‘That’s right. Echolocation gives whales x-ray vision. Grandma says a dolphin or whale can detect a shark swimming hundreds of meters away, using its echolocation to see right into its belly to determine if it’s fed recently.’

‘Does your grandmother know why there are so many whales migrating into the Gulf of Mexico?’

‘It’s the anomaly.’

‘Anomaly? What anomaly?’

‘The one she detected in the Chicxulub Crater. It’s screwing up the whales’ sense of direction.’

‘I don’t understand?’

‘Inside a whale’s brain are these things called magnetite crystals. Whales navigate by tuning in to the Earth’s magnetic force fields. It’s sort of like having a built-in compass. The magnetic anomaly in the Gulf is scrambling their compasses, confusing them. That’s why a lot of them are beaching. My grandpa Julius, he knew all about whales, too.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘It’s in his journal.’ The teen types in another command, causing a new home page to appear on screen.

THE JOURNAL OF JULIUS GABRIEL

Your grandfather’s memoirs?’

‘Uh-huh. Jake transferred everything to audio disk. Computer, recite Journal Entry 722.’

JOURNAL ENTRY #722
RECORDED ON THE NAZCA PLATEAU, NAZCA, PERU.
JANUARY 17, 1993.

The computerized voice of the late Julius Gabriel crackles from behind the surround-sound speakers:

Of all the zoomorphs engraved in the desert pampa, perhaps the most bizarre are those of the three Nazca whales, each mammal drawn distinctly different from the next.

I shall begin with the oldest of the lot, a thirty-foot specimen possessing an enormous fluke and four leglike appendages. Although several of my colleagues regard the addition of these strange appendages as ‘artistic license,’ I disagree, believing our ancient artist had something different in mind.

Paleontologists have determined that modern whales descended from an extinct giant rodentlike land mammal called a Pakicetid. This terrestrial creature mysteriously walked back into the sea on all fours sometime after the asteroid strike that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. In the 25 million years that followed, evolution succeeded in transforming this land mammal into an ocean dweller.

Equally mystifying is a strange object that was drawn below the ancient cetacean’s lower jaw. Most of my peers have identified this feature as the mammal’s spout. Here I disagree emphatically. Anatomically speaking, a whale’s blowhole is part of its dorsal surface, yet this object has clearly been drawn below the creature’s lower jaw. My colleagues’ rebuttal to these inarguable facts is simply to shrug the matter off, crediting it to a mistake made by the artist.

Mistake? The ancient Nazca icons and geometric figures are inhumanly precise. Was the creator of these drawings capable of such a grievous error? I think not.

My theory, improbable as it sounds, is that the circular object was meant to represent a form of communication. I believe the creator of the Nazca drawings was able to communicate with these ancient whales, and the artist clearly wanted us to know it.