A novel by
Richard Setlowe
HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON • New York

Copyright © 1980 by Richard Setlowe
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book or portions thereof in any form.
Printed in the United States of America

In memory of my father
Ernest Setlowe

Every great advance in science has issued from
a new audacity of imagination.
—John Dewey
The Quest for Certainty

Acknowledgments
There are several medical experts who generously educated
and advised the author during the researching and writing of
this book. I am deeply grateful to them—
Virginia Armon, Ph.D.; Bruce R. Bodell, M.D.; Gerald W.
Gardner, Ph.D.; Howard M. Grindlinger, M.D.; Murray
Grossan, M.D.; Charles M. Grossman, M.D.; Jay D. Hyman,
D.V.M.; LCDR D. A. Ingrum, MC, USN; Thomas Muziani,
C.C.P.; Martin J. Nathan, M.D.; William R. Sweetman, M.D.

PRELUDE
Epic events in man's evolution are, more often than not,
heralded by very ordinary circumstances.
"Ninety-three KHJ with all the good sounds this beautiful Sun-
day afternoon here in Southern California. Fair September skies,
eighty-four degrees downtown, in the nineties in the valleys. Lotsa
smog, but what the hay, we're from Los Angeles and we're tough.
We wont breathe air we can't see. Right? Right on"
The radio report was followed by a "golden oldie" titled, "Feel-
ings." The throbbing ballad hung in the hot arid air, as if it were a
physical element like the automobile exhausts from the Ventura
Freeway, the .36 parts per million ozone count, the sweet resinous

2
pollen of the lemon trees or the oily smoke from the backyard bar-
becue.
Ruth Styles had, in this her thirty-fifth year of life, developed
an acute sensitivity to all the different air particles about her
home in the San Fernando Valley suburb of Encino. The sight of
her husband Harry, hovering over the smoking barbecue, was re-
minder enough that there was something malignant in those parti-
cles.
Harry stood an inch, maybe two, under six feet, and he had not
long ago been a husky man. But now his blue shirt hung loosely
on a frame recently wasted by cancer. The aftermath of the dis-
ease was evident in the gaunt hollows of his face and in his pale
skin. Yet his movements reflected none of the painful, resigned
caution of a sick man. He skewered the plump franks, flipped the
thick hamburgers with quick decisive movements of his right
hand while balancing a half-quart can of beer with his left. Harry
Styles gave every impression of a man who still believed in his
own immortality.
"Daddy, Daddy, that one." Four-year-old Christopher, as blond
as a sunbeam, bobbed eagerly at his father's side and pointed out
a hamburger beginning to singe around the edges.
"Aha!" Harry flipped the hamburger with a theatrical flourish.
It was a game that father and son played at the barbecue.
Ruth watched them a moment, then continued to set a red-
wood picnic table. The table was heaped with baskets of stone-
ground whole-wheat hamburger and hot dog rolls, bags of natural-
style potato chips prominently labeled "No Preservatives Used,"
overflowing bowls of homemade coleslaw and carrot and raisin
salad, pitchers of homemade lemonade sweetened with unrefined
sugar, and baskets of fresh fruit. Ruth's preoccupation with natu-
ral and organic foods had developed simultaneously with Harry's
illness and accelerated with the prognosis of the disease.
She studied the abundant table, spread before her like the
overflow of a cornucopia, as if drawing some healing magic from
the array. Then she turned back toward her family.
Alongside the pool, thirteen-year-old Brenda Styles, in a polka-
dot bikini, lay stretched out on an air mattress sunning herself
and reading. Or rather she was cramming Silas Marner for the
next day's quiz in freshman English, all the while her tapping toes
kept the beat to the music blaring from the transistor radio
propped next to her.

3
Brenda had inherited her mother's black satin hair and ala-
baster skin, a lustrous milky flesh whose lack of pigment resisted
the baths of sunshine and Swedish Tanning Secret to darken it.
Christopher, on the other hand, had Harry's genes, an inherit-
ance of fair hair that bleached to a pale lemon silk and skin that
darkened as if doused with a walnut stain after a summer in the
sun.
The third child, David, aged eleven, suddenly surfaced from the
depths of the pool, thrashing the water, sputtering and choking.
"For Chrissakes, Davey, you're splashing me," his sister com-
plained loudly.
The boy wore a diver's face mask, at the moment flooded with
water, and he ripped it off in a panic for air.
"Hey, Dad, the mask is too big," David yelled. "It keeps
flooding."
"The mask is the right size. You're not clearing it right."
A dog, a shaggy black mutt that had been slumbering in the
shade of the picnic table, lunged to the pool's edge, barking excit-
edly at David. The dog danced about the edge, as if theatening to
plunge in, but each time he approached the lip, he dropped down
on his forepaws, then back-stepped away from the water.
"I'm trying to clear it, but it doesn't work," David complained.
"Will you show me again? Please."
"Okay."
Ruth anxiously looked at her husband.
"Honey," Harry called out to her, "will you watch the ham-
burgers while I give Junior Jacques Cousteau there a snorkle les-
son?"
"Harry, I don't think you should."
Harry smiled at his wife and dismissed her alarm with a wave of
his hand. "It's all right. I'm not going to swim forty laps. I'm just
dipping into the water. It's warm enough and I won't get a chill.
Hell, all the time I was in the hospital, all I thought about was
lying in that pool with a cold beer and the hot sun on my skin."
"Is that all you thought about?"
Harry laughed. "Well, maybe it was the second thing on my
list."
Ruth indeed looked lovely. She wore a long white cotton pique
dress. The gingham ties that nipped the waist emphasized the
weight she had lost in the last few months. That loss was due to
the strain she'd been under, and the tension showed in the lines
now etched in her face.

4
Ruth had bought the sun dress at Joseph Magnin for Harry's
homecoming from the hospital. At the same time she had gotten
the sports outfit Harry now wore, a chambray shirt-jacket with a
drawstring hood and matching swim trunks. It evoked images of a
man who surfed and jogged along the beach. Ruth had bought it
for Harry to convalesce in.
He unzipped the jacket and removed it, stripping to his bathing
trunks. A livid red scar ran all the way from his back across his
side to the center of his chest, as if he had been all but literally
cut in two.
The sight of the scar brought tears to Ruth's eyes. The hooded
surfer's jacket was false hospital room cheer, like a Hallmark get-
well card that cajoled: "You'll be up and running around in no
time." But the scar stated incalculable pain, irreparable damage.
Beneath the blue chambray optimism, it was the reality of how
deeply Harry had been mutilated.
Harry reached down and took his son's small hand. "Okay,
Chris, let's get wet and show your big brother which end is up."
"Yay!" The kid bounced and skipped at Harry's side. Chris-
topher was a stocky child, with stout arms and legs, but at four he
still had his baby potbelly. His suit invariably slipped below this
little pot, precariously hanging on to the chubby cantilever of his
behind.
Harry gingerly eased himself into the pool, testing the water
temperature with his foot, then slowly stepped in and lowered
himself all the way down to his neck, although the water at that
end was only three feet deep.
Christopher belly-flopped into the pool with a great splash, dog-
paddled over to Harry, and hung around his neck, kicking vigor-
ously.
The shaggy black dog began barking excitedly. He dipped a paw
tentatively into the water, then sprang back yelping with renewed
frustration.
"Come on, Groucho. Come here," Christopher coaxed the dog.
"It won't hurt you. Come here."
The pool was fifteen yards long—"A thousand dollars a yard,"
as Harry frequently commented—and the ground for it had been
broken fourteen months before, right after Harry's last salary raise.
It had been filled just a month before the first devastating medical
report.
"Why is Groucho scared of the water?" Christopher asked. The

5
thought of being frightened by the pool, especially when his fa-
ther was there with them, was something totally alien to the boy's
understanding.
"Because your brother, the great animal trainer, tried to teach
Groucho how to swim by just throwing him into the pool when
we first got him. It terrified the poor puppy/'
"But we won't let him drown. Fll teach him how to swim."
"He doesn't know that. In the back of his mind, all he re-
members is being suddenly dropped into this cold wet mysterious
stuff and not being able to breathe and choking and not knowing
what was happening."
Harry treaded his way along the edge of the pool to where
Brenda lay. Her round behind in its polka-dot bikini loomed up
like a beach ball. Harry reached up out of the water and gave the
beach ball a playful swat with his palm.
"You've got your mother's behind, Bren, honey. You're going
to be a heartbreaker."
"DaddyJ" Brenda sat up, shocked, at once embarrassed and flat-
tered and confused. She glanced at her mother, who laughed.
Brenda settled back down. "Meet my father, the dirty old
man," she said to no one in particular.
Harry treaded water into the deep section of the pool, where
David was hanging on the side. He eased Christopher's grip off
from his neok and placed the child's hands on the lip of the pool.
"Hang on here and practice your kick," he told the four-year-old,
then took the face mask David held out to him.
"The trick is to press at the top like this." Harry demonstrated,
putting on the mask. His voice, with his nose sealed off, had a
thick congested sound. "Then blow the air out through your nose.
The air pressure forces the water out through the bottom."
David nodded.
"I'll go underwater and fill the mask up and you watch me clear
it."
"Okay."
Harry submerged and sat on the bottom of the pool. In a mo-
ment David joined him, his face a few inches from his father's,
peering at him intently through the blurring green water. The
boy's long black hair swirled and drifted about his head in the
eddies generated by his sculling hands and feet.
Harry pulled the mask away from his face, allowing the water to
fill the mask. Then he pressed it against his forehead with the tips

6
of his fingers and exhaled through his nose. The water in the mask
began to recede.
On the surface, Christopher hung on the edge of the pool try-
ing to peer into the mysterious depths to see what his father and
brother were doing. Brenda sighed and struggled to refocus her
drifting attention on Silas Marner. Ruth sipped a tall glass of lem-
onade and critically surveyed the flower garden she had land-
scaped about the pool. She had, at first, assiduously cultivated it.
Now the neglected rosebushes were badly in need of pruning, the
camellias were wilted for lack of deep watering and feeding.
The surface of the pool suddenly exploded as Harry broke water
choking and coughing. He yanked off the mask trying to get at
the air, but was unable to catch his breath. His body was con-
vulsed by spasms as he gasped hoarsely for air.
"Daddy!" Christopher, delighted at his father's emergence, let
go of the side of the pool and dog-paddled over to Harry, clutch-
ing at him for support.
David surfaced by his dad and looked at him a moment in con-
fusion. "Hey, Dad! What's the matter?" Then the boy wailed in
alarm. "Mcz/"
Ruth dropped the glass she was holding and sprang to the pool
side. One look at Harry choking and fighting to breathe and stay
afloat while a terrified Christopher clung to his neck and she
leaped into the pool, her long white sun dress billowing about her
like a parachute.
She struggled to hold Harry afloat, swallowing water herself,
gasping out, "David . . . grab Christopher . . . Brendal"
Brenda stretched out as far as she could reach and caught her
mother's grasping hand. Then the girl got a grip on Christopher's
chubby arm and hauled the terrified child over the edge, while
Ruth and David supported Harry. He was making terrible retch-
ing sounds, the sound charged with the deep pain convulsing his
body.
"Oh, my God, Harry!" The anguish and helplessness in Ruth's
face reflected a pain as great as that racking her husband. Blood
now appeared at Harry's mouth. It bubbled at his lips and splat-
tered Ruth, the bloody froth violently spitting, foaming, and ebb-
ing with each agonized gasp for air.

1
Fifty yards from shore, a half-dozen surfers sat astride their
boards, bobbing listlessly in the swells, their eyes squinting sea-
ward, searching for a gathering comb of water.
The sky was overcast, bleeding all color from the landscape.
The sky, sea, and sand seemed made of the same muted gray ele-
ment. A veil of mist hung on the surface of the water, and the
surfers rising up into it on glassy swells looked as if they were levi-
tating into thin air.
Karl Steinhardt watched them a while, then kicked at the thick
wet sand and trudged on through it. A towering, gaunt figure,
white-haired, with a deeply lined face. Head bent, he stalked the
beach, searching the shoreline like a shell collector. At one point
he stopped and stooped to examine the olive-green shell of a kelp
crab, then again kicked at the sand and continued his stalking.
Kicking sand. That is what his late wife Johanna had always
called his long ruminative treks along the beach. When his brain
had become numb with study, analysis, classification, research, ex-
periments, and dissections, he had always fled to the beach.

8
Beaches on the Skagerrak outside Oslo and on the Baltic Sea
south of Stockholm, the dunes of Massachusetts, the tidal flats of
Chesapeake Bay, and now the gleaming white Pacific sands of
Southern California. The wandering pocks in the sand that were
obliterated at high tide were the footsteps of his career.
Steinhardt searched the landscape about him. To the south the
foothills swelled up out of the water, rolling to the distant peaks.
The town of Marejada spilled out of a sun-baked valley of the
California coastal range right to the edge of the sea. The red tile
roofs of the Spanish-style homes that predominated in the town
looked like a cluster of russet stones that had been washed down
the arroyo in the past winter's rain.
But to the north, toward Los Angeles, the land's advance from
the sea was gentler, creating a broad, gleaming beach that
stretched for miles to a distant fog-shrouded point of sea cliff.
Steinhardt trudged on in that direction.
A massive wood and steel pier loomed over him. It thrust like a
pointing finger from the beach into the sea for a quarter of a mile.
It was the landmark of the Institute of Oceanography. Alongside
its barrel-thick pilings, four scuba divers waded ponderously into
the water, laboring with iron tanks, lead weights, nylon-mesh spec-
imen bags, and plastic slates. Except for the surfers and divers,
dressed in thick black neoprene wet suits against the chill, the
beach was deserted.
The divers submerged in a brief eruption of bubbles and Stein-
hardt was totally alone. He walked on, head bent to the ground,
shoulders hunched, hands clasped behind his back. Here at the
water's edge Steinhardt was not searching for the carapace of kelp
crabs but for the answers to fundamental questions of life. At the
interface of land, sea, and air he sought the primal rhythms of cre-
ation, the rhythms to which all life played harmony and counter-
point.
In the past, after kicking at the sand and slugging through the
soft oblivious dunes, the answers had always spontaneously come
to him. It was as if the synapses in some as yet uncharted folds in
his brain had attuned themselves to those primal rhythms and
decoded the messages they carried, as a radio receiver tunes in and
decodes the information in radio waves.
But today no answer came from the sands he kicked or the echo
of the surf in his ears. Nor would it come. For the question he

9
asked was not one of biology or medicine but of destiny. Should
he go on with his research? Had he already gone too far?
Steinhardt turned and slogged through the sand back toward
the campus. At the edge of the beach and up the slopes of the hill
beyond it were the Institute of Oceanography's sprawl of dis-
parate buildings—monolithic concrete block offices and class-
rooms, Victorian wood-frame houses, Quonset huts, red-tiled haci-
endas. The size and architectural style of each building gave a
historical balance sheet of the institute, its ebb and flow of endow-
ments, state appropriations, private gifts, and military research
grants. The largest and most impressive building was the most re-
cent, a three-story, surreally modern structure. Its steeply slanted,
raw concrete walls looked as if they had been carved out of the
bedrock of the hill from which the building jutted out and from
which it traced its extreme bevels and contours.
On the seaward side, the offices facing the ocean opened onto
balconies that ran the width of the building. Above Steinhardt, a
white gull sailed over the beach. It glided without beating its wings
and settled gracefully on the topmost balcony just opposite Stein-
hardt's office.
He looked up at the white gull curiously. Perhaps its choice of
his office balcony was an omen.
Aaachl He kicked at the sand in disgust. An omen. How easily
the confused mind slips into mysticism. On the brink of a major
breakthrough in his work, he was hesitant, uncertain, assailed by
grave misgivings. They bogged him down like the soft sand
through which he now labored, sinking ankle-deep, the sand spill-
ing into his shoes and making every step an effort. Steinhardt
headed back to his laboratory, back to his unfinished work, that
work which he had begun to distrust.
The front door of the research building burst open and Mark
Matsuda, Steinhardt's assistant, ran out. He vaulted down the
three steps leading to the beach walk in one stride, ran a few
steps, then, spotting Steinhardt, slowed his pace, as if such a rau-
cous approach was an outrage.
"Dr. Steinhardt!" Matsuda was out of breath and excited. He
had apparently run down the entire four flights of stairs from
their office.
"Dr. Steinhardt, the University Medical Center called. Dr.
Bernstein said for you to call him as soon as possible."

10
"Jaaa" The word came out as a long breath. The fate of his
life's work was going to be resolved after all. His question was to
be answered not by mystic seaside revelations but by the personal
tragedy of another man, a total stranger.

2
How many times had Dr. Morris Bernstein made this same deci-
sion—ten times? A hundred? Each time he had blocked it from
his memory, so that now the agony was as acute as it had been the
first time.
Bernstein studied the patient lying on the bed of the intensive
care unit of the University Medical Center. He checked the os-
cilloscopes and digital read-outs again, desperately searching for a
deviant flicker. There was none.
"Nothing's functioning on it now," Bernstein said finally. "It's
over."
A second doctor standing beside Bernstein nodded gravely in
agreement, as if grateful the decision wasn't his to make.
It was just such decisions, such pronouncements, that had pre-
maturely aged Bernstein. He wearily rubbed his furrowed forehead
and tight, freckled scalp. Now in his mid-fifties, he looked over
sixty years old. At sixty, should he live so long, he would look like
the emaciated, wasted eighty-two-year-old corpse that lay on the
bed before him, making its mechanical parodies of life.

12
"The family won't give permission to pull the plug/' the other
doctor said. "They say it isn't the will of God."
Bernstein shook his head as if acknowledging some grotesque
joke. He looked about him at the machinery that imitated life. A
mechanical respirator, the heavy piston in the transparent plastic
cylinder pumping air in and out of a tube inserted directly into
the old man's throat, did the work of lungs and a diaphragm that
no longer functioned. An electronic pacemaker galvanized the
heart that no longer had the ability to maintain its own beat.
The dialyzer sucked the blood from the man's wrist into a stain-
less steel cabinet where cellulose membranes substituted for the
failed kidneys. And hanging bottles dripped glucose, electrolytes,
vitamins, proteins, fats, and water into translucent tubes that
shunted into translucent veins the nutrients that the disease-
ravaged stomach could no longer absorb.
"Will of God, huh?" Bernstein said. He smiled, but it was
irony, not humor, that twisted his lips. He turned and hurried
from the intensive care unit, fleeing through the swinging doors.
In the anteroom Steinhardt paced impatiently. He whirled at
the sound of the door opening. Bernstein, preoccupied, was star-
tled to find Steinhardt waiting for him.
The gaunt, towering figure of the Scandinavian moved forward
and seized the doctor's hand, his right hand squeezing Bernstein's
palm, his left gripping the smaller man's forearm. The blue eyes
eagerly searched the other man's.
Bernstein nodded. "Yes, Karl," he said softly, acknowledging
the other man's unspoken question. "Yes."
Harry Styles sucked greedily at the oxygen, his pained gasps
making a harsh rasping sound. Gradually his panic quieted, the
vertigo subsided, and he relaxed and sank back into his pillow,
waving the oxygen mask away.
"That better?" Ruth asked.
"Yes. Thank you." Harry's voice was a labored whisper.
Ruth replaced the oxygen mask in its holder by the head of the
hospital bed. There were bubbles of perspiration on Harry's brow.
She gently wiped them with a tissue and then kissed Harry lightly
on the temple, as if testing the degree of his fever.
There was an intimacy in the gesture that made Bernstein,
standing in the doorway, feel as if he were intruding. He said

13
nothing but stood politely waiting for them to be aware of his
presence.
Harry Styles had weakened so quickly in the last few weeks that
the sudden momentum of his illness seemed to have also physi-
cally drained his wife. Ruth Styles had visibly aged, as if her vital-
ity and health were inseparably linked with her husband's. Now
they sat silently holding hands, their fingers entwined, the wasting
hulk of a once handsome blond man and a beautiful woman
whose milky skin and black silky hair now were both dry and lus-
terless, man and wife fading together like cut flowers.
"Can I bring you anything from home?" Ruth asked.
"A carton of cigarettes."
Her laugh was meant to be polite, but even that effort failed
and tears coursed freely down her cheeks. She buried her face in
her husband's shoulder.
"Oh, Jesus, Harry, what the hell am I going to do without
you?"
He lightly stroked her hair.
"I'm not going to die," he said in a hoarse whisper that gath-
ered strength and conviction from his mounting anger. "I refuse
to die."
Bernstein knocked on the open door. Ruth sat up and dabbed
at her tears as he entered. The physician nodded and smiled—that
smile heralding sympathy, condolences, tragedy—first at Ruth and
then at Harry.
"How are you feeling today, Mr. Styles?"
"Weaker than I felt yesterday. Stronger than I'm going to feel
tomorrow."
Steinhardt stood behind Bernstein, the shaggy white head loom-
ing above the other's bald pate, the blue eyes riveted on Harry.
"Are you in any pain?" Bernstein asked.
"Only when I breathe."
"A great kidder," Bernstein said to Ruth. Noticing the direction
of her gaze, he then waved his hand. "This is Dr. Steinhardt, an
old colleague and friend. The ivory tower of medical research. He
is going around with me to observe medicine in its mundane prac-
tice." He picked up the chart hanging from the foot of Harry's
bed and studied it, sharing it with Steinhardt.
"Tried to give my body to medical science," Harry whispered.
"They rejected me."
"What sort of research?" Ruth asked Steinhardt.

14
With great reluctance Steinhardt looked up from the chart and
summoned a shy smile. "Very basic work in respiration and oxy-
gen assimilation/' he said. The voice was deep and resonant, the
diction precise, and the speaker's native Norwegian was a nuance
rather than an accent. "I'm working at the Institute of Oceanog-
raphy."
"Mr. Styles here is involved in aerospace research," Bernstein
interjected quickly.
"Ah, yes." Steinhardt nodded.
"Just nuts-and-bolts electronics." Harry made a weak, deprecat-
ing wave. "Avionics."
"But you have been much more successful in your field than we
have in mine," Steinhardt said expansively. "You have men ca-
vorting on the moon. We can't get them more than a couple of
hundred feet down into the ocean without putting them into ar-
mored pressure cookers."
Harry gestured weakly, pointing to something behind Stein-
hardt. In a frame on a nightstand was a Kodacolor print of Ruth
Styles and three children posed beside a tent on a Sierra lake.
Next to it was a detailed model of the Apollo spacecraft, the
replica looking more like a child's top than the command module
that had carried men to the moon and back. That and the photo-
graph were the only personal effects evident in the hospital room.
Steinhardt studied both as if they were important, even critical, to
his mission, before turning back to the ashen, wasted man in the
bed.
"You worked on the moon landings?"
Harry nodded, a bob of the head and a small weak smile.
"Harry was also the head of the team that developed the guid-
ance and navigational system for the space shuttle." Ruth Styles
volunteered the information in a soft, low voice that was vibrant
with pride.
"Ah!" Steinhardt's appreciation was emphatic, as if it had some
great significance for him.
"Just a subsystem within a system within a system," Harry whis-
pered. "But my claim to immortality." Harry turned to look at his
wife with great affection and lifted her hand to his mouth to kiss
it lightly. "That," he whispered, "and our children."
For the first time since entering the room, Bernstein turned his
full attention to Ruth Styles. Despite the sleepless grief that had

i5
etched the skin about her eyes with spiderwebs of lines and
drained the flush from her face, she was a beautiful woman.
Bernstein was disturbed. It was not Ruth's beauty that suddenly
made him anxious, but the way she totally possessed her husband.
He and Steinhardt would have to confront that, and the expecta-
tion of that emotional tug-of-war depressed him, draining the ex-
citement Bernstein had experienced just a few moments before.
"He's relatively young."
Bernstein nodded. "He started smoking two packs a day in col-
lege, and he told me that the pressure and deadlines of his work
had him up to three and sometimes four packs. That, and liv-
ing in the Los Angeles basin all his life. He's probably accumu-
lated as much lung pollution and stress as a man of eighty."
Steinhardt and Bernstein hurried down the corridor of the hos-
pital. The polelike figure and the short, pudgy surgeon made a
Mutt-and-Jeff-ish procession, Bernstein taking two jogging steps to
each one of Steinhardt's strides, amid a flux of doctors, nurses, or-
derlies, and visitors.
"But his heart is still strong," the scientist commented.
"There's very little oxygen in his blood for it to circulate,"
Bernstein said. "We took out the right lung three months ago.
Apparently there'd been a simultaneous involvement of both
lungs, but on the left lung it must have been microscopic and we
missed it on the biopsy. In any case, it was centrally located so we
couldn't have done a lobectomy." He and Steinhardt had pre-
viously discussed the case in detail, but Bernstein once again went
over all he had done as if seeking absolution for his failure to save
his patient.
"He's still alert. How much more time does he have?"
Bernstein shrugged. "A month at the most. If you're going to
get his permission you haven't any time to waste."
They entered the hospital lobby, packed with forlorn visitors
carrying flowers and books, dismissed patients waiting impatiently
in wheelchairs for cars to arrive at the entrance to pick them up.
"I anticipate Mrs. Styles will be my major obstacle," Steinhardt
said.
Bernstein nodded. "Karl," he said softly, "even if Styles and his
family consent, I doubt very much if the committee will ever
agree to the procedure." He was referring to the committee on

i6
research involving human beings. "It's too experimental. Too far
out."	»
Steinhardt looked down at his colleague. "In that event perhaps
we can have him transferred to a naval hospital."
Bernstein was surprised. "Will they let you do it?"
Steinhardt shrugged. "Most of my funding comes from the
Office of Naval Research. The rest from the National Science
Foundation. Neither, I'm quite sure, has the vaguest idea what ex-
actly it is that I'm doing. My last two papers have yet to be pub-
lished. They are, no doubt, somewhere at the bottom of a huge
stack of other research papers awaiting publication on the desk of
the editor of the Journal of the American Society for Experi-
mental Biology. How many people really are interested in 'Oxy-
gen-Carbon Dioxide Diffusion Across Transplanted Silastic
Membranes'?"
Steinhardt smiled, and like Bernstein's own smile, the scientist's
was an expression of irony rather than cheer.
He seized his friend by the shoulder in a warm grip, shook his
hand, and then was across the lobby and through the main door
in three great strides.

3
When Ruth Styles returned home that afternoon she drifted
vaguely from room to room not really looking for anything in par-
ticular.
Ruth was alone, and the silence in the normally noisy house
was strange and disorienting, distorting her sense of place as if her
meanderings were in a dream from which she would wake; this an-
esthetized world suddenly would shatter with the explosion of the
alarm clock summoning Harry to work and thrusting her back
again into the noisy, tactile reality of her life.
Christopher was being looked after by a neighbor; David and
Brenda were at school. The children were the perimeters of
Ruth's life now. She went to the hospital in the morning and
came home in time for the children's return from school. After
dinner with the children, she returned to the hospital to resume
her death watch.
Ruth harbored no shred of hope, clung to no straw of faith in
the spontaneous remission of the tumor. Twice before in her life

i8
she had passionately believed in such things, and twice her faith
had been devastated.
The first time had been when her father was stricken with can-
cer. With each operation, each course of chemotherapy, each radi-
ation treatment, each vague statement that her father felt a little
better today, she had had hope. But inexorably, relentlessly, he
had weakened, his flesh shrinking on his bones as it was consumed
from within. In five months he was dead.
When Ruth was told that Harry had lung cancer, she had
reacted to the diagnosis as though she had been told her husband
was dead. She refused to be comforted by the doctor's optimistic
plans for surgery. Although Ruth encouraged Harry's desperate
hopes, she herself remained numb with dread.
When Harry returned from the hospital with his lung removed
and then slowly gained strength, she had had a giddy surge of
hope. Perhaps they had gotten it all. She and Brenda had gone
out and bought a huge poster photo of John Wayne. "Real men
only need one lung," she had inscribed on the poster. Harry had
hung it over his desk in his study. Then it had all started again,
the dry hacking, the constant clearing of the throat, the occasional
vomiting, and the cough day and night.
Ruth wandered into the bedroom. Groucho was sleeping on the
bed. The dog stirred, looked up guiltily, then jumped off the bed
and slunk forward, his tail downcast but wagging supplicantly, ex-
pecting a scolding.
Ruth did not have the will to rebuke the dog. She knelt down
and hugged him, drawing comfort from his warmth and fur, even
from his musty doggy smell. Groucho snorted happily and licked
Ruth's face. She stood up and then wearily sank down on the bed.
She longed to sleep.
Ruth had shared this bed with Harry until the day he was
finally taken to the hospital. She had shared the sleeplessness, the
incessant cough and shifting for a comfortable position, the vapor-
izer to ease the breathlessness that only got worse. She had admin-
istered the cough medicines, the lozenges to soothe his raw throat
and the countless glasses of water and cups of hot rose-hip tea in
the middle of the night. She had adjusted the pillows to try to
help his chest pains and rubbed his back to ease the ache there.
And when Harry finally fainted into an uneasy sleep, she lay next
to him listening to the dry, grating snore with its echoes of a
death rattle.

19
There had been no rest for her. Even when, totally exhausted,
she managed to fall asleep for a few hours, she always awoke with
a stabbing sense of guilt for having somehow abandoned Harry.
Harry, seeing her exhaustion, tried to get her to sleep in one of
the other rooms, but Ruth refused to take even that small step to-
ward abandoning him. All too soon he would be utterly alone,
when she would be helpless to either share or ease his sleepless
nights, the pain, the insatiable struggle for breath.
Harry's rapidly decreasing lung capacity first affected his walk-
ing, and then he was restricted to bed. He increasingly needed oxy-
gen to breathe. He could not drink enough to keep hydrated and
needed intravenous fluids. Ruth wanted to nurse him at home
rather than abandon him to the impersonal care of a hospital. It
was Harry who insisted on going. It was because of the boys.
Brenda fussed about her father, coming in unbidden to read to
him or just to wipe his hot, moist forehead. But David and Chris-
topher watched from a distance, increasingly remote.
"I'm becoming their aged invalid grandfather," Harry said the
night before he was taken to the hospital, and he cried. He and
Ruth huddled close together, silent. Brenda had come and looked
into the dark room and then left without saying a word.
It was almost time to pick Christopher up from Mrs. Levine.
Ruth got up from the bed and listlessly wandered into the study,
a fourth bedroom in the rear of the house that Harry had con-
verted for his work. The nearest telephone was there.
Behind the desk was the John Wayne poster. "Real men only
need one lung." It now represented all their betrayed hopes, all
Ruth's anguish. At the sight of it, she felt a rush of fury. She sank
down at Harry's desk and cried, her deep sobs causing the dog at
her feet to whine and bark.

4
Steinhardt was at the hospital early the next morning. Bernstein
escorted him to see Harry, then left the two of them alone.
Harry, at first, had difficulty following what Steinhardt was try-
ing to explain to him. He'd had a bad night, one of his worst to
date, and the pain and coughing had kept him from sleeping. He
kept the oxygen mask on most of the time Steinhardt was talking
to him, and the doctor's references to his research on oxygen-car-
bon dioxide diffusion got confused in Harry's mind with the oxy-
gen he was breathing.
Then Steinhardt produced the schematics, and Harry's techni-
cally trained mind immediately focused on them. He was fas-
cinated. The schematics were like the cutaway diagrams of a
human head and torso used in TV commercials to demonstrate
the efficacy of aspirin or nasal sprays. However, the anatomical de-
tail was considerably greater, especially the cross-section detail of
the manufactured implants.
"That's ingenious," Harry said in a labored whisper that still
conveyed his admiration.

21
"It's hardly an original invention. The basic design is approxi-
mately four hundred million years old/' Steinhardt noted, then
added, "except for the elaborate arrangement of the blood vessels
here in the anterior comb to form a countercurrent heat ex-
changer." He pointed to that section of the drawing.
"Ingenious," Harry repeated. "An artificial gill." He stared at
the drawings in his lap.
"It would allow a man to literally breathe oxygen directly from
the water as fish and other aquatic animals do." Steinhardt's voice
was muted, but his eyes betrayed an intense excitement that made
Harry hesitate to ask the question that came to his mind.
"But why is it necessary? What's wrong with the scuba lung?"
"Any apparatus that uses compressed air or gases is too limited
in depth and range. Below two hundred feet pressurized nitrogen,
which constitutes eighty percent of air, becomes a drug causing ni-
trogen narcosis. Pure oxygen under pressure is toxic, so mixtures of
oxygen and inert gases like helium must be used for deep dives.
However, when the diver ascends to the surface too quickly, the
pressurized gases in the blood are released in bubbles. It's the
same effect as when you open a bottle of beer or soda pop. But
bubbles in the blood can be fatal. They create the bends and em-
bolisms. In order to get a man down to four hundred feet for only
fifteen minutes of work we must encase him in a suit of armor
and afterward take two and a half hours to gradually decompress
him."
Steinhardt shrugged. "Obviously, this isn't very practical, if you
want men to explore greater depths or work on oil drilling or min-
ing operations."
Harry sat propped up on three pillows, a position that some-
what eased the pressure on his chest and allowed him to breathe
with slightly less difficulty. Over the plastic proboscis of the oxy-
gen mask, he stared at the tall, gaunt Scandinavian, who was pa-
tiently explaining the basics of diving physiology to him as a
teacher might instruct a not particularly quick student. Harry was
as fascinated by this intense, brooding man as he was by the
lesson.
But why was Steinhardt explaining all this to him? At the edge
of his consciousness, Harry already knew the answer. It both
horrified and enthralled him.
Steinhardt was still talking. "Yet there would be no limits to
our ability to explore and work underwater, either in time or

22
depth, if we could absorb oxygen from the water directly into our
bloodstream as the most primitive fish does." He paused and stud-
ied Harry, examining the masked face to determine whether or
not the other man was following him.
Harry said nothing. He felt a little light-headed. Perhaps in his
excitement he'd taken in too much oxygen too quickly. He slipped
off the mask and consciously tried to calm his breathing. In a few
moments he relaxed, as the oxygen-carbon dioxide level in his
blood reached a more normal ratio.
Harry put his hand on the drawings of the artificial gill. "How
long has this work been going on?"
Steinhardt shrugged. "General Electric developed the thin sili-
cone membrane in the early sixties. Bodell, a researcher in tho-
racic and cardiovascular surgery in Chicago, described what he
called an artificial gill in 1965 using Silastic capillary tubing devel-
oped by Dow Corning. It was a device to oxygenate the habitats
of rats underwater." The scientist gave a small smile, one that
briefly illuminated his face with a humor and warmth Harry
hadn't seen before.
"From such modest origins, worlds are conquered," Steinhardt
said.
"In 1966, just a year after Bodell published, Ayes was awarded a
patent on a gill-type underwater breathing device. However, the
major medical breakthroughs have come about in just the past
decade. In open-heart surgery both the heart and lungs are
bypassed. The blood is totally oxygenated outside the body.
Efficient artificial gill-like devices about a liter in size are now
standard in heart-lung machines. My research has been directed at
getting back to biological basics. Using the same silicone materials
and surgical techniques, I've developed an artificial gill that can
be implanted into mammals. It will sustain them underwater for
prolonged periods."
Steinhardt had been talking with great assurance and authority,
but now he suddenly fell silent. He gave Harry a shy, hesitant
smile and sat there staring at him as if he were embarrassed to say
anything further. He glanced down at his shoes and then looked
back at Harry with the same awkward smile.
Harry returned a grim smile. "You're looking for a volunteer,"
he whispered.
Steinhardt nodded. "It's never been implanted in a human yet,"
he said reluctantly. "It is at best a very dangerous operation. One

23
in which there are countless more unknown factors than known."
He shifted his glance away from Harry, avoiding the sick man's
eyes.
Harry trembled. He sucked deeply at the oxygen again to relax,
but the hollow ache of fear in his gut remained.
He slowly lay back against the pillows, his heart pounding, and
watched Steinhardt. The research scientist obviously didn't have
Bernstein's bedside manner. He didn't have his colleague's experi-
ence of hour-by-hour confrontations with cancer, strokes, bedsores,
chronic pain, death, suicidal patients, grief-stricken families, the
constant bleeding, howling maelstrom of the dying and dead.
How was it that Bernstein had first introduced Steinhardt? "The
ivory tower of medical research."
Harry was painfully aware that his fear and Steinhardt's embar-
rassment had the same source. "You need an already condemned
man to volunteer," he said finally.
Steinhardt nodded, and his acknowledgment was in itself an an-
guished apology. "I'm sorry," he said softly. "But the most we
could hope for the first time is to get preliminary data on the
amount of carbon dioxide and oxygen diffusion taking place across
the silicone membranes of the gill. We would not even begin the
operation until the patient had slipped into a final coma."
For a long time the two men were silent, and neither looked at
the other. Then Harry pulled aside his oxygen mask and spoke.
"What you're saying is that I'll never regain consciousness," he
whispered. "Never know whether or not the operation, the experi-
ment, was a success."
Steinhardt nodded. "As a research scientist yourself you know
that no experiment is a failure," he said. "We often learn more
from those that don't succeed than from those that do."
After Steinhardt left, Harry lay still, his hands nervously play-
ing with the drawings. The scientific authority had confirmed his
death sentence. Harry's fear of death suddenly bordered on panic,
and only his physical weakness kept him from screaming.
He had not given Steinhardt an answer. To do so would have
meant accepting his own death. Harry might academically ac-
knowledge the fact that he was going to die, eventually, and he
had dutifully made all the necessary arrangements to provide for
Ruth and the children. But those preparations had no more emo-

24
tionally accepted his immediate death than had the insurance
policies he had taken out when he was healthy.
As a drowning man, Harry still clung to whatever straws he
could grasp. And in medical fact, Harry was drowning. Periodi-
cally fluid had to be withdrawn from his chest cavity, his lung
tapped, to ease his breathing. It is said that drowning men see
their entire lives flash before their eyes, and as Harry's con-
sciousness cycled from periods of pain to periods of quiet and
back to pain, Harry did in fact review his life.
He did not think about his wife or the children. They were
sources of contentment, and there was nothing there in his life he
would change if he could. It was in his career, in the sum total of
his professional life, that he had been frustrated. Now he mentally
worried that unfulfilled void in his life as if it were an unfilled
tooth.
Before he had become ill, Harry at thirty-five had been middle-
aged, not physically but psychologically. He was at a point of per-
spective in his life where the past assumed meaningful patterns
and the future fortuned its logical limits. He would have had a
solid, financially comfortable career in engineering management
in the aerospace industry. But he had come to accept that without
a Ph.D. he would never realize his original ambitions of exploring
and expanding the frontier of science. His job was to engineer
other men's explorations. For Harry, work had become an increas-
ing drudgery.
On weekend afternoons he and David often plunked down in
front of the TV set to watch reruns of "Star Trek." It was their
favorite program, often nonsense of course, but Harry was always
strangely moved when the announcer intoned: "Its five-year mis-
sion: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new
civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before."
Harry had frequently considered going back to Cal Tech for his
doctorate. But when, in the privacy of his study, he had drawn up
a realistic budget to support Ruth and the three kids and his stud-
ies, he had despaired.
A month before the cancer was diagnosed he had again gone to
his study. It had been a particularly frustrating day at work. This
time he had drawn up a second budget—one based on mortgaging
the house, Ruth's working, canceling his life insurance, and using
the money they'd saved for the children's college. He'd do his
graduate work at UCLA, the state university, rather than the

more prestigious but expensive Cal Tech, a private school. This
budget had worked, but he had never discussed it with Ruth. It
sat in his desk drawer, the blueprint for a dream irrevocably de-
ferred.
Now, in death, he was being offered the participation that had
eluded him in life. The macabre irony of this didn't escape Harry,
and with the little breath he had left, he summoned up a joyless
laugh. But the laugh emerged as a hoarse bark that broke down
into a pain-racked cough.

5
That afternoon Ruth got a call from Dr. Bernstein. Would it be
convenient for her, he wondered, to stop by his office before
her visit to her husband? Dr. Steinhardt wanted to discuss some-
thing with her.
"A new course of treatment for Harry?" Ruth asked wearily.
"No. Fm afraid the prognosis remains pretty much what I de-
scribed to you before."
"Then what's it about?"
"Fd rather Dr. Steinhardt explained it to you. It's compli-
cated."
Ruth agreed, and an appointment was made for ten the next
morning. Though exhausted and numb, she was still curious. She
remembered vaguely that Steinhardt was involved in some sort of
research but couldn't recall anything else about his work. Yet her
mental image of the doctor was quite vivid. She remembered the
towering frame, and above all, his face and eyes. To Ruth, Stein-
hardt's penetrating eyes seemed neither kind nor cruel; they sim-
ply absorbed and totally accepted everything, like those of a

27
young child before learning to be critical, when the world is only a
source of constant wonder.
But there was no sense of wonder in Steinhardt's eyes the next
morning when he met Ruth in Bernstein's office. The scientist in
fact seemed very ill at ease. After greeting her, he blurted out,
"Mrs. Styles, please know you have my sincerest sympathy. My
own dear wife Johanna died just a few years ago of cancer. I know
the anguish, the feeling of helplessness you're experiencing."
Ruth was surprised. The sudden grief and pain in Steinhardt's
face was so poignant that she couldn't look at him; she felt as
though she'd dissolve into tears. She looked down and said,
"Thank you." And after a moment, she asked, "What was it you
wanted to discuss with me?"
Steinhardt briefly outlined the research and experiments he had
been conducting with silicone membranes to reproduce the oxy-
gen-carbon dioxide diffusion that takes place across the gills of
aquatic animals. His voice was low and vibrant, as if what he was
explaining was of life and death importance. And the slight Nor-
wegian accent seemed to heavily underline the grave scientific im-
port of the procedures he was detailing. Ruth was confused, hav-
ing lost the thread of what Steinhardt was explaining almost at
the beginning. She was mesmerized by his eyes.
Steinhardt suddenly paused, as if he had reached a significant
point in his exposition. He studied Ruth in silence a moment,
then reached down and opened a frayed black leather portfolio at
the desk. From it he withdrew the medical illustrations of the
man with the gill implant.
Ruth had only a glimpse of them as they traveled from the
portfolio to Steinhardt's lap. But a glimpse was all Ruth required,
one vivid horrifying picture that jelled those thousand confusing
words. She was three steps ahead of any further explanation be-
fore Steinhardt said another word.
"No! Never!" Ruth shouted.
Steinhardt looked up in astonishment. He glanced at Bernstein
to see if the doctor had said or done something to trigger Ruth's
outburst, but Bernstein only returned his look of bewilderment.
Ruth pointed an accusing finger at the medical drawings in
Steinhardt's hand. "I will not allow Harry to be a guinea pig in
some grotesque medical experiment."
Steinhardt perceptively stiffened, as if Ruth had delivered a per-
sonal offense, but his voice remained patient. "Medically, there is

28
nothing particularly grotesque about this procedure, Mrs. Styles.
Today we routinely replace arteries with Dacron tubes and rebuild
shoulder joints, hips, and leg bones with Vitallium metal. We to-
tally reconstruct jawbones and hip joints with Cerosium ceramics.
The implanting of atomic-powered heart pacemakers, electronic
bladder stimulators, and plastic eyeballs is commonplace."
Ruth shook her head, an abrupt, angry shake. "No!"
Bernstein looked from Ruth to Steinhardt and back to Ruth,
his troubled eyes reflecting both her grief and the scientist's disap-
pointment. "But, Mrs. Styles, your husband has indicated he
wants his body donated to medical science."
"He thought he might donate his kidneys or his eyes to some-
one who needed them," she said in a whisper, almost at the point
of tears. "Please, let's just let nature take its course."
Steinhardt was not going to relinquish that easily. "You did not
let nature take its course when Mr. Styles's right lung was sur-
gically removed. Nor when he underwent a painful series of radio-
active cobalt treatments and chemotherapy."
Ruth looked up and met Steinhardt's eyes and, for that mo-
ment, there were neither tears nor compromise in her eyes and
voice. "He's suffered enough. We've all suffered enough. Now I
want him to die in peace."
After leaving Bernstein's office, Ruth immediately found a la-
dies room. She shut the door to a stall, sat down, and put her face
in her hands and wept, her tears triggered as much by a sense of
shame as of grief.
In her encounter with Steinhardt, she'd felt she couldn't con-
tinue to look him in the eye. She could no longer look anyone in
the eye, for at any moment she felt she was going to break down
into tears. But it was not just her vulnerability to tears, as acute as
an exposed nerve, that made Ruth self-conscious. It was the
knowledge, finally admitted to herself, that she wanted Harry to
hurry and die.
His death had been what she had once most feared, but now
that it was inevitable she wanted it to come swiftly and pass on.
Death was no longer terrifying. It had become a nagging presence
that tormented, humiliated, and exhausted her and Harry in a
thousand obscene ways each day. It stank, the sweet, noisome
smell of catheters, bedpans, and bedsores that no amount of caus-
tic disinfectants and pine sprays would dispel.

29
Twice a day Ruth dragged herself to the hospital to watch the
once beautiful blond man she had loved, the robust father of her
three children, agonizingly being consumed and transformed into
the same skeletal specter that her father had become. To keep
from going mad, she had had to anesthetize every joy, every hope
and dream for which she had once lived.
Were Ruth alone she might willingly have died with Harry, like
some faithful Hindu widow throwing herself on her husband's fu-
neral pyre. But there were three children who were growing, each
as inexorably storming the future as Harry, in his fate, relentlessly
sank into death.
Whether the future beyond Harry's death would be barren and
lonely for her or would hold new opportunities, a new life, Ruth
did not as yet even allow herself to speculate. But the future was
there, and if nothing else it promised release from the present.
Ruth wanted Harry to die as swiftly and easily as possible, and she
would battle anything that delayed his death.

6
Harry had lost a great deal of weight and had weakened consid-
erably since he'd gone to the hospital. In his struggle for breath he
had been barely aware of the harrowing change in his appearance.
Ruth had shaved and groomed him daily on her visits so he had
no practical reason to look into a mirror. He was not by nature a
vain man, but now he registered his decline in the shocked silent
faces of his three children as they lined up alongside the bed.
Their reaction caused him deeper pain than the cancer in his
lung.
Harry had asked Ruth to bring all the children. He wanted to
tell them formally that he was very ill and he was probably going
to die. He felt that if he told them, it would somehow be easier
for them to accept. But when they were standing beside the bed,
he found he couldn't speak. David and Brenda, his two dark-
haired beautiful oldest children, were rapidly maturing into reflec-
tions of their mother. Blond and cherubic Christopher was the
image of himself as a boy. Harry looked at them and his throat
caught. Emotionally he simply didn't believe he was going to die.

3i
He couldn't tell his children that. Instead he looked at the three
grave, silent, frightened faces of his children and whispered, "I
want you each to know I love you very much. You know that,
don't you?"
He looked at Brenda. The girl nodded and then began to weep.
Harry looked at David, and the eleven-year-old whispered back,
"Yes, sir, I love you too."
Christopher stared back at his father, the child's eyes wide and
awestruck.
Harry motioned to his daughter. "I'm not contagious." Brenda
leaned forward and kissed her father on the cheek, a timid but
affectionate kiss. Then she buried her face in Harry's neck, her
tears splashing his face.
Harry sat up and took her face in both hands, staring at her
with bright fevered eyes before kissing her on the forehead.
David solemnly took his sister's place at the head of the bed.
He hesitated a moment, then dutifully leaned over and kissed his
father on the cheek. With as much strength as he could muster,
Harry squeezed his son's shoulders with pale gaunt hands.
. Christopher now moved beside Harry's pillow, the child's tangle
of blond curls and his enormous wondering eyes barely peeking
above the white-sheeted hummock of the high hospital bed.
Ruth, watching in the background, moved forward and lifted
Christopher so that the four-year-old could reach his father.
"Daddy!" Christopher cried out. He clutched at Harry, throwing
both his stout little arms about his father's head, choking off his
air.
Alarmed, Ruth yanked the child away. "Daddy can't breathe."
Her momentary panic infected the child, who looked from her to
Harry with now confused and frightened eyes.
With great pain, Harry forced himself to sit up and reach out
toward the boy. He kissed the blond head and worried little face,
comforting the child. "If he smothers me," Harry gasped in a
choked whisper, "that's the way I want to go."
Ruth ushered the three children from the hospital room. Harry,
his face contorted with anguish, watched them leave, then grasped
for the oxygen mask. The effort and emotional excitement of the
brief meeting with his children had exceeded the capacity of his
strength. He was near collapse.
He literally gulped oxygen, his breaths panicked and pain-
racked. His head cleared, but the oxygen did not relieve his

32
distress. Instead it seemed to dissolve the last restraining thread of
Harry's self-control, triggering sobs deeper and more agonized
than his desperate gasps for oxygen. The hoarse sobs and crying
were muffled by the plastic oxygen mask, and the tears flowed
abundantly down his wasted face, collecting in the oxygen intake
of the mask, making a muted blubbering sound like that of a
heartbroken child.
That afternoon Harry was placed in an oxygen tent, a plastic
canopied affair that fitted over the bed and enveloped him in a
cool, moisturized atmosphere that was 50 percent oxygen. They
also gave him Dilaudid, a narcotic, for the increasing pain.
The drug made Harry more than comfortable; he felt as if he
were floating, suspended weightless. With curious detachment
Harry became conscious of his breathing, the desperate in and out
pulse of it, the flare and ebb of energy his breath ignited as if each
inhalation were the puff of a bellows on a dying ember. The insist-
ent, automatic rhythm of it, in and out, up and down, seemed to
be reverberating to all the other rhythms that surrounded him,
heartbeats and respirators, all harmonics of the rising and setting
of the sun, the ebb and flow of the tide.
The afternoon sunlight streamed through the window and the
plastic sheeting of the oxygen tent, the light fracturing and the
motes swirling like bubbles, coalescing into a shining fluid stream.
Harry's body, with its weight and pain, dissolved away and he
drifted up into that stream as if he were some elemental aquatic
creature. Ahead was a shining luminous sea. He swam eagerly to-
ward it, propelling himself with an instinctive whipping motion.
All about him he sensed countless other flagellating creatures all
frantically racing toward the same goal. Faster, faster, faster. He
had to stay ahead of the others. To be first was everything. To be
less than first was oblivion. Suddenly he was at the shining sea;
he plunged into the blinding light and was consumed in ecstasy.
His identity dissolved, all knowledge of being a separate distinct
being instantly melted from him. He became the light, an ele-
ment of the shining sea.
Harry lay still on his hospital bed. It was a long time before he
came back to himself. He was still trapped in the enfeebled body
of Harry Styles.
When Dr. Bernstein looked in on him later that evening, Harry
tried to describe the experience.

33
Bernstein at first listened with great interest, then dismissed it.
"The drug Dilaudid sometimes produces hallucinations. So does
anoxia."
Harry shook his head. "No. It wasn't a hallucination. Or a
dream. I really relived it. They're all there somewhere, aren't they?
All the memories of the womb and birth?"
Bernstein nodded. "Yes, but that would have been before your
brain or memory had developed."
"But my brain, my whole body, they all developed from the nu-
cleus of that very first cell, didn't they? It just divided and redi-
vided."
"Well, yes."
"That very first cell is me. I know what it knows. The memory
is still there. It was buried or suppressed. Maybe the drugs, or my
condition, released it. But it was no hallucination. I really experi-
enced it."
Harry sank back against the pillows. In the shadow of death he
was convinced he had relived his own conception, the primal mo-
ments of his life. He lay on his bed, his mind beyond pain or dis-
comfort, filled with wonder.
"I don't want the children here again."
Ruth had to press her face against the thin plastic sheeting of
the oxygen tent in order to hear Harry. Despite the oxygen tent
his voice had become weaker, his breath more labored than even
the previous day.
"I don't want them to remember me this weak and sick," Harry
continued with great difficulty. "It's only going to get worse."
Ruth said nothing but sat perfectly still, her chair drawn up
against the bed. Only a barely perceptible nod indicated that she
had heard her husband.
Through the plastic Harry could see Ruth clearly, but the waves
and bows of the transparent material created strange distortions in
her face, as if Harry were underwater. The cooled, humidified, oxy-
gen-charged atmosphere that enveloped him and the hum of the
electric motor that circulated and cooled the air in the tent iso-
lated him from Ruth and the rest of the hospital room. His illness
and medical technology had already removed him, by degrees,
beyond the pale of normal life, as if gradually conditioning him to
the final isolation of death.
Harry restlessly shifted his body in a futile effort to breathe

34
more easily, but even that slight movement brought a great shock
of pain. Despite the constant pain, he had deliberately cut the
drugs he'd been taking in order to clear his mind. He did not
want to be drugged and befuddled. He had a decision to reach,
and now he had reached it.
With a feeble gesture of his hand, he motioned Ruth to lean
closer. "I want Steinhardt to do the experiment," he whispered.
"Oh, my God, Harry." Even through the distorting plastic
sheet Harry could plainly see the shock registered in her face.
"Why? Why? It won't change anything."
Harry was silent. Ruth strained forward against the plastic par-
tition, her eyes intent on Harry's face, waiting for an answer.
"I want to be the first," he said.

