From the Ocean from teh Stars (15 page)

am confident that we need expect no more trouble. Above all, it is im
portant that we interfere with him as little as possible. His independence
and originality of mind, though no longer as exaggerated as they were,
are a fundamental part of his personality and will largely determine his
future progress.

Only time will show whether all the skill and effort lavished on this case will be repaid in cents and dollars. Even if it is not, those engaged
upon it have already received their reward in the rebuilding of a life,
which will certainly be useful and may be invaluable.

Ian K. Stevens
Director, Division of Applied Psychiatry,
World Health Organization

Part II
The Warden

☆
CHAPTER TWELVE

Second Warden Walter Franklin was having his
monthly shave when the emergency call came through. It had always
seemed a little surprising to him that, after so many years of research, the
biochemists had not yet found an inhibitor that would put one's bristles
permanently out of action. Still, one should not be ungrateful; only a
couple of generations ago, incredible though it seemed, men had been
forced to shave themselves every day, using a variety of complicated,
expensive, and sometimes lethal instruments.

Franklin did not stop to wipe the layer of cream from his face when
he heard the shrill whining of the communicator alarm. He was out of
the bathroom, through the kitchen, and into the hall before the sound
had died away and the instrument had been able to get its second breath.
As he punched the Receive button, the screen lighted up and he was
looking into the familiar but now harassed face of the Headquarters oper
ator.

"You're to report for duty at once, Mr. Franklin," she said breath
lessly.

"What's the trouble?"

"It's Farms, sir. The fence is down somewhere and one of the herds
has broken through. It's eating the spring crop, and we've got to get it
out as quickly as we can."

"Oh, is that all?" said Franklin. "I'll be over at the dock in ten min
utes."

It was an emergency all right, but not one about which he could feel
very excited. Of course, Farms would be yelling its head off as its produc
tion quota was being whittled down by thousands of half-ton nibbles. But he was secretly on the side of the whales; if they'd managed to break into
the great plankton prairies, then good luck to them.

"What's all the fuss about?" said Indra as she came out of the bed
room, her long, dark hair looking attractive even at this time of the
morning as it hung in lustrous tresses over her shoulders. When Franklin
told her, she appeared worried.

"It's a bigger emergency than you seem to think," she said. "Unless
you act quickly, you may have some very sick whales on your hands. The
spring overturn was only two weeks ago, and it's the biggest one we've
ever had. So your greedy pets will be gorging themselves silly."

Franklin realized that she was perfectly right. The plankton farms
were no affair of his, and formed a completely independent section of the Marine Division. But he knew a great deal about them, since they were an
alternative and to some extent rival method of getting food from the sea. The plankton enthusiasts claimed, with a good deal of justice, that crop
growing was more efficient than herding, since the whales themselves
fed on the plankton and were therefore farther down the food chain. Why
waste ten pounds of plankton, they argued, to produce one pound of
whale, when you could harvest it directly?

The debate had been in progress for at least twenty years, and so far
neither side could claim to have won. Sometimes the argument had been
quite acrimonious and had echoed, on an infinitely larger and more
sophisticated scale, the rivalry between homesteaders and cattle barons
in the days when the American Midwest was being settled. But unfortunately for latter-day mythmakers, competing departments of the Marine Division of the World Food Organization fought each other purely with
official minutes and the efficient but unspectacular weapons of bu
reaucracy. There were no gun fighters prowling the range, and if the fence had gone down it would be due to purely technical troubles, not midnight
sabotage. ...

In the sea as on the land, all life depends upon vegetation. And the
amount of vegetation in turn depends upon the mineral content of the
medium in which it grows—the nitrates, phosphates, and scores of other basic chemicals. In the ocean, there is always a tendency for these vital substances to accumulate in the depths, far below the regions where light
penetrates and therefore plants can exist and grow. The upper few hun
dred feet of the sea is the primary source of its life; everything below
that level preys, at second or third hand, on the food formed above.

Every spring, as the warmth of the new year seeps down into the
ocean, the waters far below respond to the invisible sun. They expand
and rise, lifting to the surface, in untold billions of tons, the salts and
minerals they bear. Thus fertilized by food from below and sun from
above, the floating plants multiply with explosive violence, and the

creatures which browse upon them flourish accordingly. And so spring
comes to the meadows of the sea.

This was the cycle that had repeated itself at least a billion times before man appeared on the scene. And now he had changed it. Not
content with the upwelling of minerals produced by Nature, he had sunk his atomic generators at strategic spots far down into the sea, where the
raw heat they produced would start immense, submerged fountains lifting
their chemical treasure toward the fruitful sun. This artificial enhance
ment of the natural overturn had been one of the most unexpected, as
well as the most rewarding, of all the many applications of nuclear en
ergy. By this means alone, the output of food from the sea had been in
creased by almost ten per cent.

And now the whales were busily doing their best to restore the bal
ance.

The roundup would have to be a combined sea and air operation.
There were too few of the subs, and they were far too slow, to do the job
unassisted. Three of them—including Franklin's one-man scout—were
being flown to the scene of the breakthrough by a cargo plane which
would drop them and then co-operate by spotting the movements of the
whales from the air, if they had scattered over too large an area for the
subs' sonar to pick them up. Two other planes would also try to scare
the whales by dropping noise generators near them, but this technique
had never worked well in the past and no one really expected much suc
cess from it now.

