Last Gasp Read Online Free PDF Page A

surrounded by a bracelet of dazzling pink coral. He was a shortish, robust man with a boxer’s torso and shoulders burned a deep mahogany, and whereas many men his age had thickened and grown slothful, Theo kept to a strict regimen: The discipline of his scientific calling extended into every area of his hermetic life. Beneath a spiky crew cut of snow-white hair his face was grizzled and etched with lines, his eyes of transparent blue screwed up against the brilliant mirror of the lagoon.
    Canton Island is the tiniest of a loosely scattered group, the Phoenix Islands, fractionally below the equator, which seem no more than flyblown specks in the vast blue expanse of the tropical Pacific. For Theo Detrick, Canton Island was important precisely because of its location. Nearly twenty years before, at the age of forty, he had come to the island and stayed here, its sole inhabitant. What had begun as a routine research project in marine biology, sponsored by a two-year Scripps Fellowship, had turned into his life work.
    Behind the boat trailed a surface-skimming net. Its fine silk mesh had captured a kind of greenish goo, which he was careful not to disturb as he hauled the net over the stern. Later, in his laboratory in the single-story clapboard house, Theo would cut the silk into ten-centimeter squares and examine each one patiently and painstakingly under the microscope. But even with the naked eye the evidence was plain enough—to his practiced eye at any rate. The phytoplankton index was in decline. It was a trend that had been noted in all the oceans of the world, but never plotted so carefully, so thoroughly, over such a long period of time.
    The scientist shielded his eyes and looked beyond the coral reef to the open sea, a thousand glittering facets in the unbroken arc of blue.
    It was out there, in the narrow belt along the equator, that the upwelling of colder water brought with it a rich soup of microorganisms from the ocean depths. These were the countless billions of minute unicellular planktonic algae that formed the staple diet of most fish. Important too in that a significant proportion of the world’s constantly replenished oxygen supply came from these tiny free-floating plants. Like all green plants they absorbed the energy of the sun and by means of photosynthesis converted water into its constituent parts of hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen they used to produce carbohydrates for their own needs, dumping the oxygen as a waste product into the atmosphere.
    But what was “waste” to the plants was vital to all animal life on the planet.
    There wasn’t any man living who knew as much about this microscopic form of marine life as he did. His book on the subject, nine years in the writing and published a decade ago, was now regarded as the standard text. From the royalties and the grant he still received from Scripps, he was able to continue his research—though he guessed that at the institute he existed merely as an entry on the accounts department balance sheet. “Old Theo? Thought he was dead.” He visited the mainland once, at the most twice, a year, so he couldn’t blame them. His wife had died fourteen years ago. His daughter, Cheryl, herself a postgraduate at the institute, must have felt she was corresponding with a distant relative—a stranger even—when they exchanged their brief, polite letters.
    He rowed back to the jetty, the oars smooth in his leathery palms. The years of isolation had bred in him a fear and distrust of the outside world. By choice he would have preferred to be left alone on his island. He wanted nothing more than to work at what he knew best, at the subject to which he had devoted the greater part of his working life.
    But—the question—what good was that work, that research, all that dedication, if not used for the benefit of mankind? He had a duty not only to himself. He was a forgotten man, wouldn’t have had it any other way, but the time had come to consider