Far From The Sea We Know (11 page)

“Maybe I’ve had enough of metaphysics for
one day,” he said. “I could use a break.”

“You need a drink.”

“Maybe I want a drink, but I don’t
need
a drink.”

She lifted her gaze toward heaven and raised
her right hand with two bent fingers, the other remaining on her
heart, a tableau of piety framed in sanctimony.

“Okay,” Matthew said. “But first, did you
come up with anything immediately significant in your reading of
the students’ observations?”

“Indeed. All is not smooth sailing on the
Valentina
.”

“I found that out already.”

“Jack Ripler?”

Matthew could not help furrowing his brows.
“Yes. How’d you know?”

“Just did the math.”

“Never my best subject.”

“And I saw the last few seconds of your
meeting when I went out for some air. Too bad about the hat.”

“I’ve got another.”

She stared at the top of his head and said,
“Well, I’ll look forward to seeing it up there.”

Penny’s smile was like a sun-break in the
rain. But Ripler was sure Doctor Bell was the leader of an
outrageous campaign of fraud and deception, and she was Bell’s
daughter. He did not want to believe that any of it could be true,
but Ripler’s pieces at least fit together.

“Time for that drink,” Matthew said.

Penny had moved into the cabin usually
reserved for her father. Matthew had been assigned a space in the
men’s quarters with the students but had just thrown his bags on
the bunk and left. Even though the cabin was small, it gave him the
feeling he could relax and let go. That, and the scotch she was
pouring from a bottle into a couple of paper cups, would be
enough.

“Ice?”

“No, straight up for me.”

“Good. I don’t have ice anyway.” She handed
him a cup holding at least two shots and lifted hers in a quick
toast. “See you in hell.”

Matthew took a long slow sip. Smooth.

“If you’re going to poison yourself,” she
said, “might as well have the good stuff.”

He nodded slowly and savored the after-burn.
“You’re an ethologist. What are you working on?”

“How animals have adapted to us. Like crows
and squirrels, but for the last year, I was tracking urban coyotes
in Albuquerque. We tried to develop predictive models using grids
of habitat variables, regression coefficients, the whole drill. We
radio-collared seventeen coyotes, by the way, so I do have
experience with remote tracking. Done it many times. We used
satellites, just like here.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“It was, most of the time. But in the end,
all the study proved is what I already knew: it would be hard to
find a place anywhere in Albuquerque that coyotes don’t make free
use of, at least at night. Unlike their larger cousins, they’re
doing great.”

“A success story.”

“Success by adaptation, yes,” she said.
“Their strategy seems to be to live off us. In a way, we have
indirectly become their food source.”

“We should be glad that some animals are
finding us so beneficent, I suppose, even if they do tend to be the
scavengers. How’d you get into this line of inquiry?”

“Deep depression,” she said, but her face
was unreadable.

Matthew remained silent. She poured herself
another drink and offered him the bottle.

“No thanks,” he said. “I’m still working on
this. I don’t want to nose into your life….”

“Sure you do, but it’s no big deal. I’ve
always been strongly empathetic with animals. A day came when I saw
that I couldn’t handle standing-by while they were all losing their
place. So, I decided to focus on the survivors.”

“You believe it’s hopeless?”

“We’re watching the end play out. Then we’ll
see who’s left.”

“There are more people than ever working
right now….” His words suddenly sounded weak. “You could be
wrong.”

“I didn’t mean to sound like the word of
God,” she said, turning the cup in her hand as she spoke. Its paper
lip was getting frayed. She put it down, got up, and looked out the
window. “I saw a supertanker go by after my nap. Do you know how
long it takes to stop one of those things?”

“Ten kilometers or so.”

“With the engines on full reverse. And
that’s where we are now. When and if we ever decide to change the
way we live in the world, there won’t be time.”

“You know, if you have enough space, you can
shorten the distance to about three kilometers by cutting back and
forth.”

“Do we have the space to do that? Seems like
less and less to me.”

“Metaphors can be stretched only so
far.”

