Far From The Sea We Know (12 page)

“What about the current behavior of the
whales we are following?” another woman asked. “Oh, excuse me,
Matthew. My name is Mary. Mary Sims.” She gave Matthew a polite
smile and went on. “The whales we are following are acting the same
as the ones Matthew described seeing from his fishing boat. There
is no need to discount everything he says just because one part is
still a little confused.”

Dirk shrugged his shoulders. “The behavior
is significant, but they could have got here the usual way. There
was time. My guess is that the ‘displacement’ is the result of
equipment problems, solar flares or some other kind of glitch, but
I am interested in solving this, and I believe Matthew is telling
the truth as far as he knows it.”

“Thanks,” Matthew said.

Dirk nodded, then looked toward the woman
who spoke before. “Something else?”

“Thank you, yes,” Mary said and carefully
cleared her throat, which only succeeded in bringing attention to
her prim manners.

“Well, straightaway,” she said, “this lead
whale, the one we have here now, is not cataloged in spite of being
the largest gray I have ever seen.”

“We don’t have every whale listed,” Ripler
said. “It’s odd, granted, but not impossible.”

“Virtually all the gray whales we see were
born after the complete moratorium on the commercial harvesting of
grays in 1946.”

“Could you say a little more about that?”
Penny asked.

“Of course. Most of the grays alive now were
probably born after the moratorium. Because of this, the largest
that we find them is…well, the current record is about thirty-nine
tons and sixteen meters. My guess is that this whale is closer to
forty-five tons and perhaps seventeen and a half meters in
length.”

“So, he’s older?” Penny said.

“At that size, she is most certainly a
female and may be one of the few survivors from before the
moratorium. So, yes, older and close to the end of her normal life
span. I think it is incredible that we missed her until now.”

“Of course,” Ripler said, “but far more
possible than a flying purple whale. Excuse me for being harsh, and
I can see you have still more.”

“Thank you.” Mary continued. “Today, I was
going to feed into our database the identifying characteristics we
have so far on the lead whale we have been tracking. First I did a
test search, of course, to see if she was already in there. I used
three of the clearest points. Two were notches on her left fluke
and the other was a distinctive splotch on her right fluke. Three
whales came up, not unusual. One of them, designated ‘Black
Beauty,’ matched the additional sixteen points we have on our new
whale, including a distinctive white spot on the forehead.”

“Any chance purple being one of the points?”
Ripler asked.

“Jack…”

“Wait a minute,” Dirk said to Mary. “You
mentioned there was no record of the whale at the head of the group
we’ve been following, but now you seemed to be saying she is this
Black Beauty in the database.”

“At every point of comparison, except for
the size difference, the current leader
is
an exact match.”
She paused before going on. “However, Black Beauty washed up on a
beach three weeks ago. Dead.”

“Cue the drama chords,” Ripler said in a low
voice.

Instead, the door flew open and a young man
rushed into the room. He was thin and had wavy dark hair that he
was already losing. His eyes seemed larger than his face could
handle, especially now.

“You won’t believe what we just got! It’s
off the scale. Emory’s recalibrating on the fly right now to be
sure. I mean, it was—”

“Slow down,” Thorssen said. “What’s ‘off the
scale’?”

The young man looked around as if trying to
find the words he needed somewhere in the galley, but quickly gave
up. “Maybe if you could all come down to C-lab?”

Thorssen nodded and started to leave the
room, and soon they were all filing through the narrow passageway.
Matthew was looking around for Penny when suddenly he felt her
breath warm the back of his neck. A wave of ease rolled over him.
Her hand lighted on his shoulder with no more weight than a summer
breeze.

“You did all right back there,” she said,
and gave his shoulder a welcome squeeze. They followed the others
until they came to C-lab. Matthew recognized the large guy he had
seen working with Dirk on the holding tank earlier in the day. He
sat hulking over a keyboard, typing and mousing his way through
something. This had to be Emory. His eyes were about the only part
of his face not engulfed by his beard, and black horn-rimmed
glasses held on by an elastic strap covered them. He abruptly
stopped what he was doing and looked up at Thorssen and the others.
Ripler, looking almost bored, motioned him to speak, but Emory
focused his gaze on the Captain.

