Arthur Clarke - The Deep Range

Where was Don? It was impossible to see his echo in the shifting chaos of the sonar screen. Franklin switched his communication set to high power and started calling through the moving darkness. There was no reply; probably Don was too busy to answer, even if he had received the signal.

The pounding shock waves had ceased; with them had gone the worst of Franklin’s fears. There was no danger now of the hull being cracked by pressure, and by this time, surely, he was clear of the slowly toppling mountain. The current that had been aiding his engines had now lost its strength, proving that he was far away from its source. On the sonar screen, the luminous haze that had blocked all vision was fading minute by minute as the silt and debris subsided.

Slowly the wrecked face of the mountain emerged from the mist of conflicting echoes. The pattern on the screen began to stabilize itself, and presently Franklin could see the great scar left by the avalanche. The seabed itself was still hidden in a vast fog of mud; it might be hours before it would be visible again and the damage wrought by Nature’s paroxysm could be ascertained.

Franklin watched and waited as the screen cleared. With each sweep of the scanner, the sparkle of interference faded; the water was still turbid, but no longer full of suspended matter. He could see for a mile — then two — then three.

And in all that space there was no sign of the sharp and brilliant echo that would mark Don’s ship. Hope faded as his radius of vision grew and the screen remained empty. Again and again he called into the lonely silence, while grief and helplessness strove for the mastery of his soul.

He exploded the signal grenades that would alert all the hydrophones in the Pacific and send help racing to him by sea and air. But even as be began his slowly descending spiral search, he knew that it was in vain.

Don Burley had lost his last bet.

The great Mercator chart that covered the whole of one wall was a most unusual one. All the land areas were completely blank; as far as this mapmaker was concerned, the continents had never been explored. But the sea was crammed with detail, and scattered over its face were countless spots of colored light, projected by some mechanism inside the wall. Those spots moved slowly from hour to hour, recording as they did so, for skilled eyes to read, the migration of all the main schools of whales that roamed the seas.

Franklin had seen the master chart scores of times during the last fourteen years — but never from this vantage point. For he was looking at it now from the director’s chair.

“There’s no need for me to warn you, Walter,” said his ex-chief, “that you are taking over the bureau at a very tricky time. Sometime in the next five years we’re going to have a showdown with the farms. Unless we can improve our efficiency, plankton-derived proteins will soon be substantially cheaper than any we can deliver.

“And that’s only one of our problems. The staff position is getting more difficult every year — and this sort of thing isn’t going to help.”

He pushed a folder across to Franklin, who smiled wryly when he saw what it contained. The advertisement was familiar enough; it had appeared in all the major magazines during the past week, and must have cost the Space Department a small fortune.

An underwater scene of improbable clarity and color was spread across two pages. Vast scaly monsters, more huge and hideous than any that had lived on Earth since the Jurassic period, were battling each other in the crystalline depths. Franklin knew, from the photographs he had seen, that they were very accurately painted, and he did not grudge the illustrator his artistic license in the matter of underwater clarity.

The text was dignified and avoided sensationalism; the painting was sensational enough and needed no embellishment. The Space Department, he read, urgently needed young men as wardens and food production experts for the exploitation of the seas of Venus. The work, it was added, was probably the most exciting and rewarding to be found anywhere in the Solar System; pay was good and the qualifications were not as high as those needed for space pilot or astrogator. After the short list of physical and educational requirements, the advertisement ended with the words which the Venus Commission had been plugging for the last six months, and which Franklin had grown heartily tired of seeing: HELP TO BUILD A SECOND EARTH.

“Meanwhile,” said the ex-director, “our problem is to keep the first one going, when the bright youngsters who might be joining us are running away to Venus. And between you and me, I shouldn’t be surprised if the Space Department has been after some of our men.”

“They wouldn’t do a thing like that!”

“Wouldn’t they now? Anyway, there’s a transfer application in from First Warden McRae; if you can’t talk him out of it, try to find what made him want to leave.”

Life was certainly going to be difficult, Franklin thought. Joe McRae was an old friend; could he impose on that friendship now that he was Joe’s boss?

“Another of your little problems is going to be keeping the scientists under control. Lundquist is worse than Roberts ever was; he’s got about six crazy schemes going, and at least Roberts only had one brainstorm at a time. He spends half his time over on Heron Island. It might be a good idea to fly over and have a look at him. That was something I never had a chance to get around to.”

Franklin was still listening politely as his predecessor continued, with obvious relish, to point out the many disadvantages of his new post. Most of them he already knew, and his mind was now far away. He was thinking how pleasant it would be to begin his directorate with an official visit to Heron Island, which he had not seen for nearly five years, and which had so many memories of his first days in the bureau.

Dr. Lundquist was flattered by the new director’s visit, being innocent enough to hope that it might lead to increased support for his activities. He would not have been so enthusiastic had he guessed that the opposite was more likely to be the case. No one could have been more sympathetic than Franklin to scientific research, but now that he had to approve the bills himself he found that his point of view was subtly altered. Whatever Lundquist was doing would have to be of direct value to the bureau. Otherwise it was out — unless the Department of Scientific Research could be talked into taking it over.

Lundquist was a small, intense little man whose rapid and somewhat jerky movements reminded Franklin of a sparrow. He was an enthusiast of a type seldom met these days, and he combined a sound scientific background with an unfettered imagination. How unfettered, Franklin was soon to discover.

Yet at first sight it seemed that most of the work going on at the lab was of a fairly routine nature. Franklin spent a dull half-hour while two young scientists explained the methods they were developing to keep whales free of the many parasites that plagued them, and then escaped by the skin of his teeth from a lecture on cetacean obstetrics. He listened with rare interest to the latest work on artificial insemination, having in the past helped with some of the early — and often hilariously unsuccessful — experiments along this line. He sniffed cautiously at some synthetic ambergris, and agreed that it seemed just like the real thing. And he listened to the recorded heartbeat of a whale before and after the cardiac operation that had saved its life, and pretended that he could hear the difference.

Everything here was perfectly in order, and just as he had expected. Then Lundquist steered him out of the lab and down to the big pool, saying as he did so: “I think you’ll find this more interesting. It’s only in the experimental stage, of course, but it has possibilities.”