7
The cypress logs in the fireplace crackled and exploded. They
shot up geysers of steam and sparks, protesting that they hadn't
had enough time to dry before being burned.
The view of the ocean that Steinhardt had so painstakingly
framed by cutting down the cypress was now shrouded in darkness
and night fog. The picture window only reflected back the flames
and the gaunt figure of Steinhardt hunched over an old book.
Steinhardt removed his glasses, wearily rubbed his eyes, and let
his glance drift about the dark paneled study. The walnut-stained
bookcases and the tiers of leather- and cloth-bound books walled
the room from floor to ceiling.
It was the eclectic collection of a lifetime—his ancient university
and medical school texts in Swedish and Norwegian, the standard
medical references in English, and shelves of scientific tomes in
German, French, and English that had been published in very
limited editions. There was, in addition, a concentration of philo-
sophic works from Aristotle to Teilhard de Chardin, including the
complete published works of Emanuel Swedenborg, the eight-

36
eenth-century scientist, philosopher, and mystic. Steinhardt's Swe-
denborg collection, including volumes Oeconomia Regni Animalis
and Regnum Animate in the original Latin text, was one of the
most comprehensive outside the Royal Academy of Science in
Stockholm.
The heavy leather-bound volumes were the cache of a secret al-
chemist still hunting for the philosophers' stone that transmuted
base metals to gold and indefinitely prolonged life. After a life-
time of medical and biological research Steinhardt had realized
that each discovery ultimately turns out to be merely the opening
of a Chinese box revealing another box within, another mystery.
Like Swedenborg, Steinhardt had come to the belief that the
basic principles of nature correspond to larger, ultimately divine
patterns. Each transaction of the lungs and heart, each whip of
the bronchial cilia was, when understood, the key to cosmic se-
crets.
At the age of fifty-seven, Swedenborg had had a profound spirit-
ual revelation, thereafter abandoning science to devote his life to
writing Biblical prophecy. Steinhardt, in his sixties, had yet to ex-
perience a divine revelation. This evening he felt only a bone-deep
weariness. He once again rubbed his eyes, replaced his old-
fashioned half-lenses for reading, and concentrated on the page
before him from Swedenborg's "Clavis Hieroglyphica."
There is no motion without conatus, but there is
conatus without motion. For if all conatus were
to break out into open motion the world would
perish, since there would be no equilibrium.
Conatus. For Swedenborg, it meant the motive force in nature
that corresponds to the will in human minds. It transcended both
man and nature, originating in the Infinite.
The sharp ring of the telephone jarred Steinhardt from his med-
itation. He stared at the phone in confusion. He was a reclusive
man who seldom received calls at night.
The phone rang a second time, and he reluctantly pushed him-
self up from the chair.
It was Ruth Styles. "My husband will let you perform the gill
experiment on him." Her voice on the phone was tense, angry,
frightened. "Hell be your guinea pig." Her voice broke and there

37
was an audible sob on the line. "My God, I don't know why. He's
suffered so much already. Why does he insist on doing this?"
"Mrs. Styles, I don't entirely understand why he wants to my-
self. I've spent my entire life in research in comparative physiol-
ogy. In a rather narrow specialty. And yet I've seen time and time
again men suffer any pain, often risk their lives for . . ."
"I don't want Harry to suffer anymore," Ruth Styles interrupted
him. "He's in great pain now. I can see it in his face even when
he's asleep. I don't want him made into one of those vegetables
that you keep alive with machines."
"Mrs. Styles, you have my solemn word we won't prolong his
life artificially a moment longer than we have to to collect our
data. I totally sympathize with your feelings. I lost my own wife
less than three years ago. I believe I mentioned that to you."
There was silence on the other end of the line. Steinhardt
wanted to say a great deal more, but it was not the time. He had
known with certainty that Styles would agree to the operation.
But he couldn't explain why to Ruth Styles in her present state of
pain and confusion. Perhaps he might never be able to explain it
to her.
"I greatly appreciate your calling, Mrs. Styles. I know how
difficult it is for you. I'll stop by and see you and Mr. Styles to-
morrow. Dr. Bernstein and I will make all the necessary arrange-
ments."
Steinhardt said good night, hung up, and stood, with his hands
leaning on the oak desk, staring at the shadows in his study.
For a quiet man Steinhardt knew too many men who had died
violently, and at this moment he felt their ghosts surrounding him
in the writhing shadows cast by the fire. There were the B-29
bomber crews, faint with high-altitude anoxia, who had crashed
and burned. Nordstrom, who had frozen to death in Spitsbergen
studying lichens, and Ramenofsky, who had fallen from a cliff of
ice in Antarctica while searching for Ordovician fossils. The divers
who had died in agony of the bends, and the old veteran diver
Matsui, who—knowing what tortures awaited him on the surface
if he made a rapid emergency ascent—had chosen to drown si-
lently in the depths.
"Yes, Mrs. Styles, I've seen time and time again men suffer any
pain, often risk their lives for . . ."
It is the special power of lonely old widowed men to conjure up
the ghosts of events past, and in the solitude of his study Stein-

38
hardt called them forth. He desperately needed the momentum of
their lives flowing into his, the reassurance that the next experi-
ment was the logical progression.
This time he was not just opening another Chinese box. He was
entering the sanctum sanctorum. He was violating the primordial
nature of man cast in God's image. And Steinhardt was terrified
of the consequences.

8
Bernstein studied the photographs, then reluctantly passed the
pictures down the conference table to the doctor on his right.
Bernstein had seen the photographs innumerable times before.
They were standard in texts on embryology. The first was a grainy
head and shoulder side view of a three-year-old girl with small, ir-
regular, ulcerlike openings in the side of her neck. The second dis-
played a boy, five years old and very pale, with similar branchial
clefts.
The pictures were passed from hand to hand, studied, and
passed on. The thoracic surgeons, anesthesiologists, heart-lung ma-
chine operators, and scrub nurses now gathered around the con-
ference table had, like Bernstein, seen them before, but now they
viewed them with a sense of revelation. Before the photos had
been studies of birth defects, biological calamities to be bemoaned
and, if possible, surgically corrected. Today they were heralds of a
new world.
"The development of all embryos reenacts the basic stages of
evolution/' Steinhardt sat at the center of the table. Even seated,

4°
the scientist towered above the others in the group. "At five weeks
old the human embryo has four distinct gill clefts at each side of
the neck. A tail, curving upward toward the head, heightens the
external resemblance to a fish, but the similarity is even more pro-
nounced in the internal organs—the heart, blood vessels, kidneys,
and brain."
Ontogeny recapitulates phytogeny. It was a natural law every-
one in the conference room had recited in high school biology
class. The development of an embryo repeats the stages of the ev-
olution of its species. Thus a fertilized human ovum is at first a
unicellular organism like an amoeba and then, in progressive
stages, the embryo resembles a sponge, a worm, a primitive fish,
and in many characteristics, a reptile, before it becomes a distinct
mammalian embryo and finally a human fetus.
"After a short existence of two weeks, the gill arches disappear
and the embryo advances from a stage potentially adapted to
aquatic respiration to one that anticipates the breathing of air,"
Steinhardt continued.
"Early in the second month the arms and legs appear as buds,
as the future human retraces the evolution from fish to amphib-
ian. And by the end of the eighth week the tail has usually been
incorporated into the spinal column. The primordial gills and gill
pouches evolve into the pharynx, larynx, tonsils, middle ear,
and other related structures."
Steinhardt paused while a second set of schematics of embryos
at five and eight weeks was passed about the room.
"Oxygen is, of course, supplied by blood from the mother's cir-
culation. But the fetus's existence is totally aquatic. It is immersed
in amniotic fluid, which is strikingly similar in composition to sea-
water. The fetus breathes the fluid in and out of its lungs, and
studies suggest some oxygen is absorbed this way. At birth, air is
substituted for the fluid, and respiration becomes deeper and more
sensitive.
"However, on occasion normal development goes awry. There
are numerous reported cases of infants being born with their em-
bryonic tails. In a parallel birth defect, children are occasionally
born with vestiges of their embryonic gill clefts still evident. Their
lungs are fully developed, and the gill openings are usually cor-
rected by a simple surgical procedure and skin graft."
Steinhardt searched in the recesses of his frayed leather portfo-
lio and withdrew still another set of photographs and drawings.

4i
He studied them silently, frowning, then as if having reassured
himself he looked up. "The embryonic studies and the birth de-
fects are invaluable to us in this procedure, because they indicate
exactly where the artificial gills should be implanted. Where they
are biologically most likely to be accepted by the body."
Steinhardt passed the final set of schematics around the table,
stirring a renewed shuffle of diagrams, photographs, coffee cups,
and cigarette packs. The majority of the medical personnel in the
room were on duty, and the briefing was squeezed in between
rounds of the surgical ward. About half the people were smoking,
most notably Bernstein. The thoracic surgeon smoked almost
incessantly. He smoked with the same confidence with which he
moved about the wards and hospital beds infected with galloping
diseases, as if he believed that along with the antibodies he had
built up to contagious bacilli and viruses, he had also developed an
immunity to the carcinogens of tobacco smoke. The ashtray on
the table in front of him was already choked with butts and ashes,
and despite the air conditioning a stale, pale-blue aureole ap-
peared to encircle his head. The scrub nurse who sat on his left, a
nonsmoker, constantly fanned the air in front of her face.
About the table there was a great deal of comment and moving
of chairs as the doctors and technicians left their seats and clus-
tered around the new schematics. Their interest was more than ac-
ademic. They were the operating room team that had been
selected for the actual implant.
"The gills themselves are composed of what?" Ben Harrison
asked. Harrison was the chief surgical resident. He was a thin,
tense man, always overworked and harassed by the responsibilities
of his job, but there was no one Bernstein would rather have on
the other side of the operating table.
"The main structural elements are composed of the same sili-
cone rubber now routinely used to replace leg tendons and ear
and nose cartilage. The capillaries are Silastic, a liquid-impervious,
oxygen-permeable silicone membrane with which researchers have
been working some years now to construct artificial hearts and
lungs." Steinhardt gave a small bemused smile. "There are no se-
cret ingredients. I have made no new discoveries. A tuna fish
created the basic design."
"Why a tuna fish?"
"It is one of the few warm-blooded fish. That is, its body tem-
perature is higher than that of the surrounding water. As much as

42
twenty degrees higher. And its banks of muscles develop forty
times the power of more typical fish the same size. Its gills are
therefore designed to take in oxygen much more effectively to
meet those greater metabolic demands."
"Dr. Steinhardt, what do you think the chances of success will
be for this operation?"
"Success?" Steinhardt was puzzled by the word. "Our purpose
in this first experiment is only to get data on the amount and
efficiency of the oxygenation that takes place using this design and
these materials. Does the device damage flowing blood, breaking
up cells, leading to damage to other organs, the kidneys, the brain,
the bone marrow? We must find this out. It's not a question of
success or failure. In all experiments we learn something. Perhaps
that we're totally on the wrong track." He smiled faintly.
"What about the patient?"
"I think my colleague Dr. Bernstein can best answer that."
Bernstein rose from his chair, feeling compelled by being
addressed by the title "colleague" to attain a somewhat greater
stature. "Well, in the present prognosis of the disease the patient
would probably not live out the week. He's presently lapsing in
and out of coma. This procedure won't alter his eventual death
forty-eight hours one way or another. Both he and his family are
aware of this, but they have agreed to the experiment in the inter-
est of medical science. The patient is a research engineer and, in
fact, is highly motivated to make what he feels is a final contri-
bution."
Behind his glasses, Bernstein's eyes, habitually moist by nature,
glistened with tears, a reaction to his fatigue and the irritating cig-
arette smoke as much as any sentiment, but it transformed Bern-
stein's brief comment into a eulogy. He bent his head and sat
down.
"Actually you're all involved in much more complicated proce-
dures as a matter of daily routine in your heart and lung opera-
tions," Steinhardt continued. "You totally bypass both vital or-
gans and completely oxygenate the blood in what is in essence an
artificial gill within the heart-lung machine. The blood cells are
considerably damaged in their transportation through the tubing
and pumping machinery, as you're aware. I'm simplifying this sur-
gical procedure and oxygenating the blood in the manner nature
first did. If you'll look at the operation in this way, it won't seem
quite as exotic or alien to you."

43
After the briefing Bernstein and Harrison accompanied Stein-
hardt to Harry's room to check on their subject's progress toward
death. Harry's skin had taken on a pronounced bluish tinge that
no amount of oxygen cleared up.
Outside the hospital room Steinhardt pronounced, "If the ex-
periment is to produce any results at all, the operation must be
performed within the next forty-eight hours."
The two surgeons both nodded in agreement. "I'll schedule it
for the day after tomorrow," Harrison said, scowling. Harrison's
habitual expression was, in fact, a dark scowl, no matter how
agreeable his actual reply was. Like the deep, harassed lines in his
brow, the scowl seemed to have been permanently etched into the
flesh of his face.
After the two men had seen Steinhardt into the elevator, Har-
rison turned to Bernstein. "He makes it sound like the most natu-
ral and inevitable procedure in the world. Infinitely more natural
than, say, implanting an atomic pacemaker in some guy's chest.
Then I think, 'Holy shit, we're going to try and implant gills in
some guy.'"
Bernstein nodded and smiled. "The committee on human re-
search had the same reaction."
"How the hell did you get it past them?"
"We almost didn't. I had to really stick my neck out and put it
on the block to get them to approve. Christ, but he's a total inno-
cent when it comes to hospital politics. In that respect he hasn't
learned a thing in thirty years."
"You've known him that long?"
Bernstein nodded. "Since my residency at Massachusetts Gen-
eral."
Harrison checked his watch. "You through cutting for today?"
he asked.
Bernstein nodded.
"Let me check by my office for messages. Then let's get the hell
out of here and have a drink. I want to hear about this."
Harrison and Bernstein went to Walsh's, a quiet neighborhood
bar near the hospital, an old hangout where the stained wooden
floors were still swept with sawdust.
They ordered drinks and Bernstein recounted his relationship
with Steinhardt. But what could he tell Harrison really? The
merest outline. He'd known Steinhardt for thirty years but he
knew the man hardly at all. They had met, as Bernstein had said,

44
when they were both surgical residents in Boston. But Steinhardt
was several years older, already an experienced surgeon who had
taken his training in London during World War II and was work-
ing as a senior resident in an American hospital to acquire a li-
cense to practice here. He had, while in England, already done
significant research in high-altitude anoxia in bomber crews.
"Ben, you ever wanted to be anything but a surgeon?" Bern-
stein suddenly asked Harrison.
"No."
"Not a football player, a novelist, a movie star?"
"No."
"A psychiatrist?"
"God forbid."
"Me neither. Nothing but a surgeon." Bernstein held up his
two hands, examining them, turning them first palm up and then
studying the backs. "With these we're artists in flesh. We're
healers. We're God. Right?"
"Right!" Harrison agreed emphatically.
"Maybe, if we have a flash of brilliance. Or if we're lucky. We
come up with a new technique, a new procedure that goes into
the books. It all adds up to a career. But for Steinhardt, it was
never enough."
The waitress brought them another round of drinks. Bernstein
lit another link in his chain of cigarettes and for a moment
watched the plume of smoke. The practice of surgery had never
been enough for Steinhardt. Bernstein, in those days, couldn't see
beyond his next bowel resection, but Steinhardt's mind was al-
ready somewhere else. Bernstein's wife Selma used to call him the
Viking. Steinhardt always had an air about him that any moment
he was going to plunge into an open longboat and sail due north,
defy the Norse gods and giants, and go explore Niflheim, the
mythical frozen land of the dead. What Steinhardt did, in fact,
was get a research grant to trek into the Arctic to study the
physiological adaptation of the Eskimos to below-freezing cli-
mates.
Bernstein took a good healthy slug of his drink and ordered an-
other round. What did he know? He was just a workaday chest
cutter. But Steinhardt was doing fundamental studies of respira-
tion, circulation, and metabolism.
"When did you run into him again?" Harrison asked.
Bernstein shrugged. "You know how it is with old friends. A

45
letter here and there. A Christmas card. We've never really been
out of touch." Every few years, if they were in the same place or
passing through for a conference, they might get together for din-
ner. They'd talk about work. Steinhardt would recount whatever
exotic research he was doing at the time. Bernstein remembered
his excitement while describing how he'd dissected over a hundred
sea snakes to find out how they absorbed oxygen from seawater
without gills. Sea snakes in the South Seas and Eskimos in the
North Pole. There was a part of Bernstein's soul that ached to
traipse off on adventures with his towering Nordic friend.
But now that Bernstein thought about it, he recalled that they
talked mostly about his own work. Steinhardt had kept up with
the literature. He was particularly interested in the then new heart
and lung bypass procedures. After Steinhardt joined the Institute
of Oceanography he would on occasion look over Bernstein's
shoulder during operations. But the surgeon didn't know what he
was working on until after Steinhardt's wife died. Then he
plunged completely into his research. Perhaps it was a way of as-
suaging his loneliness or grief. Or maybe Steinhardt suddenly felt
he didn't have many years left himself. Bernstein knew that feel-
ing. In the pit of his guts he knew that feeling. He peered intently
through the thick lenses of his glasses at Harrison across the table.
What the hell, Harrison was practically a kid. There was no way
Bernstein could describe the desperation of that feeling to Har-
rison. But it drove Steinhardt.
Then one day Bernstein received a call from Steinhardt asking
if he could drive down to the institute and have dinner with him.
He laid out all his cockamamy gill research. Steinhardt had al-
ready designed and made up the prototype. He had gone to the
plastic fabrication shop that made the oxygenators for the heart-
lung machine. He and the biomed engineer first did a mathe-
matical model based on Steinhardt's studies. How much surface
area of blood did they need to expose? Then a computer had de-
signed the gill. Steinhardt stood over the plastics technician per-
sonally supervising her applying the Dacron velour on the tubing.
And then he set up a complete surgical lab at the institute. But he
needed Bernstein's help. He needed his finely honed surgical
skills.
Bernstein had been both frightened and enraptured. The idea
of a man breathing water like a fish appalled him. But Stein-
hardt's work was undeniably a fundamental breakthrough. Aside

46
from underwater diving—in which Bernstein had little interest—
the artificial gill was a key step in the development of a functional
prosthetic lung. Bernstein had had heady visions of scientific im-
mortality. He cut down on his surgical practice and spent after-
noons, evenings, and weekends working with Steinhardt. "We did
a lot of dogs and monkeys," he told Harrison.
"Dogs and monkeys with gills," the resident said with wonder
in his voice. "Son of a bitch! That's when he began looking over
your shoulder on every pneumonectomy, laryngectomy, coarcta-
tion, and transplant. You said it had to do with his research on
embolism."
"It did," Bernstein insisted. "Embolisms, bends, narcosis. The
whole spectrum of diving diseases. You eliminate them all by
bypassing the lungs and oxygenating the blood directly in a gill."
Harrison shook his head and stared down at the table. "His
whole life," Harrison said. "It's as if Steinhardt has been prepar-
ing for this one procedure his whole life."
"In a sense that's true of all of us, isn't it?" Bernstein said.
"Even that poor son of a bitch guinea pig Styles. If we ever do
anything that's significant, that lives after us, everything is prepa-
ration for it. Even our blind alleys, gropings, and failures."
"You've had too much to drink." Harrison laughed.
"Shit, I haven't had enough to drink," Bernstein said. "Two
more and I'll have a goddamn cosmic vision."
"Two more, Morris, and you'll pass out."
'That's when I'll have the goddamn cosmic vision. On my way
head first into the spittoon." He looked around the bar. "There
aren't any more spittoons. When I was a student in Boston, all
the bars had spittoons. Big brass spittoons. Goddamn works of
art. I miss the spittoons in bars. That's why I don't drink much
anymore, Ben."
"Also, you have a low tolerance for alcohol, Doctor."
Bernstein turned back to Harrison, and the brown, tear-bright
eyes behind the glasses were sober and unglazed. "I'm scared,
Ben."
"Scared? Scared of what?"
"I don't know. This whole mishegaas."
"Something wrong about it?"
"No, nothing's wrong. What could possibly go wrong? I just
have this premonition."
"A premonition of what, goddammit?"

47
"I don't know. It's just a premonition. Look, I've been into peo-
ple's hearts, lungs, larynx, and bowels, what, three thousand times.
I'm entitled to a premonition."
"You're entitled," Harrison agreed. "You're one of the great
chest cutters. No doubt about it."
Bernstein held up his hands, examining them as he had earlier,
first holding the palms up to the light and then the backs.
"Then why, this once, after three thousand times into the god-
damn chest, am I suddenly afraid to use these hands?" he asked.

9
At six-thirty on the morning of the operation, Harry Styles
suffered a pulmonary hemorrhage. He was rushed to the operating
room, sweating, breathing frantically, and coughing up blood, the
blood bubbling at his mouth in a red froth. Emergency calls were
made to Steinhardt and Bernstein.
When they arrived at the hospital, Styles was already stretched
out on the operating table, his chest and abdomen bared, shaven,
and painted mustard yellow with antiseptic. Harrison "and the
nurses were bending over him.
"What the hell are you doing, starting without me?" Bernstein
asked, bursting into the operating room.
"I was afraid he was going to expire in the hall," Harrison said.
"He was choking on his own blood and turning a terrific blue.
We rushed him in here to get him on oxygen. We're cutting this
a little close. You'd better get on with this operation as expedi-
tiously as possible, or your patient may not last long enough to get
him on the machine."

49
Bernstein carefully probed Styles's abdomen with his fingers,
feeling for muscle tension.
A soft asthmatic wheeze punctuated each stroke of the respira-
tor, as a rubber bellows forced a mixture of oxygen, nitrous oxide,
and ethane through a tube down the patient's throat and into his
one remaining lung. The anesthesiologist stationed at the head of
the table studied a stainless steel console of gauges measuring the
patient's tidal volume and respiratory rate and then looked up at
Bernstein.
"He's paralyzed," the anesthesiologist said. "I've given him four
milligrams of Pavulon."
"That should do it." Bernstein nodded. "But we've got to be
extra careful with Clancy around. She damned near killed a pa-
tient of mine the other day. A coronary bypass. We were already
into the chest and she rubbed against him on the pretext of hand-
ing me a hemostat and he got a giant erection. The blood drained
out of his heart into his groin just like that, and he went into
shock. It took eight units of blood to reprime his heart."
The scrub nurse, Agnes Clancy, the object of the eight-unit
erection, was a plain woman in her early forties with the figure of
a pine board. Her sensuality was part of the elaborate and obscene
mythology that Bernstein had fabricated about members of the
operating room team. The longer they worked with him, the more
elaborate and obscene was the myth, embroidered over the years
amid heart valve replacements, pulmonary embolectomies, and
pneumonectomies. The stories were needed to break the tension
of exhausting twelve- and sixteen-hour stretches of surgery. They
were never mentioned outside the sterile walls of the operating
room. Outside they would be misunderstood.
The fantastic stories were the libretto to the music that issued
from a cassette player on the table next to the heart-lung ma-
chine. Bernstein's preference was saccharine old show tunes, lush
Mantovani strings, schmaltzy movie scores.
Bernstein nodded to Harrison, who stood across the table from
him. "Go ahead and open him up. Give us lots of room to work
in."
Harrison started the incision at the base of the throat, slicing in
a line down the middle of the chest to just above the navel. He
did not have to cut through much fatty tissue to expose the
breastbone, as the patient had become emaciated by his illness.
"Bovie."

50
The severed blood vessels were sealed by the spark from an elec-
tric cauterizing needle.
"The Black and Decker."
The scrub nurse handed Harrison the sternal saw, a stainless
steel instrument similar to a workshop electric hand saw. The cas-
sette was playing an instrumental version of "If I Loved You,"
but the throbbing strings were drowned out by the grating whine
of the blade as it sawed through the breastplate, tearing the bone
into two halves. Bernstein reached over and gripped each side of
the sternum, forcing the two halves apart.
Without a word Clancy dressed the exposed bleeding cross sec-
tions of bone with a wax and then draped a sponge cloth over
each of the cut edges.
"A little wider, please," Harrison instructed Bernstein. He
slipped the stainless steel blades of a retractor into the gap and be-
tween the two halves of the breastplate presented by Bernstein,
then turned a screw knob that forced the blades apart until there
was a nine-inch-wide hole in the patient's chest, exposing his puls-
ing heart.
"Enough already," Bernstein said.
"You wanted lots of room to work in."
"Any more and you'll shatter his ribs." He peered into the
chest. "Shit, what a mess. Let's get him tied off before he bleeds
out."
"It's lousy exposure to work on the lung."
"Yeah, but going through the chest gives us our best shot to
hook up the pulmonary vessels on both sides."
"If you say so," Harrison muttered. "It's my first gill implant."
Bernstein grunted. Above the green surgical mask, his eyes
shone with the intensity of his concentration, part of the astound-
ing transformation that occurred whenever he began to operate.
At bedside, his sympathy and concern for his patients was deep
and sincere. His melancholy brown eyes seemed always on the
verge of tears. But when he donned his surgical mask, his basic
personality seemed to change. He became a cool, facile technician.
The patient, dressed and draped in sterile sheets that revealed iso-
lated organs, was no longer a human being in pain. Bernstein was
confronted only by the imperfect machinery of the flesh that had
to be corrected with speed and exacting skill.
He rapidly isolated the hemorrhaging vessel, tied it off, and
drained the chest cavity. Then he reached in and grasped the

5i
throbbing heart muscles in his hand. He looked up to study a tele-
vision monitor on the wall. The picture showed electrocardiogram
and pulse readings as horizontal waves.
"This guy is still strong/' Bernstein said over his shoulder. Be-
hind him Steinhardt loomed, his white head just brushing one of
the disks of the lights that canopied the operating table. "I did a
dissecting aortic aneurysm last Tuesday on a seventy-five-year-old
who was so weak we would have killed him if we cut his hair."
"What happened?"
"The operation was a success, but we couldn't get him off the
machine. He went into fibrillation every time we tried to get him
restarted on his own again, and he just never came out."
Bernstein pushed the heart to one side to expose the left lung.
"Take a look," he invited Steinhardt. "It's a wonder he's breath-
ing at all."
Steinhardt examined the lung, noting the extent to which the
tumor had destroyed it.
"If we touch it, it'll fall apart," Bernstein said. "It won't hold a
stitch. We might as well take the lung out. He's dead if we do
and dead if we don't. He'll be on the heart-lung machine from
here on out; so he won't be using it. Removing it will make the
hook-up cleaner. What do you think?"
Steinhardt studied the devastated lung, then nodded reluc-
tantly.
Bernstein turned to Harrison. "We won't bypass the heart. Let
him pump naturally as long as he's able. It'll prevent problems,
and we'll be able to keep him on the machine that much longer.
We'll tap into the outflow tract here and the left atrium here.
Can you hear me, Tom?"
The medical technician seated behind the desk-sized stainless
steel console of the heart-lung machine stirred. "I hear you, doc-
tor. We're not bypassing the heart. Just the lungs."
"So bring him on the machine very gently. Just enough pressure
to get the blood to and from your machine. I want his heart to
work as normally as possible."
"Gently. I got you."
Harrison made an incision into the base of the artery that con-
ducted the blood directly from the heart to the lungs, and the
plastic cannula to the heart-lung machine was inserted. A surgical
hook-up was made with a second tube from the machine and the

52
left atrium of the heart, the chamber into which the freshly oxy-
genated blood from the lungs normally flowed.
"Okay, let's go on the machine very gently."
"Very gently," repeated the heart-lung machine operator. The
machine had already been primed with a chemical "cocktail"
compatible with blood. It contained, among other things, an an-
ticoagulant to prevent blood clotting, a diuretic, an electrolyte, al-
bumen, anesthesia, and muscle paralyzers. Now a throttle was
opened and the patient's blood flowed through a long transparent
tube into the machine and through a web of polymer membranes,
where it mixed with oxygen and carbon dioxide gases. The oxy-
genator, about the size of a quart bottle, was the "lung" of the
heart-lung machine. The blood then circulated through a rotary
pump, the "heart," which forced the blood through another plas-
tic tube back into the body.
"We're on bypass," the machine operator called out.
Bernstein nodded and turned to Harrison. "I'll take it from
here, Ben."
Up to that point, Bernstein had delegated the routine of the
operation to the resident surgeon. Now he appeared to hesitate.
He looked first at Steinhardt and then at Harrison. His eyes,
framed by the surgical cap and mask, were the only clues to his ex-
pression. They were distant and somber.
"The hook-up is complete," he said to the anesthesiologist.
"You can turn off the respirator."
The anesthesiologist clicked a switch. The heavy rubber bellows
sighed and sank toward the bottom of its transparent plastic cylin-
der like an exhausted piston. The pressure gauge peaked at 500
milliliters and then slowly bled down to zero.
Bernstein reached into the chest cavity with his hand and at his
touch the lung collapsed. Harry Styles had taken his last breath.

10
The pink stone castle of the mermaid's kingdom, its towered
walls wavering in the invisible currents in the water, loomed in
the gloomy distance. Before it, half buried in the sand on the bot-
tom of the sea, lay the shattered wreck of an eighteenth-century
brig. Above its splintered foremast hovered a beautiful fantailed
Japanese goldfish, its popeyes staring unblinkingly back at Ruth
Styles.
Harry had bought the goldfish and created the fairy-tale sea-
scape for Brenda's fifth birthday. The delight and care with which
he had arranged the sand, the ship, and the castle made Ruth
wonder whether he was giving his daughter a birthday present or
passing on his own childhood fantasies to her.
On Brenda's sixth birthday, Ruth had bought her a ceramic
mermaid, a brightly painted figurine with blond hair. The little
girl had ignored it. She had never placed it in the bowl and even-
tually the figurine had disappeared.
One afternoon Ruth had heard Brenda in the living room talk-
ing to the goldfish, scolding it for some imagined misbehavior.

54
Ruth then realized, as Harry had known all along, that Brenda
was the mermaid princess. Not only was the painted ceramic
figure a usurper to her throne but its concrete artificiality was also
a threat to the existence of the kingdom itself and the powers of
enchantment that had created it.
The original goldfish had died years ago, and Harry had imme-
diately replaced it. The goldfish bowl sat on an end table in the
living room, and the sovereignty of its kingdom had passed, in suc-
cession, from Brenda to David to Christopher. Ruth had never en-
tered its realm.
The night of the operation Ruth sat staring at the goldfish, ex-
pecting at any minute to receive a call from the hospital telling
her that her husband was dead. There were no hopes to be nur-
tured, no plans to be made. All she could do was wait.
Ruth had prepared the children for the news. The afternoon
after they had all last seen their father at the hospital, she had
gathered them around her in the living room. The doctors had
done all that they could to cure him, Ruth had told them, but
there was a very good chance that their father would die. The
children had wept; Christopher clung to her as if she too might
leave them.
This evening, Ruth had once again told them. But this time the
children were all silent. She tried to encourage them to talk, to ask
questions, but there were no questions. There was only the silence
of her children, as each retreated into himself.
Ruth looked up. Brenda was standing in the doorway watching
her.
"Ma, do you have a picture of Daddy I can have?" The girl
walked slowly into the living room. "You know, one before he got
sick."
"Yes, Fm sure I do. There's a box of them in the study."
She and Brenda went into the study and searched through the
cache of loose photographs. There were bunches of pictures that
Ruth had never gotten around to pasting in albums. Pictures of
each of the children at every age. All the children together. The
dog. Her and the children. But there were only three or four
photos of Harry.
Brenda carefully studied them. Was the image of her father al-
ready dimming so that she needed a photograph to keep it alive in
her memory? Or did the child need to replace the too cruelly vivid
picture of her father in the hospital that she could not forget?

55
Brenda finally selected a snapshot of Harry, the incompleat
angler, awkwardly trying to fish. Ruth had taken it during a family
camping trip to Yosemite. Brenda took the picture to her room,
leaving Ruth alone in the study.
On the desk was the framed Kodacolor print of Ruth and the
children that Harry had taken on the same camping trip. It was
the picture Harry had kept in his office and the one he'd taken to
the hospital with him. Ruth had removed it from the hospital
room that morning.
It had always seemed to Ruth a happy picture, she and the chil-
dren beside a tent pitched on a Sierra lake. But now it seemed
ominous, foreboding. Harry was not in the picture. She and the
children were alone in a wilderness.
Ruth picked it up and took it to the living room mantel, and
then went to check on her other two children. Both boys had
gone to bed that evening without their usual protest. When she
entered their room, Groucho, a black shadow at the foot of the
bed, jumped up and gave a low rumbling growl before he recog-
nized her and came to the door.
. Christopher was a tangle of bedclothes and limbs as if he'd
been sleeping very restlessly. Ruth rearranged the sheet and cover
and tucked him in. He muttered groggily and then fell immedi-
ately asleep. Even asleep, the sun-bleached flaxen head buried in
the pillow, the boy was the carbon copy of photographs of Harry
at that age. As she stared down at the boy, Ruth experienced a
surge of joy, poignant and bittersweet, at the recognition that
even as Harry died he remained so visibly alive in this child.
She felt David watching her. The older boy was not asleep but
lay in the next bed perfectly still, his eyes wide open.
"You all right?" Ruth asked.
"Yeah." Then the boy asked, "Are you all right?"
"As well as can be expected." Ruth bent over and gently
brushed the long black hair from her son's forehead and kissed
him. "Get some sleep," she said softly. "School tomorrow."
She left the room, and the dog, who had trailed at her feet from
bed to bed, again settled down with a grumbling sigh at his post
at the foot of David's bed.
There was still school tomorrow. Ruth didn't know whether
Harry would die that night, or the next day, or the day after that.
So there was still school tomorrow. The children were so quiet
and frightened. They had been that way since the last visit with

56
their father at the hospital. As much for their sake as her own,
Ruth wanted it over and done with. She had already done her
mourning and grieving. Cancer does that to you, she thought.
You mourn and grieve and agonize with each day's dying so that
when death finally comes it's a relief for the survivors. Harry's ill-
ness had at first terrorized her, but it had eventually become her
oppressor. She had become its slave, obediently performing all the
odious tasks it demanded, silently suffering its torments.
Ruth reentered the study and went to the liquor cabinet. The
bottle she took out was almost empty. She poured what remained
into a glass and sank into a chair at Harry's desk. It was late, and
the hospital had not called yet. They would probably not call
until the next day. She had to get through the night.

11
Bernstein swiftly excised the lung. He pulled the bloody organ
from Styles's chest and dropped it into a stainless steel basin that
Clancy held out. "There goes his jogging/' Bernstein said.
Harrison routinely examined the chest cavity, probing about the
heart and blood vessels, searching the pleural walls. "That's it. I
don't see any other signs of cancer. Apparently it was still local-
ized in the lung. Not that it makes much difference at this point."
Bernstein nodded. Then slowly, as if the movement itself were
a weighty decision, he raised his head to stare at Steinhardt, who
stood hovering behind Harrison. "So much for phase one," Bern-
stein said.
Steinhardt now moved into position over the cavity in Styles's
chest. Harrison, his part of the operation over, stood off to one
side to observe.
Operating very slowly and meticulously, Steinhardt and Bern-
stein cut out the windpipe and bronchi that had once brought air
into Styles's lungs and sewed closed the trachea. Then they cut
new channels from the chest cavity into the neck, paralleling the

58
path of the carotid arteries, the critical blood vessels through the
neck to the brain. The pulmonary arteries and veins that had once
serviced the lungs were sewn into place at the base of the chan-
nels. Bernstein nodded to Steinhardt. "And that's phase two."
Bernstein checked the patient's vital signs, all of which re-
mained strong. Then he and Steinhardt began the third and criti-
cal stage of the procedure, the one for which there was no medical
precedent. On each side of the patient's neck four distinct lines
had been drawn in blue dye, marking the position of the gill clefts
in the birth defects and embryonic studies.
Steinhardt's scalpel now traced one line, cleaving the flesh and
transforming the line from blue dye to blood. The sterno-
cleidomastoid muscle of the neck was then retracted, and a
broad passage cut through the neck directly into the windpipe.
The artificial gill Steinhardt sutured into the trachea resembled
a Chinese fan. The rigid ribbing was spanned by laminations of
wispy translucent membranes, each a web of exceedingly delicate
capillaries.
The surgeon made an incision down the length of the neck,
behind the collarbone and into the chest. Then artificial blood
vessels made of Dacron were planted into these channels and
drawn through into the chest cavity, where they were sutured to
the pulmonary arteries and veins that had formerly gone to the
lungs.
Working together, Steinhardt and Bernstein cut and sewed the
artificial blood vessels to valves on the artificial gill, then cut the
ties. The transparent membranes of the gill filled with blood,
transforming it into a delicate red fan, pulsing with a vivid, primal
beauty. For a moment Steinhardt and Bernstein stared at each
other.
Then they set to work transplanting the second gill, then the
third, and fourth, each operation proceeding without difficulties,
and each procedure swifter and less hesitant than the one before
it.
Bernstein sewed the last incisions still open in the neck, then
turned to Harrison. The operation at that point had been going
on for fourteen hours, but there was a strain and exhaustion in
Bernstein's eyes that Harrison had not seen in the man after twice
that long in the operating room.
"Ben, would you please close up," Bernstein asked.
"Of course." There was little left to do except the routine of

59
joining the split sternum with stainless steel sutures, sewing the
chest, and preparing the chest drains.
Since the beginning of the operation, a green sterile sheet had
been hung and pinned tight just below the patient's jaw line. It
formally separated the surgeons from the anesthesiologist or, more
to the point, separated the sterile working area of the surgeons
and nurses who had scrubbed for the operation from the unsterile
place of those who had not scrubbed.
Bernstein now ripped off his surgical mask and walked around
to the anesthesiologist's station and stared down at Styles, seeing
the face of the man for the first time since the operation had
begun. The patient was no longer dressed and draped into an iso-
lated impersonal organ but was a mutilated and mortally
wounded human being. Bernstein, his face unmasked, was not the
supremely efficient and detached technician whose every move-
ment Harrison had been carefully studying. The exhausted sur-
geon now somehow seemed as naked and vulnerable as the pa-
tient before him. His face reflected back the dying man's pain and
mute anguish.
For the tenth time that evening, Harrison checked the patient's
electrocardiogram, arterial pressure, and urine output. Just then
Bernstein walked into the room. "The lab finished the analysis of
the blood sample," he said, handing Harrison the report.
Harrison looked it over. The patient's oxygen, carbon dioxide,
and electrolyte levels were all within safe limits.
"How's he doing?" Bernstein asked.
"Stabilizing."
"Stabilizing," Bernstein repeated and shook his head. "After
having his chest sawed open and his lung cut out. After having
been inflicted with a half-dozen other equally mortal wounds and
been injected with five or six different deadly poisons to paralyze
his mind and body, the patient is stabilizing."
Harrison nodded. "The medical miracle isn't modern surgery
but the human body's ability to recover from its outrages." The
operation had, to his surprise, gone almost routinely. There had
been no dramatic, heart-stopping ventricular fibrillations. Many
open-heart operations he and Bernstein had performed had been
trickier.
Harrison relaxed into a chair and studied the patient stretched
out on the bed. The only visible movement was the rotating head

6o
of the heart-lung machine pumping the blood from its silicone
rubber oxygenator back through the tubes in the patient's abdo-
men. They had decided to allow Styles's condition to stabilize for
a period rather than proceed with the next phase of the experi-
ment immediately after the trauma of surgery. Now they were tak-
ing turns keeping a medical watch.
"You know, Morris, all this arcane crap about tuna fish and
four-hundred-million-year-old Devonian period designs, it's all just
a lot of academic masturbation on Steinhardt's part. His artificial
gill is just another development of the medical technology that's
become commonplace in the last ten years." He pointed to the
heart-lung machine. "Christ, the invention of new blood oxygena-
tors has accelerated so fast that the Patent Office's classifications
are obsolete as soon as they are published."
"What did you do, run a patent search?" Bernstein asked.
Harrison shrugged. "I had an idea I wanted to check out."
"What happened?"
"Somebody else had the idea first."
Bernstein grunted an acknowledgment.
Harrison looked over at him and scowled. "For Chrissakes,
Morris, go to bed. You're about to collapse. I'm watching him."
It was a moment before Bernstein moved. "Yeah, you're right.
Tomorrow's the big day/' he said in a voice that croaked with ex-
haustion. He patted Harrison's shoulder, muttered "Good night,"
and shuffled out.
The room was now eerily silent. There was not even the asth-
matic bellows sound of the mechanical respirators or the labored
gasps of the patients that resounded from one bed after another
in the intensive care unit outside. Here there was only the soft
whirling sound of the heart-lung machine forcing the oxygenated
blood back into the patient's arteries and veins.
Jesus Christ. Harrison suddenly understood what had so fright-
ened Bernstein the night they'd been drinking. Harrison stared at
the patient on the bed, the same fear now gripping him.

12
The night of the operation Steinhardt couldn't sleep. He sat up
reading Oeconomia Regni Animalis, Emanuel Swedenborg's trea-
tise on the human body as the kingdom of the soul, in the hope
that the eighteenth-century text would drug his brain into sleep.
But something in Swedenborg's writings kept haunting him, flit-
ting into consciousness like a gadfly buzzing in and out of his field
of vision. To designate the human soul, Swedenborg had used the
term anirna, which in Old Latin had originally meant "breath."
Jung also had used the same term anima to denote the inner per-
sonality attuned to the unconsciousness. Were they, and the an-
cient mystics, declaring that there was an inseparable union be-
tween the human soul and breath? Steinhardt read until dawn
before he finally dozed off, only to sleep fitfully, plagued by night-
mares.
When he got to the hospital the next morning he quickly ex-
amined Styles, who was still in a coma, and immediately began
setting up the experiment. Steinhardt felt enormously energetic,
despite his lack of sleep. Before this day ended, the years of work

62
would come to a culmination. The doubts and corrosive fears that
assailed him would be resolved.
He breathed deeply in a deliberate effort to dissolve the knot of
fear and anxiety in his stomach. He had to retain a detached
scientific objectivity, but his surging blood conspired against him.
His assistant Mark Matsuda arrived, and together they installed
a large Plexiglas tank alongside the bed. The tank was seven and a
half feet long and deep and wide enough to easily accommodate a
man. It had a heater and bubble oxygenator similar to those in
large tropical fish aquariums. Steinhardt and Matsuda had filled
the tank with a sterile saline solution and were adjusting the tem-
perature when Bernstein and Harrison returned.
"Why ninety-three degrees?" Harrison asked.
"That's the water temperature experiments indicate will cause
the least shock to the system," Matsuda said.
Matsuda was a man in his mid-twenties, unusually tall and
brawny for a Nisei. He had been a competitive swimmer as an un-
dergraduate at the University of California. He had begun work-
ing with Steinhardt as a research assistant during his Ph.D. candi-
dacy in marine biology. When Steinhardt asked Matsuda to
continue to work with him after he had been awarded his doctor-
ate, Matsuda had considered it a greater honor than his advanced
degree.
He now bent over Styles's comatose body, affixing postage-
stamp-sized medical sensors to the gill implants. The sensors
measured the rate of oxygen and carbon dioxide diffusion across
the gills. Matsuda had to work around the blood-filled lines that
emanated like tendrils from Styles's chest to the heart-lung ma-
chine.
Steinhardt nervously hovered over Matsuda, suggesting minute,
almost imperceptible corrections to the placing of the sensors, af-
terward pressing them with a finger as one might assure himself
that a postage stamp was firmly secure on a letter. Then Stein-
hardt straightened and muttered, "It's ready."
Bernstein and Harrison helped the two other men lift the pa-
tient. Styles was so emaciated that it required very little effort to
lower him into the tank of saline solution. Steinhardt arranged
Styles's limbs, a totally unnecessary fussing, since they floated
freely. Then he stood back and stared.
Totally submerged, Styles's shrunken flesh was suspended and
weightless, making it appear fuller, an effect that was further en-

63
hanced by the magnifying effect of the water and Plexiglas. He
floated motionless as if set in an emormous transparent jewel, sur-
rounded by shimmering bubbles that caught the light and
reflected it back like a current of smaller jewels. The blood-gorged
plastic tubes spouted from his abdomen like synthetic umbilicals
to a creature, not quite of this world, who hung suspended in am-
niotic fluid as if awaiting birth.
It was a moment before Steinhardt could speak. Then he asked
in a strained voice, "What amount of diffusion are we getting
across the gills?"
Matsuda checked the read-out on a console of instruments set
up across the room. "There's . . . there's no indication of any oxy-
gen or carbon dioxide diffusion taking place."
Steinhardt was instantly at his side. "What? There must be."
He peered at the instruments. "Perhaps it's the sensors," he said.
"They've shorted out in the saline solution."
"I don't think so," Matsuda said. "We're getting normal base-
line readings. There's just no diffusion taking place across the
membranes."
• "Is there water circulation in the pharynx and past the gill
combs?" Steinhardt asked anxiously.
"Yes, sir. A strong circulation. About one hundred cc per
second."
"It must be the sensors," Steinhardt insisted, a note of despera-
tion distorting his voice. "What else could it be?"
The panic in his voice and face galvanized the others. Without
stopping to take off their jackets, Matsuda and Harrison plunged
their arms into the tank and lifted Styles's head and chest out of
the water, while Steinhardt hurriedly replaced the sensors on the
gills.
Then they all stared at the read-out on the instrument panel.
There was no change.
"I don't understand," Steinhardt said. "On the animals we ex-
perimented on. The dogs. The monkeys. We always got a signifi-
cant diffusion."
"Maybe he's too weak," Matsuda said. Then he added uneasily,
"Perhaps man has evolved to some biological point of no return.
He can't revert back to primitive organisms."
Steinhardt stared at his assistant, then looked over at the tank
in which Styles lay, and his eyes filled with tears. It was a while

64
before he turned back to the others, and when he finally spoke,
his voice was little more than a whisper.
"Gentlemen, I would appreciate it very much if you would
please continue to take readings of the vital signs for the next few
hours," he said in a flat voice. "Also the blood gases." He started
to say something more, but his voice failed. He strode from the
room.
The experiment's total failure devastated Steinhardt. He wan-
dered the halls of the hospital, and it was as if each scene he en-
countered had been deliberately contrived to confront him with
the waste of his life. A child with a congenital heart defect that
would have normally killed him before he was ten was wheeled
into surgery to correct it. A young man whose arm had been
crushed and all but amputated in an industrial machine was pre-
pared for an operation to rebuild his hand. A mother whose ma-
lignant abdominal tumor had been diagnosed and excised in time
struggled to consciousness in the recovery room and smiled wanly
at the surgeon who hovered over her. In each case the healer
might have been Steinhardt. Might have been. The words were a
trembling accusation of guilt. Guilt for the children whose lives
he had not saved. The suffering he had not relieved. But primarily
guilt for the futility of his own life. Instead he had gone off in
search of . . . what? Secrets. Mysteries. Curiosities.
Steinhardt found himself on a balcony above the black asphalt
parking lot ten stories below. Off in the distance, beyond the
squalid bungalows and the flaking stucco apartment houses and
hotels that supplied the university hospital with the majority of its
patients, Steinhardt could see the ocean. Once, Steinhardt had
regarded the sea as the living blood of all life. Now it lay dark, im-
placable, and lifeless beneath the haze of brown smog.
Steinhardt felt dizzy. Far below him the concrete and asphalt
seemed to swirl as if it too were a backwater of the distant ocean.
Unlike the sea, the swirling mass ten stories below taught him no
secrets of life, but staring at it all with distracted eyes Steinhardt
had a vivid glimpse of death.

13
Matsuda conscientiously kept recording Styles's vital signs over
the next few hours. Styles had been on the heart-lung machine too
long—he was rapidly weakening as his blood cells were damaged
and deteriorated.
When Steinhardt bolted from the room, Matsuda and the two
surgeons had tacitly agreed that he needed time alone to absorb
the shock of the experiment's total failure. But after several hours
Styles had declined irrevocably toward death, and Steinhardt had
still not reappeared. The three men became concerned.
They were about to launch a search for him when the old man
shambled through the door. He looked as if he had aged ten years
in the few hours he had been absent. His shoulders slumped. His
skin had a lifeless gray hue, and his eyes were bloodshot with fa-
tigue.
He gazed a moment at the tank, where Styles hung from the
plastic tubes in his abdomen in a grotesque mechanical parody of
life. Then he turned to Matsuda.

66
"There's been no change in the readings." Matsuda answered
the unspoken question.
"I had thought not/' Steinhardt said. "What is the funda-
mental axiom of research?" he addressed the three men in the
room. "There is no such thing as an unsuccessful experiment.
Well, today we have proved nothing; we have discovered nothing;
we have learned nothing. Except perhaps the folly of an old man's
fantasies, his arrogance, and his conceit."
Bernstein put his hand on Steinhardt's shoulder. "Karl, it was a
perfectly valid approach."
Steinhardt reached up and patted his friend's hand. "Thank
you, Morris."
Steinhardt roused himself and leaned over Matsuda's shoulder
to study the log of Styles's vital functions. Then he turned back to
Bernstein. "Let us end this poor creature's suffering."
Bernstein walked over to the heart-lung machine, but then hesi-
tated and stood staring at the switches and dials, his face drawn
and morose, his eyes tear-filled.
"We've made a promise to the family," Steinhardt said in a soft
voice.
The surgeon nodded but still stood motionless by the machine.
Finally he reached forward and closed a throttle and clicked off a
series of switches. The pump ceased rotating and the blood
drained back into Styles's chest, leaving the returning transparent
plastic tube blood-smeared and empty. The machine decelerated
and then was silent as though the whirl were itself the sound of
the life now rapidly dying.
"Dr. Harrison, would you please witness and verify the exact
time we cease to get EEG and EKG patterns?" Steinhardt asked,
and turned away. "It should take approximately three minutes be-
fore total anoxia and hypoxia take place."
"Of course."
Matsuda, still seated at his post at the diffusion monitor, low-
ered his head and wiped his eyes. The unflinching dials he had
watched so intently for hours now blurred. A needle flickered.
Matsuda dried his eyes with a handkerchief and blew his nose.
The needle flickered again. Matsuda stared at it. Once again the
needle moved, the fluctuation stronger than before.
He looked at the man in the tank. Styles's head and chest con-
vulsed as if he had coughed. Again the needle registered strongly.
"Dr. Steinhardt/"

6?
"It's just an involuntary spasm, Mark," Steinhardt answered, as
if anticipating him, "as the medulla suffers oxygen deprivation."
"No, damn it, I'm getting a diffusion reading here."
"What!" Steinhardt was immediately over him. Both men
looked back and forth from the dials to the man in the tank. The
coughlike convulsions continued. They were irregular, with no
pattern, but with each spasm, the needle jumped on the monitor
registering the oxygen level of the blood.
Steinhardt sprang back to the tank and hovered over it, intently
studying the man lying there. Then his eyes traced the path of the
plastic tubes leading from the abdomen to the now quiet heart-
lung machine. "Of course," he said softly to himself. "How could
I be so stupid. So incredibly stupid. Davis and Potter."
"Who the hell are Davis and Potter?" Bernstein snapped.
Steinhardt didn't take his eyes off Styles. "Their work with
human fetuses. It was published over a quarter of a century ago.
I'd forgotten it. If the placental circulation is interrupted, or if the
umbilical cord is tangled, the fetus makes exaggerated respiratory
movements, aspirating large amounts of amniotic fluid. The same
instinctive reaction occurred in the early as well as the more ad-
vanced fetus. Inadequate oxygen saturation of the fetal blood trig-
gers the respiratory mechanism." Steinhardt pointed to the heart-
lung machine. "Until we cut his umbilical circulation, he did not
have to breathe the fluid in which he was immersed. Now he
does."
"But for how long can he do it?" Bernstein asked.
Matsuda joined the three doctors alongside the tank. "The
readings are still spasmodic," he reported.
They stared at the man in the tank. Styles's face was contorted,
his eyes squeezed shut, and his mouth yawning wide like that of a
child bawling.

14
Ruth Styles kept track of the almost imperceptible changes of
season in Southern California by her roses. In April she began a
program of deep watering, feeding, and spraying to prevent the in-
fection of powdery mildew that plagued the flowers during the
hot, dry summer.
In June she cut the flowers and pruned the sucker stems that
had sprouted at the base of the bushes. She stopped watering in
November to encourage the plants to go dormant in the winter,
and in February she pruned the rosebushes to prepare them for
the spring growth.
Ruth's pruning was brutal. She first systematically stripped
away all the dead canes, twigs, crisscrossing branches, and the new
suckers, cutting them off at the base of the plant. That done, she
selected the three youngest, most promising canes and mercilessly
snipped off all the others at the bud onion.
Now behind her on the grassy border of the rose garden that
ran across the front of the house there was a pile of amputated
woody and green rose canes lying before each upright triad of

69
young branches she had selected for the summer blossoming. For
her work, Ruth wore a wide-brimmed straw hat that shaded her
pale skin from the sun. The sun hat flattered her. It softened the
dark shadows and etched lines of fatigue and tension that had in
the past year marred her complexion. She gently fingered a bud,
then snipped the cane a quarter of an inch above it, cutting the
stalk back to that one promising bud.
The sound of a car pulling up made her turn toward the street.
To her surprise the long figure of Steinhardt uncoiled from the
passenger's seat and stood towering above the car, shyly looking at
her as if he were reluctant to walk forward and greet her. A mo-
ment later Bernstein got out of the car and together they ap-
proached.
Ruth was embarrassed by their visit. She had been expecting
simply a call from Bernstein. "Gardening is about all I can cope
with right now," she said with a nervous gesture toward the roses.
"That and getting the kids fed and off to school."
She looked at the pile of prunings at her feet, then looked back
at Bernstein and asked, "Is Harry dead? Is that why you're here?"
Bernstein exchanged a look with Steinhardt. "No, he isn't. As a
matter of fact, his condition seems to have stabilized."
Ruth shook her head. "I don't understand. You told me on the
phone that Harry's other lung had been removed. And that you
would turn off the artificial life supports as soon as the experiment
was over." She looked from Bernstein to Steinhardt.
"Well, it's rather difficult to explain," Steinhardt said. "We
don't entirely understand what is happening ourselves."
"Mrs. Styles, may we discuss this inside?"
"Yes, of course," Ruth said uneasily. She walked ahead of them
into the house.
"Well, did you or did you not turn off the artificial life sup-
ports?" she asked as soon as they were seated.
"Yes, we did."
"Then what's keeping Harry alive?"
Steinhardt shrugged. "We're not exactly sure. For one thing the
implanted artificial gill is functioning with much greater effec-
tiveness than it had on any of the laboratory animals we'd used
earlier. They usually succumbed to shock or pneumonia after
being totally immersed. We fully expected that your husband
would react in a similar way, but the heart-lung machine ap-
parently modified . . ."

7°
"What the hell is the heart-lung machine?" Ruth interrupted.
She had prepared herself for Harry's death. The fact that he was
still lingering in some grotesque limbo had her utterly bewildered.
"It's a machine that pumps and oxygenates the blood. It's used
routinely in heart and lung bypass operations. The newer types
with membrane oxygenators are, in essence, artificial gills, and
that may have created a condition we simply did not anticipate."
"Dr. Steinhardt, I simply don't understand what you're saying.
But I demand to know what's happening to Harry!"
Steinhardt held out his hands in supplication. "Please, Mrs.
Styles, I understand your confusion. Frankly, Dr. Bernstein, my
colleagues, and I don't entirely understand what's happening our-
selves. We only have a hypothesis at this point."
"Well, what's your hypothesis?" Again her voice snapped with
anger.
"In our previous experiments with animals we didn't use the
heart-lung machine. There was no need; we weren't removing the
lungs. We were merely implanting the artificial gill."
"But the animals still died," Ruth insisted.
"Yes, but that was because of other complications, not the in-
adequacy of the gill."
"What about Harry?"
"He was totally oxygenated by the heart-lung machine. And
since his lungs had been removed, he didn't experience the same
complications. I suspect that being submerged weightless in a
warm saline solution was, in fact, salubrious to his system rather
than a shock. It is a form of therapy in several—"
"And when you turned off the machine?" Ruth interrupted im-
patiently.
"The technique of switching a patient's respiration on and off
the machine has become sophisticated to the point at which it
can be done with very old people or weak cardiac cases. The
shock is minimal. As I mentioned, the machine incorporates a
membrane blood oxygenator, and in essence your husband had al-
ready made the transition from his lungs to an artificial gill."
Steinhardt looked at Ruth and shrugged helplessly. "When we
turned the machine off, the function of the oxygenation of his
blood merely switched to the artificial gill. It was in fact physiolog-
ically more convenient and less damaging to the blood than the
machine had been."
He looked at Bernstein for support, but Bernstein remained si-

7i
lent. "There undoubtedly will be complications. The gill itself
may prove inadequate to support his system, in which case there
will be a swift physical deterioration including irreversible brain
damage. A blood clot or a postoperative infection may develop.
We don't know yet what may happen." Once again Steinhardt
shrugged helplessly. "But at the moment your husband's condi-
tion appears to have stabilized."
"What about the cancer?"
"We removed it," Bernstein said. It was the first thing he had
said since they entered the room.
Ruth stared at him incredulously. "You mean Harry is just
lying there in this . . . this . . . this fish tank . . . breathing
water?"
Neither Bernstein nor Steinhardt said anything.
Ruth started to laugh hysterically, then began to sob.
"Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God." Tears streamed
down her face. She trembled uncontrollably and sat hugging her-
self, rocking back and forth.
The trembling subsided as quickly as it had begun, and she sat
shaking her head. "Oh, Harry. Harry, you compulsive son of a
"bitch. Now you've really gone and done it."
Bernstein silently offered her a cigarette and she readily ac-
cepted it, then wryly regarded the cigarette. "How quickly we for-
get," she commented.
There was a moment of silence while Bernstein lit it. "I
watched my father die of cancer," Ruth said, wiping her still wet
cheeks with the back of her hand. "What are the five classic
stages that all terminal patients go through?" She held up her
hands and tallied the five stages on her fingers. "First, they deny
they're going to die. Then they get angry. Then they bargain for
life. In the fourth stage they get depressed, almost suicidal. And
finally, they accept that they are going to die."
She rose and walked to the built-in bookcase that covered the
far wall. "It's all here in Dr. Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross's book." She
searched for a moment without success, then turned back to
Steinhardt. "But you know all that," she said, and the edge of
anger in her voice made it an accusation. "I'm sure you've seen it
many times in your experience."
"Yes. With my own wife."
Steinhardt had spoken quietly, but the pain evident in his voice
and in his eyes stopped Ruth short.

