Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

forlornly at the legal-pad pages piling up on the desk next to where Margaret Painborne was typing. He handed a roll of bills over to Kona. "Go. Buy nugs. Bring him back. Bring back my change."
    "I'm throwing in my board for the cause," said Kona. "I could use some time in the mystic myself."
    "Do you want me to tell Auntie Clair that you tried to extort me?" Clay had taken to using Clair as a sort of sword of Damocles/assistant principal/evil dominatrix threat over Kona, and it seemed to work swimmingly.
    "Must blaze, brah. Cool runnings."
    Suddenly something sparked in Clay's head, a dйjа vu trigger snapping electric with connections. "Wait, Kona."
    The surfer paused in the doorway, turned.
    "The first day you came here, the day that Nate sent you to the lab to get the film – did you actually do it?"
    Kona shook his head, "Nah, boss, the Snowy Biscuit see me going. She say keep the money and she go to the lab. When I come back with my ganja, she give me the pictures to give to Nate."
    "I was sort of afraid of that," Clay said. "Go, blaze, be gone. Get what we need."
    * * *
    So three days later they all stood watching as Lolo hit the return key and the subsonic waveform from a blue-whale call began scrolling across the bottom of the screen, while above it letters were transcribed from the data. Lolo was a year older than Kona, a Japanese-American burned nut brown by the sun with ducky-yellow minidreads and a tapestry of Maori tattoos across his back and shoulders.
    Lolo spun in the chair to face them. "I mixed down a fifty-minute trance track with sixty percussion loops that was way harder than this." Lolo's prior forays into sound processing had been as a computer DJ at a dance club in Honolulu.
    "It's not saying anything," said Libby Quinn. "It's just random, Clay."
    "Well, that's the way it's gone so far, right?"
    "But there's been nothing since that first day."
    "We knew that might happen, that there couldn't be messages on all of them. We just have to find the right ones."
    Libby's eyes were pleading. "Clay, it's a short season. We have to get out in the field. Now that you have this program, you don't need the manpower. Margaret and I will bring back more tapes – we have them coming in from people we trust – but we can't afford to blow off the season."
    "And we need to go public with the torpedo range," Margaret added, less sympathetic than Libby had been.
    Clay nodded and looked at his bare feet against the hardwood floor. He took a deep breath, and when he looked up, he smiled. "You're right. But don't just blow a whistle and hope someone will notice. Cliff Hyland told me that the diving data was the only thing they were worried about. You're going to need proof that humpbacks dive close to the bottom of the channel, or the navy will claim that you're just being whale buggers and there's no danger to the animals. Even with the range."
    "You're okay if we go public, then?" asked Libby.
    "People are going to know about the torpedo range soon enough. I don't think that's dangerous for you. Just don't say anything about the rest of this, okay?"
    The two women looked at each other, then nodded. "We have to go," Libby said. "We'll call you, Clay. We're not running out on you."
    "I know," Clay said.
    After they left, Clay turned to the two surfers. Thirty years working with the best scientists and divers in the world, and this was what it came down to: two stoner kids. "If you guys need to go do things, I understand."
    "Outta here," said Lolo, on his feet and bounding toward the door.
    Clay looked at the screen where Lolo had been sitting. Scrolling across it: WILL ARRIVE GV APPRX 1300 MONDAY__HAVE__SIZE 11 SNEAKERS WAITING FOR QUINN__END MSS__AAAA__BAXYXABUDAB.
    "Get him back," Clay said to Kona. "We need to know which tape this was."
    "Libby gave them all to him."
    "I know that. I need to know where she got it. Where and when it was recorded. Call Libby's cell phone. See if you can get hold of her." Clay was trying to make the screen print before the message scrolled away. "How the hell does this thing work?"
    "How you know I'm not leaving?"
    "You woke up this morning, Kona. Did you have a reason to get out of bed other than waves or pot?"
    "Yah, mon, need to find Nate."
    "How'd that feel?"
    "I'm calling Libby, boss."
    "Loyalty is important, son. I'll go catch Lolo. Confirm which tape it was."
    "Shut up, boss. I'm trying to dial."
    Behind them the cryptic message scrolled out of the printer.

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