Sarah Zettel: Under Pressure

Then the fish started dying.

“Ed?”

Ed shook himself and looked up at Nelson Renier. It was a long way up, too. The captain had developed a permanent slouch to cope with cramped pilot houses and a willfully deaf ear to cope with jokes about being a sailor named Nelson.

“Yeah?”

“Weather service says we got a squall coming down. We’d better head back in.”

Ed pushed himself away from the rail. “Some days, Nels, I think it’d be better if we never went out.”

The captain dug his hands into the pockets of his Thinsulate anorak. “I’m telling you, you federal types are never going to get Superior to play nice.”

“I’m not a federal type,” muttered Ed.

Nels shrugged. “Whatever you say, Ed. But the lake’s still the enemy. Back in the sixties, my granddad lost two fifteen-thousand ton ships right out from under him. He used to say Superior was just waiting for a chance to do it to you, whoever you were.”

Ed mustered a brisk tone. “I’m going down to see what the kids’re doing. Let me know when we’re in.” Balancing carefully so he didn’t need to lean against the rail, he made his way along the deck.

Ed descended the metal ladder to the tiny laboratory cabin and slid the door back.

Once upon a time, Ed had believed that laboratories were serious, orderly places, full of white-coated inhabitants speaking in a language comprised entirely of six-syllable words. Somewhere that might be true, but not aboard the Inland Sea. The lab was a crowded room with the counter-top equipment wedged into place by textbooks and reference manuals to keep it from rattling around. Only the glassware was consistently stored in its cabinets. Over the sink, one of his early students had hung the sign “This is a lab sink, not a kitchen sink. Leave dishes and die!”

As Ed pushed open the door, Doug was distributing his tissue samples into petri dishes by pouring them out of a Waring blender. Marcy, busy over her test tube rack, turned around briefly and said, “Pass me the hand thingy, will you?”

Obligingly, Doug tossed her the miniscanner.

“Anything new?” Ed braced himself in the threshold.

“Not yet.” Marcy scribbled a number on the corked sample tube full of clear lake water and then ran the scanner over the label to record its information in her sketchpad computer. “I’d like to get some algae samples, though.”

Ed shook his head. “Squall’s coming. We can put out a net, or you can call the spy-buoy when we get in.”

“OK,” she agreed reluctantly. “Maybe I can ask it where the EK 96 algae strain’s gotten itself to.”

“And while you’re at it, ask it how come we’re getting consisently low fat tissue readings from these fish.” Doug yanked open the drawer to find an extra roll of sticky labels.

“What’ve you found?” Ed demanded.

“Nothing!” Doug slammed the drawer shut again. “Same old song. All the fish we’ve gotten samples from in the past three months have a lower than average proportion of fat cells.”

“Are you saying you’re going with the theory they’ve been noising around on the south shore? That the fish are starving to death?” Ed felt his brow furrow.

“I wish it was that obvious.” Doug jammed his pencil down so hard onto the label the tip snapped off. “All the fish we’ve sampled, here and on the shore stations, have had full stomachs. If I was going to guess about what got this last school, I’d say they died of cold.”

Marcy’s busy hands froze. “Lake Superior whitefish?”

“Look, they haven’t got enough fat in their bodies, that means they’re going to be susceptible to the cold, and disease, and bacteria and—”

“There are no abnormal bacterial levels in them, Doug, or in the water around them. There is nothing in that water that hasn’t either been there for hundreds of years, or that we haven’t grown and catalogued. I’ve checked.” She tapped her sketchpad meaningfully.

“Which leaves cold.” Doug scraped the broken point of the pencil across the label and scowled at the result.

“Reality call for Doug.” Marcy held up an imaginary telephone receiver. “The whitefish are bred to thrive in the cold!”

Slowly, Doug set down the pencil and the roll of labels. “Then you tell me what’s doing it,” he said. “What is killing them without leaving a trace? These damned fish are perfectly bred, perfectly adapted, and perfectly dead.”

A series of low chimes sounded through the lab, cutting off what could have worked itself into a serious blowup. As it was, Marcy and Doug kept glowering at each other while Ed flipped back the cover on one of the spare sketchpads and plugged the cable into the nearest phone jack.

“Nickerson,” he said succinctly as the machine powered up and the screen cleared.

Danette grinned at him from the other side. “Hello, Stranger.”

“Danni!” Ed was one of the three people living who had permission to use her nickname. “Where are you?” The range for the communications facilities on the Inland Sea didn’t extend past the Mackinac bridge, never mind all the way down to Detroit.

“Your office,” she told him. “I didn’t think you’d mind, and you haven’t changed your pass code in three years.” She leaned forward, suddenly serious. “Have you found anything new out there, Ed?”

"Another school of dead fish and a missing strain of algae.” He sighed and flicked a glance at his students. They were both bent over their samples, studiously pretending not to listen. “The grads are working up some ideas that might get us somewhere, but we’re not there yet.”

Danette began to chew her lower lip.

“What’s happened?” Even as he asked, Ed wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.

Danette’s gaze shifted to the right, and then to the left, as if she were checking to make sure no one was looking over her shoulders. “Jerry’s reasoning powers have crashed.”

“What?”

She sighed. “Our project director has decided that the TDS symbiote is to blame for the fish dying off. He’s been getting the lab to work up graphs showing a curve of unpredicted symbiote increase as related to the increased rate of die-offs. More symbiote per pound of fish, per sample of algae, that kind of thing...” She cut herself off.

“Is there a real relationship?” Ed frowned.

Danette shook her head. “The average body weight on the fish is down and the concentration of symbiote in the wild is a lot higher than in the hatcheries. There’s also a higher concentration of symbiote in the algae samples we’ve been taking than in the ones we’ve been breeding. So the relationship is real, but in context it doesn’t necessarily mean what Jerry’s making out. In fact, we don’t have any idea what it really means. However, the symbiote is the one thing we’ve introduced on a big scale. The folks who designed it all work for En-Gene, not the project. Jerry’s going to use the numbers to make Judas goats out of them.”

“Lies, damn lies and statistics,” muttered Ed.

“You got that right.” Danette’s shoulders sagged. “The problem is, Jerry’s worked himself up into believing it. He’s jacked into the fact that I won’t buy it, so he won’t even open his door for me. I was hoping you could get him talking again. If we can get even a little advance warning on just how bleak he’s going to paint things tomorrow, maybe we can haul together some counterarguments.”

“We’re on our way back in now, Danni. We should be there in a couple of hours.”

“I’ll be waiting. And Ed, if you think of anything brilliant on the way in—”

“I’ll try, Danni. I’ll try.”

They said goodbye and shut the connection down. Ed turned around. Doug and Marcy were staring at him, hands dangling at their sides.