72
"I'm sorry. You mentioned that to me."
She paced nervously, quieter now, sensitive to another's pain.
"You assumed Harry had accepted death. But you were wrong.
You operated on a very willful, driving man who was at that mo-
ment enraged at the idea of dying. And he was still desperately
bargaining for life. Bargaining with a medical experiment that was
no more alien or impossible to his mind than the space flights on
which he had worked."
The photograph on the mantel of herself and the children at
Yosemite caught her eye. The other night the absence of Harry
from the picture had seemed foreboding. Now she was struck not
by his absence but by his enveloping, possessing presence, the lov-
ing eye that had staged, posed, and taken the photograph and
painstakingly cropped and framed it.
She turned back to the two men. "Dr. Steinhardt, I don't give a
damn what your hypothesis or prognosis is. But in that fishbowl
of yours my husband is still fighting to stay alive. I don't know
whether to laugh or cry."
Steinhardt stared at her, his face drained white, confronting for
the first time the honor he had wrought.

15
That night Harry Styles regained consciousness. The cannulas
from the heart-lung machine had been surgically removed, but the
electrodes transmitting his vital functions were still in place. Bern-
stein was on watch. The surgeon sat brooding over the read-outs,
then laboriously made notes in the medical log as if each inscrip-
tion he made were painful, another burden of grief for his wearily
stooped shoulders.
A nurse from the intensive care unit came in to check the
catheter and intravenous feeding. Then she stood studying the
motionless, naked figure suspended in the tank. "My God, what
in hell are they going to do with him?" she asked.
Bernstein looked up at her and shook his head. "I don't know."
The man in the tank was no longer just a surgical or medical
problem. He had become an acute moral dilemma. The dilemma
was reflected in the uncertainty in Bernstein's voice, the confusion
in his eyes. He glanced at the nurse and his look was furtive, as if
he were ashamed.
The nurse brought Bernstein a steaming cup of black coffee,

74
and they both sat sipping their coffee, each for the moment more
comfortable with silence than with discussing their extraordinary
patient.
"Can I ask you a personal question?" the nurse finally asked.
Bernstein hesitated and then said, "Sure. Why not? I can al-
ways plead the Fifth." There was a forced levity in his voice.
"I've been a nurse, what, twenty years. I've seen the interns, the
residents, the surgeons all come and go," she said. "They almost
always fall into two categories. Those who want to save the world
and those who want to make a million dollars. It's almost as if
they've got it written on them. I can always tell which they are.
All except you. I can't figure you. Which category are you in?"
Bernstein gave a short, quick laugh. It came out like a bark.
"That's easy. I thought you were going to ask me something
tough. You had me worried."
"Which are you?"
"Both. I'm both. I want to save the world and make a million
in the bargain."
"You want too much."
"You sound like my wife Selma. That's what she's always . . ."
Bernstein saw a movement in the tank. Styles shifted, if a man
floating weightless can be said to have shifted his weight. The
movement was tentative, the instinctive caution of a creature who
has been terribly wounded and doesn't know what pain even the
gentlest stirring might create. He was coming out of a deep,
drugged sleep, still anesthetized with morphine.
Bernstein stood up but didn't move to the tank—he was mes-
merized by the fascination and horror of Styles's awakening. He
tried to imagine what the man was experiencing. Styles's first sen-
sation should be one of general comfort. The temperature of the
saline solution was regulated so that he would experience neither
heat nor cold. Styles floated just below the surface so that he felt
no pressure, not even that of his body weight upon a mattress, the
burden of gravity that in the days before his operation had be-
come increasingly painful as he was afflicted with bedsores. The
only exception to the general feeling of comfort would be a dull
aching pain in his chest and neck.
Hesitantly, still not fully conscious, Styles touched his chest,
fingering the incision there. His hands drifted up to his neck and
gingerly explored the stiff protrusions. His eyes opened—confused,
unfocused, frightened.

75
Styles saw lights, colors, shapes, but everything was blurred and
distorted, the surreal images of a nightmare. As he moved, he felt
the water, the weight and resistance of it, its suffocation. Instinc-
tively he groped for the surface to breathe. But no breath came.
He screamed, as if the alarm of his own voice would wake him
from this nightmare, but no sound came forth. He thrashed in the
water to get his head above water, his hands splashing about des-
perately for something to grab.
The nurse whirled about at the sound of the splashing. "My
God, he's going wild!" she shouted at Bernstein, breaking him
from a trance. "He'll rip out his I.V."
Bernstein leaped to the tank and grabbed Styles's shoulders.
Gently he tried to push him back into the water. "It's all right,
Harry. It's all right. Just lie back."
Styles was terrified. He pleaded with Bernstein. "Help me. Help
me." His eyes and lips begged the doctor, but his entreaties had no
voice. Styles suddenly realized that Bernstein was trying to force
him under the water. To drown him. He fought back with pan-
icked strength, inundating the room with great waves of water.
"Help me get him underwater, before he suffocates," Bernstein
cried out to the nurse. He threw his weight on Styles, plunging
halfway into the tank himself, while the nurse pressed on his
shoulders.
Styles tried to struggle but he was too weak. He was forced un-
derwater, into its warm suffocating envelopment, his nightmare
totally realized.
"The sedative! Quick!" Bernstein commanded.
The nurse sprang for the table and in a moment was back at
the surgeon's side with a syringe. Bernstein was half submerged in
the tank holding Styles down with his body«weight, one of the pa-
tient's hands clawing at his face, still trying to fight him off.
Styles's other arm was thrust out of the water, the I.V. line whip-
ping about, his hand futilely grasping at the air, trying to clutch
anything. The nurse grabbed the arm and jabbed the needle into
the nipple on the intravenous line.
After a moment, the hand ceased grasping at the air and
slipped slowly under the water.

16
If Paul Buckley, director of the Institute of Oceanography,
could have found a way quietly to murder Harry Styles and dis-
pose of the body he might have seriously considered it that morn-
ing. Buckley had not known of the existence of Styles before the
early morning phone call to his office. Now the institute was
threatened by that existence, and his own career was not just
threatened but possibly doomed.
He removed his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, then re-
placed the glasses and continued to stare out his office window at
the sea and pier. Buckley's office was on the second floor of the
administration building of the institute, and the window framed a
panoramic view of the ocean, the beach, and the quarter-mile-long
research pier.
"The pier is an arrow pointing our way into the mysterious, still
unknown depths of the sea," Buckley would say to visitors. He
often said things like that to legislators, trustees, press, and poten-
tial endowers. His verbal flair was one of the reasons why, at forty-
two he was director of the Institute of Oceanography. He had

77
done no significant research in over a decade, since he had organ-
ized a study of the petrology and plate tectonics of the East
Pacific Rise. The expedition had been sponsored by three oil com-
panies. Buckley's workdays were now spent in boardrooms and ac-
ademic meetings; he dressed in tailored suits rather than coveralls
for wrestling drill pipes aboard a research vessel or lab coats for
analyzing sediment cores.
The door to his office opened and Steinhardt entered. The tall
man's face was haggard and pale, but his eyes were bright with ex-
citement.
The two stood silently facing each other.
"In God's name, Karl, what have you done?"
"It was just a continuation of my work on the artificial gill. I've
been sending you regular reports."
"Yes, yes. I know." Buckley indicated several folders strewn
over his desk in contrast to the meticulous neatness of the rest of
the office.
"But apparently you only just now read them," Steinhardt
added.
"With my schedule I haven't had a chance to keep up with ev-
erything," Buckley said, vaguely apologetic, then suddenly ex-
claimed, "My God, Karl, this time you experimented with a
human being! You should have cleared it with me first. My door
is always open to you."
"Cleared it! I am not in the practice of clearing my research at
each step of the work with anyone," Steinhardt said rather stiffly.
"I already had adequate funds, and the hospital human research
committee had approved the procedure."
"Jesus Christ, we're not talking about some goddamn Rhesus
monkey or a dog from the pound. We're talking about a human
being. A human being. It's a hell of a time to start standing on ac-
ademic prerogatives."
"It wasn't a matter of academic prerogatives," Steinhardt said,
now more subdued. "You were at that ecological conference in
Rome. There just wasn't time. The patient was terminal. He had
gone into a final coma when we began the experiment. He wasn't
expected to survive."
"How the hell am I going to explain that to a board of trustees
of ex-bank presidents and oil tycoons? Not to mention a governor
who is practically a Jesuit priest?"
"Since my work is of such acute embarrassment to you, you will

78
have my resignation on your desk this afternoon absolving both
you and the institute of any responsibility," Steinhardt said in
clipped, imperious tones. He turned on his heel and strode to the
door.
Buckley was shaken, but he jumped to intercept Steinhardt at
the threshold. "Karl, for Chrissakes, you must realize that this has
all come as a great surprise and shock to me. My first concern is
for the institute. I apologize if I was overbearing with you." Buck-
ley was stalling for time. The whole experiment had, truthfully,
come as a great shock to him. He had not had time to evaluate it.
Were the dangers worth the acclaim? The lines of responsibility
between a scientist of Steinhardt's stature and the institute were,
at best, delicate. Government research grants were made directly
to specific scientists, not to universities or institutes. The scientists
were, in essence, independent contractors. In Steinhardt's case he
was supported primarily by the Office of Naval Research and paid
the institute a percentage of his grants for overhead. They pro-
vided him with research facilities and their prestige was a factor in
his securing research grants. He, in turn, contributed the prestige
of his name to the institute, helped support it, and provided work
for the graduate students and faculty.
If Steinhardt resigned, Buckley as director of the institute
would still share the infamy of the experiment, if indeed it be-
came infamous, but he would be excluded from the laurels if the
tide flowed the other way. In academic and scientific circles Buck-
ley would be fingered as the villain who had driven Steinhardt
from the institute. Steinhardt was a recluse, a maverick, an eccen-
tric, an egotist, and a son of a bitch to deal with. But his dis-
coveries about oxygen transport and fluid pressure in body tissues
had been nominated for a Nobel prize. There was no question
that the operation would create a great deal of excitement once it
became known. Buckley had to stall and placate Steinhardt until
he had more information. "You must realize that this is going to
bring a great deal down on our heads," he rationalized.
"You're talking politics, not science," Steinhardt said with con-
descension.
Steinhardt's patronizing tone once again triggered Buckley's
temper. "The facts of life are that this is a political institution," he
snapped. "Of this year's budget of forty-one million dollars, less
than a million came from our endowment fund. Another million
dollars came from gifts and private grants. The rest—some ninety-

79
five point five percent of our funds—comes directly from a dozen
federal government agencies and the state of California. Our life-
blood is controlled by politics, not science."
Buckley stared at Steinhardt, then jabbed angrily toward his
desk. "When word of this Frankenstein experiment of yours gets
out, that phone is going to be ringing from Sacramento to Wash-
ington. State assemblymen, senators, preachers, and rabbis are go-
ing to be screaming for your head. And mine. Despite your
vaunted independence as a researcher, you're still officially affili-
ated with this institution. It'll come crashing down about our ears.
And so will your career and mine."
"I think you're being melodramatic," Steinhardt said in an un-
certain voice.
Buckley heard the uncertainty. He seized it. "Am I, Karl? Do
you read the newspapers? Do you watch TV? Do you remember
what happened when it came out that the Army and the CIA had
performed experiments on humans with drugs? And those experi-
ments had been over for twenty years! When the politicians and
press get wind of this experiment, you're going to have TV cam-
eras following you right into the men's room. Do you think the
Navy or the National Science Foundation is going to touch your
work? Let alone continue to fund you?"
Steinhardt was silent. He looked stricken.
Buckley turned his back on the scientist and stared out the win-
dow. He had succeeded in intimidating Steinhardt. For the mo-
ment at least the director was in control. Buckley clasped his
hands behind his back and rocked back and forth on his toes and
heels. "Now just what the hell do we do with . . . Homo sapiens
gillus?" He turned back to Steinhardt. "No, let's give credit where
credit is due," Buckley said with a cuttings edge to his voice.
"Homo sapiens Steinhardtus"
"His name is Harry Styles," Steinhardt said lamely.
"Well, just what the hell do we do now with Harry Styles?"

17
Harry Styles lay immobile in the tank, his eyes open and only
an occasional blink indicating that he was conscious. His stillness
disturbed Bernstein. There had been cases in which a patient left
too long on the heart-lung machine during surgery had suffered
extensive brain damage. The thoracic surgery had been a success
but the patient had lost his mind.
Bernstein now had Styles heavily tranquilized, with ten milli-
grams of Valium every four hours flowing directly into his blood-
stream through the I.V. Technically, ethically, Styles was still his
patient, although Steinhardt was now dictating the procedures
and tests to be made. It was, after all, Steinhardt's experiment.
Bernstein's work was to keep his patient alive as long as possible-
prescribe the necessary antibiotics, the intravenous fluids, the
blood chemistry tests—a task he viewed with increasing horror.
An underwater speaker had been placed in the tank, and Bern-
stein uncertainly lifted the microphone to his lips. "Harry. Can
you hear me, Harry?"
Styles continued to stare straight ahead. Steinhardt had devised

7i
an operculum, a gill cover that fitted about Styles's neck and
resembled the thick collars worn by victims of neck injuries. It
protected the very delicate, capillary-thin membranes of the gill. It
was open at the top and bottom and clefts at the side permitted
the free flow of water. It made Styles look considerably less gro-
tesque than he had with the exposed gill combs.
"Can you hear me, Harry? Please nod if you can."
For a long moment Styles remained still. Then hesitantly, like
an arthritic who expects any movement to cause pain, he slowly
nodded his head.
Bernstein turned and looked at Steinhardt, who stood beside
him staring at Styles.
"Talk to him more," Steinhardt commanded in a low voice that
was quick with excitement.
Once again Bernstein reluctantly raised the microphone. "I
don't know what to say, Harry. We know this has been a tremen-
dous shock to you. Quite frankly, the experiment has succeeded
beyond Dr. Steinhardt's and my wildest expectations. We can
only attribute it to your own unexpectedly strong constitution and
adaptability. We're doing all we can to make you as comfortable
as possible. Are you feeling any pain?"
Styles shook his head, but the movement was very slight, ap-
parently restricted by the collar.
"Is there anything troubling you, Harry?" Bernstein asked.
"Just point to it, if you can."
Styles pointed to his eyes, making a vague, confused gesture
about them.
"Yes, Harry, your eyes. Everything is blurry, is that it?"
Styles nodded.
"We have some goggles that should clear that up. But we'll
have to raise your head out of the water to put them on. Do you
think you can handle that?"
Styles nodded.
Steinhardt and Matsuda quickly got on either side of the tank
and, supporting Styles's neck and head, partially raised his head
out of the water, while Bernstein slipped the goggles on. Then
Styles slipped below the water again.
"Is that better, Harry?" Bernstein asked.
Styles turned his head slightly to look at Bernstein. Magnified
by the interfaces of air, glass, and water, Styles's eyes were gar-
goyled—and infinitely sad.

82
"Can you see now?"
Styles raised his hand and made a circle with his thumb and
forefinger indicating "okay."
"Ask him if he can see clearly enough to write," Steinhardt
asked.
Styles overheard the question and nodded.
Steinhardt picked up a plastic-coated slate and a thick pencil,
the type divers use to take notes underwater, reached into the
tank, and placed them in Styles's hands.
"If you want to communicate anything with us, Harry," Bern-
stein said, "just print it out in large letters."
Styles held the slate and pencil right up to his face, examining
them as if terribly nearsighted, then began laboriously to write.
"This is incredible." Paul Buckley stood behind Steinhardt,
staring at the man in the tank, totally awed by the spectacle.
"How long do you expect him to live?"
Steinhardt shrugged and pointed to the large electronic monitor
displaying Styles's vital signs in a series of waves and digital read-
outs. "He appears at the moment to be gaining strength. But it
is, in all probability, a temporary recovery. It often happens in op-
erations, especially any type of transplant. The expectation is that
he will soon develop some sort of systemic complication or in-
fection. Or he may still reject the gill transplant. In either case he
would expire very quickly."
"It's a miracle he even survived the operation."
Styles finished writing and held the slate up out of the water.
Steinhardt took the slate. In large, sprawling, almost illegible
letters was printed:
I AM THE FIRST ONE!
Steinhardt nodded and said softly, almost inaudibly, "Yes, indeed,
you're the first." He took the mike from Bernstein and repeated
into it, "Yes, Harry, you're definitely the first." Then for the first
time since the operation itself Steinhardt turned and smiled at
Bernstein, but it was a strange smile, one of triumph overlaid with
deep tragedy.
Styles's hand reached out of the water, his fingers making little
grabbing motions to indicate he wanted the writing slate again.

83
Steinhardt handed it to him, and Styles immediately began scrib-
bling.
Buckley studied the man in the tank, then turned to Stein-
hardt. "Karl, I don't know whether they're going to crucify you
for this or give you the Nobel prize," he whispered.
The scientist looked with irritation at Buckley, then turned
back to Styles. "It's the historical practice of the medical estab-
lishment to first crucify their pioneers," he remarked in a brittle
voice, "and then canonize them a generation or two afterward."
Once again a hand rose out of the water, holding forth the
slate. Steinhardt read it and silently handed the slate to Bernstein.
The crude letters, like those of a six-year-old learning to print,
read:
i want my wife
Bernstein and Steinhardt exchanged a troubled look, then the
surgeon spoke into the mike. "Your wife is on her way, Harry. I
.spoke to her as soon as we saw you were conscious."
Harry nodded, then leaned back and shut his eyes, all the effort
having apparently debilitated him.
Bernstein himself felt exhausted. The events of the last several
days had physically and emotionally drained him. Now he awaited
the appearance of Ruth Styles with trepidation. Bernstein had
strongly suggested that she not come to the hospital, but she had
been adamant. If Harry was expected to die, what right did he as
a doctor have to keep his wife from seeing him? Bernstein had
had to yield to her.	*
"Harry?" Ruth Styles's outburst was a question, one registering
both bewilderment and fear. Bernstein whirled around. Ruth
Styles stood frozen by the door, staring at the tank. She took a
hesitant step forward, frightened and confused.
"Hczrry?" Again the fearful question.
"Mrs. Styles." Bernstein stepped to intercept her, but the
woman walked by him moving slowly as if dazed.
"Hczrry?" She stopped at the tank and peered into it unbeliev-
ingly.
For the first time Styles recognized her, turned full face toward
her, and smiled. He said something but no sound emerged. The

84
face now turned to Ruth Styles was bloated and distorted by the
water and glass like a reflection of a fun-house mirror.
"Oh, my God!" She sank to her knees in front of the tank,
bringing her face level with his.
His mouth again formed desperate eager words that remained
mute. She reached out a hand to touch him, but it was blocked by
the glass. Styles pressed his hand on the glass opposite hers.
"HarryJ" It was a cry of stabbing anguish. Ruth threw herself
against the tank, pressing her face to the glass. Harry did too,
struggling futilely to touch her through the hard unyielding wall
between them.
Bernstein watched, helpless, and suddenly he began to cry si-
lently, tears flowing down his cheeks.
The night attendant paused in his mopping and glared at Bern-
stein and Steinhardt as they tracked footprints on his freshly
washed floor. They entered an office at the end of the hall. The
office was a cramped, utilitarian room with two steel filing cabi-
nets, a large sprawling desk, a couch wide and long enough for
napping, and an end table. From its contemporary design the fur-
niture looked as if it should have been relatively new, but heavy
abuse by a succession of interns and resident doctors had prema-
turely aged it so that the pieces and the room had the feeling that
they were decades older than the hospital itself.
Steinhardt sank onto the couch, leaning back and shutting his
eyes as if the touch of the couch had dissolved the last fiber of
muscle holding him upright. Bernstein withdrew a key from his
pocket and unlocked the bottom drawer of the desk. "Schnapps?"
Steinhardt nodded, his eyes shut. His hands rested in his lap,
atop several large X-ray photographs. Bernstein withdrew a bottle
of Cutty Sark Scotch and glasses from the bottom drawer and
poured two stiff drinks.
"Karl."
Steinhardt opened his eyes, sat up, and accepted the offered
glass with a grateful nod. Both men drank in silence. Then Stein-
hardt sighed audibly, stirred from the couch, and reached for
the telephone on the desk. He dialed a number, and while he
waited for an answer he spread the X-rays on the desk, reexamin-
ing them for the tenth time, searching for some hidden symptom
he might have missed before.
Steinhardt glanced sharply at Bernstein as the phone was an-

85
swered. "Hello, Paul, this is Karl. Fm sorry to disturb you so late,
but you wanted me to call you immediately if there was any
significant change in Styles's condition."
He paused to listen to the other end of the line. He took a
drink, as if fortifying himself, then responded. "Actually his con-
dition is quite the contrary. It's entirely possible that Mr. Styles
might very well live longer than I will."
He listened again. "No, I'm quite serious. In hindsight it's actu-
ally very simple. Styles was originally destined to die of lung can-
cer. In totally removing both his lungs we have effectively arrested
the cancer. At least temporarily. Of course it may still have metas-
tasized elsewhere. But no other organs were involved as far as we
could detect at the time of the operation. There is a forty percent
probability—almost an even chance—that the cancer will not
recur elsewhere. That statistic is the opinion of my colleague Dr.
Bernstein, who has had considerable experience with this type of
malignancy."
Bernstein took a large gulp of his drink, as though to buffer an
impending blow.
• "Yes, well, the danger of infection seems to have passed," Stein-
hardt said. "In fact, this evening Dr. Bernstein and I discovered
indications of natural cell growth beginning within the graft it-
self."
Steinhardt listened a moment. "Yes, in any case our original
plan of my discreetly publishing an epoch-making paper after
Styles's quick quiet burial is no longer operable."
"Jesus Christ, indeed," Steinhardt responded in a moment.
"Whereas our Saviour had the miraculous ability to walk on
water, he never, while in the flesh, had the ability to breathe it.
Unfortunately, our hale and hearty Harry, through no fault of
ours, no longer has the normal alternative of breathing air. And
therein lies our considerable dilemma."
Bernstein took another compulsive drink. He listened vaguely
to the rest of the conversation. After all, what more could Stein-
hardt say? He could merely repeat himself, while Buckley, now
stunned into silence, tried to absorb its significance.
Bernstein lit a cigarette and stared out the window. He was sur-
prised to see it was raining. It was a heavy winter drizzle that
smeared the red and white car lights, the street lights, the neon
signs below, puddling the colors so that for a dislocated, night-

86
marish moment or two Bernstein felt he was a submariner looking
out over a dark Atlantean city.
Steinhardt hung up the phone. Bernstein turned to face him.
Neither said a word, then Bernstein broke the silence. "Well,
'nother drink." His own glass was empty.
Steinhardt shook his head. "No, thank you, Morris."
Bernstein poured himself another drink and raised it in toast.
"Well, Fm a helluva doctor," he said. "Fve saved my patient's life
and I've kept him alive. What the hell."
Steinhardt didn't say anything.
"Fve betrayed my patient," Bernstein said. "Betrayed his fam-
ily. Betrayed myself." He stared at his hands. "I was a healer. A
healer. This is not healing. It's some perversion of medicine. I've
let myself be led down some goddamn primrose path of science."
Steinhardt nodded solemnly. "I understand how you feel,
Morris."
Bernstein vehemently shook his head. "No, you don't." How
could Steinhardt know how he felt? It was all so confused in
Bernstein's mind. The guilt. Styles, unnaturally alive in that tank,
evoked memories of grotesque Nazi medical experiments. He pro-
voked half-forgotten ancient Talmudic prohibitions against the
desecration, the mutilation of the human body. Bernstein had
committed a sacrilege.
He stared at Steinhardt. The narrow, fine-bone^ face had never
looked so Teutonic as it did at that moment. "No, you don't un-
derstand," Bernstein accused him. "How could you. You're a
goy"
"A what?"
"A goy."
"You mean a gentile?"
"A goy. A gentile. You're even an Aryan, for Chrissakes."
Steinhardt didn't speak for a while, and when he did it was in a
quiet voice that cut with an edge of personal outrage. "1'm well
aware that you Jews consider yourselves born in original virtue. I
won't debate that point. But I resent very much being accused of
leading you down some primrose path of science. You participated
fully in this experiment for your own personal motives, which had
nothing whatever to do with any four-thousand-year-old Hebraic
tradition of healing. To advance scientific knowledge perhaps. To
pioneer an entirely new field of medicine with all the attendant
glory was undoubtedly not a minor consideration. Major experi-

6?
ments into unknown provinces can't be conducted without great
risks. Risks to our reputations, our careers, even our lives some-
times. And perhaps, if we go too far, we risk our very souls. At this
point we can't undo what has been done. If our damnation lies
ahead, then let us get on with it."
Bernstein stared at Steinhardt. In the blaze of the man's eyes,
and in his voice, there was no hesitation or regret. Bernstein was
himself a proud, driven man. He too was willing to take great risks
with his patients and himself. He had always regarded death as a
very personal enemy. The death of a patient was not a natural
thing, a consequence of his diseased state; it was a personal fail-
ure. He fought death with the burgeoning arsenal of medical tech-
nology—respirators, dialysis, pacemakers—often beyond any ra-
tional sense of life. Now he had saved Harry Styles from death.
Styles lived, but he lived a grotesque, subhuman life. And that life
brought into question Bernstein's own life, the pride and the mo-
tives that had sustained and driven him for thirty-five years of
medicine. For the first time the life of a patient offended Bern-
stein. He looked down at his hands nervously twisting the glass of
Scotch. His own hands offended him.
"We are damned." The eyes Bernstein raised to meet Stein-
hardt's were lost, bloodshot, despairing.
"Don't talk to me about medieval rubbish," Steinhardt snapped
angrily. "You're a man of science. Of rationality."
"We're damned," Bernstein repeated hopelessly.

18
The boy was blond and tan, and trying to study. The girl was
lovely, with cascading chestnut hair. Her mind was not on her
book, and every few moments she would reach over and stroke the
boy or whisper something with an insinuating smile, as if there
were a flame she had to frequently stoke by an intimate touch or
it would die out. They sat sprawled on the lawn outside the Insti-
tute of Oceanography library, under a broad ancient acacia tree
that shaded them from the hot, dry afternoon sun.
Ruth watched them, gripped by the girl's almost compulsive
touches and caresses. The scene opened channels of memories
that brought tears to her eyes, the tears blurring the images and
distorting the colors. Emotion dislocated her sense of time and
place, and for a moment Ruth was the ghost of love past spying
on herself and Harry as students at the University of Southern
California. She no longer heard what Buckley was saying as he
and Steinhardt, both very attentive, guided her around the
grounds of the institute.
"You'll note we have facilities here, large tanks and medical

89
equipment, that they simply do not have elsewhere," Buckley said.
"Mr. Styles would have much more room to move around, as you
can see."
Ruth saw nothing. She was still in a state of shock and only
now gradually emerging from it. For days she had been numb.
Her sensibilities and emotions had been traumatized. Her hus-
band was still alive. She had seen him, touched him, and even
talked with him. That is, she had talked to him, and Harry in re-
sponse had scribbled brief notes to her on a slate. The gro-
tesqueness of the conversation had upset her more than if she had
not been able to communicate with him at all.
She had wanted to kiss him. His head had bubbled up from the
water, his neck braced in that thick turtleneck collar, making him
resemble a traffic accident victim recovering from whiplash, and
she had kissed him on the lips and face. But his flesh, which had
been so long immersed in the saline solution, had a smooth slick
oily feel to it, and she had involuntarily recoiled. Harry had no-
ticed, and he had been hurt.
"Fm sorry, darling, it's just that you feel so . . . wet, so . . .
different, it surprised me." She had almost said "fishy."
Harry nodded and smiled wanly.
When she went home she had said nothing about Harry's con-
dition to the children, or to friends, or to the neighbors. For some
reason she felt vaguely ashamed. She had told no one about the
experiment. Assuming Harry's death was imminent, everyone was
afraid to ask about him.
But Harry hadn't died. The complications that Dr. Steinhardt
and Dr. Bernstein had predicted had not developed. Suspended in
the amniotic fluid of his tank like some* giant fetus, Harry grew
stronger. He put on flesh. His hair, beard, and mustache grew, the
wispy blond hair covering his face and swirling in the water like
filaments of algae.
Ruth was frightened. Not of Harry or his appearance but of her
own future. Before, her future had been Harry's death. It was to
have been her release. Now she could not even imagine the future,
and when she tried she conjured up only nightmare images.
"Mr. Styles would be much more comfortable . . ." Buckley's
voice faded in and out of her hearing like the sound of a radio
with a dying battery. "And it would be, I should think, intel-
lectually challenging for him." He nodded toward Steinhardt.

7°
"Dr. Steinhardt and he would be able to continue to work directly
together."
Buckley paused solicitously, but Ruth didn't respond. "We'd
like to transfer Mr. Styles to the institute." Again he paused. "We
very much need your cooperation and agreement, Mrs. Styles."
Ruth was on a tree-lined walk, with Buckley and Steinhardt on
either side of her. To her right was a narrow quiet street, lined
bumper to bumper with cars, and beyond that a steep slope cov-
ered with slate-roofed ranch houses and red-tiled Spanish homes
with luxuriant lawns and gardens of roses and camellias, lemon,
orange, and avocado trees that defied the area's natural aridity
with batteries of water sprinklers.
To her left was a three-storied brick building and beyond that
the beach and the ocean. The afternoon offshore breeze was moist
and smelled of sea and kelp, but Ruth was still in her memories-
there was no ocean, only the trees and laboratory and classroom
buildings around her.
"Harry and I met at Southern Cal," Ruth said vaguely. "We
went together all through college. How strange it should all end
on the same sort of bright, sunlit California campus."
"This isn't an end," Steinhardt said softly. "It's a beginning."
Ruth was suddenly enraged by Steinhardt's comment and
turned on him. "Don't recite cheap song lyrics to me, Doctor.
You're going to stick Harry in some oversized bottle like one of
those laboratory specimens for the rest of the time he is alive."
Steinhardt looked directly at her, but said nothing.
After a moment Buckley repeated, "Mrs. Styles, we very much
need your help and cooperation to transfer Mr. Styles here. Re-
ally, what alternatives do you have?"
She turned on Buckley now. "For one thing, I could sue you."
"For what? Keeping your husband alive after he normally
would have died from lung cancer?" Buckley said quietly. "That's
easily remedied, Mrs. Styles. We have only to remove him from
the water. He would then suffocate and expire in a way similar to
that when both his lungs had been destroyed."
"My God, he might be better off dead,"
Steinhardt held up both hands, as if to plead with her. "Harry
has the rest of eternity to be dead. As I will have. In whatever
time he has, we could expand our knowledge of medicine and bi-
ology by quanta."
Buckley was still worrying the threat of a suit. "But you're

7i
right, Mrs. Styles. The legal profession and the courts being what
they are, I have no doubt that you could mount an embarrassing
suit for damages. And the institute would maintain we weren't re-
sponsible. Dr. Steinhardt is an independent contractor who ex-
ceeded the terms of his research grant. Together we could destroy
the career of a great scientist. And the court battles and the legal
expenses would go on for years. In which case what would you do
with Mr. Styles?"
Ruth had no answer. She gazed about at the sprawl of stately
old stucco buildings and the students hurrying to their next class.
At the end of the tree-lined path, suddenly rising from the hillside
sagebrush and manzanita shrubs, were the raw concrete, angular
planes of the new research building, looking like some surreal
space colony erected on an alien terrain.
Ruth looked back at the young couple under the acacia tree.
They no longer evoked the nostalgia of past desire and regrets.
She felt only a cold, hollow ache in her stomach, and she hugged
herself, shivering violently from a deep chill despite the heat.

19
It had rained the night before in Arlington, and the slick of water
covering the tarmac of the Pentagon's heliport gleamed and
reflected back the flat dawn light that shone through the overcast,
creating the mirage effect that Admiral Zachary Harris, the chief
of Naval Operations, was walking on water. Indeed there was a
righteous ferocity in Harris's stride and expression that gave the
impression he might be able to walk right across the adjacent Po-
tomac River into the city of Washington.
He pulled up abruptly in front of Rear Admiral Theodore Nel-
son and glared at the taller officer as if he were going to slug him.
Harris, his burly body hunched in rage, stared silently at Nelson,
while the latter grew increasingly nervous.
Twenty yards away Harris's two spit-and-polish aides, a Navy
commander and a Marine lieutenant colonel, stood waiting, each
holding tightly onto his cap. Their overcoats whipped about their
legs in the whirlwind churned up by the giant rotor blades of a
helicopter that also stood waiting. The chopper was a Boeing Sea
Knight, whale-bellied and huge enough to swallow a platoon of

93
Marines. Harris had to shout to be heard above the roar of its
twin turbine engines.
"How the hell did a thing like this happen? The United States
Navy does not perform medical experiments on human beings.
The CIA does that sort of thing. The Army does that sort of
thing. Even the Air Force may do it. But the United States Navy
does not do that sort of thing. How in the name of Jesus Christ
did a thing like this happen?"
Nelson blinked and cleared his throat. "Admiral, the Office of
Naval Research has over two thousand separate research contracts
with almost as many universities, foundations, and private com-
panies. We can't sit on top of every crazy scientist at every mo-
ment." He shook his head in acknowledgment. "But I know the
responsibility is mine. I take full blame for it." Nelson was chief
of the Office of Naval Research. He was tall and thin, white-
haired, a vivid contrast to the shorter, stocky man.
Harris was a tough, intimidating man, an impression due more
to his aggressive posture and physical hardness than the thickness
of his muscles. Every morning, rain or shine, he ran three miles
around the grounds of the Naval Observatory, where his official
residence, a large Southern mansion, was located. The self-dis-
cipline was manifest in his gaunt face, which bristled with thick
steel-wool eyebrows, hard humorless eyes, and a narrow aquiline
nose.
"Who the hell is this guy Steinhardt?"
Nelson nervously cleared his throat. "He's considered a top
man. Harvard Medical School staff, Johns Hopkins, Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institute, Scripps. His specialty is respiration and
comparative physiology. His work in tissue-fluid pressure and oxy-
gen movement in body cells has twice^been considered for a
Nobel prize. He's done research and development work in the
past for both us and NASA."
Harris grunted an acknowledgment. "We didn't know how
close he was?"
"The basic mechanics of the artificial gill have been around
since the early sixties. Apparently even Steinhardt didn't think it
was going to work with the first implant. The patient was termi-
nal. He had lung cancer."
Harris nodded, then his expression softened. "It really works?"
"Without even trying, I can think of a dozen operations in
which the Navy can use it," Nelson offered eagerly.

94
Harris nodded again. "This gill-man, he doesn't have a family,
does he?"
Nelson cleared his throat again. "A wife and three kids," he an-
swered reluctantly.
"Oh, Jesus Christ. We can't touch this thing with a ten-foot
pole. We have ecologists and the press all over us if we even ex-
periment with dolphins. And those sons of bitches in Congress
who attack us on anything just to get their faces on TV will have
a field day with this one." He looked down at his feet. "Why the
hell does it have to happen now? With the Armed Services Com-
mittee investigation, the carrier and Trident cutbacks, and the
SALT mess. Jesus."
He looked back at Nelson. "Totally dissociate the Navy from
that research project," he ordered.
"Yes, sir."
Harris pivoted on his heel and strode toward the helicopter.
When he was abreast of his aides, Harris unexpectedly turned
around and came back at Nelson. "Totally dissociate the Navy
from that research project," he repeated. He paused for emphasis,
then added, "But keep total control of it."
Then Harris strode back to the helicopter. The two aides
jumped to catch up with him. The helicopter took off immedi-
ately, circling briefly to the west to gain altitude, then headed
south toward the Atlantic Fleet Headquarters in Norfolk, Vir-
ginia. It avoided the low-hanging clouds over Washington as if
they were deadly shoals.

20
Gunther Marx listened to Ruth's outpouring, his dark and sym-
pathetic eyes never leaving her face. When she finshed, he
blurted out, "My God, Ruth, I can't start to imagine the emo-
tional agony you must be going through."
Ruth was surprised. She had come to Gunther for legal advice,
and his first concern had been for her feelings. Perhaps that was
the reason she had come to him. He had beerfthe same way when
she had asked his legal help in settling her father's estate.
There was a teddy-bear quality about him that Ruth liked, a
warm woolly comforting presence. He was stocky, and had thick
brown eyebrows and curly hair, balding in spots, that he'd made
no attempt to camouflage by blow-drying and combing, a vanity
even Harry had practiced.
She and Harry had known Gunther, but not very well, when
they had all been undergraduates at Southern Cal. When they
saw him again, he was a partner in a prosperous Beverly Hills law
firm. In addition to doing Ruth's father's estate, he had helped
Harry with his own estate planning, drawing up the will to mini-

96
mize taxes. He had done it all as a personal favor, since his firm
handled mostly corporate accounts.
"It's an incredible situation/' Gunther acknowledged. "A god-
damn can of worms legally. Off the top of my head I'd say there
are at least three legal quagmires here. One. Is this a case of medi-
cal malpractice? Or, and this is the second legal bog, was the oper-
ation an unlawful or justified human experiment? If that's the
case, then who's responsible for the research? That's the third
question. From what you've told me, this fellow Buckley's attor-
neys aren't too sure of their ground either."
"I haven't spoken to his attorneys," Ruth said.
"No, but you can bet your mortgage that Buckley has."
Gunther got up from his chair and began pacing, an impatient
bouncing movement. "To prove malpractice we have to show a
dereliction of duty that caused damages," he mumbled, like a law
student reviewing a lesson. "And to do this we'd have to bring in
expert testimony on the issue of what would a competent practi-
tioner have done in a similar circumstance. And if the practitioner
had not met the community standards of competence, he would
be liable. Of course, there's a whole other issue here. Does a
human being who no longer has the ability to sustain life have a
right to die a natural and uncomplicated death? Or may he be
subjected to human experimentation by doctors who are em-
ployed to treat him?"
"You mentioned that this might be an unlawful human experi-
ment," Ruth interjected.
Gunther turned back to her and nodded. "There are federal
government guidelines, even international guidelines to protect
patients in experimental procedures. Every hospital that does
major research has its own rules. Did Bernstein, Steinhardt, and
the hospital follow them? But even if they did satisfy the guide-
lines, there is still a question of informed consent. Did they give
you a complete explanation of the procedures involved, the risk,
the likelihood of success? Did they really make clear to you how
extraordinary the experiment was? What would happen if it did
or did not succeed? And did any of the physicians improperly
influence your husband to agree to a drastic experiment which
caused him needless pain and suffering? These are the questions
we'll have to answer just for opening arguments. We'll also have
to find out the results of any animal experiments up to this
point."

97
"Could we get one of the other doctors on the case to testify?"
Ruth asked.
Gunther shook his head. "Most doctors are notoriously reluo
tant to testify against their colleagues. They feel, "There but for
the grace of God go 1/ The reason there are so many external reg-
ulations over medicine today is that doctors have been notoriously
bad at regulating one another's actions. They are a professionally
delinquent community in terms of their ability to control one an-
other's behavior."
Ruth felt panicky. Gunther was no longer holding her hand. In
his quiet way he was forcing her to unemotionally and analytically
examine the situation she was in. As he had pointed out, Buckley
had undoubtedly been over the same ground with his lawyers and
it had all boiled down to the same question.
"In his ruthless way, Buckley's being straight with me, isn't
he?" she said. "We could sue them all. The doctors, the hospital,
the institute. It would be a hell of a case. It would be in the
courts for years and give them all a lot of headaches and bad
publicity. But then what would I do with Harry?"
"The hospital ethically would have to maintain him as best
they could in his present condition, but from what you've de-
scribed, that's not the best of all possible environments for him."
"And the institute won't take him without a release against any
liability."
"Have you discussed this with Harry?"
Ruth shook her head. "It's very difficult. Sometimes he scrib-
bles me messages on that board, but more often than not he's too
doped up. They have him heavily tranquilized."
"Is he coherent when he . . ."—Gunther groped for a word—
"writes you?"
"He seems to be. But it's so hard to tell from just a sentence
here and there."
"I'd like to see him as soon as possible."
"I'll arrange it with Bernstein. There shouldn't be any problem,
although they seem to want to keep everything top secret."
Gunther grunted. He studied Ruth, silent a moment before he
asked the next question. "What are you living on?"
"The company's disability insurance."
"Is it enough?"
Ruth shook her head. "Not quite. It's sixty percent of Harry's
salary. We have some savings to cover the gap, but I don't know

98
what'll be left after I pay the difference between the medical in-
surance and the hospital bills."
"Do I have your permission to negotiate on your and Harry's
behalf?"
"Yes, of course. But what is there to negotiate?"
"I don't know yet. For one thing, we might release Harry to the
institute but still not waive any liability they incurred in the
operation. If Steinhardt and Buckley are sincere in that they
want Harry at the institute in order to gain further scientific and
medical knowledge, then they would go along with that. Stein-
hardt, incidentally, would have nothiilg to say about it. It would
be strictly Buckley's decision as head of the institute. If I were
their lawyer, I would oppose it."
"Why?"
"Because it undercuts the only defense they have. To wit, the
Institute of Oceanography isn't responsible for Steinhardt's medi-
cal experiments. He's an independent research scientist working
under a contract with the government, or whoever the hell is
sponsoring his work. It'll be a moment of truth for Buckley. Is he
really more interested in Harry and the research or in avoiding the
liability for it?"
"What if he refuses to compromise, if you could call it that,
and insists that we sign a total release before they'll take Harry?"
"Then I guess it becomes your moment of truth. Are you more
interested in pursuing a suit that might make you and your chil-
dren rich but let Harry languish at the hospital? Or will you
release him to the institute to continue . . . what? . . . this . . .
this great experiment into the great unknown?"
Ruth was about to blurt out her answer but checked herself.
She took a deep breath to settle herself. On the wall behind
Gunther's desk was a painting, the only piece of art in his law
ofEce. A clipper ship rode perilously on the heaving sea, its narrow
racy hull half submerged in iron-blue waves, the forward mast
shattered and its sails rent to tatters by the gale. Ruth slowly let
out her breath.
"I don't give a damn about the money," she said. "Harry will
go crazy if he has to stay the way he is now. We'll both go stark
raving mad."

21
The storm fell on Los Angeles. The flood-control channels with
their high perpendicular concrete embankments swelled with the
runoff of the streets and became muddy torrents. Two young boys
in Van Nuys sneaked under the fence to play in the water and
were swept away and drowned. The North Hollywood and Bur-
bank area were blacked out when lightning struck a power line.
Street corners were flooded under a foot of water. The year's accu-
mulation of oil floated to the surface of drenched freeways, creat-
ing a slick, greased surface, and the commuting traffic crept along
like lines of great snails gliding on tractionless tires. Cars with wet
brakes careened into cars stalled with wet distributors, colliding
like rudderless barges in a river. Three people were killed in traffic
accidents caused by the rain. Harry Styles, dressed in a black
neoprene wet suit, sat upright in an aluminum-framed chair,
watching the spectacle on the six o'clock news on television.
It was not a torrential storm with gale force winds. It was just
an insistent rain whose ordained mission was to soak and replen-
ish the parched land for spring. But Los Angeles, that very techni-

lOO
cally advanced city, used technology to bulldoze and defy the pri-
mal nature of the land. In Pacific Palisades a cliff, undermined by
the cut of the Pacific Coast Highway, collapsed, burying a forty-
five-year-old salesman in his Impala. Mud and rock slides closed
the Laurel Canyon road, trapping several drivers in their cars. A
new development of $100,000 homes in Bluebird Canyon slipped
and lurched several feet, tottering on their cracked foundations. A
high tide and heavy surf breached the sand at Malibu, inundating
beach homes, the foamy seawater surging and ebbing through liv-
ing rooms. The TV reporter, his trousers rolled up to his knees,
signed off the story standing barefooted and calf deep in water in
a ruined living room, grinning cutely at the camera as if the storm
were a great joke he had personally contrived.
Like many convalescing patients, Harry spent a great deal of
time watching TV. The television was set up against one of the
viewing windows of his tank at the Institute of Oceanography. The
tank, a construction of welded steel plates framing enormous,
thick glass windows, was about the same length and width as
Harry's study at home but half again as high. It had originally
been built for a study of large pelagic fish.
The transfer from the hospital to the institute had been un-
eventful largely because Harry had been heavily tranquilized. In
fact, he had been kept that way since the first night he had
regained consciousness, and after that shock of awakening he had
biologically adapted to his new form of respiration without ex-
periencing any anxiety about it. Having fallen into a coma with
the realization that he was dying, he was at first overwhelmed
with the wonder of simply being alive. The pain that had stabbed
him with every breath was absent. The extraordinary environment
in which he found himself did not alarm him. His isolation in an
oxygen tent, numbed by drugs, before the operation had in a way
preconditioned him. In the weeks before, bound by pain and
feebleness to a hospital bed, even the shrunken weight of his body
had become intolerable, and he had developed bedsores. Now he
floated free, free from pain and the drudgery of gravity, unfettered
by anxieties, to drift effortlessly amid psychopharmocological
mists and dreams. Once Harry was at ease in the large tank, Bern-
stein, still acting as the attending physician, began gradually to
cut down on the dosage of the tranquilizers.
Although the dimensions of his tank were limited, they were a
liberation from the imprisonment of his hospital bed and the first

lOl
tank in which he had found himself. Harry felt his horizons were
in fact expanding, and this feeling was strengthened by his im-
proving health. Like all reprieved men, he experienced each new
moment of life as an unexpected gift. And each day Steinhardt or
Buckley arrived with a technical innovation that expanded Harry's
mobility—a pair of water-corrected contact lenses, a zero-gravity
toilet adapted from Skylab, and now the remote-control TV
switch, encased in waterproof flexible plastic, which allowed him
to operate the TV set himself.
'"They've installed all the comforts of home, huh." Ruth was
standing at one of the viewing windows holding the microphone
in her hand, smiling at him. Harry had not seen her come in. The
tank was located in a large, windowless concrete-walled basement
room; the only other occupant, a graduate student who sat at a
desk by the door on the other side of the room.
Harry kicked out of his chair and swam over to the window,
propelling himself with small sculling motions. He attempted to
talk to Ruth by making exaggerated movements with his lips, al-
though no sound issued from his throat.
Ruth studied his mouth very carefully, then shook her head.
"I'm sorry, honey, but I can't read your lips."
Harry nodded. He picked up the slate board leaning against the
window and began to write something out.
"Dr. Steinhardt tells me that they're already at work making
you a special throat mike so that you can talk. He says they don't
even have to invent anything special." There was a strained, false
note of cheer in Ruth's voice, but the note was dampened out as
her voice came over the speaker in the tank and was transmitted
through the water.	*
Harry finished scribbling and held up the slate for Ruth to read:
not quite all the comforts of home
"Can I bring you something from home?" Ruth asked anx-
iously. The strain of the meeting deepened the lines in her fore-
head and the webbing of fine lines about her eyes.

102
Harry nodded and immediately began writing again. His re-
quest only took a moment to write, and he held it up:
your bikini
"My bikini. Oh, Harry." Ruth forced a smile. "I'm not getting
in that water with you. You know what a chicken I am about the
water. If I get my head underwater I panic." She studied Harry
then, as if eager to change the subject, and quickly said, "You're
looking much better. That wet suit is something new."
Harry nodded and bent to writing again. He had put on weight,
but the distorting wide-angle effect of the water made him seem
huskier than he really was. His blond hair, uncut since he first en-
tered the hospital, was growing out long and full, billowing about
his head, and his beard was taking shape. The saline solution had
bleached all his hair to the color of tow to which Christopher's
reverted in the summer, and the pale yellow hair and beard en-
circled his head, reflecting the watery light like a corona.
"The wet suit looks good on you. Very macho."
With the wet suit on, the gill cover looked no more extraor-
dinary than a cowl collar. It no longer seemed the grotesque
prosthetic device it had been in the hospital when Harry, naked
and helpless, had first worn it.
they're conditioning me to colder water
"Why are they doing that?"
Harry pantomimed flexing his muscles and beating his chest.
"It will make you stronger?" Ruth interpreted. Harry nodded.
"Build up your resistance." Harry again nodded.
"Dr. Steinhardt says you're eating better. You're getting the
same food the astronauts ate when they were in space."
Harry made a grimace and wrote:
it's like eating toothpaste

103
He held up one of the metal food tubes for Ruth's inspection.
"But the doctor told me they've started you on bananas, cheese,
even hamburger."
but no fish, i'd feel like a cannibal
Ruth laughed, a very uneasy laugh that verged on tears. She was
having a great deal of difficulty talking to Harry. He sensed it in
her posture, the phrasing and rhythm of her voice, the tautness in
her expression. It was as if she were angry with him. In the past
she would get that way when, with a contractual deadline press-
ing, he would have to work late, or round the clock, or over the
weekend, or he would have to go out of town on business unex-
pectedly. There was no reasonable objection she could make, since
it was his work, schedules interlocked with the deadlines of other
space and defense subcontractors, irrevocably committed to the
countdown of space shots. She never blamed Harry. Still he could
always sense the suppressed anger, the attitude of abandonment,
the resentment. It was there now.
"Is there anything I can do for you?" she asked.
yes. i'm horny
"Oh, Harry, don't. Please." Ruth's voice broke and she covered
her face with her hands.
Harry was confused. It was meant to be a joke, one of the
bawdy intimacies he had often used in the past to break any ten-
sion between them. But the joke now had its tragic resonances.
Ruth and Harry's sex life had ceased with his illness. He had been
preoccupied with pain, the struggle for breath, and dying for over
a year. His sensuality had not extended beyond the primal lust to
breathe. What aching deprivation Ruth might be experiencing he
did not know.
With his growing awareness, Harry felt an increasing need to
touch Ruth, as if to reaffirm his life. He wanted his children.

104
i want to see the kids
"I'll bring them next time, Harry. I promise." Ruth was uncom-
fortable. "It's just that I haven't ... I haven't explained every-
thing to them." There was guilt in her stammer, a confession.
"Harry, it's so hard to explain."
what did you tell them?
"I explained that you were very sick. And that you had to have
a special way of breathing. Harry, it's as if they're afraid to ask any
questions."
Harry nodded. There were only a few inches of glass and water
between him and his wife's face, lovely even in her anguish. For
the first time it occurred to Harry that he might never be able to
transcend that fragile barrier.
"I'll tell them, Harry. I promise. And I'll bring them next time.
It's just that it's all so confusing. It all takes so much getting used
to."
Harry nodded again, but he didn't try to say or write anything.
He reached up and touched the glass, and Ruth pressed her hand
on the glass opposite him. They stood there in silence, looking at
each other, as if trying to make an extrasensory contact through
the implacable surface of glass.
"I've got to go now, Harry," Ruth said after a while. "Mrs.
Levine is sitting with Christopher."
At the door to the tank room, Ruth turned and gave Harry a
cheerful smile and wave; then she was gone, and Harry stood star-
ing forlornly at the closed door.
The attendant put down the papers he had been studying at his
desk and came up to the tank, where he logged the readings on
several gauges and drew a sample of water from a tap located at
the bottom of the tank.
Neither Harry nor the attendant was aware that in the hallway
outside Ruth had collapsed against the door, stifling her sobs so
that they couldn't be heard in the tank room.

