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

CHAPTER TWELVE

Kent felt good when he walked into the house. Funny how he missed home when he was away from it, if only a night or so. He was sleepy. Sea, sun, salt air and sharks since dawn added up to a long day. He was ready for bed. But he knew that Dad and Dr. Vernon weren't, and he knew that they wanted to discuss his idea with him. He felt just a bit uneasy about it right now, just a little guilty because he hadn't really planned to tell Dr. Vernon about it at all. But he knew that Dad already had, and that surprisingly enough Dr. Vernon was greatly pleased. It wasn't too hard to figure out adult people. It was just hard to figure them out right most of the time.

"You hungry?" asked Dad.

"No, sir," he said. "Just tired, I think."

"Try taking a shower and changing your clothes," suggested Dad. "Be another hour or so before your bedtime tonight. John Colin's coming over with a man I want you to meet." Dad raised his eyebrows and silently invited the question.

Kent put on his Indian face and refused to ask.

"What now?" he muttered and climbed the stairs to clean up. He left Dad and Dr. Vernon talking about buns and coffee or milk and sandwiches or beer and pumpernickel. They seemed pleased with themselves. And nobody mentioned anything at all about running away from the excitement at the dock. Kent wondered if Leo had enjoyed himself. He bet that he had.

There were new voices in the living room when Kent, showered, in a fresh, sports shirt and clean, khaki slacks, came down again. He could hear John Colin's caramel baritone.

"Bluefish eggs look like tapioca pudding. That is, if you could see them without a microscope. They are about six tenths of a millimeter, but they absorb water and grow bigger before the larvae, the babies, hatch out. The babies, of course have sort of a built-in free lunch, a yolk sac which feeds their bodies until they are able to find food for themselves, maybe sea urchin eggs which you couldn't see with the naked eye or plankton about on tenth of one millimeter in size which you couldn't see either."

"That's interesting," rumbled a strange voice, which sounded like a low mutter of thunder from a far-away storm at sea.

Kent guessed that it was interesting. If something you couldn't see was eating something you couldn't see, wow, what a movie that would make! He was feeling a little uneasy as he entered the living room.

"Feel better?" asked Dad. John Colin pointed his pipe stem "Hello." Dr. Vernon nodded dramatically. "This is Mr. Heinrich," said Dad and paused.

"How do you do, sir," said Kent softly.

Mr. Heinrich was an immense man, deeply tanned, with a face that looked as though it were carved from the side of a mountain, a high mountain, because the face was capped with platinum-white hair which glinted like snow above the timberline of tan. Mr. Heinrich's eyes were the color of a winter-gray sea, but they warmed slightly as they stared at Kent. He was dressed as though he had just left a formal dinner party, but a midsummer dinner party with society people. His jacket, above his black trousers, was fire engine red, and a bow tie, the same color, sat carelessly tilted on his Adam's apple.

"So," he said with a soft rumble. "This is the young man, the young man who caught the albino blue." His eyes held Kent's, and Kent stared back stubbornly, his face held as firmly as old mahogany.

"Mr. Heinrich is one of the world's great fishermen," said Dad. "He has fished all over the world for all sorts of game fish. He holds world records for swordfish. You may have read about him. "Dad's voice tracked off.

"No, sir," said Kent.

"Mr. Heinrich is also the president of the brewery which is offering the $250,000. for your bluefish. He knows about your idea and he knows how you feel about the albino, and maybe things in general. You might as well sit down and get used to the idea that your own father has done you in."

Kent sat. He knew Dad hadn't done him in and that he never would. He also knew that his own notions of what was best for Kent Palmer were sometimes not Dad's. And he also knew that there had been a lot of grown-up thinking about his idea while he was still aboard the Dolphin. He sat, and went way down inside himself, and waited.

"Mr. Heinrich is a sportsman," said Dad.

"Mr. Heinrich supports sound conservation," recited Dr. Vernon with gestures.

