Last Gasp (8 page)

They ate a cheese-and-mushroom omelet in the small kitchen and watched Angie’s news program on the portable TV. She didn’t appear on screen, but they heard her cultured tones in voice-over talking about proposed mortgage relief for one-parent families. It seemed to Chase that he’d seen that same story at least twenty times before—or perhaps it was simply that all such stories sounded exactly the same.

Angie firmly believed that television had a “morally responsible role” to play in exposing social injustice, for the most part by pointing the finger at the faceless bureaucrats in local government, who were invariably, rightly or wrongly, cast as the villains of the piece. Chase’s attitude was more sanguine. He couldn’t whip up enthusiasm for the socially deprived, even though he readily acknowledged that they probably got a raw deal.

“If you don’t want to go, then we won’t,” Angie said, noticing his pensive expression. “I just thought you might like to get out and meet some people. You work all day in the lab, come home, and collapse in a chair.”

“I’m an unsocial slob,” Chase agreed, collecting the plates and stacking them in the sink. “Sure, let’s go. Just as long as they don’t expect me to give a lantern slide lecture on the mating habits of the walrus.”

“What does the walrus do that’s so different?”

Chase thrust out his jaw. “Very difficult to describe. But I could demonstrate if you like.”

Angie slapped his wrist. “Not on a full stomach, darling.”

He made a grab for her and she ran off, squealing.

Three months ago they would have made love without a second bidding, he thought, standing at the sink and mechanically washing up, full stomach or not. In the first month he couldn’t remember doing much else. He was hanging up the dish cloth when the phone rang. Angie’s voice floated through the hiss of water in the shower as he took the call in the corner alcove at one end of the L-shaped livingroom. “I heard it,” he yelled back, picking up the phone.

“Hello, Gav, how are you?”

He recognized the voice; and only one person called him Gav.

“Hello, Nick. How’s the Lebanese Red?”

Nick chuckled. “Too bloody expensive. I’m thinking of trying glue-sniffing. What are you up to these days?”

“The same,” Chase replied, flopping down crossways in an armchair. “Developing a squint from staring down a microscope all day. What’s happening with you?”

“That’s what I’m calling you about. How do you fancy a holiday, absolutely free, all expenses paid?”

“You’ve gone into the travel business?”

“There’s a conference in Geneva in two weeks time, the ninth onward for four days. The UN is sponsoring delegates from British universities and I’ve put my name down, but there are still a few places open. How about it? You could take a week off, couldn’t you?”

“What kind of conference?”

“The International Conference on the Environmental Future. The usual gab, rich food, plenty to drink, and the rest.”

“The rest?” Chase said obtusely.

“Chicks. Like the sound of it?”

“I’m a happily kept man.”

Nick made a skeptical noise. “We might have to put in a couple of appearances, just to show we’re willing, but nobody keeps a check on who does what.”

“Or with whom.” Chase scratched his head and swung his leg. “I don’t think so, thanks all the same, Nick. I’ve got a full schedule of lab work already planned. Anyway, what do I know about the environmental future?”

“What does anybody?” Nick Power responded.

Much as he’d have liked to see Nick again, Chase didn’t see how he could justify a week in Geneva at the UN’s expense. Better that someone who was genuinely interested should make the trip. Besides, what would Angie have to say? He’d only been back a few months, they were just getting used to each other again; she might get the notion that he was grabbing at any opportunity to get away. He didn’t tell Nick that, however, fearing his reaction, but repeated his excuse about the pressure of work.

Nick sounded disappointed. “You always were a conscientious bastard. You’re too damn serious for your own good, Gav. That puritan working-class ethic is a load of old crap. Swing loose once in a while. Relax, man.”

“I don’t like to lose control,” Chase said lamely.

“Afraid of what you might find?”

“Afraid there won’t be anything there to find.”

“How’s it going with you and Angie?”

“Never better.” At that moment the lady in question came into the room barefoot wearing a blue bathrobe with a fluffy white towel wrapped turban-style around her head, her face shiny clean, and Chase went blithely on, “Of course she’s a pain in the arse sometimes, but then what woman isn’t?” He clapped his hand over his mouth as if caught in the act. Angie smiled sweetly and stuck her tongue out at him.

