Night of Whales
by Michael Barley
Part 1 apppears in this issue.
conclusion
“Anyone else?”
“Nothing except a seaplane or two holed up in Adak.”
“No response about that plane we heard... vanish?”
“Nothing. It’s like it didn’t happen.”
“What’s going on?”
“Listen, if I were a psychic, I might know.”
“You think it’s real? The wave, I mean?”
“Look at those whales...”
“Not some naval exercise?”
“Doesn’t make sense, Karl.”
“Maybe I’m going crazy, and this is all a dream...”
“I didn’t want to say anything...”
“Yeah. Probably that way.”
“I want you up here in a few minutes. We’re going to tie ourselves together.”
“God. Try kinky!”
“I figure we’ll have a better chance that way if the boat does go down. We won’t get separated. And you’re a strong swimmer.”
“That water’s almost freezing. How long do you think we’d last?”
“With the suits on... Maybe a few hours? Better than going down with the ship.”
“I thought you said she’d bob around like a cork.”
“I know what I said. And we’re sure as hell going to try and get through this. But, just in case...”
The whales disappeared as quickly as they’d come. We hadn’t seen anything swimming or flying for almost an hour.
Like a broken pearl, the moon hung above the horizon to the southeast. The sea was a sheet of rippling obsidian.
We saw half a dozen satellites pass overhead, and a single jet cut its silent northward swath thirty thousand feet above us, perhaps the Air Force doing some sort of recon.
Sheila wanted me on the bridge with her, but for a few moments more I just needed to be alone outside. Alone with the night.
Facing death; I’d always avoided thinking on it. Now, it was too late to think.
The worst thing I could imagine was having some sort of terminal illness where the people you cared for did in fact have time to contemplate. We had a only few hours, and it wasn’t getting easier.
But even then, it didn’t sink in. We couldn’t ignore it but, at the same time, it wasn’t something we could grasp with any firmness. Like the idea of God I suppose. We may think we know God but we really can’t.
Or our own minds, for that matter. What did I want to be when I grew up? I never did know. I still don’t.
And I’d never known how to pray.
Sheila wrestled with it in her own fashion, a certain desperation only half-hidden by her cavalier attitude. She had wanted us to make love, I thought only to lose herself in the closeness, the heat of our entwined flesh. While the Rommek slid silently over long, dark swells of the North Pacific, she and I rutted, trying to cheat death of its final moment.
It didn’t occur to me to think of her being so vulnerable until much later. I mean, she’s always so much in control.
I’d known Sheila Ellis for about six years and had been her second-in-command for five.
I’d wanted to be a writer, not a fisherman, but writers don’t make much of a living, so I’d gone to sea and found I enjoyed it. And so far, I’d never had much to write about, at least nothing that someone else hadn’t done already, usually a lot better than I thought I could.
Steinbeck was always my favourite. So when we were up in the bridge hooking ourselves together with a nylon life-line, I was nervously chattering about the woman in Grapes of Wrath who gave her milk to a starving man.
“Comfort in his hour of need,” she said.
“It’s always the women who have to give.”
“Men give what they can, in their own way.”
“Except men like Madison, Walsh, Deering.”
“They were afraid.”
“So am I.”
“You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t.”
“You seem to be... okay?”
“I’m just very glad you’re here, Karl .”
“I can’t imagine it all... ending.”
“It’s not going to end.”
“Right.”
She must have thought I said “write.”
“Write about today,” she told me.
“Yeah. If we make it. If we do, I’m getting out.”
“The hell you are,” she answered.
“You like it that much out here?”
“Nowhere else for me. I’ve been on the sea ever since I was a kid. Used to fish with my father and uncle.”
“What happened to your father? You never say much.”
“What’s left of his boat is somewhere on the bottom of the Grand Banks. The Rommek I. Him along with it.”
“How...?”
“A storm. Years ago.”
“So you want to die out here as well?”
“God, you’re morbid! I don’t know why I keep you around.”
“You’re a sex fiend.”
“And you aren’t?”
“I thought it was in the job description. Keep the Captain happy. Rise to the occasion whenever—”
“Listen...”
A faint noise came from the north. It was like the quiet roar of blood inside your head when your ears are plugged, but loud enough that we could hear it over the throb of the engines.
“My God. It’s... here.”
“We’re going to have to watch the rudder. Make damn sure we don’t swing sideways.”