22
Dr. Steinhardt peered into the goldfish bowl set on an end table
in the Styleses' living room. He intently studied the fish as though
it were a rare biological specimen. Across the room Paul Buckley
and Gunther Marx were conferring in low tense voices.
Ruth paused in the doorway to note the contrast in the two
men. Buckley, impeccably groomed, was wearing a glen plaid busi-
ness suit and a carefully blocked silk foulard tie. Gunther was
dressed in a bulky turtleneck sweater and a rough tweed jacket.
His hair was shaggy and his jaws shadowed. He looked more like a
tough labor leader hammering out a work contract than a corpo-
rate lawyer.
It was Gunther who had worked out the arrangements with the
institute in an extraordinary way that seemed, at least temporarily,
to have satisfied everyone. Harry had been moved to the institute
not as a patient or a guinea pig but as a paid consultant in under-
water research. But Gunther had refused to give any releases from
liability concerning the original operation. The institute's lawyers
had reluctantly agreed to the arrangement. Harry's status at the

io6
institute was made an entirely separate situation from the opera-
tion and its immediate aftermath. In that way the institute's lia-
bility was somewhat mitigated. Lawyers, Ruth thought, live in a
world of threatening suits as tangled as any form of life Harry
might find underwater. But the arrangement gave her husband a
certain dignity. For that she was tremendously grateful to
Gunther.
He looked up and caught her eye. "Are the children all right?"
"Fast asleep. God, that I could sleep so easily and so peace-
fully."
Steinhardt turned toward her, surprised to see her standing next
to him, his concentration on the goldfish had been so intent.
"How did they take the news?" he inquired solicitously.
"They were confused. They don't really understand it. I don't
think they will until they see Harry for themselves. I don't look
forward to that."
"How about the older girl?" Steinhardt asked. "Is it Brenda?"
Ruth nodded. "She's out with a school friend. A boy. It's a sort
of date." She smiled ruefully and shook her head. "They start dat-
ing so young nowadays. She wanted to stay at home with me. But
I made her keep her date. Whatever else happens, my children are
going to live normal lives."
Ruth sat down on the couch and looked from Steinhardt to
Marx and Buckley. "You know, right after I saw Harry in that
water tank for the first time, I thought of telling the children that
their father was dead."
Buckley leaned forward. "Would that have been wise?"
"I don't know what is wise or unwise anymore. As far as science
is concerned, Harry may have made another great leap for man-
kind. But as far as functioning as a father, or a husband, Harry
might just as well be dead."
There was a heavy silence in the room. Then Steinhardt stirred
and cleared his voice. "Ah, yes, well, as Dr. Bernstein and I have
explained to you in the past, the odds are still very much against
your husband surviving very long. There is still a better than even
chance that the cancer has spread elsewhere and will redevelop in
another organ. In any event, serious complications are inevitable
in a pioneering medical procedure."
Ruth said nothing. She stared at Steinhardt and then at Buck-
ley. The institute director's expression was sympathetic. But
Ruth wondered just how sincere his concern was.
"Harry will be transferred to the institute only because Paul

107
Buckley wants Harry there," Gunther had told Ruth after his ini-
tial meetings with the director. "If it were up to his lawyers they
would let Harry rot in a tank at the hospital and let us sue. It
would make an easier case for defending the institute. But Buck-
ley's an ambitious man. He's not a scientist in spite of his Ph.D.
He's a game player. A power seeker. He's carefully weighed the
pluses and the minuses. If he abandoned Steinhardt and denied
any responsibility for Harry's operation, he would gain nothing,
but he still might be a party to a messy lawsuit. Believe me, he
carefully examined that possibility long before you blurted it out.
By bringing Harry to the institute he is sticking his neck out. But
he also gains control of the situation, and he can exploit it to his
own advantage."
"What advantage?" Ruth had asked.
"Having his name linked with a major scientific and medical
advance. The publicity, the scientific prestige, the research
grants."
"But he had nothing to do with it."
"He will if Harry is brought to the institute."
That had been Gunther's canny evaluation of Buckley. Ruth
studied him closely now. His features were as neatly composed as
his foulard. He had wanted to talk to her, so he'd arranged this
meeting. He leaned toward her now, as if the diminished distance
between them automatically created an increased intimacy and
trust.
"Mrs. Styles, we are going to have to make a formal an-
nouncement in the next few days. Some word about the operation
and Mr. Styles seems to have leaked out to the media. We've al-
ready had several confused inquiries. We don't think we can put
off an announcement of some sort much longer. We'd very much
like your cooperation and participation. It will give the revelation
and the operation itself more an appearance of, well, normalcy."
Ruth was suddenly frightened. "You mean reporters. Televi-
sion."
"I'm afraid it can't be avoided," Buckley said.
Ruth shook her head vehemently. "It's out of the question."
"I think Harry would be much more at ease with you at his
side."
"At his side? I'm afraid the normal vocabulary of nuptial loy-
alty doesn't apply here. I may or may not still have a husband, but
I do have three children. And I won't have them made part of
some scientific sideshow. Step right up, folks. See Harry, the

io8
fish-man. One of the wonders of the modern world. He breathes
water like a fish and crawls on his belly like a reptile."
"Mrs. Styles/' Buckley protested, "we're hardly going to turn
this into some kind of carnival situation."
Gunther cut him off. "We're simply going to have to respect
Mrs. Styles's feelings in this matter. I'm wholly in sympathy with
her wanting to keep her children out of this. For the time being
we can give Mr. Styles another identity. It's done quite often in
the reporting of special medical cases."
Buckley looked at Steinhardt as if for help, but the scientist
only nodded, as if he were also in sympathy with Ruth. "We
could simply call him John Doe," he suggested. "Or perhaps John
Glaucus."
"Glaucus?"
Steinhardt gave a shy smile and shrugged. "It is what I've been
calling it in my reports. The Glaucus Project. In Greek mythol-
ogy, Glaucus was a mortal whom the Titans transformed into a
sea god who could only live in the water."
Ruth stared at Steinhardt in amazement. She looked from
Steinhardt to Buckley, then suddenly laughed. The laugh was bit-
ter and mocking. "Glaucus. Lord, but you people love to name
your hardware and your grandiose projects after ancient gods.
Apollo. Saturn. Poseidon. Glaucus. It's as if you are deliberately
trying to invest them with some primal, holy force. The high
priests of modern science and technology invoking the protection
of the old gods."
She stood up impulsively as if it were the first step to fleeing.
She was angry, and frightened. She turned and the end table with
the goldfish bowl was directly before her. The goldfish hovered, its
fins as delicate as veils holding it motionless, its huge popeyes star-
ing at her, the puckered mouth gulping water and the fragile gold
gills undulating softly. The convex crystal side of the bowl
magnified the fish face into a threatening gargoyle. Ruth was
revolted, horrified. She violently shoved the bowl to get it out of
her sight. It hurtled off the table, shattering on the floor in an ex-
plosion of glass, water, and sand. The goldfish lay at Ruth's feet
gasping, the delicate gills quivering.
"Ooh!" She stooped to pick up the goldfish and in her panicky
haste slashed her hand on a piece of glass. She stood and held out
her hand, the goldfish convulsing in her bloody palm, Ruth's eyes
pleading desperately with the three men in the room for help.

23
The human voice starts as an exhaled breath through the wind-
pipe into the larynx, where it passes over two folds of mucous
membranes called the vocal cords. The cords vibrate, producing a
resonance in the air enclosed in the pharynx, mouth, nose, and
sinuses. The a, e, and o sounds of speech are made by the rever-
beration of air between the vocal cords and the back of the
tongue and in the mouth. M, n, and ng sounds resound in the
nasal cavity. And the other consonants are articulated by the
teeth, tongue, and lips as the breath passes out of the mouth.
Without the breath of air there is no human speech. In Harry's
case his speech organs were intact. The solution of the com-
munications engineers was to substitute oscillating circuits for the
vibrating air columns and amplifiers for the acoustical resonating
chambers. No new technology had to be developed. The electric
voice box developed for people who have had their larynx sur-
gically removed because of throat cancer had only to be modified
and adapted.
From the first day Buckley had seen Harry scribbling on the

no
slate board, he had assigned engineers to that task. The Hydro-
Voice they developed was a marvel of miniaturized electronics. It
was the size of a small transistor radio and merely had to be
strapped across Harry's throat. But the electronic shrieks, howls,
grunts, trills, and moans it produced had to be calibrated and
registered to Harry's distorted speech patterns. If a diver breathes
air compressed to four or five times its normal density, as he
would in a pressure chamber, the vibratory range of the voice is al-
tered and the person sounds like an animated duck. Harry was
breathing water, and the vibrations he made produced no compre-
hensible sound.
Harry worked with the engineer^, pushing himself to the limits
of his returning energy. When the engineers had finished their ex-
periments for the day, Harry sat in the tank talking to himself,
practicing sounds, words, and sentences like a child left alone in
his playpen. He did not try to talk to Ruth, however. He contin-
ued to write her notes. Like an adolescent whose vocal cords sud-
denly double in size and unexpectedly drop or soar an octave,
Harry was still finding his voice. He was self-conscious about it.
He asked Ruth to delay bringing the children to see him. Chris-
topher could not read and communication with the four-year-old
would be impossible. David and Brenda might be disturbed if he
was mute. But there was more to it than he told Ruth, a changing
perception of himself that he couldn't scribble out on his slate
board. It was a view of himself that Buckley had revealed to him.
Without his voice Harry was a victim, a medical guinea pig. With
a voice he would become an explorer, communicating his dis-
coveries about the strange new world he inhabited in body and
mind.
The day the engineers announced that the Hydro-Voice articu-
lated Harry's speech as well as it ever would, Harry told Ruth that
he wanted to see the children. He did not speak to her, but scrib-
bled out his request. The next afternoon Ruth, nervous and edgy,
ushered the three excited children into the tank room.
Christopher immediately ran to the window in the tank and
stared at Harry. The two older children stopped in the middle of
the room and stared, rooted to the spot. Overhead spotlights illu-
minated the tank, and Harry hovered in their beams, suspended in
the shining water like a transcending angel. His long swirling
blond hair and beard were unfamiliar to them. They did not rec-

Ill
ognize their father, and he awed and frightened them. Ruth had
to shove them forward.
"Chrissy . . . Brenda . . . David. I've missed you." The voice
that emanated from the tank was deep, resonant, totally strange.
It was not quite human, yet it was vibrant, and something
about it suggested that the speaker had extraordinary, mysterious
powers. Ruth and the three children were stunned by it. But then
the voice took on a familiar cadence.
"Goddamn but I've missed you kids. Christopher, how's my big
boy? David, you look as though you've grown three inches and
put on twenty pounds of muscles. But it must be a visual trick of
the water, because Brenda looks like Raquel Welch."
Brenda blushed and grinned, flashing her braces, then quickly
closed her mouth in the self-conscious way of a teenaged girl.
"Still breaking ten hearts a day at junior high, honey?"
Both Brenda and David silently gawked at Harry. Christopher
took a step back and turned to Ruth. "That Daddy in there?"
The boy's eyes were wide with wonder.
Ruth nodded. "He has to stay in the tank to breathe a special
medicine, as he did in the hospital."
"Like his oxygen?" Harry's oxygen mask had made a great im-
pression on Christopher.
"Yes, like his oxygen."
Christopher turned back to look at Harry and then, as if sud-
denly reassured, he ran right up against the glass and began
breathlessly jabbering away, exploding with news. "Stevey's got a
new dog. It's a big black one, and it almost bit me. I tried to ride
on its back. And it growled at me, rrraciahhh! Like that. Just like a
lion."
Ruth put her arm around Christopher and gently moved him
to the microphone. "Christopher, honey, you'll have to talk to
Daddy through this or he can't hear you in the water."
Christopher held the mike with both hands. "It went
rrraciahhhJ Just like a lion. You gonna fight sharks, Daddy?"
Harry smiled at his son. "There aren't too many sharks in here,
Chrissy. Or at least they're hiding pretty good."
"They can eat you all up. Just like Jaws."
"I'll be careful. I'll look both ways when crossing the tank."
Harry had no favorites among his children. They each
delighted, touched, and troubled him in different ways. Chris-
topher was an exuberant, talkative puppy dog. He had been born

112
almost seven years after David, and the other two children had
treated him with amusement, deference, and protection. Of all
the members of the family, Christopher was the most buoyant
and resilient. He hadn't understood his father's illness and disap-
pearance, but he was a child with resources. His father had always
presented him with wonders—movies, the ocean, the new swim-
ming pool, Disneyland. Here was simply another wonder.
Harry studied his other two children. Standing side by side
David and Brenda looked like twins, Brenda, at some point in his
illness of which Harry was barely conscious, had celebrated her
fourteenth birthday. She was about to enter high school, and she
was preoccupied with the paraphernalia of her adolescence—the
boys, dates, grades, fads, fashions, pop music, and social stigmas.
Harry had already evolved to the status of "parent," a pronouncer
of restrictions and duties. With his illness he had now become a
source of sadness in her abundant life, an awkward legacy.
Harry sensed that sadness in her, but it was David who filled
Harry with pain. The boy was his first son. They had always had a
close, special relationship, and Harry's illness had come when the
boy seemed particularly vulnerable. He had withdrawn, silent and
brooding, into himself. Of all the children he had been the least
able to cope with Harry's illness. Christopher had often wandered
into Harry's bedroom at home, and later, in the hospital, he
would bring grave, excited news of the neighborhood or television
programs he had just watched. Brenda fussed about him, gentle
and motherly, playing nurse. But David had maintained a silent
distance, watching him from the doorway or, on occasion, speak-
ing to his father with an unnatural shyness. Of all the children,
David had instinctively known he was going to lose his father; he
could do nothing; and the loss was unbearable to him. He now
stared at Harry with dark, hurt eyes.
"You getting along okay?" the man in the tank asked David in
a strange, resounding voice.
"Yes sir." The boy's voice was subdued, hardly audible.
"You're the man of the house now, David. You've got to watch
out for everything."
The boy said nothing. Harry looked at him a moment, then
asked, "It's very weird, isn't it?"
The boy nodded timidly.
"I'm okay. Really I am," Harry insisted in that alien voice.
"Just try to think of me as a kind of astronaut. Like the first man

3
on Neptune. Only I've had a systems failure, and I'm having trou-
ble getting back to earth."
"Daddy, can I go swimming with you?" Christopher broke in.
Harry laughed, and the sound came out like the chords of a
bass guitar. "Gee, I don't know. I don't see why not."
"Harry, it's too deep/' Ruth said anxiously.
"I can hold him up. The way I used to do in the deep end of
the pool." Harry wanted to hold his younger son once more. He
felt an aching need to hold or touch each of his children and his
wife.
Ruth appealed to the attendant, the graduate student assigned
to monitor the tank. But the attendant didn't see any reason why
Christopher couldn't go into the tank with Harry. Dr. Steinhardt,
Mark Matsuda, two of the communications engineers, and the at-
tendant had all donned wet suits and jumped in the tank with
Harry at one time or another to perform medical tests or adjust
equipment.
Ruth looked worried. "You want to get in the tank with your
father and Chrissy?" she asked David.
The boy looked at Harry and then back at his mother and
shook his head. Christopher had already climbed halfway up the
steel ladder leading to the top of the tank and was squealing with
impatience. Ruth ordered him down and made him take off all his
clothes.
Then the attendant, laughing at the chubby little white ass that
bobbed energetically, climbed up the ladder with Christopher in
front of him. At the upper level of the tank, Harry treaded water
with only the top of his head and eyes above the surface of the
water, holding his arms out toward the Ipy. Christopher squealed
"Daddy," yanked out of the attendant's grasp, and lunged for his
father. He wrapped his arms about Harry's neck, and the sudden
force and weight of the boy dropping on him drove them both un-
derwater. Harry had miscalculated his own buoyancy. Without his
lungs filled with air, he could not hold the boy up. They sank to
the bottom of the tank.
The boy, frightened at being underwater, entwined his arms
about his father's neck in a death clutch, shutting off Harry's gills.
Harry struggled to loosen the boy's grip, but in his fear the child
only held on more desperately to his father.
Ruth watched with horror at what was happening. She
screamed to the attendant to get Christopher. The young man

ii4
jumped into the tank just as Harry finally pried the boy's arms
loose from about his neck and shoved the child toward the sur-
face.
The attendant grabbed Christopher's arm and hauled the boy,
choking and panicked, to the side of the tank. Ruth had scam-
pered up the ladder in the time the rescue had taken, and now she
reached out and pulled Christopher out of the water. Still cough-
ing up water and sobbing, the boy clung to his mother. Harry's
thickly bearded face surfaced at the side of the tank and he
reached up in a futile effort to try and assist Ruth. Christopher
screamed and recoiled in terror from his father so violently he al-
most knocked Ruth off the ladder.
"I'm sorry, Chris. I didn't mean to hurt you." The child's
scream and the deep electronic voice reverberated off the concrete
walls of the tank room and echoed hauntingly. "I didn't mean to
hurt you."
Harry, dismayed and sick at heart, watched Ruth carry the
screaming, terrified child down from the tank.

24
There was witchery in the sunset. Steinhardt felt it with an an-
cient homesick longing. Above the Pacific the evening sun heated
the caldron of air and moisture, and it boiled up into great puffs
of cumulus clouds, towering thunderheads, and high ghostly veils
of cirrus. The sun sank toward the sea, and at the horizon the
light struck back through the clouds. Scarlet billows, magic ma-
genta towers, and searing pink sheets covered the western sky.
Once as a child in Norway, enchanted by a similar sunset, Stein-
hardt had mindlessly sailed his small skiff out of the leeward shel-
ter of the fjord toward it. He sailed under an ancient compulsion.
There at the line where the air became water and the light be-
came the night, there was a place and time where all mysteries of
man and earth were revealed. But the sun had fallen and night en-
gulfed him on a black heaving sea. Only by luck had the boy
made it back to a beach, wrecking his sailboat in the surf and al-
most drowning.
Steinhardt turned reluctantly from the window. "We simply
don't know what changes are now taking place in his body."

6
Buckley frowned. "Fm not sure I follow you."
"Harry has apparently learned to use his diaphragm, the con-
strictor muscles in his throat, and the sternomastoid and trapezius
muscles in ways they've never been used before."
"What's it all about?"
"To create a flow of water over his gills. Higher fish have spe-
cial muscles in their operculum to accomplish this. In Harry's case
we created the flow by circulating the water in the tank with a
pump. However, now his muscles are functioning in a way we
don't understand yet. It's possibly a combination of automatic
swallowing and the action of his diaphragm."
"Can't Styles tell you anything about what's happening?"
Steinhardt shook his head. "It's entirely an unconscious re-
sponse. Probably a biofeedback mechanism of some sort. The
muscles and nerves of the jaw and neck, the pharynx, even the
striated muscles of the diaphragm, all originally develop from the
gill arches of the embryo. Perhaps they've regressed back to a
primordial function. We simply don't know at this point."
"You said something about his having developed new muscles."
"Again, it's speculation. For example, when a lung is removed,
the diaphragm becomes thicker and stronger in order to pump
more air in and out of the remaining lung to make up for the lost
one. Or if a vein is transplanted to take the place of an artery, the
vein will develop a thick sheath of muscle the same as an artery.
Just what changes are taking place in Styles's body we can only
guess at until . . . until such time as we can perform an autopsy."
At that moment the phone on Buckley's desk buzzed.
"Yes?"
"A telegram was just delivered," the voice on the speaker phone
said. "It's from the Navy Department."
"Please bring it right in." Buckley turned back to Steinhardt.
"Have you discussed this with Dr. Bernstein?"
Steinhardt hesitated, then said, "Yes, of course."
Buckley's secretary walked into the office, handed him a tele-
gram, and left without saying a word.
"I haven't seen much of him lately," Buckley said, opening the
telegram and scanning it.
"He, of course, still has his normal surgical practice." Had Buck-
ley been listening carefully he would have caught the total lack
of conviction in Steinhardt's voice. Bernstein's behavior lately had
puzzled and hurt Steinhardt. As Styles had grown healthier, Bern-

ii7
stein had become morose. He showed up at the institute rarely,
and his phone calls to Steinhardt were brief and perfunctory. It
was as if the sight of Styles had become increasingly painful to
him. On his last trip to the institute, he had collapsed in tears in
Steinhardt's office. "My God, Karl, what have we done?" he
sobbed. "What have we done?" He had been drunk.
Neither depression nor alcoholism was uncommon among doc-
tors, and Steinhardt had tactfully suggested that Bernstein should
perhaps seek psychiatric help.
"What the hell can a shrink do about that?" the surgeon had
yelled, waving his arm in the general direction of the tank room.
"Those bastardsJ"
Buckley's exclamation broke Steinhardt out of his reverie.
"Something the matter?" he inquired.
Buckley read aloud: "It is the established policy of the De-
fense Department and the Navy not to conduct or sponsor experi-
mentation on human beings. The radical medical procedure per-
formed in the Glaucus Project was totally outside the parameters
of the research authorized in the funding research grant.'"
"Is that from the Navy? Is that telegram addressed to me?"
Steinhardt interrupted, outrage in his voice.
"It's addressed to both of us," Buckley answered evenly. "But
listen, I've come to the tricky part." He continued to read:
" 'However, in view of the humanitarian considerations the Office
of Naval Research will make available whatever reasonable funds
are necessary to maintain the subject and allow him to develop his
full potential.'"
Buckley glanced at Steinhardt and then continued to read. " 'It
is expected that the scientific knowled^ generated will be trans-
mitted directly to the Office of Naval Research. The previously es-
tablished security and classification procedures will remain in
effect.'" Buckley put down the telegram and smiled.
"I don't understand. What does it all mean?" Steinhardt asked
in confusion.
"Officially they disown us. As a practical matter, they own us.
And they will liberally fund the research."
"Aach, politicians," Steinhardt said with disgust.
"Yes, indeed. They have abandoned us to suffer the slings and
arrows of our outraged colleagues, congressmen, clergymen and—"
he groped unsuccessfully for another alliteration and then added
lamely, "editorial writers." Buckley was still smiling. He was in an

n8
expansive mood that greatly puzzled Steinhardt. The institute di-
rector turned, and for the first time he noticed the glorious sunset
framed in the window.
"The tide is coming in," Buckley noted. "What's that line from
Shakespeare? There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken
at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their
life is bound in shallows and in miseries.'" He turned to Stein-
hardt, the conspiratorial smile having returned to his face. "On
such a full sea, Karl, we are now afloat."
Buckley's pompous oration irritated Steinhardt. "No doubt
quoting from Julius Caesar is quite impressive at trustee meet-
ings," he said caustically. "Just what the hell does it mean here?"
Buckley merely smiled in response. There was something trium-
phant in his expression that disturbed Steinhardt. The deep red
light from the dying sun inflamed his face, giving him a Satanic
look.

25
The tranquilizer Valium loses its effectiveness when used con-
tinuously over an extended period of time. Before that happened
Bernstein began to reduce Harry's dosage to allow his psyche to
make its own natural adjustments to its unnatural condition.
Released from their psychopharmacological bounds, the night-
mares now assaulted Harry. He awoke from a^ of them but one—
the reality that he would spend the rest of his life in a tank. He
became deeply depressed, barely responding to Steinhardt's que-
ries. Then his mood suddenly changed and he became agitated,
nervously churning about the tank.
Disturbed, Steinhardt conferred over the phone with Bernstein.
"Perhaps we should put him back on Valium."
"He's having anxiety attacks," Bernstein said. His voice was un-
concerned. "I'll tell you what a psychiatrist once told me. If you
feel compelled as a doctor to prescribe something in these cases,
fine, write the prescription, fill it, and then take it yourself. But
the patient has to learn how to cope with his panic and overcome
it."

120
"Frankly, Morris, Fm seriously concerned with the state of his
mind."
"Acute depression is very common in cases like this," Bernstein
said.
"What cases like this can you possibly be referring to?" Stein-
hardt snapped in an astonished voice.
"Well, parallel cases. Major surgery. Heart transplants. Patho-
logical depression is what you have to watch out for. Fve had pa-
tients who became psychotic after surgery and had to be sent to a
mental institution. Christiaan Barnard had a heart transplant, a
housewife the same age as Styles, who just walked out of the ward
one night and jumped out of the window. Suicides are not un-
common." He said all of this in a flat voice.
Steinhardt spoke to Harry. He related his phone conversation
with Bernstein, even mentioning the suicide.
"Why are you telling me all this?" Harry asked.
"Because I don't regard you as my patient," Steinhardt replied.
"You are my colleague. Together we are embarked on an investi-
gation which has no precedent in science. We must have absolute
trust in each other."
Harry nodded and was silent. He looked at Steinhardt standing
outside the tank. He remembered he had once been impressed
with the man's height, the gaunt severity of his features, and the
guileless, uncompromising look in his eyes. Now all that was
muted by the barrier of glass and water between them. Harry's
thoughts and emotions were in riot. He both feared Steinhardt
and was enthralled by him. "Where's Dr. Bernstein? Why isn't
he here?"
"I talk to him every day, Harry. There's really no need for him
to be here. You have, after all, a full-time doctor and surgeon in
attendance." Steinhardt allowed himself a small smile.
"It's not that," Harry said. "I got the distinct impression on his
last few visits that Dr. Bernstein was very uncomfortable in my
presence. Now he worries about my being suicidal."
Steinhardt did not say anything for a moment, then asked, "Do
you feel suicidal?"
Harry shrugged. "I look around at the four walls of the tank
and I keep saying to myself, 'Is this all there is?' I'm getting des-
perate. When I first regained consciousness, I was ecstatic that I
was still alive. That I wasn't in pain. That I would see my wife
and family again. It wasn't the tranquilizers you had me doped up

121
with. If anything, they kept me down. My mood was joy. I felt I
was reborn. But I wasn't really reborn. I can't forget what I was
before this. It's a bitter irony, but the stronger and more alert I
become, the more depressed I am. My visits with Ruth have be-
come too painful for both of us. My children are shocked and
confused. I try to visualize how I must appear to them, and in my
mind's eye I have become my own nightmare. Perhaps what I
feel now is not very different from what I felt when I was dying.
But my feelings are more intense now, perhaps because I'm
stronger.
"I said a moment ago I was getting desperate, and I am. I feel
like a prisoner in solitary confinement with a life sentence. It's all
so goddamn hopeless." Steinhardt started to speak, but Harry held
up his hand. "No, please don't interrupt. I know what you're
going to say. What you always say. We've got important work to
do. The work. That's the only thing that keeps me from losing my
mind. You know what the high point of my day is? The blood
samples. Yeah, the blood samples. The prick of the needle lets me
know I'm still alive.
"Sometimes I float here, not feeling anything. I'm weightless. I
have no body. I don't even feel heat or cold. I'm like a ghost.
Ruth comes to visit me, and I can only look at her through these
windows. I can't touch her or feel her hair or her skin. I'm not
even in the same world she's in. I'm a being from another world
lost between it and your world. And sometimes I feel as though
I'm drifting away into the other world."
"And this other world, this other dimension you're caught be-
tween," Steinhardt said intently, "what's it like?"
Harry shook his head. "I don't know. I hgve no window to look
into it. But it terrifies me. I'm so goddamn alone."
That night Harry hovered in his tank, trembling in the dark-
ness. The attendant was out of his sight, dozing at his desk in the
shadows across the tank room. Harry suddenly, irrevocably knew
he was alone, cut off forever from the world. In the silence he
heard only his ears ring. Then he heard the sound of his own
heartbeat, the throb uncertain and skipping. He felt hot, flushed,
and sweating. He had stomach cramps and a spasm in his bowels.
He was light-headed and dizzy, not getting enough oxygen. He
began to swim restlessly back and forth in the limited confines of
the tank, his actions increasingly agitated, his need for movement
panicky. He stopped and listened, hovering in the black silence.

122
He heard only his heart pounding, roaring in his ears as if it were
a bomb going to explode in the next instant, totally disintegrating
him. Harry panicked. He began screaming.
He screamed but no sound came. He had taken off his Hydro-
Voice. His scream was only a frenzied rush of water from his
throat. Only he could hear his own scream. All his terrors broke
out from their hiding places and now fueled that cry. He clenched
his fists and screamed again, and again, until, exhausted, he sank
to the bottom of the tank.

26
In 1970 a study of the plate tectonics of the East Pacific Rise, by
Dr. Paul Buckley, had been leaked to the press. It had shown that
certain offshore tidelands being considered by the Department of
the Interior for leasing to the oil companies for exploratory drill-
ing were geologically unstable. They were the locus of an earth-
quake fault. An oil company had leaked the report to a news-
paper.
The oil company had had no interest in that particular area.
They had, however, made bids on other tidelands which Buck-
ley's group had found stable and suitable for drilling. The press in
their follow-up stories had reported this.
The oil company had invited Buckley and his research associ-
ates on a pleasant outing to one of their established drilling plat-
forms in the Santa Barbara channel. The site was known to be
geologically stable. It had the added virtue of being very scenic.
Several newspaper and television reporters and cameramen were
also invited on the junket. They insisted on interviewing Buckley,
and he told them what he and his colleagues had long known. But

124
to the press and public now alarmed about earthquake faults, oil
spills, and ecology, it was suddenly news. Buckley carefully an-
alyzed how the oil company had dramatically manipulated the
news to their own advantage. Had they held an official press con-
ference or issued a formal statement, it probably would have been
ignored or treated with great skepticism.
The evening he received the telegram from the Office of Naval
Research disavowing experimentation on human beings, Buckley
worked late at his office. Was he now drilling on stable or faulted
strata? He studied the dangers, anticipated them, and formulated
a plan of action.
The next morning Buckley telephoned a writer on the Los An-
geles Times whom he had cultivated. Buckley told him just
enough to pique his interest. The reporter agreed to meet with
him at the institute the next morning. Then the director went to
Steinhardt's office.
"I don't understand. Why is the reporter coming here now?"
"I can't put him off. He knows too much. He only agreed to
hold the story because I promised him that he'd have an opportu-
nity to interview us here and get the facts straight."
"But my paper's not quite finished yet," Steinhardt protested.
"Karl, one does not announce the first man on the moon with a
paper in the Journal of Experimental Surgery. It's too sensa-
tional."
Steinhardt looked troubled.
"Perhaps it's better that it comes out this way, Karl. There sim-
ply wasn't time to publish first. The Navy might make an an-
nouncement to get themselves off the hook. We can't keep Harry
Styles a secret indefinitely. If the story comes out without our con-
trol, it's going to be distorted, sensationalized, and made gro-
tesque."
"And how are you going to stop that?"
"This Kenneth Livingstone is a respected science writer, as far
as journalists go. You and I will talk to him. He won't see or talk
to Styles. The emphasis will be on the scientific accomplishment.
And it will look better if he breaks the story. If we held a press
conference and made the announcement, it would look as though
we were deliberately seeking publicity. It might create a backlash."
Steinhardt shook his head. "I don't understand these things. I
never read newspapers."
"Never?" Buckley was astonished.

125
Steinhardt shrugged. "When I was a young man I read news-
papers and journals passionately. For a quarter of a century, I
closely followed the great crises of our civilization. But I gradually
came to the conclusion that all my reading did no one any good.
It changed nothing. It only upset me and distracted me from my
work. So I stopped reading newspapers."
"What about television?"
Steinhardt shook his head.
"Well, it's not really necessary for you to understand these
things," Buckley said. "You're a man of science."
"And you? What are you?"
"I'm a man of science also," Buckley said. Then he added with
a hint of a smile, "At the moment my field is political science."
After conferring with Steinhardt, Buckley placed a call to Bern-
stein. His publicized participation would give the artificial gill
transplant the appearance of a scientific team effort rather than
the bizarre experiment of one scientist. But to Buckley's surprise
the surgeon—when Buckley finally reached him on the phone
after several tries—refused to be interviewed. In fact, he insisted
that his name not be mentioned. The institute director was furi-
ous, but after a minute he regained his perspective. Bernstein's
withdrawal created a vacuum for him to fill with his own pres-
ence.
Kenneth Livingstone, the L.A. Times writer, was a cadaverous-
looking man with wispy gray hair and pockmarked cheeks. His
lenses magnified his eyes and his smile was a beat too eager.
He listened thoughtfully, on occasion nodding his head in grave
acknowledgment, as Buckley outlined th| background of the
artificial gill and the operation. "Fascinating, fascinating," mut-
tered Livingstone, but it was a moment or two before he realized
the full implication of what Buckley had just told him. "Wait a
minute. You mean the operation has already been performed?
This artificial gill's actually implanted in someone?"
Buckley nodded.
"Who? Where?"
"The man is currently being maintained here at the institute."
"My God, can I see him?"
Buckley shook his head. "I'm sorry. But you understand this
man has been critically ill. He's especially susceptible to infec-
tions. The slightest germ might kill him. Maybe we can do some-

126
thing almost as good. Get you together with Karl Steinhardt, the
scientist and surgeon who actually invented the gill and per-
formed the operation. He's right here on campus."
"That would be terrific," Livingstone said eagerly.
"He's almost as hard to see as his patient. But maybe if I pull
rank I can get him to talk to you. He's got diagrams of how the
damn device works and even some photographs of it."
"That would be terrific," Livingstone said even more eagerly.
Buckley made the call, and then walked with Livingstone to
Steinhardt's office. "By the way, what's the patient's name?" the
reporter asked.
"Oh, Glaucus. John Glaucus."
"How do you spell it?"
Buckley spelled it. "It's a Greek name, I believe."
Steinhardt was impatient with several of Livingstone's ques-
tions, but that characteristic crankiness added to his ivory-tower-
of-science aura and intimidated the reporter. At one point Stein-
hardt launched into a historical review of the research starting
with the Scottish physiologist Hardane's experiments with drown-
ing laboratory mice.
"Excuse me, Doctor, but I simply have to get this straight in
my own mind," Livingstone interrupted apologetically. "This
patient of yours, this Glaucus, he can only exist underwater, like a
fish?"
"Yes, yes." Steinhardt nodded brusquely. "When we operated
he had almost total pulmonary insufficiency. Both his lungs had
been virtually destroyed by cancer."
"Without the operation and Karl's prosthetic gill," Buckley in-
terjected, "this man would have been dead months ago."
Livingstone shook his head in wonderment. "This is fantastic."
He scribbled notes, then looked up at Steinhardt. "One last ques-
tion, Doctor. If you can make a successful artificial gill, why can't
you make an artificial lung to allow this man to breathe air?"
Steinhardt smiled. "Technology recapitulates phylogeny."
"I beg your pardon."
"We must follow in the steps of our Creator. We must first
solve the biological engineering problems of the gill before we can
design a lung, which is a much more complex organ. It took two
hundred million years of evolution from the first primitive fish of
the Ordovician period until the first lungfish and amphibians
crawled from the sea. Actually the first investigator to describe an

127
artificial gill, Bodell, also implanted a primitive artificial lung in
sheep and dogs the same year, but there were several technical
problems. Other experimenters suggested that a water, membrane,
and blood interface was probably the best transmitter for dispers-
ing the carbon dioxide in the blood. Actually this intermediate
water transfer of the blood gases still takes place in the lungs be-
tween the air cells and the capillaries."
Steinhardt had lost Livingstone. The reporter still smiled and
nodded agreeably, but his eyes were glazed and uncomprehending.
Buckley interrupted. "I think the important thing to remember
in all this, Ken, is that one of the long-range goals of Dr. Stein-
hardt's research is humanitarian. It's a fundamental step in the
eventual development of an artificial lung to benefit those people
who have unfortunately lost a lung because of cancer, emphysema,
tuberculosis." Here Buckley made a circling motion with his right
hand as if to imply a never-ending affliction of deadly lung dis-
eases. "But it has an immediate application to the marine sciences.
Its effect on our ability to explore and develop the two-thirds of
the world that is the sea may be more revolutionary than that
•of the submarine or the scuba."
Livingstone scribbled on his pad, then he hurriedly got up to
go—he wanted to write up the story for the next morning's edition.
He was very excited. As they left the research building, Buckley
paused on the steps overlooking the Pacific. "A thought just oc-
curred to me, Ken," the director said. "When Neil Armstrong took
that first step on the moon, Dr. Wernher von Braun referred to
it as the most significant event in human evolution since a creature
first crawled from the sea." Buckley looked directly at the reporter,
and then his eyes swept toward the distant horizon of the Pacific.
"How would he classify this scientific development, I wonder?"
"It's really incredible," Livingstone agreed. He hurried to his car,
head bent, still writing in his notebook.
When Buckley got back to his office he called the head of the
university security and ordered the guard to be doubled in the re-
search building and around the institute. He authorized the hiring
of off-duty policemen. Then he called in the institute's public rela-
tions man. Buckley briefed him on the Times story and dictated
the information the PR man could release. He wasn't to send out
a story; he was only to answer inquiries. "Don't read off the infor-
mation like a prepared statement," Buckley instructed him. "Be
informal but authoritative. You are, as they say, the official spokes-

128
man for the institute. But don't embellish what I've given you.
If anyone wants to know more, tell them a great deal of the experi-
ment is still classified."
"Classified by whom?"
"That's one of the things that's still classified."
"Gotcha." The PR man headed for the door.
Then, almost as an afterthought, Buckley called Steinhardt.
"Karl, if the story appears tomorrow, you may be getting a lot
of calls from the media. If you'd like, I can have the switchboard
transfer all your calls to the PR office or my own office. ... Of
course it's trouble, Karl. But it's part of my job."
Buckley contemplated making one more call. To Ruth Styles.
He picked up the phone to tell his secretary to place the call, then
immediately replaced it. Five minutes after talking to her, her law-
yer Marx would be on his back dictating what Buckley could and
could not do. To hell with that. Ruth Styles and Marx could get
the news with the rest of the world. By the next morning it would
be a fait accompli, and they would be on the defensive, asking
Buckley's help.

27
The next morning Ruth dropped Christopher off at day school
and returned home. She picked the Los Angeles Times out of the
rosebush and glanced at the headline.
MAN BREATHES WATER
WITH ARTIFICIAL GILL
Lung Cancer Victim First Transplant
Lives Underwater in Tank
Ruth suddenly felt faint with fear. She skimmed the article hur-
riedly, her heart pounding.
By KENNETH A. LIVINGSTONE
Times Staff Writer
marejada—The ancient myths of
mermen and mermaids living beneath
the sea like fishes have become a

130
scientific reality. In a historic break-
through, researchers at the Institute of
Oceanography here have implanted
the first artificial gill in a human
being, the Times learned exclusively
today.
The 36-year-old patient was a lung
cancer victim with a pulmonary in-
sufficiency that is invariably terminal.
However, the successfully implanted
artificial gills have allowed him to
breathe oxygen from water in the
same way fish do, according to Paul
Buckley, director of the institute.
The implanted artificial gill is the
invention of Dr. Karl Steinhardt, a
surgeon doing advanced research in
respiration and comparative physiology
at the institute. Steinhardt also per-
formed the pioneering transplant op-
eration. "We were totally taken by
surprise by its success," Steinhardt
told the Times. "We had hoped, at
best, to get a significant transfer of oxy-
gen and carbon dioxide across the
gills between the patient's blood-
stream and the saline solution. But we
had not anticipated in our most opti-
mistic speculations that it would sus-
tain him as long as it has."
The patient, dubbed John Glaucus
by the elated scientists, is being main-
tained in a tank of sterile, oxygen-rich
saline solution, which is similar to sea-
water. The name "Glaucus," that of a
mythological sea god, is an alias to
protect the patient's anonymity, a
common procedure in the reporting of
pioneering medical procedures.
Paradoxically, the gill, which is ex-
pected to revolutionize marine re-

i3i
search, is an almost incidental spinoff
of the development of oxygenators
now routinely used in operating rooms
for open-heart and lung surgery.
Ruth dropped the paper. She felt threatened, as if the story
were announcing some imminent holocaust. Her first thought was
to leave immediately with the children, to drive north over the
Santa Suzanna Mountains into the flat farmlands of Bakersfield.
She knew such an action made no sense, but the compulsion to
flee was strong. She took a deep breath to calm herself, then an-
other. She sat very still, breathing with great deliberation.
The phone rang. It was Gunther Marx.
"Did you see the story in this morning's Times about Harry?"
"I just this moment. . ."
"There's no cause for alarm yet. They've kept Harry's identity a
secret. I'll call Buckley immediately to make sure it stays that way,
and that you and the kids are kept out of it."
When she hung up the phone, Ruth picked up the paper and
scanned the rest of the Times story. It was a review of the re-
search leading up to the development of the gill. She couldn't
concentrate on it.
Gunther would soon be calling back. He would let her know if
there was any danger to her and the children. Until then, there
was nothing to do. There was no one else she could call. There
was no one else in whom she had confided.
She wandered about the house, the little black dog Groucho
following her, his claws clicking on the wood floors. She was sud-
denly aware of the silence. The house was so quiet since she had
enrolled Christopher in day school. No longer did she hear the
sound of his running footsteps, the banging doors, Groucho's
growling and grumbling in the child's wake. Ruth had become so
used to the racket of the four-year-old that she wasn't aware of it
until he was gone.
Since the incident in the tank with Harry, Christopher had be-
come unnaturally quiet. He had nightmares almost nightly from
which he woke trembling and frightened, but he didn't remember
them in the morning. Ruth decided to send him to the day
school, hoping that the new environment crowded with other kids
would occupy his mind. It had worked somewhat. Christopher

132
had come home breathless with stories of new friends and games,
but the nightmares had continued.
The night before Ruth had been wakened by a noise and gone
into the boys' room. She found David cradling Christopher, tears
streaming down the older boy's face as though he had shared the
unspeakable horror with his brother. But the older boy shared
nothing with Ruth. He kept his thoughts and fears to himself, a
dark, beautiful, and silent child stalking through the house, brood-
ing and heartbroken.
Ruth wept silently, the tears streaming down her face. She wept
for her confused, frightened children and she wept for herself. She
was as confused and frightened as they were. Ruth hadn't cried as
much in her life as she had in the past few months. Not during her
childhood nor her father's long illness nor when she thought Harry
was going to die had she cried as frequently and uncontrollably
as she did now.
She wiped her face and gasped, trying once again to deliberately
breathe deeply and compose herself. She suddenly felt a desperate
need to talk to someone—someone impersonal, a doctor.
Once, when it was certain Harry was going to die, Dr. Bernstein
had suggested both she and Harry get psychiatric counseling.
"Look, we all need help at critical times in our lives," Bernstein
had gently advised her. "Hell, fifty percent of the doctors I know
need psychiatric help. They don't get it. Doctors always make the
worst patients. The worst. We're uncooperative. We know it all.
But most of us need help." Looking back, it seemed to Ruth that
Bernstein too was suppressing tears—tears for her and Harry and
all his psychically wounded colleagues.
Ruth could call Bernstein. He was someone in whom she could
confide. He at least would be able to recommend a psychiatrist.
She dialed his office. His receptionist said he wasn't in. She didn't
know when he would be, but she would give him the message.
Ruth hung up.
She started to dial Gunther's office, but then stopped. She
would be bothering him unnecessarily. She wandered into Harry's
study, went to the liquor cabinet, and took out a bottle of Scotch
and a glass. She sat down at Harry's desk, started to pour a drink,
then stopped, and stared at the bottle. Whatever might happen
this day, she needed whatever wits she still had to cope with it-
She put the bottle and the glass back in the cabinet.
Ruth turned on the radio to KNX, the all-news station. The

133
"fish-man" was the big story of the day. The report essentially
repeated the facts that were in the L.A. Times story, but once
again Ruth felt panicky. She thought of contacting Brenda at
school. But what would that accomplish other than alarming the
girl? Yet the number of people to whom Ruth could now speak
had dwindled to her teenaged daughter.
There had been a time when Harry was sick and at home that
Brenda had competed with Ruth, vying to nurse and serve Harry.
The girl fussed about and redid little chores for her father that
Ruth had already performed, like straightening the bed and
plumping pillows, and she frequently criticized her mother. One
day they had had a terrible fight over a Coke. Harry had asked for
it.
"It's got awful gunk in it," Brenda had protested. "Chemicals
and sugar. It'll make him sicker."
"Your father's a grown man. He knows what he wants," Ruth
had tried to explain. He had a craving for something cold, some-
thing sweet. Maybe the taste evoked some now distant memory of
youth when, hot and thirsty, he had trotted off a sun-baked sand-
iot to eagerly guzzle Coke with his playmates. "Oh, what the
hell difference does it make anymore?" Ruth had finally cried out.
Shocked, Brenda had run in tears from the kitchen.
The telephone rang, snapping Ruth out of her reveries. It was
Gunther. "It took me over an hour to get through to Buckley. Ap-
parently every TV station in the area, the networks, the wire serv-
ices, newspapers, Time, Newsweek, they've all been trying to get
through. He promised me to keep Harry anonymous and keep you
and the children out of it. I guess we'll just have to trust him. We
haven't got much choice at this point." There was a note of tense
excitement and frustration in Gunther's voice. He didn't say it,
but his tone implied Buckley was in charge and dictating events
and the lawyer didn't much like it.
"How did the newspaper get the story in the first place?"
"Buckley doesn't know. They probably had some source at the
university hospital. He said they called him up with just enough
information to write a sensationalized story, so he gave them the
straight facts in order to prevent it from being distorted."
"Why wasn't Bernstein mentioned in the story? I tried to call
him but he wasn't in."
"I've been trying to get him for days. He probably thinks we
want to sue him for malpractice."

134
"Maybe he feels like me. He just wants to crawl under a rock
somewhere."
"Look, Ruth, this will all blow over in a few days. You know
the media. Everything that's novel, they blow up for a couple of
days and then they've gone on to something else. By the end of
the week there'll be a new Mideast crisis or a murder and they'll
forget about Harry. In the meanwhile, if you want to stay out of
it, perhaps you'd better keep away from the institute."
"Why?"
"It's up to you, Ruth. There are reporters and TV cameras all
around the area, according to Buckley. If you're coming and
going, you're bound to attract someone's attention."
"What about Harry?"
"Buckley's got security guards covering the research building.
He's told the press that Harry, or rather John Glaucus, is still in
critical condition. He's especially susceptible to infections and
contact with outside people is a grave risk."
"But Harry's been out of critical danger for over a month."
"I know, but for the time being the story is keeping the press at
bay."
There was little more to say. When Ruth hung up, the compul-
sion to flee that she had felt earlier had returned. She placed an-
other call to Bernstein's office, but the receptionist said she still
hadn't heard from him.
At one o'clock Brenda came home from school unexpectedly.
The girl was pale, distraught. "Daddy's in the newspaper," she
said in a frightened voice.
Ruth nodded. "I know. But nobody knows it's us."
"We have this teacher in school. This Mr. Otis. He's always
getting on a soapbox about something. And this just set him off
about experiments with human beings, the Nazis, the CIA, doc-
tors in general. He went on and on. He made it sound like Daddy
was one of the freaks in The Island of Dr. Moreau or something."
Brenda was trying to hold back her tears.
"Oh, honey, it's not like that at all." Ruth took her daughter in
her arms, burying her face in the girl's glossy black hair. "Did you
say anything?"
"Are you kidding?" Brenda whispered in a cowed voice. "I just
shrank down in my seat. As soon as the period was over I told the
homeroom teacher I felt sick. I really did. But I told them I

135
thought I was coming down with the flu. They're so terrified of a
flu epidemic that they practically ran me out of school."
Ruth kissed her daughter's brow. The girl actually did feel fe-
verish. "That's okay, honey. You stay home with me."
"Aren't you going to see Daddy today?"
"Not today."
Brenda went with her mother to pick up Christopher at the day
school at three o'clock. He knew nothing of the newspaper story.
Neither did David, who walked home after school. Ruth ex-
plained to both boys that there had been a story about their fa-
ther in the newspaper, but his name had been kept secret so they
wouldn't be bothered. Then she read the story to them. Chris-
topher listened with enormous eyes fixed on her face. When she
finished, he asked, "That's a story about Daddy?" There was glee
in his voice. David said nothing. But at five he and Christopher
came in to watch the TV evening news with their mother and
sister.
"The First Man with Gills" was the lead story. There were in-
terviews with both Steinhardt and Buckley. Steinhardt sat in his
cluttered office holding up cutaway diagrams of the gill implant to
explain how it worked, as he had once explained it to Ruth cen-
turies before. It was obvious to Ruth that his statement was se-
verely cut. Buckley by contrast was interviewed outside the hand-
some administration building, as if he had just exited and a
stakeout of reporters had snared him on his way to a meeting.
"Dr. Buckley, why was this incredible experiment kept secret for
months?"
Buckley looked directly at the reporter, his expression one of
mild surprise. "It was not kept a secret. The institute's first prior-
ity has been to keep the patient alive and healthy as possible.
We've also been trying to maximize the scientific data generated
by this extraordinary event."
Another reporter shouted, "Doctor, what about the morality of
experimenting on a human being?"
There was a momentary hush as the other reporters crowded in
to record the answer. "The morality of experimenting with a new
procedure on a human being?" Buckley answered evenly. "As op-
posed to what? Just letting him die of lung cancer? I can't answer
that. But I know someone who can. The patient himself. Hope-
fully, he'll give you his answer in the near future."
The film ended, and the anchorman turned to the reporter who

136
had covered the story. "That certainly is an incredible develop-
ment in the world of science, Bob. Did they give any reason why
the press wasn't notified when they first made the successful gill
transplant?"
"I asked Dr. Buckley just that, and he answered that he didn't
think it was the job of research scientists to notify the press. In
fact he kind of gave us all a slap on the wrist. He commented that
if the media had a fraction of the interest in science and the work
being done to extend human knowledge that we do in murder and
scandals we would have had the story the first day."
"The good doctor probably has a point." The anchorman nod-
ded agreeably and turned back to face the camera. "And a case in
point is our next story. Los Angeles homicide detectives. . ."
Brenda switched channels. David got up, heading for his room.
"Aren't you going to watch the other stations?" Brenda asked.
David shrugged. "They'll all be the same stuff."
Ruth felt numb. They were talking about her husband on tele-
vision, but they might have been discussing a complete stranger.
She experienced no connection. Harry had been dehumanized
into an event without personality, flesh, or blood. And David was
right; the other local stations on the six o'clock news and the
ABC network news at seven carried the same interviews, slightly
different quotes. The ABC network correspondent ended his re-
port leaning against the rail of the research pier with the surf
behind him and a lone gull squalling overhead. "Dr. Wernher
von Braun once referred to Neil Armstrong's first step on the
moon as the most significant event in human evolution since a
creature first crawled from the sea. Today's revelation is consid-
erably more than one man's toe in the water. It may prove to be
another great leap for mankind. Tom Stockard. ABC News. At
the California Institute of Oceanography."
As the image of Stockard of ABC faded, Ruth sensed reporters,
cameras, and microphones pressing in like the mob that had be-
sieged Buckley. Their strident belligerent echoes and ghosts had
invaded her home, now haunting the deepening shadows of the
room and threatening her and the children.
Christopher suddenly materialized beside her. "When we
gonna eat?" he asked plaintively.
Ruth had completely forgotten about dinner. "Right now!" she
exclaimed. She gave the child a fierce hug, as if to still his hunger
pangs with an embrace.

28
The next morning a television interviewer with the bland pleas-
ant looks of a Sioux Falls Junior Chamber of Commerce president
and a former Jesuit priest named Timothy Matthews, who now
wrote best sellers on devil possession, sat in swiveled armchaifs
and speculated on Harry's soul for the benefit of seven and a half
million housewives getting their kids off to school.
"It raises a definite theological question* Does this man still
have a soul—that is, as we conceive of the soul as Christians?" the
Jesuit asked. "In the Bible the existence of the soul is synonymous
with the breath. The relationship is clearly spelled out in the first
pages of Genesis: 'And the Lord God formed man of the dust of
the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and
man became a living soul.' In Biblical Hebrew the words nesha-
mah7 re'ah, and hephesh have the dual meaning of both 'breath'
and 'soul.' To the ancient Hebrews they were inseparable."
Harry Styles, his breast now aching with the imagined surgical
excision of his soul, watched the show from his tank. The night
before, he had watched the first TV news reports with keen ex-

38
citement, but contrary to his expectations, the news stories had
deeply depressed him. They were not about him. Then, as now,
he felt that the reporters and commentators on TV were talking
about some alien being just discovered to be living on this planet.
"Again both in ancient Greek and in Latin we have the same
root words meaning both breath and soul," Matthews continued.
"The words psyche in Greek and anima in Latin."
The interviewer leaned forward. "But aren't you playing word
games? Are you really changing the spiritual nature of a man sim-
ply by adapting him to breathe water instead of air?"
"I think so," Matthews said. "The Spirit of God, the Holy
Ghost, is the pneuma, which again is another Greek word mean-
ing 'breath.' This is not a word game. In the Gospel according to
St. John, Jesus gave the gift of the Holy Spirit to the disciples by
breathing on them." Matthews, his eyes bright with fervor under
his bristling black brows, visibly straightened in his chair to quote
the Gospel. " 'And when he had said this, he breathed on them,
and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost.'"
Matthews paused for dramatic effect, then noticed that the in-
terviewer wasn't paying attention to him but peering nervously off
to his right, apparently getting an urgent signal from offstage.
Matthews frowned and continued talking at a hurried pace. "This
isn't just a Judeo-Christian concept. It's also fundamental to
pagan and primitive religions. For example, the epics of Homer
represent the soul as the breath of life, as when Achilles encoun-
ters the spirit of Patroclos. The Romans even went so far as to
regard it as a religious duty that the nearest relative of a dying
man should catch his last breath at the moment it left the body
to ensure the continued existence of his soul. Interestingly
enough, the Seminole Indians of Florida had a similar custom, as
do the Athapascan tribes in Alaska."
"This all leaves me quite breathless," interrupted the TV inter-
viewer. "Thank you very much, Timothy Matthews, author of
The Unholy Ghosts. We'll be back in a moment with Beverly
Jeanot, the talented new toast of Broadway. Twelve and a half be-
fore the hour. Station break."
"It is positively medieval."
Harry whirled about. Steinhardt and Buckley stood at the win-
dow of the tank, their eyes fixed on the TV set. Harry wondered
how long they had been standing there.
Steinhardt continued angrily. "In 1700 Swedenborg was search-

139
ing for the soul in the spiritous fluid of the blood. This ex-Jesuit
has it in the alveoli of the lungs. No doubt the Holy Office is
about to reconvene the Council of Trent and issue a doctrinal
decree on Harry's soul, and mine. Then they'll burn us both at
the stake. After all, the church exiled Teilhard de Chardin and all
he did was write about the evolution of man."
"Damn it, Karl, this isn't a laughing matter," Buckley snapped.
"No? Then you don't have a sense of the absurd."
"I have a pile of telegrams on my desk," Buckley said. "Includ-
ing one from a group of rabbis in New York. They're outraged by
what they feel is a grotesque medical experiment on a human
being."
Steinhardt smiled faintly. "God gave Moses ten command-
ments. The Hassidim expanded it to six hundred and thirteen
commandments. Now apparently they have six hundred and four-
teen."
"For Chrissakes, Karl, this is sensitive as hell. It's no time to
get arrogant."
"I'm not arrogant. I welcome their scientific inquiries. I even
welcome their metaphysical inquiries. Perhaps we have surgically
removed Harry's soul from his thorax, along with his cancerous
lungs. I'd very much like to know if we have. Do the Courts of In-
quisition have a new laboratory procedure for detecting the pres-
ence or absence of the Christian soul? Or will they use the old but
proven test of trial by fire? I don't think trial by water would be
appropriate in this particular case."
"I don't think we need overly concern ourselves with the meta-
physical speculations," Buckley said evenly. "It might be enough
if Harry just spoke to the press himself. That is, if he's up to it."
He turned directly to Harry. "How are you feeling?"
"I'm mad as hell about all this, if that's what you mean. Do
you want to hold a press conference?" The idea of confronting a
battery of reporters and television cameras both frightened and ex-
cited Harry.
"I can set up a press pool situation," Buckley said. "We'll just
let a few carefully selected reporters and cameramen in to see you.
And they'll have to share it with the rest of the press. That way
they'll all pretty much stick to the facts, and they won't be bend-
ing over backward to get their own angle or interject their per-
sonal opinions."
"Is all this huckstering really necessary?" Steinhardt asked.

140
"Yes, it is," Harry said sharply.
Both Buckley and Steinhardt looked at him in surprise.
"I'm not a goddamn freak," he suddenly shouted and then in a
softer voice added, "We have to show people that."
"That's exactly what we have to do," Buckley agreed.
Harry's children would be watching TV. He wondered how
each of them was reacting. Christopher would probably just be
confused. He would have difficulty relating the TV news stories to
his father. David, however, would understand, and the reports
would make the already sensitive boy feel even more an outcast
and alien. Harry felt sure of that. He wasn't sure how Brenda
would react beyond embarrassment.
As for Ruth, Harry was already experiencing her reaction. Her
absence. She was an intensely private person, and the television
cameras and reporters she had seen on TV had frightened her
away. Strained as their visits together had become, Harry acutely
missed her. He ached for her presence. She was the contact with
the base humanity of his life, and without her he felt himself inex-
orably slipping away.
Harry gazed about the tank, the bleak steel and glass walls and
the tons of water pressing in on him defining his prison. "I am
not a goddamn freak," Harry had shouted a few minutes before.
"We have to show them that." That outburst had ignited an old
feeling in him. He had to demonstrate that he was a pioneer. A
hero. It wasn't only for his children. It was as much for himself.
He had been given a reprieve, and with it he could make his life
add up to something, something important.
Buckley elaborated at length on Harry's meeting with the press.
Harry listened carefully, but his eyes drifted over the impenetrable
walls that confined him. They were fixed on a vision that went far
beyond those walls.
"I want an American flag on my wet suit," Harry said suddenly.
"What?" Buckley was confused.
"Have one of those American flag patches on my shoulder,"
Harry explained, slapping himself on the left shoulder. "The sort
of patch that astronauts and test pilots wear on their coveralls."
Buckley thought about the idea and nodded vigorously. "That's
exactly the image you should have. That of a special test pilot or
astronaut," he agreed enthusiastically. "We won't just have a
patch. I'll have a special new wet suit made up. A deep blue."
Buckley silently studied Harry. "You'll look terrific," he decided.

