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 history, 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.
“That’s the trouble with hypnotic training,” agreed Don. “They can pump the information into you until it comes out of your ears, but you’re never quite sure how much you really know. And they can’t teach you manual skills, or train you to have the right reactions in emergencies. There’s only one way of learning anything properly—and that’s by actually doing the job.”
He paused, momentarily distracted by a shapely silhouette parading on the other side of the translucent wall. Franklin noticed the direction of his gaze, and his features relaxed into a slight smile. For the first time the tension lifted, and Don began to feel that there was some hope of establishing contact with the enigma who was now his responsibility.
With a beery forefinger, Don started to trace maps on the plastic table top.
“This is the setup,” he began. “Our main training center for shallow-water operations is here in the Capricorn Group; about four hundred miles north of Brisbane and forty miles out from the coast. The South Pacific fence starts here, and runs on east to New Caledonia and Fiji. When the whales migrate north from the polar feeding grounds to have their calves in the tropics, they’re compelled to pass through the gaps we’ve left here. The most important of these gates, from our point of view, is the one right here off the Queensland coast, at the southern entrance to the Great Barrier Reef. The reef provides a kind of natural channel, averaging about fifty miles wide, almost up to the equator. Once we’ve herded the whales into it, we can keep them pretty well under control. It didn’t take much doing; many of them used to come this way long before we appeared on the scene. By now the rest have been so well conditioned that even if we switched off the fence it would probably make no difference to their migratory pattern.”
“By the way,” interjected Franklin, “is the fence purely electrical?”
“Oh no. Electric fields control fish pretty well but don’t work satisfactorily on mammals like whales. The fence is largely ultrasonic—a curtain of sound from a chain of generators half a mile below the surface. We can get fine control at the gates by broadcasting specific orders; you can set a whole herd stampeding in any direction you wish by playing back a recording of a whale in distress. But it’s not very often we have to do anything drastic like that; as I said, nowadays they’re too well trained.”
“I can appreciate that,” said Franklin. “In fact, I heard somewhere that the fence was more for keeping other animals out than for keeping the whales in.”
“That’s partly true, though we’d still need some kind of control for rounding up our herds at census or slaughtering. Even so, the fence isn’t perfect. There are weak spots where generator fields overlap, and sometimes we have to switch off sections to allow normal fish migration. Then, the really big sharks, or the killer whales, can get through and play hell. The killers are our worst problem; they attack the whales when they are feeding in the Antarctic, and often the herds suffer ten per cent losses. No one will be happy until the killers are wiped out, but no one can think of an economical way of doing it. We can’t patrol the entire ice pack with subs, though when I’ve seen what a killer can do to a whale I’ve often wished we could.”
There was real feeling—almost passion—in Burley’s voice, and Franklin looked at the warden with surprise. The “whale-boys,” as they had been inevitably christened by a nostalgically minded public in search of heroes, were not supposed to be much inclined either to thought or emotions. Though Franklin knew perfectly well that the tough, uncomplicated characters who stalked tight lipped through the pages of contemporary submarine sagas had very little connection with reality, it was hard to escape from the popular clichés. Don Burley, it was true, was far from tight lipped, but in most other respects he seemed to fit the standard specification very well.
Franklin wondered how he was going to get on with his new mentor—indeed, with his new job. He still felt no enthusiasm for it; whether that would come, only time would show. It was obviously full of interesting and even fascinating problems and, possibilities, and if it would occupy his mind and give him scope for his talents, that was as much as he could hope for. The long nightmare of the last year had destroyed, with so much else, his zest for life—the capacity he had once possessed for throwing himself heart and soul into some project.
It was difficult to believe that he could ever recapture the enthusiasm that had once taken him so far along paths he could never tread again. As he glanced at Don, who was still talking with the fluent lucidity of a man who knows and loves his job, Franklin felt a sudden and disturbing sense of guilt. Was it fair to Burley to take him away from his work and to turn him, whether he knew it or not, into a cross between a nursemaid and kindergarten teacher? Had Franklin realized that very similar thoughts had already crossed Burley’s mind, his sympathy would have been quenched at once. “Time we caught the shuttle to the airport,” said Don, looking at his watch and hastily draining his beer. “The morning flight leaves in thirty minutes. I hope all your stuff’s already been sent on.”
“The hotel said they’d take care of it.”
“Well, we can check at the airport. Let’s go.” Half an hour later Franklin had a chance to relax again. It was typical of Burley, he soon discovered, to take things easily until the last possible moment and then to explode in a burst of activity. This burst carried them from the quiet bar to the even more efficiently silenced plane. As they took their seats, there was a brief incident that was to puzzle Don a good deal in the weeks that lay ahead.
“You take the window seat,” he said. “I’ve flown this way dozens of times.”
He took Franklin’s refusal as ordinary politeness, and started to insist. Not until Franklin had turned down the offer several times, with increasing determination and even signs of annoyance, did Burley realize that his companion’s behavior had nothing to do with common courtesy. It seemed incredible, but Don could have sworn that the other was scared stiff. What sort of man, he wondered blankly, would be terrified of taking a window seat in an ordinary aircraft? All his gloomy premonitions about his new assignment, which had been partly dispelled during their earlier conversation, came crowding back with renewed vigor.