From the Ocean from teh Stars (2 page)

coverage. Estimated time to target area 40 minutes. Will report at ten-minute intervals until contact is made. That is all. Out."

The acknowledgment from the
Rorqual
was barely audible, and Don switched off the set. It was time to look around.

He dimmed the cabin lights so that he could see the scanner screen more clearly, pulled the Polaroid glasses down over his eyes, and peered into the depths. It took a few seconds for the two images to fuse together in his mind; then the 3-D display sprang into stereoscopic life.

This was the moment when Don felt like a god, able to hold within his hands a circle of the Pacific twenty miles across, and to see clear down to the still largely unexplored depths two thousand fathoms below. The slowly rotating beam of inaudible sound was searching the world in which he floated, seeking out friend and foe in the eternal darkness where Ught could never penetrate. The pattern of soundless shrieks, too shrill even for the hearing of the bats who had invented sonar millions of years before man, pulsed out into the watery night; the faint echoes came tingling back, were captured and amplified, and became floating, blue-green flecks on the screen.

Through long practice, Don could read their message with effortless ease. Five hundred feet below, stretching out to the limits of his submerged horizon, was the Scattering Layer—the blanket of life that covered half the world. The sunken meadow of the sea, it rose and fell with the passage of the sun, hovering always at the edge of darkness. During the night it had floated nearly to the surface, but the dawn was now driving it back into the depths.

It was no obstacle to his sonar. Don could see clear through its tenuous substance to the ooze of the Pacific floor, over which he was driving high as a cloud above the land. But the ultimate depths were no concern of his; the flocks he guarded, and the enemies who ravaged them, belonged to the upper levels of the sea.

Don flicked the switch of the depth selector, and his sonar beam concentrated itself into the horizontal plane. The glimmering echoes from the abyss vanished, and he could see more clearly what lay around him here in the ocean's stratospheric heights. That glowing cloud two miles ahead was an unusually large school of fish; he wondered if Base knew about it, and made an entry in his log. There were some larger blips at the edge of the school—the carnivores pursuing the cattle, ensuring that the endlessly turning wheel of life and death would never lose momentum. But this conflict was no affair of Don's; he was after bigger game.

Sub 5 drove on toward the west, a steel needle swifter and more deadly than any other creature that roamed the seas. The tiny cabin,

now lit only by the flicker of lights from the instrument board, pulsed
with power as the spinning turbines thrust the water aside. Don glanced
at the chart and noted that he was already halfway to the target area.
He wondered if he should surface to have a look at the dead whale; from
its injuries he might be able to learn something about its assailants. But
that would mean further delay, and in a case like this time was vital.

The long-range receiver bleeped plaintively, and Don switched over
to Transcribe. He had never learned to read code by ear, as some people could do, but the ribbon of paper emerging from the message slot saved
him the trouble.

AIR PATROL REPORTS SCHOOL 50-100 WHALES HEADING 95 DEGREES
GRID REF X186593 Y432011 STOP
moving at speed after change of
COURSE STOP NO SIGN OF ORCAS BUT PRESUME THEY ARE IN VICINITY STOP RORQUAL

Don considered this last piece of deduction highly unlikely. If the
orcas—the dreaded killer whales—had indeed been responsible, they
would surely have been spotted by now as they surfaced to breathe.
Moreover, they would never have let the patrolling plane scare them
away from their victim, but would have remained feasting on it until they
had gorged themselves.

One thing was in his favor; the frightened herd was now heading almost directly toward him. Don started to set the co-ordinates on the plot
ting grid, then saw that it was no longer necessary. At the extreme edge
of his screen, a flotilla of faint stars had appeared. He altered course slightly, and drove head on to the approaching school.

Part of the message was certainly correct; the whales were moving at unusually high speed. At the rate they were traveling, he would be among
them in five minutes. He cut the motors and felt the backward tug of the
water bringing him swiftly to rest.

Don Burley, a knight in armor, sat in his tiny, dim-lit room a hun
dred feet below the bright Pacific waves, testing his weapons for the con
flict that lay ahead. In these moments of poised suspense, before action
began, he often pictured himself thus, though he would have admitted it
to no one in the world. He felt, too, a kinship with all shepherds who had
guarded their flocks back to the dawn of time. Not only was he Sir Lance
lot, he was also David, among ancient Palestinian hills, alert for the
mountain lions that would prey upon his father's sheep.

Yet far nearer in time, and far closer in spirit, were the men who
had marshaled the great herds of cattle on the American plains, scarcely

three lifetimes ago. They would have understood his work, though his implements would have been magic to them. The pattern was the same;
only the scale of things had altered. It made no fundamental difference
that the beasts Don herded weighed a hundred tons and browsed on the
endless savannas of the sea.

The school was now less than two miles away, and Don checked his
scanner's steady circling to concentrate on the sector ahead. The picture
on the screen altered to a fan-shaped wedge as the sonar beam started to
flick from side to side; now he could count every whale in the school, and could even make a good estimate of its size. With a practiced eye,
he began to look for stragglers.

Don could never have explained what drew him at once toward those
four echoes at the southern fringe of the school. It was true that they
were a little apart from the rest, but others had fallen as far behind.
There is some sixth sense that a man acquires when he has stared long enough into a sonar screen—some hunch which enables him to extract more from the moving flecks than he has any right to do. Without con
scious thought, Don reached for the controls and started the turbines
whirling once more.

