Walking along the bank, the main body of the lake on their right, they moved nearer the platform, tracing out its riveted CCCP markings along the rim. The giant vehicle had cut enormous grooves through the nexus of pools just beyond the tip of the lake, and Granger waded through the warm water, searching for specimens. Here and there were small anemones and starfish, stunted bodies twisted by cancers. Web-like algae draped themselves over his rubber boots, their nuclei beading like jewels in the phosphorescent light. They paused by one of the largest pools, a circular basin 300 feet across, draining slowly as the water poured out through a breach in its side. Granger moved carefully down the deepening bank, forking specimens into the rack of beakers, while Holliday stood on the narrow causeway between the pool and the lake, looking up at the dark overhang of the space platform as it loomed into the darkness above him like the stern of a ship.
He was examining the shattered air-lock of one of the crew domes when he suddenly saw something move across the surface of the deck. For a moment he imagined that he had seen a passenger who had somehow survived the vehicle’s crash, then realized that it was merely the reflection in the aluminized skin of a ripple in the pool behind him.
He turned around to see Granger, ten feet below him, up to his knees in the water, staring out carefully across the pool.
‘Did you throw something?’ Granger asked.
Holliday shook his head. ‘No.’ Without thinking, he added: ‘It must have been a fish jumping.’
‘Fish? There isn’t a single fish alive on the entire planet. The whole zoological class died out ten years ago. Strange, though.’
Just then the fish jumped again.
For a few moments, standing motionless in the half-light, they watched it together, as its slim silver body leapt frantically out of the tepid shallow water, its short glistening arcs carrying it to and fro across the pool.
‘Dog-fish,’ Granger muttered. ‘Shark family. Highly adaptable — need to be, to have survived here. Damn it, it may well be the only fish still living.’
Holliday moved down the bank, his feet sinking in the oozing mud. ‘Isn’t the water too salty?’
Granger bent down and scooped up some of the water, sipped it tentatively. ‘Saline, but comparatively dilute.’ He glanced over his shoulder at the lake. ‘Perhaps there’s continuous evaporation off the lake surface and local condensation here. A freak distillation couple.’ He slapped Holliday on the shoulder. ‘Holliday, this should be interesting.’
The dog-fish was leaping frantically towards them, its two-foot body twisting and flicking. Low mud banks were emerging all over the surface of the pool; in only a few places towards the centre was the water more than a foot deep.
Holliday pointed to the breach in the bank fifty yards away, gestured Granger after him and began to run towards it.
Five minutes later they had effectively dammed up the breach. Holliday returned for the jeep and drove it carefully through the winding saddles between the pools. He lowered the ramp and began to force the sides of the fish-pool in towards each other. After two or three hours he had narrowed the diameter from a hundred yards to under sixty, and the depth of the water had increased to over two feet. The dog-fish had ceased to jump and swam smoothly just below the surface, snapping at DEEP END 241 the countless small plants which had been tumbled into the water by the jeep’s ramp. Its slim white body seemed white and unmarked, the small fins trim and powerful.
Granger sat on the bonnet of the jeep, his back against the windshield, watching Holliday with admiration.
‘You obviously have hidden reserves,’ he said ungrudgingly. ‘I didn’t think you had it in you.’
Holliday washed his hands in the water, then stepped over the churned mud which formed the boundary of the pool. A few feet behind him the dog-fish veered and lunged.
‘I want to keep it alive,’ Holliday said matter-of-factly. ‘Don’t you see, Granger, the fishes stayed behind when the first amphibians emerged from the seas two hundred million years ago, just as you and I, in turn, are staying behind now. In a sense all fish are images of ourselves seen in the sea’s mirror.’
He slumped down on the running board. His clothes were soaked and streaked with salt, and he gasped at the damp air. To the west, just above the long bulk of the Florida coastline, rising from the ocean floor like an enormous aircraft carrier, were the first dawn thermal fronts. ‘Will it be all right to leave it until this evening?’
Granger climbed into the driving seat. ‘Don’t worry. Come on, you need a rest.’ He pointed up at the overhanging rim of the launching platform. ‘That should shade it for a few hours, help to keep the temperature down.’
As they neared the town Granger slowed to wave to the old people retreating from their porches, fixing the shutters on the steel cabins.
‘What about your interview with Bullen?’ he asked Holliday soberly. ‘He’ll be waiting for you.’
‘Leave here? After last night? It’s out of the question.’
Granger shook his head as he parked the car outside the Neptune. ‘Aren’t you rather overestimating the importance of one dog-fish? There were millions of them once, the vermin of the sea.’
‘You’re missing the point,’ Holliday said, sinking back into the seat, trying to wipe the salt out of his eyes. ‘That fish means that there’s still something to be done here. Earth isn’t dead and exhausted after all. We can breed new forms of life, a completely new biological kingdom.’
Eyes fixed on this private vision, Holliday sat holding the steering wheel while Granger went into the bar to collect a crate of beer. On his return the migration officer was with him.
Bullen put a foot on the running board, looked into the car. ‘Well, how about it, Holliday? I’d like to make an early start. If you’re not interested I’ll be off. There’s a rich new life out there, first step to the stars. Tom Juranda and the Merryweather boys are leaving next week. Do you want to be with them?’
‘Sorry,’ Holliday said curtly. He pulled the crate of beer into the car and let out the clutch, gunned the jeep away down the empty street in a roar of dust.
Half an hour later, as he stepped out on to the terrace at Idle End, cool and refreshed after his shower, he watched the helicopter roar overhead, its black propeller scudding, then disappear over the kelp flats towards the hull of the wrecked space platform.
‘Come on, let’s go! What’s the matter?’
‘Hold it,’ Granger said. ‘You’re getting over-eager. Don’t interfere too much, you’ll kill the damn thing with kindness. What have you got there?’ He pointed to the can Holliday had placed in the dashboard compartment.
‘Breadcrumbs.’
Granger sighed, then gently closed the door. ‘I’m impressed. I really am. I wish you’d look after me this way. I’m gasping for air too.’
They were five miles from the lake when Holliday leaned forward over the wheel and pointed to the crisp tyre-prints in the soft salt flowing over the road ahead.
‘Someone’s there already.’
Granger shrugged. ‘What of it? They’ve probably gone to look at the platform.’ He chuckled quietly. ‘Don’t you want to share the New Eden with anyone else? Or just you alone, and a consultant biologist?’
Holliday peered through the windshield. ‘Those platforms annoy me, the way they’re hurled down as if Earth were a garbage dump. Still, if it wasn’t for this one I wouldn’t have found the fish.’
They reached the lake and made their way towards the pool, the erratic track of the car ahead winding in and out of the pools. Two hundred yards from the platform it had been parked, blocking the route for Holliday and Granger.
‘That’s the Merryweathers’ car,’ Holliday said as they walked around the big stripped-down Buick, slashed with yellow paint and fitted with sirens and pennants. ‘The two boys must have come out here.’