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

CHAPTER EIGHT

"You said that Dr. Todd was starting a new experiment," said Kent as they walked through the Lab lobby on their way to join the Army for dinner. "I forgot to ask him about it. Do you know?

"Yep," answered Leo. "How fish use the sun and their own sense of time as a direction finder. How they use the sun as a compass."

"Come on," said Kent.

"Everything else is a joke," said Leo, "but not the work around here. In case you care, Dr. Todd never feeds his fish during an experiment even if it lasts thirteen weeks. That's the truth, and it may be why I like the mess sergeant. Hurry up."

"Not so fast," said a marmalade voice from a side corridor. It was John Colin taking a fix on them through his horn-rimmed glasses. "We've made some arrangements for you two tomorrow. How would you like to go shark-fishing maybe for a couple of days or more, depending upon conditions? Your albino might be out there, Kent, and you'd be off the base for a day or so, just in case," said John Colin.

"I am a great shark fisherman," said Leo perkily.

"You are shark bait, Harvard," laughed Dr. Colin. "But you'd both like the trip, and you'd learn something. How's it sound?"

"Great!" they shouted in chorus.

"Dr. John Castle and his crew are taking the Dolphin out at six-ay-em. One of his men will roust you out and take you to the dock. Take sweaters and lots of socks. It could be chilly out there. Good night, boys."

Leo thanked the mess sergeant, but he said that he didn't care for coffee with his dinner. Kent and Leo thanked the college men from the dormitory, but said that they did not care to play softball. They walked over to the East Side of the Hook and sat on one of the Army's beaches and watched the early dusk stain the sea and splatter the surf with violet light.

"What did Dr. Colin mean when he said that shark fishing would keep you off the base for a day or so?" asked Leo. "Does he want you away from the Lab? I thought they wanted you out here because of the albino."

Kent thought about it. He had never been much of a talker, and what things disturbed him he usually talked over with Dad who had a habit of coaxing him to think about things before he talked about them anyhow. But he liked Leo, and Leo was not an ordinary person. He guessed Leo was one of the people Dad had talked about, when he said that it was sort of important to be choosy about finding people with standards. The important thing, however, was that he felt Leo would understand, maybe, even more than he did what he thought about the albino and the fuss about it.

Kent talked quietly about what Dr. Vernon said about news and turning science into circuses and how the Lab was for real and its work important. Then he told Leo about the Boat Owner's Association, and how he got the idea that that was important, even if it was circusy. He suddenly had the notion that he talked himself right around to his feelings about killing the bluefish as a thing for a museum, and, maybe its right to live, to another chance even if it would be caught and studied later. "Another thing I don't like," he said, "is the idea of a lot of people chasing the albino for a prize, for money."

"You said another thing, what's the first? Asked Leo.

Kent told him. "The Lab impresses me," he said, "but it makes me sort of uncomfortable, and somehow I get the idea that maybe your people don't believe that there is an albino blue."

"Did Dr. Vernon or Dr. Colin ever hint that?" asked Leo.

"No," said Kent.

"Did anybody else just bong out and say it?"

"No."

"And nobody will either," said Leo seriously, "and because these people are scientists. They know so much about the sea that they know that there is more that they don't know than what they think they know. Sure, they're going to look at you real hard for a while. They look at me as if I'm not for real sometimes. But I'll tell you what…if you weren't you, and your father wasn't who he is; you wouldn't be here at all. And I'll tell you something else, Dr. Vernon worries because he knows that the newspaper people don't ask for scientific proof when it comes to a story. And the Boat Owner's Association just wants a hook to catch fishermen, not fish. Can't blame them either.

Kent was silent.

"You know how I know?" asked Leo. "My father once suggested a different use of snake venom as a possible help in fighting a certain type of cancer. When the newspapers got through, he had cured cancer forever. Yep, your blue may stir up a rumpus, all right." He grinned. "You did catch it, didn't you?"

They slogged across the Hook to the Lab and went to bed. Leo said a strange thing just before thy dozed off. "Did you ever think that the hunt, the search for the albino could be more important than ever finding it?"

