Almost at once he saw his incredible mistake: the two satellites were calves. It was the first time he had ever met a whale with twins, although multiple births were not uncommon. In normal circumstances, the sight would have fascinated him, but now it meant that he had jumped to the wrong conclusion and had lost precious minutes. He must begin the search again.
As a routine check, he swung the camera toward the fourth blip on the sonar screen—the echo he had assumed, from its size, to be another adult whale. It is strange how a preconceived idea can affect a man’s understanding of what he sees; seconds passed before Don could interpret the picture before his eyes—before he knew that, after all, he had come to the right place.
“Jesus!” he said softly. “I didn’t know they grew that big.” It was a shark, the largest he had ever seen. Its details were still obscured, but there was only one genus it could belong to. The whale shark and the basking shark might be of comparable size, but they were harmless herbivores. This was the king of all selachians, Carcharodon—the Great White Shark. Don tried to recall the figures for the largest known specimen. In 1990, or thereabouts, a fifty-footer had been killed off New Zealand, but this one was half as big again.
These thoughts flashed through his mind in an instant, and in that same moment he saw that the great beast was already maneuvering for the kill. It was heading for one of the calves, and ignoring the frantic mother. Whether this was cowardice or common sense there was no way of telling; perhaps such distinctions were meaningless to the shark’s tiny and utterly alien mind.
There was only one thing to do. It might spoil his chance of a quick kill, but the calf’s life was more important. He punched the button of the siren, and a brief, mechanical scream erupted into the water around him.
Shark and whales were equally terrified by the deafening shriek. The shark jerked round in an impossibly tight curve, and Don was nearly jolted out of his seat as the autopilot snapped the sub on to a new course. Twisting and turning with an agility equal to that of any other sea creature of its size. Sub 5 began to close in upon the shark, its electronic brain automatically following the sonar echo and thus leaving Don free to concentrate on his armament. He needed that freedom; the next operation was going to be difficult unless he could hold a steady course for at least fifteen seconds. At a pinch he could use his tiny rocket torps to make a kill; had he been alone and faced with a pack of orcas, he would certainly have done so. But that was messy and brutal, and there was a neater way. He had always preferred the technique of the rapier to that of the hand grenade.
Now he was only fifty feet away, and closing rapidly. There might never be a better chance. He punched the launching stud.
From beneath the belly of the sub, something that looked like a sting ray hurtled forward. Don had checked the speed of his own craft; there was no need to come any closer now. The tiny, arrow-shaped hydrofoil, only a couple of feet across, could move far faster than his vessel and would close the gap in seconds. As it raced forward, it spun out the thin line of the control wire, like some underwater spider laying its thread. Along that wire passed the energy that powered the sting, and the signals that steered the missile to its goal. It responded so instantly to his orders that Don felt he was controlling some sensitive, high-spirited steed.
The shark saw the danger less than a second before impact. The resemblance of the sting to an ordinary ray confused it, as the designers had intended. Before the tiny brain could realize that no ray behaved like this, the missile had struck. The steel hypodermic, rammed forward by an exploding cartridge, drove through the shark’s horny skin, and the great fish erupted in a frenzy of terror. Don backed rapidly away, for a blow from that tail would rattle him around like a pea in a can and might even damage the sub. There was nothing more for him to do, except to wait while the poison did its work.
The doomed killer was trying to arch its body so that it could snap at the poisoned dart. Don had now reeled the sting back into its slot amidships, pleased that he had been able to retrieve the missile undamaged. He watched with awe and a dispassionate pity as the great beast succumbed to its paralysis.
Its struggles were weakening. It was now swimming aimlessly back and forth, and once Don had to sidestep smartly to avoid a collision. As it lost control of buoyancy, the dying shark drifted up to the surface. Don did not bother to follow; that could wait until he had attended to more important business.
He found the cow and her two calves less than a mile away, and inspected them carefully. They were uninjured, so there was no need to call the vet in his highly specialized two-man sub which could handle any cetological crisis from a stomachache to a Caesarean.
The whales were no longer in the least alarmed, and a check on the sonar had shown that the entire school had ceased its panicky flight. He wondered if they already knew what had happened; much had been learned about their methods of communication, but much more was still a mystery.
“I hope you appreciate what I’ve done for you, old lady,” he muttered. Then, reflecting that fifty tons of mother love was a slightly awe-inspiring sight, he blew his tanks and surfaced.
It was calm, so he opened the hatch and popped his head out of the tiny conning tower. The water was only inches below his chin, and from time to time a wave made a determined effort to swamp him. There was little danger of this happening, for he fitted the hatch so closely that he was quite an effective plug.
Fifty feet away, a long gray mound, like an overturned boat, was rolling on the surface. Don looked at it thoughtfully, wondering how much compressed air he’d better squirt into the corpse to prevent it sinking before one of the tenders could reach the spot. In a few minutes he would radio his report, but for the moment it was pleasant to drink the fresh Pacific breeze, to feel the open sky above his head, and to watch the sun begin its long climb toward noon.
