by Wilbur Smith
It's tremendous/ he told her. But I've got bigger biceps, and I'm more
beautiful. Despite the wild choice of colour and the romantic style, he
realized she had real talent.
You don't expect me to ride in that - what if one of my creditors saw
me! Get your mind out of its stiff collar and blue suit, mister.
You have just signed on for the voyage to never-never land by way of the
moon. Before she started the engine she looked at him seriously out of
those great shining green eyes.
How long, Nicholas? she asked. How long have we got together this
time? Ten days/ he told her. Sorry, but I must be back in London by
the 25th. There is a big one coming up, the big one. I'll tell you
about it. No. She covered her ears with both hands. I don't want to
hear about it, not yet. She drove the Chevy with careless unforced
skill, very fast and efficiently, acknowledging the homage of other male
drivers with a grin and a shake of her braids.
When she slipped off highway 9 5 and parked in the lot of a supermarket,
Nicholas raised an eyebrow.
Food/ she explained, and then with a lascivious roll of her eyes, 'I
reckon to get mighty hungry later. She chose steaks, a bag full of
groceries and a jug of California Riesling, and would not let him pay.
"In this town, you are my guest. Then she paid the toll and took the
Rickenbacker causeway across the water to Virginia Key.
That's the marine division of the University of Miami and that's my lab
at the top of the jetty, just beyond that white fishing boat - see it?
The low buildings were crowded into a corner of the island, between the
sea-quarium and the wharves and jetties of the University's town lie the
harbour.
We aren't stopping/ Nicholas observed, Are you kidding? she laughed at
him, I don't need a controlled scientific environment for the experiment
I am about to conduct. And with no diminution of speed, the Chevy flew
across the long bridge between Virginia Key and Key Biscayne, and three
miles on she turned off sharply left on a narrow dirt track that twisted
through a lush tropical maritime forest of banyan and palmetta and palm,
and ended at a clapboard shack just above the water.
I live close to the shop/ Samantha explained, as she clattered up on to
the screened porch, her arms full of groceries.
This is yours? Nicholas asked. He could just make out the tops of big
blocks of condominiums on each side; they were incompletely screened by
the palms.
Pa left it to me. He bought it the year I was born/ Samantha explained
proudly. My ground stretches from there to there. A few hundred yards,
but Nicholas realized the value of it. Everybody in the world wants to
live on the water, and those condominiums were pressing in closely.
It must be worth a million. There is no price on it, she said firmly.
That's what I tell those awful sweaty little men with their big cigars.
Pa left it to me and it's not for sale. She had the door open now,
bumping it with her denim-clad backside.
Don't just stand there, Nicholas/ she implored him.
We've only got ten days. He followed her into the kitchen as she dumped
her load into the sink, and whirled back to him.
Welcome by my house, Nicholas/ and then as she slid her arms around his
waist, jerked his shirt tails out of his belt and slid her hands up his
bare back, You'll never know just how welcome. Come, let me show you
around this is the living-room. It had spartan furniture, with Indian
rugs and pottery, and Samantha's chopped-off denims were discarded in
the centre of the floor along with Nicholas shirt.
,And this - surprise! surprise - is the bed-room. She dragged him by
one hand, and under the short tee-shirt her bottom reminded him of a
chipmunk with its cheeks stuffed with nuts, chewing vigorously.
The tiny bedroom overlooked the beach. The sea breeze fluffed out the
curtains and the sound of the low surf breathed like a sleeping giant, a
deep regular hiss and sigh that filled the air around them.
The bed was too big for the room, all ornate antique brass, with a
cloudy soft mattress and an old-fashioned patchwork quilt in a hundred
coloured and patterned squares.
I don't think I could have lived another day without you/ she said, and
unwound the thick plaits of her hair.
You came like the cavalry, in the very nick of time. He reached up and
took the golden tresses of hair, winding them thickly around his wrist,
twining them in his fingers, and he pulled her gently down beside him.
Suddenly Nick's life was uncluttered and simple again.
Suddenly he was young and utterly carefree again. The petty strivings,
the subterfuge, the lies and the cheating did not exist in this little
universe that encompassed a tiny wooden shack on the edge of the ocean,
and a huge brass bed that clanged and rattled and banged and squeaked
wholesale, the completely abandoned happiness that was the special
miracle called Samantha Silver.
Samantha's laboratory was a square room, built on piles over the water,
and the soft hum of the electric pumps blended with the slap of the
wavelets below and the burble and blurp of the tanks.
This is my kingdom/ she told him. And these are my subjects. There were
almost a hundred tanks, like the small glass-sided aquaria for goldfish,
and suspended over each of them was a complicated arrangement of coils
and bottles and electric wiring.
