“Since you seem to know all about it, Walter,” he said in the lab when the gear was finally unpacked, “you’d better explain what it’s supposed to do.”
“It’s an automatic recorder, much more sophisticated than the ones we have at the gates for counting the whales as they go through. Essentially, it’s a long-range sonar scanner that explores a volume of space fifteen miles in radius, clear down to the bottom of the sea. It rejects all fixed echoes, and will only record moving objects. And it can also be set to ignore all objects of less than any desired size. In other words, we can use it to count the number of whales more than, say, fifty feet long, and take no notice of the others. It does this once every six minutes—two hundred and forty times a day —so it will give a virtually continuous census of any desired region.”
“Quite ingenious. I suppose D.S.R. wants us to moor the thing somewhere and service it?”
“Yes—and to collect the recordings every week. They should be very useful to us as well. Er—there are three of the things, by the way.”
“Trust D.S.R. to do it in style! I wish we had as much money to throw around. Let me know how the things work —if they do.”
It was as simple as that, and there had been no mention at all of sea serpents.
Nor was there any sign of them for more than two months. Every week, whatever patrol sub happened to be in the neighborhood would bring back the records from the three instruments, moored half a mile below sea level at the spots Franklin had chosen after a careful study of all the known sightings. With an eagerness which slowly subsided to a stubborn determination, he examined the hundreds of feet of old-fashioned sixteen-millimeter film—still unsurpassed in its own field as a recording medium. He looked at thousands of echoes as he projected the film, condensing into minutes the comings and goings of giant sea creatures through many days and nights.
Usually the pictures were blank, for he had set the discriminator to reject all echoes from objects less than seventy feet in length. That, he calculated, should eliminate all but the very largest whales—and the quarry he was seeking. When the herds were on the move, however, the film would be dotted with echoes which would jump across the screen at fantastically exaggerated speeds as he projected the images. He was watching the life of the sea accelerated almost ten thousand times.
After two months of fruitless watching, he began to wonder if he had chosen the wrong places for all three recorders, and was making plans to move them. When the next rolls of film came back, he told himself, he would do just that, and he had already decided on the new locations.
But this time he found what he had been looking for. It was on the edge of the screen, and had been caught by only four sweeps of the scanner. Two days ago that unforgotten, curiously linear echo had appeared on the recorder; now he had evidence, but he still lacked proof.
He moved the other two recorders into the area, arranging the three instruments in a great triangle fifteen miles on a side, so that their fields overlapped. Then it was a question of waiting with what patience he could until another week had passed.
The wait was worth it; at the end of that time he had all the ammunition he needed for his campaign. The proof was there, clear and undeniable.
A very large animal, too long and thin to be any of the known creatures of the sea, lived at the astonishing depth of twenty thousand feet and came halfway to the surface twice a day, presumably to feed. From its intermittent appearance on the screens of the recorders, Franklin was able to get a fairly good idea of its habits and movements. Unless it suddenly left the area and he lost track of it, there should be no great difficulty in repeating the success of Operation Percy.
He should have remembered that in the sea nothing is ever twice the same.
Seventeen
“YOU KNOW, dear,” said Indra, “I’m rather glad this is going to be one of your last missions.”
“If you think I’m getting too old—”
“Oh, it’s not only that. When you’re on headquarters duty we’ll be able to start leading a normal social life. I’ll be able to invite people to dinner without having to apologize because you’ve suddenly been called out to round up a sick whale. And it will be better for the children; I won’t have to keep explaining to them who the strange man is they sometimes meet around the house.”
“Well, it’s not that bad, is it, Pete?” laughed Franklin, tousling his son’s dark, unruly hair.
“When are you going to take me down in a sub, Daddy?” asked Peter, for approximately the hundredth time.
“One of these days, when you’re big enough not to get in the way.”
“But if you wait until I am big, I will get in the way.”
“There’s logic for you!” said Indra. “I told you my child was a genius.”
“He may have got his hair from you,” said Franklin, “but it doesn’t follow that you’re responsible for what lies beneath it.” He turned to Don, who was making ridiculous noises for Anne’s benefit. She seemed unable to decide whether to laugh or to burst into tears, but was obviously giving the problem her urgent attention. “When are you going to settle down to the joys of domesticity? You can’t be an honorary uncle all your life.”
For once, Don looked a little embarrassed.
“As a matter of fact,” he said slowly, “I am thinking about it. I’ve met someone at last who looks as if she might be willing.”
“Congratulations! I thought you and Marie were seeing a lot of each other.”
Don looked still more embarrassed.
“Well—ah—it isn’t Marie. I was just trying to say good-by to her.”
“Oh,” said Franklin, considerably deflated. “Who is it?”
“I don’t think you know her. She’s named June—June Curtis. She isn’t in the bureau at all, which is an advantage in some ways. I’ve not quite made up my mind yet, but I’ll probably ask her next week.”
“There’s only one thing to do,” said Indra firmly. “As soon as you come back from this hunt, bring her around to dinner and I’ll tell you what we think of her.”
“And I’ll tell her what we think of you,” put in Franklin. “We can’t be fairer than that, can we?”
He remembered Indra’s words—”this is going to be one of your last missions”—as the little depth ship slanted swiftly down into the eternal night. It was not strictly true, of course; even though he had now been promoted to a permanent shore position, he would still occasionally go to sea. But the opportunities would become fewer and fewer; this was his swan song as a warden, and he did not know whether to be sorry or glad.
For seven years he had roamed the oceans—one year of his life to each of the seas—and in that time he had grown to know the creatures of the deep as no man could ever have done in any earlier age. He had watched the sea in all its moods; he had coasted over mirror-flat waters, and had felt the surge of mighty waves lifting his vessel when it was a hundred feet below the storm-tossed surface. He had looked upon beauty and horror and birth and death in all their multitudinous forms, as he moved through a liquid world so teeming with life that by comparison the land was an empty desert.
No man could ever exhaust the wonder of the sea, but Franklin knew that the time had come for him to take up new tasks. He looked at the sonar screen for the accompanying cigar of light which was Don’s ship, and thought affectionately of their common characteristics and of the differences which now must take them further and further apart. Who would have imagined, he told himself, that they would become such good friends, that far-off day when they had met warily as instructor and pupil?
That had been only seven years ago, but already it was hard for him to remember the sort of person he had been in those days. He felt an abiding gratitude for the psychologists who had not only rebuilt his mind but had found him the work that could rebuild his life.
His thoughts completed the next, inevitable step. Memory tried to recreate Irene and the boys—good heavens, Rupert would be twelve years old now!—around whom his whole existence had once revolved, but who now were strangers drifting further and further apart year by year. The last photograph he had of them was already more than a year old; the last letter from Irene had been posted on Mars six months ago, and he reminded himself guiltily that he had not yet answered it.