that he was withdrawing permission for the article. He told me so himself.”
Trip was astonished by the unspoken implication. “Why would he change his mind?”
Ellis looked at Meg, who was seated on the bed. “Who knows what he was thinking?”
Trip’s face grew red. “So what are you saying? He wouldn’t give me an interview, so I killed him?”
There was no response. After another moment, when it became clear that no confessions were forthcoming, they turned, almost with relief, to the business of dealing with the body. Ellis went into his cabin and returned with a medical kit, which he used to tape bags over Ray’s hands. When he was done, Stavros wrapped the corpse in a sheet and secured it neatly with nylon cord. Sealing off the stateroom, they carried the body into the galley, where Meg and Dawn had removed the bottles from the wine refrigerator, and laid it snugly inside.
As they were closing the galley door, Trip happened to glance at the rack above the sink, and saw that one of the knives was missing.
Once the body had been stowed, they returned to the salon to debate their next move. The first decision was easy. The
Finally, they raised the issue of the voyage itself. “There’s no way out of it,” Stavros said. “We need to go back. If we make full speed, we can be at Antigua and Barbuda in three days.”
“We would have been done in a few more weeks,” Gary said bitterly. He looked around at the others. “I know we don’t have much of a choice, but after all this is done, I’m coming back to finish the project.”
No one spoke. In the tank, the octopus wound and unwound its arms, glowing softly, like an emblem of death from a medieval painting.
They all spent a restless night. The following morning, Trip was in the salon when he felt a soothing vibration well up through the floor. The engine had started. He was smiling at Meg and Dawn, who seemed equally relieved that they were on their way, when an alarm sounded from the cockpit. A second later, the wailing ceased, and the engine died as well.
Trip went up to the deck, where he found Stavros crouching over the hatch of the engine room, biting his lower lip. A sharp tang of scorched metal wafted up from the engine. “Overheated,” Stavros said tersely, in response to Trip’s question. “We’re taking care of it.”
Kiran, who was examining the engine, stuck his head and shoulders out of the darkened rectangle, a smudge of grease on his face. “It’s the alternator and pump. The belt’s torn to shreds. I’ll need to replace it.”
“How long will that take?” Trip asked, unsettled by the prospect of an engine failure. Although the sloop was perfectly capable of proceeding under sail, the last few days had been windless, and they were weeks away from shore.
Kiran wiped away the grease. “A couple of hours. We’ll need to hold station here.”
Word of their situation spread quickly. After learning what had happened, Ellis announced that he would spend the morning trying to capture a few more octopuses. While examining the octopus that had been caught the day before, he had noticed that one of its arms was missing, apparently severed. “We need a perfect specimen,” Ellis said, as if challenging the others to contradict him. “If we’re stuck here anyway, we may as well make the most of it.”
When no one objected, Ellis and Gary set to work. During the night, the yacht had drifted away from the octopus school, so they took the boat tender. Trip accepted an invitation to come along, glad for an excuse to get away from the yacht, and Meg agreed to join them as well.
They roared off in the tender, the water rising around them in a needlelike spray. The motor was too loud for conversation, but Trip kept a close watch on Meg, who had dark circles under her eyes.
When the tender neared the octopus school, which was visible in faint red patches through the water, Ellis cut the engine. “Gary and I will dive together. You two can wait here.”
Donning their equipment, the two scientists climbed onto the inflatable keel and slid overboard. Trip watched them descend, the sun beating down on the back of his neck, then turned to Meg. “How are you doing?”
“I’ll be all right,” Meg said. The brim of her hat left her face in shadow, but her voice, he noticed, was steady.
As they waited for the others to return, Meg began to take measurements of the water’s temperature and salinity, with Trip helping as best he could. As the minutes ticked by, he tried to steer the conversation toward the other members of the crew. “Ray didn’t seem like a guy who was easy to work with.”
Meg looked back at the yacht, which was holding station seven hundred yards away. “He was used to being right all the time. Ellis couldn’t deal with it. He also thought that he was going to have the chance to conduct his own research, but Ray worked him pretty hard.”
“Ellis seems to think that the octopus school is his last chance for a major discovery.”
“Yes, I know.” Meg hesitated, as if there were something else that she wanted to say. “There was a lot that Ellis didn’t understand. Ray drank too much, and sometimes, when we were alone, he would tell me things—”
Trip sensed that she was on the verge of revealing something important. “What is it?”
“Ray was withholding some of the team’s discoveries. You know how he insisted that Gary process the samples on board the yacht? It was so he could screen the results for genes with commercial potential. If you can find a microbe that makes it easier to produce ethanol, for example, or a luminous microbe like the one he was hoping to find the other night, it would be worth millions.”
“But the whole point of this project was to make the data freely available,” Trip said. “Every gene was going to be made public, right?”
“That’s what Ray claimed. It’s what allowed him to recruit people like Gary. If you ask Gary why he joined the project, he’ll say it was because he believed that genetic research should be as open as possible. But Ray was always driven by profit. He wasn’t about to change his ways.”
Trip could feel the elements of a story assembling themselves in his head. “You seem to know a lot about the science.”
“I spent a year in medical school before I dropped out. I couldn’t stand the dissections.” Meg glanced back at the sloop, which looked like a scale model in the sunlight. “I decided a long time ago that I was going to devote my life to pleasure, not death. For a while, I thought that marrying a rich man was the answer. That’s why I was involved with Ray. Don’t pretend you didn’t know.”
Trip went for the diplomatic response. “I had some idea of what was going on.”
“You and everyone else. I don’t mind. I knew he wasn’t going to marry me.” Meg turned back to Trip. “Maybe it’s better this way. If he’d held back results for commercial reasons, it would have come out sooner or later. Now, instead, he gets to be a martyr. In a way, I’m glad he’s dead.”
Trip tried to cut the tension. “You probably don’t want me writing about this, then.”
Meg didn’t respond. Something in her unsmiling face, which was still in shadow, sent a prickle of nervousness down his spine. Before either of them could speak again, Gary’s gloved hand emerged from the sea, clutching an octopus, which had wound itself around his upper arm. Ellis surfaced a second later, wetsuit glistening, holding an octopus of his own.
“Looks like they’ve got their prizes,” Meg said. She glanced at Trip’s hands. “You’ve been biting your nails. Are you nervous?”
When she looked back up at him, Trip held her gaze. “Not any more than you are.”
They helped Gary and Ellis onto the tender. As they headed back, the octopuses, each in its own bucket, writhed at their feet, curling into defensive balls whenever they were touched. Meg did not speak to Trip again.
When they returned to the sloop, it was already late in the afternoon. Trip was climbing into the dive cockpit when he heard shouts. At the entrance to the engine room, Stavros and Kiran were yelling at each other, and the captain had bitten his own lip out of agitation. “You stupid
Kiran was equally furious. “
“Sabotage?” Trip looked between the two men. “What are you talking about?”
