Despite himself, Franklin was fascinated by the idea. It had been suggested, in some form or other, for many years, but Dr. Lundquist seemed to have been the first to do anything about it.
The mother whale and her still somewhat indignant calf had now set out to sea, and were soon spouting and diving noisily beyond the edge of the reef. As Franklin watched them go, he wondered if in a few years’ time he would see hundreds of the great beasts lined up obediently as they swam to the mobile milking plants, each delivering a ton of what was known to be one of the richest foods on earth. But it might remain only a dream; there would be countless practical problems to be faced, and what had been achieved on the laboratory scale with a single animal might prove out of the question in the sea.
“What I’d like you to do,” he said to Lundquist, “is to let me have a report showing what an—er—whale dairy would require in terms of equipment and personnel. Try to give costs wherever you can. And then estimate how much milk it could deliver, and what the processing plants would pay for that. Then we’ll have something definite to work on. At the moment it’s an interesting experiment, but no one can say if it has any practical application.”
Lundquist seemed slightly disappointed at Franklin’s lack of enthusiasm, but rapidly warmed up again as they walked away from the pool. If Franklin had thought that a little project like setting up a whale dairy had exhausted Lundquist’s powers of extrapolation, he was going to learn better.
“The next proposal I want to talk about,” began the scientist, “is still entirely in the planning stage. I know that one of our most serious problems is staff shortage, and I’ve been trying to think of ways in which we can improve efficiency by releasing men from routine jobs.”
“Surely that process has gone about as far as it can, short of making everything completely automatic? Anyway, it’s less than a year since the last team of efficiency experts went over us.” (And, added Franklin to himself, the bureau isn’t quite back to normal yet.)
“My approach to the problem,” explained Lundquist, “is a little unconventional, and as an ex-warden yourself I think you’ll be particularly interested in it. As you know, it normally takes two or even three subs to round up a large school of whales; if a single sub tries it, they’ll scatter in all directions. Now this has often seemed to me a shocking waste of man power and equipment, since all the thinking could be done by a single warden. He only needs his partners to make the right noises in the right places—something a machine could do just as well.”
“If you’re thinking of automatic slave subs,” said Franklin, “it’s been tried—and it didn’t work. A warden can’t handle two ships at once, let alone three.”
“I know all about that experiment,” answered Lundquist. “It could have been a success if they’d tackled it properly. But my idea is much more revolutionary. Tell me—does the name ‘sheep dog’ mean anything to you?”
Franklin wrinkled his brow. “I think so,” he replied. “Weren’t they dogs that the old-time shepherds used to protect their flocks, a few hundred years ago?”
“It happened until less than a hundred years ago. And ‘protect’ is an understatement with a vengeance. I’ve been looking at film records of sheep dogs in action, and no one who hadn’t seen them would believe some of the things they could do. Those dogs were so intelligent and so well-trained that they could make a flock of sheep do anything the shephered wanted, merely at a word of command from him. They could split a flock into sections, single out one solitary sheep from its fellows, or keep a flock motionless in one spot as long as their master ordered.
“Do you see what I am driving at? We’ve been training dogs for centuries, so such a performance doesn’t seem miraculous to us. What I am suggesting is that we repeat the pattern in the sea. We know that a good many marine mammals—seals and porpoises, for instance—are at least as intelligent as dogs, but except in circuses and places like Marineland there’s been no attempt to train them. You’ve seen the tricks our porpoises here can do, and you know how affectionate and friendly they are. When you’ve watched these old films of sheep-dog trials, you’ll agree 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 porpoises? 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 Lundquist’s schemes, exciting though they were, belonged to the future; Franklin 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 idea 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 country 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 remorse, 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 XIX
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 r
emembered 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 otherwise.
“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 putting 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 appears, 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 promises 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 Organization 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 comfortable 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 facilities 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 ag
ainst 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.”
The pieces of the jigsaw fell into place; the pattern was at last clear. For a moment Franklin felt annoyed that he had been diverted across the world to deal with so absurd a challenge. Then he realized that the men who had sent him here did not consider it absurd; they must know, better than he did, the strength of the forces that were being marshaled. It was never wise to underestimate the power of religion, even a religion as pacific and tolerant as Buddhism.
The position was one which, even a hundred years ago, would have seemed unthinkable, but the catastrophic political and social changes of the last century had all combined to give it a certain inevitability. With the failure or weakening of its three great rivals, Buddhism was now the only religion that still possessed any real power over the minds of men.
Christianity, which had never fully recovered from the shattering blow given it by Darwin and Freud, had finally unexpectedly succumbed before the archaeological discoveries of the late twentieth century. The Hindu religion, with its fantastic pantheon of gods and goddesses, had failed to survive in an age of scientific rationalism. And the Mohammedan faith, weakened by the same forces, had suffered additional loss of prestige when the rising Star of David had outshone the pale crescent of the Prophet.