“I know, I know. You hooked onto me?”
“I’m hooked on you.”
“If we have to make it through that door—”
“Worry about that when it’s time.”
“After this, maybe we can settle down on land and have kids?”
“You mean that?”
“Absolutely, Cap’n. Absolutely.”
She kisses me on the cheek. “We’ll talk about that later. Now, watch the wheel. I’ll keep the engines in sync.”
We can’t see anything yet, but the noise is getting louder. I think of locomotives, the old-fashioned kind that used to thunder out of the night belching thick black smoke, beckoning with those incredibly gut-wrenching whistles. This is a hundred trains rushing out of the darkness, but at the same time it’s not really like that. There is an overtone of steam escaping from giant valves, but the fundamental note is a million tons of falling water.
Without warning, the Rommek drops into a steep-sided valley and lurches up over the first crest. Then it’s down again into a fifty-foot rift in the blackness.
“Hold it steady! Hold it steady!” she screams in my ear as we rise up again, this time a good eighty or ninety feet on the face of a rolling mountain.
“O.K. That’s it! Keep dead on! Don’t lose it...”
Then it’s down once more, and the bottom drops out of my stomach, down into blackness, a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet and, just as suddenly, up again, up, and riding over the top of the monstrous wave that goes on forever.
“This time! This time!”
“This time what, for Christ’s sake?”
“Watch out!”
And down. Down a roller coaster that has no bottom. The ship is in free fall. Loose papers fly about the bridge like crazed gulls.
“Christ! Hang onto me!”
The bottom is two hundred feet down at least, or a mile. When we hit, it’s like an explosion.
The lights go out, and all we can see is the mass of water towering in front of us and lumps of something white hurtling past on either side.
And miraculously, we are rising again, still afloat, still heading into the wall. She grabs me from behind, screaming something about ice into the back of my neck. We come up over the top of the wave, and there is a brief glimpse of moonlight reflected from whiteness.
The Grand Canyon gapes before us, and on the other side...
“Christ All Mighty...”
“I love you, sailor. I bloody love you.”
We slide down the long smooth swell in a rush of gravity and inertia, helpless as a cork in a waterfall. And hell rushes up at us, drawing the Rommek into its invisible folds, its churning surface. We must be down at least a hundred feet, the sides of the trough rising about us like steep, dark glass. The wheel spins itself around in my hands as the boat shudders to starboard. Sheila guns the port engine, and I strain against the wrenching pull of steel cables, fighting to control our heading. Gradually, the pressure eases, and we turn back to the center of the cliff that is now pouring itself across our bows.
The Rommek tips sternward at a thirty-degree angle but, instead of sliding backwards, we are carried by the wave as it rises beneath us. Up, up and up... this is what Sheila tried to explain to me, what I wouldn’t believe could be possible: right up, over the edge, bracing ourselves for the next Niagara...
She clutches me so tightly I can’t breathe. “The engines!” I yell. “The throttles! Don’t let go!” As we begin to level out, I push her away from me, toward the control console.
For a moment the ship steadies herself as we reach the peak. There is no breaking crest, just a flattened curve, and suddenly the sea has changed colour. White and green foam with wide patches of broken ice swirl around us, crashing past the hull with a gurgling roar.
Then nightmare takes us as something slams into the port bow, a lump of solid ice, turning us sideways so fast that I lose my balance. The nylon chord hauls me back across the metal deck, Sheila pulling at it, shouting at me to grab the wheel. The bow is pointing up when it should be down, and I realize we’ve come about, a complete turn, and we’re dropping backwards into the next chasm.
“Turn us! Turn Us!” she howls, but there is no way I can. There’s water everywhere, pouring through a missing window, and the Rommek begins a roll to port...
Then, it’s her at the wheel, grabbing at the metal spokes, cranking them around as if they weigh nothing. I wonder if the cables have snapped; no one could turn the wheel that fast. Yet she does, and when I get up behind her, trying to help, there’s no way I can get between her and the steering assembly. Instead, I take the throttles, revving the port engine, and slowly we begin to come back. We are sideways to the wall of water that is about to descend on us and finally I learn how to pray.
“Karl! Karl! The wheel!”
We roll to starboard, rising into blackness. The floor is too steep to stand on. We both hang on the wheel, pulling it left, leaning to port as if somehow that will make the difference between capsizing and not. Knee-deep water surges out the wheelhouse door, falling away to the right of the ship, disappearing over the side. Gradually we seem to come level again as if we have unloaded an unbalanced hold.
