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"What do you make of it?" asked Pitt.
"I'm not sure yet till I run some tests, but it appears to be a veritable cocktail of minerals flowing from the chemical element chart."
Excitement began to mount as Gunn and Renee, aroused by the sudden activity in the pilothouse, joined them and offered to make breakfast. There was an underlying current of expectation and optimism as Dodge quietly began assembling the incoming data and analyzing the numbers.
The eastern sun was still three hours from sliding over the horizon when Pitt went out on deck and studied the black sea flowing past the hull. He lay on the deck, leaned through the railing and trailed his hand in the water. When he pulled it back and raised it before his eyes, the palm and fingers were covered with a brown slime. He reentered the pilothouse, held up his hand and announced, "We're in the crud now. The water has turned a dull brownish muck almost as if the bottom silt was stirred up."
"You're closer to the mark than you think," said Dodge, speaking for the first time in half an hour. "This is the wildest concoction I've ever seen."
"Any clues to its recipe?" asked Giordino, waiting patiently as Renee filled his plate with bacon and scrambled eggs.
"The ingredients are not what you might think."
Renee looked puzzled. "What type of chemical pollutants are we talking about?"
Dodge looked at her solemnly. "The crud is not derived from manufactured toxic chemicals."
"Are you saying man is not the culprit?" inquired Gunn, pushing the chemist into a corner.
"No," Dodge answered slowly. "The culprit in this case is Mother Nature."
"If not from chemicals, then what?" Renee insisted.
"A cocktail," replied Dodge, pouring himself a cup of coffee. "A cocktail containing some of the most toxic minerals found in the earth. Elements that include barium, antimony, cobalt, molybdenum and vanadium that are obtained from toxic minerals such as stibnite, barytine, patronite and mispickel."
Renee's finely defined eyebrows lifted. "Mispickel?"
"The mineral arsenic is obtained from."
Pitt looked at Dodge, soberly, speculatively. "How is it possible that such a heavily concentrated toxic mineral cocktail, as you call it, can multiply, since it's impossible for it to reproduce itself?"
"The accumulation comes from constantly being replenished," replied Dodge. "I might add that there are heavy traces of magnesium, an indication of dolomitic lime that has dissolved in unheard-of concentrations."
"What does that suggest?" queried Rudi Gunn.
"The presence of limestone, for one thing." Dodge answered directly. He paused a few moments to study a readout from a printer. "Another factor is the gravitational force that pulls minerals or chemicals in alkaline water toward true magnetic north. Minerals attract other minerals to form rust or oxidation. Chemicals in alkaline water pull other chemicals toward their surface to form toxic waste or gas. That is why most of the brown blob has moved north toward Key West."
Gunn shook his head. "That doesn't explain why Dirk and Summer were able to study sections of the blob on Navidad Bank on the other side of the Dominican Republic out in the Atlantic."
Dodge shrugged. "A portion must have been carried by wind and currents through the Mona Passage between Dominica and Puerto Rico before drifting onto Navidad Bank."
"Whatever the cocktail," said Renee, waving her environmentalist flag, "it's turned the water harmful and dangerous to all life that uses it--humans, animals, reptiles, fish, even the birds that land in it, not to mention the microbial world."
"What puzzles me," muttered Dodge, continuing as if he hadn't heard Renee, "is how something with the consistency of silt can bind together in a cohesive mass that floats over a great distance in a cloud no deeper than a hundred and twenty feet from the surface." As he spoke, he made notations in a notebook. "I suspect sea salinity plays a part in the spread, which might explain why the crud doesn't sink to the bottom."
"That's not the only odd part of the puzzle," said Giordino.
"Make your point?" Pitt softly probed.
"The water temperature is seventy-eight, a good five degrees below normal for this part of the Caribbean."
"Another problem to solve," muttered Dodge wearily. "A drop that low is a phenomenon that doesn't go by the book."
"You've accomplished a lot," Gunn complimented the chemist. "Rome wasn't built in a day. We'll collect specimens and let the NUMA lab in Washington find answers to the rest of the enigma. Our job now is to track down the source somehow."
"We can only do that by following a trail leading to the highest concentrations," said Renee.
Pitt smiled wearily. "That's why we came here--" He broke off suddenly, stiffened and gazed out through the windshield. "That," he continued quietly, "and our fun visit to Disneyland."
