From the Ocean from teh Stars (3 page)

"I hope you appreciate what I've done for you, old lady," he mut
tered. Then, reflecting that fifty tons of mother love was a slightly awe-
inspiring sight, he blew his tanks and surfaced.

It was calm, so he opened the hatch and popped his head out of the
tiny conning tower. The water was only inches below his chin, and from time to time a wave made a determined effort to swamp him. There was
little danger of this happening, for he fitted the hatch so closely that he
was quite an effective plug.

Fifty feet away, a long gray mound, like an overturned boat, was rolling on the surface. Don looked at it thoughtfully, wondering how
much compressed air he'd better squirt into the corpse to prevent it sinking before one of the tenders could reach the spot. In a few minutes he
would radio his report, but for the moment it was pleasant to drink the
fresh Pacific breeze, to feel the open sky above his head, and to watch the
sun begin its long climb toward noon.

Don Burley was the happy warrior, resting after the one battle that
man would always have to fight. He was holding at bay the specter of famine which had confronted all earlier ages, but which would never
threaten the world again while the great plankton farms harvested their
millions of tons of protein, and the whale herds obeyed their new masters.
Man had come back to the sea, his ancient home, after aeons of exile; un
til the oceans froze, he would never be hungry again. . . .

Yet that, Don knew, was the least of his satisfactions. Even if what
he was doing had been of no practical value, he would still have wished to do it. Nothing else that life could offer matched the contentment and
the calm sense of power that filled him when he set out on a mission
such as this. Power? Yes, that was the right word. But it was not a power
that would ever be abused; he felt too great a kinship with all the creatures who shared the seas with him—even those it was his duty to de
stroy.

To all appearances, Don was completely relaxed, yet had any one of the many dials and lights filling his field of view called for attention he would have been instantly alert. His mind was already back on the
Ror
qual,
and he found it increasingly hard to keep his thoughts away from
his overdue breakfast. In order to make the time pass more swiftly, he
started mentally composing his report. Quite a few people, he knew, were
going to be surprised by it. The engineers who maintained the invisible
fences of sound and electricity which now divided the mighty Pacific into
manageable portions would have to start looking for the break; the ma
rine biologists who were so confident that sharks never attacked whales
would have to think up excuses. Both enterprises, Don was quite sure,

would be successfully carried out, and then everything would be under
control again, until the sea contrived its next crisis.

But the crisis to which Don was now unwittingly returning was a man-
made one, organized without any malice toward him at the highest offi
cial levels. It had begun with a suggestion in the Space Department, duly
referred up to the World Secretariat. It had risen still higher until it
reached the World Assembly itself, where it had come to the approving
ears of the senators directly interested. Thus converted from a suggestion
to an order, it had filtered down through the Secretariat to the World
Food Organization, thence to the Marine Division, and finally to the
Bureau of Whales. The whole process had taken the incredibly short
time of four weeks.

Don, of course, knew nothing of this. As far as he was concerned,
the complicated workings of global bureaucracy resolved themselves into
the greeting his skipper gave him when he walked into the
RorquaVs
mess for his belated breakfast.

"Morning, Don. Headquarters wants you to run over to Brisbane—
they've got some job for you. Hope it doesn't take too long; you know
how shorthanded we are."

"What kind of a job?" asked Don suspiciously. He remembered an
unfortunate occasion when he had acted as a guide to a permanent undersecretary who had seemed to be a bit of a fool, and whom he had treated
accordingly. It had later turned out that the P.U.—as might have been
guessed from his position—was a very shrewd character indeed and
knew exactly what Don was doing.

"They didn't tell me," said the skipper. "I'm not quite sure they
know themselves. Give my love to Queensland, and keep away from the
casinos on the Gold Coast."

"Much choice I have, on
my
pay," snorted Don. "Last time I went to
Surfer's Paradise, I was lucky to get away with my shirt."

"But you brought back a couple of thousand on your first visit."

"Beginner's luck—it never happened again. I've lost it all since then,
so I'll stop while I still break even. No more gambling for me."

"Is that a bet? Would you put five bucks on it?"

"Sure."

"Then pay over—you've already lost by accepting."

A spoonful of processed plankton hovered momentarily in mid-air
while Don sought for a way out of the trap.

"Just try and get me to pay," he retorted. "You've got no witnesses,
and I'm no gentleman." He hastily swallowed the last of his coffee, then
pushed aside his chair and rose to go.

"Better start packing, I suppose. So long, Skipper—see you later."
The captain of the
Rorqual
watched his first warden sweep out of the
room like a small hurricane. For a moment the sound of Don's passage
echoed back along the ship's corridors; then comparative silence descended again.

The skipper started to head back to the bridge. "Look out, Brisbane," he muttered to himself; then he began to rearrange the watches and to
compose a masterly memorandum to HQ asking how he was expected to
run a ship when thirty per cent of her crew were permanently absent on
leave or special duty. By the time he reached the bridge, the only thing
that had stopped him from resigning was the fact that, try as he might, he
couldn't think of a better job.