Penny said nothing but lifted her cup again,
took a long sip of the honey-hued liquor. Matthew looked at the
level in the fifth on the table.

She leaned toward him, eyes unblinking. “I
can hold mine. How about you?”

“Penny, a friend of mine drowned years back.
He got drunk and took a boat out at night to steal lobsters out of
traps. Capsized somehow. He’d been drinking with me. It was my
idea.”

“To steal lobsters?”

“No, to drink. I should have stopped him
from going.”

“I’m not much on sentiment.”

A wave of sadness washed across her face. A
second wave swept it away. Another part of Matthew began
surrendering to her, and he no longer cared.

“Pour me a little more, Penny. Not too
much.”

She did, and touched the rim of her cup to
his as he held it in front of his lips.

Later, they came out onto the open deck, and
immediately Dirk trotted up to tell them about a meeting at nine
thirty, which would include a late snack. The sea had become calmer
and looked as thick as oil. This far north, the sun set late in the
summer, so there was plenty of light left. Twilight would come
soon. The whales looked like black commas punctuating the long
rambling swells. Penny looked through Thorssen’s binoculars and
scanned the whales, her elbows propped on the railing of the
fo’c’sle.

“Does this look unusual to you?” Matthew
said. “I mean, whales aren’t your field, so what would be your
impression of them, if you didn’t know anything about them?”

“That sounds like a question I would come up
with. Well, they’re awesome in the original sense of the word. But
I wouldn’t be so struck by their close swimming, if I didn’t know
it was odd for grays. You want to have a look?”

“Sure.”

“Catch.”

“No!”

She tossed the binoculars to him anyway, and
he caught them as casually as he could, but she immediately sprang
over to give him a dig in the ribs.

“Okay, okay. So let me have a look!”

She became quiet but kept smiling as he
raised the binoculars. The immense size of the whales created the
illusion that they were swimming in slow motion, almost as if
tempting the ship to catch up. He searched for the lead whale.

“The whale in the lead is bigger than the
others,” he said, “and the one we saw from the
Eva Shay
was
also unusually large. But the color of this whale seems normal to
me.”

“What about the lack of barnacles we saw in
the photos?”

“There were some, although not nearly as
many as I would expect. Most of the barnacles die when they are in
the southern waters anyway. Perhaps they just haven’t grown back as
fast on this one.”

“That may be significant.”

“I don’t know,” he said. Somehow, he was
having a hard time thinking about it. “Gray whales are grazers, not
hunters, so they don’t form clans. No advantage to it. They will
migrate together, but fairly loosely except for mothers and calves.
The behavior of this group is like nothing I’ve ever heard of, and
I’ve read everything.”

“That’s just how you described the whales
you saw on the
Eva Shay,
and the tag indicates at least one
of these whales was there that day. So, observations on your lead
whale?”

“My whale, is it? Except for the behavior,
she seems to be a typical specimen. The size is unusual, but
completely possible. By the way, did the Captain tell people on
board about me seeing them disappear?”

“My guess is no,” Penny said.

“Did he know about that?”

She looked at him askance. “My father may
have told him. After we left this morning. You have a problem?”

“Ripler seemed to know all about it, and I’m
starting to feel like a complete fool. None of this makes sense.
Maybe I was hallucinating.”

“What about the rest of the crew on your
fishing boat?”

“After we got back to port, no one said
anything about it, almost like it didn’t happen. Maybe we should
concentrate on the verifiable observations in front of us now….”
Matthew suddenly brought his hand to his forehead as a memory came
back like an echo.

“What?” Penny asked?

“Ripler. When I first started talking to him
today, the woman he was working with, what’s-her-name—”

“Becka.”

“Well, Becka mentioned that something
happened to Ripler, only he didn’t want to talk about it. At all.
Kind of a denial, an avoidance, and now that I think of it, like
the way some of the crew on the
Eva Shay
acted after the
incident. But you still haven’t told me why you pinpointed Ripler
earlier.”

The ship’s bell rang out.

