In the main lab aboard the Phoenix, Carol and Garner watched a small display as the final two tracking devices were activated. The pair of blips representing the Miami whales began sending back information about the animals’ movement. The whales slowly left the floe, broke the surface momentarily, then dived to a depth of forty feet. Within an hour they had joined their three former inmates.
Initially, all five animals stayed within ten miles of the Phoenix.
“Amazing,” Carol said. “I’ve never known blues to exhibit such social behavior.”
“I guess spending a little time in lockup together makes close friends,” Garner said with a smile. “The question is, where are they going to go now?”
“You think they might lead us back to wherever they encountered the contamination?” Carol asked.
“Possibly,” Garner said. “Or maybe they’ll just continue south-out Hudson Strait and into the North Atlantic. In that case, I say we backtrack to the north and sniff around with Medusa.”
“An area like that wouldn’t leave much room for them to move, or breathe. Some areas of North Foxe Basin have complete ice cover for nine months of the year. And Fury and Hecla is only two hundred miles up.”
Fury and Hecla Strait, a narrow waterway separating Melville Peninsula from the western end of Baffin Island, averaged less than four hundred feet in depth and, excluding seasonal ice cover, was just ten miles wide. In this formidable bottleneck for floating ice and the ocean circulation of the Central Arctic, it was easy to imagine the Balaenoptera being similarly inconvenienced.
“My thinking exactly,” Garner said. “If they hit a dead end just north of here, there’s less area for us to search.”
In this case, “less area” still left over thirty thousand square miles of Foxe Basin itself, and Garner knew it. It was, at least, a less daunting search area than anything to the south.
“So we’re really hoping that they ran into this radiation source locally.”
“At the end of a dead-end street, so they’ve been soaking in it,” Garner agreed.
“Then so have we.” Carol looked extremely nervous at such speculation.
“Maybe,” Garner said.
“But the truth is, we may never know where the whales have been.” Even though blue whales were known to revisit the same oceans on a regular basis, no one knew how well defined their migration routes were, or if they truly “migrated” at all. Their “home” range could extend from pole to equator. The vastness of Foxe Basin might look like a teacup in comparison to the area they might have to search.
Looking at the lab samples again, the recently delivered dosimeters provided some more specific and encouraging news, though hardly less disturbing: the younger Balaenoptera possessed the highest levels of contamination, arguing in favor of contamination via recent food intake. That meant that the plankton themselves were irradiated, a speculation that Medusa would soon attempt to resolve with greater clarity.
Junko Kokura arrived that afternoon as the sole passenger of another Canadian Helicopters Sikorsky. Given the recent fracturing of the ice, the helicopter didn’t try to set down on the floe. It descended to within inches of the Phoenix’s helipad, then the doctor scrambled out of the passenger cabin, pulling a large backpack with her. Byrnes had the doctor in the Phoenix’s lab before the sound of the helicopter had even faded into the stillness of the Arctic twilight.
Carol joined them minutes later.
“Welcome, Dr. Kokura,” she said.
“Thank you and please, call me Junko. This place is too cold to be tripping over titles and surnames.”
Carol liked the woman immediately. She was petite, standing just over five feet tall, with a slight build but obviously in good physical health. Her black hair was pulled back from her face and unabashedly streaked with gray. Her eyes were flat and dark, but twinkled with a warmth that suggested a hint of good-natured conspiracy. Her handshake reflected that good nature, as did the way she dipped her head and angled closer, genuinely listening to anyone who spoke to her. Her calm, matter-of-fact manner contained not a trace of impatience; she persistently but politely asked Carol and her technicians questions about what they had seen on the ice. It was indeed a shame that the Balaenoptera had broken free only hours before the doctor’s arrival, but a quick inventory of the blood and tissue samples collected by the Phoenix’s technicians provided much assurance that no empirical stone had been left unturned.
When Junko felt that she had heard enough, she set to work.
“First things first,” she said. “What have you done to keep the outside from getting inside?”
“We’ve closed off all but four hatches,” Byrnes said. “Inside those, like the one you saw, we’ve hung two layers of heavy-gauge plastic sheeting to make a kind of airlock. Inside that, we cleared an area for people to hang their outside clothing.” He added that any hatches leading from the holds into the lower decks of the ship were also temporarily sealed and opened only when absolutely necessary. They had greatly reduced the amount of “threshold activity” by leaving as much regularly used equipment on deck as was possible, even if it meant taking chances with clutter and freezing.
“Excellent,” the doctor replied, “now let’s see if we can rig a second chamber for showering and a place for changes into inside clothing. A regular emergency lab rinse station would be fine, if people don’t mind the chilly water. And we’ll put sentry dosimeters in high traffic areas and inside each ‘airlock’ for people going in or out to check themselves for exposure. Although the air seems pretty clean, I don’t want to take any chances of radioactive dust being tracked into the ship. The food and water should be checked at least twice a day. And no one goes outside without a respirator or a dust mask. Seventy percent of what we can expect will be due to internal exposure to the radioactive material. The external contamination can usually be washed away.”
“Usually?” Byrnes repeated, cocking an eyebrow. “Pardon my French, Doc, but it sounds like you think we may be up to our ears in a good deal of shit here.”
“That’s not exactly my choice of words.” The doctor smiled politely. “But, yes, correct. Until we know more, the level could be higher than our ears.”
“You’re not inspiring us here, Doc,” Byrnes said.
“With radiation it is best not to think in terms of absolute solutions,” Junko countered. “First we have to stem the source and then worry about containing the spill. When it comes to exposure — to us, to the environment, or to your equipment — we will do everything we can under the field radiologist’s mantra of ALARA — as low as reasonably achievable.”
Byrnes seemed rooted to the deck with this news. He was used to managing compromise in any shipboard operation, but “ALARA” seemed disappointingly inconclusive.
Zubov, on the other hand, could not have been more inspired by the doctor’s warning and her matter-of-fact appraisal of the task before them. Given the chance, he’d gladly listen to Dr. Junko Kokura all night.
As the available hours of sunlight slowly increased toward a single, continuous glow, the regularly scheduled meals were the primary means by which the crew of the Phoenix marked the time of day. Food on polar survey vessels, oil rigs, and research cruises is unexpectedly gourmet in its preparation and necessarily ample in its portions. The food not only provides comfort and warmth against the elements, but keeps the crew burning calories. Cooks are often selected from among the more adventurous hotel and restaurant chefs, and the Phoenix was no exception: Carol had personally hired her chefs from the kitchens of Galileo and Lion D’Or in Washington, D.C.” favorite restaurants of hers while she was working as an environmental lobbyist for the Nolan Group.