'But how can I leap if there's nobody out there to…' Sam held his hands up palms inward, fingers pointed towards his chest.

Al shook Ziggy's handlink so that all the lights started flashing at once. 'Ziggy says it's all about the whale, kid. Help it out of the bay and you leap. Ninety two percent chance.'

'Back on the farm I could get the chickens to follow me if I held out a handful of corn, but how do you get a whale to follow you?' He bent to pick up the breadfruit, dusted off the worst of the sand, and broke it open. Fragrant steam rose off it into his face and his mouth watered. He took a small bite.

Al shrugged. 'Handful of plankton?' he suggested.

Mouth full of breadfruit, Sam shook his head and rolled his eyes at Al's dumb suggestion, but started walking towards the beach. Well, if rescuing a whale was going to get him to his next leap, then he had to rescue the whale. The tide was well on its way out. He dropped the rind and seeds of the fruit onto the sand.

'How could you do that?' Al gestured angrily with his cigar so that a clump of ash fell away and vanished.

'It's biodegradable, Al.' Already a small cluster of crabs had begun to gather at the discarded fruit.

The water sucked at his feet. Sam hitched the appalling underpants up and strode deeper. He could see that the whale had restricted its movements to the deepest part of the bay, the channel where most of the water came in and out on the tide, funnelled through a natural break in the reef. Al walked beside him, having to slow his pace since he wasn't actually wading. Sam had forgotten about the abrasion on his thigh until it entered the salt water. He winced at the stinging pain and stopped for a moment while he got used to it.

'You okay?' Al strolled back towards him.

'I guess.'

Al nodded. 'Salt water's good for cuts, right?'

'That's what they say.' Sam stared, apprehensive, at the dark shape of the whale in the water. It was so damn' big. It was ridiculously big. 'What if it gets spooked, Al?'

'These animals are gentle herbivores. It's not gonna bite you, doesn't even have teeth.'

'Cows are herbivores too, but that doesn't mean they're gentle. Besides, the krill these things eat is technically made up of animals, so they're carnivores.' The water came up to his middle, but as long as he kept out of the channel, it wasn't going to get a lot deeper this side of the reef.

'Now you're just getting nitpicky, Sam. These whales have never done harm to a human. They're just like big, wet puppy dogs.'

The whale rose to breathe and all Sam could see was a wall of flesh, a mountain of animal. If he hadn't known it was alive he might have thought it was some intrinsic part of the reef, a naturally occurring feature of the landscape. That thing had its own ecosystem, clusters of barnacles and other shellfish hung off its hide. Its pectoral fin was like a rock outcrop and above that, a strange protuberance that Sam suddenly realised was an eye. An eye that was looking at him.

He stopped still, afraid to move. Water sucked past him and his arm stung where salt bit into the cuts and abrasions there.

'What's the matter?' Al walked back to him again, cigar swinging through the water.

The whale's eye swivelled, its gaze focussed on Al, paused there for a moment, then returned to Sam. A low rumbling that Sam thought at first was an earthquake rippled through the water, through his body, he could feel it going core deep, recognising muscle, echoing off bone. The whale looked from Sam to Al and back to Sam again. The rumbling increased as its gaze focussed on Al, and then died away. It suddenly occurred to Sam what had just happened.

'Al. I wish you could have felt that.'

'I heard it all right. What was it?'

'It was the whale. It just used its sonar on us. It knows us. It knows you're here but that you're not really here. It looked at us.'

Al shook his head from side to side in a slow gesture of awe. 'Can you believe that?'

'That's the most amazing thing I've ever experienced.' The whale's eye, now gazing at him, seemed to be filled with an infinite intelligence. 'I think you're right. I don't think it wants to hurt me.' He stepped right to the edge of the sand bar where it dropped away into the fast moving water of the channel. The whale had aligned itself with the water but it seemed to be afraid to go through. 'Hey big feller, it's okay. That's the way out.' Sam waved his hands as if he was coaxing a small dog. 'You've got your sonar. You can see it's safe.'

The whale exhaled, long and hard, rolled its eye and squeezed it shut, then emitted a long, low moan that sounded something like a dozen ten-ton trucks crossing a bridge.

Al punched the keys on Ziggy's handlink in desperate haste, shook it till the lights all went out in protest, then slapped it with his hand till they came back on again. It squalled at him. The whale was watching. 'You might be a little off calling the whale "feller". According to Ziggy it's a she.'

This presented what Sam could only describe as an appalling implication. 'I don't care what Ziggy says, Al, I'm not kissing her.'

Al stuck his cigar into his mouth to free up both hands and tapped away at the handlink's keypad. 'The reason you're here is to help her give birth and then get back out there to her mate.'

