Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (48 page)

She had the door open now,
bumping it with her denim-clad backside.

‘
Don't just stand there, Nicholas
,’
she implored him.
‘
We've only got ten days.
’

He followed her into the kitchen as she dumped
her load into the sink, and whirled back to him.

‘
Welcome by my house, Nicholas
,’
and then as she slid her arms around his
waist, jerked his shirt tails out of his belt and slid her hands up his
bare back,
‘
You'll never know just how welcome. Come, let me show you
around
-
this is the living-room.
’

It had spartan furniture, with Indian
rugs and pottery, and Samantha's chopped-off denims were discarded in
the centre of the floor along with Nicholas shirt.

‘
And this - surprise! surprise - is the bed-room.
’
She dragged him by
one hand, and under the short tee-shirt her bottom reminded him of a
chipmunk with its cheeks stuffed with nuts, chewing vigorously.

The tiny bedroom overlooked the beach. The sea breeze fluffed out the
curtains and the sound of the low surf
breathed like a sleeping giant, a
deep regular hiss and sigh that filled the air around them.

The bed was too big for the room, all ornate antique brass, with a
cloudy soft mattress and an old-fashioned patchwork quilt in a hundred
coloured and patterned squares.

‘
I don't think I could have lived another day without you
,’
she said, and
unwound the thick plaits of her hair.
‘
You came like the cav
alry, in the very nick of time.’

He reached up and
took the golden tresses of hair, winding them thickly around his wrist,
twining them in his fingers, and he pulled her gently down beside him.

Suddenly Nick's life was uncluttered and simple again.
Suddenly he was young and utterly carefree again. The petty strivings,
the subterfuge, the lies and the cheating did not exist in this little
universe that encompassed a tiny wooden shack on the edge of the ocean,
and a huge brass bed that clanged and rattled and banged and squeaked
wholesale, the completely abandoned happiness that was the special
miracle called Samantha Silver.

Samantha's laboratory was a square room, built on piles over the water,
and the soft hum of the electric pumps blended with the slap of the
wavelets below and the burble and blurp of the tanks.

‘
This is my kingdom
,’
she told him.
‘
And these are my subjects.
’
There were
almost a hundred tanks, like the small glass-sided aquaria for goldfish,
and suspended over each of them was a complicated arrangement of coils
and bottles and electric wiring.

Nick sauntered across to the nearest of the tanks and peered into it. It
contained a single large salt-water clam; the animal was feeding with
the double shells agape, the pink soft flesh and frilly gills rippling
and undulating in the gentle flow of pumped and filtered sea water. To
each half of the shell, thin copper wires were attached with blobs of
polyurethane cement.

Samantha came to stand beside him, touching, and he asked her
,
’
What's
happening?
’
She touched a switch and immediately the cylindrical scroll
above the tank began to revolve slowly and a stylus, after a few
preliminary jerks and quivers, began to trace out a regular pattern on
the paper scroll, a trough and double peak, the second a fraction lower
than the first, and then the trough again.

She said,
‘
He's wired and bugged.
’

‘
You're a member of the CIA
,’
he accused.

And she laughed.
‘
His heart-beat. I'm passing an electric impulse
through the heart - the heart is only a millimetre across - but each
spasm changes the resistance and moves the stylus.
’
She studied the
curve for a moment.
‘
This fellow is one very healthy cheerful Spisula
solidissima.
’

‘
Is that his name? Nick asked.
‘
I thought he was a clam.
’

‘
One of fifteen thousand bivalves who use that common generic
,’
she
corrected
.

‘
I had to pick an egghead
,’
said Nicholas ruefully.
‘
But what's
so interesting about his heart?
’

‘
It's the closest and cheapest thing to
a pollution metre that we have discovered so far - or rather,
’
she
corrected herself without false modesty,
‘
that I have discovered.
’

She
took his hand and led him down the long rows of tanks.
‘
They are
sensitive, incredibly sensitive to any contamination of their
environment, and the heart-beat will register almost immediately any
foreign element or chemical, organic or otherwise, in such low
concentrate that it would take a highly trained specialist with a
spectroscope to detect otherwise.
’

Nicholas felt his mild attention
changing and growing into real interest as Samantha began to prepare
samples of common pollutants on the single bench against the fore-wall
of the cluttered little laboratory.

