The Deep Range

CHAPTER XX

The wide bay was dotted with feathery plumes of mist as the great herd milled around in uncertain circles, not alarmed by the voices that had called it to this spot between the mountains, but merely undecided as to their meaning. All their lives the whales had obeyed the orders that came, sometimes in the form of water-borne vibrations, sometimes in electric shocks, from the small creatures whom they recognized as masters. Those orders, they had come to learn, had never harmed them; often, indeed, they had led them to fertile pastures which they would never have found unaided, for they were in regions of the sea which all their experience and the memories of a million years told them should be barren. And sometimes the small masters had protected them from the killers, turning aside the ravening packs before they could tear their living victims into fragments.

They had no enemies and no fears. For generations now they had roamed the peaceful oceans of the world, growing fatter and sleeker and more contented than all their ancestors back to the beginning of time. In fifty years they had grown, on an average, ten per cent longer and thirty per cent heavier, thanks to the careful stewardship of the masters. Even now the lord of all their race, the hundred-and-fifty-one-foot blue whale B.69322, universally known as Leviathan, was sporting in the Gulf Stream with his mate and newborn calf. Leviathan could never have reached his present size in any earlier age; though such matters were beyond proof, he was probably the largest animal that had ever existed in the entire history of Earth. Order was emerging out of chaos as the directing fields started to guide the herd along invisible channels. Presently the electric barrier gave way to concrete ones; the whales were swimming along four parallel canals, too narrow for more than one to pass at a time. Automatic senses weighed and measured them, rejecting all those below a certain size and diverting them back into the sea — doubtless a little puzzled, and quite unaware how seriously their numbers had been depleted.

The whales that had passed the test swam on trustfully along the two remaining channels until presently they came to a large lagoon. Some tasks could not be left entirely to machines; there were human inspectors here to see that no mistakes had been made, to check the condition of the animals, and to log the numbers of the doomed beasts as they left the lagoon on their last, short swim into the killing pens.

“B.52111 coming up,” said Franklin to the Thero as they stood together in the observation chamber. “Seventy-foot female, known to have had five calves — past the best age for breeding.” Behind him, he knew the cameras were silently recording the scene as their ivory-skulled, saffron-robed operators handled them with a professional skill which had surprised him until he learned that they had all been trained in Hollywood.

The whale never had any warning; it probably never even felt the gentle touch of the flexible copper fingers as they brushed its body. One moment it was swimming quietly along the pen; a second later it was a lifeless hulk, continuing to move forward under its own momentum. The fifty-thousand-ampere current, passing through the heart like a stroke of lightning, had not even allowed time for a final convulsion.

At the end of the killing pen, the wide conveyor belt took the weight of the immense body and carried it up a short slope until it was completely clear of the water. Then it began to move slowly forward along an endless series of spinning rollers which seemed to stretch halfway to the horizon.

“This is the longest conveyor of its kind in the world,” Franklin explained with justifiable pride. “It may have as many as ten whales — say a thousand tons — on it at one time. Although it involves us in considerable expense, and greatly restricts our choice of site, we always have the processing plant at least half a mile from the pens, so there is no danger of the whales being frightened by the smell of blood. I think you’ll agree that not only is the slaughtering instantaneous but the animals show no alarm whatsoever right up to the end.”

“Perfectly true,” said the Thero. “It all seems very humane. Still, if the whales did get frightened it would be very difficult to handle them, wouldn’t it? I wonder if you would go to all this trouble merely to spare their feelings?”

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 conveyor belt.

The great body had already been scanned by photoelectric 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 carefully 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 conveyor to the final 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 conveyor 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 bloodstained 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 operation 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 Thero, “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.”

“Very exceptional,” interjected Franklin. “And anyway we’ve put a stop to that.”

“True, but it’s all part of the debt we have to discharge.”

“Svend Foyn wouldn’t have agreed with you. When he invented the explosive harpoon, back in the 1870’s, he made an entry in his diary thanking God for having done all the work.”

“An interesting point of view,” answered the Thero dryly. “I wish I’d had a chance of arguing it with him. You know, there is a simple test which divides the human race into two classes. If a man is walking along the street and sees a beetle crawling just where he is going to place his foot — well, he can break his stride and miss it or he can crush it into pulp. Which would you do, Mr. Franklin?”

“It would depend on the beetle. If I knew it was poisonous, or a pest, I’d kill it. Otherwise I’d let it go. That, surely, is what any reasonable man would do.”

“Then we are not reasonable. We believe that killing is only justified to save the life of a higher creature — and it is surprising how seldom that situation arises. But let me get back to my argument; we seem to have lost our way.

“About a hundred years ago an Irish poet named Lord Dunsany wrote a play called The Use of Man, which you’ll be seeing on one of our TV programs before long. In it a man dreams that he’s magically transported out of the Solar System to appear before a tribunal of animals — and if he cannot find two to speak on his behalf, the human race is doomed. Only the dog will come forward to fawn over its master; all the others remember their old grievances and maintain that they would have been better off if man had never existed. The sentence of annihilation is about to be pronounced when another sponsor arrives in the nick of time, and humanity is saved. The only other creature who has any use for man is — the mosquito.

“Now you may think that this is merely an amusing jest; so, I am sure, did Dunsany — who happened to be a keen hunter. But poets often speak hidden truths of which they themselves are unaware, and I believe that this almost forgotten play contains an allegory of profound importance to the human race.

“Within a century or so, Franklin, we will literally be going outside the Solar System. Sooner or later we will meet types of intelligent life much higher than our own, yet in forms completely alien. And when that time comes, the treatment man receives from his superiors may well depend upon the way he has behaved toward the other creatures of his own world.”

The words were spoken so quietly, yet with such conviction, that they struck a sudden chill into Franklin’s soul. For the first time he felt that there might be something in the other’s point of view — something, that is, besides mere humanitarianism. (But could humanitarianism ever be “mere’?) He had never liked the final climax of his work, for he had long ago developed a great affection for the monstrous charges, but he had always regarded it as a regrettable necessity.

“I grant that your points are well made,” he admitted, “but whether we like them or not, we have to accept the realities of life. I don’t know who coined the phrase “Nature red in tooth and claw,” but that’s the way she is. And if the world has to choose between food and ethics, I know which will win.”

The Thero gave that secret, gentle smile which, consciously or otherwise, seemed to echo the benign gaze that so many generations of artists had made the hallmark of the Buddha.

“But that is just the point, my dear Franklin,” he answered. “There is no longer any need for a choice. Ours is the first generation in the world’s history that can break the ancient cycle, and eat what it pleases without spilling the blood of innocent creatures. I am sincerely grateful to you for helping to show me how.”

“Me!” exploded Franklin.

“Exactly,” said the Thero, the extent of his smile now far exceeding the canons of Buddhist art. “And now, if you will excuse me, I think I’ll go to sleep.”