141
He turned to Steinhardt. "He looks strong enough to break down
walls."
It was true. Mostly it was an optical illusion of the water, but
Harry had put on healthy flesh and muscle. He had learned to
ingest a great variety of foods underwater. As a thirsty child auto-
matically masters taking quick short breaths between continuous
swallows, Harry now ate and aspirated water almost simulta-
neously. His taste buds no longer registered the constant saltiness
of his food due to the saline solution. His appetite had increased.
Steinhardt had Harry on a program of carefully monitored exer-
cises similar to those developed for the astronauts in the weight-
less environment of Skylab. Twice a day Harry performed a pro-
gram of isokinetic exercises and endlessly pumped on the
spring-loaded pedals of a stationary bicycle ergometer. But as
Harry's strength and work capacity increased daily, so did his des-
peration.
When Buckley had left, Harry looked at Steinhardt, then
smiled grimly. "Maybe they're right about my soul. I feel as
though I'm in some sort of limbo on the border of hell. Some-
times, at night especially, I feel I'm falling over the edge, that I'm
going to drop into hell itself."
Steinhardt frowned. "Are you in pain?"
"Not physical pain. I'm afraid. No, afraid is not the word. It's
total terror. A terror so primal it's worse than any physical pain
imaginable."
"What are you terrified of?"
"I don't know. Of becoming lost."
"What do you mean by that?"
Harry made a vague gesture with his hands. "It's something I
just feel is happening to me."	*
Once more Harry surveyed his prison. You don't always get
what you want, he thought. But you get what you need. No more,
no less. He turned back to Steinhardt. "You and I have work to
do," he said suddenly. "Let's get on with it."
Work, Harry demanded. Work to fill his loneliness and to pre-
serve his sanity. Work to keep himself from plummeting into the
terrifying abyss yawning at the edge of his mind and soul. For a
man with a unique destiny, a prison cell has often served as an in-
cubator. There, cut off from the normal world, his vision is stoked
by the will, refining and defining itself. For Harry the metamor-
phosis had begun.

29
It was late the next day that Dr. Morris Bernstein first seized on
the idea of the injection of potassium chloride. A myocardial in-
farction, a momentary stab of pain, and then it would be over-
death seemingly due to natural causes. The thought held his tor-
mented mind enthralled, but it also horrified him.
Steinhardt might ridicule the Jesuit speculations on Harry's soul
and the outrage of the rabbis, but Bernstein took it all to heart.
The stories had been picked up by the wire services and became
black headlines that accused the surgeon at every newsstand. They
recriminated him from the five-minute news briefs at the top of
the hour on his favorite FM station. They condemned him from
the evening TV news. Bernstein did not avoid the newsstands or
broadcasts. He in fact sought them out. The media reports were
the just indictment of his sins, and he accepted them with a
bowed head. His name was never mentioned, but Bernstein knew
his guilt. His father, an immigrant who had dropped dead at his
sewing machine slaving to keep his son in college, he, too, knew
his son's guilt. Bernstein had betrayed his father's labors and

3
dreams, and his own. He had perverted the humane art of medi-
cine. He had committed an unforgivable sacrilege. Where was
atonement possible? Bernstein retreated to his study at home and
searched for it in a bottle of Scotch.
When he had been in his study for several hours, Selma looked
in. "A glass of Madeira, my dear," he greeted her.
Selma smiled at him anxiously. "That's Scotch."
"Yes, it is. Fm practicing to be in one of those classy Scotch
ads. You know, profession—thoracic surgeon. Hobby—reviving the
forbidden cabalist art of creating golems. Last book read . . .
that's what stumped me. I can't remember the last book I read. I
can't even remember when I last read a book. But hell, you read
enough books for both of us. Maybe we can do the very first hus-
band and wife classy Scotch ad. You'd look terrific."
Selma Bernstein was a woman whose slenderness had a mar-
tyred severity to it, since it had been achieved by rigorous dieting
that went against her nature. Her handsome face was framed by
graying shag-cut hair. "Have you seen Murray Einhorn lately?"
she asked.
"What do I want to see Murray Einhorn for?"
"All this business, it seems to be tearing you apart, Morris."
"So what can Einhorn do about it? I saw him for four years. All
we did was talk about my father. I knew as much about psychiatry
as the psychiatrist. I could change practices. Besides, I read in one
of the journals that traditional Freudian therapy doesn't work
with doctors in a lot of cases."
"Why not?"
"If they knew that they could get it to work. Look, I'm all right.
I'm a little tired. I'm having a drink, and I'll go to bed and I'll
be all right."
Selma took a deep breath. "You've been taking more than a
drink lately," she said.
"So?" He held up his glass and examined it as if it were a medi-
cal specimen. "Drinking is a growing problem with both doctors
and assimilated Jews. I don't know what it does for doctors. But
since Jews traditionally don't drink, I guess it makes them feel less
Jewish."
"Is that the solution or the problem?"
"Ha!" Bernstein barked sharply. "That's the sixty-four-dollar
question. Is it the solution or the problem?"

144
There was a long uneasy silence before Selma spoke. "So it
starts again. I thought we were all through with it."
"What starts again?"
"The whole dreary pattern. I could see it coming already
months ago. You work day and night and you don't sleep. You
take amphetamines to stay on your feet and barbiturates to come
down. Until you're ready to spin out and crash. Then you start
with the drinking."
"It's not that at all." There was no conviction in Bernstein's
voice.
"Morris, you've already been in three major auto accidents. It's
a miracle no one's been hurt. But the next time the police stop
you, they're going to take your license away."
"God bless the Los Angeles Police Department. They protect
and serve. They'll make me walk to work. I can use the exercise."
"For God's sake, Morris, talk to me."
"What do you want to talk about?"
"Why are you killing yourself like this? What's bothering you?
Don't always keep it bottled up inside."
"Nothing's bothering me. I'm just having a drink." There was a
sudden anger in his voice. "I'm not going on a goddamn Irish
bender. I'm just having a drink to unwind. Is that all right with
you?"
Selma stared at her husband, intimidated by his anger. "I'm
going to bed," she said, and the statement was an admission of
defeat.
He raised his glass in toast. "Uchayim." He drank.
His wife left the room and Bernstein remained seated.
"Uchayim," he repeated softly to himself. "To life." He finished
off his drink. What must be done, must be done. He rose, the
effort weary and labored, and went to the desk. From his black
bag he withdrew a hypodermic syringe and began to prepare it.

30
The surf was phosphorescent, glimmering lines of silvery white.
Beyond the surf the waves rolled in massive and black. Each ex-
plosion confirmed Steinhardt's premonition of disaster. He stalked
the dark beach, plagued by his usual insomnia but also disturbed
by a new, shapeless anxiety. The headlights of a car winding along
Sea Cliff Drive momentarily illuminated a wave, the light making
the water appear even blacker and more malevolent, an evil wall
storming the beach.
As was his habit, Steinhardt had tried to read that night. He
buried himself in Teilhard de Chardin's Le Phenomene humain.
Teilhard's concept that the noosphere—the mantle of technology
that man had consciously erected on the earth—was the next stage
of natural evolution had once stirred Steinhardt. It had given him
great comfort and hope. Teilhard, the paleontologist and Jesuit
mystic, had poetically fused science and Christianity and envi-
sioned man evolving technologically toward an ultimate spiritual
unity. But this night the vision had abandoned Steinhardt. His
mind refused to focus on the transcendent destiny of man. All the

146
commotion in the press and on television about Harry Styles dis-
turbed Steinhardt. He felt himself surrounded by unnamed mortal
dangers.
At midnight he fled to the beach, trekking through the heavy
wet sand to settle his mind. But even the sea was haunted. Each
wave disintegrated into a column of ghosts, glowing white specters
that surged toward him in an angry rumble and then dissolved
into the darkness before they reached the shore.
Once again headlights glowed on the sand, conjuring up new
ghosts. The car had turned off Sea Cliff Drive and was heading
along on one of the institute's access roads toward the research
building. Now alert to its route, Steinhardt watched the head-
lights. They turned into a parking lot, briefly silhouetting the
building's angled buttresses, and then the headlights turned off.
It was very late for anyone to be visiting any of the laboratories
or offices. Steinhardt had no reason to be concerned about Styles.
There was now a round-the-clock security guard at the building
entrance and an attendant in the tank room with him at all times.
There was no logical reason for Steinhardt to be alarmed, yet he
hurried through the sand, his every sense bristling with danger.
The old man was sweating and breathless when he slammed
through the door of the tank room. Bernstein was on the tank,
halfway up the ladder.
"Morris, what in hell are you doing here at this unholy hour?"
Bernstein turned toward Steinhardt, a look of panic on his face.
He clung to the ladder, balanced on one foot like a bird about to
take flight. As he pivoted, the light on the tank caught and glit-
tered off a shining object in his right hand. Steinhardt's eyes fixed
on the hypodermic needle. "What in hell are you doing?" he
asked again.
Bernstein didn't answer. He seemed befuddled. His eyes flicked
from Steinhardt to Styles, now hovering at the window of the
tank staring out at them. Neither Styles nor the attendant had ap-
parently been disturbed by Bernstein's sudden appearance in the
middle of the night to give his patient an injection. Attending sur-
geons are often known for their erratic hours. But now the alarm
in Steinhardt's voice gripped them both.
"What is that?" he demanded and strode forward.
Steinhardt's sudden movement galvanized Bernstein. His foot
groped frantically for the next step. He awkwardly clutched at the
steel rung with one hand while holding the hypodermic away

147
from his body and then clawed up another rung of the ladder.
Steinhardt lunged at him and seized his leg. "Morris, stop this.
What are you doing?"
"Let me go. I have to do this. Let me go!" Bernstein shouted
wildly. He yanked his leg out of Steinhardt's grasp. But there was
no eluding the towering old man's reach. Steinhardt again caught
his leg.
Bernstein bucked and kicked, his foot viciously striking Stein-
hardt in the face. The old man staggered but still he hung on.
Bernstein lost his grip on the slippery steel rung. He lurched for-
ward and his head slammed against the tank. He fell backward on
Steinhardt and both men collapsed sprawling on the concrete
floor.
They lay stunned and breathing heavily, their panting amplified
and distorted by the concrete walls and ceiling as in a cavern.
Then the two men slowly rose up on their arms and elbows and
stared at each other. Bernstein's dark eyes acknowledged defeat.
He still gripped the hypodermic syringe. Steinhardt reached out
and took it from his now unresisting hand as one might take a for-
bidden cookie from a child.
He examined the syringe, then squirted it on the back of his
hand and tentatively tasted it with the tip of his tongue. There
was a distinctive salty tang with the vague aftertaste of chlorine.
He looked back at Bernstein.
"Morris, why?" Steinhardt's voice was soft, hurt.
Tears filled Bernstein's eyes and poured down his hollow
cheeks. He heaved to his feet and lurched to the door. Steinhardt
glanced over at Styles, who, wary and confused, was still staring
through the tank's window. Bernstein hadn't had time to give the
injection, Steinhardt decided. The surgeoit-was, at the moment,
no longer a danger to Styles, but to himself.
Steinhardt got up and ran after Bernstein, but he was too late.
The car roared from the parking lot in a squeal of smeared rubber.
It careened onto Sea Cliff Drive, the beam of the headlights
switching back and forth like the blade of a scythe as the car
climbed the twisting road to the heights of the palisades that
traced the sea north of the campus. Steinhardt watched until the
car's lights cut to the right and disappeared around a hairpin turn
in the road.

31
The television lights focused on the tank, brilliantly illumi-
nating it, refracting in the eddies of water in strange ways so that
John Glaucus hovered at the center of an explosion of light like
some mythic god descending. His long flowing blond hair and full
beard, bleached to a shimmering flax by its immersion in brine,
swirled about his head iridescent with its own light. Stephanie
O'Gara, the reporter for the pool of local Los Angeles TV sta-
tions, was awed. She had come, as had the other reporters, to in-
terview a patient, a sick and dying man who had been the guinea
pig in an outlandish medical experiment. But the broad powerful
body and the glory of golden hair and beard suspended in a burst
of light seemed not to have materialized from a mortal hospital
bed but from Mount Olympus.
O'Gara glanced about her at the cluster of reporters, camera-
men, and sound and lighting technicians. They too were stunned
by the sight of Glaucus hovering above them in his chamber of
liquid light. Their questions were subdued, almost reverential.

149
"Mr. Glaucus, are you comfortable in that tank?" the reporter
from Associated Press asked.
"Yes, I'm very comfortable. It's warm, buoyant, soothing. In
many ways, it's like returning to the womb." The voice of
Glaucus, resonant and electronically powerful, emanated from the
speaker outside the tank. In the dramatic acoustics of the tank
room his most mundane comment resounded like a pronounce-
ment from the throne. O'Gara's soundman was having difficulty
adjusting the sound level to record it.
All the local TV stations had been allowed only one news cam-
era crew to cover the interview, and it would have to share the
film with the others. As was the custom in pool situations, the
competing reporters had drawn lots. O'Gara, a red-headed woman
in her early thirties with shar-p, handsome features, had won the
draw. She alone would be reporting on camera for the local sta-
tions.
Buckley had carefully controlled the press admitted to this audi-
ence. There were only a reporter and a photographer from the two
major wire services and the Los Angeles Times science writer
Kenneth Livingstone. One electronic video camera was shooting
for all three networks, but Buckley had allowed each of the net-
works to have its own correspondent present. His concession to
the networks, O'Gara suspected, was a deliberate one to enhance
the star quality of the press coverage.
But the appearance of Glaucus totally upstaged the network
news stars. He wore a body-fitted, marine-blue wet suit of neo-
prene with a large American flag emblazoned on the left shoulder
sleeve. A well-proportioned man invariably looks more powerful in
a wet suit; the thick taut layer of neoprene creates the illusion of a
sheath of muscle investing the entire bod)£ The wide-angle lens
effect of the water and glass magnified the illusion. John Glaucus
looked powerful enough to snap anchor chains with his bare
hands.
The black cowl collar hiding the gill combs suggested the steel
collar on a space suit, giving Glaucus the appearance of an astro-
naut.
"How do you feel about this radical medical experiment being
performed on you?" one of the network correspondents asked. His
tone was subdued, respectful.
"You're asking me if I'd rather be dead or alive at this moment.
I very much prefer being alive."

159
Against three walls of the tank room mahogany-stained panels
had been set up; the intended effect was that of a ship's cabin. On
the panels were mounted large impressive photographs of leaping
porpoises, dramatic seascapes of surf and rocks, and studies of
crabs, shimmering schools of fish, marine research vessels cleaving
the waves, divers at work on the sea bottom, white-coated scien-
tists in a laboratory—a panorama of the work of the Institute of
Oceanography.
But no display of art could transform the thick concrete walls,
ceiling, and floor O'Gara sensed surrounding her, heavy and press-
ing as the walls of a cave. The illuminated tank threw out a wa-
tery light, transforming the room into a sea cavern—the grotto of
Glaucus, god of the sea. O'Gara felt herself under a spell. The
man before her must be an illusion, like some carnival attraction
from her youth, one that she had never actually seen but was
buried in the collective unconscious of forgotten myths and faded
old movies. O'Gara shook herself. This was no carny hype. This
was science. The man was real. "Where do you sleep?" she asked.
The question was instinctive. She had not meant to ask it.
Glaucus made an expansive gesture with his hands that em-
braced the mammoth dimensions of the tank. "As you can see, I
have the world's largest water bed."
There was something in that broad gesture that touched
O'Gara; it was both humorous and a little sad. The humor, totally
unexpected, galvanized the other reporters. They laughed appre-
ciatively and clustered about O'Gara and the microphone all at
once, as if the laughter had suddenly dissolved the inhibitions that
had been binding them.
But O'Gara refused to give up the mike. "What about your
family? Where do they live?"
There was a moment of hesitation before the answer. For
O'Gara it was more significant than the answer itself. "I have no
immediate family," the man in the tank answered.
"Don't you get lonely?" O'Gara persisted.
"Yes, terribly lonely."
Then O'Gara had to relinquish the microphone to another re-
porter. "You said a moment ago that the tank was very comfort-
able physically. But how is it mentally?" he asked. "It seems very
claustrophobic to me."
"It is. But so are submarines and space ships. You have to keep
busy."

i5i
"How do you keep busy?"
"I'm constantly involved in experiments. Right now we're con-
ducting a series to test and increase my work capacity underwater.
In a few weeks we're planning to begin work with a hyperbaric
chamber, one in which the pressure can be increased to simulate
great depths. When I'm not working, like most Americans I just
lie back and watch TV,"
"What are your favorite programs?"
"The news mostly. I watch all the news I can every day. But
'Sixty Minutes' is my favorite show. I don't really like all the
police programs. I don't think they're particularly healthy, with all
their violence and sexual innuendos, especially for kids."
O'Gara was suddenly alert. Glaucus's response was not that of a
man with "no immediate family." O'Gara herself was a divorcee
supporting her two children by hustling as a TV newswoman.
Now every maternal, feminine, and reportorial instinct was hum-
ming. She stared at John Glaucus, his hair and beard encircling
his head like waves of sunlight, the seemingly Herculean physique.
He had once been an all too frail and vulnerable human being
whom science was now transforming into God knows what. But
somewhere there was a wife. And there were children he wouldn't
allow to watch "Hawaii Five-O" and "Charlie's Angels."
"Mr. Glaucus, I understand from both Dr. Steinhardt and Dr.
Buckley that the gill had not really been expected to function as
successfully as it has." Kenneth Livingstone was at the micro-
phone, flustered by the cameras and lights. He stuttered out his
question. "I ... I understand that at first you weren't, well, how
can I phrase this, you weren't expected to survive the operation."
Glaucus nodded. "No, I wasn't. But I'm rather glad I did."
There was a burst of laughter from th^ press. O'Gara studied
Livingstone. It seemed incredible to her that this apologetic, def-
erential man had ever ferreted out a major story like this by him-
self. "Well, how do you feel about your being alive as a s-s-sort of
scientific accident?" Livingstone stammered.
Glaucus was silent a moment, and when he began speaking, his
speech was measured and thoughtful. "I don't think I would use
the word 'accident.' It was something that was unexpected. Dr.
Steinhardt and I have discussed this at great length. We've devel-
oped a certain philosophy concerning it. Before my operation I
worked in aerospace research and development, and I know from
painful experience that experiments don't always go the way you

152
anticipate. There is always the unexpected event. What you
might call an accident. Columbus accidentally found a new world
while exploring for a new route to China. In terms of his original
expectations, his voyage was in fact a failure. In all explorations
the difference between success and failure may simply be being
imaginative and daring enough to exploit these accidents. The un-
expected event. Dr. Steinhardt, Dr. Buckley, the staff here at the
institute, and I intend to be that daring."
A network correspondent seized the microphone, shouldering
Livingstone out of the way. "Mr. Glaucus, what do you think the
future holds for you? Are you optimistic about it?"
"I am challenged by it."
"Would you elaborate on that, please."
"I will see and touch and experience things that no man has be-
fore me. I will go where no man has gone before."
O'Gara hardly heard Glaucus's speech. In her mind only one
phrase echoed and reverberated: "Before my operation I worked in
aerospace research and development . . ." O'Gara pounced on it.
It was the key that might open the door to Glaucus's past life.
The male reporters were enraptured with Glaucus's vision of voy-
ages into the unknown worlds. Whatever domestic debris the man
called Glaucus might have left behind in his wake was to them
a sidebar story, but it was the story that tantalized O'Gara with its
unanswered questions.
While the TV crews were packing their equipment, O'Gara
sought out Livingstone. "Mr. Livingstone, Fm Stephanie O'Gara
from Channel Three. Fve been wanting so much to meet you.
You really got the scoop of the century. It's really fantastic," she
exclaimed, implying with her excitement that it was Livingstone
who was somehow personally responsible for the whole event.
He nodded self-consciously. "Thank you, thank you."
"You did a landmark job of reporting. How'd you get your
break?"
"My sources," Livingstone said mysteriously. "My sources. And
a lot of old-fashioned digging around."
Somebody had leaked the story to him, O'Gara was convinced.
She talked to the reporter for a few minutes, alternately flattering
him and pumping him, but she was unable to get anything out of
him she didn't already know.
As she was leaving, O'Gara noticed Buckley approach Living-
stone and walk away with him. She watched them closely. The

153
director was apparently briefing Livingstone, who nodded eagerly.
Livingstone's obsequious manner confirmed O'Gara's suspicions.
Buckley had fed the original story to him. His exclusive presence
today had been a reward for the way Livingstone had broken the
story. O'Gara frowned. Where there was news being carefully ma-
nipulated, there was also information being concealed.

32
There was a fertility figure from Nigeria on the bookcase—a tat-
tooed woman with swollen breasts and udder-like nipples and a
clinging child. It was one of several objects of African primitive
art calculatingly placed about Helena Axelrod's office. A pair of
wooden ancestral figures—a crone with spear-pointed, conical
breasts from Mali and a bearded old man from the Congo with a
potbelly and a penis that dangled to his knees—served as book-
ends. A water spirit of the Baga tribe on the Guinea coast, half
man and half crocodile, crawled across an end table toward the af-
ternoon sunlight streaming through the window. Like Dr. Axel-
rod's questions, or her silences, the figures were meant to provoke
Ruth into revealing herself. What did she fear? What did she
want?
Tm so goddamn confused. I don't understand what's happen-
ing. Who to blame. Or if I should never have let it all happen in
the first place," Ruth said.
"I think you're taking too much on yourself," Dr. Axelrod re-
plied softly. "Some things can't be foreseen or blamed on anyone.

155
They can't even be understood. They can only be endured." Hel-
ena Axelrod was about ten years older than Ruth, with long black
hair that was relentlessly turning gray. Today she wore it in long
braids. With her dark eyes and coloring, a tawny skin like a faded
tan, she looked very much like an Indian. But she was dressed in
tailored slacks and an orange pullover sweater with a wide soft
cowl collar that reminded Ruth of the one Harry wore over his
gills.
"If he was sick or crippled or had some chronic affliction, I
could endure it. I would have to make great adjustments in my
life. But I could do it. This way . . . sometimes I get so angry."
"Angry about what?"
"I don't know. It's almost as if he wanted this all to happen.
He willed it. He sees himself as some sort of explorer. You saw
him on TV. He acts like Neil Armstrong and Jacques Cousteau
rolled into one."
Ruth fell silent.
"I almost envy him," she said after a moment.
"Why envy him?"
"You have to know Harry. He's totally fulfilled now. Before, he
was frustrated in his work, an anonymous cog in the machinery.
He said he developed systems within systems within systems. Yet
he worked so hard at it. He would work without sleep, living for
days on coffee and cigarettes to meet a development deadline.
That's how he got cancer. I know it. He felt he had to drive him-
self harder because he didn't have his Ph.D. But now he is the sys-
tem. What he calls a fundamental breakthrough. He's the inven-
tion, the research leader, and the astronaut. My God, it's his
fantasy."
"You could share all that with him." *
"I can't share anything with him. He's not there to share any-
thing with. We are inexorably separated. All I would do is turn
my life and my children's lives into some kind of sideshow. Since
that press conference on television, I've been terrified that some-
one might discover who we are. I feel embarrassed all the time.
Almost ashamed."
"Ashamed? What are you ashamed of?"
"I don't really know. But it all seems so freakish. Harry's in a
bottle being exhibited. Like the bottles of deformed fetuses, the
monsters, that they have in medical schools."
"I didn't get that impression from television at all," Helena

56
Axelrod said softly. "Of course, knowing you somewhat mitigated
my reaction, but my feelings were those of awe rather than any
revulsion. But we're not here to discuss my reactions/'
"No, please, I want to hear them."
"Well, basically I was very impressed. It was somewhat like
when I first saw the three men who were going to the moon on
TV. I had the feeling of an extraordinary man, a very courageous
man."
Ruth shook her head. "He really is living out his fantasy. He sees
himself—how did he put it?—as a marooned astronaut. As far as
I'm concerned, he's been lost for almost two years. Only now it's
nothing as mundane as cancer. He's a hero." Ruth's voice grew
sharp-edged and bitter. "It's positively romantic. He's absolved of
all responsibility for his wife and children." She began weeping.
"Oh, damn it. I'm becoming a total bitch. I was never like this
before. But it's all so goddamn frustrating. I still love him, but I
can't do anything for him. He's surrounded by professionals.
They're the only ones who can help him or work with him now.
There's just no point of contact between us anymore."
"What about the children? How are they?"
"I'm not sure. They've been very subdued. It worries me terri-
bly. But since Harry was on TV, they're talking a little more. Not
much, but even a question now and then is better than nothing.
Brenda said it's as if the father they knew had died, and he had
somehow been transformed into this strange man from another
world."
"What about the oldest boy?"
"I don't know. Sometimes he looks so lost and hurt I want to
cry. But since the TV appearance he's talked about going to visit
Harry again. He's still very shy about it. I think he sees Harry now
as some sort of superhero. He's awed and intimidated by him.
That's the effect of TV. But he doesn't know how to relate to
Glaucus. He can't relate to him as he used to to his father. He's
very confused about it. Aren't we all?"
"And the littlest one? His nightmares?"
Ruth shook her head. "He still has them. He was terrorized in
that tank. That strange bearded man from another world tried
to drown him. His father would never have done that."
"Have you discussed any of this with Harry?"
"It's very difficult to talk to him, but I think he knows it. He
senses it." She shook her head and broke into angry tears again. "I

157
don't know what he knows or understands anymore. I'm not even
sure it's Harry anymore."
Helena Axelrod didn't say anything. She nodded sympathet-
ically. Ruth suddenly had a strange feeling she was taking part
in a timeless ritual—a young woman seeking counsel from the old
wise squaw. Was Ruth's dilemma really unique in history? The
primitive figures about her varied from tribe to tribe in their tat-
toos, elongated ears, filed teeth, artfully mutilated cheeks, circum-
cisions, and beaded breasts, yet each was still a recognizable arche-
type of human experience.
Ruth wiped her eyes and blew her nose. "Fve become the ulti-
mate travesty of the wife whose husband abandons her to go off
on some adventure and leaves her home with the kids." Ruth
emitted a short humorless laugh of recognition. "My mother
would be furious."
"Your mother?"
"She always used to warn me, 'Never marry a traveling man.'"
"Why? What did your father do?"
"He was a geologist. He was always off looking at mines some-
where. He was never home."
"How did you feel about that?"
Ruth shrugged. "I guess I felt as my mother did. If he really
loved us, he'd be home more."
"Does Harry remind you of your father?"
"In some ways, perhaps. The humor. The preoccupation with
work. They were both very good-looking men."
"No, I mean that he's left you and doesn't love you?"
"No, of course not. Harry couldn't help what happened."
"A moment ago you said you felt that Harry had almost willed
what had happened."	*
"I was upset."
"It's something to be very upset about. But sometimes we're
not just upset about what is happening to us now. It gets con-
fused with things that go all the way back to our childhood."
"I understand all that," Ruth interrupted sharply. She found it
uncomfortable to discuss the intricacies of her feelings, even her
anger.
Dr. Axelrod remained silent. On the desk next to her was a
crude wooden figure of a man almost a foot and a half tall with
thick elephantine legs and feet. His hands were raised in supplica-
tion and his head thrown back, straining upward. Despite the

58
figure's grotesque proportions, the yearning was so intense and
physical, Ruth could feel it across the room.
"What's that?" she asked, pointing.
Helena Axelrod looked and turned back to Ruth with a slight
smile. "It's a fetish from the Montrol tribe in northern Nigeria.
It's very powerful, isn't it?"
Ruth nodded.
"The Montrol witch doctors use it to cure sickness."
"It reminds me of Dr. Steinhardt," Ruth said.
"Who?"
"One of the doctors who operated on Harry. The one who in-
vented the artificial gill. It doesn't look like him. He's very tower-
ing and slender. But sometimes I sense the same feeling of yearn-
ing in him, that same intensity. It frightens me."
"Why? Don't you trust him?"
Trust. It was such a meaningless word to use to categorize
Steinhardt. "I don't know. Gunther said that the man is incapa-
ble of being dishonest. If he told a lie, it would destroy him. It's
all wrapped up with his being a scientist. His search for truth with
a capital T." It was Steinhardt's passion that frightened Ruth, and
how could she explain that to Dr. Axelrod? The scientist held her
husband captive, enthralled in body and soul. And God only
knew where Steinhardt's passion would lead them both.
"Who is Gunther?"
"Our lawyer, Gunther Marx."
"Oh, yes, you've mentioned him before. Have you been seeing
much of him?"
Ruth was flustered by the question. Her face grew hot and
flushed. "Gunther? He's our lawyer. I don't know what I would
have done without him. He's the one who made all the arrange-
ments for Harry at the institute and negotiated the finances."
"You're blushing. Why?"
"I don't know why. I feel embarrassed and I don't know why. I
mean there's nothing between Gunther and me. We've been to
dinner once or twice, but only so we could discuss things away
from the kids or his office."
"Why away from his office?"
"There are always interruptions. Phone calls. Senior partners
popping in, I feel like you're giving me the third degree. Why?"
"I'm just trying to explore your feelings about this Gunther.
You've mentioned him several times."

159
"He's just a very old and dear friend."
Dr. Axelrod nodded and fell silent.
"Does it work?" Ruth asked.
"Does what work?"
Ruth indicated the intense, yearning figure on the desk.
"Yes, it works," Dr. Axelrod said. "For the Montrols. But I
only use it for the most desperate cases." She looked at Ruth.
"You know, you're going to have to start consciously considering
your options."
"My options?"
"The things you can do to make a new life for yourself, without
your husband."
"A new life without Harry?" Ruth repeated it very softly, not
really as a question but as a speculation. It was a thought that had
hovered at the edge of her consciousness since he had gotten sick.
But she had never brought her mind to focus on it. Never uttered
the phrase out loud. But now Dr. Axelrod had given voice to it. It
was as if it were a forbidden phrase, like the ancient Hebrew
name for God, and once said aloud it had powerful unpredictable
consequences.

33
Two sheriff's deputies had to rappel down the cliff to recover
the body. They had to wait until low tide. The surf pounded the
rocks directly below the cliff, and when it ebbed they were ex-
posed, wet, black, and shining in the bright morning sun.
Steinhardt hung back from the cliff. He forced his mind not to
speculate on the grisly scene below. He would have to confront it
soon enough. He thought it strange that in Southern California
special squads of police were trained in mountaineering and scuba
diving just to recover bodies and rescue sightseers. Before he had
come here, he had had the impression that it was a benign tropi-
cal land. He was surprised to discover it was an arid confrontation
of mountains, deserts, and sea, and only great irrigation works and
technology had made its sprawling population possible. In its
primitive state the land was harsh and unforgiving. Automobiles
often plunged off tortuous mountain roads or sea cliff drives and
were not discovered for days.
There were several police cars gathered just off the road thirty
yards from the cliff's edge. Seagulls soared overhead squawking at

i6i
the intrusion of their sanctuary. One gull, a mussel clenched in
its beak, rose above the others, then deliberately dropped the
shellfish on the rocks below. Then the bird swooped down to peck
and tear at the shattered shell and devour the exposed meat.
Steinhardt shuddered. The shattered body of the man on the
rocks had been there for days before the wreck had been spotted.
There was a shout from below. A winch on the front of the res-
cue truck was engaged and began hauling up a heavy load at the
end of its steel cable. The wire body basket, filled with a dark
form, appeared at the edge of the overhang, and then scraped up
the steep incline. Several deputies gathered around the body and
one of them motioned to Steinhardt. He moved forward to the
basket, his limbs heavy and reluctant, his stomach queasy.
The corpse was bloated and soaking wet. The flesh of the hands
and face was gray and bloodless, but relatively well preserved from
immersion in cold water. The fish, crabs, and gulls had not yet
gotten to the body. There was a great tear of cloth and flesh from
the groin to the hip, exposing viscera, as if a great force had al-
most ripped off the leg. As the sun warmed the body, the blood
that had congealed at death in the cold water now all at once
began to flow from the tear and a dozen other wounds, soaking
immediately into the parched brown sand.
A sheriff's deputy materialized at Steinhardt's side. He pointed
behind them. "He must have been going fast and was out of con-
trol, 'cause he missed the turn and smashed into the guard rail
there and ricocheted off, then rolled down this here incline. We
can't find any skid marks but the dirt is too loose to show them
up."
Steinhardt remembered the car headlights spiraling up Sea Cliff
Drive. He had a vision of the car soaring right off the palisade, the
lights blazing like twin meteorites arcing into the sea. He forced
himself to stare down at the gray, grotesquely swollen face. "Are
his glasses in the car, I wonder," he muttered.
"Then you can positively identify him?" one of the deputies
asked.
"Yes, that's Dr. Bernstein," he said, knowing already that he
would be haunted by that face for the rest of his life.
Late that night Steinhardt ransacked his desk, distracted, search-
ing. He was trying to find an old photograph. On the wall behind
him, the only one not completely covered by shelves of books, was

162
a tableau of Steinhardt's professional life. The mounted photo-
graphs had been carefully arranged by Johanna. In the first, Stein-
hardt, thirty-five years younger, stood posing with a World War II
B-29 bomber crew, each of whom held up a new oxygen mask. In
a second photograph Steinhardt, bundled in furs, huddled with a
family of Baffin Island Eskimos outside their igloo, and in a third
picture he stood in an almost identical pose with a family of
naked Australian aborigines in the Arnheim Land reservation. His
studies of the two extremes of metabolic adaptation to freezing
temperatures had been his first important publications.
In the desk drawer there were more photos. Steinhardt in tropi-
cal shorts and a pith helmet squatted up to his haunches in
swamp water holding up the head of an alligator whose jaws had
been wired shut. In an ill-fitting suit he stood squinting awk-
wardly into the sun amid a large group of scientists and engineers
with three astronauts at Cape Canaveral. In a scuba mask and wet
suit he explored a coral reef in the Bismarck Archipelago. He had
been hunting for Hyrophis, the venomous sea snakes whose ability
to obtain dissolved oxygen from swallowed seawater had been an-
other Chinese box he had elaborately dissected only to discover
another Chinese box within. On that expedition his assistant,
Wilkie, a bright young Ph.D. candidate in marine biology, had
momentarily mishandled one of the serpents and been bitten.
There had been no antidote.
Steinhardt slammed the desk drawer shut. The picture of Bern-
stein and himself at Massachusetts General Hospital was lost. He
wept. He wept not for the lost picture but for Bernstein and that
part of himself that had also been crushed on those sea rocks and
perished. After all his exotic expeditions and research he had
come full circle. Bernstein, unknowingly, unwittingly, had always
been his alter ego. No doctor, however skilled, is both a superb
clinician and a superb research scientist. For Bernstein surgery was
the art of healing, and if he could have healed with the laying on
of his hands, he would have gladly forsaken his scalpel. Most sur-
geons cut the flesh with passion. Bernstein had operated with
compassion. As a resident, Steinhardt had witnessed the young
surgeon instinctively do things that were not correct procedure
but had immediately worked. It was as if his hands were in com-
munion with each organ and felt its suffering.
It was Bernstein, by his example, who had demonstrated to
Steinhardt that his own passion was not for the practice of medi-

163
cine but elsewhere. Once Steinhardt had learned and practiced a
vagotomy or pneumonectomy he was bored with the surgical pro-
cedure. For him it was the end of his research in that area, his
adventure of discovery. But for Bernstein it was then the begin-
ning of the practice of his art.
Steinhardt could never have performed the gill operation on a
human being if Bernstein had not assisted him. But it was more
than the surgeon's skill and hands that Steinhardt had required.
He had needed Bernstein's approval. His fiat. And there in the op-
erating room, Bernstein had given it. With his hands he had in-
stinctively sewn in the silicone structures and Dacron tubing as if
they were natural fascia, the intimate connective tissue investing,
supporting, and binding together the organs. And the body had
accepted and nourished them. In those exhausting hours, the two
physicians had synergized over the body of a dying man, fusing a
scientific vision and a healing art that neither individually pos-
sessed.
Later Bernstein had accused Steinhardt of having seduced him
into helping create a perversion of man. Steinhardt had been
deeply offended. Now, unreconciled, Bernstein was dead, and his
death had the stench of self-destruction clinging to it. The fiat
had been revoked. Steinhardt was now alone. The old man wept
uncontrollably for both Bernstein and himself.

34
In the early sixties, researchers at the State University of New
York at Buffalo investigating the phenomenon of "fluid breath-
ing" drowned twenty-nine mongrel dogs inside a U.S. Navy de-
compression chamber. Unknown to them, one of the bitches was
about two weeks pregnant.
The experiments were among dozens of similar ones being con-
ducted at the time in the United States and Europe. "Fluid
breathing" had first been observed by John Scott Haldane, the
Scottish physiologist who laid the foundation for the modern
study of respiration. About the turn of the century Haldane re-
ported a delay in the drowning time of mice when they were
submerged in water with high oxygen tension. Later scientists got
the drowning time of mice and rats up to eighteen hours by pres-
surizing buffered salt solutions. The animals were seen rhythmi-
cally inhaling and exhaling the water.
Paradoxically the return to air breathing proved more dangerous
than the initial drowning. Pneumonia developed or the lungs col-
lapsed. The pregnant dog in Buffalo, however, survived twenty-

165
seven minutes of fluid breathing and the return to air. Forty-five
days after the experiment she delivered nine healthy pups.
"If by some special arrangement men could be made to breathe
water instead of air/' the physiologist Johannes Kylstra speculated
in Scientific American in 1968, "serious obstacles to attempts to
penetrate deeper into the ocean and to travel to outer space might
be overcome."
The Navy now wanted to test Harry in a pressure chamber.
"It's very dangerous," Steinhardt told Harry. "I don't know how
pressure will affect the gills. It might rupture them." Steinhardt's
voice was listless, without confidence. His skin, once the healthy
pink flush of a white-haired vigorous old man, was now sallow and
yellowish. He stood bent and stoop-shouldered before the tank,
communicating discouragement and foreboding disaster. He had
been that way since Bernstein's death.
"What about the rest of me? My body? Won't it be crushed?"
Harry asked.
Steinhardt shook his head. "Sperm whales dive a mile deep and
stay down for an hour just to hunt squid."
"But a whale has had sixty-five million years of evolution in the
sea."
Steinhardt shrugged noncommittally. "How many years of evo-
lution in the sea has a mouse had? Ornhagen and Lundgren pres-
surized liquid-breathing mice up to eight thousand two hundred
and fifty feet deep—two hundred and fifty times normal atmos-
pheric pressure—and some of them recovered and functioned nor-
mally afterward, even though no special efforts had been made to
save them. Apparently the mammalian body has the inherent ca-
pacity to absorb tremendous hydrostatic pressures without injury.
The pressure of the water itself is not the problem in deep diving.
Breathing compressed gases under pressure creates the problems."
"How deep can divers go?"
"For scuba divers breathing compressed air, the record is only
four hundred thirty-seven feet. However, using an oxygen-helium
mixture, two divers swam out of a diving bell at one thousand feet
deep off Catalina Island right off the coast here. French divers
have simulated a dive to two thousand and one feet in the Comex
Chamber in Marseille. They also breathed an oxyhelium mix-
ture."
Harry grunted, the electronic sound deep and bull-like. Ever

66
since the press conference and his appearance on TV he had been
in a state of great excitement. He felt as if the enormous electrical
energy required to transmit his image and voice around the world
was being routed directly through him. The energy had emanated
from the TV cameras, the microphones, technicians, and re-
porters, but mainly from the spotlights. They were blinding and
hot, sizzling with a power that separated him from those outside
their aura. It had not been an unpleasant experience, but rather a
feeling of greatly enhanced magnetism, a palpable charisma.
When he had watched himself on TV, he had hardly recog-
nized himself or the resonant electronic voice. The image on TV
was infinitely more confident and powerful than he had felt. His
own electronic image fed back to him that confidence and power
and it now radiated directly from him. The vision of himself he
had blurted out, the fantasy, had become his destiny. "Theoret-
ically, h'ow deep can I go?" Harry pressed Steinhardt.
"Theoretically, we simply don't know. We don't have enough
information. We don't know whether the gill structure itself will
withstand the pressure."
"But if it does, there's no reason that I couldn't withstand the
pressure down to at least a mile deep?"
"The experiments with dogs and mice would seem to indicate
that," Steinhardt admitted reluctantly. He was hesitant, unwilling
to volunteer information. His eyes were red and his gaunt frame
more drawn than ever.
"That's over two and a half times as deep as the French
record."
"This is not an Olympic competition," Steinhardt snapped irri-
tably. "This is a scientific investigation."
"You're wrong, Doctor. It's always an Olympic competition. To
go higher, faster, farther. To build the fastest fighter. The deepest
submersible. To be first. First at the North Pole. First on the
moon. The first heart transplant."
Steinhardt shook his head. "No, it's for knowledge," he insisted.
His voice fell to a strained whisper. "For knowledge."
"Is that what you want? Knowledge?"
Steinhardt looked surprised. "Yes, of course."
"Then get me deeper than any man has ever been before. And,
dead or alive, I'll bring you back new knowledge."
Steinhardt stared at Harry, then held up his hands in a gesture

167
of despair. "But there's no such chamber available. We don't
have the equipment."
"The Navy can build it for us. They have the hardware, the
chambers, multistage compressors, pressurization systems. It's just
a matter of adapting and modifying them for me."
"It would be enormously expensive."
"Yes, it will be," Harry agreed. "And they won't do it to test
rats or dogs for pure scientific research, Doctor. But they will do it
to get a man a mile deep. Deeper than any diver has ever been be-
fore."
Steinhardt said nothing. He stared at Harry, grave doubts
etched in his sallow, despairing face.
"But before we approach them," Harry continued, "we'd better
first run a series of hydrostatic tests on an assembled gill to see
how it stands up under the pressure."
Steinhardt nodded distractedly.
"Believe me, I know what I'm doing," Harry insisted. "You're
the genius in medicine and biology, but now we've crossed over
into my bailiwick, material and systems testing. Help me get a
mile deep, and I'll get you new knowledge about life processes."
The deep urgency in Harry's voice echoed in the tank room like
the rumbling of distant thunder. "Get me to the bottom of the
abyss and I'll bring you back the secrets of life itself."

35
Stephanie O'Gara's divorce had left her with her illusions of se-
curity shattered, her trust in men gutted, and with two daughters
to support. Her ex-husband's support payments were, at best, ir-
regular.
Before her first child was born she had worked for a small sub-
urban newspaper. In returning to work, she had looked unsuccess-
fully for a newspaper or radio or TV news-writing job for four
months and then had taken a job as a typist in the sales depart-
ment of a Los Angeles TV station. She calculatingly made the ac-
quaintance of everyone in the newsroom and had been on the
spot when a production assistant's job opened up six months later.
In three months she had moved up to a news writer. It had taken
her another year and a half to wangle a job as a field reporter.
During that period she had had a brief, guilt-laden affair with a
married assistant news director.
If she had felt insecure before, she was totally vulnerable as an
on-the-air reporter. She looked into the mirror and her once soft,
pretty features reflected back sharp anxious lines. Younger women

169
with billowing manes of hair were being hired to sell news on TV
as they pitched shampoo. Her job was subject to vagaries of per-
sonality, charisma factors, overnight ratings tabulated at fifteen-
minute intervals, and the winds of station politics. O'Gara desper-
ately felt she had to make a big splash. She needed a scoop, an ex-
clusive. It was not a matter of vanity but of survival.
"If the fish-man does have a wife and child, it'll make a helluva
story," Greenberg agreed. He was the assistant news director.
"He does. I know it," O'Gara said.
"What makes you so sure?"
"Just call it my feminine intuition."
"Feminine intuition. You and Lucrezia Borgia." There was an
edge to Greenberg's voice that O'Gara caught. He still felt that
she'd used him. She hadn't. She had been lonely and unsure of
herself and their affair had simply happened. She was still lonely
and unsure of herself, but she knew now that playing Back Street
once a week with a man with three kids of his own was no solace.
"How're you going to track him down?"
"I have a lead. But I'll need a day in the office just to run it
down on the phone."
"That's what we have editorial assistants and assignment edi-
tors for. What's the lead?"
O'Gara shook her head. "I'll have to do it myself. It's a touchy
situation."
Greenberg stared at her, then nodded. "Okay, I'll rework the
schedule."
O'Gara spent the next day on the phone. She began by simply
calling the heads of press relations of the major aerospace firms in
the Los Angeles area. She told them that a source had tipped her
that the so-called gill-man John Glaucus had once worked for
their company. She drew a blank.
O'Gara had automatically assumed that Glaucus had been re-
ferring to a local Los Angeles aerospace company. With a shock it
suddenly occurred to her that he might have worked anywhere in
the country. There were clusters of the industry in Houston, Or-
lando, Cambridge, Seattle, and Palo Alto. There was no way for
her to check them all out.
She had to follow up on her original hunch. She searched
through the yellow pages of the half-dozen phone directories for
the Los Angeles area. There were pages of companies listed under
Aircraft Mfgrs, Missile & Rocket Component Mfgrs, Missile &

170
Rocket Instrument and Guidance Equipment, Space Components
and Systems, Space Research and Development. O'Gara's heart
sank.
Doggedly, with ebbing hope, she began calling the numbers in
the columns. She tried ruses, ploys, pretenses. She called the per-
sonnel offices at Rockwell, T.R.W., Hughes, and Lockheed and
said she was* from the business office of the county hospital. She
needed to know the insurance coverage of John Glaucus. She
claimed she wasn't supposed to give out his real name unless the
person on the other end of the line was authorized. The response
on the other end of the line was total confusion. By the end of
the day she had made over a hundred phone calls and still didn't
have a ghost of a lead.
When Greenberg came to say good night, she felt humiliated.
She was on the verge of tears. Her head throbbed and she was
nauseated. She smiled at Greenberg. "If it was easy, any bum
could get the story."
Greenberg shrugged. "I'm sorry it didn't work out. I can't give
you any more time on it. Tomorrow you're scheduled to go out
with the crew."
O'Gara nodded. She didn't say anything. She would dig out the
story on her own time if she had to. But, damn it, she was going
to dig it out.

36
Steinhardt, already on edge after Bernstein's death, felt threat-
ened by the two Navy men. In his mind they represented massive
machinery that would overwhelm and oppress him, Harry too. He
found even their looks deceptive.
In his gray worsted suit the tall slender man with white hair and
rimless glasses would at first glance be taken for a university pro-
fessor. He was in fact Rear Admiral Theodore Nelson, chief of the
Office of Naval Research. "Glaucus appears to be preoccupied
with setting a world record," Nelson commented.
"It's the influence of his aerospace industry background, I be-
lieve," Steinhardt murmured.
"Ah, yes."
To Nelson's right, and a step behind, ambled a square-faced,
beefy man. With his fireplug physique and blunt scowling face,
Roger Morrison would be typecast as the boss of an oil drilling
gang. He was in actuality a Navy doctor with the rank of captain,
a specialist in diving medicine. Like Nelson, Morrison wore a ci-
vilian suit

172
"We're not opposed to making some sort of world mark, mind
you/' Nelson continued. "But our primary consideration, as it is
for all tests of this type, is the safety of the personnel involved."
Nelson's tone was admonishing, as if he were criticizing Stein-
hardt for some unspecified fall from grace.
Steinhardt nodded. "I understand that is your official position."
Despite Nelson's scholarly appearance, Steinhardt was intimi-
dated by the man. This admiral commanded not a fleet of war-
ships but one of the most powerful scientific organizations in the
world. After World War II the Office of Naval Research had
plunged deeply into underwriting pioneering work at universities
on nuclear accelerators, solid-state physics, quantum electronics,
computers, marine biology, and medicine. The Navy's aggressive
policy became the pattern for the Atomic Energy Commission,
the National Science Foundation, NASA, the National Institutes
of Health—the alphabet soup of bureaucracies that now domi-
nated science in the United States. But the Navy's roots in re-
search were deep and historic. Charles Darwin's epic discoveries
on evolution, Steinhardt now recalled, had been made sailing as a
naturalist aboard the Beagle on an official naval expedition. The
admiral carried the mantle of that tradition.
Nelson nodded his head toward Buckley. "I was just telling
Paul here, Dr. Steinhardt, I'm as excited by the basic research
you've done that might lead to a workable prosthetic lung as I am
by the gill's potential to allow us to exploit the sea floor. My back-
ground's in electronics so I don't understand all the aspects. But
my medical people are tremendously impressed with the way
you've worked out the problems of sufficient surface area in the
blood-water interface. Also the countercurrent heat exchangers in
the bloodstream to minimize loss of body heat."
"They're not my inventions," Steinhardt said. "Nature worked
them out millions of years ago for marine animals. The break-
through was our technology developing to the point where we
could manufacture a silicone capillary small enough in diameter
yet strong enough. Then it was simply a matter of programming a
computer to design a mathematical model to achieve the neces-
sary heat transfer and oxygenation for a man."
"It's a remarkable achievement. However, I would be less than
candid with you, Dr. Steinhardt, if I didn't admit we were ex-
tremely reluctant to continue sponsoring your work when we real-
ized how far you had gone."

173
"I simply don't understand your attitude/' Steinhardt replied
with an edge of anger in his voice. "I've done nothing unethical,
disreputable, or inhumane. I followed the federal guidelines for
human experiments. The procedure was reviewed by the hospital
committee on research involving human beings."
"No one is implying otherwise, Karl," Buckley smoothly inter-
rupted. "I think the admiral is only restating the Navy's official
position for the record."
"Research involving human beings is always acutely sensitive,"
the admiral said vaguely. "There's no question but that you've
made some historic studies in the Glaucus Project. What I hope
we can now do is organize the research to better evaluate your
work's full potential. I see the hyperbaric chamber tests as merely
a beginning."
Morrison nodded vigorously. "Up to now your research has
been aimed at evaluating an unanticipated event, an accident."
His Texas drawl somewhat mitigated his emphatic speech. In the
course of the visit Morrison had referred several times to "the
unanticipated event, the accident." He seemed fond of the phrase.
Steinhardt didn't know if he was referring to the gill itself or to
Styles's recovery. In either case he found the phrase offensive.
Morrison bounced on his toes as he talked, as if straining for
height amid considerably taller men. "The information on car-
diopulmonary functions, maximal oxygen uptake, and energy bal-
ance is first-rate. First-rate." He frowned. "But I would have liked
a great deal more psychological evaluation. Cognitive perform-
ance, reaction time, and personality changes. We have next to
nothing in that area."
"I'm sure it would have made fascinating reading," Steinhardt
said sharply. "But it would have been scientifically pointless. We
would have data on a man who had fully expected to die and had,
in fact, almost expired on the operating table. He was revived and
sustained only through extraordinary means, then woke up to find
himself totally submerged in water. From that point on—until our
admittedly sketchy psychological testing and psychiatric evalua-
tion began—he was heavily tranquilized and under intensive care.
He is still experiencing a great deal of personal conflict and confu-
sion, understandably so. I doubt if a daily MAACL profile of his
anxiety, hostility, and depression would have any validity."
Neither Nelson nor Morrison said anything.
"There still remains the question," Buckley interjected. "Does

174
Glaucus go to the chamber or does the chamber come to
Glaucus?"
Nelson cleared his throat and looked pensive. "The logistics of
the situation would indicate that it is more convenient, and safer,
to set up the chamber here than to transport Glaucus back and
forth to Bethesda. We have no facilities to maintain him there."
"I agree," Buckley said immediately, seizing the opportunity.
"If you get the necessary contracts to me, I'll work out the arrange-
ments with the university."
Steinhardt looked questioningly at Buckley. The Office of
Naval Research policy was always to make their contracts directly
with the scientist rather than with the university. The contracts
had no deadlines and were renewed if the progress warranted it.
Steinhardt wondered if Buckley was now maneuvering to place
himself legally in charge of the next phase of the research. And of
Harry Styles.
After Nelson and Morrison had driven off, Buckley turned to
Steinhardt with a cynical smile. "Logistics, hell. They could build
a habitat for Styles as easily as they can transport and set up a
hyperbaric chamber here. They're afraid of his dying on them.
That's why they want the depth tests run on the institute
grounds."
He and Steinhardt walked to the research building in silence.
When they reached the door, Buckley turned once again to make
a point. "That Morrison's going to give us problems. He's the
hatchet man. They're going to try and take over Glaucus."
"Yes, I anticipate so," Steinhardt said dully.
The Navy built a hangar for the hyperbaric chamber and a small
holding tank for Styles at the north end of the campus. The speed
and efficiency with which the construction was completed and the
chamber installed impressed Steinhardt.
Morrison shrugged. "It's nothing. In the Tekite Project we
built a small city on St. John. And that was only to keep four men
in a habitat forty-nine feet down in the Caribbean. Who the hell
knows where this will end. Look, we built a forty-billion-dollar
empire to put two men on the moon." Morrison, like Buckley,
had visions of empire building. He squinted up at Steinhardt.
"There's a right way and a wrong way to go about experiments,"
he said. "We're going to eliminate the unanticipated events, the
accidents."

175
In his career Steinhardt had studiously avoided such large-scale
projects. He had, because of the brilliance of his work, been
offered directorships of research institutes, chairmanships of com-
mittees. He had refused them all. As a researcher, he was almost
medieval, the alchemist who searches for his truths in solitude.
Now here he was in the very situation he had always shunned—
research by teams. Teams of hematologists, cardiovascular special-
ists, physicians, physiologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists.
Buckley had even enlisted political scientists and sociologists.
NASA had commissioned a study of public reaction to Glaucus.
The space agency wanted to know if the public would accept sim-
ilar surgical operations to adapt men to work in hostile environ-
ments in space.
Each day was crowded with meetings. There were conferences
to plan experiments, make out schedules, anticipate emergencies,
and formulate procedures. The demands on Steinhardt's time
were excessive, unending. Yet as busy as he was, Steinhardt could
not shake the despair that had engulfed him since Bernstein's
death. The surgeon had died violently, convinced of their damna-
tion. It was as if his friend had pronounced a dying curse, and no
amount of rationalization could dispel the growing horror and
doubt Steinhardt felt.
He conferred increasingly with Harry, even on medical ques-
tions in which Harry had no knowledge. It was from Harry him-
self Steinhardt now sought the moral justification, the fiat to go
on with the work that Bernstein had irrevocably withdrawn.
"What's this associative memory test?" Harry asked.
Steinhardt had shown him the schedule of pressure tests in the
chamber. "It's a standard psychological test used in diving-related
research."
"Cut it out. We don't need it. It'll take too much time." There
was no reason for his objection. It was merely a capricious exercise
of control, as though Harry were compelled to assert that he
wasn't simply a guinea pig but the final decision maker.
Steinhardt gave in. As the pressure trials loomed near, Harry be-
came increasingly temperamental in his demands. He insisted all
tests and experiments be cleared with him. Yet he seemed basically
happier; his energy was manic.
If Harry Styles had indeed surrendered his soul for continued
life and scientific immortality, he seemed at the moment content

176
with his Faustian pact. The anxiety attacks had ceased; his psy-
chological tests indicated less depression.
Puzzled, Steinhardt conferred with the psychiatrist Shapiro.
"It's really quite simple," Shapiro said. "His former life was very
goal-oriented. His work was always geared to developing a piece of
hardware within a specific deadline. He's a product of the system
that payloaded a man on the moon, blasted probes to Saturn.
After his operation his life didn't have that sort of specificity. He
was just existing, and that existence was without meaning to him.
Now he once again has a concrete goal he understands, one that is
tremendously ego-satisfying to him."
Steinhardt didn't entirely accept the psychiatrist's explanation.
He couldn't dispel the mounting anxiety he felt about the pres-
sure tests. The Glaucus Project had developed a steamrolling mo-
mentum of its own, and Steinhardt had lost control.
The hyperbaric chamber was a long cylindrical steel structure
like a boiler drum with the area of a medium-sized room. It was
dry and air-filled but rested on top of an oblong "wet pot,"
smaller in size and filled with an oxygenated saline solution.
The pot opened into the chamber like a pool into a steel-walled
room. Harry lay submerged in the pot. With him was a Navy div-
ing medical officer, Dr. Daniel Gillespie, who breathed through a
"hookah," an air regulator supplied by a hose that snaked into the
chamber above. Steinhardt's assistant Mark Matsuda was sta-
tioned in the dry chamber.
Morrison had insisted that two men be present in the chamber
with Harry as safety tenders. Steinhardt had agreed but not for
Morrison's reasons. If the gill ruptured, there was little the doctor
or Matsuda could do. For Steinhardt's experiment, the two men
breathing compressed air, both in and out of the water, were "con-
trols," normal men against whom he could measure the success or
failure of the gill. Gillespie was a slightly built man, thirty-five
years old, who played tennis once a week. Matsuda, twenty-six,
was considerably huskier, a muscular man who ran several miles
on the beach almost every morning.
There was a loud hiss as valves opened and compressed air was
released into the chamber. Slowly, pound by pound, the pressure
was increased. Harry and the two tenders were each fitted with
medical sensors. Steinhardt and Morrison continuously monitored
their vital functions on a console outside the chamber.

