Fluke or I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings - By Christopher Moore Page 0,116

of Samoa and did his best to drink off that beer while balancing the other two that he'd opened to get the caps.

"So the Clair can probably be in Chuuk in three days. I'll fly in and meet them, pick up the sub, and then we can probably steam to these co-ordinates in four or five days if we cruise at top speed," Clay said. "Now we're here - »

"We can't be, we can't be there," said Kona.

"Why not?"

"Out of beers."

"So you get to that spot. Then what?" Clair asked. "Then I get in a submarine and see what there is to see six hundred and twenty-three feet down."

"So we're sure it's feet, not meters?"

"No. I'm not sure."

"Well, I just want you to know that I am not comfortable with you doing this sort of thing, Clay."

"But I've always done this sort of thing. I sort of do this sort of thing for a living."

"So what's your point?" Clair asked.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Black and White

and Red All Over

Once, off the coast of California, Nate had followed a pod of killer whales as they attacked a mother gray whale and her calf. They first approached in formation to separate the calf from the mother, and then, as one group broke from the pod to keep the mother busy, the others took turns leaping upon the calf's back to drown it - even as the mother thrashed her great tail and circled back, trying to protect her calf. The whole hunt had taken more than six hours, and when it ended, finally, the killer whales took turns hitting the exhausted calf, keeping in a perfect formation even as they ripped great chunks of flesh from its still-living body. Now, in the amphitheater, as the killer whaley boys approached - their teeth flashing, the breath from their blowholes puffing like steam engines - the biologist thought that he was probably experiencing exactly what that gray-whale calf had during that gruesome hunt. Except, of course, that Nate was wearing sneakers, and gray whales almost never did.

It was a big room. He had space to move. He just had to get around them. His sneakers squeaked on the floor as he came down the steps, faked right, then went left at a full sprint. The whaley boys, while amazingly agile in the water, were somewhat clumsy on land. Half of them fell for the fake so badly that they'd need a postcard to tell them how it all came out. They stooged into a whaley pile near the steps.

The remaining three pursuers tried to fan out into a new formation, the alpha female coming the closest to getting between Nate and the exit. Nate was running in a wide arc around the amphitheater now, and by virtue of sheer speed he could tell he'd beat at least two of the remaining killers, but the alpha female was going to intersect with him before he got clear. She probably weighed three times what he did, so there was no going though her with a vicious body check. Maybe if he'd been on skates, he'd have tried it: pit his pure, innate Canadian skating force against her paltry cetacean hunting instinct and drive that bitch to the mother of pearl. But there were no skates, no ice, so at the very last second, as the female was about to slam him in a bone-breaking crunch against one of the benches that lined the walls, Nate pulled a spin fake, a move that was much more Boitano than Gretzky but nevertheless sent the big female tumbling over a bench in a tangle of black-and-white and ivory - like a flaccid piano botching the vaulting horse. Nate high-stepped the last twenty yards to the door, thinking, Yeah, three million years of walking upright not for nothing. Rookie. Meat.

About the third step into his jubilation, Nate heard the sound of a great expulsion of air from his right, then a wet splat. Suddenly he saw his sneakers waving before his face. He felt the freedom of weightlessness, the exhilaration of flight, and then it was all gone as he slammed to the floor, knocking the wind out of himself. He slid to a stop in the huge loogie of whale spit that one of the trailing males had expectorated at his feet. Had he been able to breathe, he might have called a foul, but instead he struggled to get to his feet