“Stand by for landing, Kurt,” Zavala warned.
The helicopter angled down toward a U.S. navy cruiser, and moments later it landed on the deck helipad. Pete Muller, the ensign they had met when his ship was guarding the vessels at the Lost City, was waiting to greet them.
“How's it look?” Muller yelled over the thrump of the rotors.
Austin was grim-faced. “About as bad as it gets.”
He and Zavala followed Muller to a briefing room belowdecks. About thirty men and women were seated in rows of metal folding chairs drawn up in front of a large wall screen. Austin and Zavala quietly slipped into a couple of chairs in the back row. Austin recognized some of the NUMA scientists in the audience but knew only a few of the uniformed people from the armed forces and the suits from various governmental agencies charged with public security.
Standing in front of the screen was Dr. Osborne, the Woods Hole phycologist who had introduced the Trouts to the Gorgonweed menace. He was wielding a remote control in one hand and a laser pointer in the other. Displayed on the screen was a chart showing the circulation of water in the Atlantic Ocean.
“Here's where the infestation starts, in the Lost City,” he said. “The Canaries' current carries the weed down past the Azores, flows westward across the Atlantic Ocean where it joins the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream moves northerly along the continental shelf. Eventually, it joins the North Atlantic current, which takes it back to Europe, completing the North Atlantic gyre.” He swirled the red laser dot in a circle to make his point. “Any questions?”
“How fast does the Gulf Stream move?” someone asked. “About five knots at its peak. More than a hundred miles a day.” “What's the present state of the infestation?” Muller asked.
Osborne clicked the remote and the circulation chart disappeared. A satellite photo of the North Atlantic took its place. An irregular yellowish band that resembled a great deformed donut ran in a rough circle around the edge of the ocean, close to the continents.
“This real-time composite satellite photo gives you an idea of the current areas of Gorgonweed infestation,” Osborne said. “Now I'll show you our computer projection of the further spread.” The picture changed. In the new photo the ocean was totally yellow, except for a few dark blue holes in the central Atlantic.
A murmur ran through the audience.
“How long before it gets to that stage?” Muller asked.
Osborne cleared his throat as if he were having a hard time getting the words out. “A matter of days.”
There was a collective gasp at his answer.
He clicked the remote. The picture zoomed in on the eastern seaboard of North America. “This is the area of immediate concern. Once the weed reaches the shallower waters of the continental shelf, we're really in trouble. For a start, it will destroy the entire fishing industry along the east coast of the United States and Canada and northwestern Europe. We've been trying various measures of at-sea containment. I saw Mr. Austin enter the room a few minutes ago. Would you like to bring us up-to-date, Kurt?”
Not really, Austin thought as he made his way to the front of the room. He scanned the pale faces in front of him. “My partner, Joe Zavala, and I just completed an aerial survey of the picket line that has been established along the edge of the continental shelf.” He described what they had seen. “Unfortunately,” he concluded, “nothing made a dent.”
“What about chemicals?” a government bureaucrat asked.
“Chemicals are quickly dissipated by water and wind,” Austin said. "A little seeps down, and it may kill a few tendrils, but Gorgonweed is so thick that the chemical doesn't go all the way through.
We're talking about a vast area. Even if you were able to cover it you'd end up poisoning the ocean."
“Is there anything that could destroy a large area?” Muller asked.
“Sure. A nuclear bomb,” Austin said, with a bleak smile. “But even that would be ineffectual with thousands of square miles of ocean. I'm going to recommend that booms be erected around major harbors. We'll try to keep our major ports clear so we can buy time.”
A beefy four-star army general named Frank Kyle stood and said, “Time for what} You've said yourself that there is no defense against this stuff.”
“We've got people working on genetic solutions.”
The general snorted as if Austin had suggested replacing his soldiers' rifles with flowers. “Genetics! DNA stuff? What the hell good is that going to do? It could take months. Years.”
“I'm open to suggestions,” Austin said.
The general grinned. “Glad to hear that. I'm going to pass your suggestion about nuclear bombs along to the president.”
Austin had dealt with military types when he was with the CIA and found that they were usually cautious about using force against any enemy. General Kyle was a throwback to another nuclear general, Curtis LeMay, but in a climate of fear his recommendation might prevail.
“I was not suggesting it,” Austin said patiently. “As you'll recall, I said a nuclear bomb would make a relatively small dent in the weed.”
“I'm not talking about one bomb,” General Kyle said. “We've stockpiled thousands of them that we were going to use against the Russians. We carpet bomb the ocean, and if we run out we can borrow more from the Ruskies.”
“You're talking about turning the ocean into a nuclear waste dump,” Austin said. “A bombing campaign like that would destroy all ocean life.”
“This weed of yours is going to kill all the fish anyhow,” Kyle replied. “As you know, shipping has already been disrupted and there is a loss of billions of dollars by the hour. This stuff is threatening our cities. It's got to be stopped by any means. We've got 'clean' nukes we can use.”
Heads were nodding in the audience. Austin saw that he was getting nowhere. He asked Zavala to sit in on the rest of the strategy session while he went to the bridge. A few minutes later, he was in the wheelhouse, using the ship's radiophone to call the Trouts, who were on the Sea Searcher, over the Lost City. He made quick contact with the NUMA research vessel and a crewman tracked down Paul, who had been directing a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) from the deck.
