She'd stopped walking, and I felt her eyes on me behind those twin mirrors.

'Even the primitive models could measure a magnetic field a billionth the strength of geomagnetic force; it's like pulling a whisper out of cheering stadium.'

'Cops can do that already, with parabolic microphones and lasers.'

'But your data's still secure.' Pride in profession. 'No government'll let their cops have Squids, not even the security heavies. Too much chance of interdepartmental funnies; they're too likely to Watergate you.'

'Navy stuff,' she said, and her grin gleamed in the shadows. 'Navy stuff. I got a friend down here that was in the navy, name's Jones. I think you'd better meet him. He's a junkie, though. So we'll have to take him something.'

'A junkie?'

'A dolphin.'

He was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin's point of view he might have seemed like something less. I watched him swirling sluggishly in his galvanized tank. Water stopped over the side, wetting my shoes.

He was surplus from the last war. A cyborg.

He raised out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides, a kind of visual pun, his grace nearly lost under articulated armor, clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on either side of his skull had been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on exposed sections of his gray-white hide.

Molly whistled. Jones thrashed his tail, and more water cascaded down the side of the tank.

'What is this place?' I peered at vague shapes in the dark, rusting chain link and things under tarps. Above the tank hung a clumsy wooden framework, crossed and re-crossed by rows of dusty Christmas lights.'Funland. Zoo and carnival rides. "talk with the War Whale." All that.

Some whale Jones is...'

Jones reared again and fixed me with a sad and ancient eye.

'How's he talk?' Suddenly I was anxious to go.

'That's the catch. Say "Hi," Jones.'