“Sorry, Nick—what was that?” He’d missed what Nick was saying. “The Russian, remember? He kept going on about Stan or Nick and we couldn’t figure out what he meant. I was looking through the conference brochure and one of the delegates is a Professor Stanovnik. Get it? Stan-ov-nik.”

“Is he Russian too?”

“Yeah, think so.” There was a riffling of paper and a tuneless whistle, and then Nick said, “Professor B. V. Stanovnik of the Hydro-Meterological Service, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Moscow. Perhaps Stanovnik and the guy we found were colleagues.”

Chase gnawed at his thumbnail, trying to make the connection between the two of them. The Hydro-Meteorological Service was certainly in the right area. Oceans. Climate. But who was Stanovnik? More to the point, what was he? Climatologist? Oceanographer?

“Is Stanovnik giving a paper at the conference?” he asked.

“He’s on the list of speakers, but it doesn’t say what subject or give the title of his paper.” Nick chuckled over the line. “Do you want me to ask him what he knows about the absorption of carbon dioxide in seawater? That was it, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, that was it,” Chase said slowly. “But you’d be better off asking him what he doesn’t know about it. If the Russian was carrying out research, then presumably it was to fill in a blank somewhere—something the Hydro-Meteorological Service was keen to find out. That’s assuming there’s a link between them, which is unlikely.”

Nick said he’d keep it in mind, that he was sorry Chase couldn’t drag himself away, and they said their good-byes.

The conversation ran around his head while he showered, almost absentmindedly hunting for the soap, which Angie always managed to misplace, even in the damned shower. Women of certain breeding, he had come to learn, were congenital slatterns, as if expecting as of right that a posse of servants was there to scurry after them, clearing up, tidying away.

At idle moments he had pondered the unsolved antarctic “mystery.” Nothing had ever appeared in the newspapers about the man who had died of a brain hemorrhage, and why should there? It was one of those odd incidents you witnessed or heard about, you puzzled over for a while, and then forgot. But for Nick bringing it up, he most likely wouldn’t have brought it to mind again, except perhaps as a curious incident to enliven a dull conversation down at the local pub.

Stan-ov-nik.
Is that what he’d been trying to say? Stan or Nick. Stan-ov-nik. Stan or Nick. Stanovnik. Well ... yes. Stan or—

“What the hell are you mumbling about in there?”

Angie’s face appeared around the edge of the frosted shower screen, hair damp and tousled from being rubbed. Through the steam he could see the soft swell of her breasts at the bathrobe’s overlapping V neck. “Remember what I said about the walrus?”

“Yes?”

“Look at this,” He reached out and fastened on her wrist.

“No!”

“No?” Drawing her in.

“My robe—it’ll get wet.”

“Then take it off.”

“Oh, Gavin, we’ll be late!”

“Not the way the walrus does it.”

“How’s that?”

“Like this.”

In the first hour Chase had three stiff whiskeys, lost sight of Angie, nodded distantly at three or four people, and wandered in a mellow haze from room to room of the large old house. Everything was stripped down to the bare wood. Their host had greeted them at the door attired in a plum-colored velvet jacket, faded denims, and fashionably scuffed training shoes. (Adidas—he knew it!) He couldn’t have looked less like a Clydeside spot-welder if he’d tried, Chase thought uncharitably. And the little squirt—he was under five feet six—had kissed Angie not on the cheek but on the lips, with a warmth that didn’t befit an employer-employee relationship. It prompted him to wonder whether she’d been unfaithful while he was away, which led to the speculation of how he, Chase, might have behaved had the circumstances been reversed. He’d have been tempted, but would he have fallen? He didn’t honestly know.

Content with the Scotch for company, Chase stood in the lee of a monstrous growth of dark-green shrubbery that sprouted from a Victorian urn. What was it about these people he didn’t like? He felt uncomfortable, the stranger-in-a-strange-land syndrome. They inhabited a world he didn’t understand, glossy and slick, “trendy” in the worst possible meaning of the word. As if—this was the implication, he sensed—what they were involved in mattered, was at the center of the stage, while everyone else didn’t matter and was thus relegated to shadowy anonymity.

Steady, he told himself. Your paranoia is showing. He guzzled the Scotch and tried to remain inconspicuous.

