Secrets of the Deep

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Mr. Lillibulero almost smiled. His frosty emerald eyes sparkled. Lieutenant Vargas did smile. And Robby’s father beamed. As for Robby himself, he felt good all over, with a warm, spreading glow he had never experienced before. So that suddenly he had to do something to show it.

  “And Balthasar!” he cried, running to the edge of the platform where the big dolphin curvetted in the waves. “Balthasar was more help than two of me!”

  And Balthasar leaped clear of the water, twisting with joy. The praise meant nothing to him, but what meant all the world was the sound of his name called happily once more in the voice of his beloved young master.

  Secrets Under Antarctica

  Without making him in any way responsible for the shortcomings of the author, I would like to acknowledge my appreciation for the suggestions regarding research materials of Mr.John Anderson, Field Leader of the University of Minnesota Geology Team, Antarctica, 1961-1962.

  Whale in Trouble

  Rrrrriiiing!—went the alarm bell.

  Robby Hoenig, who was down below the main deck, for-ward in the storage section, and up to his neck in cartons of Control Caps, Control Boxes, and similar equipment, dropped everything. He raced for the metal ladder in the middle of the ship and went up it like a porpoise heading toward the surface for a leap out of water.

  “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” he yelled, popping out into the Control Room like the porpoise into the air. At the same moment his father came racing in from the laboratory in the tail of the Palship X (for “experimental”) Two—one of the five small experimental Palships, or whale pod research vessels currently in the Antarctic waters—also shouting, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!”

  They ran into each other just in front of the Whale Signal Board. Robby, being half Dr. Hoenig’s weight, bounced. He managed to grab the Whale Signal Controls, though, and keep his balance.

  “Oh, sorry,” said his father. “Did I hurt you? You aren’t going to get a nosebleed are you? Just a minute while I shut off the alarm. You’d better sit down.”

  He shut off the alarm. The silence seemed to ring in their ears.

  “Yes,” said Robby, feeling his nose.

  “Yes, what?” said Dr. Hoenig, anxiously.

  “Yes, you hurt me,” said Robby. “But I’m all right now. I don’t get nosebleeds anymore. Look, it’s Blue Mountain Bill.”

  He pointed to the Whale Signal Board, a large, upright panel divided into squares. In each square were several meters with numbers and quivering black needles, some lights, and what looked like a small television screen. Across each screen a line of white light wavered up and down. On one of the squares a light was flashing red.

  “You’re right,” said Dr. Hoenig, turning around to look at the board. “That is Blue Mountain Bill’s square. What on earth—? A blue whale his size ought to be able to take care of himself.”

  “A kraken—” began Robby, then stopped himself. “I mean, maybe a giant squid attacked him.”

  “Impossible,” said his father. “A deep-sea cephalopod that big wouldn’t show up this far south. These Antarctic waters are shallow by their standards. Only about a mile or so deep.”

  “But the kraken. . .” began Robby.

  “. . . doesn’t exist,” said his father, doing things with the controls and studying the dials of the instruments in the square connected with Blue Mountain Bill. One dial showed that Bill was a good half mile away from the pod of whales under the protection of Palship X Two, and half a mile deep in the icy Antarctic Ocean.

  “But—” began Robby again.

  “The kraken,” said Dr. Hoenig firmly, “is merely a legend. A Norwegian legend about a sea monster. We think the legend was started by the sight of a giant cephalopod, but we don’t know.”

  “There might be sea monsters,” said Robby. “Nobody knows for sure, do they?”

  “No,” said his father. “But I, personally, doubt it. Bill’s hurt.”

  “Hurt?” said Robby, forgetting about sea monsters in his concern over the big whale. He and his father had been in the Palship X Two, moving with this pod of whales for over two weeks now, and he had come to know the enormous sea beasts as individuals. He felt almost as close to them as he did to Balthasar, his own Risso’s dolphin. But with the large numbers of killer whales that hunted their prey in these frigid waters, Dr. Hoenig had thought it wouldn’t be safe for Robby to bring the big dolphin with him. Otherwise he would have been here now, playing in the waters about the Palship X Two and mingling with the great blue whales of the pod.

