“I wonder if this is how a pod of tagged whales feels,” someone remarked. For now, every one of them was immersed in the same tragic situation, and all — at least as far as their badges were concerned — remained in good health with minimal exposure.
In the end, every one of them resolved to stay with the ship to the end of the cruise and returned immediately to duty.
Garner and Zubov replaced the sampling bottles on Medusa and recalibrated her thermometers, salinometers, and light meters. Once again. Medusa was hoisted high on the A-frame, then swung back and down into the wake of the Phoenix as the ship’s diesel engines grumbled to life. The sphere disappeared beneath the waves and was guided back on its tow wire to a depth of twenty meters. The onboard radiation meters responded almost immediately, rising to indicate the highly elevated radiation levels the crew had come to expect in the surface current.
“This isn’t going to last for long,” Zubov said. “There’s so much radiation in the water, it’s frying the probes in the gamma specs.” The probes’ manufacturer had not anticipated — had never even imagined — the need to measure such intense levels of radiation.
“Then we’ll order more,” Garner said.
Zubov looked at him dubiously.
“Would that be a catalog order or the Internet, sir? Priority Mail or Fedex?”
Silently, a hundred questions roiled inside Garner.
“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it” was all he said.
“All right, but believe me, we’re gonna come to it,” Zubov said.
The Phoenix headed west, following the current upstream. As Medusa dutifully relayed information from the water column below, Garner called minor course corrections up to the bridge. In this manner, the Phoenix managed to track the hot water like an iron-hulled bloodhound with its sensitive, very expensive nose trailing behind on an electronic leash. The temperature anomaly in the water column persisted and the radiation levels continued to rise. Twice the sampler had to be retrieved so that Garner could recalibrate or replace the spectrometers, which continued to respond erratically to the intense bombardment of radiation.
By the time Medusa had been retrieved for a third time that afternoon, the patience of Zubov and the deck crew was beginning to wear. Each retrieval, they knew, wasted valuable time and forced the Phoenix to slow her progress, at least temporarily. They had run out of clean sampling bottles and were beginning to reuse some of the less contaminated ones. More significantly, the absorbed radiation levels which now approached a whopping twenty grays in spots were interfering with the electronics of Medusa’s cameras. Unless the optics on the sampler were overhauled soon, there was a chance she would have to fly blind.
After a further inspection of the problem, Zubov estimated that it would be hours before the sphere was ready to be deployed again.
“Goddammit,” Zubov said. “I hate it when I’m right.” Which is most of the time, if any one’d bother to listen, he thought.
“Do what you can,” Garner said. He was just as annoyed, but knew there was no point in exacerbating the situation.
“We’re falling behind on the wet samples anyway.” By Zubov’s most optimistic estimate, Garner would have at least the rest of the day to work in the lab, so he and Byrnes set up a series of processing stations and put the Phoenix’s technicians to work.
“Wet samples” referred to the water sampled directly by Medusa’s automated Nansen bottles. Even with modern technology, bottles were the principal means by which oceanographers sampled and determined the chemical and biological properties of the sea. Modern methods and instrumentation had greatly streamlined and foreshortened this process. Medusa, for instance, could determine more about “the state of the sea” in a single tow than a small army of laboratory technicians could in a week’s time. Still, the wet samples collected in Medusa’s gullet required analysis, if only to confirm what the various probes, particle counters, and cameras were describing digitally.
Over the next several hours, as the samples were processed and identified, Garner gradually developed a catalog of plankton species and a rough map of population densities for several of the main zooplankton groups. Encouragingly, the radiation appeared to be doing little to reduce the plankton’s density or the species’ apparent vitality. The lack of effect on these entry-level members of the marine food web, however, could not be assumed of the higher-order organisms that fed on them. As the Balaenoptera, the arctic fisheries, and even the men of the Explorer had shown, the lethal effects of the radiation could silently accumulate in the tissues of higher organisms, with devastating consequences.
Garner switched from counting and sorting Medusa’s zooplankton samples and set up the Phoenix’s fluorescent microscope. Housed inside a small black tent to block outside light, the ingenious instrument revealed microscopic organisms — bacteria, virus particles, and other cell constituents — when they were treated with specialized dyes that glowed brilliantly under ultraviolet light. This particular scope could reveal the presence of organisms less than one ten-thousandth of an inch in diameter, far too small to be caught by any net or tracked by submersible cameras.
For the next two hours, Garner moved quickly through a dozen or so samples decanted from Medusa’s water bottles. Once again, the bacterial levels Garner found were not at all inconsistent with “clean” samples from outside the water heated by the reaction of the radionuclides. What caught his eye was a particular bacterium he had never seen before.
Garner racked the microscope to its maximum magnification and focused on a single group of the mysterious cells. What first called it to his attention was the unusual way in which it had taken up the bright acridine orange, a staining compound of zinc chloride that targeted the fats of bacterial cells and made them glow orange under the fluorescent light. The unusual-looking cells easily constituted the majority of the bacteria in the last case of samples.
Backtracking over all the samples he had processed so far, Garner saw that the abundance of the bacterium corresponded to the highest levels of radionuclides in solution. The strange visitor not only tolerated the radiation in which it was forced to live, but apparently thrived in it.
Garner was not on a first-name basis with the bacteria of the polar oceans — hardly anyone was. Except among marine microbiologists, bacteria were typically an assumed-but-ignored constant in water samples, as even the best instruments remained myopic to much of the submicroscopic world. Further, while most researchers were aware of bacteria’s ubiquitous presence, few possessed the patience or interest to decant the cells from the larger samples, rear them in some growth medium in the laboratory, then identify the resulting homogenous cultures. No, the presence of some unknown bacterium in Medusa’s sample bottles was not surprising — that there was suddenly so much of it was.
Garner stooped and looked again into the microscope. What the hell could it be?
“Thiobacillus ferrooxidans,” Junko said confidently. The species name slipped from the doctor’s tongue as though it had been well practiced.
She studied the plated culture under the fluorescent microscope a moment longer.