“Greetings from the wild weird world of Dr. Strangelove,” Austin said.
“Huh?” Trout replied.
“I'll explain in a minute. How's your work going?”
“It's going,” Trout said, with no real enthusiasm. “We've been running an ROV to collect samples of algae and weed. Gamay and her team are busy in the lab doing analysis.”
“What's she looking for?”
“She hopes they can find something in the weed's molecular structure that might help. We've been sharing information with NUMA scientists back in Washington, and with scientific teams in other countries. How about you?”
Austin sighed. “We've tried every trick we can think of, but with no success. The offshore wind is giving us a little reprieve. But it won't be long before every harbor on the east coast will be clogged up. The Pacific is showing patches of infestation as well.”
“How long do we have?”
Kurt told him what Osborne had said. He could hear Paul suck his breath in.
“Are you having any problem navigating in the stuff?” Austin asked.
“The area around the Lost City is relatively clear. This is where the infestation starts, and it thickens as it goes east and west of here.”
“That may be the only clear patch in the ocean before long. You'd better plot an escape route so you don't get caught up in the weed yourself.”
“I've already talked to the captain. There's a channel open south of here, but we're going to have to leave within twenty-four hours if we expect to get out. What was that you said about Strangelove?”
“There's a general here by the name of Kyle. He's going to tell the president to nuke the stuff with every bomb in our arsenal.”
Trout paused in stunned silence and then found his voice. “He's not serious.”
“I'm afraid he is. There is tremendous political pressure on leaders around the world to do something, anything. Vice President Sandecker may be able to stall him. But the president will be forced to act, even if the scheme is foolhardy.”
“This is more than foolhardy! It's crazy. And it won't work. They can blow the weed to pieces, but every stray tendril will self-replicate. It could be just as disastrous.” He sighed. “When can we expect to see mushroom clouds over the Atlantic?”
“There's a meeting going on now. A decision could come as early as tomorrow. Once the machinery is set in motion, things could start moving fast, especially with the Gorgonweed lapping at our shores.” He paused. “I've been thinking about MacLean Didn't he tell you that he could come up with an antidote for the weed using the Fauchard formula?”
“He seemed fairly confident that he could do it. Unfortunately, we don't have MacLean or the formula.”
Austin thought about the helmet buried under tons of rubble.
“The key lies in the Lost City. Whatever caused the mutation in the first place came from the Lost City. There's got to be a way to use something from down there to fight this thing.”
“Let's think about this,” Trout said. MacLean knew that his life-extension formula was flawed, that it would reverse aging, but as Racine Fauchard learned the hard way, the formula was unpredictable. It also accelerated growth."
“That's what I was getting at. Nature is always out of balance.”
“That's right. It's like a rubber band that snaps back after being stretched too far.”
“I don't know if Racine Fauchard would like being compared to a rubber band, but it makes my point about nature seeking equilibrium. Mutations happen every day, even in humans. Nature has built a corrective device into the system or we'd have people running around with two or three heads, which might not be all that bad. When it comes to aging, every species has a death gene that kills off the old to make room for the new generation. Go/gonweed was stable until the Fauchards introduced the enzyme into the equation, tipping things out of balance. It's got to snap back eventually.”
“What about the mutant soldiers who lived so long?”
“That was an artificial situation. Had they been on their own, they probably would have devoured each other. Equilibrium again.”
“The constant here is the enzyme,” Trout concluded. “It's the precipitating factor. It can retard aging or it can accelerate it.”
“Have Gamay look at the enzyme again.”
“I'll see how she's coming along,” Trout said.
“I'm going back to the meeting to see if I can discourage General Kyle from a nuclear carpet bombing of the Atlantic Ocean, although I'm not optimistic.”
Trout's head was spinning. The Fauchards were dead, but they were still managing to inflict harm on the world from their graves.
He left the bridge and went down to a “wet” lab where Gamay was working with a four-person team of marine biologists and those from allied marine sciences.
“I was talking to Kurt,” Paul said. “The news isn't good.” He outlined his conversation with Austin. “Have you turned up anything new?”
“I explored the interaction between the enzyme and the plant, but I didn't get anywhere, so I've been looking into DNA instead. It never hurts to revisit previous research.”
She led the way to a table where a series of about twenty steel containers were lined up in a row.
“Each one of these containers contains a sample of Gorgon weed. I've exposed the samples to the enzymes that the ROV collected from the columns to see what would happen. I wanted to see if there would be any reaction if I overloaded the weed with various forms of enzyme. I've been busy following other avenues and haven't looked at the samples recently.”
“Let me see if I understand what happened,” Trout said. “The Fauchards distorted the molecular makeup of the enzyme during the refinement process, when they separated it from the microorganisms that created the substance. The irregularity was absorbed into the genetic makeup of the weed, triggering its mutation.”
“That's a pretty good summation.”
“Stay with me. Up until that time, the weed coexisted with the enzyme in its natural state.”
