“Senator Malthus, good to see you again.”

“Bill, let me just say here and now that you are damned lucky to have even gotten this meeting.”

“I know that my request might seem excessive, but trust me--”

“Excessive? Now, Bill, you know I like to consider myself a patron to the sciences and I try to look out for you and the rest of the boys at the NOAA. But this? This is something else.”

“Sir, I’ll explain everything, and I think then you might at least understand. I only need a minute of your time.”

“Bah. You’ve already got your meeting, come in.”

Malthus pushes open his office door. The carpeting inside is a bright cobalt blue, not a stain on it, and it smells fresh, new. The wallpaper, on the other hand, is old, but its yellowed gray and white stripes are barely visible beneath multitudes of framed medals, paintings, photographs, and newspaper clippings. A ceiling fan overhead spins lazily and an air conditioner hangs from a window in the corner, buzzing as it struggles to cool the room in the burning summer heat.

The senator steps around behind a large mahogany desk at the back of the room and pulls out his chair. His portly form fits snug between the chair’s arms as he sits. Breathing a deep, tired sigh, he runs a wrinkled hand through hair that appears far too thick and black for his age. He leans forward, eyes moving to Bill, and crosses his arms over his tidy workspace, a neat stack of papers to his left, and a boxy white computer monitor on his right. He gestures for Bill to sit opposite him.

Bill takes his seat and scoots closer to the desk. His own age shows in shoulder-length gray hair and sun-spotted skin, but his posture is that of a much younger man. Slipping his briefcase onto his lap, he flips a three-digit combination into the lock on top and it clicks open. Inside the case is a single yellow folder, filled to bursting with papers and pictures. Bill grabs the file with beaten, scarred hands, and rests it atop Malthus’s desk. His green eyes glow with determination and lock with the senator’s.

“Alright, Bill,” Malthus says. “You’ve got half an hour.”

“I think I can manage with that.” Bill smirks.

Malthus chuckles. “Glad to see you’re confident, cause it’s gonna take something real special to convince me that the NOAA, of all organizations, is in need of a soon-to-be-retired nuclear submarine.”

Bill takes a deep breath and nods. Opening the folder, he slips out two sheets of paper covered in graphed jagged lines and pushes them across the desk toward Malthus who picks them up to examine them.

“A couple of months ago,” Bill begins, “our deep-sea hydrophone array in the Pacific recorded this. That graph you’re looking at is a sound, approximately fifteen seconds long, and loud enough to be heard across our entire network. We weren’t sure where exactly it came from, but we triangulated it to be somewhere between the Antarctic Peninsula and Cape Adare.”

Flipping through the folder a bit, Bill produces a map of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. On it, the two points he’s outlined are marked in red.

Malthus looks the map over. He stretches his fingers between the two points and then moves them over to the bar scale in the corner.

Looking up, Malthus raises an eyebrow. “You weren’t exactly sure? Bill, you got damn near half the continent between these two points.

“I know, I know.” Bill raises his hands. “We sent a boat over to help narrow it down. I’m not done yet.”

Malthus nods. “Continue.”

“We do still have quite a bit of coastline to explore, even after our preliminary survey. That’s part of the reason we need the sub.”

“So you’re looking to find the source of this sound, I get that. But what’s wrong with the boat you already sent down there? Or any boat you’ve got, for that matter?”

“We believe the source is somewhere under the ice, and to find it we anticipate having to spend a considerable length of time submerged. Nothing we have today can do that.”

Malthus leans back in his chair, the wood creaking as he stretches his arms. “This sound. Pardon if I’m off base, I try to keep up to date, but it ain’t always easy. But, this noise you heard, you heard this type of thing before, haven’t you? If I recall, the NOAA has always stated it was,” he shakes his head, waving his hand in the air, ”crashing icebergs, or whatnot?”

Bill nods. “You’re on the money. We have heard other, similar sounds before, and we did officially chalk them up to grounding icebergs. But I don’t believe that’s truly the case.”

The senator tilts his head down, peering at Bill from above his thick-framed glasses. “You saying you’ve revised your theory? Or that you lied?”

Bill rubs his chin, scratching at a stubble that he hasn’t found the time to shave. “We weren’t--I wasn’t--confident. Not even all of my colleagues were convinced until this most recent occurrence. The grounding iceberg theory was more accepted, so I went along with it until I was able to sort out my own research.”

Malthus leans forward. “That ain’t like you, Bill. Why all the secrecy? Spill the beans, what do you think’s really down there?”

Bill exhales. “I’m sure you know the blue whale is the largest animal to ever exist on this planet. It beats out the megafauna of the last glacial period. It beats out the dinosaurs. But, what if it’s not?”

“Not the biggest?”

“What if there was something out there that would make the blue whale look like a dolphin? Something large enough that its whale song could be heard across the entire Pacific Ocean.”

“You think there’s something like that living under the south pole?” Malthus asks, his tone calm but engaged.

“I didn’t come here until I was beyond a reasonable doubt, until we had done those initial surveys and solidified the theory. I wanted to be sure, because I understand that this is a lot to ask for, but I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t believe it would be worth it.”

Malthus sits up straight and bites his thumbnail. “You’re really sure?”

Bill smiles. “I am. All of my data points to it. It's all in here.” He pats the open file.

Malthus shakes his head. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I trust you. You’ve got a fire in your eyes that I can’t ignore. You’ve always been one of the best. I can’t promise anything, and I’m gonna need to pull a lot of strings, call in some big favors, but I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you, senator.”

Malthus stands and comes back around to the desk’s front. He and Bill exchange a firm handshake before Bill takes the file, puts the map and graphs back inside, and pushes it toward Malthus’s seat.

As Bill steps out of the office, closing the door behind him, the senator sits again. He grabs the file and looks it over. There’s a yellow tab sticking out of the top labeled with a single word in black marker, a name.

“Julia.”