“Were you really going to let Medusa pull you off the ship?” Garner asked.
“I didn’t have a choice,” Zubov replied. “She’s the only reason I’m on this tub. I didn’t even bring a deck of cards. And I wasn’t going to spend the next week repairing that umbilical. I can’t believe you were going to cut it.”
“Are you kidding?” Garner replied, clapping him on the back. “That’s a twelve-thousand-dollar cable. The knife was for your legs.”
The black humor broke the tension as Medusa was properly secured and clamped in place until her next use. Given the amount of data that the umbilical provided on every tow and the value of the station time already compromised by the storm, more than a few researchers might consider one technician’s life a regrettable but necessary trade.
With the last A-frame tow of the day completed and the twilight becoming full night, the Lansing’s deck was secured and the running lights switched on. Garner and Zubov peeled away their cold-weather suits and hung them in the ship’s aft laboratory.
“See you in the morning?” Zubov asked. Except for the second watch, most of those on board had retired for the day. The scientists slept off recurring seasickness in their bunks, read thumb-worn paperbacks, or sat through their two hundredth screening of The Empire Strikes Back on videotape in the officers’ lounge. Zubov himself was overdue for the nightly poker game with the Lansing’s off-duty crew.
“See you. Get some rest,” Garner confirmed. He himself had to wade through a day’s worth of data from Medusa before dawn, then prepare the sampler for its next tow, at 4:00 a.m.
Garner’s path to the decks of the Lansing had been a long and convoluted one since his upbringing on an Iowa farm. Retiring early but respectably decorated from the U.S. Navy at the rank of lieutenant commander, Garner had excelled in several valuable areas of military intelligence. Ultimately, however, Garner’s well-developed acrophobia limited his advancement up the military’s career ladder. In truth, on the infrequent occasions Garner mentioned that chapter of his life, he would say that he remained intrigued with the practice of intelligence gathering but had grown disillusioned at how that intelligence might later be used about the only thing he shared with his former father-in-law, Charles Harmon.
Military targets and perceived enemies of the state gradually became less interesting to him than broader, more academic pursuits. Garner exchanged a background in ocean acoustics and electrical engineering for the pursuit of a doctorate in biological oceanography. For one of the very few times in his life, professional skill and personal interest had come together. Most days, this incidental confluence of fate, aptitude, and pleasure provided him with enough stability to weather most of life’s storms, even those in the Southern Ocean.
Garner had started his thesis — use of an automated sampler to describe plankton population structures — as an attempt to design a better mousetrap. As Medusa’s mechanical problems accumulated and diversified, Garner suddenly found his research taking on the premise of an engineering project. Then, to justify the expense and frustration of the sampler’s design and give credibility to its results, he found he needed to extend Medusa’s sampling to other oceans and other seasons. These more ambitious plans to test Medusa, in turn, led to further complications and disappointments with the device’s design. It was becoming clear to more people than Sergei Zubov that if Medusa wasn’t Garner’s ultimate undoing, his own meticulousness would be.
Zubov’s reputation for being cantankerous and bellicose where Medusa was concerned was exceeded only by his expertise and resourcefulness.
After a dozen cruises as Garner’s assistant, Zubov had reached the tenuous but manageable compromise with Medusa that expert mechanics and complex machines sometimes do, and Garner could no longer imagine completing his work without one or the other.
When it came time to sample the Southern Ocean, Garner had recruited Zubov from his usual assignment boatswain on the research vessel Exeter to accompany him on the Lansing for this third and possibly last excursion to Antarctica. Now, while the Lansing was laboring toward Drake Passage, the Exeter was on a research cruise to Palau as part of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, or WOCE. In his contempt for this geographical juxtaposition, Zubov made a daily point of reminding Garner that he should really be basking in the tropical Pacific.
For all her ingenuity, it wasn’t long ago that Medusa had seemed destined for some high-tech scrap heap. Then she had proven instrumental in identifying and tracking a monstrous red tide that had swept ashore from the northeast Pacific Ocean. In recognition of his ongoing service in a reserve commission, Garner had received a promotion to full commander and the Legion of Merit from the U.S. Navy.
To Garner’s initial chagrin, this sidetrack had pushed his dissertation back at least six months, but the dramatic applied demonstration of the device had been enough to keep research grants coming in.
Now, at just thirty-eight years of age, William Brock Garner found himself to be a reluctant Navy commander twice retired, a flawed husband once divorced, an inventor of international repute, and a local hero to the citizens of the Pacific Northwest. But still not yet, not quite, a Ph. D. Mr. Garner still needed these data from the Southern Ocean before he could aspire to being Dr. Garner.
It seemed too frivolous to admit aloud in light of his academic accomplishments to date, but he needed the credibility of a Ph. D. to feel he had achieved at least a modicum of professional acceptance. He needed his committee back at the University of Washington to sign off on his dissertation before he could begin to let loose the sense of struggle and selfdefense that had gripped him for far too long.
To an equal degree, Garner’s work was also driven by a passion to collect, to describe, to translate, and, finally, to resolve what in his estimation were among the most important dilemmas facing the planet. In the case of the Southern Ocean, this necessarily included the condition of the plankton, especially the incalculably immense populations of krill that sustained the world’s largest planktivores, the baleen whales. Gradually, Medusa was defining the parameters of these minute but vitally important organisms. Most significantly.
Garner’s invention was finding a diversity of species notably their larval life stages more than ten times higher than had ever been described. With the thinning of the ozone layer over the South Pole, the amount of ultraviolet radiation striking the sea surface had significantly increased. Exposed to increased irradiation, the reproductive cells of many plankton species, up to six times more susceptible to destruction by ultraviolet light, were gradually being destroyed. It was not the sort of thing making front-page headlines yet but slowly, almost imperceptibly, the ocean’s plankton community was becoming sterile. Some estimates of plankton population decline now reached 15 percent, with entire generations being killed off long before reaching adulthood.
Any credible description of ocean conditions needed round-the-clock observations and multiple replicates. Plankton biologists often work through the night, when the zooplankton come up to the surface waters under the cover of darkness to feed on phytoplankton satiated by the day’s sunlight. Dawn had just broken on the eastern horizon when Garner and Zubov finished Medusa’s 4:00 A.M. tow, without incident.