The Byssus Killer by Charles Tucker (read a book .TXT) 📗

of the shell from one metre to three metres. That is genuine mutation. The old codger was right. There was a source of radiation down there. It is not there now. The Falmouth salvage company merely measured radon gas on the surface. They failed to measure any radiation on the seabed after the Pinna nobilis left the Seven Stones.”

Question: Where is that source now?

Answer: The Pinna nobilis shells were attached to the B-47 atom bomb. They took it with them!

 

 

 The Byssus Virus

Seawater currents near the Seven Stones were influenced by the Gulf Stream heading in a north-easterly direction. The migrating Pinna nobilis would sense warmer water and head south against the Gulf stream. Progress would be agonisingly slow only moving forward when the tide flowed southwest out of the English Channel. The marine scientists estimated the shells’ best progress was fifty yards each day. To reach halfway to the French Brest peninsular would take a year. The general opinion concluded they would never make it. The cold twelve-degree Celsius water would kill them.

But the scientists had forgotten about the Russian and Bulgarian factory ships hoovering up everything on the seabed beneath them. A Bulgarian fish processing factory ship came to a stop, halted by a huge shell jamming its suction gear. The crew hauled up the suction trawl through the stern slipway, amazed to see a massive platen of shells attached to the one jammed in the gear. But it wasn’t a shell. A long, grey, barnacle-covered tubular object was lodged across the hauling gear. The ship was a few miles south of the Isles of Scilly, but the captain refused to enter British waters to clear the problem. He put the ship into a slow speed turning circle and ordered the wrecking crew to heave the tube over the side. It needed the mobile crane to wrench it free. The captain notified the French Coastguard, in French, his second language, that a two-ton tubular object had been dumped overboard. He gave its position. The A-bomb now lay at the bottom of the English Channel. Four crew remained on the bridge, the rest of the one hundred crew were sent down to work in the fish processing hold.

In Sennen, the old codger stood up looking far taller than his well-built six feet. His ‘senses of the sea’ told him his A-bomb was no longer a threat to the ‘Soul of the Sea’.

Not being aware of Senora Vigo’s warning of treating the Pinna nobilis with the ‘Soul of the Sea’ reverence, the crew set about the shells with power hammers, saws and drills. The smashed molluscs were pushed into a crusher to separate the flesh for animal feed and the shells for boiling down into tinned soup.

Due to the captain’s pressure to get the work done and the ship under way, the crew hardly noticed some colleagues lying rigid on the deck until panic took root. The four bridge officers went below to quell it. They were met by crazed men armed with hammers and tools. Driven out of the loading bay into the sea, the ship sailed on, the bridge unmanned. The Brest Coastguard had earlier heeded the Bulgarian ship’s warning. Having heard no progress for some hours, and being unable to contact the factory ship, the Coastguard requested the nearest vessel to render assistance. A trawler from the fishing port of Concarneau made full speed to the given position. He notified the Coastguard he was on station approaching the factory ship but could see no sign of life. The ship did not reply to his radio messages.

The trawler closed in on the ten thousand tons factory ship and a French deck hand jumped aboard.  He signalled the bridge was unoccupied. Along the upper decks there was no movement. He finally reached the ladder access to the fish processing hold. The view greeting him was staggering. All the one hundred crew were lying rigid amongst gigantic mussel shells, some smashed but most in a large flat platen. He fled up the ladder, convinced a glass like shell was chasing him. He reached the rail to signal the trawler to recover him. Too late, the trawler closed in to see the deck hand fall flat, straight and rigid. Before he could be reached, the victim rolled into the sea and sank like a stone.

In a second approach, the first mate jumped aboard the factory ship. He, too, confirmed the bridge to be deserted and the ship on an uncontrolled starboard turn. The trawler skipper radioed him to keep the engines running on minimum power, disconnect the propellers and drop the bow anchors into forty fathoms of English Channel. Both the Falmouth and Brest Coastguards were notified of a hazard to shipping, but the hazard was anchored and maintaining electrical power, fully lit at night.

The Coastguards requested the reasons for the factory ship’s unusual behaviour of steaming a circular course with the bridge deserted. The French Coastguard requested the reason for the deck hand to hurry from the fish processing floor, signal to be taken off and then fall overboard and drown. Would the mate please investigate the fish processing floor status?

Breaking in, the Falmouth Coastguard urged extreme caution. “The Plymouth marine scientists have been analysing gigantic mussel shells identical to those described in the ship’s hold. They may be dangerous and a threat to life. We recommend sealing entry to the hold and processing floor. Ban all personnel from entry.

The long serving mate had never heard such a preposterous tale; mussel shells killing people, killing a whole ship’s crew in short order! Impossible! He decided impetuously to sneak a look into the processing floor before he sealed it. What greeted him was traumatic. The five-hundred square metres of gut swilling processing floor was covered in whole and broken shells and huge chunks of mussel flesh and innards. Most mind chilling was the hundred log-like dead