Page 17 (1/2)

Chapter 1~2

For Ji, Flip Nicklin,

and Meagan Jones:

extraordinary people who do

extraordinary work

Fluke (flook) 1 A stroke of good luck

2 A chance occurrence; an accident

3 A barb or barbed head, as on a harpoon

4 Either of the two horizontally flattened divisions of the tail of a whale

PART ONE

The Song

An ocean without its

unnamed monsters would be like a

completely dreamless sleep

-JOHN STEINBECK

The scientific

more than a system of rules to keep us

fro to each other

-KEN NORRIS

CHAPTER ONE

Big and Wet

Next Question?

Amy called the whale punkin

He was fifty feet long, wider than a city bus, and weighed eighty thousand pounds One well-placed slap of his great tail would reduce the boat to fiberglass splinters and its occupants to red stains drifting in the blue Hawaiian waters Amy leaned over the side of the boat and lowered the hydrophone down on the whale "Good , punkin," she said

Nathan Quinn shook his head and tried not to upchuck fro a look at her botto a little sleazy about it Science can be complex Nate was a scientist Amy was a scientist, too, but she looked fantastic in a pair of khaki hiking shorts, scientifically speaking

Below, the whale sang on, the boat vibrated with each note The stainless rail at the bow began to buzz Nate could feel the deeper notes resonate in his rib cage The whale was into a section of the song they called the «green» the series of whoops that sounded like an aht have thought that the whale was rejoicing, celebrating, shouting howdy to the world to let everyone and everything know that he was alive and feeling good, but Nate was a trained listener, perhaps the most trained listener in the world, and to his expert ears the whale was saying-Well, he had no idea what in the hell the whale was saying, did he? That's why they were out there floating in that sapphire channel off Maui in a s their breakfasts around at seven in theNate had been listening to the them with sticks for twenty-five years, and he still had no idea why, exactly, they sang

"He's into his ribbits," A that usually caht before the animal was about to surface The scientific term for this noise was «ribbits» because that's what they sounded like Science can be simple

Nate peeked over the side and looked at the whale that was suspended head down in the water about fifty feet below them His flukes and pectoral fins hite and described a crystal-blue chevron in the deep blue water So still was the great beast that hein space, the last beacon of so race-except that he wascroaky noises that would have soundedthan the archaic remnant of a superrace Nate smiled He liked ribbits The whale flicked his tail once and shot out of Nate's field of vision "He's co up," Nate said

Amy tore off her headphones and picked up the motorized Nikon with the three-hundred-milli the wet cord to spool into a coil at his feet, then turned to the console and started the engine Then they waited

There was a blast of air from behind them and they both spun around to see the colu in the air, but it was far, perhaps three hundred meters behind them-too far away to be their whale That was the problem with the channel between Maui and Lanai where they worked: There were sothe one you were studying from the hundreds of others The abundance of aniuy?" Auys As far as they kneay The DNA tests had proven that

"Nope"

There was another blow to their left, this one much closer Nate could see the white flukes or blades of his tail under the water, even from a hundred meters away Amy hit the stop button on her watch Nate pushed the throttle forward and they were off Aainst the console to steady herself, keeping the ca He would blow three, maybe four times, then fluke and dive Aet a clear shot of his flukes so he could be identified and cataloged When they ithin thirty yards of the whale, Nate backed the throttle down and held theh to catch some of the -mouth smell that they would have encountered in Alaska Humpbacks didn't feed while they were in Hawaii

The whale fluked and Amy fired off two quick frames with the Nikon

"Good boy," Amy said to the whale She hit the lap timer button on her watch

Nate cut the engine and the speedboat settled into the gentle swell He threw the hydrophone overboard, then hit the record button on the recorder that was bungee-corded to the console Amy set the camera on the seat in front of the console, then snatched their notebook out of a waterproof pouch

"He's right on sixteenit in the notebook She wrote the time and the frame nue nuitude and latitude fro system) device She put down the notebook, and they listened They weren't right on top of the whale as they had been before, but they could hear hih the recorder's speaker Nate put on the headphones and sat back to listen

That's how field research was Mo (Nate's first ex-wife had once commented that their sex life could be described in exactly the same way, but that was after they had separated, and she was just being snotty) Actually, the wait here in Maui wasn't bad-ten, fifteen ht whales in the North Atlantic, Nate had sometimes waited weeks before he found a whale to study Usually he liked to use the downtime (literally, the tiotten a real job, one where you otten into a branch of the field where the results of his ereships-a pirate You know, security

Today Nate was actively trying not to watch Amy put on sunscreen Amy was a snowflake in the land of the tanned Most whale researchers spent a great deal of time outdoors, at sea They were, for the most part, an intrepid, outdoorsy bunch ind- and sunburn like battle scars, and there were feho didn't sport a selasses raccoon tan and sun-bleached hair or a scaly bald spot Aht, short black hair so dark that the highlights appeared blue in the Hawaiian sun She earing maroon lipstick, which was so wildly inappropriate and out of character for this setting that it approached the coeek of the Pacific, which was, in fact, one of the reasons her presence so disturbed Nate (He reasoned: A well-for in space is just a well-formed bottom, but you hook up a well-formed bottom to a whip-sot yourself is well, trouble)

