Last Gasp by Trevor Hoyle Read Free Book Online

hundred yards astern, the RMT (Rectangular Mid-Water Trawl) scooped surface water to a precisely calibrated depth of two meters, capturing the tiny mesopelagic creatures on their upward migration from the middle depths.
    Part of the fleet belonging to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Melville was on a shakedown cruise for the Marine Biology Research Division, testing a new type of opening-closing release gear. It was operated from the afterdeck on instructions from the monitoring room amidships, and it was Cheryl Detrick’s and Gordon Mudie’s task to watch and report on the trawl’s performance. After nearly two hours Cheryl was bored to tears. Not so much with deck duty as with Gordon and the fact that despite nil encouragement, he kept coming on strong. He was tall, skinny, with lank mousy hair that straggled in the breeze, and a gaping loose-lipped grin that reminded her of Pluto’s. She thought him unattractive and charmless, while he thought he was making a first-rate impression.
    Gordon stood by the winch, happy in his ignorance, while Cheryl kept lookout through Zeiss binoculars. Both were graduate students working on a research project for Dr. Margaret Delors, who for ten years or more had been gathering data on the eastern subequatorial Pacific.
    “Jeez, it’s hot,” Gordon complained, fanning himself and stating the obvious. “Don’t you think so, Sherry?”
    Cheryl continued watching the RMT. She hated being called Sherry. “Release gear open,” she reported into the button mike and received the monitoring room’s acknowledgment over the headset. Now another fifteen minutes of Gordon’s witty repartee and inane grin. Lord deliver us ...
    Moving to the rail she did a slow sweep of the placid ocean. After a moment she removed the headset and dangled it on a metal stanchion. The breeze ruffled her cropped sun-bleached hair. All through university she’d never cut it once, until it reached her waist, and then a friend had advised her that she really ought to style it to suit her height and figure. Which Cheryl interpreted as meaning that girls of medium stature with big tits looked dumpy with waist-length hair.
    Gordon leaned his bony forearms on the rail and beamed at her, full of bright, sincere, lecherous interest. She might have liked him if he hadn’t been so damned obvious. He was probably too honest, she reflected. The guys she fancied were devious bastards, some of them real chauvinist pigs at that, which was a trait she didn’t admire in herself. But there had to be a physical turn-on, no matter who it was, and Gordon didn’t qualify.
    “It was your dad, wasn’t it, who wrote the book? You’re the same Detrick, aren’t you?” He was trying manfully to keep the conversation rolling, and Cheryl felt a slight twinge of compassion.
    “That’s me.” Cheryl smiled. “The nutty professor’s daughter.”
    “Somebody told me he could have been really big at Scripps—even the director if he’d wanted—and he just went off into the blue.” Gordon waved his hand. “An island a zillion miles from nowhere. What made him do it?”
    “He hates people,” Cheryl said flippantly. She was tempted to add, “It runs in the family,” but didn’t. Gordon was a pain in the ass, but she didn’t want to make a cheap remark for the sake of it.
    “Is that right? Does he hate people?” Gordon was giving her his intense moony stare, perhaps hoping he’d discovered a topic of mutual interest.
    Cheryl shrugged, scanning the ocean through the binoculars. “I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t know him all that well. I get a Christmas card every February and there isn’t much room for a life story between the holly and the snow-covered turtles.”
    “Jeez, Sherry, you’re his daughter.”
    “So you keep reminding me, Gordy.”
    Gordon mused on this and then came up unaided with the thought for the day. “They do say that geniuses are very weird people. Not like the rest of us. You