‘
Here
,’
she held up one test tube,
‘
aromatic carbons, the more poisonous
elements of crude petroleum - and here
,’
she indicated the next tube,
‘
mercury in a concentration of 100 parts to the million. Did you see the
photographs of the human vegetables and the Japanese children with the
flesh falling off their bones at Kiojo? That was mercury.
Lovely stuff.
’

She picked up another tube.
‘
PCB, a by-product of the
electrical industry, the Hudson River is thick with it. And these,
tetrahydrofurane, cyclohexane, methylbenzene - all industrial
by-products
,
but don't let the fancy names throw you. One day they will
come back to haunt us , in newspaper headlines, as THF or CMB - one day
there will be other human cabbages and babies born without arms or legs.
’
She touched the other tubes.
‘
Arsenic, old-fashioned Agatha Christie
vintage poison. And then here is the real living and breathing bastard
daddy of them all - this is cadmium; as a sulphide so it's easily
absorbed. In 100 parts to the million it's as lethal as a neutron
bomb.
’

While he watched, she carried the tray of tubes across to the
tanks and set the ECG monitors running. Each began to record the normal
double-peaked heart-beat of a healthy clam.

‘
Now,
’
she said,
‘
watch this.
’

Under controlled conditions, she began to
drip the weak poisoned solutions into the reticulated water systems, a
different solution to each of the tanks.

‘
These concentrations are so low that the animals will not even be aware
of trauma, they will continue to feed and breed without any but
long-term indications of systemic poisoning.
’

Samantha was a different
person, a cool quick-thinking professional. Even the white dust-coat
that she had slipped over her tee-shirt altered her image and she had
aged twenty years in poise and authority as she passed back and forth
along the row of tanks.

‘
There
,’
she said, with grim satisfaction as the stylus on one recording
drum made a slightly double beat at its peak and then just de
t
ectably
flattened the second peak.
‘
Typical aromatic carbon reaction.
’

The distorted heart-beat was repeated
endlessly on the slowly turning drum, and she passed on to the next
tank.

‘
See the pulse in the trough, see the fractional speeding up of the heart
spasm
?
That's cadmium in ten parts to the million, at 100 parts it will
kill all sea life, at five hundred it will kill man slowly, at seven
hundred parts in air or solution it will kill him very quickly indeed.
’

Nicholas
’
interest became total fascination, as he helped Samantha record
the experiments and control the flow and concentration in the tanks.
Slowly they
increased
the dosage of each substance and the moving stylus
dispassionately recorded the increasing distress and the final
convulsions and spasmodic throes that preceded death.

Nicholas voiced the tickle of horror and revulsion he felt at watching
the process of degeneration.

‘
It's macabre.
’

‘
Yes
.’
She stood back from the tanks.
‘
Death always is.
But these organisms have such rudimentary nervous systems that they
don't experience pain as we know it.
’
She shuddered slightly herself and
went on.
‘
But imagine an entire ocean poisoned like one of these tanks,
imagine the incredible agonies of tens of millions of sea birds, of the
mammals, seals and porpoises and whales. Then think of what would
happen to man himself
.’
Samantha shrugged off her white dust-coat.

‘
Now I'm hungry,
’
she announced, and then looking up at the fibreglass
panels in the roof,
‘
No wonder! It's dark already!
’

While they cleaned
and tidied the laboratory, and made a last check of the pumps and
running equipment, Samantha told him,
‘
In five hours we have tested over
a hundred and fifty samples of contaminated water and got accurate
indications of nearly fifty dangerous substances - at a probable cost of
fifty cents a sample.
’
She switched out the lights.
’
To do the same with
a gas spectroscope would have cost almost ten thousand dollars and taken
a highly specialized team two weeks of hard work.
’

‘
It's a hell of a
trick
,’
Nicholas told her.
‘
You're a clever lady - I'm impressed, I
really am.
’

At the psychedelic Chevy van she stopped him, and in the
light of the street lamp looked up at him guiltily.

‘
Do you mind if I show you off, Nicholas?
’

‘
What does that mean?
’
he asked
suspiciously.

‘
The gang are eating shrimps tonight, Then they'll sleep over on the boat
and have the first shot at fish tagging tomorrow - but we don't have to
go. We could just get some more steaks and another jug of wine.
’
But he
could see she really wanted to go.

She was fifty
-five foot, an old purse-seiner with the ungainly
wheelhouse forward looking like a sentry box or an old-fashioned pit
latrine. Even with her coat of new paint, she had an old-fashioned
look.