"We have ways," said Nuñez, trying not to sound spooky but failing. This evidently amused the whaley boy at the console and the two pilots no end, and they nearly wheezed themselves out of their seats.
"Oh, fuck you guys," said Nuñez. "It's not like you guys are a bunch of geniuses."
"And you guys were the nightwalkers that Tako Man was talking about," Nate said to the pilots. "You guys sank Clay's boat."
The pilots raised their arms over their heads in a menacing scary-monster pose, then bared their teeth and made some fake growling noises, then collapsed into what Nate was starting to think of as whale giggles. The whaley boy at the console started clapping and laughing as well.
"Franklin! We're not done here. Can we get the interface back?"
Franklin, obviously the whaley boy who had been working the console, slumped and put his hand back in the socket. "Sorry," came a tiny voice from his blowhole.
"Bitch," came another tiny voice from one of the pilots, followed by whaley snickering.
"Let's send one more time. I want base to know we'll be there in the morning," Nuñez said.
"Morale's not a problem, then?" asked Nate, grinning at Nuñez's loss of temper.
"Oh, they're like fucking children," Nuñez said. "They're like dolphins: You dump them in the middle of the ocean with a red ball and they'll just play all day long, stopping only long enough to eat and screw. I'm telling you, it's like baby-sitting a bunch of horny toddlers."
Franklin squeaked and clicked a response, and this time Tim and Jane joined in the laughter with the whaley boys.
"What? What?" asked Nate.
"I do not just need to get laid!" shouted Nuñez. "Jane, you got this?"
"Sure," said the blonde.
"I'm going to quarters." She left the bridge to the snickering of the whaley boys.
Tim looked back at Nate and nodded toward the sonar screen and headset that Nuñez had vacated. "Want to stand in?"
"I'm a prisoner," said Nate.
"Yeah, but in a nice way," said Jane.
That was true. Everyone since he'd come on board had been very kind to him, seeing to his every need, even some he didn't want seen to. He didn't feel like a prisoner. Nate wasn't sure that he wasn't experiencing the Helsinki syndrome, where you sympathized with your captors — or was that the Stockholm syndrome? Yeah, the Helsinki syndrome had something to do with hair loss. It was definitely the Stockholm syndrome.
He stepped up to the sonar screen and put on the headset. Immediately he heard the distant song of a humpback. He looked at Tim, who raised his eyebrows as if to say, See.
"So tell me," Nate said, "what's the singing mean?" It was worth a shot.
"We were just going to ask you," said Jane.
"Swell," said Nate. Suddenly he didn't feel so well. After all this, even people who traveled inside whales didn't know what the song meant?
"Are you all right, Nate?" Jane asked. "You don't look so good."
"I think I have Stockholm syndrome."
"Don't be silly," said Tim. "You've got plenty of hair."
"You want some Pepto?" asked Jane, the ship's doctor.
Yes, he thought, escape would seem a priority. He was pretty sure that if he didn't get away, he was going to snap and kill some folks, or at least be incredibly stern with them.
Funny, he thought, how your priorities could change with circumstances. You go along for the greater part of your life thinking you want something — to understand the humpback song, for instance. So you pursue that with dogged single-mindedness at the expense of everything else in your life, only to be distracted into thinking maybe you want something in addition to that — Amy, for instance. And that becomes a diversion up until the time when circumstances make you realize what it is you really want, and that is — strangely enough — to get the fuck out of a whale. Funny, Nate thought.
"Settle down, Kona," Clair said, dropping her purse by the door, "I don't have a spoon."
Clay jumped off Margaret's lap. He and Kona watched as Clair crossed the room and exchanged hugs with Margaret and Libby, lingering a bit while hugging Libby and winking over her shoulder at Clay.
"So nice to see you guys," Clair said.
"I'm not going out to get the pizza, mon. No way," said Kona, still looking a bit terrified.
"What are you guys doing?" Clair asked.
And so Margaret took it upon herself to explain what they had discovered over the last few hours, with Kona filling in the pertinent and personal details. Meanwhile, Clay sat down in the kitchen and pondered the facts. Pondering, he felt, was called for.
Pondering is a little like considering and a little like thinking, but looser. To ponder, one must let the facts roll around the rim of the mind's roulette wheel, coming to settle in whichever slot they feel pulled to. Margaret and Libby were scientists, used to jamming their facts into the appropriate slots as quickly as possible, and Kona… well, a thought rolling around in his mind was rather like a tennis ball in a coffee can — it was just a little too fuzzy to make any impact — and Clair was just catching up. No, the pondering fell to Clay, and he sipped a dark beer from a sweating bottle on a high stool in the kitchen and waited for the roulette ball to fall. Which it did, right about the time that Margaret Painborne was reaching a conclusion to her story.
"This obviously has something to do with defense," Margaret said. "No one else would have a reason — hell, they can't even have a good reason. But I say we write our senators tonight and confront Captain Tarwater in the morning. He's got to know something about it."
"And that's where you're completely wrong," Clay said. And they all turned. "I've been pondering this" — here he paused for impact — "and it occurs to me that two of our friends disappeared right about the time they found out about this stuff. And that everything from the break-in to the sinking of my boat" — and here he paused for a moment of silence — "has had something to do with someone not wanting us to know this stuff. So I think it would be reckless of us to run around trying to tell everybody what we know before we know what we know is."
"That can't be right," said Libby.
" 'Before we know what we know is'?" quoted Margaret. "No, that's not right."
"Is making perfect sense to me," said Kona.
"No, Clay," said Clair, "I'm fine with you and the girl-on-girl action, and I'm fine with a haole Rasta boy preaching sovereignty, but I'm telling you I won't stand for that kind of grammatical abuse. I am a schoolteacher, after all."
"We can't tell anyone!" Clay screamed.
"Better," said Clair.
"No need to shout," Libby said. "Margaret was just being a radical hippie reactionist feminist lesbian communist cetacean biologist, weren't you, dear?" Libby Quinn grinned at her partner.
"I'll have an acronym for that in a second," mumbled Clair, counting off words on her fingers. "Jeez, your business card must be the size of a throw rug."
Margaret glared at Libby, then turned to Clay. "You really think we could be in danger?"
"Seems that way. Look, I know we wouldn't know this without your help, but I just don't want anyone hurt. We may already be in trouble."
"We can keep it quiet if you feel that's the way to go," said Libby, making the decision for the pair, "but I think in the meantime we need to look at a lot more audio files — see how far back this goes. Figure out why sometimes it's just noise and sometimes it's a message."
Margaret was furiously braiding and unbraiding her hair and staring blankly into the air in front of her as she thought. "They must use the whale song as camouflage so enemy submarines don't detect the communication. We need more data. Recordings from other populations of humpbacks, out of American waters. Just to see how far they've gone with this thing."