"Bah," said Mr. Heinrich sounding like a kettledrum. "Mr. Heinrich is a beer salesman who would ruin the ocean to sell beer. Mr. Heinrich offers a big prize for a rare fish that he never may have to give. Mr. Heinrich is a cheapskate who wants to cheapen the albino bluefish. Mr. Heinrich is a pig who wants to put pig-people on Kent Palmer's private ocean, pig-people who would never fish for fish unless they thought they could get rich fishing for fish, and never think a thought about God's miracle of the sea itself. Is that Mr. Heinrich, young man?"

Kent kept silent.

"And who is Kent Palmer to leave the State of New Jersey, my advertising people, and who know how many newspapermen and television people who only work for a living, waiting at a dock because he knows more than anybody else knows? And who is Kent Palmer to think that a thing as precious as his albino blue couldn't happen to one of Mr. Heinrich's pig-people if he could get them out in the sun of God's ocean in the fresh air even for money and beer? Does Kent Palmer own an ocean? Who is this Kent Palmer?"

Kent was not fooled by the rumble. He felt a flash of temper, but it did not show in his voice when he spoke.

"The boy, who caught the blue," he said. He sounded completely grownup himself.

Mr. Heinrich smiled. He sat down and made an armchair look like a dollhouse toy. There was warm, blue glint in his gray eyes. He nodded.

"Yes," he said. "Good boy."

Dad said nothing at all. Dr. Vernon added to the nothing. And John Colin added his nothing to the rest of the nothings.

"And what do you think of my idea?" asked Kent softly.

"I wish I had thought of it myself," boomed Mr. Heinrich. "Now we talk and make a little play which will help a lot of people and maybe only annoy the people I pay to be annoyed anyhow. Yes, we will make a little play and Kent and I will be actors."

Dad interrupted. "Mr. Heinrich's company has offered you twenty-five thousand dollars for your co-operation with his prize offer for the blue," he said. And Kent suddenly knew why Dad picked this moment to tell him.

"Let him donate it to my idea," he said steadily.

Mr. Heinrich rumbled without words and rolled low notes around his ankles. "So talk to me, boy," he said when the vibrations died. "Other people have told me what they think you think. I would like to hear what you think you think."

"I'll try," said Kent. And he did. He told Mr. Heinrich as simply as he could about his new certainty that searching was more important than finding, and what he had discovered about the work at the Lab. He said that he hadn't wanted to embarrass Dr. Vernon and that work with what Dr. Vernon called circuses. He admitted that he was confused, but that to him, at least, an ocean full of...of whatever...made the albino blue a little, a cheap thing. The lamplight was gentle in the room, but when Kent talked of the blue, Mr. Heinrich's face lighted as though morning sun had spilled across its slopes. Then Kent talked about his idea, and what Dr. Castle and Leo had said about telling it on television or how best to tell it anyhow.

"Your father told it best by telling me first," said Mr. Heinrich. "Now the two of us will tell it best together, and I will have no surprises, but I will still sell beer. You, young man, will just be yourself and that is good enough. Leave details to others." He was understanding. "You can talk to Leo and Dr. Castle," he said. "No one else outside this room."

"And you can go to bed," added Dad, just as though there were no others in the room at all. "Lots of fuss at the Lab tomorrow. A press conference. We'll talk about it at breakfast."

A press conference is only a meeting to which newspapermen and television men and radiomen and, sometimes, magazine men are invited to attend if they think they might find some news. It is a meeting usually held to announce something which might be news or to discuss something which is already news. It depends upon who arranges a press conference whether or not anything comes out of them or whether any press people go to them at all.

Ten nervous young advertising men who represented Mr. Heinrich's brewery and five gray-haired and sleepy men from the State of New Jersey's public relations department ran this meeting. It was held in the Lab lecture room where marine experts sometimes talked to the members of the Littoral Society. The fifteen men who ran the meeting asked Kent and his father and Dr. Vernon to sit at a table. Then they asked Leo just to sit somewhere at the back of the room.