Within twenty minutes of the alarm, Franklin was watching the enor
mous food-processing plants of Pearl Harbor falling below as the jets of the freighter hauled him up into the sky. Even now, he was still not fond
of flying and tried to avoid it when he could. But it no longer worried
him, and he could look down on the world beneath without qualms.

A hundred miles east of Hawaii, the sea turned suddenly from blue to
gold. The moving fields, rich with the year's first crop, covered the Pacific
clear out to the horizon, and showed no sign of ending as the plane raced
on toward the rising sun. Here and there the mile-long skimmers of the floating harvesters lay upon the surface like the enigmatic toys of some
giant children, while beside them, smaller and more compact, were the
pontoons and rafts of the concentration equipment. It was an impressive
sight, even in these days of mammoth engineering achievements, but it did not move Franklin. He could not become excited over a billion tons
of assorted diatoms and shrimps—not even though he knew that they fed
a quarter of the human race.

"Just passing over the Hawaiian Corridor," said the pilot's voice from
the speaker. "We should see the break in a minute."

"I can see it now," said one of the other wardens, leaning past Frank
lin and pointing out to sea. "There they are—having the time of their
lives."

It was a spectacle which must be making the poor farmers tear their hair. Franklin suddenly remembered an old nursery rhyme he had not
thought of for at least thirty years:

Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn,

The sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn.

There was no doubt that the cows were in the corn, and Little Boy
Blue was going to have a busy time getting them out. Far below, myriads of narrow swathes were being carved in the endless yellow sea, as the
ravenous, slowly moving mountains ate their way into the rich plankton
meadows. A blue line of exposed water marked the track of each whale
as it meandered through what must be a cetacean heaven—a heaven
from which it was Franklin's job to expel it as promptly as possible.

The three wardens, after a final radio briefing, left the cabin and went
down to the hold, where the little subs were already hanging from the
davits which would lower them into the sea. There would be no difficulty
about this operation; what might not be so easy would be getting them
back again, and if the sea became rough they might have to go home
under their own power.

It seemed strange to be inside a submarine inside an airplane, but Franklin had little time for such thoughts as he went through the routine
cockpit drill. Then the speaker on his control panel remarked: "Hovering
at thirty feet; now opening cargo hatches. Stand by, Number One Sub."
Franklin was number two; the great cargo craft was poised so steadily,
and the hoists moved down so smoothly, that he never felt any impact
as the sub dropped into its natural element. Then the three scouts were
fanning out along the tracks that had been assigned to them, like mech
anized sheep dogs rounding up a flock.

Almost at once, Franklin realized that this operation was not going to
be as simple as it looked. The sub was driving through a thick soup that completely eliminated vision and even interfered seriously with sonar.
What was still more serious, the hydrojet motors were laboring unhappily
as their impellers chewed through the mush. He could not afford to get
his propulsion system clogged; the best thing to do would be to dive below
the plankton layer and not to surface until it was absolutely necessary.

Three hundred feet down, the water was merely murky and though

vision was still impossible he could make good speed. He wondered if
the greedily feasting whales above his head knew of his approach and
realized that their idyl was coming to an end. On the sonar screen he
could see their luminous echoes moving slowly across the ghostly mirror
of the air-water surface which his sound beams could not penetrate. It was odd how similar the surface of the sea looked from below both to
the naked eye and to the acoustical senses of the sonar.

The characteristically compact little echoes of the two other subs were
moving out to the flanks of the scattered herd. Franklin glanced at the
chronometer; in less than a minute, the drive was due to begin. He
switched on the external microphones and listened to the voices of the
sea.

How could anyone have ever thought that the sea was silent! Even
man's limited hearing could detect many of its sounds—the clashing of
chitinous claws, the moan of great boulders made restive by the ocean
swell, the high-pitched squeak of porpoises, the unmistakable "flick" of a
shark's tail as it suddenly accelerates on a new course. But these were merely the sounds in the audible spectrum; to listen to the full music of
the sea one must go both below and above the range of human hearing. This was a simple enough task for the sub's frequency converters; if he
wished, Franklin could tune in to any sounds from almost a million cycles
a second down to vibrations as sluggish as the slow opening of an ancient,
rusty door.

He set the receiver to the broadest band, and at once his mind began to interpret the multitudinous messages that came pouring into the little
cabin from the watery world outside. The man-made noises he dismissed
at once; the sounds of his own sub and the more distant whines of his
companion vessels were largely eliminated by the special filters designed
for that purpose. But he could just detect the distinctive whistles of the
three sonar sets—his own almost blanketing the others—and beyond those the faint and far-off
beep-beep-beep
of the Hawaiian Corridor. The double fence which was supposed to channel the whales safely
through the rich sea farms sent out its pulses at five-second intervals, and though the nearest portion of the fence was out of action the more distant
parts of the sonic barrier could be clearly heard. The pulses were curi
ously distorted and drawn-out into a faint continuous echo as each new
burst of sound was followed at once by the delayed waves from more and
more remote regions of the fence. Franklin could hear each pulse running
away into the distance, as sometimes a clap of thunder may be heard
racing across the sky.

Against this background, the sounds of the natural world stood out