  “He acts as if he’s fighting something. I’ll take the smallboat,” said Dr. Hoenig. “Jump into your Outside Suit,if you’re coming with me.”

  “I’m coming,” said Robby.

  He hurried to his locker on the other side of the Control Room, as Dr. Hoenig turned to burrow into his own locker. Two minutes later they were both dressed and sealing them-selves in their suits by pressing together the magnetic edges of the suits’ openings. This magnetic fastener, invented by a man with an odd name that at the moment Robby could not remember, was a great improvement over the zipper. In the heated suits, boots, and fishbowl-like helmets with the little converters that could extract oxygen from the sea water, the two Hoenigs would be safe and comfortable not only under the surface of the salt Antarctic seas, but in the far more cold air above the sea and ice. Although right now, thought Robby,the air temperatures were probably no worse than freezing.This was the twenty-fourth of January, which is summertime around the South Pole.

  “We could take the Palship,” he said now, speaking over the radio circuit between his helmet and his father’s, “instead of the smallboat. Then, if it just happened to be a kraken—”“It is not a kraken!” Dr. Hoenig’s voice sounded tinny coming through the receiver speaker in Robby’s helmet. “And I’m not going to chase a hurt whale with sixty other whales following me. The pod is used to staying close to the Palship for protection against the killer whales. They’ll follow if we take it. If we leave it, they’ll stay behind. Come on now. And be careful of that suit of yours.”

  “I will,” said Robby patiently.

  He was used to his father’s mentioning the suit every time Robby put it on. It had needed to be specially made to fit Robby’s wiry, thirteen-year-old body; and had cost more than Dr. Hoenig cared to think about. As a marine zoologist employed by the International Department of Fisheries, Salt Water Research Division, he had his own suit furnished free by the Department. Robby, of course, was no employee of the Department, and in fact had been allowed to come with his father only by special permission.

  That permission was a reward from the Department for Robby’s help in capturing some Vandals who had invaded the Department’s Point Loma Research Station, off the west coast of Mexico. The Point Loma Station was where the Hoenigs lived. But it was also an underwater tower full of valuable Departmental equipment and specimens of sea life. Robby, together with an operative of the International Bureau of Police named Mr. Lillibulero, had not only captured the Vandals but helped recapture a large and valuable Martian sea badger that the Vandals had stolen.

  Accordingly, the Department had given Robby permission to come along with his father when Dr. Hoenig came here. Dr. Hoenig was making the trip to study the way in which cow blue whales seemed to be able to “talk” to their whale calves. The study was a direct descendant of the original radio-telemetry experiments with wild birds of the “Grousar” project by Dr. W. H. Marshall away back in 1962. Now Dr. Hoenig thought that if more were known of how the blue whale cows and calves communicated, a big step would have been taken toward the day when man would be able to talk to whales.

  It was a fascinating subject to Robby. Already people like his grandfather, Jacob Hoffer, had been able to come close to talking with the porpoise and the dolphin. These, like the blue and killer whales were Cetacea. And Cetacea were—like fur seals, walruses, sea elephants, sea lions, and “true” seals such as the fierce leopard seal—actually la
nd animals who had gone back to living in the sea. But the intelligence of the Cetacea was astounding. Their brains were almost as fully developed as man’s.

  It would be something, Robby had thought to himself, to talk with one of the blue whales, the largest living creatures in the world. It would be fascinating to hear, for example,what they thought of humans. Also, the whale would have things to tell that men had never known before. He might know that there was a kraken, and where one lived, and what it looked like. He might even guide men to such a sea monster and help them capture it. Anything was possible.

  Dr. Hoenig had no such thoughts. He simply wanted to find out everything about the blue whales that he could. He was a true scientist, who loved knowledge for its own sake.When he had finished studying the whales here, he planned to write a paper entitled: Intercommunications Between Cows and Calves of Blue Whale Pod Number 5498 and Their Relationship to Brain-Mapped Areas.

