“Go on,” said Franklin, with such a note of resignation in his voice that even Lundquist, who had little sense of humor, was forced to smile.
“What I want to do,” he continued, “is to catch a couple of killer whales and train them to work with one of our wardens.”
Franklin thought of the thirty-foot torpedoes of ravening power he had so often chased and slaughtered in the frozen polar seas. It was hard to picture one of these ferocious beasts tamed to man’s bidding; then he remembered the chasm between the sheep dog and the wolf, and how that had long ago been bridged. Yes, it could be done again—if it was worthwhile.
When in doubt, ask for a report, one of his superiors had once told him. Well, he was going to bring back at least two from Heron Island, and they would both make very thought-provoking reading. But Lundquist’s schemes, exciting though they were, belonged to the future; Franklin had to run the bureau as it was here and now. He would prefer to avoid drastic changes for a few years, until he had learned his way about. Besides, even if Lundquist’s ideas could be proved practical, it would be a long, stiff battle selling them to the people who approved the funds. “I want to buy fifty milking machines for whales, please.” Yes, Franklin could picture the reaction in certain conservative quarters. And as for training killer whales—why, they would think he had gone completely crazy.
He watched the island fall away as the plane lifted him toward home (strange, after all his travels, that he should be living again in the country of his birth). It was almost fifteen years since he had first made this journey with poor old Don; how glad Don would have been, could he have seen this final fruit of his careful training! And Professor Stevens, too—Franklin had always been a little scared of him, but now he could have looked him in the face, had he still been alive. With a twinge of remorse, he realized that he had never properly thanked the psychologist for all that he had done.
Fifteen years from a neurotic trainee to director of the bureau; that wasn’t bad going. And what now, Walter? Franklin asked himself. He felt no need of any further achievement; perhaps his ambition was now satisfied. He would be quite content to guide the bureau into a placid and uneventful future.
It was lucky for his peace of mind that he had no idea how futile that hope was going to be.
Nineteen
THE PHOTOGRAPHER HAD finished, but the young man who had been Franklin’s shadow for the last two days still seemed to have an unlimited supply of notebooks and questions. Was it worth all this trouble to have your undistinguished features—probably superimposed on a montage of whales—displayed upon every bookstand in the world? Franklin doubted it, but he had no choice in the matter. He remembered the saying: “Public servants have no private lives.” Like all aphorisms, it was only half true. No one had ever heard of the last director of the bureau, and he might have led an equally inconspicuous existence if the Marine Division’s Public Relations Department had not decreed otherwise.
“Quite a number of your people, Mr. Franklin,” said the young man from Earth Magazine, “have told me about your interest in the so-called Great Sea Serpent, and the mission in which First Warden Burley was killed. Have there been any further developments in this field?”
Franklin sighed; he had been afraid that this would come up sooner or later, and he hoped that it wouldn’t be overplayed in the resulting article. He walked over to his private file cabinet, and pulled out a thick folder of notes and photographs.
“Here are all the sightings, Bob,” he said. “You might like to have a glance through them—I’ve kept the record up to date. One day I hope we’ll have the answer; you can say it’s still a hobby of mine, but it’s one I’ve had no chance of doing anything about for the last eight years. It’s up to the Department of Scientific Research now—not the Bureau of Whales. We’ve other jobs to do.”
He could have added a good deal more, but decided against it. If Secretary Parian had not been transferred from D.S.R. soon after the tragic failure of their mission, they might have had a second chance. But in the inquiries and recriminations that had followed the disaster, the opportunity had been lost, possibly for years. Perhaps in every man’s life there must be some cherished failure, some unfinished business which outweighed many successes.
“Then there’s only one other question I want to ask,” continued the reporter. “What about the future of the bureau? Have you any interesting long-term plans you’d care to talk about?”
This was another tricky one. Franklin had learned long ago that men in his position must co-operate with the press, and in the last two days his busy interrogator had practically become one of the family. But there were some things that sounded a little too farfetched, and he had contrived to keep Dr. Lundquist out of the way when Bob had flown over to Heron Island. True, he had seen the prototype milking machine and been duly impressed by it, but he had been told nothing about the two young killer whales being maintained, at great trouble and expense, in the enclosure off the eastern edge of the reef.
“Well, Bob,” he began slowly, “by this time you probably know the statistics better than I do. We hope to increase the size of our herds by ten per cent over the next five years. If this milking scheme comes off—and it’s still purely experimental—we’ll start cutting back on the sperm whales and will build up the humpbacks. At the moment we are providing twelve and a half per cent of the total food requirements of the human race, and that’s quite a responsibility. I hope to see it fifteen per cent while I’m still in office.”
“So that everyone in the world will have whale steak at least once a week, eh?”
“Put it that way if you like. But people are eating whale all day without knowing it—every time they use cooking fat or spread margarine on a piece of bread. We could double our output and we’d get no credit for it, since our products are almost always disguised in something else.”
“The Art Department is going to put that right; when the story appears, we’ll have a picture of the average household’s groceries for a week, with a clock face on each item showing what percentage of it comes from whales.”
“That’ll be fine. Er—by the way—have you decided what you’re going to call me?”
The reporter grinned.
“That’s up to my editor,” he answered. “But I’ll tell him to avoid the word ‘whaleboy’ like the plague. It’s too hackneyed, anyway.”
“Well, I’ll believe you when we see the article. Every journalist promises he won’t call us that, but it seems they can never resist the temptation. Incidentally, when do you expect the story to appear?”
“Unless some news story crowds it off, in about four weeks. You’ll get the proofs, of course, before that—probably by the end of next week.”
Franklin saw him off through the outer office, half sorry to lose an entertaining companion who, even if he asked awkward questions, more than made up for it by the stories he could tell about most of the famous men on the planet. Now, he supposed, he belonged to that group himself, for at least a hundred million people would read the current “Men of Earth” series.
The story appeared, as promised, four weeks later. It was accurate, well-written, and contained one mistake so trivial that Franklin himself had failed to notice it when he checked the proofs. The photographic coverage was excellent and contained an astonishing study of a baby whale suckling its mother—a shot obviously obtained at enormous risk and after months of patient stalking. The fact that it was actually taken in the pool at Heron Island without the photographer even getting his feet wet was an irrelevance not allowed to distract the reader.
Apart from the shocking pun beneath the cover picture (“Prince of Whales,” indeed!), Franklin was delighted with it; so was everyone else in the bureau, the Marine Division, and even the World Food Organization itself. No one could have guessed that within a few weeks it was to involve the Bureau of Whales in the greatest crisis of its entire history.
It was not lack of foresight; sometimes the future can be charted in advance, and plans made to meet it. But there are also times in human affairs when events that seem to have no possible connection—to be as remote as if they occurred on different planets—may react upon each other with shattering violence.