Don Burley was the happy warrior, resting after the one battle that man would always have to fight. He was holding at bay the specter of famine which had confronted all earlier ages, but which would never threaten the world again while the great plankton farms harvested their millions of tons of protein, and the whale herds obeyed their new masters. Man had come back to the sea, his ancient home, after aeons of exile; until the oceans froze, he would never be hungry again.…
Yet that, Don knew, was the least of his satisfactions. Even if what he was doing had been of no practical value, he would still have wished to do it. Nothing else that life could offer matched the contentment and the calm sense of power that filled him when he set out on a mission such as this. Power? Yes, that was the right word. But it was not a power that would ever be abused; he felt too great a kinship with all the creatures who shared the seas with him—even those it was his duty to destroy.
To all appearances, Don was completely relaxed, yet had any one of the many dials and lights filling his field of view called for attention he would have been instantly alert. His mind was already back on the Rorqual, and he found it increasingly hard to keep his thoughts away from his overdue breakfast. In order to make the time pass more swiftly, he started mentally composing his report. Quite a few people, he knew, were going to be surprised by it. The engineers who maintained the invisible fences of sound and electricity which now divided the mighty Pacific into manageable portions would have to start looking for the break; the marine biologists who were so confident that sharks never attacked whales would have to think up excuses. Both enterprises, Don was quite sure, would be successfully carried out, and then everything would be under control again, until the sea contrived its next crisis.
But the crisis to which Don was now unwittingly returning was a man-made one, organized without any malice toward him at the highest official levels. It had begun with a suggestion in the Space Department, duly referred up to the World Secretariat. It had risen still higher until it reached the World Assembly itself, where it had come to the approving ears of the senators directly interested. Thus converted from a suggestion to an order, i
t had filtered down through the Secretariat to the World Food Organization, thence to the Marine Division, and finally to the Bureau of Whales. The whole process had taken the incredibly short time of four weeks.
Don, of course, knew nothing of this. As far as he was concerned, the complicated workings of global bureaucracy resolved themselves into the greeting his skipper gave him when he walked into the Rorqual’s mess for his belated breakfast.
“What kind of a job?” asked Don suspiciously. He remembered an unfortunate occasion when he had acted as a guide to a permanent undersecretary who had seemed to be a bit of a fool, and whom he had treated accordingly. It had later turned out that the P.U.—as might have been guessed from his position—was a very shrewd character indeed and knew exactly what Don was doing.
“They didn’t tell me,” said the skipper. “I’m not quite sure they know themselves. Give my love to Queensland, and keep away from the casinos on the Gold Coast.”
“Much choice I have, on my pay,” snorted Don. “Last time I went to Surfer’s Paradise, I was lucky to get away with my shirt.”
“But you brought back a couple of thousand on your first visit.”
“Beginner’s luck—it never happened again. I’ve lost it all since then, so I’ll stop while I still break even. No more gambling for me.”
“Is that a bet? Would you put five bucks on it?”
“Sure.”
“Then pay over—you’ve already lost by accepting.”
A spoonful of processed plankton hovered momentarily in mid-air while Don sought for a way out of the trap.
“Just try and get me to pay,” he retorted. “You’ve got no witnesses, and I’m no gentleman.” He hastily swallowed the last of his coffee, then pushed aside his chair and rose to go.
“Better start packing, I suppose. So long, Skipper—see you later.”
The Captain of the Rorqual watched his first warden sweep out of the room like a small hurricane. For a moment the sound of Don’s passage echoed back along the ship’s corridors; then comparative silence descended again.
The skipper started to head back to the bridge. “Look out, Brisbane,” he muttered to himself; then he began to rear-range the watches and to compose a masterly memorandum to HQ asking how he was expected to run a ship when thirty per cent of her crew were permanently absent on leave or special duty. By the time he reached the bridge, the only thing that had stopped him from resigning was the fact that, try as he might, he couldn’t think of a better job.
CHAPTER II
THOUGH HE HAD been kept waiting only a few minutes, Walter Franklin was already prowling impatiently around the reception room. Swiftly he examined and dismissed the deep-sea photographs hanging on the walls; then he sat for a moment on the edge of the table, leafing through the pile of magazines, reviews, and reports which always accumulated in such places. The popular magazines he had already seen—for the last few weeks he had had little else to do but read—and few of the others looked interesting. Somebody, he supposed, had to go through these lavishly electro-printed food-production reports as pan of their job; he wondered how they avoided being hypnotized by the endless columns of statistics. Neptune, the house organ of the Marine Division, seemed a little more promising, but as most of the personalities discussed in its columns were unknown to him he soon became bored with it. Even its fairly lowbrow articles were largely over his head, assuming a knowledge of technical terms he did not possess.
The receptionist was watching him—certainly noticing his impatience, perhaps analyzing the nervousness and insecurity that lay behind it. With a distinct effort, Franklin forced himself to sit down and to concentrate on yesterday’s issue of the Brisbane Courier. He had almost become interested in an editorial requiem on Australian cricket, inspired by the recent Test results, when the young lady who guarded the director’s office smiled sweetly at him and said: “Would you please go in now, Mr. Franklin?”
