CHAPTER 11
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.
“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.”