The newspapermen, some of whom had been at the dock when the Dolphin came home, asked Kent whether or not he had caught an albino bluefish and what he knew about bluefish anyhow and how long had he fished around there or anywhere anyhow. They asked him how he knew it was bluefish if he caught it in the first place and why he hadn't brought it to the Lab instead of tagging it and letting it go. Other men took Kent's picture alone and with Dr. Vernon and with his father. A man from the Boat Owner's Association wanted his picture taken with Kent. Leo wanted his picture taken with Dr. Vernon to send to his father in Washington. The nervous young men from the advertising agency handed out papers, which told about the $250,000. They gave out pictures of a factory and some of Mr. Heinrich. The five men from the State dozed and talked to each other about their salaries.

Kent answered only the questions that were asked. Nobody asked him what he thought of the contest at all. Then the press conference was over except that the men from the State wanted Kent and his dad to come down to the park on the Hook and have their pictures taken as they pointed to a sign which read, "Sandy Hook State Park." The young advertising men wanted to go, too, and have their photographers take a picture of Kent pulling a beer can out of the surf with a fishing rod. They had a toothpick, freshwater fishing rod with them for the purpose and seemed quarrelsome when they discovered it was not proper equipment.

Kent co-operated with everyone.

Dad stayed out at the Lab to lunch, and he made arrangements with John Colin for Leo to come to dinner and stay the night at Rumson. John Colin said that he personally would drop Kent and Leo off at the house when he finished his work for the day. He excused Leo from bluefish scales for the afternoon.

Kent and Leo wandered the Lab. Dr. Castle welcomed them to the third floor and showed them skeleton shark heads and explained teeth. He kicked them out and they visited Robert Lund, a biologist-diver. He told them about a night dive during which they turned off the underwater lights and saw a whole school of bluefish making their own green-blue trails of light as the school swam through billions of microscopic animals, which glowed in the dark. When he kicked them out they found Terry Grap, another diver-biologist. He showed them three-dimensional charts of the surface-to-bottom ocean temperatures along the continental shelf. He said the National Geographic Magazine was going to print them in color, and kicked them out. They went to the library and examined a cabinet made to keep seashells in by the ship's carpenter of the sailing bark H. G. Johnson out of Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1880. They went to visit the Army's mess sergeant. He showed them a lemon meringue pie made by Dugan's local bakery that very day.

They rode to Kent's house with John Colin, and he reminded them that there was always work at the Lab, and a dollar and hour had to be earned, and that he would pick them up at exactly eight in the morning no matter what.

During dinner, Dad looked more than ever like a man expecting earth-shaking wonders. He talked about the press conference, and he talked as one grownup to another with Leo about Harvard, which he compared well with Lafayette College in some respects. He said that he had a real gift when it came to producing spaghetti and giant meatballs. He thought they went well with banana ice cream and chocolate sauce, particularly if the chocolate sauce were really homemade fudge, which hadn't thickened right to be hard fudge. Kent was suspicious of him.

The telephone rang before they finished dinner, and Dad answered it.

"He's pretty neat," said Leo.

"He's up to something else," said Kent.

Mr. Heinrich was on the phone. He talked at length with Dad. He asked to speak with Kent.

"Everything is fine," he said, and he sounded as a man sounds having fun. "You are going to be on a big television show Sunday evening. You first, then me with you. It's a summertime show but the real star of it owes me a favor or two and he is also a fisherman. He'll be there to run things. Twenty-six and fort tenths million people will see us if they bother to turn on their sets. Somebody from the advertising agency will give you something to read. Stick it in your pocket and say what you think you ought to say. I like your idea better all the time. See you later. Goodbye."

They talked about Mr. Heinrich as they sampled the banana ice cream with fudge sauce.

"He thinks he invented the albino bluefish by now," said Dad. "It is making him much younger."

"And me older," said Kent.