“What about the third type you mentioned?”
“That’s the one we haven’t identified or even described. We just call it ‘X’ because people still laugh when you talk about sea serpents. The only thing that we know about it is that it undoubtedly exists, that it’s extremely sly, and that it lives in deep water. One day we’ll catch it, but when we do it will probably be through pure luck.”
Franklin was very thoughtful for the rest of the evening. He did not like to admit that, despite all the instruments that man now used to probe the sea, despite his own continual patrolling of the depths, the ocean still held many secrets and would retain them for ages yet to come. And he knew that, though he might never see it again, he would be haunted all his life by the memory of that distant, tantalizing echo as it descended swiftly into the abyss that was its home.
Thirteen
THERE ARE MANY misconceptions about the glamour of a warden’s life. Franklin had never shared them, so he was neither surprised nor disappointed that so much of his time was spent on long, uneventful patrols far out at sea. Indeed, he welcomed them. They gave him time to think, yet not time to brood—and it was on these lonely missions in the living heart of the sea that his last fears were shed and his mental scars finally healed.
The warden’s year was dominated by the pattern of whale migration, but that pattern was itself continually changing as new areas of the sea were fenced and fertilized. He might spend summer moving cautiously through the polar ice, and winter beating back and forth across the equator. Sometimes he would operate from shore stations, sometimes from mobile bases like the Rorqual, the Pequod, or the Cachelot. One season he might be wholly concerned with the great whalebone or baleen whales, who literally strained their food from the sea as they swam, mouth open, through the rich plankton soup. And another season he would have to deal with their very different cousins, the fierce, toothed cetaceans of whom the sperm whales were the most important representatives. These were no gentle herbivores, but pursued and fought their monstrous prey in the lightless deep half a mile from the last rays of the sun.
There would be weeks or even months when a warden would never see a whale. The bureau had many calls on its equipment and personnel, and whales were not its only business. Everyone who had dealings with the sea appeared to come, sooner or later, to the Bureau of Whales with an appeal for help. Sometimes the requests were tragic; several times a year subs were sent on usually fruitless searches for drowned sportsmen or explorers.
At the other extreme, there was a standing joke that a senator had once asked the Sydney office to locate his false teeth, lost when the Bondi surf worked its will upon him. It was said that he had received, with great promptness, the foot-wide jaws of a tiger shark, with an apologetic note saying that these were the only unwanted teeth that an extensive search had been able to find off Bondi Beach.
Some tasks that came the warden’s way had a certain glamour, and were eagerly sought after when they arose. A very small and understaffed section of the Bureau of Fisheries was concerned with pearls, and during the slack season wardens were sometimes detached from their normal work and allowed to assist on the pearl beds.
Franklin had one such tour of duty in the Persian Gulf. It was straightforward work, not unlike gardening, and since it involved diving to depths never greater than two hundred feet simple compressed-air equipment was used and the diver employed a torpedo for moving around. The best areas for pearl cultivation had been carefully populated with selected stock, and the main problem was protecting the oysters from their natural enemies—particularly starfish and rays. When they had time to mature, they were collected and carried back to the surface for inspection—one of the few jobs that no one had ever been able to mechanize.
Any pearls discovered belonged, of course, to the Bureau of Fisheries. But it was noticeable that the wives of all the wardens posted to this duty very soon afterward sported pearl necklaces or earrings—and Indra was no exception to this rule.
She had received her necklace the day she gave birth to Peter, and with the arrival of his son it seemed to Franklin that the old chapter of his life had finally closed. It was not true, of course; he could never forget—nor did he wish to— that Irene had given him Roy and Rupert, on a world which was now as remote to him as a planet of the farthest star. But the ache of that irrevocable parting had subsided at last, for no grief can endure forever.
He was glad—though he had once bitterly resented it— that it was impossible to talk to anyone on Mars, or indeed anywhere in space beyond the orbit of the Moon. The six-minute time lag for the round trip, even when the planet was at its nearest, made conversation out of the question, so he could never torture himself by feeling in the presence of Irene and the boys by calling them up on the visiphone. Every Christmas they exchanged recordings and talked over the events of the year; apart from occasional letters, that was the only personal contact they now had, and the only one that Franklin needed.
There was no way of telling how well Irene had adjusted to her virtual widowhood. The boys must have helped, but there were times when Franklin wished that she had married again, for their sakes as well as hers. Yet somehow he had never been able to suggest it, and she had never raised the subject, even when he had made this step himself.
Did she resent Indra? That again was hard to tell. Perhaps some jealousy was inevitable; Indra herself, during the occasional quarrels that punctuated their marriage, made it clear that she sometimes disliked the thought of being only the second woman in Franklin’s life.
Such quarrels were rare, and after the birth of Peter they were rarer. A married couple forms a dynamically unstable system until the arrival of the first child converts it from a double to a triple group.
Franklin was as happy now as he had ever hoped to be. His family gave him the emotional security he needed; his work provided the interest and adventure which he had sought in space, only to lose again. There was more life and wonder in the sea than in all the endless empty leagues between the planets, and it was seldom now that his heart ached for the blue beauty of the crescent Earth, the swirling silver mist of the Milky Way, or the tense excitement of landfall on the moons of Mars at the end of a long voyage.
The sea had begun to shape his life and thought, as it must that of all men who try to master it and learn its secrets. He felt a kinship with all the creatures that moved throughout its length and depth, even when they were enemies which it was his duty to destroy. But above all, he felt a sympathy and an almost mystical reverence, of which he was half ashamed, toward the great beasts whose destinies he ruled.
He believed that most wardens knew that feeling, though they were careful to avoid admitting it in their shoptalk. The nearest they came to it was when they accused each other of being “whale happy,” a somewhat indefinable term which might be summed up as acting more like a whale than a man in a given situation. It was a form of identification without which no warden could be really good at his job, but there were times when it could become too extreme. The classic case—which everyone swore was perfectly true—was that of the senior warden who felt he was suffocating unless he brought his sub up to blow every ten minutes.
Being regarded—and regarding themselves—as the elite of the world’s army of underwater experts, the wardens were always called upon when there was some unusual job that no one else cared to perform. Sometimes these jobs were so suicidal that it was necessary to explain to the would-be client that he must find another way out of his difficulties.
But occasionally there was no other way, and risks had to be taken. The bureau still remembered how Chief Warden Kircher, back in ‘22, had gone up the giant intake pipes through which the cooling water flowed into the fusion power plant supplying half the South American continent. One of the filter grilles had started to come loose, and could be fixed only by a man on the spot. With strong ropes tied around his body to prevent him from being sucked through the wire meshing, Kircher had descended into the roaring darkness. He had done the job and returned safely; but that was the last time he ever went under water.