77
"Harry, this is Dr. Steinhardt. How do you feel?" He spoke into
a microphone on the console.
"I'm fine. Are you increasing the pressure?" Harry's voice came
over a speaker, strained and anxious.
"Yes, we are."
"I have no sensation of pressure," Harry said.
"Dr. Gillespie?"
"I had a slight ear and sinus block," the medical officer in the
chamber reported, "but I've equalized it. I'm okay now."
"Mark?"
"No problems, Doctor."
The pressure was stabilized at the equivalent of thirty-three feet
of seawater, a depth at which the pressure is twice that at sea
level. At that depth any pocket of air in the body is compressed to
half its normal volume. Like a passenger in a jet airliner descend-
ing for a landing, Dr. Gillespie felt this as a painful squeezing on
his eardrums and sinuses. The air that Gillespie and Matsuda
were breathing was twice the weight and density as that outside
the chamber.
But water, even under great pressure, does not compress as air
does. The water that Harry breathed and that filled the sinuses
and pockets of his body did not change in volume or density as
the pressure was increased. Steinhardt had anticipated this, and he
wasn't surprised that Harry didn't have the same sensation of
pressure that the two air-breathing men in the chamber experi-
enced.
At the simulated depth of thirty-three feet Harry and the two
divers were run through a battery of exhausting physiological, psy-
chological, and medical tests. Then the pressure in the chamber
was carefully lowered to normal, and Harry was minutely ex-
amined for any injuries or trauma from the increased pressure.
The doctors could find none.
Steinhardt and Morrison agreed to wait several days to see if
any problems developed. None did, and a second chamber "dive"
was made to sixty-six feet. Then ninety-nine feet. After each dive
the medicial staff pored over the EKG tracings from Harry's, Gil-
lespie's, and Matsuda's hearts and the EEG tracings from their
brains. Urine and blood samples were analyzed. Rectal tempera-
tures. Gillespie's and Matsuda's lung volumes and ventilation
were computed and compared with Harry's gill-flow rates. Heart-

178
beats, stroke volume, cardiac output, carbon dioxide output, and
oxygen uptakes were charted and graphed.
After the third chamber dive Harry still showed no adverse reac-
tion to a fourfold increase in pressure, and Steinhardt proposed
accelerating the dive schedule.
"What the hell's the big rush?" Morrison snapped. As the
depths increased, the conflicts between Steinhardt and the Navy
doctor had increased mathematically. The relentless build-up of
pressure in the chamber seemed to radiate its force beyond the
cylindrical steel walls, generating a mounting tension between the
two men.
Steinhardt realized that Morrison thought he was a crazy scien-
tist who had performed a bizarre human experiment without the
proper authorization. Now Morrison was assigned to oversee a
series of extremely dangerous tests. If the trials succeeded, the suc-
cess would be Steinhardt's. If there was a disaster, the respon-
sibility would be Morrison's, as far as the Navy was concerned. As
a career officer, he had been placed in a terrible position where he
had nothing to gain and everything to lose. He lived in constant
fear of what Steinhardt or Harry might do. The anxiety oozed
from him as sweat, staining the armpits and collar of his khaki
shirt.
"We're going to take it slow and sure. By the book," he said.
As the pressure sank to the 165-foot depth, six times that of
normal pressure, the divers with Harry could no longer breathe
compressed air. Air is 80 percent nitrogen, and nitrogen under
pressure becomes a powerful narcotic similar to the nitrous oxide
"laughing gas" dentists use as anesthesia. At two hundred feet
deep, divers stoned on compressed air have tried to give their air
hoses to passing fish. Breathing pure oxygen is also dangerous, be-
cause pressurized oxygen by itself has a toxic effect that causes
convulsions. For work at greater depths, Navy and commercial
divers use carefully controlled high-pressure mixtures of oxygen
and helium. Harry, directly absorbing the oxygen in the water
through his gills as a fish does, wasn't affected by these problems.
As the depths increased, the two men with Harry created an-
other problem—exhaustingly long decompressions. It took twelve
minutes to pressurize the chamber to three hundred feet. It took
Harry and the two divers three hours to perform the physical and
psychological tests for that depth. It took over twenty-four hours
to safely decompress the divers back to sea level. The deeper a

179
diver descends, the more the pressurized gases he is breathing dis-
solve in his blood. If he is brought back up too quickly, the gases
bubble in his blood like a bottle of Coke that has been suddenly
uncapped. In mild cases the tiny bubbles cause itching, a rash, fa-
tigue, minor aches and pains, and dizziness. In severe cases there
is excruciating pain, paralysis, blindness, convulsions, and death.
The bends.
Steinhardt carefully compared Harry's blood at three hundred
feet with that of the divers'. The divers' blood, like bottled Coke,
was charged with the pressurized gases they had been breathing.
Harry's blood was not.
"The Navy decompression tables we're adhering to are meaning-
less for Styles," Steinhardt told Morrison.
The Navy captain glowered. "Not for the divers."
"The tenders are no longer needed, and now they're unneces-
sarily delaying the experiment. Styles doesn't need these long de-
compression periods."
Sweat bubbled on Morrison's brow. The perspiration on his
scalp made his close-cropped black hair and exposed white skin
gleam as if they were coated with oil. "We're going by the book
here," he said, his voice tight with anger. "As far as I'm con-
cerned, your gill-man is a medical patient in my chamber. Accord-
ing to the book, he undergoes compression with qualified tenders
in the chamber with him. And we decompress by the tables. I'm
in charge of the operation of the chamber, and that's the way
we're doing it."
Steinhardt looked from Morrison to Gillespie, who stood be-
hind the senior medical officer. Gillespie remained silent. His lank
brown hair framed a pale, morose face. Both he and Morrison
were totally preoccupied with imagining *jvhat could go wrong.
Steinhardt could readily understand why the Navy had selected
Morrison to supervise the pressure tests. He was excruciatingly
thorough and conscientious. But Morrison's ability to avert disas-
ter was based on experience, and there were no precedents for
Harry Styles. With no precedents to guide him, a scientist needs
audacity and intuition. These were qualities Morrison simply did
not possess.
"We're creating an unnecessary hazard," Steinhardt insisted.
"Don't tell me how to run these tests," Morrison exploded. "I
get that every day from your monster."
"My monster?" Steinhardt was outraged.

i8o
Morrison looked away. "He's not a natural man/' Morrison
muttered. "He's a laboratory freak. We don't know how he's
going to react to any situation. We're flying blind." He turned on
his heel and strode away. Gillespie glanced nervously at Stein-
hardt, then dogged after the senior officer.
Steinhardt stared at their retreating backs. There had been
something strangely fearful and furtive in Gillespie's drawn face.
It occurred to Steinhardt that Morrison and Gillespie each hated
Harry Styles. It was not the physical revulsion that Morrison's
outburst had indicated. Harry Styles was an alien life forcing Mor-
rison to venture beyond the safe pale of his knowledge. And he
was forcing Gillespie, who was locked in the pressure chamber
with him, beyond the limits of his courage.
The surge of high-pressure gas into the chamber made a deafen-
ing blast. The chamber itself roared and trembled, seething in the
center of the hangar-sized building like an enormous cylindrical
bomb that threatened to explode at any moment. In the hangar
the air was at normal atmospheric pressure, 14.7 pounds per
square inch. Inside the chamber the pressure was six hundred
pounds per square inch. The depth reading was 1,320 feet. For
Gillespie and Matsuda each breath was a heavy labor to pull in
and push out gases sixty times heavier and denser than the air out-
side. The pressure and the helium altered the vibratory range of
their vocal cords. When they tried to talk, incomprehensible duck-
like squawks came out of their mouths. They communicated
with each other through notes and hand signals and their mes-
sages to the outside were tapped out on an electric typewriter.
Once again the tedious hours of tests began. Aerobic work rates
and anaerobic limits were tested by pedaling a stationary bicycle
to exhaustion. How long did it take before Harry, faint with the
exertion and thigh muscles cramping, faltered and could not keep
up with the pace? Or Matsuda? Or Gillespie?
The tremors in each man's hand, a symptom of high-pressure
nervous syndrome, were measured by a transducer attached to the
middle finger. Gillespie showed considerably more tremors than
either Harry or Matsuda. But wide deviations in the high-pressure
nervous syndrome between individual divers was the rule rather
than the exception.
A second test for the syndrome was given. They picked up ball
bearings with a tweezer and placed them in a tube of the same di-

i8i
ameter. Gillespie kept dropping the ball bearings. He became visi-
bly irritated and frustrated, swearing in harsh angry duck noises.
Each of the tests was a standard used in diving research. There
were volumes of data against which to compare the three men's
performances. Morrison moved on to tests for touch, hearing,
eyes, and reaction time. There were problems to solve in spatial
orientation and arithmetic.
The tests took several hours to complete, but the dive was far
from over. The men in the chamber were hostages to the immuta-
ble laws of physics that govern pressure and gases. The decompres-
sion from 1,320 feet would take fourteen days.
The chamber itself was oppressively bleak—bare steel walls with
only jutting pipes and pressure fittings for relief. The toilet facili-
ties, bunks, benches, and tables were also of steel. Matsuda had
brought with him photos of his wife and child, a tottering stack
of paperback novels and magazines, playing cards, and a chess
board. Gillespie brought only a few books. He declined the other
man's invitation to play cards or chess, preferring to spend the
decompression time reading and sleeping. Harry and Matsuda
managed several difficult games of amphibious chess, raising and
lowering the magnetized board into the wet pot after each move.
On the second day of decompression Gillespie suddenly threw
down a book he had been reading and made an unintelligible
comment.
Matsuda looked up in surprise and laughed. The laugh came
out, "Quack quack quack."
Gillespie glared at him with a murderous look. He didn't speak
to either Matsuda or Harry for the rest of the day but sat brood-
ing. When Steinhardt or Morrison asked him a question, he an-
swered with a curt nod or shake of his head 6r ignored them com-
pletely.
Morrison ordered the psychologists to decode the MAACL
profile Gillespie had taken at 1,320 feet. They reported back that
his measures of anxiety, hostility, and depression had greatly esca-
lated since the previous dives. But there was no way the decom-
pression could be speeded up without risking seriously injuring the
three men. Whatever happened, they were trapped inside an over-
sized pressure cooker for another twelve days.
On the fourth day it was evident that Gillespie was sleeping
fitfully when he slept at all. Rather than being exhausted, he was
nervously agitated. He paced the chamber like a caged beast. He

182
took four strides, hit the blank steel wall, pivoted, and took four
strides to the opposite wall.
"Dr. Gillespie, perhaps you'd be more comfortable if you took a
tranquilizer," Steinhardt suggested tactfully. He peered into the
chamber through a small viewing port.
Gillespie squawked back, his voice further distorted by anger.
Steinhardt couldn't understand a word he was saying.
Matsuda came up and placed a placating hand on the medical
officer's shoulder. He said something in duck gibberish and
pointed to the typewriter, suggesting Gillespie use it to com-
municate.
Gillespie violently threw off Matsuda's hand, sending the young
man reeling against the steel bulkhead with a painful crash. The
two men screamed at each other in horrible squawks.
Harry broke water and thrust his head and shoulders into the
chamber. "For Chrissakes, guys, ease off. We've got ten more days
to go and you're already going stir crazy." The helium and pres-
sure didn't affect his electronic larynx.
The sight of Flarry seemed to further enrage Gillespie. He flung
himself at Harry, grabbed him by the neck, and tried to drag him
out of the wet pot. Harry instinctively yanked back and pulled the
other man into the pot with him. They furiously thrashed in the
water, inundating the chamber with heaving waves. Matsuda
jumped to the lip of the pot and struggled to pull Gillespie off
Harry. The chamber resonated with their garbled frantic cries, a
bedlam of battling geese.
Steinhardt watched horror-struck. He and the men outside the
chamber were as powerless to help Harry as if they were on sepa-
rate planets. Morrison bellowed into the microphone for them to
stop fighting, but his loud panicked orders only added to the pan-
demonium.
Matsuda managed to haul Gillespie, choking and sputtering,
out of the water. For a moment they wrestled, but Gillespie
sensed he was no match for the husky, heavier young man, and all
the fight and fury suddenly went out of him.. He slumped to the
floor of the chamber.
Matsuda lifted him to a chair, where he sat sodden and listless,
staring vacantly into space, his lank brown hair hanging in his
face dripping water.
For the next ten days the medical officer was tranquilized. He
remained silent, hardly functioning, moving about the chamber

83
like a sleepwalker. On several occasions he burst into tears for no
apparent reason. Matsuda had to gently prod him into eating and
washing. Both men abandoned shaving. Matsuda had discreetly
gotten rid of the razors in the garbage disposal. At the end of the
fourteen days Dr. Gillespie had to be carried out of the pressure
chamber on a stretcher.
For the next two weeks Steinhardt and the Navy staff minutely
examined Harry and restudied all the medical data. They were
like stress engineers searching for telltale cracks after a test flight.
"I want to go alone on the next dive," Harry suddenly an-
nounced. "All the way. Down a mile."
Morrison shook his head. "It's too dangerous."
"If we don't do it, all this has been for nothing."
"That's not so," Morrison insisted. "The gill has checked out.
The tests all indicate it's at least equally as effective as our most
advanced underwater breathing apparatus."
Harry looked toward Steinhardt, but the scientist remained si-
lent. He couldn't dispel the deep apprehension he had always felt
about the pressure tests. Something about them was inherently
wrong, Steinhardt's sixth sense was warning him, but he couldn't
put his finger on the danger.
Harry was vehement. "I won't let you stop now. I'll take what-
ever risk is necessary. But we have to go deeper. Deeper than any
man has ever been before or will go for a long time. We have to
be the first!"
Morrison shook his head. There was a dumb bull-like stub-
bornness in the gesture. Steinhardt suddenly knew what was
wrong with the Navy's whole testing procedure. The knowledge
came to him, as scientific breakthroughs ofterf do, in a flash of in-
tuition. It was like adding one drop of catalyst to a supersaturated
solution; instantly the solution crystallizes. All the vague uncrys-
tallized doubts and fears Steinhardt had been experiencing for the
past several weeks suddenly took a tangible shape. He knew with
absolute certainty what was wrong with the tests and what had to
be done. And with that knowledge the despair that had paralyzed
him for weeks also disappeared. "We will go ahead with the
tests," he said quietly. "And Harry will go alone."
Morrison whirled on him angrily. "Who the hell do you think
you are?" he exploded. "I'm in charge of that chamber. I'm re-
sponsible for it."

184
"You've been responsible for forcing a scientific experiment to
blindly adhere to dangerous procedures."
"I've followed the book," he said adamantly.
Steinhardt gestured toward Harry. "A third-year medical stu-
dent could analyze his blood chemistry and tell you that the book,
the Navy decompression tables you slavishly follow, are totally ir-
relevant. You have created decompression problems where none
exist."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"You've insisted on divers who have to breathe pressurized oxy-
helium accompanying Harry on every dive. Their gasses contami-
nate the fluid he breathes and in turn saturate his blood the same
as the divers'."
"But that's to be expected."
"Only because you've created an artificial environment of high-
pressure oxygen and helium for the divers. But in the ocean, even
at great depths, no such high-pressure gas exists. The gases dis-
solved in the water are essentially the same as they are at sea level.
Fish experience no decompression problems. But under your
artificial conditions even a herring would have to decompress by
the official Navy tables."
For the first time since Steinhardt had met him, Morrison
looked bewildered. He glanced from Steinhardt to Harry, his eyes
confused and anxious.
"We will make a dive to one mile deep," Steinhardt declared.
"But we will seal off the water with rubber matting so we don't
contaminate it with high-pressure helium and oxygen. The gas
levels in the water will be kept the same as they occur naturally
in the ocean. There is no more book to follow, Dr. Morrison. We
must take a calculated risk."
"Jesus Christ," Morrison swore, his voice almost inaudible.
"And we must have the courage to fail."
"Jesus Christ," Morrison repeated. He looked terrified.

37
The once carefully tended garden around the swimming pool
had become a jungle. After the heavy winter rains it exploded in
wild tangled growth. The hibiscus crowded and shaded the roses.
The camellias, once spherical masses of broad glossy leaves and
carmine blossoms, shot up like rangy trees and produced dried
brown buds that never bloomed. The bougainvillea crawled over
the wall and roof of the garage, as undisciplined as jungle vines.
Ruth surveyed the backyard one morning after she had taken
Christopher to school. The garden had once been her joy, but
since Harry's illness she had neglected it. Today she suddenly felt
guilty. The plants and flowers were like abandoned children. They
had lain dormant during the cold, wet winter, but now in the late
spring they seethed with unruly life. They needed watering, feed-
ing, pruning. Otherwise, the roses, hibiscus, and azaleas would
soon wilt and die.
Moved by pity as much as anything, Ruth changed into her
jeans and an old shirt and went to work. The morning had started
cool and overcast, but by noon the overcast had burned off and

86
the smog built up, a choking, contaminating presence in the air.
She was exhausted and soaked with perspiration. About the garden
were tidy piles of cuttings stacked and bound with twine. It would
take several more mornings of work, but she had made a good
start. It surprised her to feel the energy to garden again; for so
long she had felt exhausted, dulled to the point of total inertia.
She wiped the sweat on her face and neck and looked at the
pool. Unlike the garden it had not been neglected. It was swept
clear of leaves and recently chlorinated. Harry had assigned it as
David's responsibility, and her quiet, conscientious middle child
had steadfastly maintained it as if it were a memorial to his fa-
ther. The water was blue and clear. Ruth had a strong urge to
jump in with her work clothes on. She was hot and sticky and
could still feel the cobwebs of the camellias on her bare arms. The
idea of going into the house and pulling a tight bathing suit over
her hot dirty skin was repugnant. Ruth had never swum nude in
the pool before, but suddenly the idea of it was delicious, tan-
talizing.
The children were not due from school for hours and the yard
was sheltered by a high redwood stake fence. A row of camellia
bushes and split-leaf philodendrons further screened the pool.
Ruth slipped off her clothes at the edge of the pool and quickly
slid into the deep end, pulling the enveloping water about her like
a protective cloak. It felt cool and marvelous. She hesitantly
breast-stroked to the shallow end and immediately swam back to
the deep end. The pressure and flow of the cool water across her
breasts and buttocks as she dove and swam was a new experience,
sensual and amazingly pleasurable. She swam slowly back and
forth, doing laps with an Australian crawl. But she quickly tired
and became breathless, her stroke awkward. She rolled over on her
back to catch her breath. Occasionally she did a languid back
stroke, savoring the water, but mostly she just floated, her face to
the sun.
Like a child, she didn't want to ever leave the water, but finally
she crawled from the pool. She sprawled on the sun-baked tiles,
the hot, hard polished glaze warming the sensitive flesh that had
never before been exposed to those textures. She lay motionless,
the water dripping from her limbs, evaporating in the slight
breeze that stirred the bushes and cooled her. The sun was a be-
nign warmth. She felt mindless, sensing only the coolness and

187
warmth and the confusion of excitement and vulnerability that
her nakedness aroused.
. Ruth had never before taken such a self-centered pleasure in
the pool. It had been completed shortly before Harry had become
ill, and they had never swum together. At least one of the chil-
dren was always around when she had swum before. But now she
was alone and, in essence, a widow, abandoned. She felt a new
selfishness that was oddly liberating. She felt it in the sun on her
bare breasts and stomach. She belonged only to herself. It was a
self-possession, she knew, that would evaporate as soon as she
started to the car to go pick up Christopher at nursery school.
But, for the moment at least, the feeling was there. And because
of it things formerly forbidden were now possible.
That night Ruth visited Harry. With the constant flow of doc-
tors, physiologists, medical technicians, and psychologists in and
out of the tank room, her regular visits created no undue curiosity.
However, at Gunther's advice, she scheduled her visits after din-
ner, when the great bulk of personnel had gone for the day. She
was, at first, startled by the change in Harry. The golden-bearded
husky man was physically more of a stranger to her than ever. But
Harry was working again, deeply involved in a technical problem,
and the air of preoccupation with which he addressed her was very
familiar to her. Harry explained in great detail the pressure tests
they were conducting.
"I don't understand all this about decompression, nitrogen, and
helium," Ruth said in confusion.
"It's freshman chemistry," Harry said impatiently. "Dalton's
law of partial pressures. In a mixture of gases, each gas exerts a
pressure proportional to its percentage of the Volume of the total."
"I didn't take chemistry in college. I only had to take a year of
biology. Talk to me about zygotes and reproduction." Harry's im-
patience in explaining the highly technical aspects of his work to
her was also familiar, an unpleasant characteristic she had forgot-
ten during his illness but now sharply remembered.
"How're the kids?" Harry asked. It was presumably a safe sub-
ject. Harry listened avidly while Ruth talked about the children.
She mentally edited what she said. The Christopher about whom
she told anecdotes was the bouncing extrovert of the day school,
but not the child who awoke in terrified tears from nightmares in
the middle of the night. The David she described was the brilliant

88
straight-A student, but not the boy who came home immediately
from school and wandered aimlessly about the house. The Brenda
of her stories was the teenager plunging into the confusion of ado-
lescence, who asked her mother for advice on clothes, hairdos,
boys, and dating, but not the girl who blushed and looked acutely
embarrassed when neighbors asked how her father was doing at
the hospital.
Ruth's visit with Harry was subdued and unemotional. It was a
polite passing of information. They had learned through the pain
and anguish of their previous meetings how to avoid feelings—the
necessity of throttling all hope, desire, and even love.
"Harry, these pressure tests. Are they dangerous?"
Harry shrugged. "It's an unknown area. We don't know if it's
more hazardous for me than other men or less hazardous. That's
what we have to find out"
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why do you have to find that out? What's worth getting
killed or crippled or becoming a vegetable? Just to find out how
deep the gill will go?"
Harry stared at Ruth, as if closely examining her, then shook
his head. "You've never understood. You've always thought that
life was just about you and me and the kids."
"No, I never thought it was just that," Ruth said quietly. She
looked at her husband imprisoned in his cell of water. What did
he really have to lose?
There was an awkward silence, then Ruth volunteered, "I'm
reading a book on marine biology."
"Oh, have you learned anything?"
"A lot. I've become an expert on the mating habits of the Car-
ibbean tulip-shell snail."
"The what?"
"The mating of the Caribbean tulip-shell snail. It's a very dan-
gerous courtship. If a female tulip-shell snail approaches a male
who is bigger than she is, he'll eat her. And vice versa. A success-
ful mating occurs only when both the male and the female size
each other up and decide neither can devour the other."
Harry laughed, the deep bass sound resounding in the tank
room. "Honey, you've always been too tough for me to gobble up.
I wouldn't have it any other way."

189
When Ruth returned home that evening, the children were still
up. Christopher and David waited in bed to hear about their fa-
ther. The man called Glaucus had become a bedtime story, a fairy
tale Ruth told about a superman who lived underwater.
Tonight she described the deep pressure dives Harry was mak-
ing. "The pressure chamber looks something like the picture of
the Trieste—you know, the bathyscaphe that dove to the deepest
spot in the Marianas trench." Ruth had picked up The Wonder
Book of Oceanography at the supermarket, and she and the boys
had read it together. "Only the pressure is all on the inside, not
on the outside, as it is at the bottom of the sea. Dr. Steinhardt
took me on a guided tour. All the dials and machinery confuse me
—you know how I am about technical things. But I think you'd
be interested in it, David. Dr. Steinhardt said he'd be happy to
show you around."
Steinhardt had really said that. In fact, to Ruth's surprise, he
had been very concerned with David's problems in relating to his
father, as if they echoed some deep personal conflict of Stein-
hardt's own.
"Do you want to see what your father's doing?" Ruth
prompted.
David shifted uneasily on the bed. He shrugged. "I don't know
what to say to him."
"He's still your father. Talk to him like you've always talked to
him." Wonderful advice to give an eleven-year-old, Ruth thought.
She couldn't even follow it herself.
"Nothing's the same anymore," David said. He shrugged again.
"I don't know," he said lamely.
Ruth looked at Christopher. The youngdt boy was frightened.
Stories about Glaucus entranced him, but the actual prospect of
again visiting the strange bearded man in the tank now terrified
him. Ruth wondered if they would ever reconcile the memory of
their father with the man they now knew as Glaucus.
She tucked them in and kissed both on the brow. Christopher
blinked, yawned, and finally nodded off to sleep. When Ruth left
the boys' room, David was still awake, lying with his hands be-
hind his head, staring off into space.
Ruth checked Brenda's room. The girl was in bed but reading a
homework assignment. Ruth retreated to the study, closed the
door behind her, and broke out a bottle of Scotch.

190
"You could try to get involved in his work," Dr. Axelrod
suggested. "Understand and share his enthusiasm for it."
On the wall behind Dr. Axelrod was displayed a new exhibit of
African primitive art. Two wooden masks, one male and one fe-
male, from the Bajokwe tribe in the Congo. The female face was
hauntingly beautiful and serene, the nose narrow and delicately
shaped, the eyes Oriental and the mouth composed. The male
mask, on the other hand, was ferocious. The sharp curving lines of
the brow and cheekbones created a gargoyle effect and the mouth
was grotesquely wide and gaping with sharp, serrated teeth. The
Bajokwes' beauty and the beast.
"I've never shared Harry's work," Ruth said. "We shared a bed,
sex, children, a home, weekend outings, even ice cream cones, but
I never shared his work."
"Perhaps you should make an effort to expand your interests,"
Dr. Axelrod said.
"Oft, reallyJ" There was a copy of the Los Angeles Times on
the end table. Ruth grabbed it and ripped it open to the classified
ads. After a brief search she read aloud a three-line ad placed by
an aerospace firm. " 'Employment Opportunities. Systems Analyst
—To provide algorithm design and statistical analysis and model-
ing on GEODSS. Areas of application include electro-optic sensor
modeling, sensor data processing hardware, software performance
and analysis.'"
"My God, is that in English?" Helena Axelrod asked.
"That's the sort of work you expect me to have shared with
him. I couldn't do it then. And I certainly can't now."
Ruth sensed disapproval in the other woman's expression. "But
I've been reading up on oceanography and marine biology," she
added. "Are you familiar with the sex life of the angler fish?"
Dr. Axelrod shook her head.
"Well, the male angler fish swims about very freely in his
youth," Ruth explained. "But as soon as he matures he begins a
desperate search for a female. When he finds one, he sinks his
teeth into her and just hangs on. After a while his mouth fuses
with the female's flesh and their blood systems become connected.
Eventually the male's eyes are gradually absorbed into the fe-
male's body and finally disappear. He becomes a total parasite.
His body degenerates until he's nothing more than a sack of re-
productive organs, permanently attached to the female to periodi-
cally service her."

191
The psychiatrist stared at Ruth curiously. "Do you relate that
to you and Harry?"
"Oh, my God, no," Ruth exclaimed. "I just thought it was
funny. Don't you?"
Helena Axelrod nodded. She didn't smile. "I think you just de-
scribed my first marriage," she said.
Gunther Marx called to ask if Ruth was free for dinner. There
were some complicated legal matters concerning Harry he wanted
to discuss with her.
Ruth was happy about the invitation on two counts. First, she
wanted Gunther's advice. She was thinking about going back to
work. She and Dr. Axelrod had talked about it at length. In the
fall Christopher would begin kindergarten. Her days would get
progressively lonelier. But, more urgently, she just wanted to see
Gunther again. She was confused about her feelings toward him.
After he called she experienced a curious excitement like that she
had once felt as a young girl going on a date.
But when Gunther picked her up she sensed something wrong.
Throughout the ride to the restaurant and while they were being
seated, he was brooding and withdrawn.
"Ruth, we're totally at their mercy." Gunther's eyes were anx-
ious and troubled. "I'm sorry."
"Gunther, what the hell are you talking about?"
"We simply don't have a case. I've researched all the prece-
dents and conferred with a half-dozen other lawyers who are spe-
cialists in malpractice law, and the conclusion is that we don't
have a case. If we brought a suit it would probably be dismissed."
Gunther's voice was heavy with defeat.
"I don't understand why," Ruth said.
"It's not just a case of medical malpractice according to the pre-
cise legal criteria for malpractice. The operation wasn't thera-
peutic. It wasn't supposed to cure or alleviate a condition. Harry
was terminal. There are depositions by all the doctors involved in
the operation that he was in extremis and they had to rush him to
the operating room. His lung had hemorrhaged and he was liter-
ally seconds away from death. He was kept alive only by mechani-
cal means."
Ruth felt slightly faint. She put her hand to her head and took
a quick sip of water. "I didn't know that."

192
"It's not something surgeons generally discuss with the family
after an operation."
"But this was the first time this sort of operation was ever per-
formed on a human being."
Gunther shook his head. "That in itself doesn't constitute a
malpractice case." He launched into an earnest brief of the law, as
if trying to convince Ruth with a wealth of scholarly detail how
hard he had been working. He cited laws, precedents, Karp v.
Cooley, the Helsinki Declaration, the National Institutes of
Health guidelines. Since the 1947 Nuremberg trials of Nazi physi-
cians, an extensive body of international and federal laws regulat-
ing medical experiments with humans had been developed.
"Since Steinhardt's research was federally funded, he was obli-
gated to follow guidelines set up by the National Institutes of
Health. They're essentially a system of reviews by other doctors,"
Gunther explained. "But Steinhardt did that. And there's no
question of your informed consent. It's heavily documented.
Steinhardt and Bernstein went into great detail explaining both to
you and to Harry exactly what they were doing. They held out no
hope. The most that could have been hoped for was to prolong
Harry's death. Not to prolong his life in any significant fashion.
It's not uncommon in medical research to briefly prolong a pa-
tient's death by artificial devices in order to obtain important
data."
"But Harry's still alive," Ruth protested. "In a goddamn giant
goldfish bowl."
"The fact that Harry unexpectedly lived would, if anything,
weaken our case unless we could prove extraordinary pain and
suffering." Gunther shrugged helplessly. "I'm afraid Harry's grand-
standing on TV has pretty well shot down that argument. At this
point a judge would probably dismiss the case. And there'd be no
point in appealing. The Supreme Court has never heard a case of
medical malpractice or human experimentation."
Gunther looked so dejected that Ruth instinctively reached out
to take his hand. "I really didn't care that much about a suit," she
said. "I just wanted something to fight with. To make sure Harry
and the kids are taken care of."
"But I wanted it," Gunther said in a thick voice. "A big fat set-
tlement. Something that would take care of you for the rest of
your life. I wanted to bring it to you on a silver platter."
Ruth shook her head. "Something like that might have created

193
more problems than it would solve. As long as we have enough to
keep the house, and we can maintain our privacy, we can keep our
lives on an even keel."
Gunther looked down at the table. "I can't even guarantee
that."
"What do you mean?"
"The institute or the hospital or anyone else can make public
Harry's real identity, and his family, any time they want."
Ruth was suddenly alarmed. "I thought you told me that a pa-
tient and his family had a right to privacy. That the doctors and
the hospital were forbidden to disclose personal information un-
less we authorize it."
Gunther continued to look at the table. "Normally that's true.
They have what's known as an obligation of confidentiality. But
it's not absolute. The law recognizes an exception. The exception
is that an important scientific discovery takes precedence over a
patient's or his family's privilege of nondisclosure." Gunther held
up his hands in a helpless gesture. "Ruth, you have no right to
privacy."
"My God." Ruth suddenly felt frightened. She looked anxiously
about the restaurant at the other diners. She seized Gunther's
hand. "That's the one thing I just don't think I could handle. My
life, the children, we're all in such a precarious balance. We have
our whole lives to rework. If we were thrust into anything
now . . ." She didn't finish the sentence but just shook her head.
"The press, other people, they can all be so cruel and stupid."
"I know," Gunther said. "I'll do everything I can."
There was something in his voice, a breaking quality that had
been there when he had said earlier, "I wanted to bring it to you
on a silver platter." It was a devotion that*Ruth didn't quite un-
derstand. But she was grateful it was there. "You're much more
than just my lawyer," she said softly.
Gunther nodded and smiled shyly. There was a confession in
his smile and in that nod.

38
Each evening, as the sun set and the sky darkened, in the sea
offshore of the institute swarms of dragonfish, spirula squid,
hatchetfish, bristlemouths, and lanternfish migrated from the dark
mile-deep abyss of the Marejada trench to the warm surface
waters. There the smaller creatures grazed in the teeming pastures
of phytoplankton, and they in turn were eaten by the larger fish.
Every hunter became the hunted. At the first rays of dawn the
survivors plunged back into the lightless depths. It was a nightly
ritual, eons old, of primitive creatures. Yet a man with the most
sophisticated diving equipment could not follow them. The rapid
compression and decompression would kill him.
Harry was alone in the hyperbaric chamber, immersed in the
narrow confines of the wet pot staring out the viewing window at
the crowd of technicians in the control room. There were no
divers in the chamber above him, and a mat of black rubber now
blanketed the surface of the water to seal out the gases above. It
made the wet pot seem much smaller, claustrophobic. Up until

195
this moment Harry hadn't realized how much he depended on
having the two other men in the chamber with him. He was now
alone. He felt light-headed and a little nauseated. The sound of
the high-pressure gas blasting into the empty chamber had a
louder, roaring, more ominous sound.
Harry lay quietly in the water. He willed himself to relax. He
had to read his body—separate the false signals generated by his
fear from the real signs of physical stress or damage.
The pressure built relentlessly—three hundred pounds per
square inch, five hundred pounds.
The living tissue of flesh, blood, muscle, and sinew are largely
liquid, and like water cannot be compressed. Harry's body con-
ducted the pressure as a bar of copper conducts electricity. He and
the pressure were one.
"How do you feel?" Morrison suddenly asked over the speaker.
"Fine. No aches or pains."
"Any nausea or vertigo?"
"No problems." Through the viewing window, Harry could see
Morrison's strained, anxious face and the sweat gleaming oily on
his scalp.
At 1,320 feet, the greatest depth to which Harry, Matsuda, and
Gillespie had dove before, the compression was stopped.
"Come to the window, please," Steinhardt asked. He closely ex-
amined Harry's face for any telltale hemorrhages, then held up an
optometer. "Your eyes, please." Harry held his eyelids open with
his fingers as Steinhardt probed them with a light. It was a prel-
ude to the tedious battery of tests he had taken on the other
dives. He now repeated them all to establish the baseline data for
the plunge into the realms of pressure where no man had ever
gone before.
Seven hundred pounds per square inch.
Eight hundred pounds.
Steinhardt's voice suddenly crackled on the speaker. "Are you
experiencing any difficulty?" There was alarm in his voice.
"I'm terrific," Harry boomed.
"Your pulse, blood pressure, and cerebral oxygen levels are all
rising. How do you feel?"
"Excited as hell. We're about to break the French record—two
thousand feet."
There was silence, then Steinhardt said, "Please try to remain
relaxed, Harry. You're distorting the medical readings."

196
One thousand pounds. Twelve hundred and fifty pounds. Harry
felt the pressure pulsing through him, galvanizing his nerves. His
fear and excitement flowed into that current; it hummed and
buzzed through every fiber and tissue of his being.
Fifteen hundred pounds. Seventeen hundred and fifty pounds.
The descent now went rapidly, as the increase of depth from two
thousand feet to four thousand feet would only double the pres-
sure Harry had previously withstood. Helium, stored in huge steel
tanks under enormous pressure, blasted into the chamber. The
noise was as shattering as that of a jet taking off. At the four-
thousand-foot depth Harry was under 122 times the pressure the
men outside the steel chamber felt.
Two thousand pounds per square inch of flesh. Two thousand
two hundred and fifty pounds.
Steinhardt methodically asked Harry questions, checking his
mental alertness, coaching him to anticipate any medical prob-
lems. But the tension in Steinhardt's voice betrayed the man's
own fears.
Two thousand four hundred pounds per square inch; 160 times
the pressure of air at sea level.
"He's a mile deep," Morrison whispered. His voice broke as
though he were afraid of speaking, like a man standing alongside
an enormous, unstable bomb which the mere sound of his voice
might set off.
"I want to bring him back as quickly as possible," Morrison
whispered urgently.
"We will run the scheduled tests," Steinhardt insisted. "This is
a scientific investigation. Not a stunt."
In the chamber Harry sensed the conflict between the two men
outside as if it were a dangerous rise in the pressure.
BAM! There was a sharp explosion.
"My God, what's that?" Morrison cried out.
His panic instantly transmitted itself to Harry. "What's hap-
pened?" he shouted. His instant fear was that the chamber had
ruptured. An explosive decompression—the sudden release of pres-
sure in the chamber—would kill him.
"Oh, Jesus Christ," Morrison swore.
"What the hell's happening?"
"Champagne. Some joker opened a bottle of champagne." Mor-
rison appeared in the view window holding up a bottle. He pawed
at the sweat pouring from his face and took a deep drink directly

197
from the bottle. "To the new world record holder," he toasted in
a hoarse voice.
Harry was exhausted. He felt almost faint, at once giddy and ex-
hilarated. "Save some of that champagne. I want a drink when I
get out of this pressure cooker."
"You can't drink," Morrison said.
"I'm going to drink like a goddamn fish," Harry exclaimed hap-
pily.
Once again Harry plunged into the gauntlet of tests. He
dropped a ball bearing. "I don't know whether it's high-pressure
nervous syndrome or just my nervousness," Harry reported. His
voice came in gasps. He felt as though he were about to explode.
"Are you experiencing any physical discomfort? Any pain?"
"No. But I'm a little dizzy."
"You're breathing too rapidly, Harry. Stop what you're doing.
Now consciously force yourself to slow down your gill-flow rate,"
Steinhardt ordered calmly. "That's very good, Harry. Just keep
that same slow steady flow for a minute or two."
Harry concentrated on slowing his breaths of water. The dizzi-
ness and the feeling that he was about to burst gradually subsided.
"You're still exhibiting signs of nervous syndrome, Harry. It may
be due to the pressure or it may be the stress of the situation.
Continue with the tests as soon as you feel comfortable. Make a
conscious effort to relax and do everything slowly and methodi-
cally."
The tests took considerably longer than they had before. Then
the decompression began. Theoretically, a diver breathing com-
pressed gases should take a month to compress from a mile-deep
dive. Steinhardt's schedule called for less than a day. The cham-
pagne Harry had joked about earlier now became a deadly meta-
phor. The bubbles that exploded and fizzed when the cork
popped might be reproduced in Harry's blood. His reaction to a
rapid decompression was still unknown.
He lay quietly in the tank systematically surveying his body for
the telltale symptoms of the bends. At one point or another he
imagined he detected every one of them, but when he willed him-
self to relax and concentrated on his breathing, the symptoms
faded. As the pressure gradually decreased, so did his fear.
As his fear abated, there came a great feeling of satisfaction. He
had that day redefined his aloneness. It was no longer that of a
leper unable to live among normal men. He was now a man with

198
a unique strength and ability. Others would follow him as far as
they dared. He had paid a great price. But then anyone who
achieved a unique pinnacle was altered in some way in either body
or soul. An Olympic weight-lifting champion was more grotesque
to the eye than he was. And, as Harry had painfully learned from
his cancer, life often mutilates men to no purpose at all. Lying
weightless in the tank, quietly waiting for the decompression to
sea level to be completed, Harry felt at peace with both himself
and the world.
At sea level the pressure between the chamber and the world
outside was equalized, and the hatch opened. Morrison rushed in,
clambered to the edge of the wet pot, and yanked off the rubber
matting. "Congratulations!" he boomed and reached his hand out
to Harry.
The bearded blond head broke water, but Harry ignored Mor-
rison's outstretched hand and reached out to Steinhardt, who had
followed Morrison. The old man seized Harry's hand and arm
fiercely in both of his old, pale white hands. Steinhardt was trying
to smile but the effort became a grimace as his eyes brimmed
with tears. He couldn't speak. Gripping his hand, beaming rapidly
up into the old man's face, Harry too found it difficult to speak.
A flash went off. A Navy photographer posed Morrison and
Steinhardt kneeling at the lid of the pot with Harry. Buckley ma-
terialized. The intensity of that moment of union with Steinhardt
was shattered. There was a great hubbub of nonsensical com-
ments, exclamations, shouts, and laughter echoing and ringing in
the chamber. Finally Steinhardt, Morrison, Buckley, and the
others withdrew outside the packed chamber to allow the corps-
men to transfer Harry.
The procedure was to quickly lift and carry Harry in a canvas
stretcher from the chamber to his tank. It had to be done speed-
ily, as Harry was a fish out of water. Two corpsmen plunged into
the wet pot and arranged the stretcher for Harry to squirm into.
Then with a corpsman at each corner, it was lifted up out of the
water.
As he was rushed from the chamber, Harry suddenly ordered:
"Wait. I want to take a picture standing with Dr. Steinhardt out-
side the tank."
"Harry, you're too weak," Steinhardt protested.
"Hell, I'm the strongest man in the world. I can bear more
pounds per square inch than any man alive."

99
Before Steinhardt could intercept him, Harry swung off the
stretcher. He heaved to his feet, but his legs immediately col-
lapsed under him. He sprawled heavily on the floor. It was as if he
had never walked or crawled on the ground before. He struggled
to get his legs and arms under him, but they were too weak to
raise the weight of his body. He flopped about helplessly. His
chest felt heavy as concrete, crushing him into the hard implaca-
ble surface of the floor.
"What's happening?" Harry cried in terror. "I can't move!"

39
The seaplane, a fat-bellied Grumman Mallard, taxied into load-
ing position at the head of the pier thrusting into Los Angeles har-
bor and now stood with its twin engines idling. The prop wash
stirred Ruth Styles's raven hair, causing it to swirl about her pale
face and shoulders.
Watching her brush the fine hair away from her face, Karl
Steinhardt wondered if it was the hunger for that beauty that had
driven Harry during the dangerous drudgery of the pressure tests.
When a man is married to a beautiful woman he must do extraor-
dinary things. Was each new heralded accomplishment Harry's
desperate way of trying to maintain a hold on his wife? Had it
now motivated him to dare the hazards of this new expedition?
At the moment Harry lay at the foot of the pier in a tub made
of plywood and lined with fiberglass. It was about nine feet by
three feet by three feet. A bottle of compressed oxygen was
strapped to the side and attached by tubes to a filter and aerator,
identical to those in a home aquarium, which emitted a constant
stream of bubbles about Harry's head and gills. The tub rested on

201
the blades of the forklift that had hauled it from the ambulance
still parked at the foot of the pier.
Ruth bent over the tub. "Harry, stick your head out and look at
the seaplane you're flying to the island in," she urged her husband.
Harry's face emerged from the boil of bubbles. He peered first at
his wife and then toward the seaplane and nodded.
"You're really traveling in style."
Steinhardt and Buckley had moved down the pier to give the
Styleses a measure of privacy. But Steinhardt could still make out
their conversation and detect the strain and false cheer in Ruth
Styles's voice.
"The island's not that far away, Harry. Dr. Buckley said he'll ar-
range for me to fly or take a boat over any time I want. I'll be out
next Sunday for sure."
Steinhardt didn't hear Harry's response, if indeed he made one.
Harry had been in a state of depression since his collapse after the
record-breaking pressure test. Steinhardt still felt guilty about
Harry's collapse. It had simply never occurred to him to warn
Harry about attempting to walk. His legs were no longer strong
enough to support him. In fact, his arms and legs weren't even
strong enough to crawl. Sustained weightlessness had weakened
Harry's muscles to the point where he was helpless on land. Astro-
nauts had similar problems on returning to earth, but none had
experienced the long period of weightlessness that Harry had. Ex-
ercise on the bicycle had not been enough to prevent the deterio-
ration. That work was only in the magnitude of tens of pounds.
Human muscles must lift hundreds of pounds of body weight
daily in order to maintain their strength.
Harry, in addition, had undergone another great physical
change. His lung cavity, which was once filfed with air, was now
filled with serous fluid. The great increase in weight of his torso
and the shift of the body's center of gravity was not noticeable un-
derwater, but out of the water his body had become as unwieldy
as a whale's. Neither physical change affected his health, but the
discovery he could no longer walk had been a great blow to Harry.
It eroded the heroic self-image he had constructed of himself.
Steinhardt wondered if Harry had told his wife about his collapse;
he doubted it. The humiliation would have been too great, espe-
cially after the success of the depth tests. That was a triumph
Harry had wanted to present to her undiminished, like the first
scaling of Mount Everest. But after the flurry of publicity and TV

202
interviews, Harry plunged into despair. It caught Steinhardt and
the psychiatrist Shapiro by surprise. They were dealing with a
much more fragile and unstable man than they'd realized. There
were emotional quicksands hidden just below the surface that all
their psychological testing had not shown up.
"I don't know why you insist on flying over," Buckley suddenly
exclaimed. "The institute has plenty of boats available for this
sort of trip." He mopped at his brow with a handkerchief and
eyed the seaplane with undisguised dread. Steinhardt had never
seen him so agitated before.
"The channel's too choppy," Steinhardt explained. He gestured
toward Harry. "In that sardine box he'd probably get seasick. In
his case vomiting, if it got into his gills, might be fatal." He
turned his attention back to Ruth and Harry Styles.
"I envy you," she said with an encouraging smile. "They say it's
very beautiful over there. It's the closest place where the ocean is
unpolluted enough to risk the experiment." She leaned toward
Harry, her hair again tumbling across her face.
From the tub Harry's hand reached out to tentatively touch
and caress her hair. "It's that ocean that will be between us."
"That's a strange thing for John Glaucus, modern science's an-
swer to the sea god, to say."
Harry's hand continued to stroke her hair. Then the resonant,
electronic voice from the tank said, "Ruth. We haven't kissed in
months. We haven't even touched."
Ruth stared down at him. Out of the froth of bubbles, the
bearded dripping head rose and leaned toward her. Ruth kissed
him quickly, and yards away Steinhardt could sense the recoil
from the contact, the slight shudder that she immediately fought
to suppress.
"I'm sorry, Harry. You just felt so strange." She smiled. "You're
very wet, you know."
Harry looked at her, the hurt showing in his eyes, then slipped
back into the tank, the water once again coming between them.
In his own desperate way Harry Styles still courted his wife. He
wooed her with heroic feats. Harry himself might be unaware of
it, but Steinhardt saw it clearly. Harry brooded and waited anx-
iously for his wife's visits. And if he was sometimes impatient or
picked quarrels with her, it was only because she failed to always
recognize and applaud the ingenuity and courage with which
Harry fought to live and even prevail. But Ruth Styles was the

203
fountain of life for her husband. If he could hold on to her, still
possess her love, however remotely, his life had purpose.
Steinhardt supervised the loading of Harry's tank aboard the
seaplane. It was strapped down and secured in place with a lug-
gage net. The tank had been used previously to transport a large
shark to an aquarium in San Francisco.
"Are you comfortable, Harry?"
Harry, deeply preoccupied in his own thoughts, did not respond
immediately. Then he acknowledged Steinhardt with a nod.
Steinhardt turned to the pilot. "Please keep your altitude as low
as possible. The lower air pressure above sea level causes the oxy-
gen in the water to bubble out too rapidly."
"Yes, sir, I understand." The pilot headed toward the cabin.
Steinhardt took his seat beside Buckley and strapped himself in
for takeoff. As the seaplane taxied into the harbor, he caught a
glimpse of Ruth Styles through the window. She stood on the end
of the pier, waving, the wind whipping her hair and dress, a
forlorn and deserted figure. She waved goodbye to a husband who
could not see her. How many other basic gestures of their life to-
gether had now become totally meaningless, Steinhardt wondered.
Both engines roared to takeoff power, and the seaplane surged
through the water. Gathering speed, the plane violently ham-
mered its way through the wind-churned waves of the harbor, al-
ternately ricocheting off the crests of small swells and slapping
down again with a shuddering thwack.
"Oh, God," Buckley cried. His eyes were clenched shut and he
clutched the arms of the chair in a white-knuckled grip. His face
was bloodless.
The seaplane nosed up and was airborne, climbing swiftly as
soon as it broke free of the drag of the water. Over the stone
breakwater that artificially created Los Angeles harbor, the plane
banked west toward the Channel Islands.
Buckley opened his eyes but kept his grip on the seat. "How
soon before we're there?" he asked. The question was almost a
whine.
"The flight should take less than a half-hour." Buckley's fear of
flying had come as a surprise to Steinhardt. The man was about to
jump out of his skin.
Steinhardt looked across Buckley out through the window. The
freighters and tankers in the crowded harbor, the smoking oil
refineries of San Pedro, and the luxuriant hills of Palos Verdes Es-

204
tates dipped beneath the right wing. The city of Los Angeles
sprawled across the flat basin to the north, a baking plain of con-
crete and asphalt. From the perspective of the open sea of the San
Pedro Channel, the smog was a clearly defined brown cloud
smothering the city.
"God, the only thing I hate more than boats is flying/' Buckley
said suddenly.
"What a strange thing for an oceanographer to say."
"Fve never shared all the romantic nonsense and mysticism
about the sea. To me, it's a cold, hostile, suffocating element."
Buckley's fear, bordering on hysteria, was making him giddy and
talkative.
"What on earth ever led you into marine science?"
"It was a quite logical decision I made in college. I assayed the
fields of science. Aerospace—the great glamour industry of the six-
ties—was already overcrowded and overfunded by government.
There were bound to be cutbacks. There was obviously not going
to be any significant economic return from space in my lifetime.
On the other hand, as we quickly ran out of fuel, mineral re-
sources, and food, the sea was the natural place for research and
development. It will be the wealth and power base of the future,"
Buckley rattled on nervously, "as the colonies once were for
Europe. And as our western frontier was for the United States."
The idea of pursuing science as a basis of wealth and power was
repugnant to Steinhardt. It was as if a bishop had said that he was
in the church for the money and the power. Steinhardt ignored
Buckley and studied the sea below.
To the south Santa Catalina Island loomed up out of the mist,
its rock cliffs primal and brooding. It was the only one of the
Channel Islands that was inhabited. The other islands, scattered
to the west and south of Los Angeles as far as sixty miles offshore,
were deserted except for a handful of National Park Service
rangers and Navy station keepers.
The ocean-assaulted cliffs and harsh peaks jutting from the sea
were extensions of the Santa Monica Mountains, separated from
the mainland after the Ice Age. Evolution had taken its own dis-
tinctive course here. Giant coreopsis with thick muscular tree
trunks erupting into huge sunflowers covered the misty hillsides
but grew nowhere else. The island bats, deer mouse, and gray fox
were separate species unknown elsewhere. It was appropriate,

205
Steinhardt mused, that man himself should now take a bold new
step in his own evolution in these waters.
He rose to check on Harry. "Are you comfortable?" Harry
looked up and again merely nodded. "Please talk to me, Harry. I
want to hear your speech. Any signs of aphasia would indicate
that you weren't getting enough oxygen."
"I'm reasonably comfortable," Harry said. "I'm sorry to be un-
communicative. I'm just depressed by my meeting with Ruth. I
was hoping she'd bring the kids to say goodbye." He emitted a
short mirthless laugh and even the electronic resonance could not
disguise the undertone of bitterness. "I'm a heroic figure to the
kids now, but the real sight of me frightens them."
"Did she tell you that?"
"Only that I'm a hero to them, not that I frighten them. Ruth
is much too sensitive to tell me anything like that. But what's not
said and not done now say a great deal more than any of her apol-
ogies or gestures." Harry was silent a moment. "I suppose this all
answers your medical questions, Doctor. If I were anoxic I'd have
this pleasant, don't-give-a-damn feeling of well-being. And there
would be no pain." Steinhardt nodded. There was nothing he
could say to Harry, no comforting platitude that wouldn't ring
falsely in Steinhardt's own ears. He busily checked the gauge on
the oxygen bottle and returned to his seat. Buckley pointed out
the window at a scene below.
A behemoth supertanker, like an island unto itself, was moored
in the calmer sea leeward of one of the islands. There were several
smaller vessels attending it. They were lightering, transferring
crude oil from the supertanker to the smaller ships for delivery to
West Coast ports. Even these remote rocky Pleistocene islands
were now threatened by oil pollution.
"Swimming through even a small spill would be fatal for
Harry," Steinhardt said. "If the oil got on his gills, it would
suffocate him."
Buckley said nothing but continued to study the oil tankers
below with great interest.
The upcoming experiments worried Steinhardt. There were
more unknown factors than known. In the open sea he would
have none of the laboratory controls he had had in the chamber
tests, and for that reason alone they were more dangerous. He had
no way of predicting how Harry would react.
The seaplane swept low, paralleling a line of blunt dark cliffs

206
that plunged into the sea. The plane's passage disturbed nesting
gulls, brown pelicans, and cormorants, which soared into the air in
great flocks and flapped away. A rookery of panicked sea lions
swarmed over a rocky ledge at the foot of a sheer cliff and
splashed into the sea for protection. As the plane slapped down
on the water, Buckley emitted a low whimper.
The engines were cut, and the plane settled heavily into the
water. It taxied sluggishly toward a long narrow pier that stabbed
out from the beach of a shallow cove. There were a dozen men
waiting on the pier. All were dressed in military uniforms. For the
first time it occurred to Steinhardt that on this remote island he
and Harry were in effect prisoners.

