Friends of students have booked passage on the fishing trawler Harbinger to study the results of global warming on a pod of Orcas. Things become downright mortal, After the crew of the ship dredges up a newly thawed little bit of older space wreckage. It appears that the Russians experimented creatures that are tiny resilient able to withstand the extremes of distance radiation. The animals survived, but maybe perhaps not without mutation. Now the crew is exposed to organisms that were mutating. And the critters are not about to give up the warmth of human closeness.