“I am glad you were not my professor, Marty, because he liked my thesis. He gave me an A.” She flicked a wave as she started down the gangway to the pier. “See you tomorrow.”
“See you, Pip.”
Clamping the stem of his pipe back between his teeth, Marty entered the ship’s salon through a set of bi-folding doors. When he’d decided to call the Oannes his permanent home, he’d wanted a living area that felt homey, so he’d decorated the previously spartan salon—the main social cabin of a boat—with teak joinery and luxury textiles, plum velvet, button-tufted leather, Art Deco mahogany furniture, and objets d’art from around the world. He liked to believe the finished product was a Neo Baroque masterpiece reminiscent of gentlemen’s yachts from the 1930s (though Pip always complained it felt like a room lifted from The Addams Family home).
The renovations had cost a small fortune, but money had never been an issue for him. His grandfather had been a successful treasure hunter known for discovering several famous shipwrecks. Old Alfred Murdoch hit the motherlode in 1981 when he located the wreckage of the RSS Republic, a steam-powered ocean liner that was lost off Nantucket in 1909. He successfully salvaged US gold Double Eagles and other valuables from the ship’s rotting holds—appraised to be worth close to half a billion dollars at the time.
When Alfred died in 1983, the fortune was divided amongst his widow and three children, one of whom was Marty’s father. As a child Marty was cosseted in luxury, splitting his time between a Georgian mansion in the heart of London and an even grander riverside estate in Oxfordshire. He attended one of the most prestigious private schools in the country, and the University of Cambridge after that, where he earned an undergraduate degree in marine biology and a doctorate in zoology. Thanks to a thirty-million trust fund he’d received on his twenty-fifth birthday, he was able to privately fund field research expeditions around the world, gaining a reputation as a foremost expert on ecology and conservation.
By his mid-thirties he became fascinated by a little-known hypothesis called the aquatic ape theory. First proposed by a marine biologist named Alister Hardy in 1960, the theory posited that about ten million years ago a branch of primitive ape-stock was forced by competition from the forests to the shallow waters off the coast of Africa to hunt for food, and these semi-aquatic apes became the ancestors of Homo sapiens. The idea stemmed from the fact that modern humans had several aquatic adaptations not found in other great apes. A lack of body hair. A layer of subcutaneous fat. The location of the trachea in the throat rather than the nasal cavity, as well as the overall regression of the olfactory organ. The propensity for front-facing copulation. Tears and eccrine sweating. Webbed fingers. The theory went so far as to argue that bipedalism evolved as an aid to wading through water, and that the use of tools evolved from using rocks to crack open shellfish and sea urchins.