“It was getting dark, soon after I talked to
you,” Emory said. “Malcolm and I finally got the infrared camera
system on-line and functioning properly.”

He noticed Matthew and Penny and added for
the benefit of the newcomers, “It can pick up whales easily in the
dark by their body heat, so it’s a good nighttime aid. The
temperature readings are highly accurate.”

“To within a tenth of a degree,” Malcolm
added. “We can use it on whales to determine health aspects at a
distance, running a scan on them, really. You know, as in ‘Captain,
we’re being scanned!’” He laughed, but no one else did. “Yeah,
well, it’s excellent on pregnant cows. For instance, I’ve been able
to tell within an hour when they’ll calve—”

“Malcolm?” Thorssen said.

“Right,” he said. “So this is what we
got.”

He hit a key, and an image appeared on the
screen.

“The bodies of the whales are red against
the black of the sea. The flukes are blue, of course, as they are
always cooler. We calibrated it that way, it’s all relative. I’ve
set the scale differential fairly close, so there isn’t as much
variance in temperature as it may seem. Anyway, that’s the normal
temperature I would expect for these whales. Up front, we see the
new member. He—”

“She,” Mary said.

“Oh? Yeah, of course. Anyway, she is
entirely white. That indicates the temperature is out of the
scale’s range. So I reset the calibrations and finally got a range,
like so. Here. Okay, the subject is running close to ten degrees
higher than all the others! I don’t see how this whale could still
be alive.”

“Well, then. Maybe it
is
the same
one,” Ripler said.

Mary seemed to take special notice of the
taint of sarcasm in his voice.

Matthew tried running a few explanations
through his mind, but none made any real sense. Penny put her hand
out to the screen and traced the image of the whale with her
finger, searching for some meaning. “A fever?”

“Much too big a difference for that,” Becka
said. “Maybe equipment error, although I don’t see how.”

The fallback explanation of the last few
days was quickly growing threadbare.

“Ideas, Jack?” Thorssen said.

“Well, the other whales seem to be showing
up correctly, so if this replay is what the equipment really got,
no. I suggest we try it again, maybe with a different team.”

“It’s accurate,” Emory said a little too
loudly. “There’s nothing wrong with the gear.”

“The data is right there,” Malcolm added.
“And the unit checked out.”

Ripler smiled back at their agitation. “I
don’t doubt you at all, but we’ve had trouble with this instrument
before, have we not? It’s standard procedure to double-check
something unusual like this.”

Almost in unison, Emory and Malcolm opened
their mouths then closed them. Emory seemed to reel his anger back
in and finally looked away. In a low voice he muttered, “Okay, why
not?”

“Do it,” Thorssen said. “Jack, care to have
a go?”

“Be happy to.”

Thorssen turned to the rest of the group.
“Like to remind you of the visit from the Air Force, hopefully a
quick one if we make it clean. They’re not interested in whales,
just some technicalities. Cooperate, but no need to answer unasked
questions.” He looked over the roomful of people. “Clear on
that?”

The heat seemed to have gone out of the
issue. Matthew saw Ripler talking with Emory and Malcolm as the
three of them walked out of the room.

“It might be a good idea to be there for the
follow-up,” Penny whispered into his ear.

“I think everyone will be there,” Matthew
said as he headed through the companionway. When the group emerged
onto the deck, however, some students were missing.

He glanced back and Penny said, “I heard a
few of them talking about staying in the lab to watch the show on a
monitor down there.”

“They get the same thing?”

“They get to stay comfy.”

The rest were already hovering around the
infrared camera. Once they had made repairs on the infrared unit,
Malcolm and Emory had apparently tied it into the same video
tracking setup Matthew had seen earlier.

A nearly full moon was rising in the
twilight. Thorssen stood well off to the side, looking at the
gentle ocean swells and the moonlit road burning ever brighter
through the mist on the horizon. He seemed to be just watching, as
men had watched the sea for centuries, and showed little interest
in the bustle around the equipment.

