pH: A Novel. Nancy Lord

else he deemed more important than data collection and mentoring students. Oakley had apparently thought that he’d have constant satellite communication, and when he learned, not long after they’d gotten underway, that that was not the case, he told Ray he was leaving. He had already called, while he could still reach him on the marine radio, an old friend with a boat. “A fanatical fisherman,” he told Ray. “He works now for Shell in their offshore operations. Lucky I could reach him.”

      Lucky indeed.

      “I feel very confident leaving everything in your capable hands,” Oakley had said, with false flattery. “And Helen’s. She’ll do a better job than I ever could.” The false modesty bothered Ray only a trace less than the false flattery.

      There was no use arguing with him. Ray could only think about the government grants, the ones that included their names and credentials as co-leaders and spoke to the ways they assured best practices in all the data collection and analysis, the strict adherence to protocols, and the importance of consistency and continuity year to year with the time series. Ray had written into the narrative whole paragraphs about the significance of ocean acidification and the need to track ocean chemistry and understand what that change might mean in the cold, biologically-rich waters off Alaska. This year’s grants had specifically emphasized student mentoring and all the benefits that students would receive from spending a week with experts in their fields. And now they would have just the poor sucker zooplankton guy.

      On top of that, this was the cruise on which he’d decided to bring his daughter, because he hoped she might discover, before she became an indifferent teenager, a love for science—or at least the ocean. He had hoped to spend some time with her.

      What was more important than the research cruise? He had asked Oakley this, but Oakley had only shaken his head. The implication was: Everything about me is important, and this is only a boat trip.

      Ray looked at his watch. They were nearly on schedule, not far from their first station.

      The image of Oakley reaching for that beer was really bothering him. There was a reason they jokingly referred to research cruises as “Seahab.” Ray preferred to think of them as “cleansings,” as he preferred to think of himself as a social drinker, not an alcoholic, although his wife might disagree. Anyone might get headaches when stopping a regular habit; it happened with coffee drinkers, too. And only once on a previous cruise had he even thought about looking for a bottle of vanilla in the ship’s pantry. If his hands shook, it was probably from drinking more coffee than usual. The students, with their youthful, small-fingered competence, easily changed the chlorophyll filters in the lab and only kidded him about his inability to work with tweezers.

      Still, it was hard not to want that beer. Or at least to want Oakley not to have it.

      Back in his cabin to fetch a data sheet and a hat, he glanced at his interrupted work. He’d got the computer set up, photos of his beloved zooplankton swimming over the screen. The general messiness of books, papers, instructional manuals, loose batteries, the cruise plan folded back on itself to the list of personnel—these were the proof of his life.

      He found Colin and the three young women in their padded float coats on the back deck. They were leaning against the rail, exclaiming about the Dall’s porpoises jetting around the ship. Tina, the funny one, said something that made the others laugh. Cinda, Ray noted, wore new rubber rain pants, still creased from their packaging. The lovely Helen stood just apart from the others, dark ponytail tossed over one shoulder.

      They all watched the porpoises for another few minutes, and then the two women who had been working in the wet lab joined them. They gathered around the giant pumpkin of the CTD—the instrument package they would drop to the bottom of the sea—to await Ray’s approval and instructions.

      Where was Aurora? He thought she would have come out with the women students. She wanted to see this.

      “She’s in our cabin,” Tina said. “Listening to her iPod. Er—I mean reading. Studying.”

      Aurora was missing a week of school and had brought along more books than the grad students.

      “And what about Annabel? I haven’t seen her since last night.” Annabel was the artist. The government funders liked them to include a teacher, a journalist, or an artist on every cruise. The theory was that non-scientists could help interpret the work and convince the public of its value, and then the public would convince their legislators to provide funding. Good luck with that, Ray always thought before writing up his boilerplate bullshit.

      Annabel had been recommended by someone in the art department, but he wasn’t sure what her art was, other than she called it “environmental.” He had not had time to talk to her yet, except to learn that she wanted to be with the night crew and had something in mind that had to do with bioluminescence. He made a mental note: talk to Annabel. And another: have an open mind about frigging modern art.

      “We haven’t seen her this morning. Last night she was in the kitchen asking for sheets of nori.” Tina had removed her hat that looked like a rabbit’s head with floppy pink ears to straighten the wire in the ears.

      “She had a bunch of chemistry questions,” Cinda said. “She’ll be disappointed that Professor Oakley left.”

      Ray looked at Helen. “Did she talk to you?”

      “Not about chemistry,” she said in her quiet Helen voice. “About drugs.”

       “Drugs?”

      “She had three different kinds of motion sickness pills, plus those wristbands with the pressure points. She wondered if she would need any of them.”

      Cinda asked, “So what big-deal consulting thing is Professor Oakley doing?” She was picking at something on her new raingear, and Ray couldn’t tell which of them her question was addressed to. Helen just looked away.

      He felt obliged to say, “I don’t know about any big-deal consulting thing.” He waited. “Helen?”

      “I don’t know that it’s a big deal,” she said, even quieter than before. “He’s been getting a lot of invitations to speak.”

      Everyone looked uncomfortable now, or maybe they were just eager to get on with the work. Ray stretched his face into what he hoped looked like a smile and said, “It’s his loss, missing out on all our fun.” He would leave it at that, leave his fresh anger in the cold place behind his heart. How embarrassing was it that students knew more than he did about whatever his so-called colleague was doing? And how annoying that acidification was the media’s new darling and everyone wanted a piece of Mr. Acidification himself. No one would miss Ray Berringer and his zooplankton expertise for a week, but apparently the world couldn’t live without constant contact with His Hotness Jackson Oakley. Apparently, the public could not get enough explanation of instrument calibration.

      Only Marybeth, the undergrad helping with zooplankton studies, hadn’t worked with the CTD before, so he quickly went over the basics: conductivity, temperature, depth; the collection bottles that would trip closed at different depths; additional instruments; and the communications cable that connected to the computer.

      Ray checked that all the knobs were tight and the troublesome wires free, though he knew that Colin would already have done this. He looked at the milk crates filled with sampling bottles. “Is Alex set up in the lab?” Alex was another incredibly diligent student. Not for the first time, Ray wondered why so many of the best students, like Alex, had Korean and Chinese family names. He had his theories, involving stereotypes that were best left unspoken.

      “Almost. He says he has to do the rest himself.”

      “Computer?”

      “Ready to fire.”

      The CTD drop at the first station went well. When the bottles were back onboard, the three women took their places on overturned buckets, like milkmaids around a cow, to siphon off samples—carbonate, nutrient, chlorophyll. In the wet lab, Alex had finished assembling his towers and was setting filters in place.