Last Gasp Read online

  “Well, thank God I’m leaving soon,” Chase said with genuine feeling. “Back to sanity and civilization.”

  “And sex,” said Nick with such lugubrious envy that Chase couldn’t help bursting out laughing.

  The four-engined ski-shod C-130 landed the next afternoon right on schedule, taking advantage of the paltry rays cast by a centimeter of sun peeping reluctantly over the horizon. It was a clear calm day with the wind down to 15 knots, the sky a magnificent deep magenta, and everyone not engaged with some pressing duty was on the surface to greet the aircraft. Any diversion brought a welcome break in routine.

  With typical thoroughness the Americans had sent a three-man medical team equipped with a special stretcher onto which the injured man was carefully placed, made comfortable, and strapped down. Chase had to admit grudgingly that he was receiving the best possible care and attention.

  He stood with Nick Power and several others watching the stretcher being taken on board through the rear drop-hatch. Professor Banting was a little way off with the American in charge of the operation, a young executive officer named Lloyd Madden, who had the alert, eagle-eyed look of a military automaton. Probably brushed his teeth the regulation number of strokes, Chase conjectured sourly, prepared to find fault at the least excuse.

  When the stretcher had disappeared into the hold of the Hercules, Chase left the group he was with and wandered across. Banting paused in midsentence and gave him a fisheyed stare. Chase ignored it and stuck out his mittened hand.

  “Lieutenant? I’m Gavin Chase.”

  “Yes—Dr. Chase. You’re the one who found him on the ice, so Professor Banting informs me.” Soft voice, hard eyes.

  “That’s right. I thought he’d pissed on his chips.”

  The young lieutenant frowned, making his hatchet face inside the red parka hood sharper still. “Excuse me?”

  “Dead. Zilch,” Chase said. “Nearly but not quite.”

  Lieutenant Madden raised his smooth chin and brought it down in a swift, decisive nod. Chase sniffed rosewater on the wind. “Right,” the lieutenant said, as if having deciphered a garbled message over a faulty land-line.

  “Who is he? Any idea?”

  “Not yet. We’re hoping to find out.”

  “I’ll bet you are,” Chase muttered.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Chase wasn’t good at placing American accents but this one sounded to him to be cultured New England, very gentle, polite, with hardly any inflection. The gentle politeness, he suspected, was an exceedingly thin veneer.

  “He’s Russian, isn’t he?”

  Lieutenant Madden’s eyes shifted in Banting’s general direction, then snapped back. “Yes ... that is, we believe so.”

  It would take a stick of dynamite in every orifice to make the American offer a candid opinion, Chase felt. He said, “You seem very anxious to get hold of him, considering you’ve no idea who he is.”

  “Anxious? In what way?”

  “You’ve sent an aircraft two thousand miles on a special flight. You’ve come personally to oversee the operation. And you’re moving somebody in a serious condition who ought not to be moved at all.”

  “Are you a medical doctor, Dr. Chase? I understood you were a marine biologist.” Still the soft voice and gentle tone, but the demarcation between Chase’s personal concern and professional standing had been clearly drawn. In other words, butt out, buster.

  Professor Banting, ever the pedant, closed ranks. “I don’t have to remind you, Dr. Chase, that we’ve had this discussion once before. This matter has nothing whatsoever to do with you. Both Lieutenant Madden and myself are acting on instructions from a higher authority. Please understand that we are simply doing our best to carry them out. ” Chase said stubbornly, “Even if it kills the patient.”

  “Dr. Chase, we have a full range of medical facilities at McMurdo. This is for the best, believe me. He’ll be well treated and looked after, you have my word.” Lieutenant Madden’s eyes thawed a little. “I’ll even have the medic send you a progress report, how’s that?”

  They must think him stupid. He didn’t like being soft-soaped. He stared levelly at the American. “You can’t seriously believe he’s a security risk, not with a broken back.”

