NH3

by Stanley Salmons

  Max stepped into the wheelhouse, twisted a key in a panel in front of him, and pressed two large red buttons. The twin motors spluttered into life, shattering the silence of the pool. He flicked a couple of switches and the beams of two powerful spotlights probed the darkness ahead. Then, with the wheel in one hand and the levers in the other, he eased them away from the quay.

  Maggie settled herself down in a corner of the cabin and watched the lights of the town and the quay receding. Some minutes later the increased motion of the boat told her they’d left the harbour. Max extinguished the spotlights and advanced the throttles. Waves splashed against the hull in a recurrent rhythm. Her eyelids grew heavy.

  She awoke with a jerk, unaware of having fallen asleep. The engine note had dropped to an idle. Max’s features were thrown into relief by the weak illumination coming from the instrument panel.

  “On the button,” he said, pointing – presumably at the GPS.

  She got up, stretched, rubbed her eyes and gave her head a little shake. Then she checked her watch. It was ten to three.

  She opened a wooden chest, painted grey with red stripes. Inside were the respirator masks, and with them the precious canister of the new organism. She lifted it out and went to the rear deck to wait for the precise moment.

  In the darkness the sounds and smells of the night were magnified. The deck rocked gently under her feet, the motors puttered, and the water smacked against the hull. Then her nostrils twitched and she stiffened. It was faint, but there was no mistaking it.

  Ammonia.

  Should they put on the masks? She checked her watch again. Three o’clock.

  Let’s get this over with.

  She unscrewed the cap, swirled the canister and emptied the contents over the side into the black, unseen water.

  CHAPTER 67

  “Ice storms,” said Milner. “I heard about them, I seen pictures on television, but I never been stuck in one before. Why did it have to happen now?”

  He and Terry had more or less finished breakfast, but they sat by the window, sipping coffee and staring disconsolately at the dim, deserted street.

  Terry pushed his cup away. “John Gilchrist showed me this weather system last Friday. The ice storm was sitting on Montreal then. It was big but I had no idea it would affect us. Either it’s spread all the way to Boston or it’s in the process of moving off to the south or south-east. My hope is that it’s moving.”

  “Because it won’t last so long?”

  “Not just that. A day or two after this little lot moves off it’s going to set up severe storm conditions in the Atlantic. Maggie’s planning to carry out some field trials in that area next week. I’d feel much better about it if the whole system had passed through by then.”

  Milner sighed. “Yeah. Well, so much for flying back today. I phoned Logan this morning. Still nothing happening.”

  “I’m not surprised. Far too dangerous for anything to land with the runways all iced up.”

  “What about helicopters? They don’t need runways. They could fly us to an ice-free airport. Somewhere like T.F. Green in Rhode Island.”

  “Not in freezing rain they couldn’t. It would ice up the rotors inside a minute. What did you do about the flights?”

  “They rebooked us on the next scheduled service.”

  “That’s Friday, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” Milner craned his neck to look up again at the sky. He was almost talking to himself. “Day after tomorrow. Maybe it’ll clear by then.”

  “Sam, even if the conditions change now the airport may not be functioning as soon as that. And the next flight isn’t till Monday. Aren’t there any alternatives?”

  He got up.

  “I’ll go see. If I find something I’ll phone your room. Otherwise we’ll meet in the bar later.”

  It was still dark as Cleaver II entered the calm water of the harbour. Maggie stood in the wheelhouse, straining to see if her people were in place. A thin mist curled off the water, writhed in the spotlight beams, and formed haloes around the quayside lights. As the boat inched up to the quay the team came into view: shadowy figures standing there on the jetty, huddled in their padded jackets and windproof trousers. Max cut the engines. It was five to seven.

  Sara Tennant called out: “All right, Maggie?”

  “Yes, fine. Do you want to hand that down?”

  Maggie took a large bag from her and carried it to the cabin. Rob Guillemain and Jos Wentink picked up an insulated chest between them. There was another chest on the jetty next to them.

  “Casey,” Max said, “you wanna give the youngsters a hand with those chests? They go here.”

  He pointed underneath the wooden bench that ran around the sides of the cabin.

  With Casey’s help Jos and Rob got the chest on board and went back for the second one. Sara Tennant and Sonia Yudin came up behind with the rest of the sampling gear. They were all on board.

  “Okay, people,” Maggie said. “Make yourselves comfortable. We’ve got a six-hour trip ahead of us.”

  Casey was already casting off. He jumped back into the boat and shouted to Max: “All clear.”

  Maggie said: “Max? You know where we’re going, don’t you? The furthest point. Then we’ll take samples on the way back to where we dumped the stuff this morning.”

  He nodded and started the engines, and Cleaver II nosed out of the harbour again.

  A blush was just beginning to spread into the eastern sky.

  Terry returned to his room and stood there for several minutes, at a loss as to what to do next. He hadn’t brought his lap top with him because it had data and programs on it that would have posed security issues. The streets were far too icy to risk venturing outside. He went back to the ground floor where there was a bookshop and newsstand, bought copies of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, and took them up to his room. There was little else he could do for the moment except settle down with Wednesday’s papers.

