Following the whalers came the missionaries, the sugar farmers, the Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and Portuguese who all worked the sugar plantations, and Mark Twain. Mark Twain went home. Everyone else stayed. In the meantime, King Kamehameha I united the islands through the clever application of firearms against wooden spears and moved Hawaii's capital to Lahaina. Sometime after that Amy came cruising into the Lahaina harbor at the wheel of a twenty-three-foot Mako speedboat with a tall, stunned-looking Ph.D. sprawled across the bow seat.

The radio chirped. Amy picked it up and keyed the mike. "Go ahead, Clay."

"Something wrong?" Clay Demodocus was obviously in the harbor and could see them coming in. It wasn't even eight in the morning. He was probably still preparing his boat to go out.

"I'm not sure. Nate just decided to call it a day. I'll ask him why." To Nate she said, "Clay wants to know why."

"Anomalous data," Nate said.

"Anomalous data," Amy repeated into the radio.

There was a pause. Then Clay said, "Uh, right, understood. That stuff gets into everything."

The harbor at Lahaina is not large. Only a hundred or so vessels can dock behind her breakwater. Most are sizable, fifty- to seventy-foot cruisers and catamarans, boats full of sunscreen-basted tourists out on the water for anything from dinner cruises to sport fishing to snorkeling at the half-sunken crater of Molokini to, of course, whale watching. Jet-skiing, parasailing, and waterskiing were all banned from December until April, while the humpbacks were in these waters, so many of the smaller boats that would normally be used to terrorize marine life in the name of recreation were leased by whale researchers for the season. On any given winter morning down at the harbor at Lahaina, you couldn't throw a coconut without conking a Ph.D. in cetacean biology (and you stood a good chance of winging two Masters of Science working on dissertations with the rebound).