Lost At Sea Part 62

Even though it took the radiation authority three weeks to respond to Richard's e-mail, everything moved very quickly after that. Within days, they'd turned up at his flat with the police.

"They told me to get out with my hands up. They scanned me with Geiger counters. There was nothing. They measured the whole apartment. They said I was arrested for a crime against the radiation-safety law."

And that's it, so far. Sixteen weeks have pa.s.sed and nothing has happened to him, besides making headlines all over the world.

"I don't regret it," he says, "because it was exciting. I'm sad I can't do it anymore."

We glance at his basket of elements. "There are no other experiments you could do with these?" I ask.

"I can," he says, "but I don't want to."

"What could you do?" I ask.

"I could ..." Richard pauses. "This thallium is very, very poisonous. If you break the ampoule, it would start to react with the air and oxidize. Thallium oxide. Very poisonous. If you get it on your fingers, you can die."

"But you would never consider ..."

"No, no," Richard says. He pauses. "Actually, I'm thinking of trying again to become a pharmacist. I'm going to read up on some courses from the high school and begin to study in the university."

I RECEIVE a slightly alarmed e-mail from Jason Bobe, who runs DIYbio.org, an online community for home-science experimenters. I'd e-mailed him as part of my research. He says he's worried my story may discourage home science. Maybe, he suggests, I should talk to Victor Deeb, whose experiments in his bas.e.m.e.nt went disastrously wrong in a very different way and whose story might offer a counterbalance.

Deeb lives in a small Ma.s.sachusetts town called Marlborough. He's retired, in his mid-seventies, and although he's lived in the U.S. almost all his life, he still has a strong Syrian accent, which gets stronger as he becomes more incensed over the phone.

Three years ago, on August 5, 2008, a policeman happened to be driving past Deeb's house. "He saw smoke billowing from the air conditioner in an upstairs room, so he called the fire department." Deeb speaks in short, exact phrases, as if he considers our conversation to be like a chemical experiment, requiring complete precision.

A plug had shorted in the bedroom. The fire department put out the fire, glanced into the bas.e.m.e.nt, and immediately called for emergency reinforcements.

"The whole fire department came," Victor says. "The FBI. Even the CIA was here. It couldn't have been any more crazy. They went into the sewer system to see if I was dumping anything down the toilet."

What they had found in the bas.e.m.e.nt was a hundred bottles of chemicals. None was hazardous. There was nothing poisonous. "I was working on a coating for the inside of beverage cans containing no bisphenol A," Deeb says.

BPA, he explains, is standard in beverage-can coatings. The problem is that it can seep into the drink and play havoc with our hormones, causing men to grow b.r.e.a.s.t.s and girls as young as seven to have periods. Back in 2008, he says, "there were few references in the media to the negative effects of BPA. Currently, there is a deluge of articles. So my desire to eliminate BPA was ahead of its time." He pauses. "I spent an enormous amount of time with the authorities, trying to explain what I was working on, but they had no perception. No concept."

And so he watched as they hauled away all the chemicals and test tubes in a truck. "I had a box full of files and notes and comments," he says. "Twenty years' work. They hired two Ph.D. chemists to go through the box, looking for confirmation that there were hazardous materials in the bas.e.m.e.nt. When they couldn't find anything, they left the box out in the rain. It destroyed all my notes. Twenty years of my life and work and efforts to help others down the drain."

"When they realized their mistake, I presume they apologized and paid you a settlement," I say.

"The opposite!" he says. "They're suing me for the cost of emptying my bas.e.m.e.nt."

For America's online community of home-science experimenters, the most outrageous moment of all came when the enforcement officer, Pamela Wilderman, explained her decision-making process to the local paper: "I think Mr. Deeb has crossed a line somewhere," she said. "This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation."

"Allow me to translate Ms. Wilderman's words into plain English," wrote Robert Bruce Thompson, the author of Ill.u.s.trated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments. "'Mr. Deeb hasn't actually violated any law or regulation that I can find, but I don't like what he's doing because I'm ignorant and irrationally afraid of chemicals, so I'll abuse my power to steal his property and shut him down.' ... There's a word for what just happened in Ma.s.sachusetts. Tyranny."

Before I hang up, Victor Deeb says he wants to remind me of something. He says that for every David Hahn and Richard Handl, there's a Steve Jobs and a Charles Goodyear. "They started at home. Goodyear developed the vulcanization process by mixing sulfur with virgin rubber on his wife's stove in their kitchen."

And then he is gone, to do-he says-what he spends every day doing. He's going to try to remember what he'd written on the pages in the box that was left out in the rain.

Lost at Sea

The Port of Los Angeles, October 23, 2011. At the Goofy Pool on deck 9 of the Disney Wonder, the Adventures Away celebration party has begun. "Good-bye, stress!" the cruise director shouts. "h.e.l.lo, vacation!" The ship's horn sounds out "When You Wish Upon a Star" to indicate that we're about to set sail, to Mexico.

