The only problem was that he loved the sea, above and below. There was no way he could simply turn his back and give it up. Somewhere there had to be a compromise.
He refocused on the current problem of the brown crud. Still only minor traces of it were on the chemical detection instruments, whose delicate sensors were mounted under the hull. Despite the fact that no ship's lights showed on the horizons, he picked up a pair of binoculars and idly scanned the darkness ahead.
At a comfortable cruising speed of twenty knots, Poco Bonito had left the Cayos Perlas Islands behind over an hour ago. Laying down the glasses and then studying a navigation chart, Pitt estimated that they were about thirty miles off the town of Tasbapauni on the Nicaraguan coast. He glanced at the instruments again. Their needles and digital numbers still stood unwavering on zero, and he began to wonder if they were on a wild-goose chase.
Giordino joined him with a cup of coffee. "Thought you might like a little something to keep you awake."
"Thank you. You're an hour early for your watch."
Giordino shrugged. "I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep."
Pitt gratefully sipped at the coffee. "Al, how come you never got married?"
The dark eyes squinted with curiosity. "Why ask me that now?"
"I've had nothing but time on my brain and it wanders to strange subjects."
"What's the old line?" Giordino said with a shrug. "I never found the right girl."
"You came close once."
He nodded. "Pat O'Connell. We both had our reservations at the last minute."
"What if I told you I'm thinking about retiring from NUMA and marrying Loren?"
Giordino turned and looked at Pitt as if he'd taken an arrow through one lung. "Say again?"
"I think you get the drift."
"I'll believe that when the morning sun rises in the west."
"Haven't you ever wondered about packing it in and taking it easy?"
"Not really," said Giordino thoughtfully. "I've never entertained any great ambitions. I'm happy at what I do. The husband and father routine never turned me on. Besides, I'm away from home eight months out of the year. What woman would put up with that? No, I guess I'll keep things just as they are until they wheel me into a nursing home."
"I can't picture you expiring in a nursing home."
"The gunslinger Doc Holliday did. His last words were 'I'll be damned' when he looked at his bare feet and realized he wasn't dying with his boots on."
"What do you want on your tombstone?" Pitt asked, not without humor.
" 'It was a great party while it lasted. I trust it will continue elsewhere.' "
"I'll remember when your time comes—"
Suddenly, Pitt went silent as the instrument displays came to life and began detecting traces of chemical pollution in the water.
"Looks like we're picking up something."
Giordino turned for the stairway leading to the crew's cabins. "I'll wake Dodge."
A few minutes later, a yawning Dodge climbed to the pilothouse and began scanning the computer monitors and recordings. Finally, he stood back, seemingly perplexed. "This doesn't look like any man-made pollution I've ever seen."
"What do you make of it?" asked Pitt.
"I'm not sure yet till I run some tests, but it appears to be a veritable cocktail of minerals flowing from the chemical element chart."
Excitement began to mount as Gunn and Renee, aroused by the sudden activity in the pilothouse, joined them and offered to make breakfast. There was an underlying current of expectation and optimism as Dodge quietly began assembling the incoming data and analyzing the numbers.
The eastern sun was still three hours from sliding over the horizon when Pitt went out on deck and studied the black sea flowing past the hull. He lay on the deck, leaned through the railing and trailed his hand in the water. When he pulled it back and raised it before his eyes, the palm and fingers were covered with a brown slime. He reentered the pilothouse, held up his hand and announced, "We're in the crud now. The water has turned a dull brownish muck almost as if the bottom silt was stirred up."
"You're closer to the mark than you think," said Dodge, speaking for the first time in half an hour. "This is the wildest concoction I've ever seen."
"Any clues to its recipe?" asked Giordino, waiting patiently as Renee filled his plate with bacon and scrambled eggs.
"The ingredients are not what you might think."
Renee looked puzzled. "What type of chemical pollutants are we talking about?"
Dodge looked at her solemnly. "The crud is not derived from manufactured toxic chemicals."
"Are you saying man is not the culprit?" inquired Gunn, pushing the chemist into a corner.
"No," Dodge answered slowly. "The culprit in this case is Mother Nature."
"If not from chemicals, then what?" Renee insisted.
"A cocktail," replied Dodge, pouring himself a cup of coffee. "A cocktail containing some of the most toxic minerals found in the earth. Elements that include barium, antimony, cobalt, molybdenum and vanadium that are obtained from toxic minerals such as stibnite, barytine, patronite and mispickel."
Renee's finely defined eyebrows lifted. "Mispickel?"
"The mineral arsenic is obtained from."
Pitt looked at Dodge, soberly, speculatively. "How is it possible that such a heavily concentrated toxic mineral cocktail, as you call it, can multiply, since it's impossible for it to reproduce itself?"
"The accumulation comes from constantly being replenished," replied Dodge. "I might add that there are heavy traces of magnesium, an indication of dolomitic lime that has dissolved in unheard-of concentrations."
"What does that suggest?" queried Rudi Gunn.
"The presence of limestone, for one thing." Dodge answered directly. He paused a few moments to study a readout from a printer. "Another factor is the gravitational force that pulls minerals or chemicals in alkaline water toward true magnetic north. Minerals attract other minerals to form rust or oxidation. Chemicals in alkaline water pull other chemicals toward their surface to form toxic waste or gas. That is why most of the brown blob has moved north toward Key West."
Gunn shook his head. "That doesn't explain why Dirk and Summer were able to study sections of the blob on Navidad Bank on the other side of the Dominican Republic out in the Atlantic."
Dodge shrugged. "A portion must have been carried by wind and currents through the Mona Passage between Dominica and Puerto Rico before drifting onto Navidad Bank."
"Whatever the cocktail," said Renee, waving her environmentalist flag, "it's turned the water harmful and dangerous to all life that uses it — humans, animals, reptiles, fish, even the birds that land in it, not to mention the microbial world."
"What puzzles me," muttered Dodge, continuing as if he hadn't heard Renee, "is how something with the consistency of silt can bind together in a cohesive mass that floats over a great distance in a cloud no deeper than a hundred and twenty feet from the surface." As he spoke, he made notations in a notebook. "I suspect sea salinity plays a part in the spread, which might explain why the crud doesn't sink to the bottom."
"That's not the only odd part of the puzzle," said Giordino.
"Make your point?" Pitt softly probed.
"The water temperature is seventy-eight, a good five degrees below normal for this part of the Caribbean."
"Another problem to solve," muttered Dodge wearily. "A drop that low is a phenomenon that doesn't go by the book."
"You've accomplished a lot," Gunn complimented the chemist. "Rome wasn't built in a day. We'll collect specimens and let the NUMA lab in Washington find answers to the rest of the enigma. Our job now is to track down the source somehow."