Far From The Sea We Know

by Frank Sheldon

  Why hadn’t Thorssen mentioned this?

  He didn’t want to let Ripler know about his recent conversation with Thorssen, but he had to counter with something.

  “The Captain told me he had an experience this morning with the lead whale that was in some ways similar to the one I had on my fishing boat. The point is, there’s more to this incident than just the displacement, and I know that because I experienced it firsthand.”

  “Oh, and what was that, exactly?”

  “I’m going to wait until I have the opportunity to talk to everyone together.”

  “Fine,” Ripler said, as he smiled indulgently. “Except whatever your ‘experience’ was, Thorssen could have just fed your account back to you, thereby adding weight to this charade and keeping you hooked.” Then Ripler laughed. “Those poor old fools!”

  Matthew took a step toward him, but Ripler just leaned back on the railing, his contempt barely disguised.

  “At least what I am suggesting is possible,” Ripler said, “supported by the facts, and in accordance with the known laws of science. This magic whale with a warp drive is completely ridiculous, and you know it. If it were up to me, Thorssen would be out of a job already. I’m convinced that he has a hand in this fraud, and we’ll find Bell’s in there as well.”

  “To say something like that about a captain while at sea is close to mutiny, you know.”

  Ripler laughed again. “Excuse me, but this is not the Bounty. I will still do my job and do it impeccably, but ‘no thanks’ to The Twilight Zone. When all this unravels—and it will—they’ll take you down with them. I thought you might have some sense. Now it looks like the only work you might ever get at the Point would be janitorial. No, that’s too harsh, sorry. Maintenance, as I heard you’re good with a screwdriver.”

  Ripler walked away, then turned on his heel. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to hear your ‘Moby Pink’ story. Oh that’s right, it was purple. Which reminds me. I had a friend check up on something I remembered reading about. Heard back from him last night. There’s an immersion compound used in the undersea mining industry to keep clouds of silt down. Stick to anything it settles on even underwater. Or anything that swims through it. One kind happens to be florescent pink so they can layout areas clearly. A gray whale covered partly in this stuff might well seem purple. That’s how they did it, Matthew, only it wore off.”

  Without a smile, he turned and disappeared around the bulkhead.

  Matthew stood frozen for a moment, utterly frustrated. Then he yanked off his hat and threw it spinning away into the air. A breeze caught it and whirled it back toward him like a boomerang, but gave out too soon. The hat settled into the receding wake of the Valentina, and was now, like them all, at the mercy of an unfathomable sea.

  CHAPTER 10

  Matthew wandered around the passageways searching for Penny. He found her in a small lab viewing files on a laptop. She looked up and smiled as he entered.

  “Penny, I’m sorry about what happened at the harbor. I’m more stressed out than I realized.”

  “Dad’s a great seducer, you know. Following him, sometimes people get in over their heads. You’ve been there before, I’d guess.”

  “Which is why I’ve been trying to play straight this time. You get tired of winning a little and losing a lot.”

  They were silent for a while, then he said, “Have you been in the lab all afternoon? I thought you liked to be ‘out there.’”

  “I came in here a half hour ago. I took a nap before.” She shifted some papers and closed the lid on her laptop.

  “There was another incident just before they found the whales,” he said.

  “Sort of. Andrew told me about it after you left. They’re not really sure what happened. They lost contact for about a minute, then it came on again, but the whales hadn’t moved in any unusual way. The techs thought it was probably a glitch with the equipment.”

  If so, it was an awfully convenient glitch, but he wasn’t ready for another argument.

  “So, what are you up to in here?” he asked.

  “Studying the way crew entered their observations in a common log they keep on their network, especially the last two days. It’s a line I’ve been following in my work lately. The way we look at something becomes what we find.”

  “Biases influencing interpretation?”

  “Yes, but I’m starting to even wonder if we influence the facts themselves by the way we observe them. We do not even come close to understanding just how limited and distorted our perceptions are. And it’s likely that the things we are most sure about are the ones we are most wrong about.”

  “And you think that’s going on here?”

  “If that’s not a rhetorical question,” she said smiling, “yes.”

  “Okay, could this be an example?” he asked. “A few years ago, I spent some time with Eskimos near Point Barrow. They showed me some carved ivory. I remember one carving in particular, several animals carved out of this single walrus tusk, and they were all still linked, but in almost every orientation. Up, down, sideways. I assumed it was simply to get the most out of the ivory, and it probably was. An old man was showing the carving to me and talking about one of the figures, a wolf. The whole time, he held it so the wolf was upside down. I finally realized it wasn’t an issue for him at all. He could see it just as coherently no matter which way he held it.”

  “And many similar cases, all well documented,” she said.

