From the Ocean from teh Stars (8 page)

Franklin smiled and answered: "Of course I remember: it still turns
my stomach sometimes. I hope you found plenty of vitamins."

Yet strangely enough, the puzzled expression—so typical of a man straining after memories that will not come—still lingered in his eyes. It
made him look lost and more than a little worried, and Indra found her
self reacting with a sympathy, which was disconcerting. She had already had several narrow escapes from emotional entanglements on the island,
and she reminded herself firmly of her resolution: "Not until
after
I've
got my master's degree . . ."

"So you know each other," said Don plaintively. "You might introduce me." Don, Indra decided, was perfectly safe. He would start to flirt
with her at once, like any warden worthy of his calling. She did not mind that in the least; though big leonine blonds were not precisely her type, it
was always flattering to feel that one was causing a stir, and she knew
that there was no risk of any serious attachment here. With Franklin,
however, she felt much less sure of herself.

They chattered pleasantly enough, with a few bantering undertones,
while they stood watching the big fish and porpoises circling slowly in the oval pool. The lab's main tank was really an artificial lagoon, filled
and emptied twice a day by the tides, with a little assistance from a
pumping plant. Wire-mesh barriers divided it into various sections
through which mutually incompatible exhibits stared hungrily at each
other; a small tiger shark, with the inevitable sucker fish glued to its
back, kept patrolling its underwater cage, unable to take its eyes off the
succulent pompano parading just outside. In some enclosures, however, surprising partnerships had developed. Brilliantly colored crayfish, look
ing like overgrown shrimps that had been sprayed with paint guns,
crawled a few inches away from the incessantly gaping jaws of a huge
and hideous moray eel. A school of fingerlings, like sardines that had
escaped from their tin, cruised past the nose of a quarter-ton grouper that
could have swallowed them all at one gulp.

It was a peaceful little world, so different from the battlefield of the
reef. But if the lab staff ever failed to make the normal feeding arrangements, this harmony would quickly vanish and in a few hours the popu
lation of the pool would start a catastrophic decline.

Don did most of the talking; he appeared to have quite forgotten
that he had brought Franklin here to see some of the whale-recognition
films in the lab's extensive library. He was clearly trying to impress Indra,
and quite unaware of the fact that she saw through him completely. Franklin, on the other hand, obviously saw both sides of the game and
was mildly entertained by it. Once, Indra caught his eye, when Don was

holding forth about the life and hard times of the average warden, and
they exchanged the smiles of two people who share the same amusing
secret. And at that moment Indra decided that, after all, her degree
might not be the most important thing in the world. She was still deter
mined not to get herself involved—but she had to learn more about
Franklin. What was his first name? Walter. It was not one of her favor
ites, but it would do.

In his calm confidence that he was laying waste another susceptible
female heart, Don was completely unaware of the undercurrents of emo
tion that were sweeping around him yet leaving him utterly untouched. When he suddenly realized that they were twenty minutes late for their
appointment in the projection room, he pretended to blame Franklin,
who accepted the reproof in a good-natured but slightly absent-minded
manner. For the rest of the morning, indeed, Franklin was rather far away from his studies; but Don noticed nothing at all.

The first part of the course was now virtually completed; Franklin
had learned the basic mechanics of the warden's profession and now
needed the experience that only time would give. In almost every respect,
he had exceeded Burley's hopes, partly because of his original scientific
training, partly because of his innate intelligence. Yet there was more to it even than this; Franklin had a drive and determination that was sometimes frightening. It was as if success in this course was a matter of life
and death to him. True, he had been slow in starting; for the first few
days he had been listless and seemingly almost uninterested in his new
career. Then he had come to life, as he awoke to the wonder and chal
lenge—the endless opportunity—of the element he was attempting to
master. Though Don was not much given to such fancies, it seemed to
him that Franklin was like a man awakening from a long and troubled
sleep.

The real test had been when they had first gone under water with
the torpedoes. Franklin might never use a torp again—except for amusement—during his entire career; they were purely shallow-water units
designed for very short-range work, and as a warden, Franklin would spend all his operational time snug and dry behind the protective walls
of a sub. But unless a man was at ease and confident—though not overconfident—when he was actually immersed in water, the service had no
use for him, however qualified he might be in other respects.

Franklin had also passed, with a satisfactory safety margin, the de
compression, C0
₂
, and nitrogen narcosis tests. Burley had put him in
the station's "torture chamber," where the doctors slowly increased the
air pressure and took him down on a simulated dive. He had been per-

fectly normal down to 150 feet; thereafter his mental reactions became
sluggish and he failed to do simple sums correctly when they were given
to him over the intercom. At 300 feet he appeared to be mildly drunk
and started cracking jokes which reduced him to tears of helpless laugh
ter but which were quite unfunny to those outside—and embarrassingly
so to Franklin himself when they played them back to him later. Three hundred and fifty feet down he still appeared to be conscious but refused to react to Don's voice, even when it started shouting outrageous insults. And at 400 feet he passed out completely, and they brought him slowly
back to normal.