The drop down the backside of the last swell is far easier, almost gentle, only half the height of the previous one. The trailing waves are smaller, and there’s only a slight tugging to one side or the other. We get back onto our direct bearing and then it becomes much like any other storm on the open ocean.
Steady the engines, carefully. It’s okay to be ecstatic; we’re alive!
Half-dazed, I turn to find Sheila, but I can’t see her in the darkness. She clutches herself so tightly to my waist it takes me a few moments to realize it’s her and not some part of a bulkhead that’s welded itself to me. And when I remember to breathe, I feel the pain of cracked ribs and what later turns out to be a fractured wrist bone.
I can’t tell if she’s sobbing or laughing. I wait as long as I can before I try to disentangle us.
“Did you mean what you said back there, sailor?”
“What did I say?”
“Something about kids. And settling down.”
“I meant the weather. I said I hoped it was settling down.”
“Sure you did!”
“So what about this? Are we still on the same planet?”
“God only knows. It looks as if the wave was carrying a lot of ice with it. Broken chunks for the most part. I thought we were going to be smashed to pieces by the stuff, not by the wave.”
“So where has it all come from?”
“The Arctic. It’s covered in ice as you may recall.”
“Enough of it floating around here to cover an ocean.”
“That’s it! My God, yes!”
“What?”
“The ice! It’s broken up! That’s what’s going on! The ice cap has broken up!”
“How could it happen without any warning?”
“Like a frozen lake in the spring! When the thaw comes, it’s very quick.The ice on a lake can break up in an hour or rwo.”
“You think the ice cap has...”
“I know it! Let’s try getting the radio back on.” Our lights and some of the auxiliaries had gone down as we rode the waves.
“So the whales all knew?”
“And the fish! And the birds! All of them!”
“But not us!”
“With all our sonar and radar and satellite photographs! And no one knew.”
“How could the whales have known? Before it happened?”
“Some sort of telepathy? Shock waves? Who knows? Maybe there was a quake under the sea that set it off. That must be it. Sound travels much faster in water than air.”
“But it’s... it’s more than a thousand miles away.”
“Somehow they all knew. And it scared them.”
“So they all turned south... I suppose it’s possible.”
“Damn right it’s possible.”
“There must be some way of finding out.”
“I can’t get a thing on this radio.”
“The ride must have jarred something.”
“There’s spare parts stashed in the hold.”
“We’ll dig them out tomorrow. In the meantime, what about a new heading, Captain?”
“I think so, sailor. Let’s follow that wave. And we’d better get this ship back in order.”
Reprieve? Another chance? Things change so quickly. One minute life is going on all around us, just as it always has. Status quo.
And then, like the Rommek, it gets whirled completely around.
There is a very real process of... of preciousness, of finding out what is important, what isn’t.
On the way back we have a lot to talk about, Sheila and I. She isn’t half bad in the understanding department. And she says as much of me, which I don’t understand at all.
Six months later we’ve repaired the damage, and we’re back out on the Pacific again, the monster tsunami behind us in memory.
The west coast had been swamped by the waves. There was very little left of most of the unprotected harbors around the North Pacific, but we managed to find a working marina on the inside passage near Seattle. But its effect is still very much with us.
Sheila was right for the most part. A massive earthquake centered on the ocean floor near the North Pole, an upsurge of bedrock and seawater, and the northern ice cap became a thing of memory. There are small areas of ice left clinging to some of the islands north of Labrador, and there’s still a lot of ice left on the Greenland plateau, but the scientists say it’ll be gone for good in a few years, maybe less.
Nothing was ever found of Madison or the others. Even if they had made it into Whitlock, the island’s naval station was wiped out, scoured from the face of the earth. There was no trace that any human habitation had existed on the island according to stories coming from our Coast Guard friends.
* * *
Sheila is very pregnant. It was from the night of the whales. She wanders around the deck of the Rommek II, her stomach hitched into her overalls, looking just like one of those humpbacks when they come up out of the water, almost standing on their tails before they drop back sideways in a slow breach.
I tried talking her into staying ashore this time, but there’s no way she listens to me. After all, she’s the boss.
And, apart from the whales, she’s the most beautiful creature I’ve ever laid eyes on.
Copyright © 2025 by Michael Barley
