The Deep Range

CHAPTER II

Though he had been kept waiting only a few minutes, Walter Franklin was already prowling impatiently around the reception room. Swiftly he examined and dismissed the deep-sea photographs hanging on the walls; then he sat for a moment on the edge of the table, leafing through the pile of magazines, reviews, and reports which always accumulated in such places. The popular magazines he had already seen — for the last few weeks he had had little else to do but read — and few of the others looked interesting. Somebody, he supposed, had to go through these lavishly electroprinted food-production reports as part of their job; he wondered how they avoided being hypnotized by the endless columns of statistics. Neptune, the house organ of the Marine Division, seemed a little more promising, but as most of the personalities discussed in its columns were unknown to him he soon became bored with it. Even its fairly lowbrow articles were largely over his head, assuming a knowledge of technical terms he did not possess.

The receptionist was watching him — certainly noticing his impatience, perhaps analyzing the nervousness and insecurity that lay behind it. With a distinct effort, Franklin forced himself to sit down and to concentrate on yesterday’s issue of the Brisbane Courier. He had almost become interested in an editorial requiem on Australian cricket, inspired by the recent Test results, when the young lady who guarded the director’s office smiled sweetly at him and said: “Would you please go in now, Mr. Franklin?”

He had expected to find the director alone, or perhaps accompanied by a secretary. The husky young man sitting in the other visitor’s chair seemed out of place in this orderly office, and was staring at him with more curiosity than friendliness. Franklin stiffened at once; they had been discussing him, he knew, and automatically he went on the defensive.

Director Cary, who knew almost as much about human beings as he did about marine mammals, sensed the strain immediately and did his best to dispel it.

“Ah, there you are, Franklin,” he said with slightly excessive heartiness. “I hope you’ve been enjoying your stay here. Have my people been taking care of you?”

Franklin was spared the trouble of answering this question, for the director gave him no time to reply.

“I want you to meet Don Burley,” he continued. “Don’s first warden on the Rorqual, and one of the best we’ve got. He’s been assigned to look after you. Don, meet Walter Franklin.”

They shook hands warily, weighing each other. Then Don’s face broke into a reluctant smile. It was the smile of a man who had been given a job he didn’t care for but who had decided to make the best of it.

“Pleased to meet you, Franklin,” he said. “Welcome to the Mermaid Patrol.”

Franklin tried to smile at the hoary joke, but his effort was not very successful. He knew that he should be friendly, and that these people were doing their best to help him. Yet the knowledge was that of the mind, not the heart; he could not relax and let himself meet them halfway. The fear of being pitied and the nagging suspicion that they had been talking about him behind his back, despite all the assurances he had been given, paralyzed his will for friendliness.

Don Burley sensed nothing of this. He only knew that the director’s office was not the right place to get acquainted with a new colleague, and before Franklin was fully aware of what had happened he was out of the building, buffeting his way through the shirt-sleeved crowds in George Street, and being steered into a minute bar opposite the new post office.

The noise of the city subsided, though through the tinted glass walls Franklin could see the shadowy shapes of the pedestrians moving to and fro. It was pleasantly cool here after the torrid streets; whether or not Brisbane should be air-conditioned — and if so, who should have the resulting multimillion-dollar contract — was still being argued by the local politicians, and meanwhile the citizens sweltered every summer.

Don Burley waited until Franklin had drunk his first beer and called for replacements. There was a mystery about his new pupil, and as soon as possible he intended to solve it. Someone very high up in the division — perhaps even in the World Secretariat itself — must have organized this. A first warden was not called away from his duties to wet-nurse someone who was obviously too old to go through the normal training channels. At a guess he would say that Franklin was the wrong side of thirty; he had never heard of anyone that age getting this sort of special treatment before.

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 “whaleboys,” 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.

The city and the sunburned coast dropped below as the lifting jets carried them effortlessly up into the sky. Franklin was reading the paper with a fierce concentration that did not deceive Burley for a moment. He decided to wait for a while, and apply some more tests later in the flight.