  “Anyway, I spent some time there, and he often did this. Once, I gave him a photograph of him standing with his grandson. I had taken it myself, with his permission, and I was pleased with the way it had come out. When he took it from me, he didn’t bother to turn it right side up. It made such an impression on me that I can close my eyes now, and he’s still there looking at this picture, upside-down. Looked at it for almost three minutes that way. Simply wasn’t necessary for him to see it the way it would be for most people. We always turn things right side up. His way of perceiving is hard for us to grasp, although his people seem to be losing this facility.”

  “Exactly,” she said, and got up from the stool she had been perching on. She stretched back and up, her hands touching the steel ceiling panels above, and yawned like a cat.

  “Perfect example,” she said. “We lose it, maybe to make room for something else, and then assume we never had it.”

  “Fine,” he said nodding, “but you were implying that this influences reality in some way.”

  “What we take as the real world is simply how our perceptions are assembled for us.”

  “‘Assembled’ by who?”

  “Well, no one outside ourselves. I mean our conditioning.”

  “But you implied that facts themselves can be changed.”

  “Why not?” Penny asked. “Maybe the world was flat once, and we made it round, by believing it round. Now we just go in circles, winding up back where we began, thinking we know it all. Hey, relax, just kidding.”

  She had seemed so down to earth before, and now she was talking about it being flat. Out through the porthole, the sun was getting lower.

  “Maybe I’ve had enough of metaphysics for one day,” he said. “I could use a break.”

  “You need a drink.”

  “Maybe I want a drink, but I don’t need a drink.”

  She lifted her gaze toward heaven and raised her right hand with two bent fingers, the other remaining on her heart, a tableau of piety framed in sanctimony.

  “Okay,” Matthew said. “But first, did you come up with anything immediately significant in your reading of the students’ observations?”

  “Indeed. All is not smooth sailing on the Valentina.”

  “I found that out already.”

  “Jack Ripler?”

  Matthew could not help furrowing his brows. “Yes. How’d you know?”

  “Just did the math.”

  “Never my best subject.”

  “And I saw the last few seconds of yo
ur meeting when I went out for some air. Too bad about the hat.”

  “I’ve got another.”

  She stared at the top of his head and said, “Well, I’ll look forward to seeing it up there.”

  Penny’s smile was like a sun-break in the rain. But Ripler was sure Doctor Bell was the leader of an outrageous campaign of fraud and deception, and she was Bell’s daughter. He did not want to believe that any of it could be true, but Ripler’s pieces at least fit together.

  “Time for that drink,” Matthew said.

  Penny had moved into the cabin usually reserved for her father. Matthew had been assigned a space in the men’s quarters with the students but had just thrown his bags on the bunk and left. Even though the cabin was small, it gave him the feeling he could relax and let go. That, and the scotch she was pouring from a bottle into a couple of paper cups, would be enough.

  “Ice?”

  “No, straight up for me.”

  “Good. I don’t have ice anyway.” She handed him a cup holding at least two shots and lifted hers in a quick toast. “See you in hell.”

  Matthew took a long slow sip. Smooth.

  “If you’re going to poison yourself,” she said, “might as well have the good stuff.”

  He nodded slowly and savored the after-burn. “You’re an ethologist. What are you working on?”

  “How animals have adapted to us. Like crows and squirrels, but for the last year, I was tracking urban coyotes in Albuquerque. We tried to develop predictive models using grids of habitat variables, regression coefficients, the whole drill. We radio-collared seventeen coyotes, by the way, so I do have experience with remote tracking. Done it many times. We used satellites, just like here.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “It was, most of the time. But in the end, all the study proved is what I already knew: it would be hard to find a place anywhere in Albuquerque that coyotes don’t make free use of, at least at night. Unlike their larger cousins, they’re doing great.”

  “A success story.”

  “Success by adaptation, yes,” she said. “Their strategy seems to be to live off us. In a way, we have indirectly become their food source.”

  “We should be glad that some animals are finding us so beneficent, I suppose, even if they do tend to be the scavengers. How’d you get into this line of inquiry?”

  “Deep depression,” she said, but her face was unreadable.

  Matthew remained silent. She poured herself another drink and offered him the bottle.

  “No thanks,” he said. “I’m still working on this. I don’t want to nose into your life….”

  “Sure you do, but it’s no big deal. I’ve always been strongly empathetic with animals. A day came when I saw that I couldn’t handle standing-by while they were all losing their place. So, I decided to focus on the survivors.”

  “You believe it’s hopeless?”

  “We’re watching the end play out. Then we’ll see who’s left.”

  “There are more people than ever working right now….” His words suddenly sounded weak. “You could be wrong.”

  “I didn’t mean to sound like the word of God,” she said, turning the cup in her hand as she spoke. Its paper lip was getting frayed. She put it down, got up, and looked out the window. “I saw a supertanker go by after my nap. Do you know how long it takes to stop one of those things?”