Nate did not watch her rub the SPF50 on her legs, over her ankles and feet He did not watch her strip to her bikini top and apply the sunscreen over her chest and shoulders (Tropical sun can fry you even through a shirt) Nate especially did not notice when she grabbed his hand, squirted lotion into it, then turned, indicating that he should apply it to her back, which he did-not noticing anything about her in the process Professional courtesy He orking He was a scientist He was listening to the song of Megaptera novaeangliae ("big wings of New England," a scientist had na that scientists drink), and he was not intrigued by her intriguing bottom because he had encountered and analyzed si to Nate's analysis, research assistants with intriguing bottoms turned into wives 66666 percent of the time, and wives turned into ex-wives exactly 100 percent of the time-plus or minus 5 percent factored for post-divorce comfort sex)

"Wantout her preferred sunscreen-slathering hand

You just don't go there, thought Nate, not even in a joke One incorrect response to a line like that and you could lose your university position, if you had one, which Nate didn't, but still You don't even think about it

"No thanks, this shirt has UV protection woven in," he said, thinking about what it would be like to have Amy do him

Amy looked suspiciously at his faded WE LIKE WHALES CONFERENCE 89 T-shirt and wiped the re " 'Kay," she said

"You know, I sure wish I could figure out why these guys sing," Nate said, the huarden to return to that one plastic daisy that would just not give up the nectar

"No kidding?" Aure it out, ould we do tomorrow?"

"Show off," Nate said, grinning

"I'd be typing all day, analyzing research,tapes- »

"Bringing us doughnuts," Nate added, trying to help

Aers, "- picking up blank tapes, washing down the trucks and the boats, running to the photo lab- »

"Not so fast," Nate interrupted

"What, you're going to depriveto the photo lab while you bask in scientific glory?"

"No, you can still go to the photo lab, but Clay hired a guy to wash the trucks and boats"

A delicate hand went to her forehead as she swooned, the southern belle in hiking shorts, taken with the vapors "If I faint and fall overboard, don't let me drown"

"You know, Amy," Nate said as he undressed the crossbow, "I don't knoas at Boston doing survey, but in behavior, research assistants are only supposed to bitch about the hurunt work and lowly status to other research assistants It was that hen I was doing it, it was that way going back centuries, it has always been that way Darwin hile to file dead birds and sort index cards"

"He did not I've never read anything about that"

"Of course you didn't Nobody writes about research assistants" Nate grinned again, celebration for a s up to standards onthis research assistant His partner, Clay, had hired her alo, and by now he should have had her terrorized Instead she orking him like a Starbucks froth slave

"Ten oing to shoot him?"

"Unless you want to?" Nate notched the arrow into the crossbow He tucked the windbreaker they used to «dress» the crossbow under the console It was very politically incorrect to carry a weapon for shooting whales through the crowded Lahaina harbor, so they carried it inside the windbreaker, er

Amy shook her head violently "I'll drive the boat"

"You should learn to do it"

"I'll drive the boat," Amy said

"No one drives the boat" No one but Nate drove the boat Granted, the Constantly Baffled was only a twenty-three-foot Mako speedboat, and an agile four-year-old could pilot it on a calm day like today Still, no one else drove the boat It was a ht of a wo a boat or a television remote control

"Up sounds," Nate said They had a recording of the full sixteen-h twice, in fact He stopped the recorder and pulled up the hydrophone, then started the engine

"There," A under the water The whale blew only twenty yards off the bow Nate buried the throttle Aht herself on the railing next to the wheel console as the boat shot forward Nate pulled up on the right side of the whale, no more than ten yards away as the whale came up for the second time He steadied the wheel with his hip, pulled up the crossbow, and fired The bolt bounced off the whale's rubbery back, the hollow surgical steel arrowhead taking out a cookie-cutter plug of skin and blubber the size of a pencil eraser before the wide plastic tip stopped the penetration

The whale lifted his tail out of the water and snapped it in the air,as the massive tail muscles contracted

"He's pissed," Nate said "Let's go for a measurement"

"Now?" Amy questioned Normally they would wait for another dive cycle Obviously Nate thought that because of their taking the skin sa They could lose hi a measurement

"Now I'll shoot, you work the rangefinder"

Nate backed off the throttle a bit, so he would be able to catch the entire tail fluke in the caefinder, which looked verya distance efinder and co the size of the tail in the frame of the picture, they could measure the relative size of the entire aniave theth of a whale with 98 percent accuracy Just a few years ago they would've had to have been in an aircraft to th of a whale

"Ready," Amy said

The whale blew and arched its back into a high hump as he readied for the dive (the reason whalers had naefinder on the whale's back; Nate trained the camera's telephoto on the same spot, and the autofocus motors made tiny adjustments with the movement of the boat

The whale fluked, raising its tail high in the air, and there, instead of the distinct pattern of black-and-white s by which all huh black letters across the white-the words BITE ME!

Nate hit the shutter button Shocked, he fell into the captain's chair, pulling back the throttle as he slu in his lap

"Holy shit!" Nate said "Did you see that?"

"See what? I got seventy-three feet," Aefinder "Probably seventy-six from where you are What were your fra for the notebook as she looked back at Nate "Are you okay?"

"Fine Frame twenty-six, but I e stack of index cards, searching a million article abstracts he had read to find some explanation for what he'd just seen It couldn't possibly have been real The fils when you did the ID photo?"

"No, did you?"

"No, never mind"