picture when he heard the clang of footsteps overhead. Someone was climbing down the ladder.
“Mind if I join you?” The voice took him by surprise. Turning, he saw a pair of feminine legs enter his field of vision. When the woman had descended all the way, he saw that it was Meg, the ship’s stewardess and deckhand.
“Not at all,” Trip said, unsure of how to react. Meg was trim but shapely, with short dark hair and a patrician nose. From the moment of their first meeting, she had struck him as the sort of young woman who is perfectly aware of the power that she possesses, as well as the fact that it will not last forever. Among other things, although the relationship was not openly acknowledged, everyone on the yacht knew that Meg spent most of her nights in Ray Wiley’s stateroom.
“I came to see what all the excitement was about,” Meg said, spreading herself across the mattress pad. “Amazing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.” Trip turned back to the window. They lay side by side, not speaking, as the lights drifted past them in glowing bands. He gradually became aware that Meg’s leg was pressing pleasantly against his own.
A moment later, a diver appeared in the circle of sea disclosed by the largest porthole. It was Ray. As he passed the observation chamber, he turned toward the window, the beam of his flashlight slicing through the water. Through the mask, it was hard to see his face, but his eyes seemed fixed on theirs.
At his side, Trip felt Meg stiffen. Rolling onto her back, she took hold of the nearest rung and went up the ladder without a word. Trip did not move. He remained eye to eye with the diver on the other side of the window, the octopuses forgotten, until Ray finally turned and swam away.
The following morning, when Trip went on deck, he found Ray standing in the dive cockpit with Ellis and Gary. An awning had been erected over the aft deck, shielding it from the sun, but it was still hot enough for the men to strip down to shorts and sandals as they took a sample of seawater, a ritual performed once a day, every two hundred miles, as the
In the water around the yacht swam countless octopuses, their luminescence muted in the daylight. Ellis leaned over the railing. “What’s the line in Tennyson?
“
Taking a seat, he watched as a hinged arm with a pump on one end was lowered five feet below the surface. After the temperature and salinity had been recorded, fifty gallons of water were pumped into a plastic drum, passing through a series of increasingly fine filters. The process took about an hour. As they waited, Gary engaged in a friendly contest with Kiran, the yacht’s first mate, to see who would be first to catch an octopus. Gary had floated a baited trap out to sea on a cable, while Kiran, tan and muscular, was taking a more active approach, which he claimed to have learned in the Canary Islands. It involved a hooked rod and a red rag tied to a stick, and did not, at first glance, seem especially effective.
As Ellis and Ray stowed their equipment, they picked up the thread of what seemed to be an ongoing debate. “We need to stay here,” Ellis said. “If we leave now, we’ll be giving up the chance of a lifetime.”
“The chance of your lifetime, not mine,” Ray said, rinsing himself off in the cockpit shower. “We’re already running behind schedule. If we stay here much longer, we won’t make it to the Galapagos as planned.”
“Then we need to push back the deadline. This is a new species. Only one other variety of luminescent octopus has ever been described—”
“Take a specimen, then. I’ve already asked Kiran to put together a couple of tanks.”
“A few specimens won’t be enough,” Ellis argued. “We’re seeing extraordinary collective behaviors here. Octopuses aren’t supposed to travel in schools, and at this distance from shore, they live well below the waterline. Something is causing them to appear in groups on the surface. We need to find out why.”
Ray turned to Trip, the beads of water standing out on his face. “Are you getting all this? Ellis thinks that science can only take place in a bathysphere. He can’t accept that a new kind of octopus isn’t going to change the world.”
“It may not change the world,” Trip said carefully, “but it’s something that a lot of people would like to see.”
“I agree,” Ellis said. “If anything, it would enhance the reputation of this project.”
Ray shook his head, dislodging a cascade of drops. “You’re missing the point. In the sample of water we’ve taken today, we’re going to find a thousand new species of microbe, if not more.” He turned to Trip. “With every sample we analyze, we double the number of genes previously known from all species across the planet. It’s the first time that modern sequencing methods have been applied to an entire ecosystem. I don’t see how an octopus is any more important than this.”
“It isn’t a question of importance,” Ellis said impatiently. “It’s a question of—”
“Even now, nobody really knows what the ocean contains,” Ray continued, still looking at Trip. “Every milliliter of seawater contains a million bacteria and ten million viruses. Until I came along, nobody had tried to analyze the ocean with the same thoroughness that had been applied to the human genome. When we’re done, the results will be available to everyone, free of charge, with no strings attached. That, my friends, is what will enhance our reputation. Not a glowing octopus.”
He turned to look at Gary, who was seated on the transom, clutching the cable of his octopus trap. “As I see it, there are two approaches to science. You can lunge after something with a rag on a stick, like Kiran, or you can bait a trap and see what floats by. It’s less glamorous, maybe, but in the long run—”
Ray was interrupted by an excited shout. At the other end of the sloop, Kiran had caught an octopus on the end of his hook, and was lifting it carefully out of the water. As Kiran dropped the octopus into the bucket at his feet, Trip saw a handful of arms writhing uselessly in the open air.
Ellis turned to Ray. “What were you saying about the two approaches to science?”
Ray forced his face into a grin, then turned to the first mate. “Kiran, think you can catch a few more of these monsters?”
“Not a problem,” Kiran said, climbing into the cockpit. “How many do you want?”
“As many as you can get,” Ray said. “We’re having octopus for dinner tonight.”
An embarrassed silence ensued. Kiran gave them all an uneasy smile, then headed below. After a pause, Ray turned to Ellis. “All right. We’ll hold station for one more day. You should be satisfied with this.”
“Fine,” Ellis said, although he was obviously displeased. “I’ll do what I can.”
The two scientists went their separate ways. A few minutes later, when the filtering process was complete, Gary unscrewed a set of steel plates and used tweezers to fish out the filters inside. Each filter, the size of a vinyl record album, had been stained various shades of brown, as the microbes were captured in paper of decreasing porousness. “I’m sorry you had to see that,” Gary said to Trip, sliding the filters into plastic bags. “Those two don’t always see eye to eye—”
“What about you?” Trip asked, helping him pack up the morning’s sample. “Do you think we should stay longer?”
Gary headed for the companionway. “Ray pays my salary, which doesn’t make me a disinterested observer. The fact is, I love both of those guys, but Ellis is just as ambitious as Ray is. He’s better at hiding it, that’s all.”
He disappeared down the stairs. As the day wore on, Trip caught occasional glimpses of Gary in the wet lab across from the salon. Through the laboratory window, Trip saw him sterilize a pair of shears with a blowtorch and slice each filter in two, one half to be frozen for later analysis, the other to be sequenced aboard the yacht itself. Aside from the time spent gathering each day’s water sample, Gary spent most of his time in the lab, dissolving the filters and analyzing the resultant genetic material, which meant that he was the only crew member without a tan.
Trip took a seat in the salon, where the captured octopus had been installed in a plastic tank. Since his arrival, he had been struck by the demands being made of the scientific team. Sequencing the genes of all the organisms in a random sample of seawater was an incredibly complicated process, akin to assembling a thousand jumbled jigsaw puzzles. Normally, most of the analysis would have taken place on shore, but Ray, hoping to save time, had insisted that it occur on the sloop itself. Several competing efforts to sequence marine ecosystems were currently underway, and Ray had become obsessed with concluding the project before the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth, which was in less than three weeks.
