John somehow found a smile. “The real tragedy is that I can’t go anywhere without her. She was able to get the funding to keep me afloat. Without her, I’m back at GatorLand.”
“So you were using her for her money?” Kyle asked. “Boss. You just became my hero.” Frank jabbed him in the ribs with the giant bone to shush him as they all climbed into the big people carrier. Kyle got behind the wheel as Frank tossed the bone on the floor in the back. He noticed John eyeing the bone with passive curiosity.
“It’s not valuable or anything. Just a mastodon femur. I take them from time to time just to mess with Spencer’s head. Hey Kyle. Let me drive.”
“No. It’s still my turn.”
John mentally bolstered himself against the negative feelings blanketing his thoughts and buckled himself in. “As it turns out, that’s about all she’s good for, but she’s at least good for it. I tried to get the funding myself and they turned me down flat. She’s got friends on the panel.”
“Yeah. I’ll bet she does,” Frank muttered under his breath. Mac shot him a look in the mirror and Kyle turned around to scowl at the comment.
John tried to ignore it. “I’m pretty much screwed without the research money.”
Frank defended himself. “What? You think it was a coincidence that she decided to broaden her horizons right when your money ran out? I’m willing to bet she’s got an escape route from Spencer all planned, too. In fact, it’s probably you. She would’ve come back if you had the money or even the promise of money, I guaran-friggin-tee you. That’s why we wanted you to tell her as little as possible. We needed to see whether or not she was on board.”
“Before we threw our hat in the fire,” Mac added.
“Ring,” Kyle corrected, mostly for John’s sake.
“Before we threw our ring in the fire then, not that that makes any sense.”
“Well, if you’re wondering about her chasing the money, I’m afraid that’s kind of a moot point.”
Frank and Kyle exchanged assuring nods. Mac confirmed and squeezed John’s shoulder. “You’re a good egg, Charlie Brown. I wouldn’t worry too much about the money. That part isn’t as hard as you think.”
“I have to worry a little. I’m not even sure I can feed myself. I wonder if anyone’s looking for the abominable snowman.”
Kyle made eye contact with him in the rear-view mirror. “What Mac means is that we can use Frank’s rat money.”
“Rat money?” John looked Frank in the eye. “You have rat money?”
“We have rat money.”
“How much rat money do you have?”
“Enough rat money to tide us over. Probably enough to fund your project.”
“Really? That much rat money?”
“That much rat money?”
“That’s amazing. Hey Frank?”
“Yeah, Doc?”
“What’s rat money?”
“It’s research grant money,” Mac explained. “We applied for some grants for research and were somewhat frugal, shall we say, in how we arrived at our findings. We usually managed to have a few bucks left over.”
Frank filled in the gaps. “It started when I was reading a study on how males and females find their way. Women generally rely on landmarks and memory while men rely more on a natural sense of direction and distance traveled. See, some years ago a researcher was conducting some experiments using rats in a maze. One of the rats jumped up on top of the maze and walked a straight line to the cheese. Most techs would have just put the rat back and covered the top. But this genius spotted something about it. It occurred to him that the maze was completely different. Only the start and finish were the same. Despite all the turns and twists, this rat somehow remembered where the cheese was. He tried a few dozen rats and found out that the males consistently went in the right direction while the females responded to similar landmarks and turns. He expanded his finding to prove that human men and women find their way using different criteria.”
“This is why women can’t give men directions and vice versa,” Kyle said.
“Exactly. They’re speaking a different language.”
John was entertained if not intrigued. “So you figured out how to present the findings in a politically correct way?”
“Better. What I did was turn the findings backwards. See, we’ve done about a jillion behavioral studies using maze rats over the past few decades. I presented a research request to suggest that any such study where the tech didn’t record the gender of the rat was tainted. We would have no way of knowing why the rat performed as it did because we don’t know what the rat was looking for. What I proposed was first researching the tests that were possibly tainted and then redoing them with male and female control to see if the original findings were accurate.”
“So you recreated every experiment ever done using lab rats in mazes?”
All three grinned sheepishly at the proposition. “Well, let’s just say they got new findings,” Mac confessed.
“Oh we did a few,” Kyle said. “We took pictures and everything. The rats wore little pink and blue ribbons. It was cute as hell.”
“But mostly we just looked at the experiment and guessed whether or not the outcome would be different if the rat had balls. We spent about a week guessing and the money has been drawing interest ever since,” Mac said.
Frank was the least apologetic about the grant process. “Once we established the pipeline, it was easy. We came up with about a dozen causes worthy of grant money.”
“Some were doozies,” Mac said.
“But a lot of them were pretty thin. The most recent one was a huge stretch. Frank found a dog that had died from being fed imitation, meat-flavored dog food.”
Frank helped. “Dogs aren’t like us. They’re true carnivores. They need meat to survive. Without it, their immune system breaks down and they become susceptible to any disease they’re exposed to. The slightest virus can become fatal.”