The main body of the whale pack was now sweeping past him to the east. He had no fear of a collision; the great animals, even in their panic,
could sense his presence as easily as he could detect theirs, and by similar
means. He wondered if he should switch on his beacon. They might
recognize its sound pattern, and it would reassure them. But the still un
known enemy might recognize it too, and would be warned.

The four echoes that had attracted his attention were almost at the
center of the screen. He closed for an interception, and hunched low
over the sonar display as if to drag from it by sheer will power every scrap
of information the scanner could give. There were two large echoes,
some distance apart, and one was accompanied by a pair of smaller satel
lites. Don wondered if he was already too late; in his mind's eye he
could picture the death struggle taking place in the water less than a mile
ahead. Those two fainter blips would be the enemy, worrying a whale
while its mate stood by in helpless terror, with no weapons of defense
except its mighty flukes.

Now he was almost close enough for vision. The TV camera in Sub 5's
prow strained through the gloom, but at first could show nothing but the
fog of plankton. Then a vast, shadowy shape appeared in the center of
the screen, with two smaller companions below it. Don was seeing, with the greater precision but hopelessly limited range of light, what the sonar
scanners had already told him.

Almost at once he saw his incredible mistake: the two satellites were calves. It was the first time he had ever met a whale with twins, although
multiple births were not uncommon. In normal circumstances, the sight would have fascinated him, but now it meant that he had jumped to the
wrong conclusion and had lost precious minutes. He must begin the
search again.

As a routine check, he swung the camera toward the fourth blip on
the sonar screen—the echo he had assumed, from its size, to be another
adult whale. It is strange how a preconceived idea can affect a man's
understanding of what he sees; seconds passed before Don could interpret the picture before his eyes—before he knew that, after all, he had
come to the right place.

"Jesus!" he said softly. "I didn't know they grew that big." It was a
shark, the largest he had ever seen. Its details were still obscured, but
there was only one genus it could belong to. The whale shark and the
basking shark might be of comparable size, but they were harmless her
bivores. This was the king of all selachians—
Carcharodon
—the Great White Shark. Don tried to recall the figures for the largest known speci
men. In 1990, or thereabouts, a fifty-footer had been killed off New
Zealand, but this one was half as big again.

These thoughts flashed through his mind in an instant, and in that
same moment he saw that the great beast was already maneuvering for the kill. It was heading for one of the calves, and ignoring the frantic
mother. Whether this was cowardice or common sense there was no way
of telling; perhaps such distinctions were meaningless to the shark's tiny
and utterly alien mind.

There was only one thing to do. It might spoil his chance of a quick
kill, but the calf's life was more important. He punched the button of the siren, and a brief, mechanical scream erupted into the water around him.

Shark and whales were equally terrified by the deafening shriek. The
shark jerked round in an impossibly tight curve, and Don was nearly
jolted out of his seat as the autopilot snapped the sub onto a new course.
Twisting and turning with an agility equal to that of any other sea crea
ture of its size, Sub 5 began to close in upon the shark, its electronic
brain automatically following the sonar echo and thus leaving Don free
to concentrate on his armament. He needed that freedom; the next operation was going to be difficult unless he could hold a steady course for at
least fifteen seconds. At a pinch he could use his tiny rocket torps to
make a kill; had he been alone and faced with a pack of orcas, he would
certainly have done so. But that was messy and brutal, and there was a

neater way. He had always preferred the technique of the rapier to that of the hand grenade.

Now he was only fifty feet away, and closing rapidly. There might never be a better chance. He punched the launching stud.

From beneath the belly of the sub, something that looked like a sting ray hurtled forward. Don had checked the speed of his own craft; there was no need to come any closer now. The tiny, arrow-shaped hydrofoil, only a couple of feet across, could move far faster than his vessel and would close the gap in seconds. As it raced forward, it spun out the thin line of the control wire, like some underwater spider laying its thread. Along that wire passed the energy that powered the sting, and the signals that steered the missile to its goal. It responded so instantly to his orders that Don felt he was controlling some sensitive, high-spirited steed.

The shark saw the danger less than a second before impact. The resemblance of the sting to an ordinary ray confused it, as the designers had intended. Before the tiny brain could realize that no ray behaved like this, the missile had struck. The steel hypodermic, rammed forward by an exploding cartridge, drove through the shark's horny skin, and the great fish erupted in a frenzy of terror. Don backed rapidly away, for a blow from that tail would rattle him around like a pea in a can and might even damage the sub. There was nothing more for him to do, except to wait while the poison did its work.

The doomed killer was trying to arch its body so that it could snap at the poisoned dart. Don had now reeled the sting back into its slot amidships, pleased that he had been able to retrieve the missile undamaged. He watched with awe and a dispassionate pity as the great beast succumbed to its paralysis.

Its struggles were weakening. It was now swimming aimlessly back and forth, and once Don had to sidestep smartly to avoid a collision. As it lost control of buoyancy, the dying shark drifted up to the surface. Don did not bother to follow; that could wait until he had attended to more important business.

He found the cow and her two calves less than a mile away, and inspected them carefully. They were uninjured, so there was no need to call the vet in his highly specialized two-man sub which could handle any cetological crisis from a stomach-ache to a Caesarean.

The whales were no longer in the least alarmed, and a check on the sonar had shown that the entire school had ceased its panicky flight. He wondered if they already knew what had happened; much had been learned about their methods of communication, but much more was still a mystery.