The Glasshouse Mountains — those strangely shaped fangs jutting from the eroded plain — swept swiftly beneath. Then came the little coastal towns, through which the wealth of the immense farm lands of the interior had once passed to the world in the days before agriculture went to sea. And then — only minutes, it seemed, after take-off — the first islands of the Great Barrier Reef appeared like deeper shadows in the blue horizon mists.

The Sun was shining almost straight into his eyes, but Don’s memory could fill in the details which were lost in the glare from the burning waters. He could see the low, green islands surrounded by their narrow borders of sand and their immensely greater fringes of barely submerged coral. Against each island’s private reef the waves of the Pacific would be marching forever, so that for a thousand miles into the north snowy crescents of foam would break the surface of the sea.

A century ago — fifty years, even — scarcely a dozen of these hundreds of islands had been inhabited. Now, with the aid of universal air transport, together with cheap power and water-purification plants, both the state and the private citizen had invaded the ancient solitude of the reef. A few fortunate individuals, by means that had never been made perfectly clear, had managed to acquire some of the smaller islands as their personal property. The entertainment and vacation industry had taken over others, and had not always improved on Nature’s handiwork. But the greatest landowner in the reef was undoubtedly the World Food Organization, with its complicated hierarchy of fisheries, marine farms, and research departments, the full extent of which, it was widely believed, no merely human brain could ever comprehend.

“We’re nearly there,” said Burley. “That’s Lady Musgrave Island we’ve just passed — main generators for the western end of the fence. Capricorn Group under us now — Masthead, One Tree, North-West, Wilson — and Heron in the middle, with all those buildings on it. The big tower is Administration — the aquarium’s by that pool — and look, you can see a couple of subs tied up at that long jetty leading out to the edge of the reef.”

As he spoke, Don watched Franklin out of the corner of his eye. The other had leaned toward the window as if following his companion’s running commentary, yet Burley could swear that he was not looking at the panorama of reefs and islands spread out below. His face was tense and strained; there was an indrawn, hooded expression in his eyes as if he was forcing himself to see nothing.

With a mingling of pity and contempt, Don understood the symptoms if not their cause. Franklin was terrified of heights; so much, then, for the theory that he was a spaceman. Then what was he? Whatever the answer, he hardly seemed the sort of person with whom one would wish to share the cramped quarters of a two-man training sub…

The plane’s shock absorbers touched down on the rectangle of scorched and flattened coral that was the Heron Island landing platform. As he stepped out into the sunlight, blinking in the sudden glare, Franklin seemed to make an abrupt recovery. Don had seen seasick passengers undergo equally swift transformations on their return to dry land. If Franklin is no better as a sailor than an airman, he thought, this crazy assignment won’t last more than a couple of days and I’ll be able to get back to work. Not that Don was in a great rush to return immediately; Heron Island was a pleasant place where you could enjoy yourself if you knew how to deal with the red tape that always entangled headquarters establishments.

A light truck whisked them and their belongings along a road beneath an avenue of Pisonia trees whose heavily leafed branches blocked all direct sunlight. The road was less than a quarter of a mile long, but it spanned the little island from the jetties and maintenance plants on the west to the administration buildings on the east. The two halves of the island were partly insulated from each other by a narrow belt of jungle which had been carefully preserved in its virgin state and which, Don remembered sentimentally, was full of interesting tracks and secluded clearings.

Administration was expecting Mr. Franklin, and had made all the necessary arrangements for him. He had been placed in a kind of privileged limbo, one stage below the permanent staff like Burley, but several stages above the ordinary trainees under instruction. Surprisingly, he had a room of his own — something that even senior members of the bureau could not always expect when they visited the island. This was a great relief to Don, who had been afraid he might have to share quarters with his mysterious charge. Quite apart from any other factors, that would have interfered badly with certain romantic plans of his own.

He saw Franklin to his small but attractive room on the second floor of the training wing, looking out across the miles of coral which stretched eastward all the way to the horizon. In the courtyard below, a group of trainees, relaxing between classes, was chatting with a second warden instructor whom Don recognized from earlier visits but could not name. It was a pleasant feeling, he mused, going back to school when you already knew all the answers.

