It was a shrewd question, and like a good many he had been asked in the last few days Franklin was not quite sure how to answer it.
“I suppose,” he said slowly, “that would depend on whether we could get the money. It would be up to the World Assembly, in the final analysis. The finance committees would have to decide how kind we could afford to be. It’s a theoretical question, anyway.”
“Of course—but other questions aren’t so theoretical,” answered the Venerable Boyce, looking thoughtfully at the eighty tons of flesh and bone moving away into the distance. “Shall we get back to the car? I want to see what happens at the other end.”
And I, thought Franklin grimly, will be very interested to see how you and your colleagues take it. Most visitors who went through the processing yards emerged rather pale and shaken, and quite a few had been known to faint. It was a standard joke in the bureau that this lesson in food production removed the appetites of all who watched it for several hours after the experience.
The stench hit them while they were still a hundred yards away. Out of the corner of his eye, Franklin could see that the young bhikku carrying the sound recorder was already showing signs of distress, but the Maha Thero seemed completely unaffected. He was still calm and dispassionate five minutes later as he stared down into the reeking inferno where the great carcasses were torn asunder into mountains of meat and bone and guts.
“Just think of it,” said Franklin, “for almost two hundred years this job was done by men, often working on board a pitching deck in filthy weather. It’s not pretty to watch even now, but can you imagine being down there hacking away with a knife nearly as big as yourself?”
“I think I could,” answered the Thero, “but I’d prefer not to.” He turned to his cameramen and gave some brief instructions, then watched intently as the next whale arrived on the conveyer belt.
The great body had already been scanned by photo-electric eyes and its dimensions fed into the computer controlling the operations. Even when one knew how it was done, it was uncanny to watch the precision with which the knives and saws moved out on their extensible arms, made their care- fully planned pattern of cuts, and then retreated again. Huge grabs seized the foot-thick blanket of blubber and stripped it off as a man peels a banana, leaving the naked, bleeding carcass to move on along the conveyer to the first stage of its dismemberment.
The whale traveled as fast as a man could comfortably walk, and disintegrated before the eyes of the watchers as they kept pace with it. Slabs of meat as large as elephants were torn away and went sliding down side chutes; circular saws whirred through the scaffolding of ribs in a cloud of bone dust; the interlinked plastic bags of the intestines, stuffed with perhaps a ton of shrimps and plankton from the whale’s last meal, were dragged away in noisome heaps.
It had taken less than two minutes to reduce a lord of the sea to a bloody shambles which no one but an expert could have recognized. Not even the bones were wasted; at the end of the conveyer belt, the disarticulated skeleton fell into a pit where it would be ground into fertilizer.
“This is the end of the line,” said Franklin, “but as far as the processing side is concerned it’s only the beginning. The oil has to be extracted from the blubber you saw peeled off in stage one; the meat has to be cut down into more manageable portions and sterilized—we use a high-intensity neutron source for that—and about ten other basic products have to be sorted out and packed for shipment. I’ll be glad to show you around any part of the factory you’d like to see. It won’t be quite so gruesome as the operations we’ve just been watching.”
The Thero stood for a moment in thoughtful silence, studying the notes he had been making in his incredibly tiny handwriting. Then he looked back along the blood-stained quarter-mile of moving belt, toward the next whale arriving from the killing pen.
“There’s one sequence I’m not sure we managed to film properly,” he said, coming to a sudden decision. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go back to the beginning and start again.”
Franklin caught the recorder as the young monk dropped it. “Never mind, son,” he said reassuringly, “the first time is always the worst. When you’ve been here a few days, you’ll be quite puzzled when newcomers complain of the stink.”
That was hard to believe, but the permanent staff had assured him that it was perfectly true. He only hoped that the Venerable Boyce was not so thoroughgoing that he would have a chance of putting it to the proof.
“And now, Your Reverence,” said Franklin, as the plane lifted above the snow-covered mountains and began the homeward flight to London and Ceylon, “do you mind if I ask how you intend to use all the material you’ve gathered?”
During the two days they had been together, priest and administrator had established a degree of friendship and mutual respect that Franklin, for his part, still found as surprising as it was pleasant. He considered—as who does not?—that he was good at summing men up, but there were depths in the Mahanayake Thero beyond his powers of analysis. It did not matter; he now knew instinctively that he was in the presence not only of power but also of—there was no escaping from that trite and jejune word—goodness. He had even begun to wonder, with a mounting awe that at any moment might deepen into certainty, if the man who was now his companion would go down into history as a saint.
“I have nothing to hide,” said the Thero gently, “and, as you know, deceit is contrary to the teachings of the Buddha. Our position is quite simple. We believe that all creatures have a right to life, and it therefore follows that what you are doing is wrong. Accordingly, we would like to see it stopped.”
That was what Franklin had expected, but it was the first time he had obtained a definite statement. He felt a slight sense of disappointment; surely someone as intelligent as the Thero must realize that such a move was totally impracticable, since it would involve cutting off one eighth of the total food supply of the world. And for that matter, why stop at whales? What about cows, sheep, pigs—all the animals that man kept in luxury and then slaughtered at his convenience?
“I know what you are thinking,” said the Thero, before he could voice his objections. “We are fully aware of the problems involved, and realize that it will be necessary to move slowly. But a start must be made somewhere, and the Bureau of Whales gives us the most dramatic presentation of our case.”
“Thank you,” answered Franklin dryly. “But is that altogether fair? What you’ve seen here happens in every slaughterhouse on the planet. The fact that the scale of operations is different hardly alters the case.”
“I quite agree. But we are practical men, not fanatics. We know perfectly well that alternative food sources will have to be found before the world’s meat supplies can be cut off.”
Franklin shook his head in vigorous disagreement.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but even if you could solve the supply problem, you’re not going to turn the entire population of the planet into vegetarians—unless you are anxious to encourage emigration to Mars and Venus. I’d shoot myself if I thought I could never eat a lamb chop or a well-done steak again. So your plans are bound to fail on two counts: human psychology and the sheer facts of food production.” The Maha Thero looked a little hurt.
“My dear Director,” he said, “surely you don’t think we would overlook something as obvious as that? But let me finish putting our point of view before I explain how we propose to implement it. I’ll be interested in studying your reactions, because you represent the maximum—ah—consumer resistance we are likely to meet.”
“Very well,” smiled Franklin. “See if you can convert me out of my job.”
“Since the beginning of history,” said the There, “man has assumed that the other animals exist only for his benefit. He has wiped out whole species, sometimes through sheer greed, sometimes because they destroyed his crops or interfered with his other activities. I won’t deny that he often had justification, and frequently no alternative. But down the ages man has blackened his soul with his crimes against the animal kingdom—some of the very worst, incidentally, being in your particular profession, only sixty or seventy years ago. I’ve read of cases where harpooned whales died after hours of such frightful torment that not a scrap of their meat could be used—it was poisoned with the toxins produced by the animal’s death agonies.”