Last Gasp

trembling bosom. 'You know my name. What's yours?'

The girl said she was called Jill, touched his glass with hers, and drank.

'Swell party,' he said benignly, grimacing with pleasure as the whiskey warmed his gut. Angie was right. For three months he'd been completely absorbed in his work and it was high time he got smashed. The mood beckoned to him like a seductive lover.

'You really think so?'

'Definitely. Plenty of excellent free Scotch and attractive company.'

'I thought Arctic explorers were supposed to be shy.'

'That wasn't a proposition.'

'Wasn't it? Oh, what a pity.' She pouted coquettishly and he wasn't sure whether she was being serious or pulling his leg. 'You fit the description, anyway. My illusions haven't been shattered.'

'What description?' Chase said, having lost the drift.

'For Arctic explorers. Tall, dark, and handsome.'

Was she being serious?

'I suppose Glaswegian spot-welders are short, fat, and hairy,' he said.

'What?'

'Private joke. You work in television, I suppose.'

'I'm a PA. Production assistant.'

Chase had only a vague idea what that was.

Jill explained. 'I do the running around, getting everything organized. We move about a lot, news, current affairs, documentaries, local programs. PAs are the gofers of the television industry. Without us it would collapse.'

Chase had never thought of television as an industry. Its product seemed so ephemeral. In one eye and out the other.

'What do you do when you're not exploring?' she asked him.

'I'm in the marine biology department at the university. At the moment I'm classifying some specimens I brought back from the Antarctic. Microscopic plant life.' Chase waved his hand dismissively. 'Not very interesting to the layman, I'm afraid. Or the laywoman, for that matter.'

'Plankton?' Jill said. She gave him a look. 'I may get my continents mixed up, but I'm not completely stupid.'

'Well, 'plankton' is a general term for all floating plant and animal life in the seas and rivers. My speciality is Halosphaera, Phaeocystis, silicoflagellates, and Bacillariophyceae. ' That'd teach her to be such a smart ass.

But apparently that hadn't dampened her interest, for she asked him to tell her more about them, which Chase found difficult. The alcohol didn't help. To simplify it, he said, 'They form the basic diet for most fish-- phytoplankton, that is, the plant forms. If you look at a pond you'll see the bottom carpeted with the stuff, with millions of tiny silver bubbles clinging to it. That's oxygen, which phytoplankton releases after splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. They're a very primitive organism, been around for, oh, two thousand million years or more. But for the phytoplankton we wouldn't be having this conversation.'

'Why, are they that important?'

'You have to breathe, don't you?'

'That's where we get our oxygen from?'

Chase nodded. 'There wasn't any around to begin with. Most people think it's always been a constituent of the atmosphere, but when the planet was formed the atmosphere was highly poisonous--to us, that is. Mainly hydrogen, ammonia, and methane. Then the early primitive forms of algae came along and started releasing oxygen, which eventually formed the ozone layer, protecting the early animal life from ultraviolet radiation. So it does two crucial jobs: gives us oxygen to breathe and prevents us from frying.'

Jill looked thoughtful for a moment. 'I always had the idea that the trees did that--gave us oxygen. You know, all this fuss about the rain forests in South America and Southeast Asia. They're destroying millions of acres and burning them, which apparently does something to the climate.'

'That's true. All green plants take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, but the best estimates we have suggest that the phytoplankton in the oceans provides roughly seventy percent of the recycled oxygen.

Sure, the trees are important, but if we didn't have phytoplankton there wouldn't have been any trees in the first place.'

'It isn't dull at all,' Jill said reprovingly. 'Why do you pretend it is?'

'Do I?' Chase shrugged. He swirled his whiskey, making the ice cubes clink. 'I suppose it's because most people never give a second thought to the way the biosphere works. They just take it for granted. They don't understand that the whole bag of tricks depends on microscopic plant life, so when you start talking about it they just turn glassy-eyed and drop into a doze. You have to be a genius like David At-tenborough to make them see and understand.'

'What about Sir Frederick Cole?'

'What about him?'

'You've heard of him, I take it?'

There was a gleam in her brown eyes and an underlying hint of mockery in her tone, as if it were his turn to be patronized. He chided himself for taking Jill at his own estimation--a shallow media person, all mouth and trousers--when clearly she had more up top.

'He was one of my lecturers at Cambridge. We used to call him 'Firebrand Fred.' '

'You actually know him then? He's coming into the studio next week to give a talk for a schools program. We're taping it next Wednesday afternoon and I'm the gofer.'

'I should think he'd be rather good on the telly,' Chase said, thinking about it. 'Blunt northern humor, straight from the shoulder. An instant TV guru.'

Jill laughed. 'We've made him buy a new suit. He turned up at the office wearing a pullover with holes in it and the crotch of his trousers somewhere level with his kneecaps. If I hadn't met him at the station I don't think the doorman would have let him into the building. 'Firebrand Fred,' ' she said, giggling. 'That suits him. I'll call him that next time I see him.'

'Feel free,' Chase said darkly, 'but don't mention my name. What's he going to be talking about?'

'It's one of a series of programs dealing with different aspects of aquatic life in English lakes and rivers. How plants and animals adapt to their particular environments. I wasn't involved in the filming, just the linking sequences in the studio.'

It occurred to Chase that if he wanted to pick someone's brains about C0₂ absorption in seawater, he couldn't do better than Sir Fred.

He'd earned his knighthood for impressive research work in the sixties and early seventies and was still regarded as one of the top three people in the field, even though he'd given up the lab bench for the lecture platform.

'Would it be possible to meet him while he's here?'

'Yes, I don't see why not.' Jill gave a slow, lingering wink. 'You could meet me at the same time. Why not come to the studio on Wednesday? I'm sure Firebrand would be delighted to meet one of his old students.'

'What time?'

'He'll be arriving about one and will probably have lunch in the canteen. We're in the studio at two-thirty and we'll be through by four or soon after. After would be better, I think. He'll be fidgeting with notes and things before the recording.'

'Late afternoon suits me better too,' Chase said.

'What is it, something to do with your work? Or a reunion?'

'More of a general problem really.' Chase stroked his jaw. 'A small matter of marine chemistry.'

Jill pointed at his empty glass. 'That looks like a small matter of alcohol deficiency. Can I get you another?'

Chase thanked her in advance and gave up his glass. Angie strolled up, her long hollow cheeks flushed, arms linked with Archie Grieve. He wondered again about her fidelity, or lack of it. Or was he being provincial and boorish? He suspected that Jill had been making gentle fun of him and was surprised to find that he rather enjoyed