While Bernie had to inhale only one breath before sinking back down, she had to gasp several times before she could hold her breath again.

Meanwhile Bernie descended, trailing Junior in a spontaneous game of follow the leader, investigating whatever Junior investigated, turning when Junior turned. Fifteen seconds, twenty seconds, twenty-five.

The moment Bernie finally exhaled at twenty-nine seconds, the air burst from her snorkel, even louder than the last time. The dolphins looked at her, Bernie with the most interest, surprised she was breathing when he did. He sank back under the water and nosed his way over to her, as she huffed in and out through her snorkel trying to catch her breath.

As soon as she felt able to, she sucked her breath in again and held it.

However, within a few seconds, her lungs began to hurt. Her body needed to breathe. Bernie cocked his head, clicking at her from a few feet away. The clicking vibrated in her tight lungs. He rotated 90 degrees to look at her sideways, while her heart thumped hard in her ears. Was it possible through the water he could hear her heart?

Although only ten seconds had passed since the last time he’d breathed, he looked her in the eyes and rose purposefully to the surface.

This time, she stood up and yanked the mask and snorkel off to gasp at the air. Bernie stuck his head out of the water also, much closer than he normally would have; she could have reached out and touched him. However she didn’t really focus on that as she was rocking with the effort of breathing.

As her breathing slowed, she turned to Bernie. His head the size of her torso. His fixed grin and brown eyes. This close she could see his pupil was a strange horseshoe shape, different from a human’s. Looking her in the eye, he began deliberately to make loud rasping gasps. His breathing, along with the raspy noises, emerged from the blowhole on the top of his head. This was how dolphins breathed. However, the strange thing was, while he made these noises, he kept his mouth open and rocked in time with the gasps.

Imitating her.

He stopped and examined her, then rolled beneath the water and was gone.

She wrote up what she’d seen, then looked it over.

In general she liked the written word so much more than the spoken word, for her hearing didn’t get in the way of reading. Still, writing down her own thoughts was intimidating. It was difficult to think of all the ways the words might be interpreted. She had to imagine herself into the reader’s mind, for the meaning of the words was in the intersection between the writer and reader. Both sides had to be willing to work hard, to try to imagine all that the other might be thinking.

Tibbet would read these notes in disbelief. He would say she needed data not stories. She did not know what Blum would think. How much observation did he really want?