Though he would never have occasion to use them, he was also tested
with the special breathing mixtures which enable a man to remain conscious and active at far greater depths. When he did any deep dives, he would not be wearing underwater breathing gear but would be sitting
comfortably inside a sub breathing normal air at normal pressure. But a warden had to be a Jack of all underwater trades, and never knew what equipment he might have to use in an emergency.

Burley was no longer scared—as he had once been—at the thought
of sharing a two-man training sub with Franklin. Despite the other's
underlying reticence and the mystery which still surrounded him, they
were partners now and knew how to work together. They had not yet
become friends, but had reached a state which might be defined as one of
tolerant respect.

On their first sub run, they kept to the shallow waters between the Great Barrier Reef and the mainland, while Franklin familiarized him
self with the control, and above all with the navigational instruments. If
you could run a sub here, said Don, in this labyrinth of reefs and islands,
you could run it anywhere. Apart from trying to charge Masthead Island at sixty knots, Franklin performed quite creditably. His fingers began to
move over the complex control board with a careful precision which,
Don knew, would soon develop into automatic skill. His scanning of the
many meters and display screens would soon be unconscious, so that he
would not even be aware that he saw them—until something called for
his attention.

Don gave Franklin increasingly more complicated tasks to perform,
such as tracing out improbable courses by dead reckoning and then
checking his position on the sonar grid to see where he had actually arrived. It was not until he was quite sure that Franklin was proficient in
handling a sub that they finally went out into deep water over the edge of
the continental shelf.

Navigating a Scoutsub was merely the beginning; one had to learn to

see and feel with its senses, to interpret all the patterns of information displayed on the control board by the many instruments which were continually probing the underwater world. The sonic senses were perhaps, the most important. In utter darkness, or in completely turbid water, they could detect all obstacles out to a range of ten miles, with great accuracy and in considerable detail. They could show the contours of the ocean bed, or with equal ease could detect any fish more than two or three feet long that came within half a mile. Whales and the larger marine animals they could spot right out to the extreme limit of range, fixing them with pinpoint accuracy.

Visible light had a more limited role. Sometimes, in deep ocean waters far from the eternal rain of silt which sloughs down from the edges of the continents, it was possible to see as much as two hundred feet— but that was rare. In shallow coastal waters, the television eye could seldom peer more than fifty feet, but within its range it gave a definition unmatched by the sub's other senses.

Yet the subs had not only to see and feel; they also had to act. Franklin must learn to use a whole armory of tools and weapons: borers to collect specimens of the sea bed, meters to check the efficiency of the fences, sampling devices, branders for painlessly marking un-co-opera-tive whales, electric probes to discourage marine beasts that became too inquisitive—and, most seldom used of all, the tiny torpedoes and poisoned darts that could slay in seconds the mightiest creatures of the seas.

In daily cruises far out into the Pacific, Franklin learned to use these tools of his new trade. Sometimes they went through the fence, and it seemed to Franklin that he could feel its eternal high-pitched shrieking in his very bones. Halfway around the world it now extended, its narrow fans of radiation reaching up to the surface from the deeply submerged generators.

What, wondered Franklin, would earlier ages have thought of this? In some ways it seemed the greatest and most daring of all man's presumptions. The sea, which had worked its will with man since the beginning of time, had been humbled at last. Not even the conquest of space had been a greater victory than this.

And yet—it was a victory that could never be final. The sea would
always be waiting, and every year it would claim its victims. There was a
roll of honor that Franklin had glimpsed briefly during his visit to the
head office. Already it bore many names, and there was room for many
more.
3
Slowly, Franklin was coming to terms with the sea, as must all men

who have dealings with it. Though he had had little time for nonessential reading, he had dipped into
Moby Dick,
which had been half-jokingly, half-seriously called the bible of the Bureau of Whales. Much of it had
seemed to him tedious, and so far removed from the world in which he
was Uving that it had no relevance. Yet occasionally Melville's archaic,
sonorous prose touched some chord in his own mind, and gave him a
closer understanding of the ocean which he, too, must learn to hate and
love.

Don Burley, however, had no use at all for
Moby Dick
and frequently
made fun of those who were always quoting it.

"We could show Melville a thing or two!" he had once remarked to
Franklin, in a very condescending tone.

"Of course we could," Franklin had answered. "But would you have
the guts to stick a spear into a sperm whale from an open boat?"

Don did not reply. He was honest enough to admit that he did not
know the answer.

Yet there was one question he was now close to answering. As he
watched Franklin learn his new skills, with a swiftness which could un
doubtedly make him a first warden in no more than four or five years, he knew with complete certainty what his pupil's last profession had
been. If he chose to keep it a secret, that was his own affair. Don felt a
little aggrieved by such lack of trust; but sooner or later, he told himself,
Franklin would confide in him.

Yet it was not Don who was the first to learn the truth. By the sheerest of accidents, it was Indra.