From the Ocean from teh Stars (25 page)

that anything a dog could do a hundred years ago we can teach a porpoise
to do today."

"Just a minute," said Franklin, a little overwhelmed. "Let me get
this straight. Are you proposing that every warden should have a couple
of—er—hounds working with him when he rounds up a school of whales?"

"For certain operations, yes. Of course, the technique would have limitations; no marine animal has the speed and range of a sub, and the
hounds, as you've called them, couldn't always get to the places where they were needed. But I've done some studies and I think it would be
possible to double the effectiveness of our wardens in this way, by eliminating the times when they had to work in pairs or trios."

"But," protested Franklin, "what notice would whales take of por
poises? They'd ignore them completely."

"Oh, I wasn't suggesting that we should use porpoises; that was
merely an example. You're quite right—the whales wouldn't even notice
them. We'll have to use an animal that's fairly large, at least as intelligent
as the porpoise, and which whales will pay a great deal of attention to indeed. There's only one animal that fills the bill, and I'd like your authority
to catch one and train it."

"Go on," said Franklin, with such a note of resignation in his voice
that even Lundquist, who had little sense of humor, was forced to smile.

"What I want to do," he continued, "is to catch a couple of killer
whales and train them to work with one of our wardens."

Franklin thought of the thirty-foot torpedoes of ravening power he
had so often chased and slaughtered in the frozen polar seas. It was hard
to picture one of these ferocious beasts tamed to man's bidding; then he
remembered the chasm between the sheep dog and the wolf, and how
that had long ago been bridged. Yes, it could be done again—if it was
worthwhile.

When in doubt, ask for a report, one of his superiors had once told him. Well, he was going to bring back at least two from Heron Island,
and they would both make very thought-provoking reading. But Lund
quist's schemes, exciting though they were, belonged to the future; Frank
lin had to run the bureau as it was here and now. He would prefer to
avoid drastic changes for a few years, until he had learned his way about.
Besides, even if Lundquist's ideas could be proved practical, it would be
a long, stiff battle selling them to the people who approved the funds. "I
want to buy fifty milking machines for whales, please." Yes, Franklin
could picture the reaction in certain conservative quarters. And as for

training killer whales—why, they would think he had gone completely
crazy.

He watched the island fall away as the plane lifted him toward home
(strange, after all his travels, that he should be living again in the coun
try of his birth). It was almost fifteen years since he had first made this
journey with poor old Don; how glad Don would have been, could he
have seen this final fruit of his careful training! And Professor Stevens,
too—Franklin had always been a little scared of him, but now he could
have looked him in the face, had he still been alive. With a twinge of re
morse, he realized that he had never properly thanked the psychologist
for all that he had done.

Fifteen years from a neurotic trainee to director of the bureau; that
wasn't bad going. And what now, Walter? Franklin asked himself. He
felt no need of any further achievement; perhaps his ambition was now satisfied. He would be quite content to guide the bureau into a placid and
uneventful future.

It was lucky for his peace of mind that he had no idea how futile that hope was going to be.

☆
CHAPTER NINETEEN

The photographer had finished, but the young man
who had been Franklin's shadow for the last two days still seemed to have
an unlimited supply of notebooks and questions. Was it worth all this
trouble to have your undistinguished features—probably superimposed on
a montage of whales—displayed upon every bookstand in the world?
Franklin doubted it, but he had no choice in the matter. He remembered
the saying: "Public servants have no private lives." Like all aphorisms,
it was only half true. No one had ever heard of the last director of the
bureau, and he might have led an equally inconspicuous existence if the
Marine Division's Public Relations Department had not decreed other
wise.

"Quite a number of your people, Mr. Franklin," said the young man
from
Earth Magazine,
"have told me about your interest in the so-called
Great Sea Serpent, and the mission in which First Warden Burley was
killed. Have there been any further developments in this field?"

Franklin sighed; he had been afraid that this would come up sooner
or later, and he hoped that it wouldn't be overplayed in the resulting

article. He walked over to his private file cabinet, and pulled out a thick
folder of notes and photographs.

"Here are all the sightings, Bob," he said. "You might like to have a
glance through them—I've kept the record up to date. One day I hope
we'll have the answer; you can say it's still a hobby of mine, but it's one
I've had no chance of doing anything about for the last eight years. It's
up to the Department of Scientific Research now—not the Bureau of
Whales. We've other jobs to do."

He could have added a good deal more, but decided against it. If
Secretary Farlan had not been transferred from D.S.R. soon after the
tragic failure of their mission, they might have had a second chance. But
in the inquiries and recriminations that had followed the disaster, the
opportunity had been lost, possibly for years. Perhaps in every man's life there must be some cherished failure, some unfinished business which
outweighed many successes.

"Then there's only one other question I want to ask," continued the
reporter. "What about the future of the bureau? Have you any interesting
long-term plans you'd care to talk about?"

