wholesale, the completely abandoned happiness that was the special
miracle called Samantha Silver.
Samantha's laboratory was a square room, built on piles over the water,
and the soft hum of the electric pumps blended with the slap of the
wavelets below and the burble and blurp of the tanks.
This is my kingdom/ she told him. And these are my subjects. There were
almost a hundred tanks, like the small glass-sided aquaria for goldfish,
and suspended over each of them was a complicated arrangement of coils
and bottles and electric wiring.
Nick sauntered across to the nearest of the tanks and peered into it. It
contained a single large salt-water clam; the animal was feeding with
the double shells agape, the pink soft flesh and frilly gills rippling
and undulating in the gentle flow of pumped and filtered sea water. To
each half of the shell, thin copper wires were attached with blobs of
polyurethane cement.
Samantha came to stand beside him, touching, and he asked her/What's
happening? She touched a switch and immediately the cylindrical scroll
above the tank began to revolve slowly and a stylus, after a few
preliminary jerks and quivers, began to trace out a regular pattern on
the paper scroll, a trough and double peak, the second a fraction lower
than the first, and then the trough again.
She said, He's wired and bugged. You're a member of the CIA/he accused.
And she laughed. His heart-beat. I'm passing an electric impulse
through the heart - the heart is only a millimetre across - but each
spasm changes the resistance and moves the stylus. She studied the
curve for a moment. This fellow is one very healthy cheerful Spisula
solidissima. Is that his name? Nick asked. I thought he was a clam.
One of fifteen thousand bivalves who use that common generic/ she
corrected I had to pick an egghead/ said Nicholas ruefully. But what's
so interesting about his heart? It's the closest and cheapest thing to
a pollution metre that we have discovered so far - or rather, she
corrected herself without false modesty, that I have discovered. She
took his hand and led him down the long rows of tanks. They are
sensitive, incredibly sensitive to any contamination of their
environment, and the heart-beat will register almost immediately any
foreign element or chemical, organic or otherwise, in such low
concentrate that it would take a highly trained specialist with a
spectroscope to detect otherwise. Nicholas felt his mild attention
changing and growing into real interest as Samantha began to prepare
samples of common pollutants on the single bench against the fore-wall
of the cluttered little laboratory.
Here/ she held up one test tube, aromatic carbons, the more poisonous
elements of crude petroleum - and here' she indicated the next tube,
mercury in a concentration of 100 parts to the million. Did you see the
photographs of the human vegetables and the Japanese children with the
flesh falling off their bones at Kiojo? That was mercury.
Lovely stuff. She picked up another tube. PCB, a by-product of the
electrical industry, the Hudson River is thick with it. And these,
tetrahydrofurane, cyclohexane, methylbenzene - all industrial
by-products but don't let the fancy names throw you. One day they will
