From the Ocean from teh Stars (16 page)

sharp and clear. From all directions, with never a moment's silence, came
the shrill shrieks and squealings of the whales as they talked to one another or merely gave vent to their high spirits and enjoyment. Franklin
could distinguish between the voices of the males and the females, but he
was not one of those experts who could identify individuals and even
interpret what they were trying to express.

There is no more eerie sound in all the world than the screaming of
a herd of whales, when one moves among it in the depths of the sea.
Franklin had only to close his eyes and he could imagine that he was
lost in some demon-haunted forest, while ghosts and goblins closed in
upon him. Could Hector Berlioz have heard this banshee chorus, he would have known that Nature had already anticipated his "Dream of
the Witches' Sabbath."

But weirdness lies only in unfamiliarity, and this sound was now part of Franklin's life. It no longer gave him nightmares, as it had sometimes
done in his early days. Indeed, the main emotion that it now inspired in him was an affectionate amusement, together with a slight surprise that
such enormous animals produced such falsetto screams.

Yet there was a memory that the sound of the sea sometimes evoked.
It no longer had power to hurt him, though it could still fill his heart with
a wistful sadness. He remembered all the times he had spent in the signals rooms of spaceships or space stations, listening to the radio waves coming in as the monitors combed the spectrum in their automatic search. Some
times there had been, like these same ghostly voices calling in the night,
the sound of distant ships or beacons, or the torrents of high-speed code
as the colonies talked with Mother Earth. And always one could hear a
perpetual murmuring background to man's feeble transmitters, the end
less susurration of the stars and galaxies themselves as they drenched
the whole universe with radiation.

The chronometer hand came around to zero. It had not scythed away
the first second before the sea erupted in a hellish cacophony of sound—
a rising and falling ululation that made Franklin reach swiftly for the
volume control. The sonic mines had been dropped, and he felt sorry for
any whales who were unlucky enough to be near them. Almost at once
the pattern of echoes on the screen began to change, as the terrified
beasts started to flee in panic toward the west. Franklin watched closely,
preparing to head off any part of the herd that looked like it would miss
the gap in the fence and turn back into the farms.

The noise generators must have been improved, he decided, since the
last time this trick had been tried—or else these whales were more
amenable. Only a few stragglers tried to break away, and it was no more

than ten minutes' work to round them up on the right path and scare
them back with the subs' own sirens. Half an hour after the mines had been dropped, the entire herd had been tunneled back through the in
visible gap in the fence, and was milling around inside the narrow corri
dor. There was nothing for the subs to do but to stand by until the
engineers had carried out their repairs and the curtain of sound was once
more complete.

No one could claim that it was a famous victory. It was just another
day's work, a minor battle in an endless campaign. Already the excite
ment of the chase had died away, and Franklin was wondering how long
it would be before the freighter could hoist them out of the ocean and fly
them back to Hawaii. This was, after all, supposed to be his day off, and
he had promised to take Peter down to Waikiki and start teaching him
how to swim.

Even when he is merely standing by, a good warden never lets his attention stray for long from his sonar screen. Every three minutes, without any conscious thought, Franklin switched to the long-range scan and
tilted the transmitter down toward the sea bed, just to keep track of what
was going on around him. He did not doubt that his colleagues were
doing exactly the same, between wondering how long it would be before
they were relieved. . . .

At the very limit of his range, ten miles away and almost two miles
down, a faint echo had crawled onto the edge of the screen. Franklin
looked at it with mild interest; then his brows knit in perplexity. It must
be an unusually large object to be visible at such a distance—something
quite as large as a whale. But no whale could be swimming at such a
depth; though sperm whales had been encountered almost a mile down, this was beyond the limits at which they could operate, fabulous divers
though they were. A deep-sea shark? Possibly, thought Franklin; it would
do no harm to have a closer look at it.

He locked the scanner onto the distant echo and expanded the image
as far as the screen magnification would allow. It was too far away to
make out any detail, but he could see now that he was looking at a long,
thin object—and that it was moving quite rapidly. He stared at it for a
moment, then called his colleagues. Unnecessary chatter was discouraged
on operations, but here was a minor mystery that intrigued him.

"Sub Two calling," he said. "I've a large echo bearing 185 degrees,
range 9.7 miles, depth 1.8 miles. Looks Uke another sub. You know if
anyone else is operating around here?"

"Sub One calling Sub Two," came the first reply. "That's outside my

range. Could be a Research Department sub down there. How big would
you say your echo is?"

"About a hundred feet long. Maybe more. It's doing over ten knots."

"Sub Three calling. There's no research vessel around here. The
Nautilus IV
is laid up for repairs, and the
Cousteau's
in the Atlantic.
Must be a fish you've got hold of."

"There aren't any fish this size. Have I permission to go after it? I think we ought to check up."

"Permission granted," answered Sub One. "We'll hold the gap here.
Keep in touch."

Franklin swung the sub around to the south, and brought the little
vessel up to maximum speed with a smooth rush of power. The echo he was chasing was already too deep for him to reach, but there was always
the chance that it might come back to the surface. Even if it did not, he
would be able to get a much clearer image when he had shortened his
range.

