The Merlin Effect

by T.A. Barron

  “Tell me after I reconnect the dish.”

  Rising under the shroud of blankets, she stood before him. “The dish isn’t there.”

  He grunted as if he had been punched in the chest. “Not there?”

  “That’s right,” she said tentatively. “I saw it . . . dragged off by a whale.”

  “What? Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “No whale could have done that. Not unless he had hands to untie the net.”

  He reached for the door handle, when Kate placed her own hand on his.

  “The whale didn’t untie it,” she confessed. “I did.”

  He stared at her in amazement. “You what?”

  “And I broke the dish, too. Trying to rescue the whale! He was all tangled up in the net, and I thought he would die for sure unless I did something.”

  “Did something!” roared Jim. “Kate, how could you be so stupid?”

  He flung open the door and pushed past her. She watched helplessly as he strode to the stern, almost tripping on the mass of cables dangling from the metal stand in the middle of the deck.

  He leaned over the railing by the buoy and began fishing for any sign of the nylon net or the lost transmitter dish. The splashes grew louder, as did his cursing.

  Kate turned away, unwilling to watch. Angrily, she threw her wet braid over her back. She was certain that her father’s cherished project was dead. As dead as their brief moment of closeness. And she was certain that she had killed them both.

  VI: Piece of Eight

  Grounded from using the kayak, Kate found her only solace exploring the shoreline along the promontory, especially when low tide unveiled a band of beach, a hundred feet wide, stretching between the black lava rocks and the rim of the sea. On one such foray, she pulled off her sandals and loped along the sand, her feet slapping into puddles and sinking into soft depressions.

  Her eye caught a tidal pool, and she kneeled to examine this miniature ocean, frightening an orange crab who skittered away sideways. Shoots of eel grass waved in the water, undulating, sheltering the tiny blue fish who zipped in and out of the comely groves. Snail tracks flowed like ski trails down the sloping stones.

  Spying a gnarled barnacle as big as her fist, Kate reached into the pool to grasp it when a small explosion burst in the water. She jerked back her hand as a sting ray lifted off the sandy bottom and floated to the far end of the pool. With a mixture of fear and fascination, she watched it move, flapping in slow motion like an underwater bird.

  Then, from beyond the mouth of the lagoon, from behind the bank of fog resting on the water, she heard distant voices wailing. Eerily strange, yet hauntingly familiar, the songs of the whales filled the air for a few seconds, then died away.

  Kate thought back to when she and her father had returned to camp in the Skimmer two days ago. No sooner had they dropped anchor than Isabella had met them on the beach and informed Jim that, despite all her pleas, the government had rejected her request for an extension. In three short days, she had said, they would have to leave the lagoon.

  An explosion of activity, and of tempers, had ensued. After much ranting on both sides, Jim had finally convinced Terry to help him attempt to take one more picture. The young geologist had agreed, although he had expressed serious doubts it would be possible without the missing transmitter dish, and even more serious doubts they would find anything at all below the whirlpool. He had made it clear that he would cooperate only because the group’s sole hope of remaining past the deadline would be to produce a recognizable picture of the sunken ship. As they had set to work, Isabella had sequestered herself in her makeshift lab, trying to complete her own experiments.

  For the past two days, none of them had stopped working, leaving Kate to explore the beach on her own. She moved on, roaming among the rocks, watching striped lizards scurry through the pickle weed and cardon cactus. Spying some water spurting from a siphon hole in the sand, she dug furiously until she uncovered a plump, white Venus clam. She considered digging up the whole colony and preparing the tasty clams for supper, but she quickly discarded the idea, knowing that no one would pay any attention.

  As she continued down the beach, she found herself seeing less of her natural surroundings and more of the discarded debris of civilization that had floated ashore even in this isolated lagoon. The beach seemed to be littered with plastic oil containers, stray bottles, beer cans.

  “Looking for a message in a bottle?” asked a voice behind her.

