“Maybe you’re right, Walter,” the culprit had admitted cheerfully enough, “but I think the farms will last out my time. It’s not easy to make people sentimental over shrimps—they don’t have cute little ten-ton babies to nurse.”
That was perfectly true; it was very hard to draw the line between maudlin sentimentality and rational humanitarianism. Franklin remembered a recent cartoon showing the Thero raising his arms in protest while a shrieking cabbage was brutally dragged from the ground. The artist had taken no sides; he had merely summed up the viewpoint of those who considered that a great deal of fuss was being made about nothing. Perhaps this whole affair would blow over in a few weeks when people became bored and started arguing about something else—but he doubted it. That first television program had shown that the Thero was an expert in molding public opinion; he could be relied upon not to let his campaign lose momentum.
It took less than a month for the Thero to obtain the ten per cent vote needed under the constitution to set up a commission of inquiry. The fact that one tenth of the human race was sufficiently interested in the matter to request that all the facts be laid before it did not mean that they agreed with the Thero; mere curiosity and the pleasure of seeing a department of the state fighting a defensive rearguard action was quite enough to account for the vote. In itself, a commission of inquiry meant very little. What would matter would be the final referendum on the commission’s report, and it would be months before that could be arranged.
One of the unexpected results of the twentieth century’s electronic revolution was that for the first time in history it was possible to have a truly democratic government—in the sense that every citizen could express his views on matters of policy. What the Athenians, with indifferent success, had tried to do with a few thousand score of free men could now be achieved in a global society of five billion. Automatic sampling devices originally devised for the rating of television programs had turned out to have a far wider significance, by making it a relatively simple and inexpensive matter to discover exactly what the public really thought on any subject.
Naturally, there had to be safeguards, and such a system would have been disastrous before the days of universal education—before, in fact, the beginning of the twenty-first century. Even now, it was possible for some emotionally laden issue to force a vote that was really against the best interests of the community, and no government could function unless it held the final right to decide matters of policy during its term of office. Even if the world demanded some course of action by a ninety-nine per cent vote, the state could ignore the expressed will of the people—but it would have to account for its behavior at the next election.
Franklin did not relish the privilege of being a key witness at the commission’s hearings, but he knew that there was no way in which he could escape this ordeal. Much of his time was now spent in collecting data to refute the arguments of those who wished to put an end to whale slaughtering, and it proved to be a more difficult task than he had imagined. One could not present a neat, clear-cut case by saying that processed whale meat cost so much per pound by the time it reached the consumer’s table whereas synthetic meats derived from plankton or algae would cost more. Nobody knew—there were far too many variables. The biggest unknown of all was the cost of running the proposed sea dairies, if it was decided to breed whales purely for milk and not for slaughter.
The data were insufficient. It would be honest to say so, but there was pressure on him to state outright that the suspension of whale slaughtering would never be a practical or economic possibility. His own loyalty to the bureau, not to mention the security of his present position, prompted him in the same direction.
But it was not merely a matter of economics; there were emotional factors which disturbed Franklin’s judgment and made it impossible for him to make up his mind. The days he had spent with the Maha Thero, and his brief glimpse of a civilization and a way of thought far older than his own, had affected him more deeply than he had realized. Like most men of his highly materialistic era, he was intoxicated with the scientific and sociological triumphs which had irradiated the opening decades of the twenty-first century. He prided himself on his skeptical rationalism, and his total freedom from superstition. The fundamental questions of philosophy had never bothered him greatly; he knew that they existed, but they had seemed the concern of other people.
And now, whether he liked it or not, he had been challenged from a quarter so unexpected that he was almost defenseless. He had always considered himself a humane man, but now he had been reminded that humanity might not be enough. As he struggled with his thoughts, he became progressively more and more irritable with the world around him, and matters finally became so bad that Indra had to take action.
“Walter,” she said firmly, when Anne had gone tearfully to bed after a row in which there was a good deal of blame on both sides, “it will save a lot of trouble if you face the facts and stop trying to fool yourself.”
“What the devil do you mean?”
“You’ve been angry with everybody this last week—with just one exception. You’ve lost your temper with Lundquist—though that was partly my fault—with the press, with just about every other bureau in the division, with the children, and any moment you’re going to lose it with me. But there’s one person you’re not angry with—and that’s the Maha Thero, who’s the cause of all the trouble.”
“Why should I be? He’s crazy, of course, but he’s a saint—or as near it as I ever care to meet.”
“I’m not arguing about that. I’m merely saying that you really agree with him, but you won’t admit it.”
Franklin started to explode. “That’s utterly ridiculous!” he began. Then his indignation petered out. It was ridiculous; but it was also perfectly true.
He felt a great calm come upon him; he was no longer angry with the world and with himself. His childish resentment of the fact that he should be the man involved in a dilemma not of his making suddenly evaporated. There was no reason why he should be ashamed of the fact that he had grown to love the great beasts he guarded; if their slaughter could be avoided, he should welcome it, whatever the consequences to the bureau.