Nick sauntered across to the nearest of the tanks and peered into it. It
contained a single large salt-water clam; the animal was feeding with
the double shells agape, the pink soft flesh and frilly gills rippling
and undulating in the gentle flow of pumped and filtered sea water. To
each half of the shell, thin copper wires were attached with blobs of
polyurethane cement.
Samantha came to stand beside him, touching, and he asked her/What's
happening? She touched a switch and immediately the cylindrical scroll
above the tank began to revolve slowly and a stylus, after a few
preliminary jerks and quivers, began to trace out a regular pattern on
the paper scroll, a trough and double peak, the second a fraction lower
than the first, and then the trough again.
She said, He's wired and bugged. You're a member of the CIA/he accused.
And she laughed. His heart-beat. I'm passing an electric impulse
through the heart - the heart is only a millimetre across - but each
spasm changes the resistance and moves the stylus. She studied the
curve for a moment. This fellow is one very healthy cheerful Spisula
solidissima. Is that his name? Nick asked. I thought he was a clam.
One of fifteen thousand bivalves who use that common generic/ she
corrected I had to pick an egghead/ said Nicholas ruefully. But what's
so interesting about his heart? It's the closest and cheapest thing to
a pollution metre that we have discovered so far - or rather, she
corrected herself without false modesty, that I have discovered. She
took his hand and led him down the long rows of tanks. They are
sensitive, incredibly sensi
tive to any contamination of their
environment, and the heart-beat will register almost immediately any
foreign element or chemical, organic or otherwise, in such low
concentrate that it would take a highly trained specialist with a
spectroscope to detect otherwise. Nicholas felt his mild attention
changing and growing into real interest as Samantha began to prepare
samples of common pollutants on the single bench against the fore-wall
of the cluttered little laboratory.
Here/ she held up one test tube, aromatic carbons, the more poisonous
elements of crude petroleum - and here" she indicated the next tube,
mercury in a concentration of 100 parts to the million. Did you see the
photographs of the human vegetables and the Japanese children with the
flesh falling off their bones at Kiojo? That was mercury.
Lovely stuff. She picked up another tube. PCB, a by-product of the
electrical industry, the Hudson River is thick with it. And these,
tetrahydrofurane, cyclohexane, methylbenzene - all industrial
by-products but don't let the fancy names throw you. One day they will
come back to haunt us , in newspaper headlines, as THF or CMB - one day
there will be other human cabbages and babies born without arms or legs.
She touched the other tubes. Arsenic, old-fashioned Agatha Christie
vintage poison. And then here is the real living and breathing bastard
daddy of them all - this is cadmium; as a sulphide so it's easily
absorbed. In 100 parts to the million it's as lethal as a neutron
bomb., While he watched, she carried the tray of tubes across to the
tanks and set the ECG monitors running. Each began to record the normal
double-peaked heart-beat of a healthy clam.
Now, she said, watch this. Under controlled conditions, she began to
drip the weak poisoned solutions into the reticulated water systems, a
different solution to each of the tanks.
These concentrations are so low that the animals will not even be aware
of trauma, they will continue to feed and breed without any but
long-term indications of systemic poisoning. Samantha was a different
person, a cool quick-thinking professional. Even the white dust-coat
that she had slipped over her tee-shirt altered her image and she had
aged twenty years in poise and authority as she passed back and forth
along the row of tanks.
There/ she said, with grim satisfaction as the stylus on one recording
drum made a slightly double beat at its peak and then just delectably
flattened the second peak.
Typical aromatic carbon reaction. The distorted heart-beat was repeated
endlessly on the slowly turning drum, and she passed on to the next
tank.
See the pulse in the trough, see the fractional speeding up of the heart
spasm" That's cadmium in ten parts to the million, at 100 parts it will
kill all sea life, at five hundred it will kill man slowly, at seven
hundred parts in air or solution it will kill him very quickly indeed.
Nicholas interest became total fascination, as he helped Samantha record
the experiments and control the flow and concentration in the tanks.
Slowly they the dosage of each substance and the moving stylus
dispassionately recorded the increasing distress and the final
convulsions and spasmodic throes that preceded death.
Nicholas voiced the tickle of horror and revulsion he felt at watching
the process of degeneration.
It's macabre. Yes . She stood back from the tanks. Death always is.
But these organisms have such rudimentary nervous systems that they
don't experience pain as we know it. She shuddered slightly herself and
went on. But imagine an entire ocean poisoned like one of these tanks,
imagine the incredible agonies of tens of millions of sea birds, of the
mammals, seals and porpoises and whales. Then think of what would
happen to man himself - Samantha shrugged off her white dust-coat.