“Kind of like AIDS,” John suggested.
“Very like AIDS. That was the selling point. I determined that the absence of manganese in the diet caused a breakdown of the autoimmune system. So how does this relate to humans? While we’re not actually carnivorous and need very little manganese, I hypothesized on the possibility of rebuilding or strengthening the immune system with a form of manganese or a time-release derivative that stays in the bloodstream.”
“Several pharmaceutical companies, two major universities and the U.S. government thought it was worth looking into. That made for a tidy little nest egg.”
John was as impressed as he was amused. “Sounds like you guys weren’t planning on staying with Spencer too much longer.”
“Actually, we were just looking for an excuse to leave him in the lurches,” Frank said with a barely perceivable hint of vindictiveness.
“Like rats from a stinking ship,” Mac said. Only John was confused but had learned not to bother saying anything.
Kyle took the offensive. “We’re not going to hurt him by walking out, Frank. I’m telling you we need to leave for us. But if you’re doing it to bother him, forget it. He’ll just hire new bodies that fit the team caps he bought and go on like nothing happened.”
Mac tried to be the voice of reason. “Let’s focus on the here and now. We’ll be in a much better position to make a decision after we talk to Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.” By this time even John was taking his mixed references in stride as Mac had a bizarre way of misstating to an unbelievable degree without failing to convey his point. This one brought a slight twinge to his co-riders but no one said a word. “I love that movie. Oh – you - Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. Pretty Chitty-Bang-Bang we love you.” The team continued the long drive to the fairgrounds listening to Mac’s renditions of show-tunes.
Chapter Nine
Beau came quietly on board and made his way to his office. Things weren’t going exactly as he’d hoped and he needed to take control of the situation. As he logged onto his PC, he made a phone
call and waited three rings.
“Hello?” said the gravelly voice on the other end.
“Sorry to wake you, Carl. It’s Spencer.”
Carl Linton cleared his throat and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes as he tried to at least sound coherent. “It’s all right, Beau. I had to get up in five or six hours anyway. I take it you got my email.”
Spencer’s computer was just about booted up. “Opening it now. Is there something I should be sitting down for?”
“Well, I get to tell you in person then. Your coordinates were perfect. We found the nest and recovered a remarkable specimen. I believe we have a viable egg.”
Beau almost lunged out of the chair. “You took an egg? That’s incredible. Who else knows about it?”
“Just my team and they’re on their way to the Med right now.”
“Good. Keep it that way. Say nothing until I get there.”
“I understand. What time is your flight?”
Beau was staring at John Nagle’s sound patterns and comparisons. “No flight. We’re cruising up. We’ll need the Princess anyway and I think we’ll be conducting some research along the way. Sit on this for a few weeks, Linton. Can you do that?”
“Can and will. It’ll give me some time to run some tests. See you when you get here.”
Spencer hung up; his next call was to Billikin.
* * * * *
The waters south of New Zealand were frigid year-round. Close to Antarctica, the deep sea hosts a very different variety of life forms than is found in climates humans consider more inhabitable. The deep cold is a world of extremes. Animals are known to grow to gargantuan size or to minute proportions.
Lying on the bottom, shielded by darkness, a giant lay in wait of a meal. It had been there for hours without luck and felt its body signaling its need for oxygen. With a minimum of effort, the tremendous hunter lifted its great mass and began to rise toward the surface. Four enormous fins hung limp at its side; using them now would only waste precious oxygen. This creature was a master at conserving energy. It controlled its body temperature in the freezing waters with a thin but dense layer of fat that was resistant to the cold. It slowly digested its meals and generated internal heat through the process. It could remain underwater for more than eight hours while hunting but once fed it could lie still on the bottom for more than a day. Even when air became an issue, only the massive muzzle broke the surface. It took in enough air in a single gulp to sustain it. This beast loathed the surface and the dangers there. Had it not learned the threat of man and the value of evasion, it would have suffered the same fate as its ancestors, almost all now extinct. When it hunted, it was fast and efficient. The large, slow-moving fish in these waters were easy prey though they only filled the years-long gap between its preferred hunt. That time was soon to come.
The beast came up through the crisp water effortlessly. Its giant tail moved just enough to propel it. The surface was choppy this day; even an observer—had anyone or anything managed to elude the uncanny sense of smell and hearing that this giant used at all times—might have seen only the undulating swells in the Antarctic Sea. The waves rose twelve feet and dropped as much. The beast came close enough to hold its mouth in wait. The sea came down to it and it took its life-giving breath from the lowest, most protected point of the sea; then it dove. It pulled its giant head down and paddled back into the waiting depths. It was not yet hungry enough to go off in hunt so waiting on the bottom would suffice.
Before it came to a depth of two hundred feet, a sound came to it that it rarely heard. It immediately reacted to the distant call. In the northern oceans, sea traffic and man-made noise disrupts the travel of most sounds. Blue whales used to be able to find each other from nearly fifty miles by a single call but now only five miles away and a mate can be missed. But here the sea was quiet. And this beast was more in tune than any whale. It heard, understood and swam off toward the call without hesitation.