  She spun around to face a pale-skinned man, heavy in the shoulders and chest, squinting at her from behind his thick glasses. His sandy hair lay twisted in all directions, apparently uncombed for several days.

  “Terry,” she said in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

  He continued to squint at her. “Decided to take a walk on the beach. Do you mind?”

  “No, of course not. It’s just that I’ve never seen you take a walk before.”

  “That’s because this is my first. Thought I’d better take at least one before we leave. Tomorrow’s our last day, you know.”

  She kicked at a crab shell protruding from the sand. “I know. I guess that means you and Dad haven’t made much progress.”

  “Only a little. You have no idea what we’re up against, technically speaking.” Thrusting his hands deep into the pockets of his flaming orange Bermuda shorts, he added in a cutting tone, “We had a bit of vandalism to the equipment.”

  Her cheeks grew hot. “Look, I apologized already! Three or four times. Isn’t that enough?”

  “No,” he answered crisply, trying to shield his eyes from the sun. “You can’t imagine what I put into developing those devices. Both on the boat and on the buoys. To have you come by and rip it all apart . . . well, it’s beyond asinine.”

  “I was just trying to—”

  “Save a whale, I know. How sweet. Maybe that will qualify you for the Vandal of the Year award.”

  “Get lost.”

  “Is that what you said to my transmitter dish?”

  Kate could only stare at him, feeling pain more than anger, regret more than rage. To her consternation, her eyes grew quite misty.

  As Terry watched her, rubbing the two-day stubble on his chin, his expression softened slightly. “Consider it over and done with, all right? At least you waited until the end of the month to do it. The truth is, my work wasn’t going anywhere anyway. I really need another six months to analyze the weird volcanism of this region.”

  “Weird?” she asked, grateful for the change of subject.

  He wiped some perspiration from his pallid brow. “Suffice it to say that some rather strange things are happening off this coast. Things that can’t be explained by plate tectonics and continental drift.”

  “You mean like the Resurreccíon?”

  Terry guffawed. “I’m talking about real things. Things you can see, measure, and record. Like the unexplained surges in temperature I’ve detected on the ocean floor. Not phantom ships that exist for no one but wishful historians.”

  Again her cheeks felt hot. “You can’t say for sure it’s not down there.”

  “I’ll grant you, there might be some old fishing boat down there, or something that looks enough like one to pull the wool over the bureaucrats’ eyes. That’s why we’re working like mad to try for another picture. But a Spanish galleon from five hundred years ago? Complete with masts and sails and a load of treasure? Give me a break.”

  “How can you be so sure? You haven’t been down to check.”

  “Because I believe in the fundamentals of science, that’s why! Not in rumors or legends or whatever.”

  Squaring her shoulders, Kate shot back, “My Dad’s proved plenty of legends are true.”

  “Sure,” he replied. “As true as nursery rhymes.”

  “If he says the ship exists, then that’s enough for me.”

  “That’s why you’re not a scientist.”

  “What’s the diffe
rence?” she demanded. “You take theories and try to find out if they’re true. He takes myths and does the same thing.”

  “Theories you can prove. Myths you can’t. That’s the difference.” He narrowed his eyes still further. “Tell me the truth. Do you honestly believe in this Merlin character?”

  “My dad thinks—”

  “Not your dad. You.”

  “Well, I . . .”

  “Do you believe it or not?”

  “Well, no,” she said quietly. “But that doesn’t mean he didn’t exist.”

  Terry nodded in satisfaction. “At least you’re more of a realist than your father. He seems to think that wizards and treasure ships are all over the place, just waiting to be found.”

  “That’s not fair,” objected Kate. “Sure, he gets caught up in his dreams every once in a while. Doesn’t everybody?” Stooping, she picked up a fragment of a sand dollar. “Didn’t you ever want to find buried treasure when you were a kid? To hold in your hand something kings and queens and pirates fought over . . . like a real piece of eight?”

  “Not really.”

  “Too bad.” She threw the sand dollar into the rocks. “You missed a lot.”

