CV

23

Three or four people popped out of their offices to greet him as he walked down the hall. “Glad to see you back,” they said, with embarrassed smiles. “You okay now? That’s great.”

“Listen, I’m really glad to see you back,” said Tim Vincent. The cigarette in his mouth was trembling. “We’ve been terrifically shorthanded here since you and Yvonne got sick. If you can start doing the temp and salinity again, and all that stuff, it’ll really make a difference.”

“Sure,” said Geller.

“Well—it’s about time for the ten o’clock. Can you take over now? Is it okay?”

“I said so, didn’t I?”

“All right. Sorry. See you later.” Vincent disappeared into his lab.

Geller looked at the familiar instruments; it was amazing that he had never noticed how ugly they were. He picked up the log, looked over the last few entries in Vincent’s crummy handwriting. Feeling an unreasonable irritation, he checked the recording salinometer and thermometer, put them back through the hatch and started them down on the cable. It was time for the dredge too; he noticed in the log that Vincent had skipped that a few times. Too busy dissecting his fish. He started the dredge cable, noted the time in the log, and poured himself a cup of coffee.

Water samples were lined up in a rack, about a week’s worth, labeled with date, time and depth, but the analyses had not been done. It would take him at least a week to catch up, working a couple of hours overtime every day.

He picked up the first one, took a measured sample, added reagents. PCB, twenty-one parts per million. He noted it on a fresh page in the log. What was he doing this for?

He sat down and tried to remember how he had felt about his work before he got sick. It had never been any more fun than it was now, as far as he could recall, but he had done it anyway, one day after the next: why was that? Gathering data—grim little numbers in a book. He remembered something he had told Newland—“I’m not that crazy about theories. What we need is data.” Balls. The data went into computers, and the computers drew charts and graphs, piling up ugly stacks of paper, and eventually somebody would analyze them and come up with some new revision of a revision of the model of deep-water distribution.

With startling clarity, he suddenly remembered the experience that had made him go into marine science in the first place. He was sixteen, a high-school kid in Skokie, Illinois. It was a warm May day, and the windows were open in the biology room, the fresh air blowing in to mingle with the stinks. Some visiting scientist was there, a skinny guy with receding ginger-colored hair. Geller couldn’t even remember his name. He wasn’t paying much attention until the guy showed them a little bottle with a cork in it and a yellowed slip of paper inside. He handed it around for them to look at, and when it came to Geller, he read the violet writing on the paper through the bluish glass, spidery, faded, almost invisible: San Francisco, July 17, 1893. And he heard the gingerhaired man saying, “That bottle was picked up by a Japanese fisherman off Hokkaido in January, nineteen sixty-three.”

Seventy years. And right then, with the image in his head of that bottle bobbing around and around the Pacific current since before his parents were born, he knew what he wanted to do with his life.

Then college, and the M.S., and the goddamn dissertation, garbage done the way his professor wanted it. He had known it would be hard work, and he had realized the importance of objectivity. You could not afford to let your romantic feelings get in the way: you had to look at the instruments. One Sunday afternoon, about six months after he came to Sea Venture, he was on the Sports Deck looking out through the screen, and he realized suddenly that he hated the sight of the ocean. He never went up there again, and on his next vacation he went as far inland as he could get.

He had told McNulty that he wasn’t buying the stuff he used to swallow, and that was true, but it was more than that. He felt now that he had been supremely, unbelievably dumb for the last ten years.

He looked at the racks of water samples, then got up and took off his lab coat.

Vincent came out of his lab as he passed the-fish tanks. “Everything okay?” he asked.

“Sure."

“Where you going now?”

“Out. If you see Yvonne, tell her I quit."

Vincent followed him down the hall. “Randy, are you still sick?”

“Hell, no, I’m feeling fine, but this is a dumb job and they can shove it.”

“Now wait a minute.” Vincent caught up to him and grabbed him by the sleeve. “Are you telling me you're going to walk out and leave me to do my work and yours too?”

“Take your hand off me, you stupid bastard.”

“What? Listen, Geller, I’ve taken about enough—”

Geller hit him in the mouth as hard as he could. Vincent went sprawling on the floor. When he got up, Geller hit him again; this time he stayed down.