This was another tricky one. Franklin had learned long ago that men
in his position must co-operate with the press, and in the last two days his
busy interrogator had practically become one of the family. But there were
some things that sounded a little too farfetched, and he had contrived
to keep Dr. Lundquist out of the way when Bob had flown over to Heron
Island. True, he had seen the prototype milking machine and been duly
impressed by it, but he had been told nothing about the two young killer
whales being maintained, at great trouble and expense, in the enclosure
off the eastern edge of the reef.

"Well, Bob," he began slowly, "by this time you probably know the
statistics better than I do. We hope to increase the size of our herds by
ten per cent over the next five years. If this milking scheme comes off—
and it's still purely experimental—we'll start cutting back on the sperm
whales and will build up the humpbacks. At the moment we are providing
twelve and a half per cent of the total food requirements of the human
race, and that's quite a responsibility. I hope to see it fifteen per cent while I'm still in office."

"So that everyone in the world will have whale steak at least once a
week, eh?"

"Put it that way if you like. But people are eating whale all day
without knowing it—every time they use cooking fat or spread margarine
on a piece of bread. We could double our output and we'd get no credit
for it, since our products are almost always disguised in something else."

"The Art Department is going to put that right; when the story ap
pears, we'll have a picture of the average household's groceries for a week, with a clock face on each item showing what percentage of it comes from
whales."

"That'll be fine. Er—by the way—have you decided what you're going to call me?"

The reporter grinned.

"That's up to my editor," he answered. "But I'll tell him to avoid the
word 'whaleboy' like the plague. It's too hackneyed, anyway."

"Well, I'll believe you when we see the article. Every journalist prom
ises he won't call us that, but it seems they can never resist the temptation.
Incidentally, when do you expect the story to appear?"

"Unless some news story crowds it off, in about four weeks. You'll
get the proofs, of course, before that—probably by the end of next week."

Franklin saw him off through the outer office, half sorry to lose an
entertaining companion who, even if he asked awkward questions, more
than made up for it by the stories he could tell about most of the famous
men on the planet. Now, he supposed, he belonged to that group himself,
for at least a hundred million people would read the current "Men of
Earth"
series.

The story appeared, as promised, four weeks later. It was accurate, well-written, and contained one mistake so trivial that Franklin himself
had failed to notice it when he checked the proofs. The photographic
coverage was excellent and contained an astonishing study of a baby
whale suckling its mother—a shot obviously obtained at enormous risk
and after months of patient stalking. The fact that it was actually taken
in the pool at Heron Island without the photographer even getting his
feet wet was an irrelevance not allowed to distract the reader.

Apart from the shocking pun beneath the cover picture ("Prince of
Whales," indeed!), Franklin was delighted with it; so was everyone else
in the bureau, the Marine Division, and even the World Food Organiza
tion itself. No one could have guessed that within a few weeks it was to
involve the Bureau of Whales in the greatest crisis of its entire history.

It was not lack of foresight; sometimes the future can be charted in
advance, and plans made to meet it. But there are also times in human
affairs when events that seem to have no possible connection—to be as
remote as if they occurred on different planets—may react upon each
other with shattering violence.

The Bureau of Whales was an organization which had taken half a
century to build up, and which now employed twenty thousand men and

possessed equipment valued at over two billion dollars. It was a typical unit of the scientific world state, with all the power and prestige which
that implied.

And now it was to be shaken to its foundations by the gentle words of a man who had lived half a thousand years before the birth of Christ.

Franklin was in London when the first hint of trouble came. It was
not unusual for officers of the World Food Organization to bypass his
immediate superiors in the Marine Division and to contact him directly. What was unusual, however, was for the secretary of the W.F.O. himself
to interfere with the everyday working of the bureau, causing Franklin
to cancel all his engagements and to find himself, still a little dazed, flying
halfway around the world to a small town in Ceylon of which he had never
heard before and whose name he could not even pronounce.

Fortunately, it had been a hot summer in London and the extra ten
degrees at Colombo was not unduly oppressive. Franklin was met at the
airport by the local W.F.O. representative, looking very cool and com
fortable in the sarong which had now been adopted by even the most
conservative of westerners. He shook hands with the usual array of minor
officials, was relieved to see that there were no reporters around who
might tell him more about this mission than he knew himself, and swiftly
transferred to the cross-country plane which would take him on the last
hundred miles of his journey.

"Now," he said, when he had recovered his breath and the miles of
neatly laid-out automatic tea plantations were flashing past beneath him,
"you'd better start briefing me. Why is it so important to rush me to Anna
—whatever you call the place?"

"Anuradhapura. Hasn't the secretary told you?"

"We had just five minutes at London Airport. So you might as well
start from scratch."

"Well, this is something that has been building up for several years. We've warned Headquarters, but they've never taken us seriously. Now your interview in
Earth
has brought matters to a head; the Mahanayake
Thero of Anuradhapura—he's the most influential man in the East, and
you're going to hear a lot more about him—read it and promptly asked
us to grant him faciUties for a tour of the bureau. We can't refuse, of course, but we know perfectly well what he intends to do. He'll take a
team of cameramen with him and will collect enough material to launch an all-out propaganda campaign against the bureau. Then, when it's had
time to sink in, he'll demand a referendum. And if that goes against us,
we
will
be in trouble."