“You’re Angie’s man,” said a small dark-haired girl, appearing at his elbow. Obviously not inconspicuous enough.

Chase nodded and looked down into large brown eyes ringed with spiky black lashes. She wore an embroidered sleeveless jacket over a loose peasant dress with a revealing neckline. He could see where her tan ended. Thin gold bracelets clinked on her arms.

“Dr. Chase, the intrepid Arctic explorer.”

“Right bloke, wrong continent,” Chase replied.

The girl bit her lip in mock horror. “I do beg your pardon. Geography was never my best subject. That’s at the bottom, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Or the arse-end as we Arctic explorers might say.”

The girl’s head fell back and she laughed, showing small, sharp, white teeth. Chase tried not to stare at her trembling bosom. “You know my name. What’s yours?”

The girl said she was called Jill, touched his glass with hers, and drank. ,

“Swell party,” he said benignly, grimacing with pleasure as the whiskey warmed his gut. Angie was right. For three months he’d been completely absorbed in his work and it was high time he got smashed. The mood beckoned to him like a seductive lover.

“You really think so?”

“Definitely. Plenty of excellent free Scotch and attractive company.”

“I thought Arctic explorers were supposed to be shy.”

“That wasn’t a proposition.”

“Wasn’t it? Oh, what a pity.” She pouted coquettishly and he wasn’t sure whether she was being serious or pulling his leg. “You fit the description, anyway. My illusions haven’t been shattered.”

“What description?” Chase said, having lost the drift.

“For Arctic explorers. Tall, dark, and handsome.”

Was she being serious?

“I suppose Glaswegian spot-welders are short, fat, and hairy,” he said.

“What?”

“Private joke. You work in television, I suppose.”

“I’m a PA. Production assistant.”

Chase had only a vague idea what that was.

Jill explained. “I do the running around, getting everything organized. We move about a lot, news, current affairs, documentaries, local programs. PAs are the gofers of the television industry. Without us it would collapse.”

Chase had never thought of television as an industry. Its product seemed so ephemeral. In one eye and out the other.

“What do you do when you’re not exploring?” she asked him. “I’m in the marine biology department at the university. At the moment I’m classifying some specimens I brought back from the Antarctic. Microscopic plant life.” Chase waved his hand dismissively. “Not very interesting to the layman, I’m afraid. Or the laywoman, for that matter.”

“Plankton?” Jill said. She gave him a look. “I may get my continents mixed up, but I’m not completely stupid.”

“Well, ‘plankton’ is a general term for all floating plant and animal life in the seas and rivers. My speciality is
Halosphaera, Phaeocystis, silicoflagellates,
and
Bacillariophyceae.”
That’d teach her to be such a smart ass.

But apparently that hadn’t dampened her interest, for she asked him to tell her more about them, which Chase found difficult. The alcohol didn’t help. To simplify it, he said, “They form the basic diet for most fish—phytoplankton, that is, the plant forms. If you look at a pond you’ll see the bottom carpeted with the stuff, with millions of tiny silver bubbles clinging to it. That’s oxygen, which phytoplankton releases after splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. They’re a very primitive organism, been around for, oh, two thousand million years or more. But for the phytoplankton we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Why, are they that important?”

“You have to breathe, don’t you?”

“That’s where we get our oxygen from?”

Chase nodded. “There wasn’t any around to begin with. Most people think it’s always been a constituent of the atmosphere, but when the planet was formed the atmosphere was highly poisonous—to us, that is. Mainly hydrogen, ammonia, and methane. Then the early primitive forms of algae came along and started releasing oxygen, which eventually formed the ozone layer, protecting the early animal life from ultraviolet radiation. So it does two crucial jobs: gives us oxygen to breathe and prevents us from frying.”

Jill looked thoughtful for a moment. “I always had the idea that the trees did that—gave us oxygen. You know, all this fuss about the rain forests in South America and Southeast Asia. They’re destroying millions of acres and burning them, which apparently does something to the climate.”

“That’s true. All green plants take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, but the best estimates we have suggest that the phytoplankton in the oceans provides roughly seventy percent of the recycled oxygen. Sure, the trees are important, but if we didn’t have phytoplankton there wouldn’t have been any trees in the first place.”