The Ghost From the Grand Banks and the Deep Range

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Don gave one more glance at his private sonar screen, then gestured to the hatch overhead.

  “Open up,” he said. “Let’s have a look at the scenery.”

  “We may ship some water,” protested Franklin. “It feels pretty rough.”

  “With the two of us in that hatch, not much is going to leak past. Here—put on this cape. That’ll keep the spray out of the works.”

  It seemed a crazy idea, but Don must have a good reason. Overhead, a tiny elliptical patch of sky appeared as the outer seal of the conning tower opened. Don scrambled up the ladder first; then Franklin followed, blinking his eyes against the windswept spray.

  Yes, Don had known what he was doing. There was little wonder that he had been so anxious to make this trip before Franklin left the island. In his own way, Don was a good psychologist, and Franklin felt an inexpressible gratitude toward him. For this was one of the great moments of his life; he could think of only one other to match it: the moment when he had first seen Earth, in all its heart-stopping beauty, floating against the infinitely distant background of the stars. This scene, also, filled his soul with the same awe, the same sense of being in the presence of cosmic forces.

  The whales were moving north, and he was among them. During the night, the leaders must have passed through the Queensland Gate, on the way to the warm seas in which their young could be safely born. A living armada was all around him, plowing steadfastly through the waves with effortless power. The great dark bodies emerged streaming from the water, then sank with scarcely a ripple back into the sea. As Franklin watched, too fascinated to feel any sense of danger, one of the enormous beasts surfaced less than forty feet away. There was a roaring whistle of air as it emptied its lungs, and he caught a mercifully weakened breath of the fetid air. A ridiculously tiny eye stared at him—an eye that seemed lost in the monstrous, misshapen head. For a moment the two mammals—the biped who had abandoned the sea, the quadruped who had returned to it—regarded each other across the evolutionary gulf that separated them. What did a man look like to a whale? Franklin asked himself, and wondered if there was any way of finding the answer. Then the titanic bulk tilted down into the sea, the great flukes lifted themselves into the air, and the waters flowed back to fill the sudden void.

  A distant clap of thunder made him look toward the mainland. Half a mile away, the giants were playing. As he watched, a shape so strange that it was hard to relate it to any of the films and pictures he had seen emerged from the waves with breathtaking slowness, and hung poised for a moment completely out of the water. As a ballet dancer seems at the climax of his leap to defy gravity, so for an instant the whale appeared to hang upon the horizon. Then, with that same unhurried grace, it tumbled back into the sea, and seconds later the crash of the impact came echoing over the waves.

  The sheer slowness of that huge leap gave it a dreamlike quality, as if the sense of time had been distorted. Nothing else conveyed so clearly to Franklin the immense size of the beasts that now surrounded him like moving islands. Rather belatedly, he wondered what would happen if one of the whales surfaced beneath the sub, or decided to take too close an interest in it. . . .

  “No need to worry,” Don reassured him. “They know who we are. Sometimes they’ll come and rub against us to remove parasites, and then it gets a bit uncomfortable. As for bumping into us accidentally—they can see where they’re going a good deal better than we can.”

  As if to refute this statement, a streamlined mountain emerged dripping from the sea and showered water down upon them. The sub rocked crazily, and for a moment Franklin feared it was going to overturn; then it righted itself, and he realized that he could, quite literally, reach out and touch the barnacle-encrusted head now lying on the waves. The weirdly shaped mouth opened in a prodigious yawn, the hundreds of strips of whalebone fluttering like a Venetian blind in a breeze.

  Had he been alone, Franklin would have been scared stiff, but Don seemed the complete master of the situation. He leaned out of the hatch and yelled in the direction of the whale’s invisible ear: “Move over momma! We’re not your baby!”

  The great mouth with its hanging draperies of bone snapped shut, the beady little eye—strangely like a cow’s and seemingly not much larger—looked at them with what might have been a hurt expression. Then the sub rocked once more, and the whale was gone.

  “It’s quite safe, you see,” Don explained. “They’re peaceful, good-natured beasts, except when they have their calves with them. Just like any other cattle.”

  “But would you get this close to any of the toothed whales—the sperm whale, for instance?”

  “That depends. If it was an old rogue male—a real Moby Dick—I wouldn’t care to try it. Same with killer whales; they might think I was good eating, though I could scare them off easily enough by turning on the hooter. I once got into a harem of about a dozen sperm whales, and the ladies didn’t seem to mind, even though some of them had calves with them. Nor did the old man, oddly enough. I suppose he knew I wasn’t a rival.” He paused thoughtfully, then continued. “That was the only time I’ve actually seen whales mating. It was pretty awe-inspiring—gave me such an inferiority complex it put me off my stroke for a week.”

  “How many would you say there are in this school?” asked Franklin.

  “Oh, about a hundred. The recorders at the gate will give the exact figure. So you can say there are at least five thousand tons of the best meal and oil swimming around us—a couple of million dollars, if it’s worth a penny. Doesn’t all that cash make you feel good?”

