"Christopher Moore - Fluke" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore Christopher)

FLUKE
OR, I KNOW WHY THE WINGED WHALE SINGS
by CHRISTOPHER MOORE (2003)


[VERSION 1.1 (Aug 02 03). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version number
by 0.1 and redistribute.]


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.
Below, the whale sang on, the boat vibrated with each note. The stainless rail at the bow began to
buzz. Nate could feel the deeper notes resonate in his rib cage. The whale was into a section of the song
they called the "green" themes, a long series of whoops that sounded like an ambulance driving through