Without looking up, he said, “Did this skull come from inside the shark?”
“Indeed it did.”
Rad said, “What’s wrong with its forehead?”
Jacky said, “Ask Marty what he thinks.”
Rad looked at him. “Marty?”
He finally pulled his eyes away from the small screen. He blinked, stunned.
Can this be what I think it is?
“Was there a body too?” he demanded.
Jacky shook her head. “Only that skull.”
“Who dissected the shark?”
“An American oceanographer. I spoke with her earlier today.”
Rad grimaced. “What’s gotten you all worked up, Marty? You haven’t dumped any enemies into the ocean recently, have you?”
Marty didn’t reply. He was finding it hard to think straight. His thoughts were moving too fast, contemplating too many possibilities at once.
“Seriously, Marty,” said Rad, touching his forearm. “What’s gotten into you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I don’t think that’s a human skull,” he told her flatly.
Chapter 3
MARTY
“The forehead might be a bit wonky,” said Rad. “But the rest of it certainly looks human to me.”
“It’s humanoid but I don’t think it’s human,” Marty clarified.
“Humanoid but not human?” Rad’s expression filled with amusement. “Please don’t tell me you think this is the skull of The Great Gazoo or some other little green man from outer space?”
“No, it’s terrestrial,” he said, trying to read Jacky’s expression.
“Okay, what’s going on?” Rad asked, shooting them both suspicious looks. “What do you guys know that you’re not telling me?”
Marty took a moment to quiet his riotous thoughts and said, “Are you familiar with the sound a dolphin makes?”
“Of course.” She impersonated Flipper, clucking her tongue in rapid succession.
“Do you know why they make that sound?”
“To communicate with other dolphins, I imagine.”
“No. Dolphins communicate with whistles and groans and sighs and squeals and other noises. The high-frequency pulses allow a dolphin to build an image of its environment. When the pulses, or clicks, encounter an object, they bounce back to the dolphin, which can then calculate the object’s size, shape, speed, distance, and direction, allowing it to ‘see,’ so to speak.”
Rad shrugged. “Echolocation. So what?”
“The clicks are produced in small air sacs in a dolphin’s melon, which acts as a kind of acoustic lens, focusing and modulating the clicks in whichever direction the dolphin is facing.”
“Melon?”
“A swollen mass of extra soft tissue located between a dolphin’s snout and the blowhole.” He added pointedly, “What you might call its forehead.”
Rad’s eyes flashed in surprise. “What are you saying, Marty? That skull is human, not dolphin, and as far as I’m aware, humans don’t have a melon.”
“But is it human?” he asked her.
“What else could it be?”
“What do you know about mermaids, Rad?”
∆∆∆
Marty spent the next few minutes outlining his aquatic ape theory, and one of his central hypotheses that if humanity’s ancestors had evolved into fully aquatic marine mammals over the course of millions of years, human eyesight, even greatly enhanced, would not suffice in a dangerous underwater environment. For merfolk to successfully navigate the murky ocean depths and track prey and evade larger threats, they would have evolved a physiological process for locating distant or unseen objects.