“It’s show time, everybody,” Becka said. She
sat next to Ripler in her usual place at the console, fiddling with
the tracking controls.

“The equipment seems to be working perfectly
after all,” Ripler said. He looked up, met Matthew’s stare with a
bored smile and said, “All of these whales are in the same
temperature range.”

There was silence for a long second, then
everyone started buzzing. Matthew looked around and Penny was
nowhere to be seen.

Becka began a slow scan back and across the
whales. The readings appeared in the same red spectrum.

“Could it be that the whale with the
peculiar readings is simply not there anymore?” Mary said.

“Peculiar?” Malcolm said. “It was off the
scale!”

“I understand, but can you tell if the
original leader is there or not?”

In a relatively calm voice, Emory pointed to
one of the infrared images of the whales on the screen and said,
“According to the tracking coordinates, this one is probably Lefty,
but we obviously can’t be sure about the identity of any of the
others until daylight.”

“Excuse me,” Ripler said, “but why not send
someone over in a Zodiac with lights to make a visual
confirmation?”

“They might…” Matthew began, then
stopped.

Ripler smiled. “Might what? Go up in a puff
of pixie dust?”

“We’re trying not to make them nervous,”
Thorssen said. “Don’t know what we’re playing with yet.”

Ripler swung around in his console seat and,
without a hint of sarcasm, said, “Then maybe now’s the time to find
out?”

“Maybe we should risk it,” Becka said. “Take
a run over and have a quick look. If the whale with the apparently
‘off-the-scale’ readout is there or not, we should verify that, one
way or another.”

Thorssen looked out toward the whales and
then at Ripler and Becka, but when he spoke, he spoke to
everyone.

“The only verifiable thing we really have is
the odd behavior of these grays. We disturb them, they might
separate and go back to usual, and we’ve blown the opportunity to
study and record something wonderful.”

Mary nodded her head in agreement. “I
believe the Captain is right. This is not the best time to be doing
a night raid.”

“Hey!” Malcolm suddenly looked dumbstruck,
but managed to speak anyway. “Head count, we could do a head count,
that would tell us something!”

“Well, we know that there were fifty-three
before,” Becka said, “So, yes, it should be possible to confirm how
many are there. Although if there’s one less, we still can’t be
sure which one.”

“Worth doing,” Emory said.

Everyone started talking.

“Matthew?” Penny said softly as she came up
behind him.

“How do you do that?” he said. “I never see
you coming. And where do you keep going off to?” He looked at Penny
and saw the moon reflected in her eyes.

“It’s part of my work,” she said. “Silent
stalking. You want to blow this Popsicle stand and compare
notes?”

He looked around. Everyone seemed to be
finding something to do or they had gone back to C-lab.

“Okay. Your place?”

She had turned and was already on her
way.

“I was surprised at the Captain’s patience
with Jack,” Matthew said.

Penny responded, “Andrew can be Ahab when he
has to be. During a typhoon off Borneo, he
willed
the crew
to do things they could never have done without him. Or so I was
told, but I believe it.”

“You’ve known him a long time?”

“Since I was knee-high to a sea slug. He’s
mellowed. For the better, I suppose.”

“Really?”

“At one time he might have just put Ripler’s
lights out. He has, as you commented, become a man of great
patience.”

“Someone once told me that patience is the
mother of will.”

“Will who?” Penny said. “Sorry, Oh-Wise-One,
but I like your own thoughts better.”

“Tell me more.”

“Maybe later.”

“I’ll wait,” Matthew said. He clasped his
arms behind his head as he leaned back in the chair. “With
patience.”

Penny stretched, sat cross-legged on her
bunk. She picked up the paper cup with the frayed edge from her
earlier drink and held it briefly before crushing it into a tight
nugget. “What do you make of the infrared scans? And Ripler?”

“Confusing. Now you see it, now you don’t. I
feel like I’m being jerked around.”