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you’d expect from a ride in a net. There might have been an oil smudge on a pants knee. Spreading the blouse, Arkady noticed a different sort of rustiness on the front flap, not a rip but a cut.
    He returned to the body. There was maroon discoloration on the limbs, breasts and around the navel. Maybe it wasn’t all blood pooling; maybe he’d been too quick to say that just to get away from her. Sure enough, as he spread the belly from the navel he saw a puncture, a narrow stab wound about two centimeters long. Just what a fisherman’s knife would leave. Everyone on the
Polar Star
had a knife with a white plastic handle and a twenty centimeter double-edged blade for gutting fish or cutting net. Signs throughout the ship advised: BE READY FOR EMERGENCIES. CARRY YOUR KNIFE AT ALL TIMES .
    Arkady’s was in his locker.
    “Let me do that.” Vainu elbowed Arkady aside.
    “You found a bump and a scratch,” Slava said. “So what?”
    Arkady said, “It’s more than the usual wear and tear, even for a high dive.”
    Vainu staggered from the table. Arkady thought he must have opened the wound more because a short length of intestine, purplish-gray and slick, stood out of it. More of it rose with a life of its own, and continued to emerge from the girl’s belly through a bubbling collar of salt water and pearly ooze.
    “Slime eel!”
    Slime eel or hagfish. By either name, a primitive butefficient form of life. Sometimes the net brought in a halibut two meters long, a beast that should have weighed a quarter ton and was nothing but a sack of skin and bones and a nest of slime eels. The outside of the fish could be untouched; the eels entered through the mouth or anus and forced their way into the belly. When an eel appeared in the factory the women scattered until the men had hammered it to death with shovels.
    The eel’s head, an eyeless stump with fleshy horns and a puckered mouth, whipped from side to side against Zina Patiashvili’s stomach; then the entire eel, as long as an arm, slid seemingly forever out of her, twisted in midair and landed at Vainu’s feet. The doctor stabbed, snapping the scalpel in two against the deck. He kicked, then grabbed another knife from the table. The eel thrashed wildly, rolling across the room. Its main defense was a glutinous, pearly ooze that made it impossible to hold. One eel could fill a bucket with slime; a feeding eel could cover bait in a cocoon of slime that not even a shark would touch. The tip of the knife broke off and flew up, cutting Vainu’s cheek. He tripped, landed on his back and watched the eel squirm toward him.
    Arkady stepped into the passage and returned with a fire ax, which he swung, blunt-end down, on the eel. With each blow the eel thrashed, smearing the deck. Arkady lost his balance on the slime, caught himself, turned the hatchet edge down and cut the eel in half. The two halves went on twisting separately until he had chopped each of them in two. The four divided parts twitched in pools of slime and blood.
    Vainu staggered to the cabinet, pulled the instruments from the sterilizing jar and poured the alcohol into two glasses for Arkady and himself. Slava Bukovsky was gone. Arkady had a fleeting memory of the third mate bolting for the door a moment after the eel appeared.
    “This is my last trip,” Vainu muttered.
    “Why didn’t anyone notice she was missing from work?” Arkady asked. “Was she chronically ill?”
    “Zina?” Vainu steadied his glass with both hands. “Not her.”
    Arkady drained his own glass in a swallow. A little antiseptic, but not bad.
    What sort of doctor, he considered, did factory ships generally have? Certainly not one with curiosity about the whole range of physical dysfunction, of deliveries, childhood diseases, geriatrics. On the
Polar Star
there wasn’t even the usual maritime hazard of tropical diseases. Medical duty on the waters of the North Pacific was pretty boring, which was why it drew drunks and medical