  “Ten kilometers or so.”

  “With the engines on full reverse. And that’s where we are now. When and if we ever decide to change the way we live in the world, there won’t be time.”

  “You know, if you have enough space, you can shorten the distance to about three kilometers by cutting back and forth.”

  “Do we have the space to do that? Seems like less and less to me.”

  “Metaphors can be stretched only so far.”

  Penny said nothing but lifted her cup again, took a long sip of the honey-hued liquor. Matthew looked at the level in the fifth on the table.

  She leaned toward him, eyes unblinking. “I can hold mine. How about you?”

  “Penny, a friend of mine drowned years back. He got drunk and took a boat out at night to steal lobsters out of traps. Capsized somehow. He’d been drinking with me. It was my idea.”

  “To steal lobsters?”

  “No, to drink. I should have stopped him from going.”

  “I’m not much on sentiment.”

  A wave of sadness washed across her face. A second wave swept it away. Another part of Matthew began surrendering to her, and he no longer cared.

  “Pour me a little more, Penny. Not too much.”

  She did, and touched the rim of her cup to his as he held it in front of his lips.

  Later, they came out onto the open deck, and immediately Dirk trotted up to tell them about a meeting at nine thirty, which would include a late snack. The sea had become calmer and looked as thick as oil. This far north, the sun set late in the summer, so there was plenty of light left. Twilight would come soon. The whales looked like black commas punctuating the long rambling swells. Penny looked through Thorssen’s binoculars and scanned the whales, her elbows propped on the railing of the fo’c’sle.

  “Does this look unusual to you?” Matthew said. “I mean, whales aren’t your field, so what would be your impression of them, if you didn’t know anything about them?”

  “That sounds like a question I would come up with. Well, they’re awesome in the original sense of the word. But I wouldn’t be so struck by their close swimming, if I didn’t know it was odd for grays. You want to have a look?”

  “Sure.”

  “Catch.”

  “No!”

  She tossed the binoculars to him anyway, and he caught them as casually as he could, but she immediately sprang over to give him a dig in the ribs.

  “Okay, okay. So let me have a look!”

  She became quiet but kept smiling as he raised the binoculars. The immense size of the whales created the illusion that they were swimming in slow motion, almost as if tempting the ship to catch up. He searched for the lead whale.

  “The whale in the lead is bigger than the others,” he said, “and the one we saw from the Eva Shay was also unusually large. But the color of this whale seems normal to me.”

  “What about the lack of barnacles we saw in the photos?”

  “There were some, although not nearly as many as I would expect. Most of the barnacles die when they are in the southern waters anyway. Perhaps they just haven’t grown back as fast on this one.”

  “That may be significant.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. Somehow, he was having a hard time thinking about it. “Gray whales are grazers, not hunters, so they don’t form clans. No advantage to it. They will migrate together, but fairly loosely except for mothers and calves. The behavior of this group is like nothing I’ve ever heard of, and I’ve read everything.”

  “That’s just how you described the whales you saw on the Eva Shay, and the tag indicates at least one of these whales was there that day. So, observations on your lead whale?”

  “My whale, is it? Except for the behavior, she seems to be a typical specimen. The size is unusual, but completely possible. By the way, did the Captain tell people on board about me seeing them disappear?”

  “My guess is no,” Penny said.

  “Did he know about that?”

  She looked at him askance. “My father may have told him. After we left this morning. You have a problem?”

  “Ripler seemed to know all about it, and I’m starting to feel like a complete fool. None of this makes sense. Maybe I was hallucinating.”

  “What about the rest of the crew on your fishing boat?”

  “After we got back to port, no one said anything about it, almost like it didn’t happen. Maybe we should concentrate on the verifiable observations in front of us now….” Matthew suddenly brought his hand to his forehead as a memory came back like an echo.

  “What?” Penny
asked?

  “Ripler. When I first started talking to him today, the woman he was working with, what’s-her-name—”

  “Becka.”

  “Well, Becka mentioned that something happened to Ripler, only he didn’t want to talk about it. At all. Kind of a denial, an avoidance, and now that I think of it, like the way some of the crew on the Eva Shay acted after the incident. But you still haven’t told me why you pinpointed Ripler earlier.”

  The ship’s bell rang out.

  Instead of giving him an answer, Penny walked away, saying over her shoulder, “Meeting time. We’ll talk more later, okay?”

  Alone now on the deck, Matthew took one last look through the binoculars in the lowering light. The whales continued their slow two-step to the North, while the Valentina idled along behind, as if shyly waiting for an invitation to dance that would never come. Though their steady headway proved it a lie, he felt marooned on an island of confusion.

  Yet his doubts no longer seemed to matter. The net was cast. The question was, had he become the fisher or the fish?

  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?”