  “This isn’t a security matter, Dr. Chase. Leastwise, not military security.” Lieutenant Madden lowered his voice as if taking Chase into his confidence. “Between us, we do have some information. We think—we’re not sure yet—that he’s a member of a Soviet oil prospecting team. We’ve known for some time that they’ve been secretly exploring the continent for oil deposits, which as you may know is in contravention of the Antarctic Treaty, ratified by sixteen nations. We’ve no hard evidence to support this, but if we can come up with dates, locations, even some of their findings from an eyewitness, then it might persuade the USSR to pull out before the whole thing blows up into a major international incident. Naturally we don’t want the Soviets looking for oil behind our backs, but even less are we seeking an energy confrontation with them on what until now has been neutral ground.”

  “I see.” Chase breathed twin plumes of steam into the blisteringly cold air. Banting stamped his feet, looking almost relieved.

  Lieutenant Madden leaned forward. “I’d appreciate it, Dr. Chase, if this didn’t go any further.” One intelligent man appealing to the integrity and good sense of another. “You understand.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Good. Fine.” The American’s thin lips twitched into something resembling a smile. “I knew I could rely on you.”

  He shook hands with them both, gave a courtesy salute, and walked briskly across the packed snow to the waiting aircraft, whose engines had been kept idling all the time it was on the ground. At 65 degrees below zero F. the fuel in its tanks would have frozen solid.

  The C-130 taxied into the wind and took off, snow spurting from its skis in a billowing cloud, and in seconds the wing and fuselage lights were bright winking stars against a sky already darkening into the twenty-two-hour night.

  Chase strolled back with Nick to the entrance ramp, not hearing his lament that Doug Thomas hadn’t materialized with the little plastic bag. He was thinking instead of the perfectly sincere expression on the sharp young face of Lt. Lloyd Madden, and of his equally sincere explanation, so confidential, so plausible, so well rehearsed.

  Three days later, during the changeover at McMurdo Station, Chase learned from a U.S. Army doctor that the Russian had died of a brain hemorrhage on the operating table. He wasn’t a bit surprised. The poor bastard had never stood a chance. From a bucket seat forward of the cargo compartment in the smooth silver belly of a C-121 Lockheed Super Constellation, Chase gazed down on the swathes of blue and green that marked the varying depths and different currents in the ocean. They were six hours out from Antarctica, with another four to go before landing at Christchurch.

  As the aircraft droned on he thought about the dead man, about the piece of paper carefully folded in his diary, about the absorption of carbon dioxide in seawater. But none of it seemed to get him anywhere at all.

  The research vessel Melville, two days out from San Diego, steamed at quarter speed through the gently rolling Pacific swell. On a towline one hundred yards astern, the RMT (Rectangular Mid-Water Trawl) scooped surface water to a precisely calibrated depth of two meters, capturing the tiny mesopelagic creatures on their upward migration from the middle depths.

  Part of the fleet belonging to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Melville was on a shakedown cruise for the Marine Biology Research Division, testing a new type of opening-closing release gear. It was operated from the afterdeck on instructions from the monitoring room amidships, and it was Cheryl Detrick’s and Gordon Mudie’s task to watch and report on the trawl’s performance. After nearly two hours Cheryl was bored to tears. Not so much with deck duty as with Gordon and the fact that despite nil encouragement, he kept coming on strong. He was tall, skinny, with lank mousy ha
ir that straggled in the breeze, and a gaping loose-lipped grin that reminded her of Pluto’s. She thought him unattractive and charmless, while he thought he was making a first-rate impression.

  Gordon stood by the winch, happy in his ignorance, while Cheryl kept lookout through Zeiss binoculars. Both were graduate students working on a research project for Dr. Margaret Delors, who for ten years or more had been gathering data on the eastern subequatorial Pacific.

  “Jeez, it’s hot,” Gordon complained, fanning himself and stating the obvious. “Don’t you think so, Sherry?”

  Cheryl continued watching the RMT. She hated being called Sherry. “Release gear open,” she reported into the button mike and received the monitoring room’s acknowledgment over the headset. Now another fifteen minutes of Gordon’s witty repartee and inane grin. Lord deliver us ...

