Marty had never known what to make of Pip’s Salvation Army fashion. Nevertheless, he didn’t give it much thought anymore. The idiosyncratic clothing had come to embody her in the two and a half years they’d been acquainted—and in his mind she would be somehow diminished without it.

What mattered most to Marty, of course, was that Pip was a sonar technician bar none. The day she first showed up at the Oannes, unannounced, and told him she was replying to the help wanted ad he’d posted on a number of online job forums, he’d explained the spot was filled (this was not an excuse because she’d looked like she’d spent the night in a trash can; he had actually hired a Colombo University graduate student two weeks prior). Yet Pip persisted, bragging that she was the best sonar technician in the city, and she’d work the first week pro bono to prove it. Although being skeptical, Marty agreed to give her a trial run, as the grad student had taken off the week to study for an upcoming exam.

That week, Pip worked every day from dawn until dusk, chipping away at the massive amount of acoustic data he’d compiled during his research trips along the island-nation’s west coast—and proved that her boast of being the best sonar technician around wasn’t hyperbolic.

“Wishful thinking?” he said to her, removing the pipe from his mouth.

“That is right,” she replied in French-accented English. “If you are not glued to a computer screen analyzing your sonar readouts, Marty, you are standing out here daydreaming about catching mermaids.”

“In fact, I wasn’t thinking about anything.”

“I cannot believe that. People are always thinking of something, yes? You are not a rock.”

“Thank you for pointing that out, Pip. Tell me then. What are you thinking about right at this moment?”

“I just told you. I am thinking that you are thinking about catching mermaids. But what I think you mean is, what was I thinking about before that? I will tell you. I was thinking about clownfish.”

“Clownfish?” he said, amused.

“I watched a Disney movie last night, the one with the clownfish. It reminded me of a paper I wrote when I was a university student. My thesis questioned why some marine animals such as clownfish forgo their own reproduction to help others in their society reproduce. Very strange, yes?”

“Any ideas?”

“Of course. Do you think I wrote a paper without answering my thesis? I posited that the largest nonbreeder from an anemone inherited the territory when a dominant breeder died and left a breeding vacancy. Thus it assumes its own breeding role and contributes genetically to the next generation of clownfish.”

“And what about the smaller nonbreeders from the anemone, or even nonbreeders from elsewhere? They simply cede this territory?”

“That is right.”

Marty shook his head. “Sorry, Pip. You get a B for effort, but that’s all. Ask any behavior ecologist and they’ll tell you that nothing in the animal kingdom waits to inherit a breeding position. They contest it immediately. The guy gets the girl, the loser skulks off into the bush. It’s why we have a little something called natural selection, not future selection.”