From the Ocean from teh Stars (14 page)

off the island. He had received far more tolerance and consideration than
he had expected—perhaps more than he deserved. All the mild hostility that had been focused upon him by the less-privileged trainees had van
ished at a stroke, but it would be best for him to escape for a few days
from an atmosphere that had become embarrassingly sympathetic. In
particular, he found it hard to talk without a sense of strain with Don and Indra.

He thought again of Dr. Myers' advice, and remembered the jolting
leap his heart had given at the words "the silly girl's in love with you."
Yet it would be unfair, he knew, to take advantage of the present emo
tional situation; they could only know what they meant to each other when they had both had time for careful and mature thought. Put that
way, it seemed a little cold-blooded and calculating. If one was really in
love, did one stop to weigh the pros and cons?

He knew the answer to that. As Myers had said, he could not afford any more mistakes. It was far better to take his time and be certain than
to risk the happiness of two lives.

The sun had barely lifted above the miles of reef extending to the east when Don Burley hauled Franklin out of bed. Don's attitude to
ward him had undergone a change which it was not easy to define. He
had been shocked and distressed by what had occurred and had tried, in
his somewhat boisterous manner, to express sympathy and understand
ing. At the same time, his
amour-propre
had been hurt; he could not
quite believe, even now, that Indra had never been seriously interested
in him but only in Franklin, whom he had never thought of as a rival. It
was not that he was jealous of Franklin; jealousy was an emotion be
yond him. He was worried—as most men are occasionally throughout
their lives—by his discovery that he did not understand women as well
as he had believed.

Franklin had already packed, and his room looked bleak and bare.
Even though he might be gone for only a few days, the accommodation
was needed too badly for it to be left vacant just to suit his convenience.
It served him right, he told himself philosophically.

Don was in a hurry, which was not unusual, but there was also a conspiratorial air about him, as if he had planned some big surprise for Franklin and was almost childishly anxious that everything should come
off as intended. In any other circumstances, Franklin would have sus
pected some practical joke, but that could hardly be the explanation now.

By this time, the little training sub had become practically an exten-

sion of his own body, and he followed the courses Don gave him until he
knew, by mental dead reckoning, that they were somewhere out in the
thirty-mile-wide channel between Wistari Reef and the mainland. For
some reason of his own, which he refused to explain, Don had switched off the pilot's main sonar screen, so that Franklin was navigating blind.
Don himself could see everything that was in the vicinity by looking at
the repeater set at the rear of the cabin, and though Franklin was occa
sionally tempted to glance back at it he managed to resist the impulse.
This was, after all, a legitimate part of his training; one day he might
have to navigate a sub that had been blinded by a breakdown of its
underwater senses.

"You can surface now," said Don at last. He was trying to be casual,
but the undercurrent of excitement in his voice could not be concealed.
Franklin blew the tanks, and even without looking at the depth gauge knew when he broke surface by the unmistakable rolling of the sub. It
was not a comfortable sensation, and he hoped that they would not stay
here for long.

Don gave one more glance at his private sonar screen, then gestured
to the hatch overhead.

"Open up," he said. "Let's have a look at the scenery."

"We may ship some water," protested Franklin. "It feels pretty rough."

"With the two of us in that hatch, not much is going to leak past.
Here—put on this cape. That'll keep the spray out of the works."

It seemed a crazy idea, but Don must have a good reason. Overhead,
a tiny elliptical patch of sky appeared as the outer seal of the conning
tower opened. Don scrambled up the ladder first; then Franklin followed,
blinking his eyes against the wind-swept spray.

Yes, Don had known what he was doing. There was little wonder that
he had been so anxious to make this trip before Franklin left the island.
In his own way, Don was a good psychologist, and Franklin felt an inexpressible gratitude toward him. For this was one of the great moments of
his life; he could think of only one other to match it: the moment when
he had first seen Earth, in all its heart-stopping beauty, floating against
the infinitely distant background of the stars. This scene, also, filled his
soul with the same awe, the same sense of being in the presence of cosmic
forces.

The whales were moving north, and he was among them. During the night, the leaders must have passed through the Queensland Gate, on the
way to the warm seas in which their young could be safely born. A living
armada was all around him, plowing steadfastly through the waves with

effortless power. The great dark bodies emerged streaming from the wa
ter, then sank with scarcely a ripple back into the sea. As Franklin
watched, too fascinated to feel any sense of danger, one of the enormous
beasts surfaced less than forty feet away. There was a roaring whistle of
air as it emptied its lungs, and he caught a mercifully weakened breath of
the fetid air. A ridiculously tiny eye stared at him—an eye that seemed
lost in the monstrous, misshapen head. For a moment the two mammals
—the biped who had abandoned the sea, the quadruped who had re
turned to it—regarded each other across the evolutionary gulf that separated them. What did a man look like to a whale? Franklin asked him
self, and wondered if there was any way of finding the answer. Then the
titanic bulk tilted down into the sea, the great flukes lifted themselves into
the air, and the waters flowed back to fill the sudden void.