Instead of giving him an answer, Penny
walked away, saying over her shoulder, “Meeting time. We’ll talk
more later, okay?”

Alone now on the deck, Matthew took one last
look through the binoculars in the lowering light. The whales
continued their slow two-step to the North, while the
Valentina
idled along behind, as if shyly waiting for an
invitation to dance that would never come. Though their steady
headway proved it a lie, he felt marooned on an island of
confusion.

Yet his doubts no longer seemed to matter.
The net was cast. The question was, had he become the fisher or the
fish?

The meeting in the galley was informal. The
light dinner consisted of cold sandwiches. As he had not eaten
since Victoria, he wolfed one down with a little juice and was glad
for another.

“We’ll keep this short,” Thorssen said.
“Malcolm and Emory got the infrared gear working and were desperate
to run it, so they’re not here. Already told them, in brief, what
you’re going to hear now. But first, anything else?”

Matthew looked around. Ripler seemed
completely self-contained. No one spoke, so Thorssen continued.

“Some news. We’ll have a visit from the Air
Force.” There was a stirring in the room that only grew more
conspicuous when Thorssen added, “Tomorrow.”

“And whose idea was this?” Becka asked.

“Not ours,” Thorssen said. “Doctor Bell
tried talking them out of it, but then figured getting too much in
their face could cause blowback later on.”

Ripler smiled. “And what could they possibly
want with us?”

“Has to do…,” Thorssen started to say, but
he paused to let his breath out and perhaps collect his thoughts.
“Transceiver signals, the tag we put on Lefty. They’re interested
in the signal disruption.”

“Someone told them about that?” Becka was
almost yelling.

Thorssen smiled and seemed to relax into the
flow of the battle.

“When we had trouble with Lefty’s
transceiver, Harold Conlan thought the Air Force might be testing
something, so he called them. A reasonable thing to do, and it’s
happened before. But this time they got back to Harold right away.
They never do that. Most likely means they’ve had troubles of their
own.”

“I don’t see how it could have anything to
do with us,” Becka said.

“They told Doctor Bell that coming here was
a matter of national security. Doubtful if we could stop them,
anyway.”

Becka had been slowly shaking her head for
at least the last minute.

“What they are going to be doing? Will they
check records?”

“Let’s not go overboard,” Thorssen said.
“Not the CIA coming here.”

“I’d like to say something,” Becka said.

“You already have,” Thorssen said, but gave
way with a hand gesture.

Becka swept her frizzy hair back, got to her
feet and addressed the room. “We haven’t been told everything.
That’s the trouble here.”

She glanced toward Matthew. He didn’t know
if she and the other crew were aware of his encounter on the
Eva
Shay
, but he had a feeling they were less up to date than
Ripler.

Thorssen looked straight at Matthew and
said, “It’s your call.”

Ever since he had agreed to Doctor Bell’s
request, Matthew had been defending himself in his imagination
against attacks on the account he would give of what had happened
to him. Ripler had put serious doubts in his mind, but he was still
glad to finally bring everything out in the open. He shifted on the
bench to face the middle of the student crew.

“The short version is that I was present
when the first loss of signal from Lefty’s transceiver occurred. I
gather all of you know about that at least?”

Out of the corner of his eye he could see
Ripler’s smirk, but Thorssen immediately added, “Matthew, they need
to hear it from you.”

“Okay,” Matthew said and started giving them
some background on how he happened to be on a fishing boat and then
told his story. They never interrupted the recounting of his tale.
Even afterwards, no one seemed to have any immediate comments. He
got up to get some water and leaned against the sideboard.
“Questions?”

“Well, the obvious one,” Becka said. “What
happened to this purple whale?”

“I don’t know. The lead whale in the group
we’re following fits the size and behavior—”

“Hang on,” someone near the front said. “I
don’t see how we can even consider the possibility that the whales
really moved in some unexplainable way.”

It was Dirk, the crewmember who had met them
in the Zodiac when they arrived. He was straight and tall, a little
stiff in the way he sat, but he seemed friendly even in his
rejection of Matthew’s account.