He had expected to find the director alone, or perhaps accompanied by a secretary. The husky young man sitting in the other visitor’s chair seemed out of place in this orderly office, and was staring at him with more curiosity than friendliness. Franklin stiffened at once; they had been discussing him, he knew, and automatically he went on the defensive.
Director Cary, who knew almost as much about human beings as he did about marine mammals, sensed the strain immediately and did his best to dispel it.
“Ah, there you are, Franklin,” he said with slightly excessive heartiness. “I hope you’ve been enjoying your stay here. Have my people been taking care of you?”
Franklin was spared the trouble of answering this question, for the director gave him no time to reply.
“I want you to meet Don Burley,” he continued. “Don’s First Warden on the Rorqual, and one of the best we’ve got. He’s been assigned to look after you. Don, meet Walter Franklin.”
They shook hands warily, weighing each other. Then Don’s face broke into a reluctant smile. It was the smile of a man who had been given a job he didn’t care for but who had decided to make the best of it.
“Pleased to meet you, Franklin,” he said. “Welcome to the Mermaid Patrol.”
Franklin tried to smile at the hoary joke, but his effort was not very successful. He knew that he should be friendly, and that these people were doing their best to help him. Yet the knowledge was that of the mind, not the heart; he could not relax and let himself meet them halfway. The fear of being pitied and the nagging suspicion that they had been talking about him behind his back, despite all the assurances he had been given, paralyzed his will for friendliness.
Don Burley sensed nothing of this. He only knew that the director’s office was not the right place to get acquainted with a new colleague, and before Franklin was fully aware of what had happened he was out of the building, buffeting his way through the shirt-sleeved crowds in George Street, and being steered into a minute bar opposite the new post office.
The noise of the city subsided, though through the tinted glass walls Franklin could see the shadowy shapes of the pedestrians moving to and fro. It was pleasantly cool here after the torrid streets; whether or not Brisbane should be air-conditioned—and if so, who should have the resulting multimillion-dollar contract—was still being argued by the local politicians, and meanwhile the citizens sweltered every summer.
Don Burley waited until Franklin had drunk his first beer and called for replacements. There was a mystery about his new pupil, and as soon as possible he intended to solve it. Someone very high up in the division—perhaps even in the World Secretariat itself—must have organized this. A first warden was not called away from his duties to wet-nurse someone who was obviously too old to go through the normal training channels. At a guess he would say that Franklin was the wrong side of thirty; he had never heard of anyone that age getting this sort of special treatment before.
One thing was obvious about Franklin at once, and that only added to the mystery. He was a spaceman; you could tell them a mile away. That should make a good opening gambit. Then he remembered that the director had warned him, “Don’t ask Franklin too many questions. I don’t know what his background is, but we’ve been specifically told not to talk about it with him.”
That might make sense, mused Don. Perhaps he was a space pilot who had been grounded after some inexcusable lapse, such as absent-mindedly arriving at Venus when he should have gone to Mars.
“Is this the first time,” Don began cautiously, “that you’ve been to Australia?” It was not a very fortunate opening, and the conversation might have died there and then when Franklin replied: “I was born here.”
Don, however, was not the sort of person who was easily abashed. He merely laughed and said, half-apologetically, “Nobody ever tells me anything, so I usually find out the hard way. I was born on the other side of the world—over in Ireland—but since I’ve been attached to the Pacific branch of the bureau I’ve more or less adopted Australia as a second home. Not that I spend
much time ashore! On this job you’re at sea eighty per cent of the time. A lot of people don’t like that, you know.”
“It would suit me,” said Franklin, but left the remark hanging in the air. Burley began to feel exasperated—it was such hard work getting anything out of this fellow. The prospect of working with him for the next few weeks began to look very uninviting, and Don wondered what he had done to deserve such a fate. However, he struggled on manfully.
“The superintendent tells me that you’ve a good scientific and engineering background, so I can assume that you’ll know most of the things that our people spend the first year learning. Have they filled you in on the administrative background?”
“They’ve given me a lot of facts and figures under hypnosis, so I could lecture you for a couple of hours on the Marine Division—its history, organization, and current projects, with particular reference to the Bureau of Whales. But it doesn’t mean anything to me at present.”
Now we seem to be getting somewhere, Don told himself. The fellow can talk after all. A couple more beers, and he might even be human.
“That’s the trouble with hypnotic training,” agreed Don. “They can pump the information into you until it comes out of your ears, but you’re never quite sure how much you really know. And they can’t teach you manual skills, or train you to have the right reactions in emergencies. There’s only one way of learning anything properly—and that’s by actually doing the job.”
He paused, momentarily distracted by a shapely silhouette parading on the other side of the translucent wall. Franklin noticed the direction of his gaze, and his features relaxed into a slight smile. For the first time the tension lifted, and Don began to feel that there was some hope of establishing contact with the enigma who was now his responsibility.
With a beery forefinger, Don started to trace maps on the plastic table top.