Carol finished the tour with obvious pride.
“I think it’s the best privately held icebreaker in the world,” she said.
“It might’ve been cheaper to build a new boat from scratch,” Zubov said, only half joking.
“Sure,” Carol said. “We thought about it, but then we’d have to decommission the old vessel and I hate wasting anything.” It was a typical Carol Harmon understatement: while most people spoke of “not wasting” something, they usually meant paper bags or leftover food, not a twelve-thousand-ton ship.
As they completed their tour, Carol apologized again for the expedition’s lack of radiation-monitoring equipment. The single dosimeter they had aboard was barely adequate for testing the air and the lab samples they had collected from the whales, and she berated herself for not foreseeing the need for it.
“Carol, you can’t be serious,” Garner said. “From what I can see, you’re prepared for every possible contingency except this, and no one could have predicted what you’ve found. There’s a limit to what a ship can carry.”
“Even this tub,” Zubov joked.
Carol chewed her lip, unconvinced.
“Still—”
“Yes,” Zubov agreed, straight-faced. “You should have brought a still. I could use a drink.” He caught Garner’s sharp look and sighed.
“All right, I’m going.” He shrugged back into his exposure suit and returned outside to assist Byrnes’s crew in bringing Medusa aboard.
Left alone in the main lab, Carol briefed Garner on everything they had learned since discovering the whales.
“The floe is already beginning to break up,” Carol said. “One of the whales finally struggled free yesterday and we could lose another one in the next day or so.” Given the serious nature of what they had found in the whales’ tissue, the notion of freeing them from their attachment to the floe had become secondary to learning as much as possible about the animals and their condition. The focus of the Phoenix’s crew had become, first, to keep the behemoths alive and, second, to keep them readily accessible for as long as possible. Even with unobstructed passage through the ice, any vessel would find it impossible to follow the whales for any period of time once they made a break for open water.
“As you might expect,” Carol added, “a hundred-ton blue whale doesn’t ask permission. Except for being stuck to this damn ice, it pretty much does whatever it wants.”
“You’ve got them fitted with tracking devices?” Garner asked.
“Of course,” Carol said. “Probe transmitters threaded through their back muscles.” The harmless, practically disposable devices were routinely employed to track the migration of large aquatic animals like whales, seals, and sharks in the open sea.
“We’ll have a running record of their movement, speed, depth, and basic metabolism, but only from this point forward. We still have no way of knowing how they got here.”
They returned to the Phoenix’s bridge and pored over the large chart table there. The latest estimation of the floe’s movement was marked on the charts, and Garner compared this with the known ocean currents through the area. The charts were standard mariner issue from the Canadian Hydrographic Office, and Garner mentioned the high-resolution versions he had borrowed from Krail.
“I think we’ll need as much information as we can get.”
“So far that’s not much,” Carol said. “In the past three days, I’ve called the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the EPA, the Sierra Club, the Canadian Energy Commission even the native legislators in Iqaluit and Igloolik. When I start asking if they know of any radiation spills in this area, they act as though I’m putting out an APB on Godzilla.”
“That bad?”
“If they know anything, they’re not talking,” Carol said. “Only Nuuk, in Greenland, reacted with any sort of concern. They said they had a Japanese scientist working there who knew something about radiation and they would have her contact me. I’ve got a great technician on board with some medical training Susan Conant. She was the first to give us a diagnosis, but even she admits she’s out of her depth on this. We all are.”
“Are there any observers who could help you?” Garner asked. Research vessels working in foreign waters often invited a representative of the host country on board to act as a liaison, a watchdog for any impropriety, and occasionally even as a navigator or pilot. For the current expedition, Canada had provided one such observer to ride along with the Phoenix.
“The kid’s name is Seaborg,” Carol said. “A summer intern. The Canadian government took some flak when they awarded this contract to an American company, so Seaborg was thrown in as a kind of peace offering. If this isn’t his first job, I’d like to know what was. I think he’s asleep more than he’s awake, and when he’s awake he’s playing golf on the computer.”
“A nubby,” Garner ventured. Nonuseful body, in naval terms. “He takes care of table scraps pretty well,” Carol said.
“In any event, I doubt the lack of information is a conspiracy against you,” Garner said. “That would suggest they know about it in the first place. If it’s a spill, chances are the only people who know about it are the ones who spilled it, and they likely won’t be stepping forward voluntarily.”
“Do you think there’s been some kind of illegal dumping?”
“From what you’ve shown me, the high-level elements are too concentrated to be from a natural source and they’re too impure to be from weapons.” He could see Carol’s disappointment.
“I know, it doesn’t answer the big question.”
“That’s why you’re here,” Carol said. “To have Medusa tell us where.”
Garner looked at the chart again, using his fingers as a pair of makeshift calipers to approximate distance and direction.
“I’d say we need to let the whales go on their way. Then we get Medusa in the water as soon as Serg can get radiometers attached to her and working in conjunction with the bottle samplers. Once the field equipment, rad suits, and your Japanese expert get here, we can head north against the prevailing current. If we can get some reliable radiation levels from inside the current, we should be able to follow the concentrations upstream to the source along the coast of Baffin Island.” He saw the dubious look in Carol’s eyes.
“Simple, right?”
“Only to you,” Carol said in resignation. She looked again at the samples they had already collected, still wrapped and enclosed within the plastic “safe” boxes they had jury-rigged.
“You know,” she continued, “if this is a large-scale radiation source. Medusa will become permanently contaminated.”
“I know,” Garner said. He also knew that sacrificing his only operating sampler would mean losing even more time before he could return to his own research, maybe even scrapping his entire thesis project.
“Looks like I didn’t plan for this contingency either.”
The uncrated Medusa sphere was lowered onto the Phoenix’s afterdeck and her support equipment stored in the main lab. Zubov continued to be impressed by the ship’s onboard resources, including a compact, six-seat hovercraft that was packed in its own hangar in the aft cargo hold.