. It was building up, sheet after written sheet, graph after graph, in the mass of notes lying between mildewed green covers on his workbench. He couldn't afford to ignore it any longer.

Who would pay heed to a forgotten man? Theo wondered, holding the skimming net in one hand while he pulled himself up with the other. Especially the apocalyptic warning of a lone scientist, long vanished from civilization? A crank? Deranged? Old Theo? Thought he was dead.

He went up the beaten path to the house, knowing what had to be done. Like a fire-and-brimstone prophet of ancient times, he was about to preach death and destruction. His sermon concerned nothing less than the end of the world.

Nick Power lounged back in the canvas chair, his calf-length combat boots with the thick-ridged soles propped on the corner of the trestle table. 'The guy's off his rocker, Gav, we both know that.'

'No, we don't. Feverish, yes, and in pain, probably drugged up to the eyeballs, but he was definitely trying to tell us something.'

'Okay,' Nick agreed charitably. 'What, for instance?'

'I don't know,' Chase said.

'Because it didn't mean anything. An elementary equation that can be found in any third-year chemistry textbook. He was deluded, babbling nonsense. Something he'd learned as a peasant back in Vladivostok.'

Chase gazed thoughtfully across the small cluttered messroom with its half-dozen late diners idling over coffee. The others had retired to the rec room along the corridor to play cards or chess, or have a game of table tennis on the battered table supported by packing cases. Some would be straining to hear whatever English- language broadcast they could pick up on shortwave--if the ionospheric storms didn't give total radio blackout, likely with the approaching winter.

It was the comfortable hour of the evening, the station battened down against the searing wind and cold and dark. Primeval man seeking the shelter of the cave, the warmth of companionship in a hostile environment.

'When are they transferring him to McMurdo?' asked Nick, hands behind his head.

'Tomorrow. The Hercules is due in at fourteen hundred hours.'

Nick perked up. 'Wowie! If Doug Thomas is flying her we could have a fresh supply of Red. That's made my day,' he said happily.

'I won't be around to smoke it with you,' Chase reminded him. 'You can blast off into outer space all on your own.'