  There were many pages on the situation in the north-west, the articles frequently illustrated with the same syndicated photographs. An enterprising pilot had overflown Yellowstone and taken photos of the thirty-mile-wide crater. Much of it was obscured by smoke and ash, and there were no houses or other recognizable features to give it scale, but it had evidently remodelled not only the whole of Yellowstone Park but part of the Lake, too. This was brought home even more forcibly by the Washington Post, which had superimposed a dotted outline of the previous boundaries. The scars were seen in the surrounding areas, too; the explosion had sent out a shock wave over a huge radius, leaving trees scattered like matchsticks. It reminded Terry of the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, except the volume of ejecta would have been at least three thousand times greater.

  The towns were a picture of devastation. He had to force himself to read the accounts. Along the path of the surges no one had survived; those who weren’t incinerated were asphyxiated. Above the dark grey surface that marked the new ground level, bodies were still being removed from the upper floors of buildings and taken away for quick burial; recovering those incarcerated in the solidified ash and mud would no doubt continue for years. The main humanitarian effort focused on the luckier ones who’d avoided the pyroclastic flows but were now totally cut off. Special trauma centres and supply dumps had been set up in neighbouring states. Cargo planes continued to make drops, and helicopters ferried in rescue teams and took out the sick and injured, but their efforts looked puny in relation to the size of the problem. The priority on the ground was to clear roads and runways so that the whole operation could be scaled up.

  The articles were interspersed with personal tales of survival and heroism, and accounts of the less savoury activities of people who’d sought to exploit the situation.

  When he’d turned the last page he felt empty. He got up and paced around the room.

  The decision was the President’s; the responsibility was mine. I’ll have to live with this for the
rest of my life.

  He pulled up short and clenched his fists. It wasn’t sensible to think in those terms. The important thing was to focus not on the million or so who may have died but on the seven billion it could yet save. He turned back and looked at the papers scattered over the sofa.

  God, Maggie, I hope your solution works. Because if it doesn’t, we did all this for nothing.

  The steady note of Cleaver II’s engines dropped. Maggie looked at her watch. They couldn’t be there yet, there was more than an hour to go. She got to her feet. Max was peering ahead and Casey had his head round the side of the cabin.

  “What is it, Max?”

  He pointed and her heart sank. It was an area of apparent calm ahead. She knew what that meant because she’d seen it before. Weed.

  “Okay, everyone,” she shouted. “Respirators on.”

  Rob was standing behind her. “I can’t smell anything, Maggie.”

  “Rob, by the time you smell it, it’ll be too late. Just put the bloody thing on.”

  For the next few minutes they busied themselves taking the masks out of the chest and fitting them to one another. It was something they’d practised, but Casey and Max needed a little help. When they’d finished Maggie inspected the result.

  In spite of the mask, Casey had managed to get his woolly hat back on, to richly comic effect. Even Max was wearing his white cap. She was grateful for these touches because in other ways the group had taken on a sinister look, like a germ warfare exercise.

  Their attention returned to the weed mat. Max was shaking his head, his voice muffled by the mask. “I been sailing these waters for many a year, and I never seen weed this far south.”

  A shout came from Casey. He was up on the bulwark, gesticulating.

  “Max, quick, hard to starboard.”

  Max gunned the throttles differentially just as a brown mass washed by. It was a couple of metres across, with trailing arms, like some bizarre sea monster. Jos was quite excited.

  “Look at the brown colour, Maggie. It could be a different species. Let me take a sample.”

  Maggie looked at Max. He tilted his head. “We’ll go slow but I don’t wanna stop them screws turnin’.”

  “Okay, Jos, but be quick.”

  Jos opened the equipment bag and fitted a filter and a bottle to the sampling drogue. He aimed, then tossed it out and handlined it in. Sara was standing by.

  “Polycarbonate tube, Sara,” Jos said.

  “Here you are.”

  “No, just hold it. I will pour the sample, you cap it. Okay, now the jar.”

  Sara unsealed a jar and Jos removed the filter from the sampling drogue and dropped it in. The filter had been a fine white gauze when they’d assembled the drogue. Now it was a greenish brown.

  “I will label this one, you label that one. Good, you can freeze that one now.”

  Sara walked forward to the cabin area, put on some thick gloves and opened one of the two insulated chests. A white mist billowed out. She tucked the polycarbonate tube well down into the dry ice, closed the lid, and pulled down the latch. Freezing the seawater to minus eighty degrees would arrest any chemical reactions until they got the sample back to the laboratory.

  The jar containing the loaded filter went into the second chest. This one contained conventional ice, which would help to preserve the internal structure of the cyanobacteria without actually freezing them.

  Jos looked up. “Okay, Maggie.”

  She nodded and paused to look at Casey, who was hanging over the bulwark, staring into the water. Then he did the same on the other side of the boat. He seemed quite agitated.

  She followed Max’s gaze out to the big weed mat. “Can you go around it, Max?”

  “Could try, but…” He showed her the chart Jos had prepared. “Where you wanna get to is here. To be safe we need to go here, then here. No way we can make it by one o’clock.”

  The rest of the team were looking on. Casey came over to join them.