  “A lot of bedtime stories.” Without another word he turned and started striding back to camp.

  VII: An Ancient Ship, the Pride of Spain

  That afternoon, Kate stood outside the main tent watching the wind generator twirling slowly in the hot sun. She kicked a clump of sand, spraying it into the air. Several grains flew into her eye.

  I couldn’t have wrecked things more for Dad if I’d tried, she lamented, rubbing the sore eye.

  The roar of an engine arrested her thoughts. She recognized the battered brown van as it chugged into camp, coughed, then lurched to a stop by Isabella’s tent. It was Thursday, and that meant fish market day. The last fish market day.

  Isabella, her slight frame made a bit taller by the bun of brown hair piled on her head, emerged from the tent. She looked tired, but not as thoroughly disheveled as Terry. Kate ambled over just as the van’s door slid open and an elderly man with sun-baked skin jumped out. In one of his leathery hands, he clasped a net full of fish.

  “Buenos dias,” he said cheerily to both of them.

  “Buenos dias,” they answered simultaneously.

  That was the last of the ensuing conversation that Kate could understand. Despite her efforts to learn Spanish in school, the real thing went so much faster. She listened to the syncopated rhythms of their speech and the rising inflection at the end of each sentence, trying to catch a word or a phrase.

  The old man, moving with surprising agility, spread out the net on the sand. Isabella began examining the fish, peppering him with questions. He answered readily, tugging nervously on his bushy black mustache whenever she paused to inspect the catch.

  Finally she pushed aside a larger fish to reveal a rather pathetic, spiny creature with goggle eyes. Catching her breath, she arched her thick eyebrows. Slowly, she said a few words Kate took to mean, “I’ll take that one.”

  Visibly disappointed, the fisherman waved a plumper specimen before Isabella’s eyes. But she shook her head and pressed a large clump of pesos into his hand. He quit protesting at once. Then, with the vigor of a much younger man, he packed up the remaining fish, tossed them into the van, and saluted Isabella and Kate.

  As the van roared off in a swirl of dust, Isabella studied the fish in her hands. “Amazing,” she muttered.

  “Pretty ugly,” observed Kate.

  “No doubt about that, eh?” answered Isabella, still studying the fish.

  “You don’t expect me to cook it, do you? It wouldn’t feed one person, let alone four.”

  “No,” she responded as she pried open the fish’s mouth and examined its teeth. “This one is not for cooking.”

  “What’s it for, then?”

  “Come see.”

  As they entered the tent, Isabella brought the fish over to her wash basin and scrubbed it under the rainwater tap. She pulled open each fin and counted the spines before laying it carefully in a pan. Then she dried her hands on her white T-shirt, pulled a fat textbook off the shelf, and began thumbing through the pages.

  Kate watched with interest as the marine biologist checked various passages, glancing from time to time at the fish in the pan. At last she turned to a two-page chart showing the evolution of a particular genus of fish. Her slender finger pointed to an illustration of a gaunt-looking fish with oversized eyes. “There,” she announced. “Remarkable, eh?”

  “That’s it, all right,” agreed Kate. “Could be the ugliest fish in the book.”

  “Could be,” said Isabella, closing the book. She turned to Kate, her gray eyes dancing with excitement. “More important, though, it’s a museum piece. Until recently, everybody, including me, thought this species went extinct several hundred years ago.”

  Kate looked at the fish with new interest “So this is the fish you’ve been studying.”

  “Hoping to study is more like it. I’ve been waiting to get my hands on a fresh specimen so I could run a genetic analysis.”

  “That’s what you’ve been looking for in the submersible?”

  “That and other things. As long as I don’t go too near the whirlpool, or too close to the bottom because of the recent volcanic activity, there are enough interesting things around here to keep me going for a lifetime.”

  She reached for her small camera and took several pictures of the fish, top, bottom, both sides. Then she handed Kate a sterilized mask and put one on herself. Next she donned a pair of rubber gloves.