* * * * *
As John had learned, Mac had a habit of rambling on and on and taking forever to get to a point. This was marginally annoying but was tolerable, as Mac never rambled on a subject in which he was less than an expert. He genuinely knew what he was talking about. The oddest thing about him was his constant misuse of clichés.
“So why are we looking for this guy again? I don’t think we can afford any more of his CDs.”
“Hopefully I can get him to share a little folklore about these callers,” Frank said. “If there is a code or language we can share with this species, these people are the key.”
“And this man is our key to finding them, if there are any left,” Kyle added.
John wasn’t convinced. “I don’t know. Do you think he’ll give up these old secrets to us?”
“He might, with the proper persuasion.”
“Ahhh,” Mac said. “So we’re going to broil him a little. Eh?”
“Broil him?”
“You know. Give him the old fourth degree.”
“Oh. You mean grill him? Actually, I think he wants to talk about it. You know. Be the expert. With a little encouragement, he’ll—”
“Squeal like a canary.”
John had finally figured out what Mac’s friends knew all too well: time was too precious to waste correcting Mac.
The festival and the booth were still there and the old man greeted them like returning family. He seemed truly happy to see them.
“So how was my grandson? Some little twerp, eh?”
“Oh, he wasn’t so bad. Very helpful, in fact.”
“Someday he may be a wise family elder,” Mac said, deliberately leading the man.
He smiled knowingly. “Someday. But there’s a lot for him to learn. His ears are okay. But he needs to open his mind a little.”
“That’s why we’re here. I need to know a little more and I can’t wait for Nate to grow old. Can you tell me what this animal is?”
“It is what it is. It is one from the eternal world. The world that never dies. It swims always but hunts on the shore.”
“How?”
“They say it throws its head to the shore like a fisherman’s line. I gotta admit that part is only legend.”
“That part?” John asked dryly.
“Can you find it?” Mac asks.
“No. Only the callers can do this. They pretty much all gone now, I think.”
“Was this your family? Are you the last caller?”
“No. They didn’t come from here. They were travelers. In fact, they came here long before we did. Only difference is we stayed. When people started living here, the animals had trouble. Had to find someplace else. The callers led them away. They still come here to live and hunt. Well, way south. Cold water. Fish are big and slow. Seals are fat. But the callers don’t help them anymore.”
“So the callers never settled here.”
“If you ask me, and you did, I think they were Norse. They could travel really far in boats. Farther than anyone else. Farther than most thought the world went. Don’t know how. But they led the animals away to a place where they could lay eggs in peace. Safe.”
“So a group of people who didn’t live here knew how to call these things?”
“Not all of them. Just one family. A sacred bloodline. The secret was passed from generation to generation, father to son. They came when it was time. Did the calls and left. The more people settled here, the less the callers came. Don’t think they come at all now.”
Mac was taking mental notes of the minute details. “When would you say was the last time a caller was here?”
“And where did they come from?” Frank added.
The old man refused to be pressured into quick answers. He smiled that rocking chair smile he was wearing when they first met him. “Far away is all we know. I always thought they were Norse but that was mostly because of how good they were at building boats and traveling across open sea. Centuries before anyone else thought to go out, these people would go wherever there
were people.”
“But there weren’t any people here then,” John said.
“Not then. Not yet. This was just a place to put in and take on fresh water and meat for the trip across to Australia. Then I think they went on to Africa and up north.”
John’s tone was sympathetic and kind. “So why the callers? I’m still not getting it.”
“Nature does strange things all the time. Look at the platypus. But every once in a while it does two things at the same time in the same place. Two things that weren’t supposed to happen. That’s when legends are born. These callers were world travelers. They even went to the Americas generations before Columbus was ever thought of. One of them, a small boy, was born mute. Couldn’t utter a word. Now if these people had been Spartan-like as a lot of people thought, he would have been killed for his imperfection. But these people were pillagers, thieves and marauders. You didn’t have to talk if you had a strong arm. He had every chance of growing up to be a mighty sailor so he was allowed to travel with them and learn.”
The team sat quietly and in sincere reverence as the sage spun his yarn in dramatic fashion. “One season they stopped on the south island. They’d come from Polynesia and were on their way around and put in for sea stores. The mute boy was up in the hills picking some fruit and got turned around. Couldn’t find his way or call out. These people waited as long as they cared and then pulled out. Just left the boy on this uninhabited island. That’s what we call an island that doesn’t have people on it—like we’re the only ones who count. They probably planned to pick him up next time through if he lived that long.”
“Did he live?” Mac asked.
“You’re such a dork,” Frank said. “Would he be telling us the story if he didn’t?”
“I might,” the old man said. “But he lived. He was already used to not talking to anyone so he didn’t go crazy like you or me would. He just ate and slept and waited for them to come back.”
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