  “Lot o’ weed in this water all aroun’, mon. Could be fouled already. Wouldn’t go anywhere now if I was you.”

  Max’s expression was grim. “This stoff stick to the hull,” he explained. “It can slide off any time and wrap itself round the screws.”

  Casey touched her arm for emphasis, his eyes wide. “We seen it happen.”

  Maggie took a deep breath. “All right, I’ve heard enough. We’re going back.”

  There was a chorus of protest from the postdocs.

  She held up a hand. “I’m not taking chances with people’s lives.”

  “What about the test?” Rob asked.

  “We’ll talk it over tonight.”

  Milner was already in the bar when Terry went down to meet up with him.

  “That okay?” He pushed a glass across to him. The brown tinge suggested there was probably some scotch amongst the rocks.

  “Thanks. Any joy?”

  Milner shook his head. “Can’t go by train: rails are still iced up. Any case the rolling stock’s all over the place; it’ll take days to get schedules back to normal.”

  “Can we rent a car and drive down?”

  “Checked that, too. Trouble is, you’d never make it out of this area without an all-wheel drive. I made a few calls to local rental companies and there’s been a run on them; they’re clean out. Looks like we have to wait till Friday for the flight.”

  “Great, another whole day of this to look forward to.” Terry sighed. “I am so bloody sick of hanging around up here. You know, I’ve been working non-stop since we moved to Florida. Now suddenly I’m twiddling my thumbs.”

  “Yeah, and I’m getting kind of tired of watching old movies.” He drained his glass and stood up. “Get you another?”

  “Yeah, why not? No ice this time.”

  Milner grinned. “Brits like their beer warm, too. Right?”

  “Right.”

  Terry dropped into a leather bench seat while Milner got the drinks. His mind wandered to the Institute. Maggie would be wondering what had happened to him. He could get a message to her via Milner’s secretary, but they hadn’t been following each other’s movements closely of late. She’d probably assume he’d gone on one of the sampling flights.

  A shadow crossed his mind. Where had she been when he went to find her? He dismissed the thought. She was probably making preliminary preparations for the field trip. There was no way they could go out this week.

  After they unloaded the boat Maggie phoned the Institute of Ocean Sciences. A technician drove down in one of their few vehicles and collected the chests of ice and dry ice. He agreed to place the samples in temporary storage. Then the team returned to the hotel and came up to Maggie’s room. Maggie was desperately tired, but morale was low and she knew they needed to decide on a new strategy as soon as possible.

  “It was sheer bad luck,” she said. “Max stopped well short of that weed mat but we didn’t realize how much there was floating around in the water. It was too dangerous to go on. In any case we couldn’t make the far point by one o’clock so we wouldn’t have been able to time the spread.”

  “Can we go out tomorrow?” Rob asked.

  “I’m afraid not. It’s going to take them all day to clean off any weed that’s still clinging to the boat. It will have to be Friday.”

  “What will we do?”

  ‘Well, we won’t be able to see how fast it’s spreading but we can still find out if it’s working. Jos and I had a quick word about it on the way back. Jos?”

  Jos produced a copy of his chart and laid it on the table. He pointed. “The current should have carried our organism through this area. We know now we cannot go there because of the weed. But if it is working it should spread like this.” He made a wedge shape with his hands, expanding from the pencilled cross, the point where Maggie had emptied the canister. “So if we approach the area from the south we should be able to take samples before we reach the weed mats.”

  Maggie saw the others nodding. �
�Okay, then,” she said, “that’s the plan. We still want to do all the sampling in daylight so we may as well stick to the same schedule as today. Right now I need some sleep. Free time tomorrow, except for picking up the chests from the Institute in the evening. And let’s be ready on the jetty on Friday morning at seven o’clock.”

  Milner came back with a glass in each hand. He paused and jerked his head towards the window.

  “Hey, Terry. Look behind you. It’s getting worse.”

  Terry got up and looked out of the window. It was snowing.

  He came back to Milner.

  “Not worse, Sam. The opposite. Snow confirms it. This system’s on the move.”

  CHAPTER 68

  It was shortly before seven on Friday morning when Maggie led the team through the darkness down to the quay. The four postdocs were unusually quiet, no doubt coping – as she was – with the shock of emerging from a warm bed into the biting cold of the morning. As they approached Cleaver II she saw Max Gibson’s white cap moving around in the dimly lit wheelhouse. Casey was standing on the jetty ready to help them board the sampling equipment and chests. Max came over.

  “Weather forecast said rain on the way,” he said.

  “We’ve got waterproofs; I think we can put up with a little rain. How bad is it likely to be?”

  “Normally I’d-a taken one look at the sky last evenin’ and told you. But this stoff in the air from the volcano, it make the sky grey all-a time. And fonny things been happenin’ to the weather all over. Could be nothin’; could turn out rough. Hard to say.”

  Maggie bit her lip. She didn’t want to take unnecessary risks but this really would be their last chance this trip. Ocean currents were not that predictable on a local scale and in another day or so a negative result could mean either that the organism wasn’t working or that it had been washed into an entirely different area. They’d return no wiser than when they came out.

  “Max, we really have to go today. What do you think?”