“You should be comfortable here,” he said to Franklin, who was busy unpacking his baggage. “Quite a view, isn’t it?”

Such poetic ecstasies were normally foreign to Don’s nature, but he could not resist the temptation of seeing how Franklin would react to the leagues of coral-dappled ocean that lay before him. Rather to his disappointment, the reaction was quite conventional; presumably Franklin was not worried by a mere thirty feet of height. He looked out of the window, taking his time and obviously admiring the vista of blues and greens which led the eye out into the endless waters of the Pacific.

Serve you right, Don told himself — it’s not fair to tease the poor devil. Whatever he’s got, it can’t be fun to live with.

“I’ll leave you to get settled in,” said Don, backing out through the door. “Lunch will be coming up in half an hour over at the mess — that building we passed on the way in. See you there.”

Franklin nodded absently as he sorted through his belongings and piled shirts and underclothes on the bed. He wanted to be left alone while he adjusted himself to the new life which, with no particular enthusiasm, he had now accepted as his own.

Burley had been gone for less than ten minutes when there was a knock on the door and a quiet voice said, “Can I come in?”

“Who’s there?” asked Franklin, as he tidied up the debris and made his room look presentable.

“Dr. Myers.”

The name meant nothing to Franklin, but his face twisted into a wry smile as he thought how appropriate it was that his very first visitor should be a doctor. What kind of a doctor, he thought he could guess.

Myers was a stocky, pleasantly ugly man in his early forties, with a disconcertingly direct gaze which seemed somewhat at variance with his friendly, affable manner.

“Sorry to butt in on you when you’ve only just arrived,” he said apologetically. “I had to do it now because I’m flying out to New Caledonia this afternoon and won’t be back for a week. Professor Stevens asked me to look you up and give you his best wishes. If there’s anything you want, just ring my office and we’ll try to fix it for you.”

Franklin admired the skillful way in which Myers had avoided all the obvious dangers. He did not say — true though it undoubtedly was — ‘I’ve discussed your case with Professor Stevens.” Nor did he offer direct help; he managed to convey the assumption that Franklin wouldn’t need it and was now quite capable of looking after himself.

“I appreciate that,” said Franklin sincerely. He felt he was going to like Dr. Myers, and made up his mind not to resent the surveillance he would undoubtedly be getting. “Tell me,” he added, “just what do the people here know about me?”

“Nothing at all, except that you are to be helped to qualify as a warden as quickly as possible. This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened, you know — there have been high-pressure conversion courses before. Still, it’s inevitable that there will be a good deal of curiosity about you; that may be your biggest problem.”

“Burley is dying of curiosity already.”

“Mind if I give you some advice?”

“Of course not — go ahead.”

“You’ll be working with Don continually. It’s only fair to him, as well as to yourself, to confide in him when you feel you can do so. I’m sure you’ll find him quite understanding. Or if you prefer, I’ll do the explaining.”

Franklin shook his head, not trusting himself to speak. It was not a matter of logic, for he knew that Myers was talking sense. Sooner or later it would all have to come out, and he might be making matters worse by postponing the inevitable. Yet his hold upon sanity and self-respect was still so precarious that he could not face the prospect of working with men who knew his secret, however sympathetic they might be.

“Very well. The choice is yours and we’ll respect it. Good luck — and let’s hope all our contacts will be purely social.”

Long after Myers had gone, Franklin sat on the edge of the bed, staring out across the sea which would be his new domain. He would need the luck that the other had wished him, yet he was beginning to feel a renewed interest in life. It was not merely that people were anxious to help him; he had received more than enough help in the last few months. At last he was beginning to see how he could help himself, and so discover a purpose for his existence.

Presently he jolted himself out of his daydream and looked at his watch. He was already ten minutes late for lunch, and that was a bad start for his new life. He thought of Don Burley waiting impatiently in the mess and wondering what had happened to him.

“Coming, teacher,” he said, as he put on his jacket and started out of the room. It was the first time he had made a joke with himself for longer than he could remember.