  Moving to the rail she did a slow sweep of the placid ocean. After a moment she removed the headset and dangled it on a metal stanchion. The breeze ruffled her cropped sun-bleached hair. All through university she’d never cut it once, until it reached her waist, and then a friend had advised her that she really ought to style it to suit her height and figure. Which Cheryl interpreted as meaning that girls of medium stature with big tits looked dumpy with waist-length hair.

  Gordon leaned his bony forearms on the rail and beamed at her, full of bright, sincere, lecherous interest. She might have liked him if he hadn’t been so damned obvious. He was probably too honest, she reflected. The guys she fancied were devious bastards, some of them real chauvinist pigs at that, which was a trait she didn’t admire in herself. But there had to be a physical turn-on, no matter who it was, and Gordon didn’t qualify.

  “It was your dad, wasn’t it, who wrote the book? You’re the same Detrick, aren’t you?” He was trying manfully to keep the conversation rolling, and Cheryl felt a slight twinge of compassion.

  “That’s me.” Cheryl smiled. “The nutty professor’s daughter.”

  “Somebody told me he could have been really big at Scripps—even the director if he’d wanted—and he just went off into the blue.” Gordon waved his hand. “An island a zillion miles from nowhere. What made him do it?”

  “He hates people,” Cheryl said flippantly. She was tempted to add, “It runs in the family,” but didn’t. Gordon was a pain in the ass, but she didn’t want to make a cheap remark for the sake of it.

  “Is that right? Does he hate people?” Gordon was giving her his intense moony stare, perhaps hoping he’d discovered a topic of mutual interest.

  Cheryl shrugged, scanning the ocean through the binoculars. “I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t know him all that well. I get a Christmas card every February and there isn’t much room for a life story between the holly and the snow-covered turtles.”

  “Jeez, Sherry, you’re his daughter.”

  “So you keep reminding me, Gordy.”

  Gordon mused on this and then came up unaided with the thought for the day. “They do say that geniuses are very weird people. Not like the rest of us. You know—kinda inhuman, cold, no emotions.”

  “I’m sure he’d be thrilled to hear that.”

  Gordon was immune to irony. “Jeez, I’d love to meet somebody like that, Sherry. I bet he’s a fascinating guy. I mean to say, the dedication it takes to go off like that, leaving civilization and all that stuff behind, living purely and simply for your work. That’s terrific.”

  “Is it?” Cheryl lowered the binoculars and stared at him, her tone sharper than she intended. “It’s terrific to live with relatives for most of your life, being shipped around like a package. To be an orphan when one of your parents is still alive. That really is terrific, Gordy.”

  The resentment, the hurt, so long buried, still had a raw edge to it. Especially when dredged up by a casual or thoughtless remark; and Gordon Mudie was an expert in that department.

  The bass throb of the engines faltered, missed a beat, and then resumed its pounding rhythm. Cheryl felt the vibrations through her rope-soled sandals. The ship seemed to be laboring. She leaned right over, holding the binoculars aside on their leather strap, and peered down into the churning water.

  Normally it was a cream froth. Now it was red, the color of blood. “Gordon, look at that!”

  “Jeez-uz!”

  “What have we hit?”

  “Must be a seal. Or a shark, maybe.”

  It was neither. Cheryl looked around and discovered that the Melville was afloat on a red ocean. She looked again over the stern and realized that the vessel was struggling to make headway through a thick spongy mass of minute planktonic organisms, which was giving the sea its reddish hue.

  There’d been several outbreaks in recent years: vast blooms of the microcellular organism Gymodinium breve had appeared without warning off the coasts of America, India, and Africa. Nobody knew what caused the growth, nor why it suddenly came and went. But the “red tide” was deadly poisonous, to both fish and man. Millions of dead and decaying fish and other sea creatures had been found off Florida’s eastern coast and in the Gulf of Mexico.

  She clamped the headset back on and spoke into the mike. “Monitoring room? We’d better wind in the RMT. We’re in the middle of an algae bloom—red stuff, acres of it. I think it’s the poisonous variety.”

