He pointed. "There . . ." and then he frowned slightly. "No, I don"t see them any more, either. I thought they might do this."
Sure enough, the report soon confirmed the truth.
"Reporting again, sir. The pod is sounding."
"All of them? Calves included?"
"It shows here," the crewman said. Hwoshien did not reply, continued to stare over the bow, his back as straight as an iron bar and his stare as cold.
"Well, they can"t stay down for much more than twenty minutes," Cora murmured. "Not with calves."
She turned and surrept.i.tiously eyed Mataroreva. The big man was tense, obvious worry creasing his usually rotund, jovial face.
"They"ll come up a d.a.m.nsight sooner than that, once they"ve decided we"re not going to leave them alone."
He"s worried, she thought. Worried but not fright- ened. Never frightened. Morally innocent, but an ad-
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mirable man nonetheless. One of the few. She might be just the one to cure him.
Wenkoseemansa was back paralleling the ship, leaping to confirm what the sonarizer had already re- ported.
"Why bother to sound?" Cora wondered. "Surely they know we"re aware of their location. They can"t lose us."
"Could be several reasons." Mataroreva studied the horizon. "They might be showing their displeasure and just incidentally giving us the chance to change our course-and our minds. Or they might not care one way or the other, since we haven"t actually disturbed their activities with our presence yet. It might be a normal feeding dive." Now he smiled slightly. "It would be just like them to surface all around us and ignore our presence entirely, not to mention our ques- tions."
Minutes later the helmsman reported, with admir- able calm, "We"re right over them, sir."
"Hold just aft of the pod, as near as you can."
"Yes, sir."
The suprafoil slowed. They cruised just behind their submerged quarry for another fifteen minutes before detection reported again. "They"re coming up, sir."
"Good," Hwoshien said into the nearby corn. "Keep us posted, please."
"Still rising." A pause, then, "Shouldn"t we move a little farther aft of them, sir?"
"No. Hold your position and speed."
"Changing course, sir-they"re going to come up all around us." Still no panic in the crewman"s voice, though the words poured out a bit hastily, Cora thought. Impa.s.sive, Hwoshien said nothing, continued to stare interestedly over the bow.
"Twenty meters. Fifteen." The engine raced.
"Hold your position," Hwoshien ordered firmly.
"Show them we"re not concerned. They know they"re
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not surprising us. Don"t show them otherwise. Besides,"
he told Cora, "it"s too late to do anything anyway."
"Five . . . four . . ." the technician counted down.
"Three... two ..."
Calm sea, tolerant sun, a few white clouds con- versing in a sky as blue as a blade of azurite, made up the momentary universe. Then it was filled with a sight few humans had ever been privileged to witness.
With intelligence had come more than thought. It brought with it an aesthetic sense, coupled with a unique unity of purpose. The entire pod, some two or three hundred adult, adolescent, and juvenile ceta- ceans, breached simultaneously. One moment the sea was calm and the air deserted. The next, it was filled with two hundred thousand tons and more of gray- brown flesh.
The pod hung suspended in the air for a second no onlooker would ever lose track of, before falling con- vulsively back into the sea. Wet thunder shook the somnolent sky. The displacement of air was enough to knock everyone off his feet. Only the fact that the pod was now evenly distributed around the ship kept it from being capsized. Still, all the silent efforts of automatic stabilizers and gyroscopic compensators were required to hold the suprafoil level on the surface.
Everyone knew that had the catodons so chosen, several of them could have landed precisely on the ship itself. The vessel would have vanished beneath the sea, to rise in thousands of fragments minutes later.
Instead, it was the pod that rose, like several hundred gigantic corks, to dot the surface with dozens of tem- porary islands. They did not remain, but cruised stead- ily on their unchanged course. The helmsman jockeyed constantly, trying to avoid ramming the whale immedi- ately ahead without being overrun by the ones just behind.
A new sound filled the air, dozens of explosive whooshes and pops as the pod flushed the built-up
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carbon dioxide from its lungs. An organic fog momen- tarily obliterated the sky above the patch of disturbed ocean, until the gentle breeze dissipated it forever.
Hwoshien said into the corn unit, without any change of tone, "Easy ahead, helmsman. You"re doing fine. Don"t screw up." He appeared completely un- affected by the t.i.tanic display of power and unity they had just been treated to.
Vast, sliding bulks hemmed the ship in. The major- ity of them were larger than the foil.
Mataroreva still looked worried. "What"s the matter?"
Cora asked.
"I know what you"re thinking, but it"s not the catodons now. I don"t see Latehoht or Wenkoseemansa or any of the orcas."
"They said they wouldn"t interfere. I expect Kinehahtoh and the rest of the pack accepted Hwoshien"s offer to stay out of this."
"I know, but still, Latehoht and her mate . . ." His voice trailed away. A surprise, she mused. For all his railing about the cetaceans" different method of think- ing, he still half hoped his two friends might have chosen to stay with him instead of with their kind.
Cora found her thoughts turning more to the minds of the catodons than to Sam"s. What was their state of mind now? If she could see inside those ma.s.sive brains, what peculiar, alien concepts would she share?
As yet they might not know that she and Sam and those who had intruded on them before were once more among them. Hwoshien"s ship was larger than the little research vessel that had originally carried them out from Mou"anui. How irritable would they be?
More importantly, how intractable when it came time to ask what had to be asked?
Mataroreva slipped down his translator unit. "Time to talk, before they make up their minds to do any- thing."
Cora adjusted her own, as did Hwoshien and Dawn.
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CACHALOT.
CACHALOT.
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