I'm standing on deck 10, looking down at the dancing crowds of guests and crew. There are 2,455 pa.s.sengers this week, and 1,000 employees. You can spot the Youth Activities team in their yellow tops and blue trousers. They look after the children in the Oceaneer Club on deck 5.

There's no talk of it, but many people on board know something terrible occurred on this route-to Puerto Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas-earlier this year. At 5:45 a.m. on Tuesday, March 22, a CCTV camera captured a young woman on the phone in the crew quarters. Her name was Rebecca Coriam. She was twenty-four, from Chester, and had recently graduated with a sports science degree from Exeter University. She'd been working in Youth Activities on board for nine months, and apparently loved it. But on the phone she was looking upset.

"You see this young boy walk up to her to ask her if she's all right," her father, Mike, told me a few weeks ago, sitting in the family's back garden in Chester. "She said, 'Yeah, fine.' Then she put the phone down. She turned around. She had her hands in her back pockets, which she always did. Then she put her hands to her head like this, pushing her hair back... ." Mike did the movement. It looked normal. "And then she walked off."

And that's the last anyone has seen of her. She just vanished.

When she didn't report for work at 9:00 a.m., the crew Tannoyed her. They searched the ship and called the Mexican coast guard, who searched the waters, all to no avail. That was seven months ago.

"Now, whenever we call anyone, all they say is 'The investigation is ongoing,'" Mike said. "We've tried e-mailing, telling them how we feel, how it's getting harder ..." He pauses. "But nothing. Just 'It's ongoing.'"

Mike and his wife, Ann, have created a website, Help Us To Find Rebecca (rebecca-coriam.com), and have organized fund-raising events. The day I visited, the house was filled with raffle prizes, chocolates, board games, and soft toys, donated by well-wishers. Mike said on some days they were just functioning, but on others they didn't know if they were coming or going.

They said only one police officer has ever been a.s.signed to investigate Rebecca's disappearance. He flew in from Na.s.sau in the Bahamas, fifteen hundred miles from the ship-just one man charged with conducting a forensic investigation and interviewing three thousand pa.s.sengers and crew. He took charge because the ship is registered in the Bahamas, for tax reasons. It wasn't deemed relevant that it's based in Los Angeles, the company's head office is in the UK, Rebecca was British, and she went missing in international waters between the U.S. and Mexico. (For European pa.s.sengers, this holds true for all cruise liners, but a law pa.s.sed last year means if a U.S. citizen disappears on a cruise ship, the FBI now has jurisdiction.)

Mike and Ann have met the Bahamas officer only once. They flew to Los Angeles on March 25 to meet the ship as it arrived back. The Disney people showed them the CCTV footage and introduced them to the policeman.

"I asked him, 'Are you going back on the ship now?'" Mike said. "He said, 'No, I'm going back to the Bahamas.' I thought, 'Hang on, you only got to the ship on Friday.' He had just Sat.u.r.day there and that was it. The pa.s.sengers weren't questioned."

"Not at all?" I asked.

"No. Not many of the crew, either," Ann said.

I told Mike and Ann that I would book myself onto the cruise, ask a few questions, just see what I could find out. They said they'd be pleased for whatever help they could get.

In the atrium on deck 3, pa.s.sengers queue for Mickey Mouse's autograph. I overhear an adult pa.s.senger ask a crew member, "Exactly how many Mickey Mouse symbols are there on board?" He looks taken aback. There are about twenty within our immediate vicinity-art deco mouse ears on the frosted-gla.s.s doorways, swirly mouse ears on the carpet. "I don't know," he replies. The pa.s.senger looks annoyed that his question can't be answered. "I can point out some hidden Mickeys," the crew member adds. It's a Disney tradition to embed tiny mouse symbols into the architecture. Fans love to spot them.

I wander into one of the bars and get talking to a waiter. "What's it like working here?" I ask.

"It's all about the show," he replies. "When you're out among the guests, you're always on show. Even if you're a waiter, or a cleaner, or a deckhand."

"How long have you been on board?" I ask.

"Seven months. I'll be going home in forty days-forty-four, to be exact." He laughs. "Seven months is long enough. Being away from your family is hard."

"Were you on board when Rebecca Coriam vanished?" I ask.

"I don't know anything about it," he says. There's a long silence. "It didn't happen," he says. He looks at me. "You know that's the answer I have to give."

It's a beautiful, clear night outside on deck 4. Ahead of us are the lights of another cruise ship. A few days later-when we reach Puerto Vallarta-I spot it again. It's called the Carnival Spirit. Forty-three people have vanished from Carnival cruises since 2000. Theirs is the worst record of all cruise companies. There have been 171 disappearances in total, across all cruise lines, since 2000. Rebecca is Disney's first. A few days ago, Rebecca's father e-mailed me: "Would like to inform you the number of people missing this year has just gone up to 17. A guy has gone missing in the Gulf of Mexico. The Carnival Conquest." By the time I get off this ship, the figure will have gone up to 19.