  The headset squawked a reply and Cheryl said, “We’re to close the release gear and bring the trawl in.” When Gordon didn’t immediately respond, she snapped, “What are you waiting for? If we pick up any of this crap it’ll take days to clean out.”

  Gordon backed away from the rail, his high forehead creased in a perplexed frown. “Where’s it come from? There must be tons and tons of the stuff.” Still frowning, he went over to the winch and began winding.

  The girl gazed down at the water, mesmerized a little, lost in the illusion that she was on a bridge with a river flowing underneath. Her snub nose with its sprinkle of freckles (the one that Gordon thought was real cute) wrinkled as she caught a whiff of something rotten, and in the churning red wake she saw the white upturned bellies of hundreds of fish. A shoal of poisoned sea bass.

  In spite of the warmth of the sun she felt a shiver ripple down her spine. What had caused it? What had gone wrong? A natural ecological foul-up or man-made thermal pollution?

  And just imagine, she thought, shuddering, if the bloom kept right on multiplying and spreading and poisoning all the fish. It would eventually take over, filling all the oceans of the world with a stinking red poisonous mess. Every sea creature would die, and the bloom might not stop there—when it had conquered the oceans it would infiltrate the river systems and lakes and streams. It might even gain a roothold on the land....

  Cheryl shook herself out of the nightmare. Thank God it was only imagination.

  Bill Inchcape—Binch as everyone called him—in short-sleeved shirt and check trousers was seated at the keyboard of the computer terminal in the cavernous air-conditioned basement where DELFI was housed behind hermetically sealed three-inch steel doors. This precaution was less for security reasons than to protect the germanium circuitry and memory disks against changes in temperature and humidity. The predominantly male staff had decided that DELFI was female, and thus any temperamental outbursts or fits of electronic pique were put down to premenstrual tension.

  Data from all parts of the world were received at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, and fed into the computer, and it was the physicist’s job to extract the climatic anomalies and prepare a summary, which was circulated to various government agencies. What purpose this information served nobody knew—it was Binch’s hunch, as he confided to Brad Zittel, that it merely served to justify Washington’s funding of the center, made them feel they were getting sufficient “drudge for their dollar.”

  At the moment he was up to his ears in print-out, his stubby, hairy arms paddling through it like a swimmer breasting a wave. Down here it was quite cool, though Binch still sweated—with his girth he could afford to�
�the garish strip-lighting reflecting on his damp scalp through baby-fine rapidly thinning hair.

  “You wouldn’t think it could get any worse, but it always seems to,” Binch complained in his reedy voice. “Just look at all this stuff!” Brad Zittel settled himself on a gray metal console. Reels spun in the shadowy background; relays chattered discreetly. He wasn’t at his best this morning. Dark circles ringed his eyes. For two months or more he’d been waking at 4:00 A.M., making a pot of China tea, and watching the sky slowly brighten from his study window. Sometimes he didn’t expect the sun to perform its daily miracle.

  “Worse in what sense?” he asked dully. “The anomalies are getting worse or there are more of them?”

  “Quality and quantity both up. This is supposed to be a two-day job and it’s going to take a week. Listen to this.” Binch snatched a print-out at random and read: ‘“Sweden: Rainfall increased by two hundred percent with some areas recording average monthly amounts in one day.’ And this: ‘Finland: Coldest December on record in Helsinki since measurements began in 1829.’”

  He lifted a thick sheaf of print-out and thrust it toward Brad. “Here, look for yourself,” he mumbled, sitting back in the swivel chair and lighting a cigarette.

  Brad took a breath, trying to quell the too-familiar panic rising in his chest, trying to tell himself not to be such a prick. He breathed out and fixed his eyes on the neat blocks of electric type.

  libya:

  Highest maximum December temperature since 1924. Precipitation during December and January exceptionally low.

  belgium:

  Coldest winter since 1962-1963. Fifth coldest this century.

  brazil:

  Northeast state of Caera experienced worst drought in living memory. Frost reported on 6-7 days in the south and snow fell in Rio Grande do Sul (extremely rare event) .