TWO
Aug. 1957
Ogunquit, Maine

Reaching the top of the dune, Blum saw the crowd standing on the beach. Off to the side was the policeman assigned to protect the body for him and Tibbet. The policeman and a few others had handkerchiefs pressed to their faces like mourners. All of them stared about 30 feet away at what appeared to be a dark ledge of rock lying half in the water.

When a wave hit the rock, its tail undulated.

A pilot whale, the smooth curves, the gleaming oneness. A body so simple in form, a backbone sheathed in muscle and fat.

Blum shifted the bag of surgical instruments to his other hand and strode forward.

With the first incision, the smell was released. Blum and Tibbet began to cough. Insulated by blubber, the internal warmth had cooked the body.

Behind them, the policeman and crowd backed up, pressing the handkerchiefs closer.

The scalpel, intended for human bodies, was too small. Blum switched to the carving knife. Once he’d reached the skull, he picked up the hatchet. He and Tibbet took turns, stopping every few hits to see if there was any sign of breaking through the bone.

The next time Blum looked over his shoulder, the crowd was gone.

He chain-smoked to reduce the stench. Each time he needed a cigarette, he’d tap one partway out, then tug it out the rest of the way with his lips so his hands in the surgical gloves never fouled it.

So far as he knew, they were the first scientists to do this, to harvest a whale’s brain and bring it back for study. A decade ago, Blum had been the first to publish on the brains of the chimpanzee and gorilla. Even though the weight of the apes’ brains was less than half of that of a human’s, he’d found strong similarities in the convoluted furrows, in the shape and size of the frontal lobe. He’d concluded there were likely implications in terms of intelligence and abilities. Quickly a scrum of other researchers had followed him, all competitively trying to define their specialty in the new field of great-ape neuroscience. In response he’d decided, as soon as his current research was published, to switch to a different species. He was considering elephants, had heard their brains were huge. The problem was that elephants were so far away, expensive to ship and feed.

Then yesterday he’d spotted an article about this stranding. Modern science knew so little about cetaceans. It was possible they were smart. And there was the added benefit that in New England, they lived just off the coast, so the subjects could be easily replenished.

When he spoke at public events, the audience tended to assume that Blum was an infallible expert, capable in every field of science. Although he would never admit this in public, he’d nearly failed statistics in college, as well as organic chemistry. Even now he relied on his postdocs for these parts of the work.