  Robby was writing a paper on the Whale Signal Board, and how it worked with the Control Caps each whale wore. This was to make up for the school he was missing while he was in the Antarctic. He had wanted to write a paper on the kraken, but his father had overruled this. Robby had decided not to argue. There was the matter of the expensive Outside Suit that had had to be bought for him, and the fact that his mother was not very enthusiastic about his going to the Antarctic without her.

  Once she too had been an employee of the Department, for she was a marine zoologist herself. But she had given up professional work in order to take care of Robby and his father properly. So she too would have needed special per-mission in order to go, and that might have complicated the situation so much that the Department would have withdrawn Robby’s permission.

  “After all,” Dr. Hoenig had said, “I’m supposed to be down there working, not taking a family vacation.”

  So Robby and his father had gone, and Robby’s mother had stayed home. She phoned them daily, though.

  Now Robby and his father hurried down into the fore part of the ship and climbed into the two-man smallboat that was housed there. It resembled a canoe with a transparent cover, but it could travel under water at eighty miles an hour, and it carried a sonic cannon in its front. This was a gun that shot bursts of sound for stunning wild killer whales that attempted to attack the blue whale calves.

  “Ready?” asked Dr. Hoenig.

  “Ready!” said Robby.

  A wall came down from overhead, shutting them off from the inside of the Palship. Another wall opened and they were suddenly out in the gray-green water fifteen feet under the surface. Dr. Hoenig looked at the small Whale Signal Board before him and quickly punched the buttons that would relay to the main board the signals from Blue Mountain Bill.

  “There he is,” said Dr. Hoenig, looking at the board, “about a mile and a half to the left of us, and nearly a mile down. He’s sounded again.”

  He put his hands on the smallboat controls and Robby was jerked back in his seat as if by a roller coaster’s starting. The smallboat flung itself forward through the water just under the surface.

  “We’ll meet him when he comes up on the surface,” said Dr. Hoenig over his shoulder to Robby. “I can’t understand this. He doesn’t seem to be fighting anything now. But the instruments show that something has hurt him.”

  The smallboat slowed suddenly, and came to a neck-jerking halt. It popped up onto the gray, rolling surface of the Antarctic Ocean. Robby looked around him. Far off to his left he could see a faint something shimmering on the horizon. He knew it was the edge of the pack ice around the Antarctic continent, which was more than twice the size of the United States, not including Alaska and Hawaii. Underneath their smallboat the cold water was nearly a mile deep.

  “Where is he?” asked Robby, looking around for Blue Mountain Bill.

  “He’s still coming up,” replied Dr. Hoenig, watching the instruments intently. “He’ll breach not fifty yards to our right.”

  Robby looked to his right and waited. He knew that whales can dive to depths of a mile or more, and that this was called sounding. When they came up, they came up like a cork released at the bottom of a swimming pool—gathering speed as they came. When they finally reached the surface they would be traveling fast enough to hurl their whole bodies out of water. This was called breaching. It was the same thing Robby had seen Balthasar do many times, but made much more impressive because of the difference in size between a thirteen-foot Risso’s dolphin and a sixty-to-hundred-foot whale.

  “Here he comes—now!” shouted Robby’s father, excited himself by the prospect of watching Blue Mountain Bill break surface this close.

  And, as he spoke, it happened.

  There was a sudden explosion in the water, a roar like an express train in a tunnel, and a titanic blue-gray body a hundred feet in length burst skyward. Up, up it went, until the enormous scoop-shaped head reached higher than the roof of a three-story apartment building. Then it turned; and, curving over, the great and awesome creature reentered the water with a sound and impact that flung the smallboat wave-high in the air.

  As it did so, the two humans in their smallboat saw a long and savage cut running from behind the fluke of Blue Mountain Bill for nearly twenty feet slantwise and down.

  “Did you see that?” shouted Robby’s father, staring. “What out here in deep water could cut him up like that? There just isn’t anything!”

  “A kraken!” cried Robby, almost beside himself with excitement. “And I’ll bet it’s under us, right now!”

  Someone Below Decks

  Robby’s father did not answer. He was too busy trying to maneuver the smallboat alongside the wounded bull whale. Blue Mountain Bill was plowing and diving through the water in the up-and-down weaving motion typical of the Cetacea, and he seemed on the verge of sounding again.

