From the Ocean from teh Stars (21 page)

thought, they were young females, and he felt a little sorry to have
robbed them of what should have been their rightful food.

He had broken the momentum of their charge; now it was up to Don
to finish his side of the mission. From the brief and occasionally lurid
comments from the loudspeaker, it was obvious that this was no easy
task. Percy was not yet fully conscious, but he knew that something was
wrong and he was beginning to object.

The men on the floating dock had the best view of the final stages.
Don surfaced about fifty yards away—and the sea behind him became
covered with an undulating mass of jelly, twisting and rolling on the waves. At the greatest speed he dared to risk, Don headed for the open
end of the dock. One of Percy's tentacles made a halfhearted grab at
the entrance, as if in a somnambulistic effort to avoid captivity, but the
speed at which he was being hurried through the water broke his grip.
As soon as he was safely inside, the massive steel gates began to close
like horizontally operating jaws, and Don jettisoned the towrope fastened
around the squid's flukes. He wasted no time in leaving from the other
exit, and the second set of lock gates started to close even before he was
through. The caging of Percy had taken less than a quarter of a minute.

When Franklin surfaced, in company with three disappointed but not
hostile sperm whales, it was some time before he could attract any atten
tion. The entire personnel of the dock were busy staring, with awe, tri
umph, scientific curiosity, and even downright disbelief, at the monstrous
captive now swiftly reviving in his great concrete tank. The water was
being thoroughly aerated by the streams of bubbles from a score of pipes,
and the last traces of the drugs that had paralyzed him were being flushed out of Percy's system. Beneath the dim amber light that was now the sole
illumination inside the dock, the giant squid began to investigate its prison.

First it swam slowly from end to end of the rectangular concrete box,
exploring the sides with its tentacles. Then the two immense palps started
to climb into the air, waving toward the breathless watchers gathered
round the edge of the dock. They touched the electrified netting—and
flicked away with a speed that almost eluded the eye. Twice again Percy
repeated the experiment before he had convinced himself that there was no way out in this direction, all the while staring up at the puny specta
tors with a gaze that seemed to betoken an intelligence every wit as great
as theirs.

By the time Don and Franklin came aboard, the squid appeared to
have settled down in captivity, and was showing a mild interest in a number of fish that had been dropped into its tank. As the two wardens joined

Dr. Roberts behind the wire meshing, they had their first clear and com
plete view of the monster they had hauled up from the ocean depths.

Their eyes ran along the hundred and more feet of flexible, sinewy
strength, the countless claw-ringed suckers, the slowly pulsing jet, and the huge staring eyes of the most superbly equipped beast of prey the
world had ever seen. Then Don summed up the thoughts that they were
both feeling.

"He's all yours, Doc. I hope you know how to handle him."
Dr. Roberts smiled confidently enough. He was a very happy man,
though a small worry was beginning to invade his mind. He had no doubt
at all that he could handle Percy, and he was perfectly right. But he was
not so sure that he could handle the director when the bills came in for
the research equipment he was going to order—and for the mountains of
fish that Percy was going to eat.

☆
CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The secretary of the Department of Scientific Re
search 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 Divi
sion'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 pre
pared.

"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 di
rectly 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 scien
tist 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 peo
ple, and got about three different opinions—none of them very encourag
ing. 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 sud
denly 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 aban-

don 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 Darwifi 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 disap
pointed 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 daugh
ter 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 ex
tremely 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 bu-