Arthur Clarke - The Deep Range

There was a long silence while the two men, their relationship suddenly altered, stared at each other across the room. Franklin searched his memory, but the other’s face evoked no echoes; that was so long ago, and he had met so many people during the intervening years.

“Were you one of the men who pulled me in?” he asked. “If so, I’ve a lot to thank you for.” He paused for a moment, then added, “You see, that wasn’t an accident.”

“I rather thought so; that explains everything. But before we change the subject, just what happened to Bert Darryl? I’ve never been able to find the true story.”

“Oh, eventually he ran out of credit; he could never make the Sea Lion pay its way. The last time I ever saw him was in Melbourne; he was heartbroken because customs duties had been abolished and there was no way an honest smuggler could make a living. Finally he tried to collect the insurance on the Sea Lion; he had a convincing fire and had to abandon ship off Cairns. She went to the bottom, but the appraisers went after her, and started asking some very awkward questions when they found that all the valuable fittings had been removed before the fire. I don’t know how the captain got out of that mess.

“That was about the end of the old rascal. He took to the bottle in earnest, and one night up in Darwin he decided to go for a swim off the jetty. But he’d forgotten that it was low tide — and in Darwin the tide drops thirty feet. So he broke his neck, and a lot of people besides his creditors were genuinely sorry.”

“Poor old Bert. The world will be a dull place when there aren’t any more people like him.”

That was rather a heretical remark, thought Franklin, coming from the lips of so senior a member of the World Secretariat. But it pleased him greatly, and not merely because he agreed with it. He knew now that he had unexpectedly acquired an influential friend, and that the chances of his project going forward had been immeasurably improved.

He did not expect anything to happen in a hurry, so was not disappointed as the weeks passed in silence. In any event, he was kept busy; the slack season was still three months away, and meanwhile a whole series of minor but annoying crises crowded upon him.

And there was one that was neither minor nor annoying, if indeed it could be called a crisis at all. Anne Franklin arrived wide-eyed and wide-mouthed into the world, and Indra began to have her first serious doubts of continuing her academic career.

Franklin, to his great disappointment, was not home when his daughter was born. He had been in charge of a small task force of six subs, carrying out an offensive sweep off the Pribilof Islands in an attempt to cut down the number of killer whales. It was not the first mission of its kind, but it was the most successful, thanks to the use of improved techniques. The characteristic calls of seals and the smaller whales had been recorded and played back into the sea, while the subs had waited silently for the killers to appear.

They had done so in hundreds, and the slaughter had been immense. By the time the little fleet returned to Base, more than a thousand orcas had been killed. It had been hard and sometimes dangerous work, and despite its importance Franklin had found this scientific butchery extremely depressing. He could not help admiring the beauty, speed, and ferocity of the hunters he was himself hunting, and toward the end of the mission he was almost glad when the rate of kill began to fall off. It seemed that the orcas were learning by bitter experience, and the bureau’s statisticians would have to decide whether or not it would be economically worthwhile repeating the operation next season.

Franklin had barely had time to thaw out from this mission and to fondle Anne gingerly, without extracting any signs of recognition from her, when he was shot off to South Georgia. His problem there was to discover why the whales, who had previously swum into the slaughtering pens without any qualms, had suddenly become suspicious and shown a great reluctance to enter the electrified sluices. As it turned out, he did nothing at all to solve the mystery; while he was still looking for psychological factors, a bright young plant inspector discovered that some of the bloody waste from the processing plants was accidentally leaking back into the sea. It was not surprising that the whales, though their sense of smell was not as strongly developed as in other marine animals, had become alarmed as the moving barriers tried to guide them to the place where so many of their relatives had met their doom.

As a chief warden, already being groomed for higher things, Franklin was now a kind of mobile trouble shooter who might be sent anywhere in the world on the bureau’s business. Apart from the effect on his home life, he welcomed this state of affairs. Once a man had learned the mechanics of a warden’s trade, straightforward patrolling and herding had little future in it. People like Don Burley got all the excitement and pleasure they needed from it, but then Don was neither ambitious nor much of an intellectual heavyweight. Franklin told himself this without any sense of superiority; it was a simple statement of fact which Don would be the first to admit.

He was in England, giving evidence as an expert witness before the Whaling Commission — the bureau’s state-appointed watchdog — when he received a plaintive call from Dr. Lundquist, who had taken over when Dr. Roberts had left the Bureau of Whales to accept a much more lucrative appointment at the Marineland aquarium.

“I’ve just had three crates of gear delivered from the Department of Scientific Research. It’s nothing we ever ordered, but your name is on it. What’s it all about?”

Franklin thought quickly. It would arrive when he was away, and if the director came across it before he could prepare the ground there would be fireworks.

“It’s too long a story to give now,” Franklin answered. “I’ve got to go before the committee in ten minutes. Just push it out of the way somewhere until I get back — I’ll explain everything then.”

“I hope it’s all right — it’s most unusual.”

“Nothing to worry about — see you the day after tomorrow. If Don Burley comes to Base, let him have a look at the stuff. But I’ll fix all the paperwork when I get back.”

That, he told himself, would be the worst part of the whole job. Getting equipment that had never been officially requisitioned onto the bureau’s inventory without too many questions was going to be at least as difficult as locating the Great Sea Serpent…

He need not have worried. His new and influential ally, the secretary of the Department of Scientific Research, had already anticipated most of his problems. The equipment was to be on loan to the bureau, and was to be returned as soon as it had done its job. What was more, the director had been given the impression that the whole thing was a D.S.R. project; he might have his doubts, but Franklin was officially covered.

“Since you seem to know all about it, Walter,” he said in the lab when the gear was finally unpacked, “you’d better explain what it’s supposed to do.”

“It’s an automatic recorder, much more sophisticated than the ones we have at the gates for counting the whales as they go through. Essentially, it’s a long-range sonar scanner that explores a volume of space fifteen miles in radius, clear down to the bottom of the sea. It rejects all fixed echoes, and will only record moving objects. And it can also be set to ignore all objects of less than any desired size. In other words, we can use it to count the number of whales more than, say, fifty feet long, and take no notice of the others. It does this once every six minutes — two hundred and forty times a day — so it will give a virtually continuous census of any desired region.”