Last Gasp

never stood a chance. From a bucket seat forward of the cargo compartment in the smooth silver belly of a C-121 Lockheed Super Constellation, Chase gazed down on the swathes of blue and green that marked the varying depths and different currents in the ocean. They were six hours out from Antarctica, with another four to go before landing at Christchurch.

As the aircraft droned on he thought about the dead man, about the piece of paper carefully folded in his diary, about the absorption of carbon dioxide in seawater. But none of it seemed to get him anywhere at all.

2

The research vessel Melville, two days out from San Diego, steamed at quarter speed through the gently rolling Pacific swell. On a towline one hundred yards astern, the RMT (Rectangular Mid- Water Trawl) scooped surface water to a precisely calibrated depth of two meters, capturing the tiny mesopelagic creatures on their upward migration from the middle depths.

Part of the fleet belonging to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Melville was on a shakedown cruise for the Marine Biology Research Division, testing a new type of opening-closing release gear. It was operated from the afterdeck on instructions from the monitoring room amidships, and it was Cheryl Detrick's and Gordon Mudie's task to watch and report on the trawl's performance. After nearly two hours Cheryl was bored to tears. Not so much with deck duty as with Gordon and the fact that despite nil encouragement, he kept coming on strong. He was tall, skinny, with lank mousy hair that straggled in the breeze, and a gaping loose- lipped grin that reminded her of Pluto's. She thought him unattractive and charmless, while he thought he was making a first-rate impression.

Gordon stood by the winch, happy in his ignorance, while Cheryl kept lookout through Zeiss binoculars. Both were graduate students working on a research project for Dr. Margaret Delors, who for ten years or more had been gathering data on the eastern subequatorial Pacific.

'Jeez, it's hot,' Gordon complained, fanning himself and stating the obvious. 'Don't you think so, Sherry?'

Cheryl continued watching the RMT. She hated being called Sherry. 'Release gear open,' she reported into the button mike and received the monitoring room's acknowledgment over the headset. Now another fifteen minutes of Gordon's witty repartee and inane grin. Lord deliver us . . .

Moving to the rail she did a slow sweep of the placid ocean. After a moment she removed the headset and dangled it on a metal stanchion. The breeze ruffled her cropped sun-bleached hair. All through university she'd never cut it once, until it reached her waist, and then a friend had advised her that she really ought to style it to suit her height and figure. Which Cheryl interpreted as meaning that girls of medium stature with big tits looked dumpy with waist-length hair.

Gordon leaned his bony forearms on the rail and beamed at her, full of bright, sincere, lecherous interest. She might have liked him if he hadn't been so damned obvious. He was probably too honest, she reflected. The guys she fancied were devious bastards, some of them real chauvinist pigs at that, which was a trait she didn't admire in herself. But there had to be a physical turn-on, no matter who it was, and Gordon didn't qualify.

'It was your dad, wasn't it, who wrote the book? You're the same Detrick, aren't you?' He was trying manfully to keep the conversation rolling, and Cheryl felt a slight twinge of compassion.

'That's me.' Cheryl smiled. 'The nutty professor's daughter.'

'Somebody told me he could have been really big at Scripps--even the director if he'd wanted--and he just went off into the blue.' Gordon waved his hand. 'An island a zillion miles from nowhere. What made him do it?'

'He hates people,' Cheryl said flippantly. She was tempted to add, 'It runs in the family,' but didn't. Gordon was a pain in the ass, but she didn't want to make a cheap remark for the sake of it.

'Is that right? Does he hate people?' Gordon was giving her his intense moony stare, perhaps hoping he'd discovered a topic of mutual interest.

Cheryl shrugged, scanning the ocean through the binoculars. 'I don't know. To be honest, I don't know him all that well. I get a Christmas card every February and there isn't much room for a life story between the holly and the snow-covered turtles.'

'Jeez, Sherry, you're his daughter. '

'So you keep reminding me, Gordy.'

Gordon mused on this and then came up unaided with the thought for the day. 'They do say that geniuses are very weird people. Not like the rest of us. You know--kinda inhuman, cold, no emotions.'

'I'm sure he'd be thrilled to hear that.'

Gordon was immune to irony. 'Jeez, I'd love to meet somebody like that, Sherry. I bet he's a fascinating guy. I mean to say, the dedication it takes to go off like-that, leaving civilization and all that stuff behind, living purely and simply for your work. That's terrific.'

'Is it?' Cheryl lowered the binoculars and stared at him, her tone sharper than she intended. 'It's terrific to live with relatives for most of your life, being shipped around like a package. To be an orphan when one of your parents is still alive. That really is terrific, Gordy.'

The resentment, the hurt, so long buried, still had a raw edge to it. Especially when dredged up by a casual or thoughtless remark; and Gordon Mudie was an expert in that department.

The bass throb of the engines faltered, missed a beat, and then resumed its pounding rhythm. Cheryl felt the vibrations through her rope-soled sandals. The ship seemed to be laboring. She leaned right over, holding the binoculars aside on their leather strap, and peered down into the churning water.

Normally it was a cream froth. Now it was red, the color of blood.

'Gordon, look at that!'

'feez-uz!'

'What have we hit?'

'Must be a seal. Or a shark, maybe.'

It was neither. Cheryl looked around and discovered that the Melville was afloat on a red ocean. She looked again over the stern and realized that the vessel was struggling to make headway through a thick spongy mass of minute planktonic organisms, which was giving the sea its reddish hue.

There'd been several outbreaks in recent years: vast blooms of the microcellular organism Gymodinium breve had appeared without warning off the coasts of America, India, and Africa. Nobody knew what caused the growth, nor why it suddenly came and went. But the 'red tide' was deadly poisonous, to both fish and man. Millions of dead and decaying fish and other sea creatures had been found off Florida's eastern coast and in the Gulf of Mexico.

She clamped the headset back on and spoke into the mike. 'Monitoring room? We'd better wind in the RMT. We're in the middle of an algae bloom--red stuff, acres of it. 1 think it's the poisonous variety.'

The headset squawked a reply and Cheryl said, 'We're to close the release gear and bring the trawl in.' When Gordon didn't immediately respond, she snapped, 'What are you waiting for? If we pick up any of this crap it'll take days to clean out.'

Gordon backed away from the rail, his high forehead creased in a perplexed frown. 'Where's it come from? There must be tons and tons of the stuff.' Still frowning, he went over to the winch and began winding.

The girl gazed down at the water, mesmerized a little, lost in the illusion that she was on a bridge with a river flowing underneath. Her snub nose with its sprinkle of freckles (the one that Gordon thought was real cute) wrinkled as she caught a whiff of something rotten, and in the churning red wake she saw the white upturned bellies of hundreds of fish. A shoal of poisoned sea bass.

In spite of the warmth of the sun she felt a shiver ripple down her spine. What had caused it? What had gone wrong? A natural ecological foul-up or man-made thermal pollution?

And just imagine, she thought, shuddering, if the bloom kept right on multiplying and spreading and poisoning all the fish. It would eventually take over, filling all the oceans of the world with a stinking red poisonous mess. Every sea creature would die, and the bloom might not stop there--when it had conquered the oceans it would infiltrate the river systems and lakes and streams. It might even gain a roothold on the land. . . .

Cheryl shook herself out of the nightmare. Thank God it was only imagination.

Bill Inchcape--Binch as everyone called him--in short-sleeved shirt and check trousers was seated at the keyboard of the computer terminal in the cavernous air-conditioned basement where DELFI was housed behind hermetically sealed three-inch steel doors. This precaution was less for security reasons than to protect the