"The Dolphin sailed at six with a morning mist still hiding much of the Hook. It was not a handsome boat although Kent had been impressed by its size. Leo had been aboard it before, but only at the dock. He was eager to show Kent its secrets. The Dolphin was a research vessel and no research vessel is pretty. Research vessels are workboats, messy workboats. This one was an ex-Army harbor tug that had been in mothballs for twelve years and had never been used for Army harbor work. It was 107 feet long with a broad, round-bottomed beam. It was shaped like the long length of a watermelon cut in half. It was painted rusty-white and worn-gray and its metal decks, which fried feet in the sun, were scuffed down to their basic steel. Its power plant was a twelve hundred horsepower Diesel engine. The engine room was compact and crowded with machinery including two generators and transformers, which supplied electricity, some of which ran a torpedo-shaped, self-steering rudder housing that also contained the propeller.

Below decks, under her bridge, the Dolphin could sleep six persons on the portside, six on the starboard in bunks. The captain, a former commercial fisherman with a Viking name, had a tiny cabin all his own. The crew, normally ten men, including four scientists from the Lab and a most important cook, had plenty of room to move about and work.

The Dolphin had a small laboratory all its own located just off the working deck at the stern. It was fifteen feet long and five wide. In it were sinks, cabinets and a bulletin board for posting such things as temperature readings, salinity or ocean-salt test readings, and notes like "Has anyone seen my test tubes?"

The Dolphin's captain was proud of his bridge. He explained some of its equipment to Kent and Leo with a shy smile. He showed them the loran for directional navigation, a Fathometer for depth measurements. He showed them a radar and sonar "fish finder" to locate and "picture" fish schools and single fish as they swam in the sea. He explained that the boat's intercom, its voice-communications system, was not as good as it might be. He also told Kent that he came from New Bedford.

"That proves that he likes you," explained Leo as the two boys made their way to the stern of the deck. They found Dr. John Castle and three of his assistants, two of them college students, examining the day. None of them seemed to be doing much and enjoying it.

"Hi," said Leo. "We're here."

"Every time I get visitors on one of my trips I get jinxed," said Dr. John Castle. He hung his lower lip out, but he winked at Kent. "This trip I am double jinxed. Probably won't see a single shark." He stuck out a bare arm and shook hands with Kent. "Welcome aboard," he smiled. "I can see you are all ready to accuse my sharks of eating your albino blue. Well, you are wrong. Once in a while, one of my sharks eat a bluefish or two if they can't find anything easier to catch, but as we say in the business, they are not heavy predators on bluefish. Frankly, my sharks eat tin cans, garbage, whole sides of bacon that fall off ships, and accordions same like you squeeze and get music. One of them had a five-gallon bucket in its stomach when we opened it to examine its diet."

Kent backed up behind his Indian face.

Dr. Castle-everybody who worked at the Lab was usually a doctor as well as a mister-wore shorts, dirty ones, and a pair of high, work shoes with thick soles. Nothing else, even though the early, morning chill was still crouching low on the sea. His stomach puffed out gently over his belt line. There was a small mattress of hair on his chest. His face was round and his eyes were round, and his forehead was beginning to chase away hair for new room on his head. He was a chunky, cheerful man as he squinted over his snub nose.

"Let's talk a little before Leo takes you below to live with the cook," he said. "We're going to run a couple of hours before we get where I want to fish today. Do you know anything about sharks?"

Kent thought a bit. He remembered a day on a boat chumming for blues with Dad, and how the school they raised off the Shrewsbury Rocks had slashed into the ground-up fish chunks of the chum. The he remembered the shadowy figures easing into the bluefish school to rend and tear and turn the clear water a sickening pink with blood.

Kent thought some more. He remembered the news stories about the swimmer at Belmar who lost an arm and a leg to a shark. He remembered some kind of a shark scare along the Jersey coast each summer.

"All I know is that they are bad news. They ruin fishing, bust tackle if they take a hook, and they eat people." He paused and said truthfully. "I guess I'm afraid of them although I've seen plenty of small sand sharks and dogfish."

Dr. Castle bobbed his head.

"I admit I'm a little cautious about sharks," he said, "but I happen to think they are a right nice fish, almost sweet compared to some. I happen to be in love with sharks. What do you think of that?"

"Would you kiss one?" asked Leo.

"I would if one said pretty please," said Dr. Castle, "and sooner than I would kiss you, you toothpick."

Kent was genuinely curious. "Why do you love sharks?" he asked.

