Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings by Christopher Moore Page A

huge Maalaea Bay and overlooking the ruins of an ancient saltwater fish pond — his first reaction is usually "Hey, not much of a sanctuary. You could get maybe three whales in those buildings, tops." Soon, however, he realizes that these buildings are simply the offices and visitor centers. The sanctuary itself covers the channels that run from Molokai to the Big Island of Hawaii, between Maui, Lanai, and Kahoolawe, as well as the north shores of Oahu and Kauai, in which there is plenty of room for a whole bunch of whales, which is why they are kept there.
    There were about a hundred people milling around outside the lecture hall when Nate and Amy pulled into the parking lot in the pickup.
    "Looks like a good turnout?" Amy said. She'd attended only one of the sanctuary's weekly lectures, and that one had been given by Gilbert Box, an ill-tempered biologist doing survey work under a grant for the International Whaling Commission, who droned through numbers and graphs until the ten people in attendance would have killed a whale themselves just to shut him up.
    "It's about average for us. Behavior always draws more than survey. We're the sexy ones," Nate said with a grin.
    Amy snorted. "Oh, yeah, you guys are the Mae Wests of the nerd world."
    "We're action nerds," Nate said. "Adventure nerds. Nerds of romance."
    "Nerds," Amy said.
    Nate could see the skeletal Gilbert Box standing off to the side of the crowd under a straw hat whose brim was so wide it could have afforded shade for three additional people and behind a pair of enormous wraparound sunglasses suitable for welding or as a shield from nuclear flash. His gaunt face was still smeared with residue of the white zinc oxide he used for sun protection when out on the water. He wore a long-sleeved khaki shirt and trousers and leaned on a white sun umbrella that he was never seen without. It was a half hour before sunset, a warm breeze was coming off Maalaea Bay, and Gilbert Box looked like Death out for his after-dinner stroll before a busy night of e-mailing heart attacks and tumors to a few million lucky winners.
    Nate had given Box the nickname "the Count," after the
Sesame Street
vampire with the obsessive-compulsive need to count things. (Nate had been too old for
Sesame Street
as a preschooler, but he'd watched it through grade ten while baby-sitting his younger brother, Sam.) People agreed that the Count was the perfect name for a survey guy with an aversion to water and sunlight, and the name had caught on even outside Nate and Clay's immediate sphere of influence.
    Panic rattled up Nate's spine. "They're going to know we're faking it. The Count will call us on it the first time I say something that we don't have the data to back up."
    "How's he going to know? You had the data a week ago. Besides, what's this 'we'? I'm just running the projector."
    "Thanks."
    "There's Tarwater," Amy said. "Who are those women he's talking to?"
    "Probably just some whale huggers," Nate said, pretending that all of his mental faculties were required for him to squeeze the pickup into the four adjacent empty parking spaces. The women Tarwater was talking to were Margaret Painborne, Ph.D., and Elizabeth «Libby» Quinn, Ph.D. They worked together with a couple of very butch young women studying cow/calf behavior and social vocalizations. They were doing good work, Nate thought, even if it appeared to have a gender-based agenda. Margaret was in her late forties, short and round, with long gray hair that she kept perpetually tied back in a braid. Libby was almost a decade younger, long-legged and lean, blond hair going gray, cut short, and she had once, not too long ago, been Nathan Quinn's third wife. A second and totally different wave of anxiety swept over Quinn. This was the first time he'd encountered Libby since Amy joined the team.
    "They don't look like whale huggers," Amy said. "They look like researchers."
    "How is that?"
    "They look like action nerds." Amy snorted again and