fifty cents a sample. She switched out the lights. To do the same with
a gas spectroscope would have cost almost ten thousand dollars and taken
a highly specialized team two weeks of hard work. It's a hell of a
trick/ Nicholas told her. You're a clever lady - I'm impressed, I
really am. At the psychedelic Chevy van she stopped him, and in the
light of the street lamp looked up at him guiltily.
Do you mind if I show you off, Nicholas? What does that mean? he asked
suspiciously.
The gang are eating shrimps tonight, Then they'll sleep over on the boat
and have the first shot at fish tagging tomorrow - but we don't have to
go. We could just get some more steaks and another jug of wine. But he
could see she really wanted to go.
She was fifty -five foot, an old purse-seiner with the ungainly
wheelhouse forward looking like a sentry box or an old-fashioned pit
latrine. Even with her coat of new paint, she had an old-fashioned
look.
She was tied up at the end of the University jetty, and as they walked
out to her, so they could hear the voices and the laughter coming up
from below decks.
Tricky Dicky/Nicholas read her name on the high ugly rounded stern.
But we love her/ Samantha said, and led him across the narrow, rickety
gangplank. She belongs to the University.
She's only one of our four research vessels. The others are all fancy
modern ships, two-hundred-footers, but the Dicky is our boat for short
field trips to the gulf or down the Keys, and she's also the faculty
clubhouse. The main cabin was monastically furnished, bare planking and
hard benches, a single long table, but it was as crowded as a
fashionable discotheque, packed solid with sunburned young people, girls
and boys all in faded jeans and tee-shirts, impossible to judge sexes by
clothing or by the length of their sun-tortured and wind-tangled hair.
The air was thick with the rich smell of broiling gulf shrimps and
molten butter, and there were gallon jugs of California wine on the
table.
Hey! Samantha shouted above the uproar of voices raised in heated
dispute and jovial repartee. This is Nicholas. A comparative silence
descended on the gathering, and they looked him over with the curious
veiled group hostility of any tribe for an interloper, an intruder in a
closed and carefully guarded group. Nick returned the scrutiny calmly,
met each pair of eyes, while realizing that despite the affected
informality of their dress and some of the wildly unkempt hairstyles and
the impressive profusion of beards, they were an elite group. There was
not a face that was not intelligent, not a pair of eyes that was not
alert and quick, and there was that special feeling of pride and self
confidence in all of them.
At the head of the table sat a big impressive figure, the oldest man in
the cabin, perhaps Nick's age or a little older, for there were silver
strands in his beard and his face was lined and beaten by sun and wind
and time.
Hi, Nick, he boomed. I won't pretend we've never heard of you.
Sam has given us all cauliflower ears You cut that out, Tom Parker/