The parting smile of the Thero suddenly floated up into his memory. Had that extraordinary man foreseen that he would win him around to his point of view? If his gentle persuasiveness—which he had not hesitated to combine with the shock tactics of that bloodstained television program—could work with Franklin himself, then the battle was already half over.
CHAPTER
22
Life was a good deal simpler in the old days, thought Indra with a sigh. It was true that Peter and Anne were both at school or college most of the time, but somehow that had given her none of the additional leisure she had expected. There was so much entertaining and visiting to do now that Walter had moved into the upper echelons of the state. Though perhaps that was exaggerating a little; the director of the Bureau of Whales was still a long way—at least six steps—down from the rarefied heights in which the president and his advisers dwelt.
But there were some things that cut right across official rank. No one could deny that there was a glamour about Walt’s job and an interest in his activities that had made him known to a far wider circle than the other directors of the Marine Division, even before the Earth Magazine article or the present controversy over whale slaughtering. How many people could name the director of Plankton Farms or of Fresh-Water Food Production? Not one to every hundred that had heard of Walter. It was a fact that made her proud, even though at the same time it exposed Walter to a good deal of interdepartmental jealousy.
Now, however, it seemed likely to expose him to worse than that. So far, no one in the bureau, still less any of the higher officials of the Marine Division or the World Food Organization imagined for one moment that Walter had any private doubts or that he was not wholeheartedly in support of the status quo.
Her attempts to read the c
urrent Nature were interrupted by the private-line viewphone. It had been installed, despite her bitter protests, the day that Walter had become director. The public service, it seemed, was not good enough; now the office could get hold of Walter whenever it liked, unless he took precautions to frustrate it.
“Oh, good morning, Mrs. Franklin,” said the operator, who was now practically a friend of the family. “Is the director in?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Indra with satisfaction. “He hasn’t had a day off for about a month, and he’s out sailing in the bay with Peter. If you want to catch him, you’ll have to send a plane out; J.94’s radio has broken down again.”
“Both sets? That’s odd. Still, it’s not urgent. When he comes in, will you give him this memo?”
There was a barely audible click, and a sheet of paper drifted down into the extra large-sized memorandum basket. Indra read it, gave the operator an absent-minded farewell, and at once called Franklin on his perfectly serviceable radio.
The creak of the rigging, the soft rush of water past the smooth hull—even the occasional cry of a sea bird—these sounds came clearly from the speaker and transported her at once out into Moreton Bay.
“I thought you’d like to know, Walter,” she said, “the Policy Board is having its special meeting next Wednesday, here in Brisbane. That gives you three days to decide what you’re going to tell them.”
There was a slight pause during which she could hear her husband moving about the boat; then Franklin answered: “Thanks, dear. I know what I’ve got to say—I just don’t know how to say it. But there’s something I’ve thought of that you can do to help. You know all the warden’s wives—suppose you call up as many as you can, and try to find what their husbands feel about this business. Can you do that without making it look too obvious? It’s not so easy for me, nowadays, to find what the men in the field are thinking. They’re too liable to tell me what they imagine I want to know.”
There was a wistful note in Franklin’s voice which Indra had been hearing more and more frequently these days, though she knew her husband well enough to be quite sure that he had no real regrets for having taken on his present responsibilities.
“That’s a good idea,” she said. “There are at least a dozen people I should have called up weeks ago, and this will give me an excuse. It probably means that we’ll have to have another party though.”
“I don’t mind that, as long as I’m still director and can afford to pay for it. But if I revert to a warden’s pay in a month or so, we’ll have to cut out the entertaining.”
“You don’t really think—”
“Oh, it won’t be as bad as that. But they may shift me to some nice safe job, though I can’t imagine what use I am now outside the bureau. GET OUT OF THE WAY, YOU BLASTED FOOL—CAN’T YOU SEE WHERE YOU’RE GOING? Sorry, dear—too many week-end sailors around. We’ll be back in ninety minutes, unless some idiot rams us. Pete says he wants honey for tea. Bye now.”
Indra looked thoughtfully at the radio as the sounds of the distant boat ceased abruptly. She half wished that she had accompanied Walter and Pete on their cruise out into the bay, but she had faced the fact that her son now needed his father’s company rather than hers. There were times when she grudged this, realizing that in a few months they would both lose the boy whose mind and body they had formed, but who was now slipping from their grasp.
It was inevitable, of course; the ties that bound father and son together must now drive them apart. She doubted if Peter realized why he was so determined to get into space; after all, it was a common enough ambition among boys of his age. But he was one of the youngest ever to obtain a triplanetary scholarship, and it was easy to understand why. He was determined to conquer the element that had defeated his father.