'Give birth? No. That's not possible. Ziggy's blown a fuse.' He'd seen his dad help the vet when some of their cows had trouble delivering their calves. It generally needed a rubber glove that went all the way up to the shoulder with the vet doing a lot of stretching to get the calf all turned around the right way. Sometimes it involved ropes and tackle, his dad and the vet both straining to get the slippery calf delivered. There was a reason he'd studied medicine, not veterinary science. 'How big is a baby whale?'

Al tapped the keys of the handlink. 'Ten tons,' he read.

'And I'm supposed to help deliver that how?'

'Baby whales need help to get to the surface when they're born, so they can take their first breath. The mother's trapped in that narrow channel, she won't be able to turn round and get to the baby. He'll die. This leap's all about the survival of a species, Sam.'

'How can just one individual make a difference?'

Al didn't answer. He stuck the cigar in his mouth and gazed at Sam, eyebrows raised, as if Sam should have known. As if that was the dumbest question ever asked. 'Ziggy says she's not far off.'

'How can he tell?'

'Just listen to the way she's breathing.'

As if on cue, the whale exhaled again. A long, shuddering breath followed by that low moan that sent ripples dancing across the waves of the bay and undoubtedly made the coral in the reef tremble. Sam's attention was caught by a whoosh! from the ocean side of the reef and the low silhouette of a whale vanishing below the surface. 'That must be her mate.'

'See? You're just here to get this family back together.'

'Oh boy.'

The water sucked out past Sam. It seemed to be moving faster now. It left salt patches on his chest and belly where the sun dried it. He wished he had something to drink, a hat to protect him from the sun. Now dry and salty, the abrasions on his shoulder were stinging again. The embarrassing shorts revealed themselves on the outgoing tide. Sam dragged at them to stop them being so clingy, but it didn't help. At least there was only Al and the whale to see this, and neither of them cared. 'How long do you think this is going to take?'

'Ziggy says she's well into labour. Probably only be a couple'a hours.'

'If it's any consolation,' Sam called to the whale, 'I know exactly how you feel.' He wondered how she managed to stop herself being dragged into the reef by the tide. There was just the gentle fanning of the one pectoral fin he could see, and the slow rise and fall of her flukes, more than eighty feet distant from him, down towards the beach.

The sun beat down on Sam, reflected off the waves up at him. He could feel the slow cook of the back of his neck, top of his head, shoulders, chest, arms, legs. He watched Al apparently levitate and walk across the surface of the water towards the whale. She watched Al, unsure. She'd read him with her sonar and seen that he wasn't there, but her eye told her a different story. There was curiosity in her gaze, no alarm.

'That's it, girl.' Al's voice was gentle. He held the handlink out in front of him, danced his fingers across the keys, and then walked into the whale.

For at least half a minute, Sam forgot to breathe. Al had completely vanished. It wasn't that Sam was really worried. Since Al wasn't actually "there," no harm could come to him in the whale's belly. It was weird, that was all. Al disliked people walking through his holographic self and he generally treated Sam's world as if it was real. This was all just so out of character. He ran the still sore tips of his burned fingers across his cracked lower lip and waited.

'That was amazing!' Al reappeared. 'Do you know what's in there?' He gestured, awestruck, over his shoulder at the whale.

'A lot of really big intestines.'

'And a cute little baby whale. It's a girl, by the way.'

'You could see in there?'

'Well it was pretty dark.' Al held up the handlink, its lights flashing yellow and orange. 'But I could see a bit with this.'

'So what did you find out? Other than it's a girl.'

'That she's fully dilated.'

'I hope this isn't going to take too long.' Sam lost his balance for a moment and almost fell over. He thought at first it was because the light on the water was disorienting him, then he realised the tide was turning. Water swirled around him as the current stopped rushing out and began rushing in. 'I'd like this to be over before high tide.'

'High tide's the best time for her to get out, too. She should just glide past the coral with junior in tow.'

'I guess being pregnant's what stopped her getting out before when it was high.'

Al nodded. 'All just a waiting game now. Wish I could offer you one of these so you could pass the time in the tradition of all expectant fathers.' Al waved the cigar under Sam's nose.

Sam nodded. He wasn't in the mood. He was cold in the water now and he had a feeling his toes had turned into prunes. He was hot where he was out of the water, baked by the sun in a slow oven. He was tired and dehydrated and confused. He hoped he'd be able to help the whale when it finally gave birth, but he wasn't sure he was even able to help himself. Edwards was dead. The man he'd leapt into had flatlined, his brain no longer functioned. He was a piece of meat hooked up to a life support machine. The knowledge scared Sam. He'd never been in this position before. What was going to happen? Or was this his last leap? Was he here just to save a whale and then die, his final karmic debt adjusted? He'd felt more battered in this leap than the time he'd leapt into the boxer and the wrestler put together. It hurt emotionally as well as physically, he felt betrayed and neglected. At least he still had Al.

'I don't think it's gonna be long now.' Al held the handlink up and peered at it.