40
Stephanie O'Gara woke up at dawn with the answer. For weeks
she had been obsessed with the one idea that someone in the
aerospace industry knew Glaucus's real identity, and if she dug
hard enough she could track him down. On her own time after
work, on weekends, and in snatched moments between her other
reporting assignments she had doggedly pursued this one lead. She
had made hundreds of phone calls, searched down a dozen blind
alleys. And she had come up totally empty-handed. It was only
now when she felt beaten and exhausted that an entirely different
approach occurred to her as she lay in bed half asleep.
She glanced at her watch. It was almost six. She wearily crawled
out of bed, went to the phone and once again began dialing. On
the third call she made contact.
When Greenberg drove into the TV station parking lot at
eight-thirty, O'Gara was waiting for him. He uncoiled from the
front seat of his car, a tall dark slender man. First thing in the
morning, before the tensions and frantic work of the newsroom
engulfed him, he had a sleepy, sweetly melancholy look that

208
O'Gara had always found attractive and touching. He now smiled
at her, his dark hooded eyes questioning why she was there wait-
ing for him.
"The operation on the gill-man was performed at the University
Medical Center hospital/' she informed him without a preamble.
"How'd you find that out?"
"It suddenly occurred to me that it had to be done at one of
the hospitals heavily involved in research, probably connected to a
medical school. So I just started calling their surgical services. I
told them who I was and said I just wanted to clarify whether the
Dr. Steinhardt who had performed the gill operation was a
member of their staff or just had operating privileges there. It
turns out neither is the case. A bored, talkative nurse on the sur-
gery desk told me he was only an associate of a Dr. Bernstein who
performed the operation with Steinhardt. But Bernstein was killed
in an auto accident months ago."
"Did this bored, talkative nurse tell you Glaucus's real name?"
O'Gara shook her head. "She didn't know it. But she did give
me the names of four other nurses who assisted in the operation
and a couple in the intensive care unit who also worked on the
case. Apparently it's still quite a topic of conversation about the
hospital."
"There's no way they're going to let you just waltz in and look
through their records."
"I'm not going to. I'm going to go down there to research a fea-
ture story on nurses. Their daily life-and-death responsibilities,
their overworked and understaffed working conditions, their low
pay. And we gals will just drink coffee and gossip, and I'll bet one
of them remembers the name on a chart in the most fascinating
case they've ever worked on."
"I hate to mention it," Greenberg said. "But it occurs to me
that there's a question of invasion of privacy here."
"Privacy? This involves major public issues. A landmark scien-
tific breakthrough. Medical experimentation," O'Gara insisted
with passion. "But it's not some dull, wordy station editorial
about ethics. It's a real life that's been turned inside out. There's
a wife and children out there somewhere. And their confusion,
heartbreak, tears, pride, loneliness—whatever the hell's going on
with them—that's an important part of the story. We're not doing
our job if we sit back and just mouth Navy or institute handouts

209
that say look at the marvelous thing we've done. Everything is
hunky-dory."
Greenberg held up his hands. "Enough," he said. "Go get your-
self an Emmy."
O'Gara reached up and gave Greenberg a brisk kiss on the
cheek, then strode to her car without another word.

41
Harry was frightened. It was a very deep fear that verged on
panic. That was the problem—where does a man with gills flee
when what terrifies him is the sea itself?
Lying in the plywood and fiberglass tub, his "traveling box/'
Harry eyed the stark rock cliffs that dropped into the lapping
green sea on either side of the beach. He was in a little cove, a
coarse sand beach walled by gray volcanic rock. The water be-
neath the cliffs was matted with giant bladder kelp, the blades an
iridescent green-gold in the sunlight. The primordial landscape
heightened Harry's fear. He felt he was the first man to plunge
into these waters since the great glaciers melted, flooded the
coastal basin, and created the island.
Behind him rose the marine biology station, a squat concrete
block building in which his new habitat was housed. He had be-
come restless and depressed with his existence in a succession of
tanks since his operation, yet now he longed for the warmth and
security of the tank. The ocean a few feet away was cold and for-
bidding. From his perspective on the beach the water stretched

211
without end to the horizon. Harry dreaded it with the instinctive
terror of an ancient, land-born animal. To awaken in an intensive
care ward breathing saline solution was one thing. But this sea held
the terrors that haunted his nightmares.
"Nervous, Harry?" Steinhardt knelt down beside him. He was
wearing a black neoprene wet suit and scuba gear.
Harry nodded. Behind Steinhardt three other divers stood wait-
ing, Steinhardt's assistant Mark Matsuda and two brawny Navy
frogmen. In the distance Harry heard the raucous barking of Cali-
fornia sea lions, out of sight beyond the rocky point.
"Your nervousness is certainly understandable," Steinhardt said.
"But there's nothing to be concerned about. The water tempera-
ture and salinity are the same as in the outdoor pool in which
we've been exercising. The oxygen content is very high due to the
kelp beds and the natural wave and wind action. However, if you
feel any signs of anoxia, give me a signal immediately and I'll
aerate the water around you." To demonstrate, Steinhardt pushed
the purge valve of his air regulator and it emitted a loud blast of
air.
"The water's relatively free of pollution, but if it tastes at all
unusual to you, swim immediately back to where it last tasted
normal."
Harry nodded again. Steinhardt had briefed him a half-dozen
times before, but he went over the procedure once more. The
three divers overheating under their thick neoprene wet suits, the
sweat dripping from their faces, restlessly shifted the weight of
their heavy steel scuba tanks. Overhead a gull circled, the white
wings dazzling in the sunlight, then settled on the water just in-
side the cove. The gull bobbed lightly on the swells, looking to-
ward Harry as though it were waiting for him.
Harry had asked not to be carried into the water. He wanted to
go in under his own power. He took a last breath of water, then
heaved himself over the edge of the tub and slid onto the sand
like a reptile.
"Don't try to get up, Harry. Remember what happened before."
Harry couldn't even crawl. He floundered on his belly for a mo-
ment, then squirmed forward, his arms and legs churning in an
aquatic motion like a three-month-old baby.
"Keep going, Harry. Don't let the sand get in your gills. Keep
going."
Harry squirmed rapidly into the water, and as it supported his

212
body weight, he got his hands and knees under him and franti-
cally crawled into the deeper water. The cold was a shock, making
him gasp. He hovered a moment, adjusting to the seawater,
breathing quickly. He could taste and smell the sand and mud in
the water. He gave a great porpoiselike kick and plunged deeper.
The sea floor of sand and scattered rocks sloped steeply, falling
away into deep blue shadows. To Harry's left was a jagged rock
reef that served as the holdfast for a forest of giant bladder kelp.
It grew straight up from the bottom in long, slender, treelike
stalks sixty feet high, the sun filtering through the gold-green col-
umns like the light in a cathedral. Steinhardt and Matsuda mate-
rialized next to Harry. The old man circled his thumb and
forefinger, a hand signal questioning if Harry was all right. Harry
repeated the signal and nodded. He pointed toward the kelp, in-
dicating that he wanted to explore in that direction. The two
Navy frogmen deployed themselves on both sides as bodyguards.
With each breath of seawater Harry's fear gradually dissolved.
The water about him was sunlit and clear and the kelp forest
teemed with life. A swarm of small bass hovered a moment, shim-
mering flashes of green and yellow, then shied away as Harry
swam toward them. The sand underneath him suddenly erupted
and five feet of halibut, its wide flat silver body undulating like a
shining magic carpet in flight, rose up out of the clouds of sand
and took off. For a moment Harry was as startled and frightened
as the fish. Then he swam on to continue his exploration.
To his astonishment, Harry suddenly felt as if he had been
released from bondage. He was no longer in bleak solitary confine-
ment looking out on the world he could no longer enter. Suddenly
he had plunged into an entirely new world, and it was his. The
water itself had a cleaner taste, a sharper tang to it than that in
the tank.
From behind the kelp stalks, large sheephead fish with blunt
red brows peered at the divers curiously and backed away as they
approached. Small golden garibaldis boldly swam right up to
Harry's face. A bat ray with a three-foot wing span and a face as
malevolent as a gargoyle bolted from the kelp and flapped away.
Matsuda made a cautionary sign with his hand and pointed to a
crevice in the rocks. Far back in the shadows Harry spotted a
moray eel, its beady rattlesnake eyes watching him and its vicious
jaws with rows of needle-pointed teeth working as if it were about

213
to rip into him. He made a wide berth of the moray's hole. But
Harry had been confined to the sterility of glass and steel tanks in
concrete-walled basements for so long that even the dangers of the
reef excited him. He felt an exhilarating rush of energy.
Matsuda proved to be an excellent guide, pointing out the ten-
tacled anemones that grew on the rock like yellow and coral
flowers and the black sea urchins with their prickly porcupine
quills. Tiny nudibranchs, marine animals with horned bodies of
startling polka-dotted blue, green, orange, yellow, and purple, slid
across the sea floor looking like creatures from Wonderland.
One of the frogmen suddenly seized Harry's arm and gestured
with alarm. Harry looked up in time to see a huge dark torpedo-
shaped body hurtling at them with frightening speed. There was
no time to retreat or escape its attack. When it was just a few feet
from them, the creature dipped its fins and banked like a fighter
plane veering off from a strafing run. Harry had a quick glimpse of
black pop eyes, whiskers, and a mischievous face. A second sea
lion immediately followed the first in mock attack and sped back
up to the surface.
Matsuda signaled that they should swim back along the reef in
the direction they had come. Harry gestured for him to surface so
they could talk.
The bedlam of the sea lion rookery just around the point of
rocks assailed Harry as he surfaced. "They looked as though they
wanted to play," he shouted happily.
Matsuda shook his head. "If you get too near their harem or
pups, they get nasty. They bite."
Steinhardt surfaced. "You all right?" he asked with concern.
"Never felt better. I'm in my element."
"Any signs of anoxia?"
"None."
"We must head back now. We're at our midpoint of air."
"Oh, hell. I'm just getting into it."
"Don't swim quite so vigorously," Steinhardt warned. He was
breathless. "You may build up an anaerobic condition by working
too hard."
Harry looked about. Above his head the cliff rose straight up
from the sea. Seen close, the basaltlike rock was not gray but
muted shades of orange, umber, and rust. Green lichen rooted in
every crevice. Great dripping stains of dried guano randomly

214
painted the top half of the sheer stone face like an in-progress
whitewash job. At the cliff's edge a dozen brown pelicans con-
ferred together, their long beaks tucked down against their stately
necks. It was a totally different world from the one on the reef,
separated by only a transparent film of water, and yet they might
have evolved on planets galaxies apart.
Harry suddenly tasted something foul in the water. A yellow-
brown blob floated in the swells just a few feet away. Harry cau-
tiously sculled toward it. It was a dead sea lion pup, its tiny pale
whiskered face with its closed eyes hanging down in the water.
Matsuda poked at it with a gloved hand. "A quarter of the pups
around here are born premature and die."
The dead pup had tawny, almost golden fur, and a fragile, pa-
thetic quality to its expression. "What kills them?" Harry said.
"Chemical pollutants. DDT, lead, mercury."
Harry was shocked. "This far out?"
"It's not just in the water. It has built up in the food chain."
Already a school of small opaleyes were nibbling at the seal car-
cass.
On the swim back and for the rest of the day, the image of the
dead pup kept coming back to Harry. It drained the exhilaration
he had felt on the reef. The death of those golden-furred pups
with their premature, protohuman faces disturbed him.
In the weeks that followed, the Navy had Harry on a back-
breaking program. They tested his work performance against that
of divers under the same open sea conditions. At frigid depths his
strength was gauged by the amount of force he could exert with a
torque wrench and his manipulative ability measured by the time
it took him to assemble a puzzle of steel rods, nuts, bolts, and
washers. He laid out navigational grids on the ocean floor and sal-
vaged with plastic foam a deliberately sunk jet plane. He patched
a sheet of steel rolled to simulate the hull of a submarine and con-
structed an underwater oil wellhead assembly. For Harry, it was
tedious and exhausting work. For the Navy, it provided data to
compare with that gathered in their SeaLab studies.
Between tests Mark Matsuda taught Harry how to spear fish
and they hunted for abalone, scallops, and spiny lobsters along the
reef. They came across other dead sea lion pups, but the carcasses
they chanced on were only a fraction of the toll. Most of the dead
and dying pups were immediately devoured by the blue sharks and

215
great white sharks that stalked the deep channels off Southern
California. Harry couldn't shake his foreboding that the pups
were an ominous omen. Without knowing why, he felt what was
killing them now somehow threatened him.

42
The Santa Ana winds roared in from the Mojave Desert. Out
over the sun-scalded griddle of rocks and dry salt lakes great cal-
drons of air heated up and boiled over the San Gabriel Moun-
tains. The wind rushed into the canyons and funnels and blasted
out in terrifying gusts that ripped across the San Fernando Valley,
uprooting trees, toppling chimneys, and jack-knifing trailer trucks.
As Ruth stepped from the shower, a violent gust shook the
house. Perhaps she should cancel her dinner date with Gunther.
No, using the winds would be a lame excuse. The Santa Anas
blew this fiercely each fall and the house had yet to be damaged.
The children were used to the howling gusts that shook the trees
and windows. Brenda, the baby-sitter for the evening, could al-
ways get help from Mike and Silvia Levine next door if there were
any problems. Ruth had already made sure the neighbors would
be at home. The hot blasts of the Santa Anas were not the cause
of her nervousness.
As she dried herself Ruth examined her reflection in the full-
length bathroom mirror. For years she had avoided looking in this

217
very mirror. She had been full figured as a young woman, but
three children had made her breasts pendulous, waist and hips
thickened, and her thighs fatty. The long siege of Harry's illness—
the worry, depression, loss of appetite—had burned the flesh from
her, but the weight loss had not been altogether flattering. There
were gaunt hollows in her face, shoulders, and hips.
However, Ruth's new morning regime of gardening, followed by
a nude swim—increasingly longer laps of the pool until her arms
and legs ached and her precise strokes faltered with fatigue—had
had a rejuvenating effect on her. Her sunbaths were deliberately
short, a sensuous rest in the sun while her limbs and flesh relaxed
under the benign heat. The quality of her skin was such that no
amount of baking would tan it. It would merely redden and blis-
ter. But under the sun the pimples and rashes "caused by nerves"
had cleared up, the wrinkles and shadows under her eyes had dis-
solved, and the pale color of her skin had changed to the vibrance
of old ivory. The exercise had improved her appetite and filled in
and contoured the gaunt hollows of her body.
But her increasing energy and physical well-being made Ruth
nervous; they awakened desires and hungers she wasn't yet ready
to satisfy. And each succeeding meeting with Gunther now made
her more anxious. Standing before the mirror by her bath she saw
herself naked and vulnerable and there were no lies or deceptions
with which she could cloak that vulnerability. Once again the
walls and windows shuddered under the hot dry desert-spawned
blasts outside. Ruth felt the tremble that passed through the
house as if it were a fear that had originated within her and she
pulled the towel tightly about her shoulders.
Three times on the drive back from the restaurant Gunther had
to detour around a large broken branch or a fallen tree blocking
the road. He pulled into the Styleses' driveway and killed the en-
gine, and in the closed sedan the constant drone of the wind in
the trees outside sounded like swarms of locusts.
"It was lovely of you to take your client out for dinner again,"
Ruth said nervously. "Your firm probably won't let you write off
our dinners anymore."
"What if I asked you out on a real date?"
"What's a real date?"
"A show or a movie."
Ruth thought a moment. "That would be terrific."

218
"Really" Gunther's voice had an adolescent excitement. "You
mean after fifteen years of my asking you're finally going to go on
a date with me."
Ruth laughed. "You've never asked me before."
"The hell I didn't. We were juniors at Southern Cal. I asked
you out and you turned me down cold."
"I don't remember you ever asking me out in college."
"My God, she doesn't even remember. I was so dejected I con-
sidered suicide. I OD'd on beer but I didn't die. I just threw up. I
went into analysis. It ruined my marriage."
"All that. And I don't even remember this traumatic rejection."
"Hell, it didn't even register that I was asking you out. You said
you'd ask Harry about it. You thought I was talking about a dou-
ble date. So then I had to scurry around to find a date. Whom I
hardly knew. I was frantic. I asked three other girls and got turned
down. So, I told you I was coming down with mononucleosis. It
was going around then. Remember? It was sort of a romantic
disease in college because you supposedly got it from playing and
working too hard."
"You're making all this up."
"I swear it's the gospel. And you don't even remember. I went
out and got drunk and married Joan on the rebound."
"You told me you got married after law school."
"And divorced. It was a long rebound. It only proves how long
I carried a torch."
Ruth stared out at the dark humming street. There was a bright
full moon that cast strong shadows. The trees shaking violently in
the hot winds animated the shadows, giving Ruth the feeling that
a riot was going on all around her. "Tonight, when I was getting
dressed, Brenda asked me if I liked you."
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her, of course I do. You're a very old and very dear
friend."
"I don't think that's what she was really asking you."
"No, it wasn't. But I did answer the question she asked. I told
her that you and I weren't having a romance, but that in addition
to your being a very good friend, a man whose company I enjoyed,
I thought you were an attractive sexy man."
"Well! I didn't think I was making that big a hit."
"You have. My sexual fantasies, such as they are, don't run to
Erica Jong's zipless fucks or Gothic rapes by tall dark handsome

219
strangers. I like men who are warm, kind of cuddly, and definitely
protective."
"Cuddly?"
Ruth laughed. "Oh, yes, you're definitely cuddly."
Gunther thought that over a moment. "Well, then, shall we go
to your place or mine?" His tone was playful but there was a seri-
ous question beneath it.
"What I'm trying to say in my roundabout way—and I'm doing
a really bad job of it—is that we're not going to either my place or
yours. Not tonight. Probably not any time in the near future. And
it doesn't have anything to do with you, or my attraction or affec-
tion for you. It has to do with me. And my own confusion."
"You mean about Harry."
"That's part of it. But it's not just Harry. It concerns me and
it's entirely selfish. One of the reasons I was terrified of Harry's
dying was that I had grown totally dependent on him. Emo-
tionally and financially."
"But that's perfectly normal."
"Maybe so. But I felt it wasn't only the husband I loved and
the father of my children who was dying. I felt I was dying also.
That my whole identity was perishing with him, and that terrified
me as much as anything. I don't ever want to go through that
again."
"You have to make a life for yourself now."
"You're right," Ruth agreed emphatically. "You're absolutely
right. And that doesn't mean transferring all my dependence over
onto you. And I realize I've almost been guilty of doing just that."
"I haven't been exactly avoiding you."
"Oh, Gunther," Ruth said, "you're sweet and tremendously
generous. But I think you're still a little bij; smitten with a nine-
teen-year-old girl at USC, If we were to get involved, in a few
months I'd just be a clinging middle-aged woman with three chil-
dren and a tendency to get fat and you'd start backing off. After
all I've been through I don't think I could handle that."
"For Chrissakes, Ruth, you're a beautiful, intelligent woman."
"Thanks. Maybe I was fishing for that. But the fact is that I'm
still very confused. I still feel a strong loyalty to Harry. I'm not
Penelope weaving her endless shroud to stall suitors, waiting
twenty years for Ulysses to come home from his adventures. Even-
tually I'm going to have to come to some sort of realistic compro-
mise with that loyalty to Harry. But not just yet. Not until I've

220
got a good running start on who I am and what I do." She shook
her head. "It's such a strange paradox. Here's Harry encased in
glass, and he's created this incredible new identity, a whole
mythology about himself. Maybe that's why I'm terrified of peo-
ple finding out who he is. It's not just the effect it might have on
the kids and having our lives disrupted and exploited, though God
knows that would be unbearable in itself. I'm afraid of being en-
gulfed and drowned in Harry's myth before I know who I am."
"Are you going back to teaching?"
"No. I did that before Brenda came, and it was okay at the
time. But I have three kids of my own now, and that's all I want
to cope with."
"What are you going to do?"
Ruth studied Gunther a moment, smiling. "I'm thinking about
going to law school."
"What? Are you serious?"
"Why not? Don't you think I can handle it?"
"It's not that. It just comes as a complete surprise." Gunther
looked unhappy.
"You really shouldn't be surprised. You've been my inspiration.
The problems with my father's estate and then all the business
with Harry—the insurance, the house, the negotiations with the
institute, and the malpractice suit. Above and beyond my personal
involvement, I was fascinated by the law and how it works. Or
often how it doesn't work. And understanding it made me feel
less helpless."
"But, Ruth, law school's tough. Especially for an—well, let's be
realistic—older woman with three kids."
Ruth shrugged. "Why's it so tough? I'm sure I can handle it
academically. I got very good grades in college and my brain
hasn't deteriorated that much. As for the kids, they'll all be at
school." She laughed lightly. "We'll be a house of students. And
the kids will just have to help out. Actually, I'll be home more
than if I took a full-time teaching job." Ruth hadn't really
thought it all out. It was a trial balloon, but the more she argued
her case, the more she became convinced.
"There really aren't that many opportunities for older women
who want to go back to work again. But people always take law-
yers seriously. Even lady lawyers. Even if I decide not to practice
law, it's a great background for just about any business the way
things are today."

221
She paused, and there was silence in the car, filled only by the
wind outside, a deep, uneasy, turbulent sound. "Well, damn it,
say something."
"I don't know what to say. It all comes as a surprise."
"You sound unhappy."
Gunther shrugged. "Why should I be happy? In two minutes,
I've had my fantasy of a romance with the girl of my dreams shat-
tered, and I've been told I'm not only going to lose an old client
but gain a tough, beautiful competitor. I already have too few
dreams and too much legal competition."
Ruth leaned forward and kissed Gunther full on the mouth.
"You and I, whatever happens, I hope we'll always be the best of
friends."
She opened the car door and got out. Gunther walked her to
the front door, and at the threshold he kissed her good night, a
light, affectionate, undemanding kiss.
The temper of the Santa Anas quieted somewhat during the
night. In the morning, before she took Christopher to kinder-
garten, Ruth made a quick survey of the house with the gusts still
tugging at her hair and blouse. A few shingles had ripped off the
roof. Small branches were strewn about the yard and leaves blan-
keted the lawn and glutted the pool, but there was no damage to
the house. Driving to and from the school Ruth had to detour
around power company work crews repairing fallen lines.
Broken tree limbs littered lawns and driveways and several large
store front windows were shattered, the long sharp shards of glass
glittering in the morning sunlight. There was still a feeling of riot
in the streets and the sound of angry siege in the air itself, pum-
meling trees and windows.
Once at home Ruth went directly to the study. There was the
application to law school to be completed. She had yet to tell
Harry. She had no idea how he would react to the idea, and she
was apprehensive, but she was determined to go through with it.
She had to start a life with its own direction and momentum. The
front door chimes interrupted her thoughts.
At the door stood a handsome red-headed woman about her
age. She looked very familiar but Ruth couldn't immediately place
her.
"Mrs. Styles? Mrs. Harry Styles?" the woman inquired.

222
Because she was intent on the woman, it was a moment before
Ruth noticed two men standing behind her and with a start real-
ized they were a television news crew. The camera was pointed at
Ruth, its cannon-sized lens zooming in.

43
Brenda Styles stared down at her textbook and then at Mr.
Allen writing on the blackboard, but her mind wasn't on algebra
equations. She heard the whispers around her. She looked straight
ahead, but out of the corner of her eyes she sensed the other kids
in the class staring at her. Mr. Allen, in the throes of transposing
his equations, stared at her, distracted for a moment from his X's
and Y's by her presence. Brenda blushed and lowered her head in
embarrassment. The blood inflamed her cheeks like a scorching
wind, and she buried her face in the textbook.
The bell ending the first period clamored, and the classroom
erupted with the noise of scraping feet and kids heaving restlessly
in their chairs until Mr. Allen dismissed them. In the seat beside
Brenda a book slammed shut with a bang. Steven Ike grinned at
her. Brenda disliked Steven Ike. He was loud and rough. She tried
to avoid him but he always seemed to be bothering her.
Brenda had always been a popular and pretty child, inheriting
her mother's vivid black hair and pale, translucent skin. But she
was self-conscious about the braces she wore to correct an over-

224
bite. She might have passed through this awkward period quietly
except for another inheritance from Ruth—a voluptuousness that
was now beginning to emerge. The effect on the boys in the class
was galvanizing. They were silly, noisily attentive, sometimes vul-
gar, or they simply stared at her as if she were a new arrival from
some strange land. But they never ignored her. She moved in a
constant riot of small embarrassments. Her sensitivity had been
heightened by her father's long illness and his transformation to
Glaucus. Now everyone knew about it.
Steven Ike said something to another boy and they both
laughed. Brenda looked away and started leaving the classroom
just as Suzi Pryor came up. Suzi was her best friend.
"I tried to call you all night, but the line was always busy," Suzi
said excitedly, continuing the conversation she had begun before
the class as if there had been no lapse for algebra.
"The phone kept ringing. My mom's lawyer was there and he
and my mom were on the phone all night."
"Who was calling?"
"Everybody. TV stations, newspapers, some of my mom and
dad's old friends. And just a lot of nuts."
"What did they say, the nuts, I mean?"
"I don't know. I didn't answer the phone. Just weird things.
After a while Gunther, my mom's lawyer, just took the phone off
the hook and left it off. Today my mom's trying to get an unlisted
number."
"Janie Passen saw your mom on TV and called me." There was
a note of reproach in Suzi's voice. "Why didn't you tell me
Glaucus was your dad? I'm supposed to be your best friend."
"I couldn't. It was supposed to be, you know, a secret."
Suzi didn't quite accept that. Secrets were what best friends
were for. "What's it like? I mean if your father has to live under-
water all the time."
Brenda looked at her friend. "Hey, I don't want to talk about it
all that much."
Suzi was hurt. "Well, pardon me." She turned and walked
away.
Brenda went to her locker to get her books for the next class.
Suddenly Steven Ike and two other boys surrounded her.
"Hey, it's Minnie the Mermaid," Ike said loudly for the whole
hallway to hear. The boys laughed, and Brenda again felt the
surge of blood to her face.

225
"She's growing gills too/' one of the other boys said.
"Those are her titties, stupid."
The hot rush of blood flared to anger and Brenda swung the
book in her hand at Steven Ike with all her strength. It caught the
boy across the cheek and sent him reeling back.
Brenda whirled and fled down the hall through a crowd of as-
tonished faces. She bolted down two flights of steps to the exit
and out the door and didn't stop running until she was off the
school grounds. For the first time she looked back. Nobody had
followed her.
She tried to call home from a gas station pay phone, but the
line was busy. She began walking home, struggling not to cry, star-
ing at the ground. She was still a block away when she saw the
crowd. There were groups of people standing on the lawn and
sidewalk in front of her house. As she approached she saw several
TV news camera crews standing around, apparently waiting for
something. She was frightened but she kept walking toward them.
There was no place else to go. All her friends were in school.
Brenda recognized Mrs. Levine, the next-door neighbor, talking
to a red-headed woman. Mrs. Levine spotted her and pointed.
"There's the Styles girl now." She waved. "Brenda, honey."
A man with a camera blocked her way. The red-headed woman
was suddenly at her side. "Brenda, how does it feel to have
Glaucus as a father?" She pointed a microphone at the girl.
"I'm very proud of my father," Brenda said slowly, primly, re-
peating what her mother had said. "I think he's very brave." She
tried to walk on, but a second and third camera converged on her.
"When was the last time you saw your father?"
"I don't remember. I think it was a couple of months ago. Ex-
cuse me, please."	*
"Do you swim in the tank with him?"
"No. Excuse me, please. My mother's expecting me."
But the crowd about her grew thicker and more suffocating.
There were people she had never seen before running across the
lawn toward her, shoving and staring at her and gawking into the
TV cameras.
"Who's that?" someone asked.
"I think it's one of the fish freak's kids."
"I have to see my mother. Excuse me, please," Brenda pleaded.
She was close to tears. She kept moving toward the front door.
She made the steps. The door was locked. She fumbled for her

226
key and dropped it. It disappeared in the crowd of feet that
pursued her. Brenda groped for the bell. "Ma, it's me, Brenda. Let
me in." Microphones mounted on poles like spearheads jabbed at
her. Brenda cried out again for her mother. She pounded on the
door in desperation. "Let me in, please!" Brenda screamed and
began to sob.
The door suddenly flew open and Brenda stumbled inside into
her mother's outstretched arms. Ruth slammed the door shut and
bolted it, then held her daughter tight as the girl cried uncon-
trollably.

44
Harry Styles hovered motionless in his tank and only the slow
clenching and unclenching of his fists betrayed his emotions. His
habitat on the island was considerably roomier and more elabo-
rately equipped than his tank at the Institute of Oceanography
had been. The new accommodations had been built specifically to
house him and not pelagic fish. There was an organized exercise
area with a stationary bicycle, barbells, and spring-loaded pulleys.
On the wall a target was mounted and beneath it hung a spear
gun with which he practiced his marksmanship. And there was a
small library of books with water-proofed pages. But it was the six
o'clock news report on TV that now mesmerized him.
The reporter, a red-headed woman, stood in the driveway of
Harry's home, and behind her a mob of newsmen, cameras, and
spectators was crowded on his front lawn. "For the second day in
a row a stakeout of reporters and just plain curious sightseers laid
siege to the Styleses' home here in Encino," the woman reported
in an excited contralto voice.
"The crowds here have grown considerably since Channel

228
Three exclusively reported that the fish-man whom scientists have
dubbed John Glaucus is actually Harry Styles, a former aerospace
engineer with a wife and three children." There was pride in the
woman's expression and voice as though she had taken personal
possession of Harry and his family.
The TV picture cut away to close-ups of the milling crowd.
Harry was seized by their expressions. Most were utterly blank as
if waiting for someone to entertain them. But others peered
about, petulant and vaguely angry. A great many, mostly teen-
agers, simply joked about and poked one another. A small cluster
of men, neatly dressed in white shirts and ties, picketed on the
sidewalk with sharply lettered signs that read: " 'God created man
in His own image.' Genesis 1:27" and "Thou shall not experiment
with Human Beings."
The camera focused on the house. The windows were all cur-
tained. The voice of the woman reporter narrated the film: "Mrs.
Styles has barricaded herself in her home and refused to talk to
reporters since her brief appearance yesterday. The three Styles
children today stayed home from school."
Harry felt enraged and humiliated. The sanctuary of his home
was being violated before his eyes and he was helpless—and he
was the cause of it all. He wanted to rush out and beat away the
sensation seekers, vandals, and reporters mobbing his front lawn.
But he could do nothing.
The camera had now invaded his backyard. The swimming pool
was covered with leaves and twigs, empty except for an inflated
plastic fish, one of Christopher's toys that bobbed listlessly among
the debris.
The camera abruptly cut to the front door, where Gunther
Marx emerged, followed immediately by Brenda, David, Chris-
topher, and Ruth. They were all carrying luggage, except for
David, who cradled Groucho in his arms. Gunther carried a large
suitcase in front of him like a battering ram to force his way
through the crowd to a car parked in the driveway. Ruth had a
vague smile frozen on her face. She ignored the questions shouted
at her by the reporters and hauled Christopher along by the hand.
The child looked up at the crush of people with a wide-eyed,
frightened expression. The woman reporter knelt with her micro-
phone to ask Christopher a question, but she was shoved by the

229
crowd and knocked down, sprawling out of sight in the jam. The
news film suddenly became shaky, the photographer himself now
being knocked about in the melee. Two policemen wrestled with
the crowd to clear a path. Ruth disappeared and then Harry
caught a glimpse of her pushing the children into the sedan in the
driveway.
"Late in the afternoon the whole Styles family made their first
appearance, and possibly their last for a while," the report contin-
ued, but Harry no longer heard it. How often before had he
dispassionately watched the same spectacle on TV involving peo-
ple who were either strangers or celebrities. But this was his fam-
ily , and now each scene was a torment.
The sedan inched out of the driveway, forcing its way through
the cameramen and the pickets. As the car pulled away, Chris-
topher pressed his face and hands against the rear window and
the camera focused on him. The awed and frightened face of
Harry's son peered out at his father, growing more and more dis-
tant until the boy faded from sight.
"Harry, we have some very special guests here to see you."
For a moment Harry was confused. He had been so stirred up
that he had not noticed Buckley and two other men enter the
habitat room. The three now stood side by side at the view win-
dow smiling cordially at him. One was an Oriental.
"Harry, this is John Chambers of Standard Oil and Mr. Hiroshi
Tokugawa of the Japan National Oil Corporation. They're very
impressed with your work." Buckley smiled at the two men as if
sharing a private joke. "Especially with your construction of that
oil wellhead assembly at depth."
Harry swam to the window and began talking excitedly but no
sound came forth. "You'll have to put on your Hydro-Voice,
Harry," Buckley said. "We can't read your lips."
Harry was in the habit of taking off the electronic larynx when
alone because the strap chafed his neck. It was lying by the TV
set. He dove for it and clasped the box to his throat. "Where the
hell are my wife and kids? I want Ruth here!"
His charged angry voice exploded in the habitat room. The
three men looked at one another in bewilderment.
Harry gestured toward the TV set. "Did you see what those
crowds and reporters are doing? My God, they're destroying my
home!" Harry slumped into a chair. "It's my fault," he muttered.

230
"All my fault. Fm to blame." He sat hunched over, staring at the
floor with stricken eyes.
Ruth flew to the island. She stood on the other side of the glass,
and with tears streaming down her face she told Harry she wanted
a divorce.
Harry felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach. He stared in
silence at his wife. How long had they been unable to touch or
hold each other? Plarry had lost track of time. Now he measured
the time not in months or years but in the anguish and hope-
lessness in Ruth's face. Finally his voice returned, and he pleaded,
"Give it a chance, Ruth."
"A chance for what, Harry? What chance do we have together?
Just tell me one. Just one. Fll cling to it. I'll pray for it."
Harry was silent. There was no hope he could offer her.
"Dr. Steinhardt tells me you're now perfectly healthy," Ruth
said. "And they have a heavy schedule of important research work
lined up for you. I have my own life to lead, Harry. And so do the
children. This has been a nightmare for us."
"All the reporters hounding you. The TV. All the publicity.
That'll settle down in a little while."
"And then what, Harry? Then what will the children and I
have to look forward to?"
Once again Harry was silent. He had no answers to his wife's
questions. No hopes to soften her despair. "What is it you „ want
to do?" he asked finally.
Ruth shook her head. "I don't know. I haven't had a chance to
work it all out. Right now I just have to get away from it all for a
while. I spoke to my mother yesterday. The kids can start school
there without losing any time."
"Colorado?"
Ruth nodded. "It will be good for the kids, Harry. Chrissy's
having nightmares. He wakes up screaming. And the nightmares
are about you."
"Colorado," Harry repeated. He said it as if she were going to
the moon.
"We'll all always love you, Harry," Ruth said softly. "You'll al-
ways be a great hero to us."
After she had left, Harry stood slumped against the wall of the
tank as if all the strength had ebbed from his body and he had to
support himself. Once he had accused Ruth of thinking only

231
about their family life. At the time he had been feverish with the
idea of setting a mark. Of breaking scientific ground where no
man had been before. And he had done it.
Now his sharp words to Ruth came back to haunt him. Even at
its most shining moment his triumph had always had a black
nimbus about it. He could never be with his family again, but he
had consumed his despair like fuel. It became his energy. It was
the warp and woof of what was regarded as his courage.
Harry felt no anger toward Ruth. She was merely formalizing
the truth of their life. She was ending nothing but the illusion of
their marriage and family. But that illusion had sustained Harry.
It was the last tie to his own humanity.
"We'll all always love you, Harry. You'll always he a great hero
to us."
Ruth had never looked more beautiful or in more pain. Harry
remembered the last time he had seen his children. David's and
Brenda's awed, frightened faces still pained him when he visual-
ized them. He once again heard Chrissy's terrified screams echo-
ing off the concrete walls of the tank room. Harry leaned his head
against the glass and wept. His convulsing throat made no sound.
His contorted features, further distorted by the water and glass,
were those of a grieving clown.
In his grief he pounded on the glass wall. The pounding was at
first slow and senseless, then quickly built in fury. The glass cage
itself became the object of his rage. His blows, heavy and violent,
resounded through the building.
Two alarmed Navy guards came running into the room. "Hey,
what's the matter?"
Harry kept pounding. His blows visibly shook the glass walls.
"Knock that off. You're going to break it."
The glass cracked. On the next blow it exploded. Thousands of
gallons of water crashed into the room, breaking like a great wave,
lifting up and throwing Harry and the two guards before it. The
three men were slammed into the wall, and then they were swept
back in a surge and crashed into the heavy steel electronic console.
The monitoring equipment and electric fuse boxes shorted out,
exploded, and flared. The lights went out.
The dark water flooded the room several feet deep, then began
receding. One of the guards struggled to his feet, stumbled back
down into the water, and fought to his feet again. The other
guard lay unconscious face down in the water. The first man

232
grabbed him and tried to hold the other's head clear, all the while
coughing and choking for breath himself.
The water pouring through the open door rapidly drained the
room. It left Harry sprawled unconscious on the concrete floor,
the puddle by his head quickly reddening with blood.

45
Steinhardt, working late in his second-floor office, heard the
pounding, but couldn't identify the sound. He listened for a mo-
ment, puzzled, and then went to the door. The sound of the tank
bursting was a dull explosion. Steinhardt's first thought was that
one of the steel bottles of compressed oxygen in the tank room
had exploded. He hurried down the steps and on the first floor
was confronted by water surging through the narrow corridor like
a flash flood in a creek bed. He plunged in and reached the tank
room in great splashing strides.
Near the door a Navy guard knelt over the unconscious body
of a second sailor, trying to rouse him. The tank room was dark,
but by the light from the hallway Steinhardt spotted Harry lying
face down and seemingly lifeless on the floor. He ran to him and
groped for a pulse. It was rapid but strong. At a glance Harry's
head injury appeared to be a scalp wound, bloody but not imme-
diately dangerous. He was at the moment more likely to die of
anoxia than blood loss or shock. Steinhardt searched about franti-
cally. Harry's traveling tub, the box in which he was carried to the

234
beach, stood on its gurney alongside the wall. It was always filled
with salt water to prevent it from drying out. Steinhardt shoved it
alongside Harry, but he couldn't lift the sodden deadweight of his
body. "Help me get him into the water," he shouted at the Navy
guard.
The man looked up, dazed.
"Doc, Johnson needs help. He's out like a light."
"This man's dying. I'll get to your friend in a moment." The
authority in Steinhardt's voice immediately brought the sailor to
his side, and together they wrestled Harry into the tub. Steinhardt
forced open Harry's mouth and pulled his tongue out to open the
passage to his gill clefts. There was a spasm and a gasping noise as
Harry sucked in water and air.
Steinhardt shoved the gurney into the lighted corridor. He
turned on the tank's aerator, then examined the scalp wound as
swarms of bubbles wreathed about Harry's neck and shoulders.
The blood was oozing rather than actively bleeding. He checked
Harry's eyes. The pupils constricted quickly in the blaze of the
bright overhead light. Harry's pulse was still strong but slower
now. Steinhardt tried to estimate the time that had elapsed from
when he'd heard the tank burst until they had gotten Harry into
the traveling tub. It seemed an eternity; it couldn't have been
more than a few minutes. Harry's respiration now appeared to be
normal, but Steinhardt had no way of telling if there was any
brain damage due to prolonged lack of oxygen.
He turned reluctantly from Harry to the unconscious sailor.
There was a large swelling at his hairline. His breathing was shal-
low, his pulse slow. His pupils reacted more slowly to the light
than Harry's. Steinhardt opened the unconscious man's shirt and
jabbed his knuckles into his breastbone. The man moaned and
then fell unconscious again.
Steinhardt looked at the other man. "Are you all right?"
"Yes, sir. I'm just wet and a little shook."
"Bring Dr. Morrison here immediately. Tell him to bring two
I.V.'s. Two I.V.'s. Do you know where Dr. Morrison's room is?"
"Yes, sir. Captain Morrison."
The man ran down the corridor, and Steinhardt turned back to
Harry. To his surprise, Harry's eyes were opened and focused on
him.
"Harry, are you all right?"
For several moments there was no reaction. Harry just stared at

235
Steinhardt. Then he nodded almost imperceptibly and said, 'Til
live."
The next day a team of Seabees flew out to the island from Port
Hueneme to repair the habitat. They replaced the glass panel,
reinforcing it with a steel plate.
On the same plane the psychiatrist Shapiro arrived at Stein-
hardt's urgent summons, but Harry refused to talk to him.
"What the hell can he do for me?" Harry yelled at Steinhardt,
the deep electronic voice resonating in the concrete grotto of the
tank room. "Can he make me walk on the land and breathe air
again like a man? Can he bring back my wife and children to me?
If he can do that, I'll talk to him. But if he's only going to use his
psychiatric and psychological bullshit to try to reconcile me to
this existence, then he's wasting his breath. I don't want to talk
about it anymore. It's all been said. We have work to do. Let's
finish it up. Just keep me busy." The last was said without anger,
almost as a plea.
Steinhardt nodded. As he started to leave the tank room, Harry
said, "If you want to bring me someone, Karl, find me one of the
priests or rabbis who's worrying about my soul. A bearded mes-
sianic man who can lay his hands on my chest and make me
whole again. Tell him my soul is still here, Karl. I know because it
goes back and forth between hell and limbo, and I'm in agony."
Steinhardt spoke to Shapiro. "He's absolutely right, you know,"
the psychiatrist said. "There's really nothing I can do for him.
Work! Your research. That's the only thing that gives his life
meaning and purpose. But you'll have to watch him closely. He's
suicidal. It's not uncommon in transplant cases. The body ego has
been violated."
Steinhardt remembered that Bernstein had told him the same
thing. But it had been Bernstein who had destroyed himself in the
end. "Even before his wife's last visit he was restless and de-
pressed," Steinhardt said. "Now his moods are swinging wildly out
of control. It's not just a case of postoperative manic-depression.
It never has been. And it's only going to get worse."
Shapiro nodded. "We're going to have to watch him very care-
fully," he repeated.
Two weeks later, at the completion of the sea trials, Harry was
flown from the island to Los Angeles. Buckley and the Navy had

236
organized a demonstration to show Harry off to a specially invited
group of industrial and political leaders. Harry was in a manic
mood, showing an unusual interest in his surroundings, bobbing
his head out of the tub to peer around.
"They look like great black birds gobbling up the land," Harry
said.
The tub was lying at the end of a pier in Los Angeles harbor
waiting for transportation. Just across the channel, right at the wa-
terline, there was a battery of oil pumps. The bird's-head-shaped
counterweights constantly bobbed up and down at the end of a
seesawing beam as if they were pecking at the ground.
"Yes, don't they," Steinhardt replied. There was something rav-
enous in the stark black silhouettes. But it was Harry's imagery of
great black birds of prey that struck him. It was perhaps symp-
tomatic. The peaks and valleys of Harry's moods had become
much greater in the past week.
"Jesus, look at all this shit," Harry exclaimed. His gesture and
his contempt seemed to embrace all of Los Angeles harbor.
Directly ahead of them, at the southwest corner of the harbor, the
sunken wreckage of a tanker that had blown up at dockside was
being salvaged. At an adjacent dock a towering conveyor belt
transferred iron ore from a barge to the top of a dark mountain of
ore the color of dried blood just beyond the pier. All around them
the water was streaked with oil refracting the light into greasy
rainbows.
"It's not exactly our pretty, pristine little kelp-strewn island, is
it, Karl?"
"It's a heavily industrialized port," Steinhardt answered.
"It's more than that. It's the belching factory town, refinery,
slag heap, pipeline terminal, butcher shop, and cannery for the
sea."
"I hadn't thought of it in those terms, but yes, I suppose it is."
Out in the center of the harbor, floating cranes and pile drivers
were constructing the foundation for the giant new supertanker
terminal.
"It's just the beginning," Harry said. "Just ask Buckley."
"Yes, Buckley's quite eloquent on the subject of the exploration
of the sea."
Harry was silent a moment, and then began to sing.

237
"Many's the night
I spent with Minnie the Mermaid
Down at the bottom of the sea.
T'was down among the corals
That I lost my morals.
Gee, but she was good to me,
Oh, baby.
"That damn song keeps running through my mind/' Harry said.
"It's an old college fraternity drinking song. I haven't thought of
it for years. Now it keeps running through my head. I think I'll
sing it to all of Buckley's VIP's out there. What do you think of
that idea?"
"I think it would be quite lively."
"Many's the night
With the pale moon shining
Down on our seaweed bungalow
That I pitched and wooed her . . ."
Harry's voice faltered as if he had forgotten the rest of the
words and he fell silent. Steinhardt exchanged a troubled look
with Mark Matsuda.
Matsuda was dressed in a black diving suit, but he had the
thick airless jacket unzipped for ventilation. His air tank, mask,
and flippers were at the foot of the pier, where Buckley was
briefing two Navy frogmen. They all simultaneously looked down
at their wristwatches, apparently synchronizing them. Then Buck-
ley strode toward Steinhardt.
"Sorry for the delay, Karl. Just getting everyone coordinated so
that Glaucus rises up from the depths of the sea at eleven o'clock
on the button." He bent down toward Harry. "Got your speech
all ready, Glaucus?" In the past several weeks Buckley had begun
to address Harry as Glaucus, as though the institute director had
forgotten the man and now spoke only to the myth he had
created.
Harry nodded and smiled. Steinhardt thought there was some-
thing disturbing about that smile.
"Great!" Buckley exclaimed enthusiastically. "You look just
great."
Harry had on a new diving suit of vivid cobalt blue. It had

238
been specially developed by the Navy to retain body heat during
prolonged work at frigid depths and was made of layers of rubber
and a new synthetic polymeric fabric. Harry's dive that day wasn't
to be particularly deep or cold, but Buckley had insisted he wear
the new suit. Its contoured bulkiness gave the illusion that
Glaucus was twice as brawny as even the muscular Navy frogmen
escorting him.
Buckley picked up the pole spear that lay alongside the tub.
"Don't forget to hold this up high," he said. The sun glistened off
the three-pronged brass spearhead. "It's a great prop for the pho-
tographers. Symbolic as hell." The spear was, in actuality, a decep-
tively simple but effective underwater weapon—a slender six-foot-
long steel shaft with a sling of rubber tubing at the butt end.
Buckley hooked the sling on his thumb and cocked the spear by
stretching the rubber loop as far as it would go while gripping the
shaft in the same hand. His hand, in essence, became both the
trigger and the barrel of a short-range spear gun. Buckley sighted
along the line of the pole and his outstretched arm at an imagined
target out in the harbor, then eased his grip and put down the
spear.
"It's going to be an important day. A very significant day."
Buckley nodded his head emphatically at Harry. He turned to
Steinhardt. "We're running a bit behind schedule. We'll have to
leave for the boat right now."
Steinhardt looked down at Harry. To his astonishment, Harry
reached up and seized his hand and forearm, gripping it and
squeezing it in both of his, as he had done once before, at the end
of the pressure tests. Then he released Steinhardt's arm and
slipped below the water that obscured the intense emotion in his
face like a veil.
"I should be in the water with him," Steinhardt said as Buckley
hurried him from the pier. There was a gray Navy sedan waiting
for them at the foot of the pier. A uniformed driver held the door
open.
"You'll be infinitely more valuable on board with me. The oil
men, congressmen, and others have specifically asked to talk to
you. You've been avoiding them, Karl. Mark and the Navy men
can take care of Glaucus in the water."
"Are all these military bodyguards really necessary?"
"They're just a routine precaution. After the incident when he
smashed the tank, we don't know what could happen. I'll trust to

239
your discretion, Karl, not to mention that to anyone there today."
The car sped along the access road to the Navy piers. On their
right a nuclear guided-missile cruiser was moored. Its block-shaped
monolithic superstructure loomed oppressively over Steinhardt. It
suggested nothing of the sea or the wind, as if it sprang from a
technology totally indifferent to nature. "Fm very concerned
about Harry's state of mind," Steinhardt said.
"He'll be all right. He's always happier when he's in the ocean."
You're a fool, Steinhardt almost blurted out. But he remained
silent. He slumped back in the car seat brooding. Something was
about to happen. Steinhardt knew that with a certainty that was
as inevitable as the tide. But he didn't know what it was nor how
to prevent it.
"Is this carnival really necessary?" Steinhardt asked.
"A carnival? Yes, I suppose it'll be a celebration of sorts."
"What are we celebrating?" Steinhardt asked with an edge to
his voice. "That Harry has become a virtual prisoner of the Navy.
That all our research may be classified rather than published."
"I don't think you need concern yourself anymore with the
Navy's restrictions," Buckley said.
"Oh. Do we have a wealthy new sponsor?"
Buckley nodded.
Steinhardt was taken by surprise. "Who are they?"
"A consortium of oil companies. Since Harry's sea trials, several
corporations are interested in financing our research. I'm thinking
of setting up an association of several companies to jointly fund
an independent foundation."
Steinhardt was puzzled. "I don't understand the oil companies'
interest. They have remote engineering systems for their sort of
work."	*
Buckley shook his head. "In a subsea oil well there's no ade-
quate substitute for a man underwater to do the final work. To
make inspections and repairs. It's the oil companies who've been
behind all the accelerated development of diving technology in
the last decade. At least since the Arab oil embargo. That was the
critical episode. Before that, we had little experience in working at
depths greater than four hundred feet. Soon the wellheads will be
a mile deep." He looked pointedly at Steinhardt. "We're not talk-
ing about pure scientific research now, Karl. We're talking about
the immediate flow of billions of dollars of fuel. And a potential
for incalculable disaster that may be prevented."

240
Steinhardt thought of the great black birds of prey devouring
the land and said nothing.
"Quite frankly, Karl, there'll be more research money available
to us than we'll know what to do with."
"That should serve your ambitions well," Steinhardt said in a
withering voice.
"My ambitions!" Buckley was outraged. He stared hard at
Steinhardt, and he was so tense with anger that the scientist was
intimidated. "Goddammit, I'm sick and tired of being cast as the
convenient villain by you and Ruth Styles. I didn't perform the
goddamn gill operation. And if I had known about it, I would
have done everything in my power to stop it. But if it wasn't for
me, Harry Styles would probably be dead now. Or a vegetable on
some life-support system in a hospital back ward. You'd be dis-
graced and your career at an end. And the Styles family would be
destitute. But I managed to maneuver the university and the
Navy to support you and Harry. And at great risk to my own ca-
reer. Believe me, it wasn't easy. You're not the most popular man
with your colleagues."
Buckley rubbed his face with his hands. "Christ," he said, but
the word was more a sigh than a curse. "Maybe that's the price of
working with genius. Even Einstein's colleagues at Princeton con-
sidered him a heretic and an old fool." Buckley studied Steinhardt
a moment, then said, "I probably shouldn't admit this to you,
but, what the hell, it's time you knew the facts of life outside the
ivory tower. I deliberately leaked the original news story on
Glaucus."
"Why?"
"To protect you. To protect the institute. It was all bound to
come out. And the press would have made you look like the mad
scientist from a 1930s horror movie. This way I was able to con-
trol the story."
Buckley turned away and stared out the window of the car.
Warships and submarines were tied up at the piers they passed,
and out beyond them, in the middle of the harbor, a giant con-
tainer ship loaded with Japanese automobiles waited to unload. "I
suppose you're right," Buckley said softly. "I do have ambitions.
Both for myself and the institute. That's not abnormal, unethical,
or un-American. But whatever personal ambitions I have, they
pale to insignificance beside your ambitions or those of Harry

241
Styles. And Fd never do anything that would so devastate and
hurt him as what his wife has done."
Everything Buckley said was true, thought Steinhardt. The two
men rode the rest of the way to the ship in silence.
The Richard Kenneth was a handsome modern oceanographic re-
search vessel the size of a Navy destroyer but broader in the beam.
On an expedition it normally carried twenty-five scientists, but
this day its supercargo numbered twice that many people. They
bunched on the wide afterdeck bundled against the crisp morning
air in a motley array of sweaters, windbreakers, mackinaws, yacht-
ing gear, and military surplus canvas jackets like weekend fisher-
men.
Mr. Hiroshi Tokugawa of the Japan National Oil Corporation
—identified by the name tag pinned to his breast—wore a yellow
nylon ski parka that reflected the sunlight so blindingly that Stein-
hardt was forced to squint.
"This operation, in a normal man with lungs, it would be re-
versible, yes?" Mr. Tokugawa asked.
"We have reversed dogs and rats back to air breathing," Stein-
hardt acknowledged. "But there are paradoxically greater dangers
in the return than in the original gill breathing. The animals
often develop pneumonia or their lungs collapse. What further
complications might develop due to prolonged inundation of the
lungs we simply don't know. We'd have to do considerably more
experiments with animals. For instance, we don't know whether
we should fill the lungs with a Ringer's solution and then sur-
gically seal them. Or whether we should let them ventilate natu-
rally with seawater. These would be the next logical experiments."
The next logical experiments. The phrase came as a shock to
Steinhardt. He had subconsciously already projected the next
areas to be investigated. His scientific training had programmed
his mind for forty years and now it automatically fed back the
next logical sequence.
"The gills, they can be removed, yes?" Mr. Tokugawa asked.
"It would require major surgery and reconstruction. All of
which has its own inherent risks. But, yes, they could be re-
moved."
"All new diving technology has inherent risks," Bob Spann of
Spann Engineering Associates said. "Hell, if an air hose broke in
the old hard-hat diving, the pressure would mash the diver right

242
up into his helmet. Couldn't scrape him out. We'd have to bury
him in the helmet."
Mr. Tokugawa blinked at Bob Spann as if trying to figure out if
he had interpreted him correctly. Then he looked back expect-
antly at Steinhardt.
Steinhardt had nothing more to say. He searched the water to
the north where the headlands of Palos Verdes and San Pedro
thrust up above the brown haze. The entrance to Los Angeles har-
bor was already veiled by smog. The launch that was supposed to
bring Harry and the Navy divers into position was nowhere in
sight.
"We need a coalition of the universities, industry, the federal
government, and the military." Buckley's emphatic voice carried
across the deck. "We now have a unique opportunity to effec-
tively exploit the two-thirds of the earth that up to now has been
denied to us. We can carry out manned underseas activity to its
limits. Not just oil but mining and agriculture also."
Steinhardt had no doubts about whom Buckley had in mind to
head that mighty coalition. But who was he to criticize Buckley?
The institute director was right—it was Steinhardt's and Harry's
ambitions that had been outrageous. He turned to see the person
Buckley was addressing. Buckley hovered over a shorter, balding,
middle-aged man whom Steinhardt recognized as head of the U.S.
Senate subcommittee on science and technology. "A fascinating
vision." The bald head nodded. "Fascinating vision."
"It's not just a vision, Senator," Buckley persisted. "It's some-
thing we must start implementing immediately."
"I'm anxious to see your man-in-the-sea Glaucus."
Buckley checked his watch, then peered aft. At the stern of the
ship a diving platform of steel grating had been rigged at the
water level. "He should be here any moment now," Buckley said,
then impatiently rechecked his watch.
Matsuda surfaced first, his black hooded head breaking water a
few yards behind the ship. He scrambled aboard the platform and
moved immediately out of the way. There was a shout about the
deck and everyone jammed to the after railing. In the prere-
hearsed military drill the two Navy frogmen surfaced alongside
the platform and swung onto it. They knelt one on each side of
the platform, each flourishing a pole spear as if it were a battle
standard.
Between them Harry now surfaced. His blond hair and beard

243
were a full thick mane that sparkled in the sunlight like wet gold.
His cobalt blue wet suit shimmered. In his right hand he held the
three-pronged bronze spear. With his left he gripped the edge of
the platform, holding himself full shouldered out of the water.
The effect was like King Neptune himself rising. Harry stared in-
tently at the crowd on the deck, and they fell silent.
"Fm a new form of man, one that scientists, philosophers, and
the writers of myths have speculated on since the dawn of man-
kind/' Harry's voice was powerful and resonant. "In this age of
technology I was an inevitability. Whether I am a man of the fu-
ture depends on mankind's need to explore, exploit, and plunder
the sea as you increasingly exhaust the resources of the earth."
Steinhardt glanced at Buckley. The blood had drained from the
man's face and he gaped at Harry. This was certainly not the
speech he had written.
"Some think I'm a monster. Perhaps I am. A monster in the
original meaning of the word. I'm a warning from the gods."
Harry's eyes searched the crowd as if seeking particular faces.
"There are those who believe I'm an unnatural man. I don't know
what's natural or unnatural for man anymore. But I do know that
I now live an unnatural life among you. My family, all that I love
and once lived for, is lost to me. In these extraordinary events,
I've been a willing collaborator/And there's no one to blame."
His gaze settled on Steinhardt. "Our work is done, Karl," he
rsaid, addressing the old man directly in a softer voice. "We've
each achieved what we set out to do." He glanced briefly at Buck-
ley and then back at Steinhardt. "The rest was to be exploitation
and empire building. I've no desire or will anymore to go on with
the work."	*
"What the hell's going on?" Morrison barreled his way to the
rail between Steinhardt and Buckley.
Steinhardt acknowledged what Harry had said with a silent
nodding of his head.
Harry blinked and his eyes left Steinhardt and once again swept
the faces at the rail. "I no longer have a life among you," he said.
"I'm going to whatever fate awaits me in the sea."
He reached for his throat mike, unstrapped it but held it
pressed to his throat. "I guess I have nothing more to say to you,"
he said. He threw the voice box at Buckley. The director, rather
than trying to catch it, threw up his arms as if warding off a blow.