But enough of this daydreaming, she told herself. She got out her file of visiphone numbers, and began to tick off the names of all the wardens’ wives who would be at home.
• • •
The Policy Board normally met twice a year, and very seldom had much policy to discuss, since most of the bureau’s work was satisfactorily taken care of by the committees dealing with finance, production, staff, and technical development. Franklin served on all of these, though only as an ordinary member, since the chairman was always someone from the Marine Division or the World Secretariat. He sometimes came back from the meetings depressed and discouraged; what was very unusual was for him to come back in a bad temper as well.
Indra knew that something had gone wrong the moment he entered the house. “Let me know the worst,” she said resignedly as her exhausted husband flopped into the most comfortable chair in sight. “Do you have to find a new job?”
She was only half joking, and Franklin managed a wan smile. “It’s not as bad as that,” he answered, “but there’s more in this business than I thought. Old Burrows had got it all worked out before he took the chair; someone in the Secretariat had briefed him pretty thoroughly. What it comes to is this: Unless it can be proved that food production from whale milk and synthetics will be drastically cheaper than the present method, whale slaughtering will continue. Even a ten percent saving isn’t regarded as good enough to justify a switch-over. As Burrows put it, we’re concerned with cost accounting, not abstruse philosophical principles like justice to animals.
“That’s reasonable enough, I suppose, and certainly I wouldn’t try to fight it. The trouble started during the break for coffee, when Burrows got me into a corner and asked me what the wardens thought about the whole business. So I told him that eighty per cent of them would like to see slaughtering stopped, even if it meant a rise in food costs. I don’t know why he asked me this particular question, unless news of our little survey has leaked out.
“Anyway, it upset him a bit and I could see him trying to get around to something. Then he put it bluntly that I’d be a key witness when the inquiry started, and that the Marine Division wouldn’t like me to plead the Thero’s case in open court with a few million people watching. ‘Suppose I’m asked for my personal opinion?’ I said. ‘No one’s worked harder than me to increase whale-meat and oil production, but as soon as it’s possible I’d like to see the bureau become a purely conservation service.’ He asked if this was my considered viewpoint and I told him that it was.
“Then things got a bit personal, though still in a friendly sort of way, and we agreed that there was a distinct cleavage of opinion between the people who handled whales as whales and those who saw them only as statistics on food-production charts. After that Burrows went off and made some phone calls, and kept us all waiting around for half an hour while he talked to a few people up in the Secretariat. He finally came back with what were virtually my orders, though he was careful not to put it that way. It comes to this: I’ve got to be an obedient little ventriloquist’s dummy at the inquiry.”
“But suppose the other side asks you outright for your personal views?”
“Our counsel will try to head them off, and if he fails I’m not supposed to have any personal views.”
“And what’s the point of all this?”
“That’s what I asked Burrows, and I finally managed to get it out of him. There are political issues involved. The Secretariat is afraid that the Maha Thero will get too powerful if he wins this case, so it’s going to be fought whatever its merits.”
“Now I understand,” said Indra slowly. “Do you think that the Thero is after political power?”
“For its own sake—no. But he may be trying to gain influence to put across his religious ideas, and that’s what the Secretariat’s afraid of.”
“And what are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” Franklin answered. “I really don’t know.”
• • •
He was still undecided when the hearings began and the Maha Thero made his first personal appearance before a worldwide audience. He was not, Franklin could not help thinking as he looked at the small, yellow-robed figure w
ith his gleaming skull, very impressive at first sight. Indeed, there was something almost comic about him—until he began to speak, and one knew without any doubt that one was in the presence both of power and conviction.
“I would like to make one thing perfectly clear,” said the Maha Thero, addressing not only the chairman of the commission but also the unseen millions who were watching this first hearing. “It is not true that we are trying to enforce vegetarianism on the world, as some of our opponents have tried to maintain. The Buddha himself did not abstain from eating meat, when it was given to him; nor do we, for a guest should accept gratefully whatever his host offers.
“Our attitude is based on something deeper and more fundamental than food prejudices, which are usually only a matter of conditioning. What is more, we believe that most reasonable men, whether their religious beliefs are the same as ours or not, will eventually accept our point of view.
“It can be summed up very simply, though it is the result of twenty-six centuries of thought. We consider that it is wrong to inflict injury or death on any living creature, but we are not so foolish as to imagine that it can be avoided altogether. Thus we recognize, for example, the need to kill microbes and insect pests, much though we may regret the necessity.
“But as soon as such killing is no longer essential, it should cease. We believe that this point has now arrived as far as many of the higher animals are concerned. The production of all types of synthetic protein from purely vegetable sources is now an economic possibility—or it will be if the effort is made to achieve it. Within a generation, we can shed the burden of guilt which, however lightly or heavily it has weighed on individual consciences, must at some time or other have haunted all thinking men as they look at the world of life which shares their planet.