Fluke,
Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings
by Christopher Moore
For Jim Darling, Flip Nicklin,
and Meagan Jones:
extraordinary people who do
extraordinary work
Fluke (flook) 1. A stroke of good luck
2. A chance occurrence; an accident
3. A barb or barbed head, as on a harpoon
4. Either of the two horizontally flattened divisions of the tail of a whale
PART ONE
The Song
An ocean without its
unnamed monsters would be like a
completely dreamless sleep.
— JOHN STEINBECK
The scientific method is nothing
more than a system of rules to keep us
from lying to each other.
— KEN NORRIS
CHAPTER ONE
Big and Wet
Next Question?
Amy called the whale punkin.
He was fifty feet long, wider than a city bus, and weighed eighty thousand pounds. One well-placed slap of his great tail would reduce the boat to fiberglass splinters and its occupants to red stains drifting in the blue Hawaiian waters. Amy leaned over the side of the boat and lowered the hydrophone down on the whale. "Good morning, punkin," she said.
Nathan Quinn shook his head and tried not to upchuck from the cuteness of it, of her, while surreptitiously sneaking a look at her bottom and feeling a little sleazy about it. Science can be complex. Nate was a scientist. Amy was a scientist, too, but she looked fantastic in a pair of khaki hiking shorts, scientifically speaking.