“Where are they now?”
“Speak of the devil.” And Brambell turned as Frayne himself approached. His lab coat was stained with purple, and he stank of wine. He looked like hell. Frayne didn’t strike Gideon as the partying type—but there he was, obviously hung over.
Glinn stepped aside as Garza turned on the man. “What the hell’s this?” he demanded.
Frayne began explaining, in a bumbling sort of way, that they’d had a bit of a sangria party, but nothing outrageous—
Garza cut him off with a gesture. “What about the missing specimen?”
At this, Frayne launched into a complex, rambling explanation, claiming it had happened long before the party, wasn’t their fault, they kept impeccable records, someone had probably stolen it for a souvenir, and anyway they really hadn’t drunk all that much…
“You know the rules,” said Garza. “No drinking once the ship came on station. I’m docking you a week’s pay. And because you’re the chief assistant, I want you to report to the brig for twelve hours—and to get some sleep.”
“Brig?” The man looked devastated. “You mean, jail?”
“Yes. Brig. Jail. I’ll have a security detail meet you there.”
“But—”
Garza stared hard at him until the man wilted and slunk off. Then he turned to Glinn. “This sort of lapse in discipline is like poison on board ship. I hope you agree with me.”
A faint incline of the head indicated Glinn’s agreement. And then, after consulting his watch, he turned to Gideon. “We’d best wrap this up,” he said. “You and I are needed in Prothero’s lab.”
36
GIDEON CROWDED WITH several others into the small, messy lab. It was like an electronic cave. An acrid smell of solder and burnt electronics hung in the stuffy air. Prothero was sitting at a rack of computer and audio components, cables dangling everywhere, wearing a dirty Hawaiian shirt, half unbuttoned. His concave, white chest, covered with a scattering of wiry black hairs, was hideous.
Standing to one side was Prothero’s assistant, the tall, thin, elegant woman named Rosemarie Wong. She looked exactly like Prothero’s antithesis. Gideon wondered how she could stand working with him.
“Sorry there’s no place to sit,” said Prothero, gesturing at two chairs, both stacked high with stuff. “I keep telling you I need a bigger lab. This one sucks.”
Glinn ignored the comment. “Dr. Prothero, tell us what you’ve found.”
Prothero began hammering away on a keyboard. “In a word: we did it. We translated the message from the Baobab. Hey, Wong? Play the tape.”
She keyed up a tape and moments later the song of a blue whale came through, followed by the sound that had been generated by the Baobab. Prothero talked at length about the nature of blue whale language.
Gideon felt himself getting increasingly vexed. “So what does it mean?” he finally interrupted.
“I want to warn you: the message is kind of strange.” Prothero rolled his eyes dramatically. “The thing said—” He hesitated—“Kill me. Kill me.”
“How sure are you of this hypothesis?” asked Glinn.
“I’m pretty damn sure. If you’d let me explain…” And explain Prothero did, again at length, playing the tape one more time, and then playing other recorded blue whale sounds, elucidating in self-congratulatory tones how they’d broken down the sounds, deduced the meanings, verified their findings.
Gideon, despite his skepticism, found himself impressed—but not convinced. When Prothero was finished, he asked: “So why would the creature be begging us to kill it? Especially after destroying one of our DSVs?”
Prothero shrugged. “That’s for you guys to figure out.”
“How do you know it’s not just mimicking blue whale sounds it heard?”
“Blue whale speech travels a hundred miles or more in water. So this thing’s been hearing all sorts of blue whale vocalizations. Why would it repeat just this one? No, my friend, it’s communicating with us.”
The “my friend” part especially grated on Gideon. “If this is communication, it makes no sense.”
“Maybe it’s confused,” said Prothero, shrugging. “Maybe it’s like the guy who goes to France and makes an ass of himself trying to speak the language.” He brayed loudly.
“We’re dealing with an alien life-form,” said Glinn. “Possibly an alien intelligence. It doesn’t surprise me we wouldn’t understand its first attempt to communicate.”
Gideon shook his head, then glanced at Wong. She was keeping her cards close. “What do you think, Rosemarie?”
Wong gave a little cough. “I think Gideon may be right. It may just be playing back sounds, like a parrot.”
Gideon felt gratified. His opinion of Wong and her intelligence rose still further.
“Well, if science were a democracy, I guess I’d be wrong then,” said Prothero, adding: “But it ain’t—and I’m right.” And he laughed again, raucously.
At that moment the warrant officer, Mr. Lund, appeared at the door. “Dr. Glinn?”
“I was not to be disturbed.”
“We’ve got an emergency. The Baobab—it’s starting to become active.”
37
BY THE TIME Glinn and Gideon arrived in the control center, it was a hive of activity. Glinn took his position at the central command console and Gideon stood to his right, at the secondary console. Chief Officer Lennart came up smartly, carrying an iPad.
“Brief me,” Glinn asked quietly.
“Very well. About twenty minutes ago, the surface sonobuoys began to register some unusual sounds coming from below. They were very similar to the types of P-waves that come from small temblors on the ocean floor, around one point five to two on the Richter scale. When we mapped the sources, we found they were clustered around the Baobab, but not coming from it.”
“Is it on the ship’s net? Bring it up.”
Lennart hit some keys on the console keyboard and a seismic map appeared.
Glinn frowned, staring at it, Gideon looking on. “Seems to form a roughly circular pattern around the creature.”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell how deep the temblors originate?”
“Shallow. At least, by seismic standards: a few hundred feet below the seafloor. But as we monitored, we noticed the temblors appear to be going deeper, and occurring farther away from the creature—basically, in a spreading and deepening ring.”
“As if the thing was extending its root system?”
“Perhaps. And that’s not all. As you know, we dropped a camera and anchored it to the seafloor, trained on the Baobab, monitoring it in green light. We’ve seen no unusual activity—until now. We’ve just begun to see some movement of the creature itself.”
“What kind of movement?”
“A swaying motion in the branches. Very slow. And the mouth, or suction hole, has extended itself several times while inspiring and expelling large amounts of seawater. The amplitude of the two-hertz sound it emits has gone up.”
“I want a detailed analysis of the temblors,” Glinn said. “With three-D mapping in real time.”
“Very good.”
There was a sudden commotion to the right, and a technician came running up. “A DSV, George, has just gone missing.”
Glinn frowned. “Missing? Aren’t they under lock and key—and alarmed?”
“The thief evaded electronic security.”
“Who was it?”
The technician spoke into his headphones, then listened. “They’re not sure, but it might have been a lab assistant named Frayne.”