'Dig dzig…' Sam stopped and coughed his voice into behaving. 'Did Ziggy say that?' So much water, he wanted to drink. He could go back onto the island and sip from that stream. Al was right. The island was paradise. It had water.

'Yeah? Hear the way she's breathing?'

Sam nodded. The long, deep exhalations of before had changed to short, snorting puffs. Like a steam train struggling on a hill.

'What if she panics?' In the pain and confusion of delivering, the whale might thrash her flukes. It wouldn't be an act of aggression, but she might forget he was there. Childbirth was bad enough in humans. During transition women had been known to scream abuse and hit and kick their husbands and the hospital staff. If the whale even clipped Sam with her tail she'd kill him.

'Don't worry. She's not gonna hurt you. I'll be here. I'll be right here.'

'That really doesn't help.'

'You'll be okay, Sam. I promise.'

The whale uttered a low and terrible moan. She raised her flukes into the air and the visible part of her blue-grey hide twitched and shivered.

'I think this is it.' Sam was suddenly focussed.

The flukes raised and dropped repeatedly onto the water sending a great spray over Sam every time they lifted. Despite her apparent distress she seemed aware of Sam, of his fragility.

'There!' Al crowed.

A sudden bloom of red clouded the water and when it cleared Sam could see the baby whale, pink and limp, drifting on the incoming tide down past its mother's raised flukes and towards the sandbar side of the channel. Sam tried to run, pushing himself through the water to the baby. Its fins and flukes were twisted and creased, as if they'd been folded up inside. It waggled its flukes in its first feeble attempt to swim.

Sam plunged into the deeper water, reaching for the baby. He really didn't know what he was doing, his hands pushing against the hot rubber of its body, feeling the pleats of its throat folds. He thrust it up, towards the sky, towards the air it needed, surfaced with it and heard it snort and then inhale, heard the gentle thuk as its blowhole slammed shut on its first breath of air.

'Let's get you back to your mommy.' Sam pushed the whale in order to turn it round. It patted at him with its pectoral flipper, rolled its eye playfully. It was three minutes old, it weighed ten tons, and the darn thing was cute. Sam had no idea how he was going to get it to move forward past against the push of the current. He didn't need to, though. The mother whale had let herself drift backwards so that now she could see her baby. The sound of her sonar boomed through the bay. The baby made a reply, something like an enraged bull, but only a squeak in comparison to its mother.

The big whale manoeuvred herself in the deepening water. She rolled onto her back, scooping her baby up with her pectoral flippers and hugging it against her. It was such a weirdly human act, Sam was stunned.

'Will you look at that?' Al was wiping tears off his face. 'That's just, that's just the most amazing thing I've ever seen.'

'I can get water now, can't I?' Sam was having trouble even standing now. He hadn't recovered from the shipwreck when the storm had happened, and he hadn't really recovered from the storm when this happened. He was exhausted and he needed water. Sleep and water. He felt that if he just laid down in the creek and did nothing but drink for the next seven or eight days, it might begin to deal with his thirst. The idea of drowning in the creek, of dying from sleep and water at the same time was like the promise of paradise.

He took an unsteady step towards the shore and his foot slipped into the deep, fast water of the channel. The whale righted herself and her pectoral fin came down towards Sam, eased under him and lifted him back onto the sandbank. A hundred ton whale. So gentle.

'Amazing,' Al said.

'She can get out now, can't she?'

Al nodded. 'Channel should be deep enough soon, and daddy's waiting out there.'

'I should leap.'

'You should leap.'

Something huge and red drifted down the channel and swirled onto the sandbank beside Sam. Knots of meat hung off it and a cloud of blood surrounded it. Little fish, washed in on the tide, swarmed around it, picking at it, snatching away mouthfuls of the meat. They must have brushed by Sam's legs, but he was too numb and frankly past caring.

'What the hell's that?' Al gawped in disgust and turned his face away from it.

'Placenta, I guess.' Sam started walking, pushing himself shorewards. The whales were saved by he hadn't leapt yet. Maybe he really could save this guy. Maybe the EEG machine was wrong, if Edwards had a very thick skull it could shield him from the machine. He might not be brainded at all.

'Oh jeez, Sam.' Al was looking back towards the open sea, his eyes wide in panic.

'What?'

'You gotta leap.'

Sam turned to see what he was looking at. The triangle fins of sharks cut through the water towards him. He stumbled backwards, wanting to get away from them and fell into the water. It was all silver and bubbled around him and he saw the sharks, their brutal eyes, their razor faces. He saw their mouths open and struggled against the rush of them, waited to feel the first chainsaw bite of them taking him apart.

Instead, he felt that first electric charge, like an extra heartbeat that surged out of his natural rhythm. His PQR wave carried on Quantum potential that rushed through him so that everything went blue…

…and he leaps…