  “No,” said Franklin. “And I’m damn sure it doesn’t make any difference to you. Now I know why you like this job, and there’s no need to put on an act about it.”

  Don made no attempt to answer. They stood together in the cramped hatchway, not feeling the spray upon their faces, sharing the same thoughts and emotions, as the mightiest animals the world had ever seen drove purposefully past them to the north. It was then that Franklin knew, with a final certainty, that his life was firmly set upon its new course. Though much had been taken from him which he would never cease to regret, he had passed the stage of futile grief and solitary brooding. He had lost the freedom of space, but he had won the freedom of the seas.

  That was enough for any man.

  CHAPTER

  11

  CONFIDENTIAL

  To Be Kept in Sealed Envelope

  Attached is the medical report on Walter Franklin, who has now successfully completed his training and has qualified as third warden with the highest rating ever recorded. In view of certain complaints from senior members of Establishment and Personnel Branch that earlier reports were too technical for comprehension, I am giving this summary in language understandable even to administrative officers.

  Despite a number of personality defects, W.F.’s capability rating places him in that small group from which future heads of technical departments must be drawn—a group so desperately small that, as I have frequently pointed out, the very existence of the state is threatened unless we can enlarge it. The accident which eliminated W.F. from the Space Service, in which he would have undoubtedly had a distinguished career, left him in full possession of all his talents and presented us with an opportunity which it would have been criminal to waste. Not only did it give us a chance of studying what has since become the classic textbook case of astrophobia, but it offered us a striking challenge in rehabilitation. The analogies between sea and space have often been pointed out, and a man used to one can readily adapt to the other. In this case, however, the differences between the two media were equally important; at the simplest level, the fact that the sea is a continuous and sustaining fluid, in which vision is always limited to no more than a few yards, gave W.F. the sense of security he had lost in space.

  The fact that, toward the end of his training, he attempted suicide may at first appear to argue against the correctness of our treatment. This is not the case; the attempt was due to a co
mbination of quite unforeseeable factors (Paragraphs 57–86 of attached report), and its outcome, as often happens, was an improvement in the stability of the subject. The method chosen for the attempt is also highly significant in itself and proves that we had made a correct choice of W.F.’s new vocation. The seriousness of the attempt may also be questioned; had W.F. been really determined to kill himself, he would have chosen a simpler and less fallible method of doing so.

  Now that the subject has reestablished—apparently successfully—his emotional life and has shown only trivial symptoms of disturbance, I am confident that we need expect no more trouble. Above all, it is important that we interfere with him as little as possible. His independence and originality of mind, though no longer as exaggerated as they were, are a fundamental part of his personality and will largely determine his future progress.

  Only time will show whether all the skill and effort lavished on this case will be repaid in cents and dollars. Even if it is not, those engaged upon it have already received their reward in the rebuilding of a life, which will certainly be useful and may be invaluable.

  IAN K. STEVENS

  Director, Division of Applied Psychiatry,

  World Health Organization

  II

  THE WARDEN

  CHAPTER

  12

  Second Warden Walter Franklin was having his monthly shave when the emergency call came through. It had always seemed a little surprising to him that, after so many years of research, the biochemists had not yet found an inhibitor that would put one’s bristles permanently out of action. Still, one should not be ungrateful; only a couple of generations ago, incredible though it seemed, men had been forced to shave themselves every day, using a variety of complicated, expensive, and sometimes lethal instruments.

  Franklin did not stop to wipe the layer of cream from his face when he heard the shrill whining of the communicator alarm. He was out of the bathroom, through the kitchen, and into the hall before the sound had died away and the instrument had been able to get its second breath. As he punched the Receive button, the screen lighted up and he was looking into the familiar but now harassed face of the Headquarters operator.

  “You’re to report for duty at once, Mr. Franklin,” she said breathlessly.

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “It’s Farms, sir. The fence is down somewhere and one of the herds has broken through. It’s eating the spring crop, and we’ve got to get it out as quickly as we can.”

  “Oh, is that all?” said Franklin. “I’ll be over at the dock in ten minutes.”

  It was an emergency all right, but not one about which he could feel very excited. Of course, Farms would be yelling its head off as its production quota was being whittled down by thousands of half-ton nibbles. But he was secretly on the side of the whales; if they’d managed to break into the great plankton prairies, then good luck to them.

  “What’s all the fuss about?” said Indra as she came out of the bedroom, her long, dark hair looking attractive even at this time of the morning as it hung in lustrous tresses over her shoulders. When Franklin told her, she appeared worried.

  “It’s a bigger emergency than you seem to think,” she said. “Unless you act quickly, you may have some very sick whales on your hands. The spring overturn was only two weeks ago, and it’s the biggest one we’ve ever had. So your greedy pets will be gorging themselves silly.”

  Franklin realized that she was perfectly right. The plankton farms were no affair of his, and formed a completely independent section of the Marine Division. But he knew a great deal about them, since they were an alternative and to some extent rival method of getting food from the sea. The plankton enthusiasts claimed, with a good deal of justice, that crop growing was more efficient than herding, since the whales themselves fed on the plankton and were therefore farther down the food chain. Why waste ten pounds of plankton, they argued, to produce one pound of whale, when you could harvest it directly?

