Infested Waters by John Sammon

Author:John Sammon [Sammon, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Raven Tale
Published: 2022-03-06T22:00:00+00:00

At the marine station, Brendan felt like—and he would excuse himself of the pun—a fish out of water. Reader and the other personnel at the facility were British, and he was an American. He was not really one of them. The thing about the British was they could disapprove of someone and not overtly show it. With that maddeningly proper aplomb of theirs, they addressed him in their clipped, upper-class accents, slightly dismissively, always politely, such as, “Yes, Mister Brendan,” or, “Certainly, Mister Brendan.” As though he were a houseboy or servant whose lowliness they had to tolerate in their effortless superiority.

There were only two exceptions. The head nurse, Hawken, whose hostility to him she could barely disguise; and the boat hand on the Trident, Putney, always covered in oil and grease and smelling highly of fish and sweat. He seemed to revel in his repugnance as though it were a badge of honor, the joy of offending more hygienic superiors and visitors because his undeniable mechanical skills made him invulnerable to reprimand.

Brendan sat in the lab knowing he was on thin ice.

He had reported a dead body in the waters off the beach at Smuggler’s Cove, and the police made a search using their own divers and had found nothing. They, like Culligan, came to believe Brendan had simply seen something playing tricks on his eyes that caused him to panic. After all, diving accidents in the islands were common.

Though he tried to keep it secret, word got back to Reader, Hawken, and undoubtedly others. He had made a false police report after recreational diving with friends, also Americans, with whom he shared a vacation rental, and one of whom had recently been questioned by officers after allegedly creating a disturbance at a bar.

Didn’t look good. Didn’t look good at all. Brendan knew that.

“You have a visitor,” Hawken, standing the doorway, icily announced.

Brendan had spent that morning using a spectrometer to measure the chemical difference in the ability of a goby to change its coloring, called metachrosis, for the purpose of camouflage to blend in with its surroundings to escape predators. Using the goby’s tissues placed in a vacuum chamber, Brendan had the machine bombard electrons so that molecules in the sample were turned into ions.

High voltages resulted in the creation of an electrical field, which then split the ions and told the researcher the identity of the molecules and thus could detect a chemical change in the fish’s change of body color.

This was a routine experiment, harmless, with supposedly little new to reveal. To Brendan it was something to occupy his time. In his mind he was being retained to sit in the lab and be its marine biologist, much like a token, a figurehead without real authority. As if he were the child of a powerful aristocrat, who like a good boy would stick to his room, play with his toys, and not bother anyone.

His pay made available by grant funding.

Brendan was also seeing in the sample

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