Dr. Castle upended a bucket and sat on it.

"Find another bucket or sit on the edge of this hook box and I'll tell you," he said.

The Dolphin's engine snored. Her bow pushed steadily eastward, and as the sun climbed, the sea flattened and looked like the surface of a lake. Dr. Castle's assistants and Leo leaned on things and hung on things and sat on things.

"Sharks are real magic," said Dr. Castle. "You listen."

Everybody listened. Castle made Kent see the beginning, the fossil prints, of the first sharks 250 million years ago, a family of fish not much different from those swimming today that had been on earth one thousand times longer than the human family. He talked about changes as the years marched, of warm seas and frozen seas, of new life forms and new surroundings for that life. But always there were sharks, the same fusiform or fish shape with skeletons of cartilage instead of bones and tough, sandpaper skin covered with toothy scales called denticles. Always there were sharks, and in practically all the world's oceans. There were some three hundred species of sharks, and the biggest of them all was the whale shark, a monster forty-five to fifty feet long. The smallest, the mid-water dogfish known to scientists as Squaliolus, lived in deep water and had a hard time, being only six inches long.

"Which ones are the man-eaters?" asked Kent.

Dr. Castle snorted. "If man stayed out of the ocean, none of them would be. You don't see any sharks walking down the streets in New York looking for men to eat, do you? But a few sharks like the white shark and the tiger shark attack large and active prey. We have quite a few white sharks along this coast, and they do nibble on a few men now and then."

"How about the stories?" asked Leo.

"I know. I know. All of them as old as man, and most of them just as phony, and all sharks are dangerous," said Dr. Castle, blandly. "I prefer to think of them more kindly, sweetly as it were."

"Oh, boy," said one of the college men.

Dr. Castle stabbed him with a glance.

"Even motherly," he added, and went on to tell Kent that most sharks had babies, pups, like human mothers although there were other ways for different types of shark. One type laid eggs, which looked like capsules made of leather right on the ocean floor.

When Dr. Castle talked about how sharks swam he sounded like a poet. "There are faster creatures in the sea than sharks," he said, "porpoises, for instance. But sharks swim like angels must fly, silk smooth and with never a sound." He waved a finger at Kent. "That's one reason the U. S. Navy is interested in our research on sharks. It would like to know how to move something through depths of water without sound and without a ripple ahead or behind, something like a nuclear submarine maybe. But, I forgot, you're a bluefish man, and we've a few chores to do before we fish. You and Leo can go talk to the captain. Come back later. Okay, let's saddle up men."

They went to the bridge by way of the galley where the cook was baking apple pies. He was glad to see them and gave them milk and doughnuts. They sat at a table fixed into the deck and big enough to seat eight men at a time. They talked. Leo explained the Lab's shark program. He explained it with his mouth full of doughnut while smelling the pies.

"Mrrumph, mrrumph, s' like bluefish studies with some differences. The shark program began for the Lab in 1961. The idea was to make a survey of the middle Atlantic bight. That's the part of the eastern seacoast from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras, only Castle chose to study the region from Long Island to Cape Henlopen in Delaware. The Lab wanted to know how many types of sharks lived there and the species of them. It wanted to know were there great number of sharks, and in what seasons of the year were there more of them and less of them. Mrrumph, wanted to know what they ate and when and where they had their pups. It wanted to know what kind of ocean sharks liked and disliked, water temperatures, salt content, water depths and even wind directions. Mrrumph the Lab wanted to know where the sharks of this coast went when they went someplace, their migration habits. So Castle started a tagging program, too."

Leo took a gulp of milk and licked the powdered sugar from the doughnuts from his lips.

"Sharks do move around when they feel like it. A sandbar shark tagged last August, right off shore here, was recovered in March this year in Florida. Also Castle and his people are working on ways to tell the age of sharks and how much they grow from season to season. Mrrumph they take sections from the backbones and put them under a microscope and look for annuli marks, sort of the way we study bluefish scales. But they are not sure they're on the right track yet. It will be a long time before they can say 'yep, this hammerhead is eight years old and grew four inches longer and twenty pounds heavier this year.' But, face it, scientists have been studying sharks for years, and they don't know so awful much yet."

Leo stood up. "That's it," he said.

"You bet that's it," said the cook, whisking away the doughnut plate. "You trying for a new record?"