244
The mechanical larynx crashed on the deck at his feet, shattering
and spewing out its electronic innards.
With a powerful kick and thrust of his arms Harry arced up out
of the water like a great leaping fish. His body slapped down with
a tremendous splash and he dove deep, the blue of his wet suit
dissolving into the blue depths.
Morrison was the first to act. "Get the hell after him!" he
bellowed at the two Navy divers on the platform below him.
"Bring him back!"
Matsuda grabbed one of the frogmen by the arm. "Let the poor
son of a bitch alone. Let him finally be." The Navy man
wrenched away from Matsuda, sending him sprawling on the plat-
form. Then the two divers sprang into the water. They hovered on
the surface a moment getting their bearings. Then one of them
pointed down and they simultaneously plunged after Harry.
It was not difficult for Steinhardt to reconstruct what followed,
the immutable biophysics of tragedy. A few miles out from the
Los Angeles harbor, where the ship was stationed, the gently slop-
ing coastal shelf steepened, dropping three thousand feet into the
San Pedro basin. In the first exultant, angry, mad rush of his es-
cape, Harry dove deep. He was unaware he was being pursued.
The two frogmen, impelled by Morrison's frantic order, doggedly
followed. They were already too deep for safety when Harry first
heard the harsh rasping and sucking sounds of their air regulators
resounding in the water. He whirled about and gestured to them to
go back. The two frogmen swarmed down on him like predatory
creatures. One grabbed his arms and the other gripped him about
the legs. Harry wildly wrestled and kicked free. The two were in-
stantly on him again. Desperate, Harry jabbed at one, then
the other with the butt end of his pole spear. But underwater the
blows were ineffectual. The frogmen warded them off with their
arms and grappled with Harry. The three frantically struggling
men continued to sink rapidly. They were now over three hundred
feet deep, in the realm of nitrogen narcosis, and the gases in their
blood drugged the divers like opium. Their grip on Harry weak-
ened. Their clutching became uncoordinated. Harry yanked his
arms and legs free and broke away. One of the frogmen took a
clumsy swipe at him, missed, and laughed in a burst of bubbles.
He took the air regulator out of his mouth, looked at it curiously,
then held it out to Harry as if offering a breath. He was entirely in
the grip of narcosis.

245
Harry frantically signaled to him to swim back to the surface,
but the diver just stared at his air gauge as if he were having trou-
ble reading it. The other man, befuddled, sank beneath them.
Harry kicked down to him. He released the catch on the man's
weight belt and dropped the lead weights to make him more
buoyant, then yanked the emergency cord on the life vest to
inflate it. In the squeeze of the great pressure it only partially
inflated. The diver watched Harry, unresisting. His eyes behind
the plate of his face mask were unfocused. Harry checked the air
gauge. The needle flickered just above the zero mark. The divers
had exhausted most of their air on the long swim to the boat.
They didn't have enough left to make the slow ascent to the sur-
face. It was a choice between drowning and the bends. The first
was certain death. The other an agonizing probability.
Harry yanked the man's head back to straighten his windpipe
and reduce the chance of an embolism, then pushed him up to-
ward the surface hundreds of feet above them.
The other diver watched Harry and apparently something in his
numbed mind clicked. He fumbled with the catch of his weight
belt, dropped it, and yanked the cord on his life vest. Then he
ripped off his face mask. There was nothing Harry could now do
for them, and he watched helplessly as both men rapidly rose, their
arms limp at their sides, their faces upturned like two black an-
gels ascending to a brighter heaven.
"Will the divers be able to capture him?" someone asked Stein-
hardt. They were acting as though Harry were an escaped prisoner
or a wild animal, Steinhardt thought.
At that moment one of the Navy frogmen burst to the surface.
He popped halfway out of the water, thei> settled, floating in his
Mae West with his head slumped forward. There was a cry on the
ship just as the second diver popped up.
Matsuda leaped into the water. "Give him a hand," Morrison
ordered a group of Navy men clinging to the platform. "We've
got to get those men to a decompression chamber immediately."
In the water Matsuda felt for a pulse in one diver's neck. From
the deck Steinhardt could see the stream of blood from the man's
ears and nose staining Matsuda's hand and washing away in the
seawater.

46
Along the Southern California coast the subsurface waters move
up the shoreline, a great languid submarine current flowing north-
west from the Mexican border to Point Conception. Harry drifted
in that current. With his yellow mane and wild beard streaming,
he sailed the subsea like a loony Neptune, still clutching his shin-
ing brass-headed trident. His mind was as adrift as his body on the
offshore current.
In the solitary confinement of his tank, the sea stretching end-
lessly beyond the walls of his prison cell had called to Harry. In
the last few weeks he had suffered from manic depression. At
the heights of his mania he had heard the sirens murmuring of
sunlight beaming through the golden cathedral columns of kelp
and bursting in rainbows from iridescent fish. The sea was a world
to which he alone of men had access and he had felt supremely
superhuman. He would be the Christ wandering in a dazzling wil-
derness.
But this mood had been followed by deep depression, when
Harry felt tortured by self-blame, guilt, and fantasies of suicide.

247
But he was not insane. A madman loses touch with reality. It was
the reality of his life that Harry had to escape.
In the nightmore of his depression the dark sea had whispered
to him. He imagined himself drawn down fathom after fathom
into the abyss until the darkness, the numbing cold, the silence,
and the heavy black water finally crushed him, and he became one
with the sea, all his pain and loneliness quieted.
The divers had checked his plunge into the depths of the ocean.
His struggle with them had exhausted him. The mania was spent,
but now he no longer had any desire or will. Harry simply drifted.
The current carried him beyond San Pedro and Palos Verdes and
up along the arc of glaring white sands that sprawled from Re-
dondo Beach to Malibu.
The two divers were either dead or crippled—Harry felt that
tragedy ruptured whatever fragile ties he might have had to other
men. He was now an outlaw. An outcast.
Harry drifted. He was suspended, weightless, in a great blue
void that had neither top nor bottom nor sides but only shadings
of light. Above him the blue was pale and below it deepened to
midnight. Gradually he became aware of another shading of light.
To his right the water was darker, almost a slate gray, than it was
to his left. And he knew, more by instinct than by reasoning, that
it would soon be night.
It was then that he saw the first physical features he had en-
countered since his escape. It was a submarine reef. Instinctively,
he sought a refuge among its crevices, and under an overhang of
rock Harry curled up into a fetal position and fainted into a deep
exhausted sleep.

47
The smog in Denver was worse than it was in Los Angeles. By
eleven in the morning it was already seeping into the huge frame
house, causing Ruth's eyes to sting. The paneled front hallway
and the living room of her mother's house were not as enormous as
Ruth remembered them as a child, but they were high-ceilinged
and spacious enough to make them prohibitive to air condition.
The hot smoggy air in the downstairs hall had a suffocating qual-
ity. But the phone was there, and Ruth had to call Gunther.
When she was a child there had been several health resorts and
sanitariums for people suffering from lung problems in that sec-
tion of Denver. The clean, dry, bracing Rocky Mountain air had
then been regarded as tonic as vitamins. In her panic-stricken
flight from California, Ruth had had a vision of a clean placid city
and towering snow-capped peaks where the crisp pure air would
purge her angry confusion. The children were all unhappy about
the move, and on the plane she had told them stories about her
girlhood—of swimming in mountain lakes, skiing and sledding on
the street in front of her house, and the old-fashioned snow-

249
dappled Christmases she'd had there. The mountains, the change
of seasons, the cool clear air had taken on the quality of original
innocence for her. In her mother's home Ruth's children would
relive her childhood. She herself would start life anew.
But as the jet cleared the Rockies and began its letdown to
Denver's airport, Ruth looked out the window and saw the smog.
It hovered over the city in a thick brown haze. To the east the
Great Plains spread out from under the blanket of smog flat and
boundless into Kansas. To the west the Rockies suddenly leaped
up in a jagged great wall fourteen thousand feet high. The first
sight of them had always thrilled Ruth on her visits home. From
Stapleton Airport one could see the Front Range from Pikes Peak
in the south 150 miles to Longs Peak in the north. But not this
way. Through the mustard haze she could barely make out Mount
Evans, the closest of the great peaks.
"That's where your grandmother lives. Just below that great big
mountain," Ruth pointed out to Christopher, trying to drum up
the enthusiasm that had suddenly drained from her.
"The smog's worse than in L.A., Mom," Brenda said, and the
statement of fact was an accusation. David didn't say anything.
The freeways from the airport were jammed bumper to bumper
with fuming cars and angry drivers. The immediate sights were
billboards, forests of TV antennas, tacky little tract homes.
By the time she stepped on the wide, wood-railed front porch
of her mother's house, Ruth knew that she had solved nothing by
running home. She had, at the most, gained only a temporary
reprieve. The reprieve had ended with Gunther's shattering call
about Harry the previous afternoon.
It was now ten o'clock in Los Angeles. Ruth's call to Gunther
was relayed through the law office switchboard to his secretary.
Gunther came on the line.
"Ruth, I was just about to call you. I just finished talking with
Steinhardt. He's still aboard the ship. I had to get patched
through by the marine operator."
"Have they found Harry?"
"No, not yet. But Steinhardt says it's just a matter of time be-
fore he shows up." Ruth heard the forced optimism in Gunther's
voice.
"What about the two divers?"
Gunther was silent for a moment. "They both died."
"Oh, my God."

250
"Maybe it's a blessing. There was brain damage."
Ruth moaned and started to weep.
"It wasn't Harry's fault, Ruth. They were both experienced
divers. They shouldn't have followed him that deep. They knew
better."
She collected herself. "Gunther, I'm flying back there."
"Ruth, why? There's really nothing you can do here."
"I can be there when Harry comes back. I'm going crazy here
just thinking about it."
There was silence on the other end of the line.
"And I can defend myself. I saw that son of a bitch Buckley on
TV last night. He was putting the blame all on me, telling them,
'Glaucus was upset because of problems with his marriage. He
and his wife were estranged.' He's damn right we were estranged.
Harry's been estranged from the whole human race since he was
wheeled into that operating room. That's what Harry was telling
everybody. But Buckley doesn't want anyone to hear it. If they do
it'll screw up his plans to become chairman of the board of the
seven seas."
"What're you going to do with the kids?"
"Mom can take care of them for a little while. Just until things
quiet down. But they're missing school. And they'll have to go
back and learn to cope with their father. I guess we'll all have to
learn that. Even if we stayed here, it would only be a matter of
time until the reporters found us again. Glaucus was the headline
in the Denver Post this morning."
"When are you coming back?"
"This afternoon. If I can get a flight. Can you pick me up at
the airport?"
"Yes, of course. And I'll try to keep the press at bay."
"I'm not afraid anymore. Maybe because I'm a little numb
right now. I didn't sleep last night. I'm tired and numb. But what
the hell else can possibly happen?"

48
The reef, which had loomed up as a black barren formation of
rocks when Harry had first spotted it, was now shimmering with
sunlight when he awoke. He was cramped and slightly chilled, but
the thick wet suit had kept him reasonably protected through the
night. He was suddenly very hungry. He hadn't eaten in a day.
His flight to the sea had first formed in his mind as a fantasy and
then had become a compulsion. He had never thought out the lo-
gistics or consequences of his act. The sea makes no allowances
for madness, but Harry had no need for rational thought. Instinct
was enough to survive.
Harry swam low over the reef. There was a movement beneath
him and a series of sharp snaps. He peered at the rocks, but he
only saw algae and barnacles and tiny pink anemones that gen-
erated their own phosphorescent color. A quick movement caught
his eye and with it came the sharp sound. A rock itself had
moved. He closely examined it. It was the shell of a large scallop.
Covered with barnacles, anemones, and algae, it was almost indis-
tinguishable from the rocks. Harry could now make out the

252
shapes of other rock scallops, six to nine inches wide, all about
him. Many of the shells were slightly agape and all around their
edges tiny tentacle eyes, the ocellus, glimmered in the water. As
his blue hulk loomed near them, the ocellus immediately retracted
and the shell snapped shut. If it hadn't been for that sound and
slight movement, Harry would have swum right over the cam-
ouflaged scallops.
From the scabbard attached to the leg of his diving suit, he
pulled out his utility knife—the blade as stout as a crowbar and
the handle as heavy as a hammer. He pried open a scallop, cut out
the muscle of succulent white meat, and devoured it. From his
hunting expeditions with Matsuda, he knew the meat would be
sweet and tender even eaten raw.
He wrenched open and ate a second scallop. A swarm of fish
materialized, tearing and gobbling at any stray bits of food. In
their feeding frenzy the fish followed him from scallop to scallop,
darting in as soon as he cracked the shell and trying to snatch the
white muscle of meat from his fingers. He consumed a dozen of
the shellfish before his hunger was satiated.
For days Harry wandered along a bight of submarine reefs that
paralleled the coast. The reefs, often the anchorings for forests of
lush kelp, provided food and nooks and crannies in which to
sleep. He didn't plunge into the cold dark depths of the abyss or
swim near shore, where the tides and surf churned up the sand
and made the water murky. In the clear deep waters of the reef he
gathered scallops, abalones, and oysters. He speared sheepheads,
perch, and rockfish and slashed the soft fleshy fillets from their
sides and wolfed them. He caught red crabs and spiny lobsters,
fractured their shells with his knife handle, and dug out the sweet
meat. He needed great quantities of the low-calorie seafood to sus-
tain himself, and the entire daylight hours were spent hunting.
Clouds of small damselfish and wrasses hovered around him,
scavenging anything he didn't eat. He wandered along the coast in
a daze, a demented sea god and his retinue.
Harry existed as if trapped in an unending dream, suspended in
a boundaryless blue twilight that was unbroken except for the
reefs or jungles of kelp. He stalked a five-foot halibut through the
kelp, the white fleshy underbelly appearing and disappearing
amid undulating yellow-green fronds. A school of opaleyes scat-
tered and then re-formed, hovering behind the fernlike leaves, all
peering at him. Sunlight rippled through the wavering stalks.

253
Harry suddenly saw a woman looking at him through the kelp.
She was hidden by green veils and only her haunting eyes and
long blond hair billowing on the eddies were visible. He swam to
her. The face disappeared, but he glimpsed the white flesh of her
legs swimming through the wispy feather-boa kelp ahead of him.
Excited and stirred, he plunged after her. There was another flash
of a lovely face wreathed in blond hair. A pale arm beckoned to
him through the sea palms and then disappeared again.
Harry ripped through the seaweed, feverishly searching for her.
Suddenly she floated before him, naked and voluptuous, a goddess
garlanded with green feathery boas.
He reached out for her. She dissolved into the swirling motes of
sunlight, then materialized again amid diaphanous membranes of
green a few yards away.
He lunged toward her, tearing up the kelp, gasping in his excite-
ment. But he couldn't catch her. She always eluded his grasp but
still tormented his vision—the sinuous blond hair, lush lips, full
buoyant breasts, soft flaxen belly, and long white thighs. Harry
collapsed, faint and sobbing, at the edge of the kelp forest.
There was nothing beyond the reef and the kelp. An empty flat
desert of gray sand stretched out before him. It was barren, life-
less, and unending. Suddenly Harry heard an eerie mournful cry.
Then another. He listened, gripped by the sounds—terrifying low-
ings, moans, and roars that echoed through the sea as if heralding
the rising of great monsters from the abyss.

49
Steinhardt stood at the top of the ladder of the Richard Ken-
neth waiting for Ruth. He held on to the rail with one hand, as if
for support; he looked ten years older than when Ruth had last
seen him.
"You look as though you haven't been sleeping very well/' he
said with some concern as he took her hand.
"I was about to say the same to you, Doctor."
His reply was a faint smile. "Men at my age either sleep too
little or too much."
He led the way to the ship's lounge. When she was seated,
Steinhardt said, "I've made arrangements for you to stay aboard.
You'll find the accommodations spartan but comfortable."
"Is Buckley aboard?" Ruth asked.
Steinhardt shook his head. "We're in touch by radio. But he
had administrative matters to tend to ashore. Besides which, he
has a tendency to seasickness."
"Do you expect Harry to return to the ship?"

255
The old man looked her straight in the eye. "If he comes back,
this would be the logical place."
Ruth's heart stopped beating for an instant. "You don't expect
Harry to come back," she said at last.
"I think the longer he stays away, the less likely it is."
"But he could stay out there indefinitely if he wanted, couldn't
he? I mean, there's food out there for him, isn't there?"
Steinhardt hesitated a moment before answering. "Oh, yes,
there's a great deal of food in the sea."
"Well, how could he die out there?" Ruth said in a voice little
more than a whisper.
"He might succumb to the cold, the pressure, or the lack of oxy-
gen at great depths," Steinhardt said reluctantly.
Ruth had a strong feeling he was withholding something. "I
want to know," she insisted. "I have a right to know what could
happen."
Steinhardt nodded. "Below two hundred meters, about six hun-
dred feet, the dissolved oxygen in the water varies a great deal. At
its lowest levels it wouldn't be enough to sustain consciousness or
even life. Harry would start hallucinating, then pass out and begin
to sink."
Ruth felt a little faint. She excused herself and went out on
deck. The sun was setting. The great red disk shimmered on the
horizon a few moments and then was swallowed by the sea, leav-
ing the sky to the west inflamed.
"Why don't you try and get some rest?" Steinhardt was at her
side.
Ruth nodded. The accumulated fatigue of days leadened her
eyes and body. She went to her cabin, stretched out on the narrow
bunk in her clothes, and immediately fell asleep.
She awoke with a start, confused and disoriented by the strange
surroundings, the creaks and sighs of the ship at mooring. The
cabin was pitch-black. Ruth tried to go back to sleep, but she
couldn't. She felt a familiar fear. If she fell asleep, Harry would
die. It was a terrible anxiety. She had felt it before, what seemed
centuries ago, when Harry was dying of lung cancer and she had
insisted on staying in the same room with him. Now it was back.
She tried to fight off the terror that came to her in a darkened
room. She tried to sleep, but finally she groped for the switch for
the bedside light and clicked it on. She sat up and wearily sagged

256
against the steel headboard of her bunk. She stared at the
cramped bare cabin. She didn't even remember going to bed.
Ruth got up and made her way on deck. The air was clear and
the stars very bright. The lights of San Pedro and Long Beach
flared across the water, giving the illusion the ship was closer to
shore than it had been earlier. Despite her nap, Ruth still felt
completely exhausted. She should go back to sleep. But she knew
that as soon as she put out the light, the terror would come back.
There was no one around, but Ruth heard a voice coming from
down the deck. As she approached, she recognized Steinhardt's
voice emanating from a porthole. "I strongly object to your per-
petuating this myth of Glaucus out there living on the great
bounty of the sea. I won't be party to a deception."
Ruth was arrested by the tension in Steinhardt's voice. There
was an answering crackle of a radio speaker and a voice that Ruth
couldn't make out. Steinhardt was apparently talking on the ra-
dio-telephone. She stepped near to eavesdrop.
"Harry is swimming around in two hundred metric tons of
DDT from the Los Angeles sewage outfall alone. It has perma-
nently poisoned the sediment. The fish all about me suffer from
tumors and fin rot. If you feed sea birds exclusively on fish from
this area, they die of DDT and PCB poisoning. The scallops here
contain three times the normal amount of mercury, and the
shellfish in the vicinity of the oil spills are cancerous. Of course I
realize the industrial interests you court don't want these matters
brought to public attention."
"Karl, I appreciate the fact that you're greatly upset by all
that's happened. We all are." The voice on the radio was low,
placating. It was Buckley's voice. "But I think we've a great many
more immediate problems. This isn't the most propitious time to
go off on a tangent on an ecological crusade."
"Perhaps I am being overly concerned with Harry's diet," Stein-
hardt responded, his pitch still taut and angry. "The immediate
danger is not what Harry eats, but what might eat him."
"Now I know you're being unnecessarily alarmist, Karl," Buck-
ley said in the same unruffled, soothing tone. "The chances of a
swimmer being attacked by a shark are as remote as his getting
struck by lightning."
"For a swimmer frolicking in the surf at Santa Monica that
may be true. But the majority of shark attacks in these waters are
by great whites against skin divers wearing wet suits and fins. That

2 57
much we have statistics on. Apparently the sharks mistake them
for injured fish or sea lions. But the larger sharks don't venture
into the shallow reef areas here in California. There aren't enough
large fish to feed them."
"What the hell does all this have to do with Glaucus?" Buckley
snapped, the self-control in his voice suddenly giving way to
alarm.
"Our trawl studies show that below six hundred feet the fish av-
erage five times as large as they do in shallow water. That's the
area the giant white sharks inhabit. And the autopsies on the two
unfortunate divers indicated that's the depth Harry may have
plunged to. If that's so, then a shark attack is no longer an event
as remote as being struck by lightning. His being devoured be-
comes an eventuality."
Ruth gripped the rail of the ship, trying to quell the shivering
that seized her body. She felt cold, sweaty. The shuddering be-
came violent. The shoreline lights blurred. She reeled and doubled
over the rail, vomiting.

50
The strange melancholy songs of migrating great whales echoed
through the sea around Harry, plaintive, moaning sounds of vary-
ing pitch and volume. Harry had never listened to the noises in
the sea. Before, he had always been with scuba divers, and the
loud sucking and rasping of their air regulators had drowned out
everything else. Now, as he hunted, he became keenly aware of
the multitude of sounds.
The water all around him vibrated with noise. Chirps, squeals,
screams, roars, croaks, whinnies, gurgles, and growls. Some sounds,
like the sharp, nerve-shattering shots of pistol shrimp, exploded
right beneath him as he swam. Others, like the wails and cries of
the great whales, reverberated through the sea from hundreds of
miles away. Unseen dolphins clicked and whistled to one another.
White croaker fish contracted their resonant air bladders and sil-
ver grunt fish ground their pharyngeal teeth. Harry listened care-
fully as he stalked through a kelp bed.
A large Dover sole suddenly flicked up out of the sand where it
had been feeding, partially buried and hidden on the bottom.

2 59
Harry's spear impaled it right behind the gills. He laid the fish out
on a rock and started to strip the fillet from its side, then stopped.
Near the tail the fish's scales were all gone and there was a pink
spongy tumor the size of a thumb. The tail fin itself was short and
misshapen as if eaten away by disease. He violently hurled the fish
away from him.
As he speared more fish, he minutely examined each one. He
discovered sole and Pacific sand dabs with twisted ray fins and
their tails completely missing, a chub mackerel whose flesh was
covered with red sores, and a striped mullet with dark tumors
dangling off its body like grapes. On a striptail rockfish the nor-
mally precise geometric mosaic of the scales was drunken and
disoriented, as if the primal pattern from which the fish was
created had gone crazy.
Harry's examination of each fish became obsessive. Even if the
fish looked normal on the exterior, he cut it open, dissected it, and
peered at its entrails. If any organ looked vaguely abnormal or dis-
eased, and they often did, he flung the fish away. He poked
through the viscera of scallops, abalone, lobsters, and crabs with
his knife point and often found fleshy cancers perched on organs,
devouring the fish from within. He fled from his discoveries, leav-
ing behind him a slaughter of disemboweled creatures. They were
quickly consumed by the scavengers and predators that followed
increasingly in his wake. But Harry himself now went hungry.
Even if a fish or shellfish passed his painstaking inspection, he ate
with reluctance.
He trekked down the sea floor and reefs to greater depths, in-
stinctively seeking escape from the poisons spilling out from the
land. The water became colder and darker. A blue-green twilight
enveloped him. The dark brooding rocks were covered with deli-
cate lacy black fans that trembled in the current. The fans were a
seaweed, plocamium, actually bright red in color, but at that
depth all the red light of the spectrum had been filtered out by
the water; only the faint blue-green rays penetrated. The plants'
red pigment was an adaptation that allowed them to absorb every
bit of blue-green light available. Since they reflected back no light
at all, they appeared black to the eye and survived in the twilight
world where green plants would perish.
The fish that swam around Harry were noticeably larger. The
shellfish had disappeared and the rocks were covered with spiny
sea urchins. The orange roe inside the black porcupine shells was

26o
nourishing but Harry disliked the taste. Instead he cracked open
several urchins and just lay still in the water with his spear cocked,
waiting for the fish to swarm and feed.
He singled out a large white seaperch and hit it just above the
pelvic fin. It flopped convulsively on the spear several times and
then was still. Harry looked at it closely. The scales and fins were
regular and well formed. He cut it open and spread the guts on a
rock for examination. Like a swarm of giant flies the other fish
darted in to feed. He tried to swat them away but they boldly ig-
nored his waving hand.
Suddenly all the fish scattered. Their disappearance was so swift
that it startled Harry. He looked about and gasped. His mind
went totally blank.
The great white shark that cruised slowly above him was so
large its shadow darkened the reef. Its open mouth was as wide as
a manhole. It drifted within a few feet of Harry, steadily staring at
him with eyes as cold as glass beads. With a thrust of its tail the
shark made a tight aggressive circle and, pectoral fins splayed out,
came head on at Harry.
He was galvanized. He dove into the rocks, clawing and kicking
frantically to crawl down into a crevice. But he was seized by the
foot and ripped from the rocks. As if his body were the tip of a
monstrous whip, Harry was violently snapped up and down. Then
he was released and sank to the bottom. He scurried into a crev-
ice, twisting and squeezing into it so that he crammed between
the rocks. He felt no pain in his leg but he couldn't turn around
to examine it. He sensed the shadow of the shark prowling above
him but he couldn't see it. From where he lay between the rocks
he could see only a narrow band directly ahead. And in that brief
field of vision he saw the handle of his spear lying on the sand just
out of reach.
Harry lost all sense of time. He stayed squeezed between the
rocks, unmoving, peering out at his spear but unable to see the
shark. Slowly he began creeping toward the spear. He squirmed an
inch, peered out and waited. Then he repeated the move, inching
out and waiting, slithering out of his hole like a spooked eel.
When the spear was almost within reach, he lunged out and
grabbed it. Then he saw the shark. It was almost on him. He was
caught in the open, half out of his hole. He tried to get back but
couldn't move fast enough. Instinctively he pointed the spear at
the shark. The shark took it in its mouth as if it were a toothpick,

261
ripping it out of Harry's hand. The handle jammed into the rocks
by Harry's head and for an instant deflected the shark's charge to
one side. In that moment Harry scampered back into his crevice.
The shark crashed into the rocks as if to bulldoze them out of the
way. The sea floor shuddered under the power of the charge. The
shark slammed again and again into the rocks, thrashing them
with its body as if it were trying to pulverize them. Then it
hovered right over the crevice, its body too thick to squeeze in. It
stared at Harry with its giant mouth opened, as though to suck
him right into it. Harry looked into the maw of the giant white
shark and saw the rows of triangular teeth, each a serrated blade
of ivory. The shark didn't move. It hung on the edge of the rocks,
its implacable eyes fixed on Harry, the butt end of the pole spear
still protruding from its giant mouth.
A midshipman fish darted into the crevice, spotted Harry, and
darted back toward the shark. It fled inside the shark's mouth and
then reemerged. For the first time Harry noticed the other fish
hovering about the shark's head. They swooped in and nipped at
the predator's flesh and then quickly backed off. Still the shark
didn't move.
A shark had to move. It had to keep water moving over its gills
or it suffocated. Sharks didn't have the muscles of the more highly
evolved fish to pump water over their gills. It was the first rational
sequence of thoughts Harry had had in days.
Harry shifted his position slightly. There was no reaction from
the shark. He timidly raised his head, inch by inch. There was still
no moment. Was the shark just waiting, catlike, to pounce on
him? Several small fish bit at its head as if feeding. There was no
flutter about the shark's gills. The shark was not even breathing.
Harry raised his head out of the crevice another inch, then an-
other.
At the upper side of the shark's head, just above its left eye, the
three brass points of the spear stuck out. The fury of the shark's
charge into the rocks had driven the steel shaft right through its
head, apparently through its brain. The shark was dead.
Harry slowly eased out of his hole, still not believing it. His
body was wedged into the rocks, and in order to get out, he had to
slide forward to a point where his head was within inches of the
shark's teeth. Only the presence of the fish now swimming freely
about the shark, nibbling at it, gave Harry the courage to move.
He recovered his knife from where he had dropped it and then

262
remembered that the shark had grabbed his leg. He studied it
with wonder. The right flipper was severed a half-inch away from
his toes. Only the shoe of the swim fin remained; the wide, thick
rubber flipper had been buzz-sawed off.
Harry looked closely at the monster. It was at least twenty feet
long and as wide as a rowboat. Even dead, with the spear har-
pooned in its brain, it terrified him. Gingerly he grabbed the spear
handle and tried to yank it out. Suddenly the shark came alive.
The great jaws snapped and the giant body convulsed, flinging
Harry through the water like jetsam.
He fell on a flat rock table with no breaks or crevices in which
to hide. But the shark didn't attack Harry. The daggerish teeth
gnashed compulsively as if trying to chew up the spear, and the
monster thrashed and writhed in a wild convulsion. Harry fled.
He kicked, crawled, and clawed through the rocks. From each
safe shelter he warily peered about and behind him before scurry-
ing on. His "crippled" fin caused him to wallow side to side when
he swam. Harry limped through the sea, a frightened, wounded,
hunted animal.
At the first sign of darkness he crawled into the rocks to sleep.
He desperately wanted to sleep, yet he couldn't. He was too
frightened. If he fell asleep he would die. Gobbled up and con-
sumed by some black blood-thirsting monster. He shoved back
into the crevice, pressing desperately against the rocks surrounding
and shielding his body. He cowered in the dark and could hear his
heart beating faster and faster. The sounds all about him were
magnified. He didn't know where the noises came from, and like
the darkening sea itself they were now terrifying.
The water became as black as ink, and from deep in the abyss
rose wails and moans. Strange phosphorescent lights darted
around Harry in the dark. He stared at them, his eyes wide and
strained with fear. With the setting of the sun began the nightly
migration of glowing nightmare creatures up from the deep to-
ward the surface to hunt. Dragonfish, hatchetfish, viperfish,
spirula squids, and medusas. Carnivores and predators swarmed
up from the depths beyond the light.
Schools of luminous skeletons darted through the blackness,
teeth slashing and tearing at other creatures in a frenzy. They
swirled around Harry, devouring one another. He cringed in the
rocks, his terror so great it was a physical agony.
The night lasted an eternity. Harry didn't remember its begin-

263
ning nor did he recognize the first return of light. But gradually,
almost imperceptibly, the creatures and the darkness faded away,
as if Harry were rising from hell itself. The water above him be-
came lighter and Harry broke from the rocks and swam furiously
toward the light.

51
The Amaroc Enterprise, a tanker carrying sixty-six million gal-
lons of crude oil from Valdez, Alaska, to Los Angeles, developed a
breakdown in its hydraulic steering off Point Sur. The rudder
stuck left. The captain stopped the ship's engines to prevent it
from steaming into the rocky Big Sur coast and then radio-
telephoned the ship's owner in New York for instructions.
At this point the ocean tug Mary Emma, hauling a lumber
barge from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Los Angeles, offered
assistance. The oil company in New York negotiated with the tug
owners in Vancouver over the salvage price, usually a fixed per-
centage of the value of the ship and cargo. In this instance the
haggling was complicated by the fact that the tug would have to
set loose and probably lose its lumber barge in order to tow the
tanker.
Waves and strong winds from the northwest, common to the
Big Sur coast, had by now driven the tanker out of the shipping
lanes dangerously close to shore. The captain dropped anchor, but
even the drag of the anchor didn't slow the A maroc Enterprise's

265
drift toward the rocks. The captain delayed sending out a distress
signal, since that would put the oil company in a bad negotiating
position. The Coast Guard in San Francisco radioed the ship as to
its situation and received an "all is well." The Coast Guard
couldn't dispatch a cutter to tow the tanker out of danger; by law
they were forbidden to compete with a commercial company, and
a tug was already on the scene. By the time the oil company and
the tug owners reached a contract, it was too late. The tanker ran
aground on an offshore reef and began to break up.
A dozen boats arrived to lay booms and skimmers to contain
the oil, but the rough seas made them useless. The oil company
dispatched a second tanker to transfer the oil but the ship
couldn't safely maneuver close enough to the Amaroc Enterprise.
Sixty-six million gallons of Alaskan crude streamed from the rup-
tured underbelly. As the ship broke in two under the pounding of
the heavy northwest winds and waves, the oil gushed from the
venting stacks like blood from severed arteries.
At the first taste of oil in the water, clusters of periwinkles, the
lovely sea snails with turban-shaped shells, crawled to the top of
the rocks. They retracted into their shells and waited for the poi-
sonous black tide to pass. It didn't, and one by one the delicate
periwinkles died and fell from the rocks.
"There's one! It's alive! Oh, please," Mary Ghio screamed.
From the pitch of her voice Resnick knew the girl was again on
the verge of hysteria. She had gotten hysterical several times that
day at the sight of clumps of oil-soaked birds and sea otters, most
of them dead. The oil had overrun the sea otter refuge south of
Big Sur. Weathering and photo-oxidation was now turning the oil
into a thick glue that smothered rocks, plants, and animals indis-
criminately.
Jay Resnick, a biologist on the faculty of the University of Cali-
fornia at Santa Cruz, was himself angry, exhausted, and close to
tears. But he kept a tight rein on his emotions. There was nothing
that could be done except to survey, count, estimate. What does a
beach ankle-deep in dead otters, birds, fish, sea urchins, crabs, and
shellfish survey out to? Approximately sixteen million destroyed
organisms per linear mile.
"Oh, a little closer, please," Mary pleaded.
Philip Wong, the other graduate student assisting in the survey,

266
sat stoically at the helm, steering the outboard through the dark
sludge. He maneuvered the boat alongside the floundering brown
shape. The bird rode low in the water, hardly moving. From the
long triangular shape of its head, Resnick identified it as a western
grebe, although its brilliant black and white plumage was coated
with oil. The girl basketed the bird in her hands, cooing to it. The
bird didn't struggle. It was already in shock and half-dead. If
ingesting the toxio oil didn't kill the birds, they died of exposure
or drowned. The oil destroyed the insulating quality of their
feathers.
The girl immediately started washing the grebe with detergent.
It was more important to keep the bird warm and feed it than to
clean it, Resnick had explained to her. But the girl wouldn't lis-
ten. A blackened oil-soaked bird was a symbol of guilt that must
be cleaned even if the ordeal killed the already weakened creature.
The psychological needs of bird rescuers, Resnick had learned,
often took precedence over the real needs of the birds.
The water alongside the boat suddenly exploded. A man vio-
lently surfaced, covered with the thick brown sludge, choking and
gasping into the air like a fish in a fouled pond.
"What the hell are you doing diving out here in this crap?" Res-
nick shouted at him. He reached out to give the man a hand, but
the diver seemed to be in a state of shock. He just hung on the
surface, gasping and coated with oil like some ghastly apparition.
It seemed as if he would slide back into the ooze at any moment
and be lost forever. Resnick screamed for the other two to help
him.
He and Wong each managed to get a grip under the man's
arms and they hauled him halfway into the boat. The swimmer
was deadweight. He seemed hardly conscious at all.
Mary now seized one of his legs and together the three tugged
and dragged the all but lifeless victim into the boat, where the
man lay stretched out gulping the air like a landed fish.
"It's a hell of a place to go skin diving," Resnick said to no one
in particular. The oil victim had on a wet suit and swim fins. Or
rather a swim fin. The other fin was broken off.
Mary stared in awe at the prostrate man, then fell to her knees
beside him and tried to pull his oil-soaked beard and long hair
away from his neck. "Oh, God," she whimpered.
"Goddammit, Mary, give him room to breathe," Resnick
snapped. "This is no time for your angel of mercy hysteria."

267
The girl turned a stricken face to Resnick. "It's Glaucus!" she
cried.
"What?"
"Glaucus. The gill-man who was lost."
Resnick dropped to his knees beside the girl to stare at the oil-
drenched head and the thick collar about the man's neck. As a bi-
ologist he had been fascinated by the Glaucus experiment and
had read every news clipping and scientific paper about it that
had circulated through the biology department. "Jesus, he's suffo-
cating in oil! His gills are covered. We've got to clean them."
Mary's bottles of detergent and rags materialized. "Be very gen-
tle. The membrane is very delicate," Resnick cautioned. He
looked at the girl and realized his warning had been unnecessary.
Her touch would be soft as a feather, as it had been on countless
birds. He had better heed his admonition himself.
Glaucus was unconscious, his mouth open, sucking in the air
from which he could no longer extract oxygen. Even if they got
his gills clean, what then?
"We've got to get him into clear water," Resnick ordered
Wong. He gestured to the north, to the ocean beyond the broken
wreck of the Amaroc Enterprise.
The young man leaped to the stern. The sudden surge of the
boat at full throttle brought both Resnick and Mary down hard
on their hands and knees. They ignored the bruising and immedi-
ately bent back to work over Glaucus.
"Won't the detergent clog his gills as bad as the oil?" the girl
suddenly asked.
"I don't know," Resnick said with desperation in his voice. "I
just don't know. The detergent will wash off in the water. The oil
won't. It's the best idea I have."
"I can't get inside the gills to clean them."
Resnick stopped scrubbing and studied Glaucus. The girl was
right. They were only cleaning the outside edges of the gill. The
broad surface areas inside the operculum were still contaminated.
"Hold his head back to keep his windpipe open," Resnick or-
dered.
He held the bottle to Glaucus's sucking mouth as if he were
giving him a drink and poured the detergent down his throat.
Soapsuds, oil, and blood streamed out through the gill clefts.
Resnick washed the detergent down until it ran clear.

268
"We're in good water!" Wong shouted. The boat throttled
back and settled in the swells.
"Help me get him over the side."
They tugged and hauled the heavy sodden body over the gun-
wale. Resnick jumped in the water, trying to hold on to Glaucus
with one hand and the boat with the other.
"Splash water into his gills and mouth," he sputtered. "Help
me hold on to him." Resnick was struggling to keep his own head
above water and hold on to Glaucus at the same time. The heavy
parka and jeans he wore were soaked and pulling him under. "I
can't hold him!" he cried out.
Wong jumped into the water beside him and got a grip on
Glaucus. The girl shoved Glaucus's head up and down in the
water, creating a bobbing motion.
"That's it. Get the water going in and out," Resnick choked
out. His hand slipped on the wet gunwale and he lunged to get a
better grip, almost capsizing the boat. Both he and Wong lost
their handholds and went under, dragged down by Glaucus and
the sodden weight of their clothes. Instinctively they both let go
of Glaucus and clutched for the surface.
"He's sinking. Grab him," Wong gasped.
"I can't reach him." In desperation Resnick dove down head
first. He grasped Glaucus's arm and kicked frantically, but he
couldn't raise the heavy, sinking body. Slowly Resnick was
dragged down. The air burst from his lungs. He let go and clawed
for the surface, coming up hard against the bottom of the boat.
Wong caught him and pulled him, choking and gagging, to the
side of the boat.
Resnick clung to it, gasping for air, and then began to sob. "I
couldn't hold him. Oh, Jesus. I couldn't hold him. I lost him."
Below them Glaucus sank from view.

52
Karl Steinhardt wandered about his study, distracted, reluc-
tantly taking leave of the warm familiar bookish clutter of the
room. He didn't know when he would be back. He surveyed the
dark musty hoard of volumes of philosophy, searching for one or
two he might take with him. But none sparked his interest. What
did any of them have to reveal to him now that he hadn't already
learned with great pain? Could any of them tell him what he had
wrought?
In a corner of the study on a simple oak lectern rested a large
Norwegian Bible. It was Steinhardt's family Bible, willed to him
by his father. The cover of the "Bibelen" was made of heavy
wood decorated with an intricate hand-carved Gothic cross, cov-
ered with red leather and embossed with gold. Steinhardt opened
the book, as if seeking his father's reassurance that there was an
infinite wisdom that had created man and still controlled his des-
tiny. Steinhardt's father, a cold, forbidding man but a devout
Lutheran, had read to the family from this Bible every evening.

270
The frontispiece was an engraving that illustrated the Creation
of Adam in the Garden of Eden.
Og de opgik en Damp af Jorden of vandede
al Jordens Overdel.
Steinhardt could hear his father's voice, resonant and thrilling
with the mystery and awe of Creation.
Of Gild Herren havde dannet Mennefket af Stov
af Jorden og bloeft Livets Uande i hans Noefe; of
Mennefket blev til en levende Sjoel.
The old Norwegian words had, for Steinhardt, a primal power
that even the beautiful Elizabethan English could never convey.
But there went up a mist from the earth, and wa-
tered the whole face of the ground. And the
LORD God formed man of the dust of the
ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath
of life; and man became a living soul.
In the Old Norwegian the word for the soul, Sjoel, was derived
from the word for the sea, S/o. The connection was the same in
all the old Scandinavian and German tongues. In Gothic, soul
was saiwala and sea was saiws; in German, the words were see and
seele. The Norsemen believed that the sea was the habitation of
the soul and that both were part of the same divine force. For
young Steinhardt, listening to his father in that dark, somber
house while the spruce logs in the fireplace crackled and steamed,
the mists of Genesis and the mists that shrouded the fjords out-
side were one. They were the breath of God leading from the sea
to man's soul. They were the veils that hid the mysteries of life.
The truths he sought were like those mists. He saw them before
him, swirling and elusive. He could strive into their midst but he
could never quite grasp them in his hand. Was that what his life-
time of medical studies and research into respiration had been?
Just an awed Norwegian boy on his knees, hands clasped on his
bed, praying fervently to understand the mystery of Creation.
Steinhardt almost laughed at the irony of it all. As a young
medical student he had been openly agnostic. Such was the intel-

271
lectual spirit of the times. "It is an illusion to suppose we can get
anywhere else what science cannot give," Freud had convinced
them. Steinhardt had been marvelously educated in all the tools
he had needed to conceive, plan, and conduct important and ex-
citing experiments. He had searched for knowledge according to
the classical meaning of the word "science," but what he had
sought to know transcended science.
There had been moments, lost in his meditations, that Stein-
hardt had experienced an ecstatic oneness with the nature he was
studying. But the moments had passed, as if fleeing from the very
"science" of his methods. Now, as an old man, he had all at once
become aware that he had searched, irrationally, in tissue dissec-
tions, chemical analyses, and computer read-outs for the breath of
God. As a scientist and physician he had succeeded brilliantly. As
a metaphysician he was no further along than he had been as a
boy.
Steinhardt broke out of his reverie. He must finish packing and
be on that road north. Buckley was furious about his leaving,
which had all the more hastened Steinhardt's departure. He was
admittedly getting to be a cantankerous old man.
But there was one person to whom he had to talk before he left.
French windows opened onto a small patio in the rear of the
house. Beyond it Steinhardt could make out the swimming pool
and the flaxen-haired boy who sat at the edge of the pool stroking
a black, shaggy dog of indeterminate breeding. The pale gold head
solemnly bobbed and nodded as the boy intently talked to the
dog. The dog sat with his front paws nervously dancing as if he
were about to leap away at any moment, and every now and then
seemed to answer the boy with a sharp excited bark.
"It breaks my heart to watch him," Ruth Styles said.
"Oh, why is that?" Steinhardt asked.
"Ever since that time in the tank when Harry pulled him under
the water, Chris has been having nightmares. I've explained to
him that it was an accident. That his father hadn't meant to hurt
or frighten him. I told him it was like the time when Groucho
was a little puppy and David, our oldest, tried to teach the dog to
swim by just throwing him in the pool. The puppy was trauma-
tized, and to this day he's been frightened of the water and always
shies away from David when he's near the pool. Ever since I made
that connection for him, he's been trying to coax Groucho into

2J2
the water. It's as though he feels if he could quiet the dog's terror,
he could exorcize his own."
As he had often been in the past, Steinhardt was struck by Ruth
Styles's beauty. Her pain, her pleasures, her anxiety and anger
were all quick and instantly measured in her eyes. Steinhardt, by
nature a shy man, was somewhat in awe of her. "Your other chil-
dren, are they well?" he asked.
A slight melancholy smile and a shrug. "Like me, they're learn-
ing to cope with anything and everything. They're back in school.
I kept Chris home today because any news of Harry on TV gets
him too excited. He won't shut up, and it tends to disturb the
other kids. Or rather the teacher." There was a long moment of
awkward silence, then she asked, "Do you think you'll find
Harry?"
Steinhardt shook his head. "I don't know. I'm rather amazed
that he's traveled so far up the coast. But the strength of the sub-
marine currents and his hunt for food might have carried him
that far north."
"But we've been getting reports of people having seen Harry
from Acapulco to Seattle. He's becoming something like the Loch
Ness monster. He's passing into the realm of legend and fantasy."
Steinhardt nodded. "Yes, but this biologist Resnick and the
others with him, they would have no reason to concoct such a
story."
"If he's telling the truth, then Harry might have been killed by
the oil."
"I don't know. I don't have enough information. We may
never know."
Ruth looked sharply at Steinhardt. "Is that why you asked to
see me? To tell me that?" There was a bitter edge to her voice.
"No."
"What was it then?"
Why was he there? Would what he wanted to tell this woman
make any difference now?
"I will not perform the operation again," Steinhardt said.
"And what will that accomplish?" Ruth asked. Her voice was
flat and emotionless. "You've published your work. There are
papers by you and Dr. Bernstein. And papers by you and Harry.
It's hardly a secret formula that you've destroyed. And if men are
desperate enough or curious enough or adventurous enough, it
will be done again." She stared at Steinhardt. "Is that what you

273
came here to tell me? That you'd never perform the operation
again? Why? Are you looking to me for some sort of absolution?"
Was that what he was looking for? Bernstein had died cursing
their work. Harry had totally abandoned him. Had Steinhardt
now sought out the only other person who might remit his sin?
Ruth Styles shook her head. "I can't give you your absolution,
Dr. Steinhardt. I'm still in pain. So are my children. And my hus-
band is still out there somewhere, lost and confused, suffering his
own agonies."
"I didn't come here for your absolution, Mrs. Styles," Stein-
hardt said. Whatever doubts he may have had, he was at least
sure of that. "What your husband and I accomplished is its own
absolution. We have proven that if men have the will and the
courage we can transcend this body of a naked ape stalking the
land. The whole world is ours. The universe is ours. We are
created in God's image not in the flesh but in our spirit."
But Ruth Styles's anger recognized no piety. "I don't think
Harry shared your spiritual pretensions," she said in a cutting
voice.
"Not in those terms perhaps," Steinhardt said quietly. "But he
wanted to accomplish something with his life. What I think he
would call 'a mark/ And he did. The part of his soul that strove
for that is at peace. Would you feel less pain, or would he, if he
had died miserably of common cancer, still unfulfilled and frus-
trated?"
Ruth's anger ebbed as quickly as it had flared. She shook her
head and her "No" was hardly audible.
"I said I wouldn't perform the operation again not because I
believe it's evil or unnatural. I don't view my work in those terms.
Something is either beneficial or injurious to life. The gill was an
investigation into the life processes that produced, almost as a by-
product, a device that allows us to investigate the depths where
life begins. That was my purpose. Or perhaps my conceit. But the
direction of our technology at the moment is toward a frantic ex-
ploitation of this planet that has become cancerous. Our rapa-
cious technology itself has become a malignancy, consuming the
earth and spawning other malignancies. And it's to those purposes
I'm afraid my work will be directed. For that realization I have
your husband to thank."
"Harry's dead, isn't he?" Ruth suddenly asked.
"I don't know. But I don't think we'll ever see him again. The

274
operation was merely a temporary reprieve. His reprieve, I've rea-
son to believe, has been canceled."
The implication of what Steinhardt just said hit Ruth like a
blow to the stomach and she let out a gasp. "The cancer spread."
"I'm not certain. There were indications that showed up in the
last examination. I'd have to perform a biopsy to be certain."
"Did Harry know?"
"I never told him. I've told no one else. But I think he must
have known. A man like Harry, who's been through it once be-
fore, doesn't need a doctor and laboratory tests to tell him he's
dying. Even if he doesn't recognize the signs consciously, the
knowledge is there in his body. He must be aware of it subcon-
sciously. Perhaps that's why he went off by himself. To spare you
the agony of watching him die again. To spare himself that in-
dignity."
Ruth's cheeks flushed red and hot with shame. "That's why you
came here. To tell me that."
Steinhardt nodded. "And to say goodbye. I'm leaving for a
while and I don't know when I'll be back. At my age I've discov-
ered it's best not to leave goodbyes unsaid."
"Where're you going?"
"After I speak to this fellow at Santa Cruz, I'm going to drive
up the coast. North of San Francisco, it reminds me a great deal
of my home in Norway. When Johanna was alive, we'd often go
there on holidays. We own an old house, but I've been renting it
out. I haven't been back there since Johanna's death. It's time
now. There's some work I want to do there. I need the quiet and
the isolation."
"Not more experiments with gills."
"Oh, no. It's somewhat in the realm of philosophy. It's an avo-
cation of mine."
"Will it take very long?"
"Yes, I expect it will," Steinhardt said. The rest of my life, he
thought.
In parting Ruth very gently kissed the old man on the cheek.
She stood watching from the open door as the scientist walked to
his car, got in, and drove away.

53
A thin morning mist hung over the sea so that the line between
the air and water was obscure; it was as though they were hues of
the same element. Harry floated near the surface. The once cobalt
blue dive suit was oil-stained and torn in several spots. The cold
water seeped in, chilled Harry, and washed out, draining away his
body heat and strength.
He sculled just below the calm, dappled surface of Monterey
Bay, warming in the sun. He was very weak. He had swallowed oil
and had vomited steadily for a day. He had eaten very little since.
But the weakness that now permeated his arms and legs had begun
before the oil. A gull squawked overhead and Harry raised his
head, searching for it. The gull flew low on the water, skimming
the waves, then soared high into the sunlight, its whiteness so in-
tense it was painful to Harry's eyes. Then Harry heard other
sounds. They hovered over the water, vague and distant, almost as
though they were memories rather than real sounds. There was
the music of a carousel. The laughter and shouts of people.
Harry listened and slowly swam in the direction of the sounds.

276
They grew louder and more definite. Other sounds now came to
him over the water. The ratchety mechanical clatter of a roller
coaster climbing and then its plunging roar. A wave booming. He
raised his head, straining, and off in the distance he saw the heav-
ing framework of a roller coaster and the line of a boardwalk sus-
pended on the mist like a mirage. A Ferris wheel leisurely rotated,
sparkling like the bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope.
He drifted closer, kicking and swimming with a weak stroke,
now carried in by the tidal surge. To his right, below a line of
cliffs, he could make out a cluster of teenaged boys straddling surf-
boards of brilliant Day-Glo colors. Harry thrust his head up again
and saw the beach.
He swam more vigorously toward the shore, his head bobbing
in and out of the water. With each movement his eyes focused on
an image. Two young boys at the surf line squealed at each other
and belly-flopped in front of the waves. In the shallow water a
man held a young boy by the hands, trying to teach him to flut-
ter-kick. A teenaged boy and girl clung to each other in the foam-
ing backwash of a wave and kissed. Each sight blazed into Harry's
consciousness with a stab of pain and joy.
On the beach a mother wrapped a towel about a skinny shiver-
ing boy and rubbed him down. Two muscular young men tossed a
football back and forth. Harry felt as though he were awakening
from a nightmare into a rapturous dream. At the shoreline a small
boy sculpted towers of dripping sand on a large castle. The child
was blond and about four years old. Harry focused all his atten-
tion on the boy.
Fie sensed the wave before he felt it roll beneath him. There
was a change of light, an enormous shadow looming up behind
him. The wave swept him up in its tremendous momentum and
then crested. Harry thrashed about but was helpless in its violent
churning power. It swept him to shore like a piece of flotsam and
dumped him on the sand.
Stunned, Harry lay still, getting his bearings. He started to crawl
back into the water but then stopped.
The little blond boy knelt in the sand before him, his eyes
brimming with barely suppressed tears. At the child's knees was
the ruin of the sandcastle he had so painstakingly built. Its towers
crumbled away into the ebbing water. The child stared at Harry a
moment and then back down at the ruin.
"Wave broke my castle."

277
Harry struggled up onto an elbow and knee and reached a hand
out to the boy. He ached to touch the child, and by that touch
finally end the long nightmare.
"Will you help me make it again?" the child asked hopefully.
Harry's fingers felt the warm downy cheek and the hot silky
blond hair.
"Will ya?"
Harry nodded.
"Yay!" The boy gave Harry a quick impulsive hug. The child's
embrace was like a burst of sunlight enveloping and warming him.
Then the boy broke away and took Harry's hand as if to lead him
farther up the slope of the beach, away from the incoming waves.
"We'll make the biggest castle in the whole world," the boy
said very solemnly. He tugged at Harry's hand.
Harry nodded and smiled. Then he made a move forward and
pitched headlong into the pile of sand.
"Mister?" the boy said in a frightened voice. He tugged again at
the man's hand.
Harry's fingers closed on the little hand, held it a moment in a
tight squeeze, then slipped off into the sand.
The little boy stared at the strange man lying so still on top of
his broken castle and then ran off to find his mother. It was a
while before a lifeguard noticed Harry lying sprawled on the
beach just beyond the waterline, his blue suit ripped and stained
with oil, his hair and beard matted, like a long-lost, shipwrecked
sailor who had finally made it back to shore.