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17.
Patrolman Cleve Bartlett of the Harbor Police stopped before the highrise, and Linsey sprinted out the main door and into the squad car. She wore civilian clothing, including white silk blouse, dark brown skirt, and beige purse, and had her badge and gun on her belt under a brown blazer. "Hey Cleve, thanks for picking me up."
"Always a pleasure," Bartlett said. He was a big, dark-haired, dark-skinned man with an easy-going nature but a sense that he was coiled like a spring ready to go off. She'd seen him run four blocks in full gear, including utility belt with ammo and gun plus Kevlar vest, and catch a 17 year old high school sprinter wanted for purse snatchings by the Star of India on Harbor Drive. "Where to? Back to our Mysterious Mushroom?"
As he pulled with lazy carefulness into traffic, she buckled up. "Yep. The Fungus Among Us. You realize, Cleveland, that this is probably the strangest case we'll ever work in our lives."
Cleve nodded. "When you call me by my full name, I know you are speaking profoundly."
"Indeed."
Cleve drove south on Pacific Coast Highway and down into the 32nd Street Naval Yard, under brooding skies that made the forests of masts, antennas, and tall cranes all the more gray for their military paint. Cleve wheeled the car down the narrow driveway to Anaconda Chemical's dock, where the black-hulled freighter with her dirty white decks and bridge loomed like a foreboding question mark.
Minutes later, a sleek gray Mercedes convertible sports car pulled in. A tall, graying man with a closely shaven salt and pepper beard got out. He was well-dressed—a lady's man, Linsey thought—with a well-tailored light gray suit, no tie, light lemon shirt open two buttons to expose a tanned chest and a crop of white hair. He was all business now, though, as he strode over extending a tanned hand. "I'm Dr. Nolan, the mycologist from UCSD. You are?"
"Lieutenant Linsey Simon," she said, shaking his strong, dry hand. It was a nice enough hand, sort of taut and bony in an intelligent way, if that made any sense. "We spoke over the phone."
"Yes, I was impressed by your comments." He and Cleve shook hands and exchanged names and pleasantries. "Show me to this find of yours. I'm intrigued."
"If you're a mushroom man, this'll make your day."
"Actually, I'm a fungus man. Mushrooms is the nonscientific name for certain edible fungi with caps. Some people call the poisonous ones as toadstools—also not scientific lingo."
"Can you educate us a little?" Linsey asked as they strolled down the gravel walk to the dock. A light breeze ruffled their hair and rattled the tackle on a nearby flag pole.
Nolon said: "There are generally considered to be three major domains of life on earth. These have superseded the older classification into five or six kingdoms. The exact categories keep being refined over time, but it will help to think of it this way. There are three main types of living things, and the distinctions are based on the nature of the fundamental building block of life, the cell.
"The cells in our human bodies, for example, contain an outer membrane, then a largely liquid part inside containing all the functioning stuff to process nutrients for energy to keep the ship going, and finally at the center is a nucleus containing genetic information. There is a lot that goes on in the nucleus—it's almost a cell within a cell. Each of the domains of living things have many examples."
"First, there are very simple life forms that do not have cell nuclei, especially most types of simpler bacteria.
"Then there are more complicated life forms made up of one or a few cells with nuclei, usually made up of a single cell type whether it's one cell or several. These include more complex bacteria, and some of the organisms living around black smokers in the ocean bottoms.
"Finally there are the advanced life forms that have very complex arrangements of often very specific types of cells. In other words, we have skin cells, eye cells, fingernail cells—different cells for every function of the body. These advanced life forms include plants, animals, fungi, and some other odds and ends like the algae. I am a biologist specializing in fungi, so I am a mycologist." He added, smiling: "I am a bit sentimental, calling my subject the Fourth Kingdom."
They came to the boat dock. "It's under there," Cleve said, pointing to the shadowy underside of the dock.
"Fascinating," Nolan said. He took his jacket off and laid it carefully aside. As Linsey and Cleve watched with wide eyes, he proceeded to undress. "Nothing to be alarmed about. I generally wear my swimming trunks for moments like this." Linsey almost laughed out loud as the handsome, tanned gentleman stood there wearing nothing but a pair of red trunks that came almost to his knees, and a banana-yellow tank top. The trunks had an array of grabby logos from some computer game involving a space station. From ladies' man to nerd, she thought. "Excuse me." He produced a small flashlight and a sample kit, and crawled into the slime under the dock.
