Then, nothing could have been sweeter than his interview with the boss yesterday. Clyde Sugden had said he was going to retire soon and that he was using his influence to have Brock advanced to his place. Brock had protested without much conviction that, after all, Hempl had been there longer than he, and so ought to have the job.
"No," the head aquarist had said. "The feeling docs you credit, Vernon, but Hempl wouldn't do. He's a good subordinate, but has no more initiative than a lamelli-branch. And he'd never sit up all night nursing a sick octopus the way you would." And so forth. Well, Brock hoped he really was that good, and that he wouldn't get a swelled head. But, knowing the rarity of direct praise from superiors, he was determined to enjoy that experience to the utmost.
He glanced at his calendar-pad. "Labelling": that meant that the labels on the tanks were out of date again. With the constant death of specimens and acquisition of new ones that characterizes aquaria, this condition was chronic. He'd do some label-shifting this evening. "Alligator": a man had 'phoned and said that he was coming in to present one to the institution. Brock knew what that meant. Some fatheaded tourist had bought a baby 'gator in Florida without the faintest notion of how to keep it properly, and now he would be dumping the skinny little wretch on the Aquarium before it died of starvation and the effects of well-meant ignorance. It happened all the time. "Legislature": what the Devil? Oh, yes, he was going to write to the Florida state legislature in support of a bill to prohibit the export of live alligators by more fatheaded tourists, while there were still some of the unfortunate reptiles left alive in the state.
Then the mail. Somebody wanted to know why her guppies developed white spots and died. Somebody wanted to know what kind of water plants to keep in a home aquarium, and the name of a reliable seller of such plants in Pocatello, Idaho. Somebody wanted to know how to tell a male from a female lobster. Somebody ... this was in nearly illegible longhand, at which Brock cursed with mild irritation—"Dear Mr. Brock: I heard your lecture last June 18th inst., on how we are dissended from fish. Now you made a pretty good speech but I think if you will excuse my frankness that you are all wrong. I got a theory that the fish is really dissended from us ..."
He picked up the telephone and said, "Please send in Miss Engholm." She came in; they said "Good morning" formally, and he dictated letters for an hour. Then he said without changing his tone, "How about dinner tonight?" (Somebody might come in, and he had a mild phobia about letting the office force in on his private affairs.)
"Fine," said the girl. "The usual place?"
"Okay. Only I'll be late; labelling, you know ..." He thought, foolish man, how surprised she'd be when he asked her to marry him. That would be after his promotion.
He decided to put in a couple of hours on his research before lunch. He tied on his old rubber apron and soon had the bunsen burners going merrily. Motions were perforce acrobatic in the confined space. But he had to put up with that until the famous extension was finished. Then in a couple of years they'd be as cramped as ever again.
Sugden stuck his white thatch in the door. "May we come in?" He introduced a man as Dr. Dumville of the Cornell Medical Center. Brock knew the physiologist by reputation, and was only too glad to explain his work.
"You're of course familiar, Doctor," he said, "with the difference between lung-tissue and gill-tissue. For one thing, gill-tissue has no mucus-secreting cells to keep the surfaces moist out of water. Hence the gills dry and harden, and no longer pass oxygen one way and carbon dioxide the other as they should. But the gills of many aquatic-organisms can be made to function out of water by keeping them moist artificially. Some of these forms regularly come out of water for considerable periods, like the fiddler-crab and the mud-skipper, for instance. They're all right as long as they can go back and moisten their gills occasionally.
"But in no case can a lung be used as a gill, to extract oxygen dissolved in water, instead of absorbing it from the air. I've been studying the reasons for this for some years; they're partly mechanical—the difficulty of getting anything as dense as water in and out of the spongy lung-structure fast enough—and partly a matter of the different osmotic properties of the breather-cells which are each adapted to operate on oxygen of a given concentration dispersed in a medium of given density.
"I've found, however, that the breather-cells of lung-tissue can be made to react to certain stimuli so as to assume the osmotic properties of gill-tissue. It consists mainly of a mixture of halogen-bearing organic compounds. A good dose of the vapor of that stuff in the lungs of one of the young alligators in this tank should enable him to breathe under water, if my theory is correct."
"I'd suggest one thing," said Dumville, who had been giving polite but interested "uh—huh's," "which is that when you hold your alligator under water, his glottal muscles will automatically contract, sealing off his lungs to keep out the water, and he'll suffocate."
"I've thought of that, and I'll paralyze the nerves controlling those muscles first, so he'll have to breathe water whether he wants to or not."
"That's the idea. Say, I want to be in on this. When are you going to try out your first alligator?"
They talked until Sugden began clearing his throat meaningfully. He said, "There's a lot more to see, Dr. Dumville. You've got to take a look at our new extension. We certainly sweat blood getting the city to put up the money for it." He got Dumville out, and Brock could hear his voice dying away: "... it'll be mostly for new pumping and filtering machinery; we haven't half the space we need now. There'll be two tanks big enough for the smaller cetacea, and we'll finally have some direct sunlight. You can't keep most of the amphibia without it. We had to take half the damned old building apart to do it ..." Brock smiled. The extension was Sugden's monument, and the old boy would never retire until it was officially opened.
Brock turned back to his apparatus. He had just begun to concentrate on it when Sam Baritz stuck his gargoyle's face in. "Say, Vuinon, where ya gonna put the bichir? It gets in tomorrow."
"Mmm—clear the filefish out of 43, and we'll make up a batch of Nile water this afternoon for it. It's too valuable to risk with other species until we know more about it. And—oh, Hell, put the filefish in a reserve tank for the present."
That means another new label, he thought as he turned back to his chemicals. What would be a good wording? "Esteemed as food ..." Yes. "Closely related to fossil forms?" Too indefinite. "Related to fossil forms from which most modern fish and all the higher vertebrates are descended." More like it. Maybe he could work in the words "living fossil" somehow ...
In his abstraction he hadn't noticed that the flask into which the oily liquid was dripping had been nudged too close to the edge of the table. The slam of a dropped plank from the extension where construction was still going on, made him start nervously, and the flask came loose and smashed on the floor. Brock yelped with dismay and anger. Three weeks' work was spread over the floor. He took his morning paper apart and swept up glass and solution. As he knelt over the wreckage, the fumes made his eyes water. In his annoyance it never occurred to him that a man's lungs aren't so different from an alligator's.
He answered the telephone. It was Halperin, the goldfish man. "I'm making a little trip down south; do you guys want me to pick up some bowfin or gar?" Brock said he'd have to ask Sugden and would call back. "Well, don't take too long, Vuinon, I'm leaving this afternoon. Be seein' ya."
Brock set out on the long semicircular catwalk over the ground-floor tanks that led around to the rear of the building and the entrance to the extension. As an old aquarium man he walked without faltering; he could imagine Dumville's cautious progress, clutching pipes and the edges of reserve tanks while glancing fearfully into the waters below.