Copyright 1968 by Carl L. Biemiller
Published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, NY
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 68-25597

CHAPTER FIVE

Kent had a lot to think about before he fell asleep. It had been a strange, very different day. There were a lot of new names to connect with a lot of unfamiliar faces, but that didn't bother him. What did bother him was the feeling that he was somehow being quietly, yet thoroughly, examined, sort of inspected. He felt, as though he was right in the middle of things yet not part of them. There were new ideas in his head, and sort of an old one too that disturbed him. What? Just what if nobody at the Lab really believed that he and Dad had caught an albino blue?

After all, and as he well knew, the one thing that scientists insist upon is proof. They can assume that something is so, all right, but then they prove it again and again and again. Oh well, he knew there was an albino blue. Dad knew it. But maybe he had been wrong to let the fish go. Maybe not, too, he thought darkly, no matter what happened.

He felt warmly grateful to Leo, curled and asleep in the cot across the little room. Leo really was a Harvard freshman. He was the son of a famous doctor in one of the National Institutes of Health. He was a brain. He was sort of a boy version of the albino blue, nicer, if not as exciting. Leo had an aim. He wanted to be a medical researcher, and to study marine biology before he went on to medicine. Leo saw a connection between life in the sea, life on earth and life in space, although Kent didn't understand Leo's explanations.

"Medicine is my second choice," said Leo. "I really want to play tackle for the New York giants football team."

Kent felt his inside grin. Leo had the energy for it. He had walked Kent from one end of the Lab to the other, into one jumble of offices and rooms as if he were afraid they'd vanish before he could show them off. He'd walked Kent down to the Lab docks a mile away to show him where the research boats were when they weren't out to sea. The docks were empty. They looked like long-deserted ruins. The Coast Guard installation adjacent to the Lab docks seemed brand new.

Kent and Leo had eaten lunch and dinner in an army mess hall. The soldiers, some of them not much older than Kent, all knew Leo. They kidded him. When Leo had introduced Kent they made remarks about the Lab as a government school for kids.

Kent could hear the surf. Its sound washed through the open window. He could see treetops, all green, gray and flowing by moonlight. A breeze drifted into the room, and except for the squashy code of the breakers along the strand, the Hook was hushed.

"Get some sleep." They were Leo's last words awake. "They use all the daylight there is around here."

Kent did, sweetly falling into a soft, dark hole in time.

At seven the next morning he was glad of it. He was standing in the shallow waters on the western side of the Hook known as Horseshoe Cove. He was pulling in his portion of a surf seine net and his arm and shoulder muscles were letting him know about it. He and Leo had been awakened at six by a chunky-built college man who had informed them that they were joining a crew in the charge of David Dart who was John Colin's assistant assigned to bluefish tagging. Small spearing, which is a sardine-sized bait fish had been reported in the bay by some night fishermen. It was assumed that small or snapper blues might follow the spearing into the trap, which was the cove. Mr. Dart wanted a mess of them right away.

Leo had been sulky.

"I'm a little kid. I need more sleep," he groaned.

His disposition had not improved. A fatherly mess sergeant producing early-morning fodder for the Army had refused him coffee.

"Coffee is bad for kids. You'll stunt your growth," he said.

"It is stunted," moaned Leo, and took cocoa.

Leo was now standing on the sandy shore much pleased. He was too small for net pulling.

The sun burned the mist from the Hook. Kent felt it pucker on his splash-wet shoulders. Across Sandy Hook Bay itself he could see the ancient headland known as the Highlands bristling with an eyebrow of green-black trees. Henry Hudson himself had taken on fresh water there in 1609. Kent wished he had some right now.

"Okay, pull, pull. This is the last net. Come on!" shouted the college foreman of the college crew. "And watch your toes!"

Kent knew what he meant. He had seen blues come over the side of a boat at sea driving their fierce, chopping jaws at anything they could reach. One of his father's friends had lost a thumb to an eight-pound blue.

None of the considerable number of fish in the net was that size. They were junior killers. They weighed from a half to two pounds, but they were active, and they were still killing spearing. Kent looked at them carefully. Any fish caught was part of the search for the albino.

The college boys used canvas gloves to clean the net and shove the blues into old gunnysacks for the trip to the Lab. They had seven of them, which they hoisted into the back of a beat-up old pickup truck.

Kent and Leo rode with the sacks.

Kent wiggled his arms to ease the stiffness in his shoulders.

Leo grinned at him. "You did that pretty well," he said.

"What?"

"Took your bath."

"So thanks. Now what happens to the fish?"

"Well, none for the mess sergeant unless he says pretty please," mused Leo with a small imp turning his green eyes a light jade. "But, Mr. Dart will explain what happens to them. That's a great thing about the Lab. You do something, then they explain what you did and why you did it. But, they'll give you time to clean up that bay muck and change your shorts first."

"I ought to bury the shorts," said Kent.

"Nope," said Leo. "Let 'em rest. The trick is never to clean up work clothes, just save them nice and dirty for another time. I wouldn't be surprised if you put them back on again before lunch."

David Dart's office was shabby and comfortable. It was lined with bookshelves. Some held books, others junk and small bottles, a few of which, contained tiny, dead fish. There were four desks in the room; most of them littered with mussed and pencil-scrawled papers. There were four men sitting at or near them. They looked shabby and easy, and again Kent had an impression of youngness, not youth, youngness. They said "hi" when Kent and Leo walked into the office.