He had traveled only two miles when he saw that the chase was hope
less. There could be no doubt; his quarry had detected either the vibrations of his motor or his sonar and was plunging at full speed straight
down to the bottom. He managed to get within four miles, and then the signal was lost in the confused maze of echoes from the ocean bed. His last glimpse of it confirmed his earlier impression of great length and relative thinness, but he was still unable to make out any details of its
structure.

"So it got away from you," said Sub One. "I thought it would."

"Then you know what it was?"

"No—nor does anyone else. And if you'll take my advice, you won't
talk to any reporters about it. If you do, you'll never live it down."

Momentarily frozen with astonishment, Franklin stared at the little
loudspeaker from which the words had just come. So they had not been pulling his leg, as he had always assumed. He remembered some of the
tales he had heard in the bar at Heron Island and wherever wardens
gathered together after duty. He had laughed at them then, but now he knew that the tales were true.

That nervous echo skittering hastily out of range had been nothing
less than the Great Sea Serpent.

Indra, who was still doing part-time work at the Hawaii Aquarium
when her household duties permitted, was not as impressed as her hus
band had expected. In fact, her first comment was somewhat deflating.

"Yes, but
which
sea serpent? You know there are at least three totally
different types."

"I certainly didn't."

"Well, first of all there's a giant eel which has been seen on three or
four occasions but never properly identified, though its larvae were
caught back in the 1940s. It's known to grow up to sixty feet long, and
that's enough of a sea serpent for most people. But the really spectacular
one is the oarfish—
Regalecus glesne.
That's got a face like a horse, a
crest of brilliant red quills like an Indian brave's headdress—and a
snakelike body which may be seventy feet long. Since we know that these
things exist, how do you expect us to be surprised at anything the sea can
produce?"

"What about the third type you mentioned?"

"That's the one we haven't identified or even described. We just
call it 'X' because people still laugh when you talk about sea serpents. The only thing that we know about it is that it undoubtedly exists, that
it's extremely sly, and that it lives in deep water. One day we'll catch it, but when we do it will probably be through pure luck."

Franklin was very thoughtful for the rest of the evening. He did not
like to admit that, despite all the instruments that man now used to
probe the sea, despite his own continual patrolling of the depths, the
ocean still held many secrets and would retain them for ages yet to come.
And he knew that, though he might never see it again, he would be
haunted all his life by the memory of that distant, tantalizing echo as it
descended swiftly into the abyss that was its home.

☆
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Th
ere are many misconceptions about the glamour of
a warden's life. Franklin had never shared them, so he was neither
surprised nor disappointed that so much of his time was spent on long, uneventful patrols far out at sea. Indeed, he welcomed them. They gave
him time to think, yet not time to brood—and it was on these lonely
missions in the living heart of the sea that his last fears were shed and his
mental scars finally healed.

The warden's year was dominated by the pattern of whale migration,
but that pattern was itself continually changing as new areas of the sea
were fenced and fertilized. He might spend summer moving cautiously
through the polar ice, and winter beating back and forth across the

equator. Sometimes he would operate from shore stations, sometimes from mobile bases like the
Rorqual,
the
Pequod,
or the
Cachelot.
One season he might be wholly concerned with the great whalebone or baleen whales, who literally strained their food from the sea as they swam, mouth open, through the rich plankton soup. And another season he would have to deal with their very different cousins, the fierce, toothed cetaceans of whom the sperm whales were the most important representatives. These were no gentle herbivores, but pursued and fought their monstrous prey in the lightless deep half a mile from the last rays of the sun.

There would be weeks or even months when a warden would never see a whale. The bureau had many calls on its equipment and personnel, and whales were not its only business. Everyone who had dealings with the sea appeared to come, sooner or later, to the Bureau of Whales with an appeal for help. Sometimes the requests were tragic; several times a year subs were sent on usually fruitless searches for drowned sportsmen or explorers.

At the other extreme, there was a standing joke that a senator had once asked the Sydney office to locate his false teeth, lost when the Bondi surf worked its will upon him. It was said that he had received, with great promptness, the foot-wide jaws of a tiger shark, with an apologetic note saying that these were the only unwanted teeth that an extensive search had been able to find off Bondi Beach.

Some tasks that came the warden's way had a certain glamour, and were eagerly sought after when they arose. A very small and understaffed section of the Bureau of Fisheries was concerned with pearls, and during the slack season wardens were sometimes detached from their normal work and allowed to assist on the pearl beds.

Franklin had one such tour of duty in the Persian Gulf. It was straightforward work, not unlike gardening, and since it involved diving to depths never greater than two hundred feet simple compressed-air equipment was used and the diver employed a torpedo for moving around. The best areas for pearl cultivation had been carefully populated with selected stock, and the main problem was protecting the oysters from their natural enemies—particularly starfish and rays. When they had time to mature, they were collected and carried back to the surface for inspection—one of the few jobs that no one had ever been able to mechanize.

Any pearls discovered belonged, of course, to the Bureau of Fisheries. But it was noticeable that the wives of all the wardens posted to this duty