"Well, that's unprofessional," Clay said.

Amy broke the kiss and whispered, "You go. Take that with you." She patted his pocket. Then she turned to Clay as she checked her watch again. "You're late!"

"Hey, missy, I set a time when I'd be at the coordinates you sent — six hundred and twenty-three feet below sea level — and I was there. You didn't mention that I had another mile of submarine cave with some of the scariest-looking rock formations I've ever seen." He glanced at Nate. "They looked alive."

"They are alive," Amy said.

"Are we close to the surface? The pressure is —»

"I'll explain on the way," Nate said. "We'd better go." Nate stepped onto the sub as Clay slipped down inside the hatch to allow him to pass. Nate crawled into the hatch and looked back to Amy before he closed it.

"I'll stay, Amy. I don't care. For you I'll stay. I love you. You know that, right?"

She nodded and brushed tears out of her eyes. "Yeah," she said, Then she spun around quickly and started walking away. "You take care of yourself, Nathan Quinn," she shouted over her shoulder, and Nate heard her voice break when she said his name.

He climbed down into the sub and secured the hatch above him.

Clay had watched Amy walk away from the big, half-submerged Plexiglas bubble in the front of the sub.

"Where's Amy going?"

"She can't come home, Clay."

"She's okay, though?"

"She's okay."

"You okay?"

"I've been better."

They were quiet for the long ride through the pressure locks to the outside ocean, just the sound of the electric motors and the low hum of instruments all around them. The lights of the sub barely reached out to the walls of the cave, but every hundred yards or so they would come to a large, pink disk of living tissue, like a giant sea anemone, which would fold back to let them pass, then expand to fill the passageway once they had gone through. Nate watched the pressure gauge rise one atmosphere every time they passed through one of the gates, and it was then that he realized he wasn't escaping at all. The Goo knew exactly where and what they were, and it was letting him go.

"You're going to explain what all this is, right?" Clay said, not even looking away from the controls.

Nate was startled out of his reverie. "Clay, I can't believe — I mean, I believe it, but — Thanks for coming to get me."

"I never told you, you know — it's not really appropriate or anything — but I have pretty strong feelings about loyalty."

"Well, I respect that, Clay, and I appreciate it."

"Yeah, well, don't mention it."

Then they were both a bit embarrassed and both pretended that something was irritating their throats and they had to cough and pay attention to their breathing for a while, even though the air in the little submarine was filtered and humidified and perfectly clean.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Pirates

Nate was standing with Clay on the flying bridge of the Clair as she steamed into the Au'au Channel.

"You'd better put on some sunscreen, Nate."

Nate looked down at his forearms. He'd lost most of his color while in Gooville, and he could feel the sun cooking him, even through his T-shirt.

"Yeah." He looked off toward Lahaina, the harbor he'd piloted into a thousand times. They'd have to anchor far outside the breakwater with a ship this size, but it still had the feeling of coming home. The wind was warm and sweet, the water the heartbreak blue of a newborn's eyes. A humpback fluked about eight hundred yards to the north of them, its tail glistening in the sun as if it were covered with sequins.

"There's still a month left of the season," Clay said. "We can still get some work done."

"Clay, I've been thinking. Maybe we can be a little more purposeful in what we're doing. Maybe a little more active, conservation-wise."

"I could go for that. I like whales."

"I mean, we have the resources now, and even if I could prove the meaning of the song — somehow decipher the vocabulary of it — I could never prove the purpose. You know, without compromising Gooville."

"Not a good idea." During the trip home Nate had explained it all.

"I mean, there's no reason we can't do good science and still, you know —»

"Kick some ass."

"Well, yeah."

Clay affected an exaggerated Greek accent. "Sometimes, boss, you just got to unbuckle your pants and go looking for trouble."

"Zorba?"

"Yeah." Clay grinned.

"Great book," Nate said. "Is that the Always Confused?"

Clay pulled up a pair of binoculars and focused on a speedboat that was rounding the Lahaina breakwater, showing more wake than she should in the harbor. Kona was driving the Always Confused.

"My boat," Clay said, somewhat distressed.

"You need to get over that, Clay."

The speedboat came around to a parallel course with the Clair as the ship cut her engines in preparation to drop anchor. Kona was waving and screaming like a madman. "Irie, Bwana Nate! Irie! The lion come home! Praise Jah's mercy. Irie!"

Nate came down the steps from the flying bridge to the deck. Whatever resentment he might have had for the surfer at one time was gone. Whatever threat he might have felt from the boy had melted away. Whatever irrelevancy Kona's youth and strength might have underscored in his own character was irrelevant. Maybe it was time to be an example instead of a competitor. Besides, he was genuinely glad to see the kid. "Hey, kid, how you doing?"

"Jammin' now, don't you know."

"That's good. How'd you like to go be a pirate?"

Because the Navy didn't maintain permanent offices on Maui, Captain L. J. Tarwater had been given a small office that the navy sublet for him in the Coast Guard building, which meant that, unlike on a naval base, here the public could pretty much come and go as they wished. So Tarwater wasn't that surprised to see someone come strolling through his office door. What he was surprised by was that it was Nathan Quinn, whom he thought quite drowned, and who was carrying a four-gallon glass jar full of some clear liquid.

"Quinn, I thought you were lost at sea."

"I was. I'm found now. We need to have a chat." He set the jar on Tarwater's desk, leaving a wet ring on some papers there, then went back and shut the door to the outer offices.

"Look, Quinn, if this is some kind of stunt, like spray-painting fur, you're wasting your time. You guys act like the military is the great Satan. I'm here to study these animals. I grew up in the same generation you did, and so did most of the people in the navy who do what I do. We don't want to hurt these animals."

"Okay," Nate said. "We only have two things to talk about here. Then I'll show you something."

"What's in the jar? That better not be kerosene or anything."

"It's seawater. I got it at the beach about ten minutes ago. Don't worry about it. Look, first you're going to finish your study and you're going to strongly recommend that the navy's torpedo range not be moved into the sanctuary. You will not let that happen. The animals do dive to depths where they can be hurt by the explosions, and they will be hurt by the explosions, which you'll be setting off not to defend the country but just so you guys can practice."

"There's no evidence that they ever dive deeper than two hundred feet."

"There will be. I've got data tags coming in from the mainland, I'll have data in a month."

"Still…"

"Shut up," Nate said, then thought better of it and added, "Please." Then he continued. "Second, you need to do everything in your power to back off of testing low-frequency active sonar. We know that it kills deepwater hunters like beaked whales, and there's probably some chance that it also injures the humpbacks, and under no circumstances do you want to do that."