  With a thin scalpel, she slit open the fish, found the spleen, extracted a blood sample and inserted it in a centrifuge. While the machine whirred, she carefully wrapped the fish and packed it into her small propane freezer. A few minutes later, she removed a tiny vial from the centrifuge and carefully transferred the liquid to a petri dish which she placed inside a compact incubator.

  Peeling off her mask and gloves, she sat down at her desktop computer and punched in a few lines of information. Then she turned and said, “Fun, isn’t it? Like waiting to open a Christmas present.”

  Kate found the analogy mystifying. “Hard to picture that goggle-eyed thing under a Christmas tree.”

  Isabella laughed. “The truth is, I feel that way about everything in the sea. That’s what comes of growing up in a Mexican fishing village, I suppose. As a child I could hear the sounds of the sea everywhere, all the time, even in my dreams.” She waved a hand at her little laboratory. “Seawater covers three fourths of our planet, spawned the very first life, even flows through our veins—yet we know almost nothing about it. Did you know that less than five percent of the ocean floor has ever been mapped, that we know more about the dark side of the moon than we do about the bottom of the sea?”

  “No, but I know all I want to know, after meeting that whirlpool.”

  “Ah, Remolino de la Muerté,” replied Isabella in her gentle voice. “You are lucky to be alive.”

  “I suppose so,” answered Kate. “Sometimes being alive doesn’t feel so great, though.” She tapped the top of the incubator. “Did you always want to study sea animals?”

  She laughed again. “Always. That is, after I got over wanting to be a pearl diver. The sea has so many mysteries! Maybe if I live to be three hundred, like some of the folks around here claim to be, I could answer all my questions.”

  “Do they really say that?”

  “Sure, that’s what they say. It’s a local tradition, eh? Claiming you’re older than the sea. No one outside the fishing villages believes it, mind you. But there’s no way to prove they’re lying, since nobody keeps birth records.”

  Kate cocked her head toward the tent flap. “How about that guy who brought you the fish? He seems pretty spry for an old man.”

  “Manuel?” Isabella brushed back a stray strand of hair from her bun. “I don’t know how old he is, but that’s another curious thing about the
villagers here. The old ones, even the ones who say they’ve lived for centuries, have the energy of youngsters. My mother used to say it’s something in the water.”

  “That would be great if it’s true.”

  Smiling, Isabella recalled, “I used to dream about living to be a thousand.” She waited a moment, then asked softly, “And where, I wonder, do your dreams take you?”

  Kate started to answer, then caught herself. She walked over to Isabella’s little wooden altar by the tent window, bordered by six hand-painted carvings of saints. Beneath the altar sat a long table laden with vials of chemicals, beakers, meters, glass columns, a large microscope, and several more petri dishes. Without facing Isabella, she said, “Someplace where I won’t cause any trouble.”

  “That’s not much of a goal.”

  Kate leaned over the microscope for a few seconds. “It’s the best I can do right now.”

  “Haven’t you ever thought about what you’d like to do with your life?”

  “I guess so.”

  Isabella lifted one petri dish to the light and examined it. “And?”

  “Well, sometimes when I play softball I think about what it might be like to play shortstop for a real major league team.”

  “That’s a good goal. Any others?”

  “No.”

  “Come, now. Tell me.”

  Kate thought for a moment. “I suppose sometimes I’ve thought about . . . about creating something, like a book or a symphony or something.” Her shoulders drooped. “Right now, though, all I create is trouble. Even when I try to do the right thing, like rescuing that whale, I mess things up royally.”

  Brushing back some loose hairs from the bun on her head, Isabella said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that, but with everything else going on I haven’t had a chance. You’re quite sure it was a gray whale?”

  “Sure as could be. A young male.”

  “How was he caught?”

  “By the tail, in the net. One of his flukes was almost completely cut off. Blood was everywhere.”

  “Oooh, that sounds bad. Was he able to swim after you set him free?”