A distant clap of thunder made him look toward the mainland. Half
a mile away, the giants were playing. As he watched, a shape so strange that it was hard to relate it to any of the films and pictures he had seen
emerged from the waves with breath-taking slowness, and hung poised
for a moment completely out of the water. As a ballet dancer seems at
the climax of his leap to defy gravity, so for an instant the whale ap
peared to hang upon the horizon. Then, with that same unhurried grace,
it tumbled back into the sea, and seconds later the crash of the impact
came echoing over the waves.

The sheer slowness of that huge leap gave it a dreamlike quality, as if the sense of time had been distorted. Nothing else conveyed so clearly to
Franklin the immense size of the beasts that now surrounded him like
moving islands. Rather belatedly, he wondered what would happen if
one of the whales surfaced beneath the sub, or decided to take too close
an interest in it. . . .

"No need to worry," Don reassured him. "They know who we are. Sometimes they'll come and rub against us to remove parasites, and then
it gets a bit uncomfortable. As for bumping into us accidentally—they
can see where they're going a good deal better than we can."

As if to refute this statement, a streamlined mountain emerged drip
ping from the sea and showered water down upon them. The sub rocked
crazily, and for a moment Franklin feared it was going to overturn; then
it righted itself, and he realized that he could, quite literally, reach out
and touch the barnacle-encrusted head now lying on the waves. The weirdly shaped mouth opened in a prodigious yawn, the hundreds of
strips of whalebone fluttering like a Venetian blind in a breeze.

Had he been alone, Franklin would have been scared stiff, but Don
seemed the complete master of the situation. He leaned out of the

hatch and yelled in the direction of the whale's invisible ear: "Move over
momma! We're not your baby!"

The great mouth with its hanging draperies of bone snapped shut, the beady little eye—strangely like a cow's and seemingly not much
larger—looked at them with what might have been a hurt expression.
Then the sub rocked once more, and the whale was gone.

"It's quite safe, you see," Don explained. "They're peaceful, good-
natured beasts, except when they have their calves with them. Just like
any other cattle."

"But would you get this close to any of the toothed whales—the sperm whale, for instance?"

"That depends. If it was an old rogue male—a real Moby Dick—I wouldn't care to try it. Same with killer whales; they might think I was
good eating, though I could scare them off easily enough by turning on the hooter. I once got into a harem of about a dozen sperm whales, and
the ladies didn't seem to mind, even though some of them had calves with them. Nor did the old man, oddly enough. I suppose he knew I
wasn't a rival." He paused thoughtfully, then continued. "That was the
only time I've actually seen whales mating. It was pretty awe-inspiring—
gave me such an inferiority complex it put me off my stroke for a week."

"How many would you say there are in this school?" asked Franklin.

"Oh, about a hundred. The recorders at the gate will give the exact
figure. So you can say there are at least five thousand tons of the best meal and oil swimming around us—a couple of million dollars, if it's
worth a penny. Doesn't all that cash make you feel good?"

"No," said Franklin. "And I'm damn sure it doesn't make any differ
ence to you. Now I know why you like this job, and there's no need to
put on an act about it."

Don made no attempt to answer. They stood together in the cramped
hatchway, not feeling the spray upon their faces, sharing the same
thoughts and emotions, as the mightiest animals the world had ever seen
drove purposefully past them to the north. It was then that Franklin
knew, with a final certainty, that his life was firmly set upon its new
course. Though much had been taken from him which he would never
cease to regret, he had passed the stage of futile grief and solitary brood
ing. He had lost the freedom of space, but he had won the freedom of
the seas.

That was enough for any man.

☆
CHAPTER ELEVEN

CONFIDENTIAL—TO BE KEPT IN SEALED ENEVELOPE

Attached is the medical report on Walter Franklin, who has now successfully completed his training and has qualified as third warden with the highest rating ever recorded. In view of certain complaints from senior members of Establishment and Personnel Branch that earlier reports were too technical for comprehension, I am giving this summary in language understandable even to administrative officers.

Despite a number of personality defects, W.F.'s capability rating places him in that small group from which future heads of technical departments must be drawn—a group so desperately small that, as I have frequently pointed out, the very existence of the state is threatened unless we can enlarge it. The accident which eliminated W.F. from the Space Service, in which he would have undoubtedly had a distinguished career, left him in full possession of all his talents and presented us with an opportunity which it would have been criminal to waste. Not only did it give us a chance of studying what has since become the classic textbook case of astrophobia, but it offered us a striking challenge in rehabilitation. The analogies between sea and space have often been pointed out, and a man used to one can readily adapt to the other. In this case, however, the differences between the two media were equally important; at the simplest level, the fact that the sea is a continuous and sustaining fluid, in which vision is always limited to no more than a few yards, gave W.F. the sense of security he had lost in space.

The fact that, toward the end of his training, he attempted suicide may at first appear to argue against the correctness of our treatment. This is not the case; the attempt was due to a combination of quite unforeseeable factors (Paragraphs 57-86 of attached report), and its outcome, as often happens, was an improvement in the stability of the subject. The method chosen for the attempt is also highly significant in itself and proves that we had made a correct choice of W.F.'s new vocation. The seriousness of the attempt may also be questioned; had W.F. been really determined to kill himself, he would have chosen a simpler and less fallible method of doing so.

Now that the subject has re-established—apparently successfully— his emotional life and has shown only trivial symptoms of disturbance, I