  The debate had been in progress for at least twenty years, and so far neither side could claim to have won. Sometimes the argument had been quite acrimonious and had echoed, on an infinitely larger and more sophisticated scale, the rivalry between homesteaders and cattle barons in the days when the American Midwest was being settled. But unfortunately for latter-day mythmakers, competing departments of the Marine Division of the World Food Organization fought each other purely with official minutes and the efficient but unspectacular weapons of bureaucracy. There were no gunfighters prowling the range, and if the fence had gone down it would be due to purely technical troubles, not midnight sabotage. . . .

  In the sea as on the land, all life depends upon vegetation. And the amount of vegetation in turn depends upon the mineral content of the medium in which it grows—the nitrates, phosphates, and scores of other basic chemicals. In the ocean, there is always a tendency for these vital substances to accumulate in the depths, far below the regions where light penetrates and therefore plants can exist and grow. The upper few hundred feet of the sea is the primary source of its life; everything below that level preys, at second or third hand, on the food formed above.

  Every spring, as the warmth of the new year seeps down into the ocean, the waters far below respond to the invisible Sun. They expand and rise, lifting to the surface, in untold billions of tons, the salts and minerals they bear. Thus fertilized by food from below and Sun from above, the floating plants multiply with explosive violence, and the creatures which browse upon them flourish accordingly. And so spring comes to the meadows of the sea.

  This was the cycle that had repeated itself at least a billion times before man appeared on the scene. And now he had changed it. Not content with the upwelling of minerals produced by Nature, he had sunk his atomic generators at strategic spots far down into the sea, where the raw heat they produced would start immense, submerged fountains lifting their chemical treasure toward the fruitful Sun. This artificial enhancement of the natural overturn had been one of the most unexpected, as well as the most rewarding, of all the many applications of nuclear energy. By this means alone, the output of food from the sea had been increased by almost ten per cent.

  And now the whales were busily doing their best to restore the balance.

  The roundup would have to be a combined sea and air operation. There were too few of the subs, and they were far too slow, to do the job unassisted. Three of them—including Franklin’s one-man scout—were being flown to the scene of the breakthrough by a cargo plane which would drop them and then cooperate by spotting the movements of the whales from the air, if they had scattered over too large an area for the subs’ sonar to pick them up. Two other planes would also try to scare the whales by dropping noise generators near them, but this technique had never worked well in the past and no one really expected much success from it now.

  Within twenty minutes of the alarm, Franklin was watching the enormous food-processing plants of Pearl Harbor falling below as the jets of the freighter hauled him up into the sky. Even now, he was still not fond of flying and tried to avoid it when he could. But it no longer worried him, and he could look down on the world beneath without qualms.

  A hundred miles east of Hawaii, the sea turned suddenly from blue to gold. The moving fields, rich with the year’s first crop, covered the Pacific clear out to the horizon, and showed no sign of ending as the plane raced on toward the rising sun. Here and there the mile-long skimmers of the floating harvesters lay upon the surface like the enigmatic toys of some giant children, while beside them, smaller and more compact, were the pontoons and rafts of the concentration equipment. It was an impressive sight, even in these days of mammoth engineering achievements, but it did not move Franklin. He could not become excited over a billion tons of assorted diatoms and shrimps—not even though he knew that they fed a quarter of the human race.

  “Just passing over the Hawaiian Corridor,” said the pilot’s voice from the speaker. “We should see the break in a minute.�
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  “I can see it now,” said one of the other wardens, leaning past Franklin and pointing out to sea. “There they are—having the time of their lives.”

  It was a spectacle which must be making the poor farmers tear their hair. Franklin suddenly remembered an old nursery rhyme he had not thought of for at least thirty years:

  Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn,

  The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn.

  There was no doubt that the cows were in the corn, and Little Boy Blue was going to have a busy time getting them out. Far below, myriads of narrow swathes were being carved in the endless yellow sea, as the ravenous, slowly moving mountains ate their way into the rich plankton meadows. A blue line of exposed water marked the track of each whale as it meandered through what must be a cetacean heaven—a heaven from which it was Franklin’s job to expel it as promptly as possible.

  The three wardens, after a final radio briefing, left the cabin and went down to the hold, where the little subs were already hanging from the davits which would lower them into the sea. There would be no difficulty about this operation; what might not be so easy would be getting them back again, and if the sea became rough they might have to go home under their own power.

  It seemed strange to be inside a submarine inside an airplane, but Franklin had little time for such thoughts as he went through the routine cockpit drill. Then the speaker on his control panel remarked: “Hovering at thirty feet; now opening cargo hatches. Stand by, Number One Sub.” Franklin was Number Two; the great cargo craft was poised so steadily, and the hoists moved down so smoothly, that he never felt any impact as the sub dropped into its natural element. Then the three scouts were fanning out along the tracks that had been assigned to them, like mechanized sheep dogs rounding up a flock.