pH: A Novel. Nancy Lord

at the ridiculous punch line, Ole’s confusion between “attract her” and “a tractor.”

      On Ray’s other side, his daughter picked at her food. Clearly she’d taken more than she could eat, eyes bigger than her stomach. How many times had Helen’s grandmother—her aana—told Helen and her cousins when they were small about the boy who ate too much? They’d loved that story, which went on and on, the greedy boy eating all the berries and greens and fish until he eventually ate a whole whale and drank an entire lake. It was a funny story, but it also taught a lesson.

      Those cousins—most of them—still lived on the North Slope and were married with children of their own, or not married but with children. Helen was old now—twenty-six—to not have children, and she knew some of her girl cousins wondered about her and felt sorry for her. In their minds children were essential; a woman without them was incomplete, lacking, lonely. They would never say this, but they would tease her: Where is your baby? At Thanksgiving she would see them all in Igalik, at the holiday feast and the wedding of the cousin who was having her second baby. She was looking forward to that.

      Now, with another bite of her sandwich, she watched Ray’s hand sneak over and snatch a potato chip from his daughter’s plate. The girl had turned toward the kitchen and didn’t notice. Ray did it again, walking his fingers like a spider across the space between them. This time Aurora noticed and swatted at his hand with a little shriek. It must have been an old routine for them. The sweetness of the play caught Helen unawares, and she raised her napkin to cover her smile.

      Ray turned to her with mayonnaise on his mustache. “We’ll be a fine team, you and me and this bunch of galoots.”

      After lunch, back on deck, more of the essential monkey work. Helen tightened a last cap, stood to stretch her back. Tina and Cinda were debating something about the bottle numbering system, and she turned from them to watch the ship’s wake drawing its long, frothy line across the blue. She could never look at the ocean and see just the surface; her eye wanted to take her down, as though into the illustrations she’d loved in grade school: past the little fish and the magnified plankton near the top to the jellyfish drifting below and then the bigger fish, always sharks, on down to the huge halibut stirring the mud on the bottom and the crabs and anemones and corals, all the waving tentacles and open mouths, marine snow falling, the big whales coming up from a dive, all that hidden world. What was the number? Ninety-nine percent of the living space on the planet is in the oceans? And they knew so little about it, still?

      “Oh, man, have I got the farts,” Tina said.

      “Methane,” Cinda said. “Twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. You’re killing us.”

      “Yeah, me and seven billion other people. Not to mention the cows.”

      Alex came out and took away more bottles for filtering.

      “Dude,” Tina shouted after him, “take a break. Save some of that for us.”

      Cinda looked up at Helen. “That was cool about the press release, how much it made the news. People are starting to pay attention. What seems weird is that no one’s screaming about it being a hoax. You’d think the nutcases who oppose climate science would have a problem with the ocean absorbing CO₂ from the atmosphere. What’s up with that?”

      The press release that Jackson had sent out had, in fact, been drafted by Helen. In Helen’s draft, it had explained for those who were still new to the idea what ocean acidification was and raised the alarm about the change in pH that they were tracking in Alaskan waters. In its final form, though, the statement focused more on the fact that ocean acidification was being studied at the university’s new Office of Ocean Acidification Science, and it didn’t mention that it was a danger, right now, to sea life. Helen had felt a little hurt by this—that she missed the assignment somehow. She was more hurt that Jackson hadn’t talked to her about the edits. When she’d asked why he decided to downplay the new data that suggested—showed—that Alaska’s cold waters were already significantly affected by acidification, his answer—not entirely convincing to her—was that the point of the release was to announce the new office. He reminded her of the “rule” that a letter to the editor or a press release should be limited to one point; otherwise people got confused. One subject. Next time, another subject.

      Cinda’s question might have been rhetorical, but Helen answered it anyway. “Maybe because it’s straightforward chemistry?”

      Cinda rinsed her last bottle. She was filling two at a time now, one in each hand. “I don’t know. All the data in the world don’t seem to convince people that we’ve got a problem with greenhouse gases. They still think Al Gore made up global warming to get rich.”

      Helen had heard exactly that from their congressman, when he’d spoken on campus. He’d claimed that global warming was “the biggest scam since Teapot Dome,” and that Al Gore was just out to make money. He’d insisted that just as many scientists didn’t believe in global warming as did and that his opinion was just as good as anyone else’s. The students in the audience had been stunned by his belligerence, and when the moderator tried to pin him down on the sources of his information, the congressman cut him off, yelling, “Don’t give me that,” and continuing his rant about how it was all just natural cycles and what was permafrost anyway—just frozen dirt. He’d said, “There’s nothing pretty about ice. Ice grows nothing.” She remembered those exact words, because he’d said them with such contempt.

      That day in the auditorium Helen had sat on her hands, horrified that a person in such an important position could be either so ignorant or so corrupt—and which was it? Even an Alaskan grade school student knew that sea ice was an essential part of the Arctic ecosystem—not just the habitat for species like polar bears and ringed seals but that the underside of it grew—yes, grew—algae that fed the zooplankton and supported the food web. So was what she heard ignorance, or was it obfuscation, meant to deny the truth and protect the interests of those who benefited from destroying ice?

      And Teapot Dome? Wasn’t that a scandal, not a scam? She’d gone home and looked it up. How odd to compare global warming to a bribery scandal, specifically one in which a government official took bribes from oil companies!

      What was especially incongruous was that the reason the congressman had been speaking on campus was to take credit for federal funding for the new acidification office. She had to think he hadn’t known what he was doing.

      The ship slowed, and the captain’s voice boomed through the speaker. “Whales at one o’clock!”

      Helen dashed for the binoculars she’d left in the boot room and headed for the stairs, close behind Colin and the girls from the lab. From the main deck they climbed the ladder to the flying bridge. The ship had slowed completely now, the engines a gentle throb through the steel deck. Colin was pointing, and she saw the vapor of a blow trailing off, still well out in front of them. Then another blow beside it, tall and straight up.

      “Two of them,” someone said. “At least two.”

      And, “They might be fin whales.”

      They all strained to look, cameras and camera phones and tablets pointed.

      The whales blew again, closer, and their long dark backs cut through the surface. They were paralleling the ship on the starboard side. They were big whales, that was for sure.

      “Fins,” Colin said under his breath.

      Ray was there now, and his daughter, who wasn’t dressed for the outside and had her bare arms crossed over her chest. Ray was explaining that fin whales mostly fed on plankton, lots of euphasiids in these waters, and on forage fish. “Two tons of food a day,” he said. “They’re sometimes called ‘greyhounds of the sea’ because of their speed, which they use to circle schools of fish to bunch them up before gulping them.”

      Then the whales were right beside the ship, so close Helen didn’t even need her binoculars. The water was so clear; she was looking through the surface and down into it, at the entire bodies of fin whales. The larger one was just