☆
CHAPTER TWO

¥ hough he had been kept waiting only a few min
utes, Walter Franklin was already prowling impatiently around the reception room. Swiftly he examined and dismissed the deep-sea photo
graphs hanging on the walls; then he sat for a moment on the edge of the table, leafing through the pile of magazines, reviews, and reports which
always accumulated in such places. The popular magazines he had al
ready seen—for the last few weeks he had had little else to do but read—
and few of the others looked interesting. Somebody, he supposed, had to go through these lavishly electroprinted food-production reports as
part of their job; he wondered how they avoided being hypnotized by the
endless columns of statistics.
Neptune,
the house organ of the Marine
Division, seemed a little more promising, but as most of the personalities
discussed in its columns were unknown to him he soon became bored
with it. Even its fairly lowbrow articles were largely over his head, assum
ing a knowledge of technical terms he did not possess.

The receptionist was watching him—certainly noticing his impa
tience, perhaps analyzing the nervousness and insecurity that lay be
hind it. With a distinct effort, Franklin forced himself to sit down and to concentrate on yesterday's issue of the Brisbane
Courier,
He had almost become interested in an editorial requiem on Australian cricket, inspired
by the recent Test results, when the young lady who guarded the direc
tor's office smiled sweetly at him and said: "Would you please go in now, Mr. Franklin?"

He had expected to find the director alone, or perhaps accompanied

by a secretary. The husky young man sitting in the other visitor's chair
seemed out of place in this orderly office, and was staring at him with
more curiosity than friendliness. Franklin stiffened at once; they had
been discussing him, he knew, and automatically he went on the de
fensive.

Director Cary, who knew almost as much about human beings as he
did about marine mammals, sensed the strain immediately and did his
best to dispel it.

"Ah, there you are, Franklin," he said with slightly excessive hearti
ness. "I hope you've been enjoying your stay here. Have my people been
taking care of you?"

Franklin was spared the trouble of answering this question, for the
director gave him no time to reply.

"I want you to meet Don Burley," he continued. "Don's First Warden
on the
Rorqual,
and one of the best we've got. He's been assigned to look after you. Don, meet Walter Franklin."

They shook hands warily, weighing each other. Then Don's face
broke into a reluctant smile. It was the smile of a man who had been
given a job he didn't care for but who had decided to make the best of it.

"Pleased to meet you, Franklin," he said. "Welcome to the Mermaid
Patrol."

Franklin tried to smile at the hoary joke, but his effort was not very
successful. He knew that he should be friendly, and that these people were doing their best to help him. Yet the knowledge was that of the
mind, not the heart; he could not relax and let himself meet them half
way. The fear of being pitied and the nagging suspicion that they had
been talking about him behind his back, despite all the assurances he had
been given, paralyzed his will for friendliness.

Don Burley sensed nothing of this. He only knew that the director's
office was not the right place to get acquainted with a new colleague, and
before Franklin was fully aware of what had happened he was out of the building, buffeting his way through the shirt-sleeved crowds in George Street, and being steered into a minute bar opposite the new post office.

The noise of the city subsided, though through the tinted glass walls Franklin could see the shadowy shapes of the pedestrians moving to and
fro. It was pleasantly cool here after the torrid streets; whether or not
Brisbane should be air-conditioned—and if so, who should have the resulting multimillion-dollar contract—was still being argued by the local
politicians, and meanwhile the citizens sweltered every summer.

Don Burley waited until Franklin had drunk his first beer and called
for replacements. There was a mystery about his new pupil, and as soon

as possible he intended to solve it. Someone very high up in the division —perhaps even in the World Secretariat itself—must have organized this. A first warden was not called away from his duties to wet-nurse someone who was obviously too old to go through the normal training channels. At a guess he would say that Franklin was the wrong side of thirty; he had never heard of anyone that age getting this sort of special treatment before.

One thing was obvious about Franklin at once, and that only added to the mystery. He was a spaceman; you could tell them a mile away. That should make a good opening gambit. Then he remembered that the director had warned him, "Don't ask Franklin too many questions. I don't know what his background is, but we've been specifically told not to talk about it with him."

That might make sense, mused Don. Perhaps he was a space pilot who had been grounded after some inexcusable lapse, such as absent-mindedly arriving at Venus when he should have gone to Mars.

"Is this the first time," Don began cautiously, "that you've been to Australia?" It was not a very fortunate opening, and the conversation might have died there and then when Franklin replied: "I was born here."

Don, however, was not the sort of person who was easily abashed. He merely laughed and said, half-apologetically, "Nobody ever tells me anything, so I usually find out the hard way. I was born on the other side of the world—over in Ireland—but since I've been attached to the Pacific branch of the bureau I've more or less adopted Australia as a second home. Not that I spend much time ashore! On this job you're at sea eighty per cent of the time. A lot of people don't like that, you know."

"It would suit me," said Franklin, but left the remark hanging in the air. Burley began to feel exasperated—it was such hard work getting anything out of this fellow. The prospect of working with him for the next few weeks began to look very uninviting, and Don wondered what he had done to deserve such a fate. However, he struggled on manfully.

"The superintendent tells me that you've a good scientific and engineering background, so I can assume that you'll know most of the things that our people spend the first year learning. Have they filled you in on the administrative background?"

"They've given me a lot of facts and figures under hypnosis, so I could lecture you for a couple of hours on the Marine Division—its his-torv, organization, and current projects, with particular reference to the Bureau of Whales. But it doesn't
mean
anything to me at present."

Now we seem to be getting somewhere, Don told himself. The fellow can talk after all. A couple more beers, and he might even be human.