Now I'm hungry, she announced, and then looking up at the fibreglass
panels in the roof, No wonder! It's dark already! While they cleaned
and tidied the laboratory, and made a last check of the pumps and
running equipment, Samantha told him, In five hours we have tested over
a hundred and fifty samples of contaminated water and got accurate
indications of nearly fifty dangerous substances - at a probable cost of
fifty cents a sample. She switched out the lights. To do the same with
a gas spectroscope would have cost almost ten thousand dollars and taken
a highly specialized team two weeks of hard work. It's a hell of a
trick/ Nicholas told her. You're a clever lady - I'm impressed, I
really am. At the psychedelic Chevy van she stopped him, and in the
light of the street lamp looked up at him guiltily.
Do you mind if I show you off, Nicholas? What does that mean? he asked
suspiciously.
The gang are eating shrimps tonight, Then they'll sleep over on the boat
and have the first shot at fish tagging tomorrow - but we don't have to
go. We could just get some more steaks and another jug of wine. But he
could see she really wanted to go.
She was fifty -five foot, an old purse-seiner with the ungainly
wheelhouse forward looking like a sentry box or an old-fashioned pit
latrine. Even with her coat of new paint, she had an old-fashioned
look.
She was tied up at the end of the University jetty, and as they walked
out to her, so they could hear the voices and the laughter coming up
from below decks.
Tricky Dicky/Nicholas read her name on the high ugly rounded stern.
But we love her/ Samantha said, and led him across the narrow, rickety
gangplank. She belongs to the University.
She's only one of our four research vessels. The others are all fancy
modern ships, two-hundred-footers, but the Dicky is our boat for short
field trips to the gulf or down the Keys, and she's also the faculty
clubhouse. The main cabin was monastically furnished, bare planking and
hard benches, a single long table, but it was as crowded as a
fashionable discotheque, packed solid with sunburned young people, girls
and boys all in faded jeans and tee-shirts, impossible to judge sexes by
clothing or by the length of their sun-tortured and wind-tangled hair.
The air was thick with the rich smell of broiling gulf shrimps and
molten butter, and there were gallon jugs of California wine on the
table.
Hey! Samantha shouted above the uproar of voices raised in heated
dispute and jovial repartee. This is Nicholas. A comparative silence
descended on the gathering, and they looked him over with the curious
veiled group hostility of any tribe for an interloper, an intruder in a
closed and carefully guarded group. Nick returned the scrutiny calmly,
met each pair of eyes, while realizing that despite the affected
informality of their dress and some of the wildly unkempt hairstyles and
the impressive profusion of beards, they were an elite group. There was
not a face that was not intelligent, not a pair of eyes that was not
alert and quick, and there was that special feeling of pride and self
confidence in all of them.
At the head of the table sat a big impressive figure, the oldest man in
the cabin, perhaps Nick's age or a little older, for there were silver
strands in his beard and his face was lined and beaten by sun and wind
and time.
Hi, Nick, he boomed. I won't pretend we've never heard of you.
Sam has given us all cauliflower ears You cut that out, Tom Parker/
Samantha stopped him sharply, and there was a ripple of laughter, a
relaxation of tension and a casual round of greetings.
Hi, Nick, I'm Sally-Anne. A pretty girl with china-blue eyes behind
wire-framed spectacles put a heavy tumbler of wine into his hand.
We are short of glasses, guess you and Sam will have to share She slid
up along the bench and gave them a few inches of space and Samantha
perched in Nicholas lap. The wine was a rough fighting red, and it
galloped, booted and spurred across his palate but Samantha sipped her
share with the same relish as if it had been a S 3 ChAteau Lafitte, and
she nuzzled Nicholas ear and whispered: Tom is prof of the Biology
Department, he's a honey.
After you - he's my most favourite man in the world. A woman came
through from the galley, carrying a huge platter piled high with bright
pink shrimps and a bowl of molten butter. There was a roar of applause
for her as she placed the dishes in the centre of the table, and they
fell upon the food with unashamed gusto, The woman was tall with dark
hair in braids and a strong capable face, lean and supple in tight
breeches, but she was older than the other women and she paused beside
Tom Parker and draped one arm across his shoulders in a comfortable
gesture of long-established affection.
That's Antoinette, his wife. The woman heard her name and smiled across
at them, and with dark gentle eyes she studied Nicholas and then nodded
and made the continental O of thumb and forefinger at Samantha, before
slipping back into the galley.
The food did not inhibit the talk, the lively contentious flow of
discussion that swung swiftly from banter to deadly back again, bright
trained informed minds seriousness and clicking and cannoning off each
other with the crispness of ivory billiard balls, while at the same time
buttery fingers ripped the whiskered heads off the shrimps, delving for
the crescent of sweet white flesh, then leaving greasy fingerprints on