Mr. Dart was as comfortable as anybody, but just standing there relaxed, he looked brightly busy. He reminded Kent of the squirrel who lectured to the birds every morning in the tree behind the house in Rumson.

"Welcome, Kent," he said. He waved a hand around the room and mentioned names as if he thought everybody knew everybody anyhow. "I hear you had a good haul at Horseshoe Cove."

"He wants to know what happens to the fish," said Leo.

"After," snapped David Dart. "We want to hear about the albino blue. We were sort of late with that news until Dr. Vernon filled us in. Tell, Kent, and from the beginning."

The little flicker of doubt tweaked him again. After all, they didn't see the bluefish. But Kent told. The men in the room didn't miss a word, and he gained confidence. They were silent when he finished. They looked most thoughtful. Kent had the idea that maybe they were weighing him just like a fish.

"Well you sure kicked up a fuss," said Mr. Dart brightly, "and no wonder…. Take a look at these."

He pointed to a stack of newspapers lying on a corner of a desk. Some of the pages were marked. Kent walked over and leafed through them. There were columns marked with crayon, most of them by rod-and-gun editors or fishing editors. The albino bluefish was reported, but cautiously. Most of the writers merely said that the Lab and Dr. Vernon had had such information from John Palmer, well-known lawyer and sportsman, and from his son who caught and tagged the fish. There was another story, which Kent read. It was about a living-fossil fish named coelacanth, which was supposed to have been extinct for fifty million years until one was caught off South Africa in 1938. The writer said that the discovery of an albino bluefish would be more popular with some eight million salt-water fishermen, most of whom had caught blues. There was another little story with Kent's picture taken from a bigger picture of his Pony League baseball team.

"Wow!" he murmured.

"We think the outdoor-sports writers are just warming up," said David Dart.

Kent was silent. He had never been a boy for much talk. He just nodded at Mr. Dart.

"He wants to know what happens to the fish," said Leo firmly.

Everyone grinned.

"Well, Harvard, suppose you tell him," smiled David Dart. "At least the part before we eat the fish for dinner."

"I can start with my own job," said Leo, not a bit dismayed. "The blues taken this morning were young ones. They were probably part of the May spawning, which takes place fairly close to shore along this part of the coast, although we think, the Lab thinks, that really big blues spawn far out to sea. These blues were too large to represent the July spawn, which is probably just starting now. After spawning and early growth, young blues tend to work their way toward the shoreline and into bays, rivers and what we call estuarial waters. We took those blues this morning for growth studies and age research. All of them will be scaled carefully. I, Leo will put the scales, one by one, on slides."

Kent felt a warm and unaccustomed sense of pride in Leo.

"Scale data are recorded in a punch-card sorting system for later examination, which will help us know age, growth and maybe the differences among several types of bluefish populations."

"Good," said David Dart.

"Blood samples will be taken from the fish also." continued Leo, scratching his nose very unlike a scientist, but very much like a small boy. "They will be used in serological tests, sort of serum tests, which show differences in blood types. Humans have different types of blood, and so do fish. Mine is type O Rh positive…."

"So is mine," muttered Kent.

"We are blood brothers," said Leo.

"How would you like a bash, Lipsky?" asked one of the men at the desks.

"Dr. Vernon has the theory that there maybe different races of bluefish just as there are different races of men. But nobody is sure. And that's why we take blood samples and run blood tests." Leo went on just as if he never heard the man at all. "It could be," he continued, "that the blues of a certain blood type might produce albino fish…." His face was peaked in thought and tense. It changed and looked like a Walt Disney elf. "Then, naturally, we eat the rest of the specimens if there are any left."

"Good," said David Dart, "and for that you can come fishing with Kent and me in about fifteen minutes from now. Go get geared." The rest of the men waved Kent and Leo from the room.

"See, what did I tell you," said Leo as they climbed worn, wooden steps to their room at the top of the building, "back into work clothes. Lunch on the boat from somebody else's leftovers from lunch on the boat."

"Don't you want to go?" asked Kent.

"Like crazy," said Leo. "The way they keep an eye on me around here, you'd think I'd bust in a breeze. I never get to sea. And, if it weren't for you, maybe I never would, at least, this summer."

They rode to the dock with David Dart in his dusty sedan. They carried a Scotch cooler, which held thin, brown tea and tinkling ice and a sack full of sandwiches across a rickety catwalk to the boat.

Kent felt knowing and familiar at the sight of the Bluefish, which was the boat's name. He had been out many times in similar craft. It was a twenty-eight foot, open-decked, lapstraked Jersey skiff painted shouting blue. The afterdeck held a small tank in which Dart could keep live fish, and a carpenter's chest in which he kept his bluefish tags and data cards. Three rigged fishing rods leaned in a corner of the transom. Their lures were metal spinners for trolling. The forepart of the boat was a small, roofed cabin, which held a ship-to-shore radiophone and the wheel. The boat was powered with a Gray marine engine.

"What's with the rods?" asked Kent.

"You can't net big blues," said Mr. Dart. "Not often. If you do, they sometimes bite their way out even through my monofilament webbing. So once in a while I use the rods."

"Want me to check and see if the tag and cards all match?" asked Leo, dropping nimbly from dock to deck.

"Thanks," said David Dart. "Okay, let's get the lines off her and go."