“Don’t bother to roll out the red carpet on our account,” Garner said, angry sarcasm masking his concern. “Where the hell is everybody?”
“Crew meeting,” Oliphant grumbled, jerking a thumb toward the ship then helping with their packs. “Carol wanted to give all of us a refresher course in rad safety.”
Oliphant looked guiltily at Junko.
“We, uh, had an exposure.”
The doctor’s eyes grew wide.
“An exposure! Who?”
“Susan Conant,” Oliphant said. “She just stuck her hand out in front of the dosimeter in the lab the sentry doodad, like we’re supposed to and it set off the alarm.”
“What about her badge, didn’t it show?”
“She wasn’t wearing it, I guess,” Oliphant admitted. “Like I said, Carol figured we could all use a reminder.”
“My God,” Junko said. She wasn’t certain whether she was more concerned that there had been an exposure or that Oliphant seemed to be so lackadaisical about it.
“Where is she?”
“The infirmary,” Oliphant said.
“It’s been a pretty hectic day,” he added, but by then Junko and Garner had passed him, headed for the ship.
The first two hatches they came to were newly sealed off. Oliphant showed them a third entrance, which had a battery of additional handwritten instructions posted inside the airlock. Garner and Junko stripped away their external gear, rinsed, and pulled on lighter Tyvek suits for use inside the ship. The crew meeting was just breaking up in the officers’ mess as the two travelers arrived.
“What’s the news?” Carol asked.
“We were about to ask you the same thing,” Garner said. “How’s Susan?”
“She’s shaken up, but from what we can tell it was a minor exposure.
“How minor?” Junko pressed.
Carol provided the details as they followed her down two decks to the infirmary.
“One of her suit cuffs wasn’t properly sealed. She had mild burns on her skin but we’ve treated them. The second-stage dosimeters kept the contamination from getting farther into the ship but we’re still checking the lab for traces.”
Susan was sitting up in bed when the three of them entered. Her skin was still a pinkish color from the scrubbing, but the area around her hand and wrist showed little in the way of external welts or swelling.
It could have been much worse.
“How are you feeling?” Junko asked Susan.
“Stupid,” Susan replied. “Very stupid. And I’ve never been so well scrubbed in my life.”
“Did you take blood?” Junko asked Carol, who nodded.
“We should keep an eye out for leukopenia over the next couple of weeks. Even one gray is enough to damage organs or the circulatory system.”
The disappointment weighed heavily on Susan’s face.
“I’m so sorry. We didn’t need this.” She had been expecting the worst of Carol’s wrath, but her boss was surprisingly compassionate.
“We’re all sorry this had to happen to anyone,” Carol said. “But at least it wasn’t a serious exposure. You’ve been doing a great job watching out for the rest of us. I hope my little pep talk just reminded everyone we’re not out of the soup yet.”
“You’d think they’d know better by now,” Garner mused.
“They do know better,” Carol said sharply. “Everyone’s been doing great, all things considered. They’re not trained for this kind of stuff hiding from something that’s invisible, watching everything they touch. They’re not used to all these procedures and scrubbing and—”
“We understand,” Junko said, placing a comforting hand on Carol’s arm. “But this kind of thing is exactly why we can’t afford to relax our guard.”
Carol hesitated before replying.
“I think we’ll all breathe a little easier once we know what we’re dealing with.” Carol turned to the two arrivals again.
“Do we know what we’re dealing with?”
As Junko examined Susan further. Garner briefly relayed their findings from Alvarez’s lab and the latest predictions of the PATRIC program.
“I think we’ve found an alga capable of taking up the hot bacteria from the water,” Garner said.
“Then what do we do with the algae?” Carol pressed.
“I don’t know yet,” Garner admitted. “But at least the sponge idea works.”
“In theory. In the lab.”
“Carol, we’re trying. We’re making progress. Trust me, remember?”
“Based on bathymetry alone, PATRIC gave us a number of possible sources,” Junko said. “Brock wants to curtail the search of all candidates and start with one, the Thebes Deep.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” Carol said.
“That’s exactly why I think we should start there,” Garner said. “There’s a reason no one’s heard of it, and I think that reason may have sprung a radioactive leak.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“No,” Garner said. “But it’s the best educated guess we’ve got.”
Zubov poked his head into the infirmary, relieved to see that his friends had returned.
“Educated guessing, huh? I hope you’re not looking to matriculate using Medusa.”
“No luck?” Garner asked.
“Short of stripping off all the metal and rebuilding her from scratch, no way. She can still sample what she was designed to, but forget about getting any more rad levels from the water.”
“She’s done her duty,” Garner said. “Medusa’s already given us enough data to suggest some possible sources using PATRIC. We can start using the model as our nose, and see where it takes us. Looks like we head on through Fury and Hecla Strait into the Gulf of Boothia the model says it’s our best bet.”
“And if the model is wrong?”
“We make a better model,” Garner shrugged.
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Zubov grunted.
“What do we have to do next?” Carol asked.
“We head for Thebes Deep,” Garner said. “I’ll go up to the bridge and tell them to head west. Depending on the ice cover, we should be through the strait by tomorrow at the latest.”
As Junko remained in the infirmary, Zubov returned to assist Byrnes on deck.
Momentarily alone in the corridor, Carol turned to Garner.
“I don’t like this,” she said. “The closer we get to the source…”
“I know.”
“I can’t allow what happened to Susan and Jeff and Tony to happen to anyone else.”
“I know that too.”
“So please tell me that you’re really, really sure this will all work out fine.”
“I can’t do that. Not yet.”
“Brock—” There it was again, the pleading in her eyes, the trust that stirred so many emotions not quite forgotten. She was looking for a promise he could not yet provide, but maybe her faith was enough to push him through to a solution.
He took her shoulders in his hands and looked deeply into her eyes.
“Everything will work out fine,” he said. “I promise.”
It was what they both wanted to hear, at least. Now it was up to him to make that promise a reality.
The Phoenix cruised almost directly west throughout the night, passing easily through the fields of broken ice that drifted across its path as it rounded the northern fringe of Melville Peninsula. Garner and Zubov spent most of this time working on Medusa, stripping off the burned-out gamma spectrometers and restoring the device’s original hardware. After midnight, they deployed the sampler from the Phoenix’s A-frame and collected some updated data on the plankton populations in the narrow conduit of Fury and Hecla Strait. At last, exhausted, the men retired to their cabins.