  The truth of the matter was that Bill was confused. The instruments before Dr. Hoenig showed electrical readings from certain areas of the whale’s brain—this was what brain mapping was all about—which were signs that the big bull was both frightened and enraged. The instrument readings showed that he was half-looking for whatever had hurt him and half-hoping that he would not find it. The Cetacea are as different, one from another, as humans. Blue Mountain Bill resembled that kind of human who secretly does not like to fight, and who has to work himself up into a rage in order to do so.

  He was in a rage now, and more or less working to keep himself in it. For that reason, he did not see the little boat with the two humans in it that was chasing him. They were simply too small to be noticed.

  Dr. Hoenig’s fingers went out to the small boat’s Whale Signal Board before him. He set one of the instruments at the number on a scale that corresponded to a certain area of Bill’s brain. Then steadily, gently, his finger began to press on a little control device rather like a car’s foot pedal in miniature.

  The huge bull whale began to slow down. And as he did so, Robby could see what looked like a little metal skullcap no bigger than Robby’s hand, winking as it caught the sunlight. It stayed firmly in its position just even with the tiny-looking eye above the comer of Bill’s enormous mouth. The little device was known as a Control Cap. It was picking up the electrical impulses sent out from the signal board in the small boat as Dr. Hoenig pressed down on the lever, and passing them on like magic through all the blubber and bone and flesh to the part of Bill’s brain known as the pleasure area.

  As a result, Bill found his rage slipping away from him in spite of his efforts to hang on to it. Little by little, as he plunged down and thrust up through the waves, a soft feeling of contentment and pleasure began to grow in him. This sensation was created by Dr. Hoenig, skillfully increasing his pressure on the lever. Slowly, the anger seeped out of Blue Mountain Bill. He no longer wanted to find his enemy and ram it with that great head of his, or smash it to flinders with his enormous tail-flukes, as whale boats had been smashed in the old days before it was realized how wasteful it was to kill intelligent creatures
like whales. Little by little, Bill began to feel that it was a pretty good watery world after all. He might have a few insignificant enemies in it, but on the other hand he had lots of friends too.

  He looked around for some. And saw the smallboat.

  “That does it,” said Dr. Hoenig, with a sigh of relief, as Bill slowed, and turned and allowed the small boat to run up alongside the cut in his side. “Now there, Bill. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  He spoke these last words out loud into the microphone that attached to the whale-speakers outside the boat, both above and under water. He could see from the instruments that Bill was now feeling sheepish, just as a human would who had flown into a rage and now was over it. Bill, of course, could not understand human speech, but the tone of Dr. Hoenig’s voice reassured the huge beast.

  “Take over on your set of controls, Robby,” said Dr. Hoenig, over his shoulder. “Keep the smallboat alongside. I’m going to have to climb out and fix that slash on Bill’s side.” He turned and spoke into the microphone again. “Easy now, Bill. I’ve got to fix up that side of yours.”

  He had already collected things from the first aid compartment and now he tilted back the cover of the smallboat. The freezing sea air of the Antarctic summer came in, but neither he nor Robby felt it. Inside the Outside Suits it was all the same to them, air or water. Dr. Hoenig could have opened the top under the sea surface without worrying. Their exposure suits would have protected them and the water-lung converter attached to the suits would have supplied them with oxygen from the sea water.

  Robby took over the smallboat controls.

  “He’s been bleeding,” Robby heard his father’s voice say over the radio circuit. “You better slip into the front seat and keep an eye out for killer whales. If there are any close they may notice the blood and try to attack him.”

  “All right,” said Robby. He slid over the back of the seat in front of him, into the place his father had just left, as Dr. Hoenig stepped up onto the side of Blue Mountain Bill and anchored himself there with a large, soft sucker pad attached to his belt. Robby fingered the firing handle of the sonic cannon in the bow of the smallboat. He had never fired at anything as big as a killer whale before; and even though he knew the sonic blast would not hurt the creature, only dizzy it enough to keep it from attacking the wounded Bill, there was something a little sobering at having the weapon under his hand. He wondered how it would work against a kraken that was even bigger than Blue Mountain Bill.