The Deep Range

CHAPTER XVI

The secretary of the Department of Scientific Research had listened to him attentively enough — and not merely with attention, Franklin told himself, but with a flattering interest. When he had finished the sales talk which had taken such long and careful preparation, he felt a sudden and unexpected emotional letdown. He knew that he had done his best; what happened now was largely out of his hands.

“There are a few points I would like to clear up,” said the secretary. “The first is a rather obvious one. Why didn’t you go to the Marine Division’s own research department instead of coming all the way up to World Secretariat level and contacting D.S.R.?”

It was, Franklin admitted, a rather obvious point — and a somewhat delicate one. But he knew that it would be raised, and he had come prepared.

“Naturally, Mr. Farlan,” he answered, “I did my best to get support in the division. There was a good deal of interest, especially after we’d captured that squid. But Operation Percy turned out to be much more expensive than anyone had calculated, and there were a lot of awkward questions about it. The whole affair ended with several of our scientists transferring to other divisions.”

“I know,” interjected the secretary with a smile. “We’ve got some of them.”

“So any research that isn’t of direct practical importance is now frowned on in the division, which is one reason why I came to you. And, frankly, it hasn’t the authority to do the sort of thing I propose. The cost of running even two deep-sea subs is considerable, and would have to be approved at higher than divisional level.”

“But if it was approved, you are confident that the staff could be made available?”

“Yes, at the right time of the year. Now that the fence is practically one hundred per cent reliable — there’s been no major breakdown for three years — we wardens have a fairly slack time except at the annual roundups and slaughterings. That’s why it seemed a good idea — ‘

“To utilize the wasted talents of the wardens?”

“Well, that’s putting it a little bluntly. I don’t want to give the idea that there is any inefficiency in the bureau.”

“I wouldn’t dream of suggesting such a thing,” smiled the secretary. “The other point is a more personal one. Why are you so keen on this project? You have obviously spent a lot of time and trouble on it — and, if I may say so, risked the disapproval of your superiors by coming directly to me.”

That question was not so easy to answer, even to someone you knew well, still less to a stranger. Would this man, who had risen so high in the service of the state, understand the fascination of a mysterious echo on a sonar screen, glimpsed only once, and that years ago? Yes, he would, for he was at least partly a scientist.

“As a chief warden,” explained Franklin, “I probably won’t be on sea duty much longer. I’m thirty-eight, and getting old for this kind of work. And I’ve an inquisitive type of mind; perhaps I should have been a scientist myself. This is a problem I’d like to see settled, though I know the odds against it are pretty high.”

“I can appreciate that. This chart of confirmed sightings covers about half the world’s oceans.”

“Yes, I know it looks hopeless, but with the new sonar sets we can scan a volume three times as great as we used to, and an echo that size is easy to pick up. It’s only a matter of time before somebody detects it.”

“And you want to be that somebody. Well, that’s reasonable enough. When I got your original letter I had a talk with my marine biology people, and got about three different opinions — none of them very encouraging. Some of those who admit that these echoes have been seen say that they are probably ghosts due to faults in the sonar sets or returns from discontinuities of some kind in the water.”

Franklin snorted. “Anyone who’s seen them would know better than that. After all, we’re familiar with all the ordinary sonar ghosts and false returns. We have to be.”

“Yes, that’s what I feel. Some more of my people think that the — let us say — conventional sea serpents have already been accounted for by squids, oarfish, and eels, and that what your patrols have been seeing is either one of these or else a large deep-sea shark.”

Franklin shook his head. “I know what all those echoes look like. This is quite different.”

“The third objection is a theoretical one. There simply isn’t enough food in the extreme ocean depths to support any very large and active forms of life.”

“No one can be sure of that. Only in the last century scientists were saying that there could be no life at all on the ocean bed. We know what nonsense that turned out to be.”

“Well, you’ve made a good case. I’ll see what can be done.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Farlan. Perhaps it would be best if no one in the bureau knew that I’d come to see you.”

“We won’t tell them, but they’ll guess.” The secretary rose to his feet, and Franklin assumed that the interview was over. He was wrong.

“Before you go, Mr. Franklin,” said the secretary, “you might be able to clear up one little matter that’s been worrying me for a good many years.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“I’ve never understood what a presumably well-trained warden would be doing in the middle of the night off the Great Barrier Reef, breathing compressed air five hundred feet down.”

There was a long silence while the two men, their relationship suddenly altered, stared at each other across the room. Franklin searched his memory, but the other’s face evoked no echoes; that was so long ago, and he had met so many people during the intervening years.

“Were you one of the men who pulled me in?” he asked. “If so, I’ve a lot to thank you for.” He paused for a moment, then added, “You see, that wasn’t an accident.”

“I rather thought so; that explains everything. But before we change the subject, just what happened to Bert Darryl? I’ve never been able to find the true story.”