“That's right,” Gamay said. “Only when the enzyme was modified did it interact with the nearest life-form, which happened to be obnoxious but perfectly normal seaweed, transforming it into a monster. I hoped that an overdose of the stuff would speed up the aging even more, just the way it did with Racine Fauchard. It didn't work.”
“The premise sounds logical there's something missing here.”
He thought about it for a moment. “What if it isn't the enzyme but the bacteria that are the controlling influence?”
“I never thought about that. I've been fooling around with the chemical, thinking that was the stabilizing factor here, rather than the bugs that produce it. In extracting the enzyme from the water, the Fauchards killed off the bacteria, which may have been the governing factor that kept things on an even keel.”
She went over to a refrigerator and extracted a glass phial. The liquid contents had a slight brown discoloration.
“This is a culture of bacteria we collected from under the Lost City columns.”
She measured off some liquid, poured it into a Gorgonweed container and made a note.
“Now what?”
“We'll have to give the bacteria time to do their work. It won't take long. I haven't eaten. What say you get me some food?”
“What say you get out of here and we have, a real meal in the mess hall?”
Gamay brushed the hair back from her forehead. “That's the best invitation I've had all day.”
Cheeseburgers had never tasted so good. Refreshed and full, the Trouts went back to the lab after an hour. Trout glanced at the container with the bacteria. The complex tangle of tendrils looked unchanged.
“Can I take a closer look at this stuff? It's hard to see in this light.”
Gamay pointed to a long pair of tongs. “Use those. You can examine the specimen in that sink basin.”
Trout extracted the glob of weed from its container, carried it to the sink and dropped it into a plastic tub. By itself, the clump of Gorgonweed looked so innocent. It was not a pretty plant, but it did have an admirable functionality, with spidery tendrils hooked onto other
pieces of weed to form the impenetrable mat that sucked nutrients from the ocean. Trout poked it with the tongs, then lifted it up by a tendril. The tendril broke off at the stem and the weed plopped wetly back into the tub.
“Sorry,” he said. “I broke your weed sample.”
Gamay gave him a peculiar look and took the tongs from his hand. She plucked at another tendril and it, too, came off. She repeated the experiment. Each time, the thin appendages broke off easily. She removed a tendril and took it over to a bench, where she sliced it up, put the thin sections on slides and popped them under a microscope.
A moment later, she looked up from the eye piece. “The weed is dying,” she declared.
“What?” Trout peered into the sink. “Looks healthy to me.”
She smiled and plucked off more tendrils. “See. I'd never be able to do this with a healthy weed. The tendrils are like extremely strong rubber. These are brittle.”
She called over her assistants and asked them to prepare microscope slides from different parts of the sample. When she looked up from her microscope again, her eyes were red-rimmed, but her face was wreathed in a wide grin.
“The weed sample is in the first stage of necrosis. In other words, the stuff is dying. We'll try it with some of the other samples to make sure.”
Again she mixed the bacteria in with the weed, and again they waited an hour. Microscopic examination confirmed their original findings. Every sample subjected to the bacteria was dying.
“The bacteria are essentially eating something in the Gorgon weed that it needs to survive,” she said. “We'll have to do more rese
arch.”
Trout picked up the phial with the original bacteria culture. “What's the most effective way to use these hungry little bugs?”
“We'll have to grow large quantities, then spread the bacteria far and wide and let them do the work.”
Trout smiled. “Do you think the British government would let us use the Fauchard submersible to spread this stuff around? It's got the capacity and speed that we need.”
“I think they'll bend over backward to keep the British Isles from being cut off from the rest of the world.”
MacLean saved our hash again,“ Trout said, with a shake of his head. ”He gave us the hope that we could beat this thing."
“Kurt deserves some credit.”
“His instincts were on the nose when he said to go back to the Lost City and to think in terms of equilibrium.”
Trout headed for the door.
“Are you going to tell Kurt the good news?”
Trout nodded. “Then I'm going to tell him that it's about time we had a send-off for a proper old Scottish gentleman.”
THE LOCH WAS several miles long and half as wide and its cold, still waters reflected the unblemished Scottish sky like a queen's mirror. Rugged, rolling hills carpeted with heather held the loch in a purple embrace.
The open wooden-hulled boat cut a liquid wake in the tranquil waters as it headed out from shore, gliding to a drifting stop, finally, at the deepest part of the loch. The boat held four passengers: Paul and Gamay Trout, Douglas MacLean and his late cousin Angus, whose ashes were carried in an ornate Byzantine chest the chemist had picked up on his travels.
Douglas MacLean had met his cousin Angus only once, at a family wedding some years before. They had hit it off and vowed to get together, but as with many a well-meant plan made over a glass of whiskey, they'd never met again. Until now. Douglas was the only living relative Trout had been able to track down. Equally important, he played the bagpipe. Not well, but loudly.
He stood in the prow of the boat, dressed in full MacLean tartans, his kilted legs braced wide to give himself a steady platform. At a signal from Gamay, he began to play “Amazing Grace.” As the haunting skirl echoed off the hills, Paul poured Angus's ashes into the loch. The gray-brown powder floated on the calm surface for a few minutes and gradually sank into the deep blue water.