Exchanging horrified looks with Cleve, Linsey took off her blazer and crawled in after him as far as she dared—avoiding the green slime that bobbed around river rocks in the water's edge. filtered light reflected in wildly undulating patterns and blobs over head on the bottom sides of the dock planks. The smell wasn't so bad here. Saltwater, decomposing algae, and seaweed almost masked the odor of the six foot long thing anchored along the rocks. Each end touched one of the thick, round pylons that were smeared black with pitch and preservatives.
Nolan probed with a hand wearing a latex glove. "Ah," he said. "Interesting. Quite wild, really. This is not precisely a fungus. Looks a bit more like a lichen."
"Can you enlichen me?" Linsey said, squirming as the round rocks hurt her knees.
"This thing looks truly unusual. I'm glad to have a look in situ. A lichen is a symbiotic—that means, living together, helping each other—relationship between a fungus and a bunch of algae. They do different jobs, and they complement each other. Usually they are very small life forms you'll see attached to rocks from the tropics to the polar regions. They are not the same as moss, which is a primitive plant. This thing is huge, if it is a lichen. This is definitely far more complicated." He held the flashlight in his mouth and, with a scalpel, took scrapings and cuttings, which he placed in little baggies.
He slipped a latex glove over the other hand, so it made a snapping noise. "So you sent samples to the lab already," he murmured, running a fingertip over the cuts already there. "I'm wondering what the reproductive cycle of this thing is like. This exemplar looks dry and spent, but I would bet my last buck that it has some way of coming back to life. Usually, fungi produce a vast number of spores, like two million a minute for your household button mushroom. I don't see any evidence here of spores—there would be piles of fine black dust here."
Linsey said: "Unless the tide washed it away."
He frowned. "You may have something there. Are you suggesting a reproductive relationship involving sea water?"
She laughed. "What do I know? I'm a cop. I'm not suggesting anything, just thinking out loud with my poor sponge of a brain. This thing is stuck to the bottom of a dock by the sea."
He nodded. "Very good. You are trained in inductive logic. You start with the facts at hand, and try not to introduce any theories based on facts not present."
"It's called evidence," she said, and couldn't help the little tone of sarcasm in her voice. Despite his efforts to keep things simple, he seemed to want to say simple things in complicated ways. What a nerd, she thought. Likeable, but a nerd.
"Right." He ignored her and continued his inspection. He crawled around the thing, murmuring "It does look like a polypores bracket fungus, maybe a sort of ganoderma, and probably a tropical genus. That would make it more advanced than a common gilled mushroom in the way it out-spores. I'm not sure we've encountered this precise specimen before." He peered at it from below and above. She squirmed as he put his face close and smelled its surfaces.
At last, he crawled out and placed his specimen kit on the dock. As he dressed, he said: "I don't know what we have here. For a bracket or shelf fungus, I would expect more of rounded or seashell shape rather than these long ribbon shelves that seem layered like…" He frowned with inspiration as he pulled his trousers on. "…almost as if it were mimicking dryrotted wood. Now that's an interesting hypothesis. Maybe this thing hitched a ride on a ship, maybe this one here. You say this freighter came from the tropics?"
"Yeah, South America," Cleve said. Linsey put her blazer back on. Nolan packed his specimens in his fine jacket pockets and clambered on the dock. "My initial guess is that it's a new bracket fungus that grows on fallen logs in a rainforest. It often helps kill the tree, and then feeds on it for months as the tree lies on its side. Mosses and other opportunistic vegetation help provide cover and keep the wood damp."
"Ick," Linsey couldn't help saying. "By the way, there are some others in the ship. The reason we took you to this one first is because we thought all along there was some connection to the guard, whose time clock was found on the gravel here."
Nolan eagerly followed them to the freighter. Cleve waited outside while Linsey gave him the tour of the ship. As they climbed on board, she said: "That smell is stronger here."
"Could be spores," Nolan said, "or it might just be the natural decay of the thallus. Most fungi have their visible portion—the part you call a mushroom—made of very fine fibers. Huge numbers of these form a sort of network that forms the cap. More technically, the fibers are hyphae, and they form structures called mycelia which include stems, caps, gills under the caps for producing spores, and so on.
They gingerly felt their way around below decks by the light of his little flashlight and her larger police light. He took a few more samples, but murmured "More of the same." She couldn't tell if that meant exciting or boring.
"I can assure you of one thing."
"What's that?" They climbed back to welcome daylight.
"An organism has a certain specific nature. It evolves in a niche that includes other life forms. No matter where it goes, it tries to behave in the manner that it evolved to behave in. So whatever is going on here, these fungi are imitating the conditions in their place of origin."
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