“Oh, eventually he ran out of credit; he could never make the Sea Lion pay its way. The last time I ever saw him was in Melbourne; he was heartbroken because customs duties had been abolished and there was no way an honest smuggler could make a living. Finally he tried to collect the insurance on the Sea Lion; he had a convincing fire and had to abandon ship off Cairns. She went to the bottom, but the appraisers went after her, and started asking some very awkward questions when they found that all the valuable fittings had been removed before the fire. I don’t know how the captain got out of that mess.

“That was about the end of the old rascal. He took to the bottle in earnest, and one night up in Darwin he decided to go for a swim off the jetty. But he’d forgotten that it was low tide — and in Darwin the tide drops thirty feet. So he broke his neck, and a lot of people besides his creditors were genuinely sorry.”

“Poor old Bert. The world will be a dull place when there aren’t any more people like him.”

That was rather a heretical remark, thought Franklin, coming from the lips of so senior a member of the World Secretariat. But it pleased him greatly, and not merely because he agreed with it. He knew now that he had unexpectedly acquired an influential friend, and that the chances of his project going forward had been immeasurably improved.

He did not expect anything to happen in a hurry, so was not disappointed as the weeks passed in silence. In any event, he was kept busy; the slack season was still three months away, and meanwhile a whole series of minor but annoying crises crowded upon him.

And there was one that was neither minor nor annoying, if indeed it could be called a crisis at all. Anne Franklin arrived wide-eyed and wide-mouthed into the world, and Indra began to have her first serious doubts of continuing her academic career.

Franklin, to his great disappointment, was not home when his daughter was born. He had been in charge of a small task force of six subs, carrying out an offensive sweep off the Pribilof Islands in an attempt to cut down the number of killer whales. It was not the first mission of its kind, but it was the most successful, thanks to the use of improved techniques. The characteristic calls of seals and the smaller whales had been recorded and played back into the sea, while the subs had waited silently for the killers to appear.

They had done so in hundreds, and the slaughter had been immense. By the time the little fleet returned to Base, more than a thousand orcas had been killed. It had been hard and sometimes dangerous work, and despite its importance Franklin had found this scientific butchery extremely depressing. He could not help admiring the beauty, speed, and ferocity of the hunters he was himself hunting, and toward the end of the mission he was almost glad when the rate of kill began to fall off. It seemed that the orcas were learning by bitter experience, and the bureau’s statisticians would have to decide whether or not it would be economically worthwhile repeating the operation next season.

Franklin had barely had time to thaw out from this mission and to fondle Anne gingerly, without extracting any signs of recognition from her, when he was shot off to South Georgia. His problem there was to discover why the whales, who had previously swum into the slaughtering pens without any qualms, had suddenly become suspicious and shown a great reluctance to enter the electrified sluices. As it turned out, he did nothing at all to solve the mystery; while he was still looking for psychological factors, a bright young plant inspector discovered that some of the bloody waste from the processing plants was accidentally leaking back into the sea. It was not surprising that the whales, though their sense of smell was not as strongly developed as in other marine animals, had become alarmed as the moving barriers tried to guide them to the place where so many of their relatives had met their doom.

As a chief warden, already being groomed for higher things, Franklin was now a kind of mobile trouble shooter who might be sent anywhere in the world on the bureau’s business. Apart from the effect on his home life, he welcomed this state of affairs. Once a man had learned the mechanics of a warden’s trade, straightforward patrolling and herding had little future in it. People like Don Burley got all the excitement and pleasure they needed from it, but then Don was neither ambitious nor much of an intellectual heavyweight. Franklin told himself this without any sense of superiority; it was a simple statement of fact which Don would be the first to admit.

He was in England, giving evidence as an expert witness before the Whaling Commission — the bureau’s state-appointed watchdog — when he received a plaintive call from Dr. Lundquist, who had taken over when Dr. Roberts had left the Bureau of Whales to accept a much more lucrative appointment at the Marineland aquarium.

“I’ve just had three crates of gear delivered from the Department of Scientific Research. It’s nothing we ever ordered, but your name is on it. What’s it all about?”

Franklin thought quickly. It would arrive when he was away, and if the director came across it before he could prepare the ground there would be fireworks.

“It’s too long a story to give now,” Franklin answered. “I’ve got to go before the committee in ten minutes. Just push it out of the way somewhere until I get back — I’ll explain everything then.”

“I hope it’s all right — it’s most unusual.”

“Nothing to worry about — see you the day after tomorrow. If Don Burley comes to Base, let him have a look at the stuff. But I’ll fix all the paperwork when I get back.”

That, he told himself, would be the worst part of the whole job. Getting equipment that had never been officially requisitioned onto the bureau’s inventory without too many questions was going to be at least as difficult as locating the Great Sea Serpent…

He need not have worried. His new and influential ally, the secretary of the Department of Scientific Research, had already anticipated most of his problems. The equipment was to be on loan to the bureau, and was to be returned as soon as it had done its job. What was more, the director had been given the impression that the whole thing was a D.S.R. project; he might have his doubts, but Franklin was officially covered.

“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.