CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Clair Stirs a Brainstorm
For all his admiration for the field biologists he'd worked with over the years, secretly Clay harbored one tiny bit of ego-preserving superiority over them: At the end of the day, they were going to have only nicked the surface of the knowledge they were trying to attain, but if Clay got the pictures, he went home a satisfied man. Even around Nathan Quinn he'd exercised an attitude of rascally smugness, teasing about his friend's ongoing frustration. For Clay it was get the pictures and what's for dinner? Until now. Now he had his own mysteries to contend with, and he couldn't help but think that the powers of irony were flexing their muscles to get back at him for his having lived carefree for so long.
Kona, on the other hand, had long paid homage to his fear of irony by, like many surfers, never eating shark meat. "I don't eat them, they don't eat me. That's just how it work." But now he, too, was feeling the sawtoothed edge of irony's bite, for, having spent most of his time from the age of thirteen knocking the edge off his mental acuity by the concerted application of the most epic smokage that Jah could provide (thanks be unto Him), he was now being called upon to think and remember with a sharpness that was clearly painful.
"Think," said Clair, rapping the surfer in the forehead with the spoon she had only seconds earlier used to stir honey into a cup of calming herbal tea.
"Ouch," said Kona.
"Hey, that's uncalled for," said Clay, coming to Kona's aid. Loyalty being important to him.
"Shut up. You're next."
"Okay."
They were gathered around Clay's giant monitor, which, for all the good it was doing them, could have been a giant monitor lizard. A spectrogram of whale song from Quinn's computer was splashed across the screen, and for the information they were getting from it, it might have been the aftermath of a paint-ball war, which is what it looked like.
"What were they doing, Kona?" Clair asked, spoon — steaming with herbal calmness — poised to strike. As a teacher of fourth-graders in a public school, where corporal punishment was not allowed, she had years of violence stored up and was, truth be told, sort of enjoying letting it out on Kona, who she felt could have been the poster child for the failure of public education. "Nate and Amy both went through this with you. Now you have to remember what they said."
"It's not these things, it's the oscilloscope," Kona said. "Nate pulled out just the submarine stuff and put it on the spectrum."
"It's all submarine," Clay said. "You mean subsonic."
"Yeah. He said there was something in there. I said like computer language. Ones and ohs."
"That doesn't help."
"He was marking them out by hand," Kona said. "By freezing the green line, then measuring the peaks and troughs. He said that the signal could carry a lot more information that way, but the whales would have to have oscilloscopes and computers to do it."
Clay and Clair both turned to the surfer in amazement.
"And they don't," Kona said. "Duh."
It was as if a storm of coherence had come over him. They just stared.
Kona shrugged. "Just don't hit me with the spoon again."
Clay pushed his chair back to let the surfer at the keyboard. "Show me." Late into the night the three of them worked, making little marks on printouts of the oscilloscope and recording them on yellow legal pads. Ones and ohs. Clair went to bed at 2:00 A.M. At 3:00 A.M. they had fifty handwritten legal-pad pages of ones and ohs. In another time this might have felt to Clay like a job well done. He'd helped analyze data on shipboard before. It killed some time and ingratiated him to whatever scientist was leading the project he was there to photograph, but he'd always been able to hand off the work for someone else to finish. It was slowly dawning on him: Being a scientist sucked.
"This sucks," said Kona.
"No it doesn't. Look at all we have," said Clay, gesturing to all they had.
"What is it?"
"It's a lot, that's what it is. Look at all of it."
"What's it mean?"
"No idea."
"What does this have to do with Nate and the Snowy Biscuit?"
"Just look at all of this," said Clay, looking at all of it.
Kona got up from his chair and rolled his shoulders. "Mon, Bwana Clay, Jah has given you a big heart. I'm goin' to bed."
"What are you saying?" Clay said.
"We got all the heart we need, brah. We need head."
" 'Scuse me?"
And so, in the morning, with the promise of a colossal piece of information for barter (the torpedo range) but without a true indication of what he really needed to know in return (everything else), Clay talked Libby Quinn into coming to Papa Lani.
"So let me get this straight," said Libby Quinn as she paced from Clay's computer to the kitchen and back. Kona and Clay were standing to the side, following her movement like dogs watching meatball tennis. "You've got an old woman who claims that a whale called her and instructed her to have Nate take him a pastrami sandwich?"
"On rye, with Swiss and hot mustard," Kona added, not wanting her to miss any pertinent scientific details.
"And you have a recording of voices, underwater, presumably military, asking if someone brought them a sandwich."
"Correct," said Kona, "No bread, or meat, or cheese, specified."
Libby glared at him. "And you have the navy setting off simulated explosions in preparation to put a torpedo range in the middle of the Humpback Whale Sanctuary." She paused meaningfully and pivoted thoughtfully — like Hercule Poirot in flip-flops. "You have a tape of Amy doing a breath-hold dive for what appears to be an hour, with no ill effects."
"Topless," Kona added. Science.
"You have Amy claiming that Nate was eaten by a whale, which we all know is simply not possible, given the diameter of the humpback's throat, even if one were inclined to bite him, which we know they wouldn't." (She was just a deerstalker, a calabash, and a cocaine habit short of being Sherlock Holmes here.) "Then you have Amy taking a kayak out for no apparent reason and disappearing, presumed drowned. And you say that Nate was working on finding binary in the lower registers of the whale song, and you think that means something? Have I got that right?"
"Yeah," said Clay. "But you have the break-in to our offices to get the sound tapes, and you have my boat being sunk, too. Okay, it sounded more connected when we were talking about it last night."
Libby Quinn stopped pacing and turned to look at both of them. She wore cargo shorts, tech sandals, and a running bra and appeared ready at any moment to just take off and do something outdoorsy and strenuous. They both looked down, subdued, as if they were still under the threat of Clair's deadly spoon of calm. Clay had always had a secret attraction to Libby, even while she'd been married to Quinn, and it was only within the last year or so he'd been able to make eye contact with her at all. Kona, on the other hand, had studied dozens of videotapes on the lesbian lifestyle, especially as it pertained to having a third party show up in the middle of an intimate moment (usually with a pizza), so he had long ago assigned a «hot» rating to Libby, despite the fact that she was twice his age.
"Help us," Kona said, trying to sound pathetic, staring at the floor.
"This is what you guys have, and you think because I know a little biology I can make something of all this?"
"And that," said Clay, pointing at the now arranged and collated pages of ones and ohs on his desk.
Libby walked over and flipped through the pages. "Clay, this is nothing. I can't do anything with this. Even if Nate was on to something, what do you think? That even if we recognize a pattern, it's going to mean something to us? Look, Clay, I loved Nate, too, you know I did, but —»