“Let’s call it a day,” Krail said into his microphone. “Tomorrow we’ll load the JIM suits into the Hawkbill and move a little closer to the Scorpion site.” Even as he made the suggestion, he regretted it. Scorpion’s wreck site was even less likely to show any results. Not only was the location under the same watchful cloak as B-82’s hidden sonar arrays, but the kind of radionuclides being reported by the Phoenix could not have come from the buried submarine.
There was no other explanation except that the pit was leaking, and until they found out where, people would continue to die.
Krail shivered inside the clammy confines of the submarine. He switched off the chatter of the JIM divers returning to the surface, then toggled the joystick controls of the Sea Sprite, angling the tiny submersible upward.
As he approached the surface, the water around him began to lighten with muted daylight and the ghostly blue glow of the ice. He was exhausted, but tried to prolong his last few moments of privacy anyway.
Too soon he would be back on the topsides and back in the tank, trying to convince the same belligerent audience that there was a deadly problem here, somewhere, to be addressed.
14
The Phoenix’s outbound personnel were ferried to the Hall Beach NORAD station, where they transferred to a Canadair CC-144 Challenger jet.
The jet took the group southeast to Gander, Newfoundland, for connecting flights, then delivered Garner and Junko to Halifax, Nova Scotia — all told, nearly nineteen hundred miles. As they traveled south, the drifting white patches of ice and snow gradually gave way to cobalt blue ocean, the surf swirling endlessly against the blunt, scarred cliff faces that made up the Canadian Maritimes. Moving over Cape Breton Island and the mainland of Nova Scotia, Junko thought that the windswept, granitic plateaus of Nova Scotia seemed even less hospitable than the icy waters of the North Atlantic. The area would be among the first to suffer massive radioactive contamination if Garner’s plan failed.
From the air, the city of Halifax was immediately recognizable. The port city of 150,000 was nestled into a steep hillside beneath the Citadel, a nineteenth-century stone fort. Stretching outward from a gleaming, modern downtown core, boxy wooden homes, canning factories, and assorted other buildings that had supported the once robust fishing and whaling industry had weathered and crumbled. Through the mist, row upon row of somber, black windows faced the sea, anticipating a return to prosperity as mournfully as a lover awaits the return of a sailor.
Garner was the first to climb out of the Challenger as it landed at CFB Shearwarer, across the harbor from the city.
“I think I’ve racked up enough frequent-flier miles this month for a free trip to the moon,” he said, hefting his two cases of samples with him.
“Business class,” Junko agreed.
“Shaken, not stirred.”
They were met by the duty officer, who escorted them across the rain-soaked tarmac to a waiting van. A driver took them across the harbor into Halifax, then down Oxford Street to the campus of Dalhousie University, which was nearly deserted during the annual break between the spring and summer semesters. The van deposited Garner and Junko in front of the life-sciences building and the two travelers made their way to the top-floor office and laboratory of Roland Alvarez.
Although Alvarez’s phytoplankton lab was well known throughout their particular corner of academe, Garner and Alvarez had never met, except for brief nods of recognition at phycological conferences and society meetings. In part, this was because of the disparity in their respective avenues of research: Garner’s Medusa sphere sought to reduce the need for hands-on identification of plankton samples, while Alvarez’s work delved into the classical realms of meticulous cataloging and illustration. Each field needed the other to comprehend the whole.
Alvarez welcomed his visitors into his cluttered office, stacked high with manila folders, student papers, and research journals. The professor’s midriff sagged a bit more than Garner remembered, and his wiry hair had grown a little thinner and grayer. Alvarez’s sharp, twinkling eyes, however, reflected a mind still passionately engaged in the pursuit of science. Though on the verge of retirement, the professor still wrote or co authored a dozen research papers each year, supplementing these with numerous conference presentations and the production of a ceaseless stream of eminently qualified botany graduates from his modest laboratory. As an ever-increasing number of prospective students were wooed by high-tech careers in biochemistry and genetics, the shortage of classically trained archivists, taxonomists, and systematists big-picture researchers was in danger of undermining the entire foundation of biological science. Alvarez seemed to take tremendous pride in championing these nearly forgotten but essential avenues of study.
During what should have been the pastoral twilight of his career, the quality and quantity of Alvarez’s work seemed to be reaching a flourish. As evidence of this, ranks of two-hundred-gallon tanks occupied every available square foot in his lab. Dozens of meticulous drawings of algae and bacterial cells were tacked up everywhere in a kind of two-dimensional museum of the unicellular world.
Garner knew that several facilities around the world had been established to catalog and archive phytoplankton species — in fact, he liberally borrowed from many of them in identifying his own samples. He knew that most stock cultures were limited to a single test tube or a flask or two of each species that could be decanted or purchased for comparison with field samples of indeterminate species composition.
Alvarez’s lab, however, had taken this methodology to the extreme, harboring large, beautifully homogeneous cultures of the most dominant algae in the North Atlantic. Cultured in this way, the specimens could be provided to fish farms or other researchers doing large-scale comparative studies.
“The untimely death of tenure and the attrition of the department here are unfortunate,” Alvarez admitted, “but they haven’t hurt me. As long as I remain willing to take on graduate students, and to keep publishing, the physical plant keeps tearing down walls from the empty laboratories around us and letting me expand my space.”
Alvarez then gave Garner and Junko a brief tour, pointing out the location of necessary bench equipment and laboratory supplies. He paused several times to address one culture or another as it floated in the large seawater tanks, discussing the merits or limits of each for the task at hand. He also showed his guests a side room containing a large, broken-down sofa and a folding Army cot.
“It’s nothing fancy,” he apologized, “but you won’t waste any time commuting and you can’t beat the price.”
He switched topics back to Garner’s task.
“It occurs to me,” Alvarez speculated, “that you need an alga that not only grows extremely well on ice, but also has a remarkably fast metabolism and the ability to reproduce rapidly perhaps more rapidly than any culture we know of.”
“The conditions will be light-saturated, but the species can’t rely on photosynthesis alone,” Garner said. “We need to create a large-scale, fast-acting uptake of the contaminated bacteria.”
Garner was especially interested in ice algae, phytoplankton species that like countless microbes thrived in the thin liquid interface between sea ice and the water supporting it. Such species had adapted to subsist in semi-insulated areas of constant movement and very little direct sunlight — fatal conditions for most true plants. Growing in thin, fibrous strands on the underside of floe ice, certain species of algae used any firmament they could find to photosynthesize, grow, and reproduce. So tenacious was the attachment of these algae to the ice that many species could only be isolated by filtering the cells from meltwater.