The Ghost From the Grand Banks and the Deep Range

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Cut your motor to quarter speed,” he said. “We know the beast’s very sensitive and we don’t want to scare it until the last minute.”

  “Can’t we flood the bow tanks and glide down?”

  “Take too long—he’s still three thousand feet below. And cut your sonar to minimum power; I don’t want him picking up our pulses.”

  The animal was moving in a curiously erratic path at a constant depth, sometimes making little darts to right or left as if in search of food. It was following the slopes of an unusually steep submarine mountain, which rose abruptly some four thousand feet from the seabed. Not for the first time, Franklin thought what a pity it was that the world’s most stupendous scenery was all sunk beyond sight in the ocean depths. Nothing on the land could compare with the hundred-mile-wide canyons of the North Atlantic, or the monstrous potholes that gave the Pacific the deepest soundings on Earth.

  They sank slowly below the summit of the submerged mountain—a mountain whose topmost peak was three miles below sea level. Only a little way beneath them now that mysteriously elongated echo seemed to be undulating through the water with a sinuous motion which reminded Franklin irresistibly of a snake. It would, he thought, be ironic if the Great Sea Serpent turned out to be exactly that. But that was impossible, for there were no water-breathing snakes.

  Neither man spoke during the slow and cautious approach to their goal. They both realized that this was one of the great moments of their lives, and wished to savor it to the full. Until now, Don had been mildly skeptical, believing that whatever they found would be no more than some already-known species of animal. But as the echo on the screen expanded, so its strangeness grew. This was something wholly new.

  The mountain was now looming above them; they were skirting the foot of a cliff more than two thousand feet high, and their quarry was less than half a mile ahead. Franklin felt his hand itching to throw on the ultraviolet searchlights which in an instant might solve the oldest mystery of the sea, and bring him enduring fame. How important to him was that? he asked himself, as the seconds ticked slowly by. That it was important, he did not attempt to hide from himself. In all his career, he might never have another opportunity like this. . . .

  Suddenly, without the slightest warning, the sub trembled as if struck by a hammer. At the same moment Don cried out: “My God—what was that?”

  “Some damn fool is letting off explosives,” Franklin replied, rage and frustration completely banishing fear. “Wasn’t everyone notified of our dive?”

  “That’s no explosion. I’ve felt it before—it’s an earthquake.”

  No other word could so swiftly have conjured up once more all that terror of the ultimate depths which Franklin had felt brushing briefly against his mind during their descent. At once the immeasurable weight of the waters crushed down upon him like a physical burden; his sturdy craft seemed the frailest of cockleshells, already doomed by forces which all man’s science could no longer hold at bay.

  He knew that earthquakes were common in the deep Pacific, where the weights of rock and water were forever poised in precarious equilibrium. Once or twice on patrols he had felt distant shocks—but this time, he felt certain, he was near the epicenter.

  “Make full speed for the surface,” he ordered. “That may be just the beginning.”

  “But we only need another five minutes,” Don protested. “Let’s chance it, Walt.”

  Franklin was sorely tempted. That single shock might be the only one; the strain on the tortured strata miles below might have been relieved. He glanced at the echo they had been chasing; it was moving much faster now, as if it, too, had been frightened by this display of Nature’s slumbering power.

  “We’ll risk it,” Franklin decided. “But if there’s another one we’ll go straight up.”

  “Fair enough,” answered Don. “I’ll bet you ten to one—”

  He never completed the sentence. This time the hammer blow was no more violent, but it was sustained. The entire ocean seemed to be in travail as the shock waves, traveling at almost a mile a second, were reflected back and forth between surface and seabed. Franklin shouted the one word “Up!” and tilted the sub as steeply as he dared toward the distant sky.

  But the sky was gone. The sharply defined plane which marked the water-air interface on the sonar screen had vanished, replaced by a meaningless jumble of hazy echoes. For a moment Franklin assumed that the set had been put out of action by the shocks; then his mind interpreted the incredible, the terrifying picture that was taking shape upon the screen.

  “Don,” he yelled, “run for the open sea—the mountain’s falling!”

  The billions of tons of rock that had been towering above them were sliding down into the deep. The whole face of the mountain had split away and was descending in a waterfall of stone, moving with a deceptive slowness and an utterly irresistible power. It was an avalanche in slow motion, but Franklin knew that within seconds the waters through which his sub was driving would be torn with falling debris.

  He was moving at full speed, yet he seemed motionless. Even without the amplifiers, he could hear through the hull the rumble and roar of grinding rock. More than half the sonar image was now obliterated, either by solid fragments or by the immense clouds of mud and silt that were now beginning to fill the sea. He was becoming blind; there was nothing he could do but hold his course and pray.

  With a muffled thud, something crashed against the hull and the sub groaned from end to end. For a moment Franklin thought he had lost control; then he managed to fight the vessel back to an even keel. No sooner had he done this than he realized he was in the grip of a powerful current, presumably due to water displaced by the collapsing mountain. He welcomed it, for it was sweeping him to the safety of the open sea, and for the first time he dared to hope.

  Where was Don? It was impossible to see his echo in the shifting chaos of the sonar screen. Franklin switched his communication set to high power and started calling through the moving darkness. There was no reply; probably Don was too busy to answer, even if he had received the signal.

  The pounding shock waves had ceased; with them had gone the worst of Franklin’s fears. There was no danger now of the hull being cracked by pressure, and by this time, surely, he was clear of the slowly toppling mountain. The current that had been aiding his engines had now lost its strength, proving that he was far away from its source. On the sonar screen, the luminous haze that had blocked all vision was fading minute by minute as the silt and debris subsided.

  Slowly the wrecked face of the mountain emerged from the mist of conflicting echoes. The pattern on the screen began to stabilize itself, and presently Franklin could see the great scar left by the avalanche. The seabed itself was still hidden in a vast fog of mud; it might be hours before it would be visible again and the damage wrought by Nature’s paroxysm could be ascertained.

  Franklin watched and waited as the screen cleared. With each sweep of the scanner, the sparkle of interference faded; the water was still turbid, but no longer full of suspended matter. He could see for a mile—then two—then three.

  And in all that space there was no sign of the sharp and brilliant echo that would mark Don’s ship. Hope faded as his radius of vision grew and the screen remained empty. Again and again he called into the lonely silence, while grief and helplessness strove for the mastery of his soul.

  He exploded the signal grenades that would alert all the hydrophones in the Pacific and send help racing to him by sea and air. But even as be began his slowly descending spiral search, he knew that it was in vain.

  Don Burley had lost his last bet.

  III

  THE BUREAUCRAT

  CHAPTER

  18

  The great Mercator chart that covered the whole of one wall was a most unusual one. All the land areas were completely blank; as far as this mapmaker was concerned, the continents had never been explored. But the sea was crammed with detail, and scattered over its face wer
e countless spots of colored light, projected by some mechanism inside the wall. Those spots moved slowly from hour to hour, recording as they did so, for skilled eyes to read, the migration of all the main schools of whales that roamed the seas.

  Franklin had seen the master chart scores of times during the last fourteen years—but never from this vantage point. For he was looking at it now from the director’s chair.

  “There’s no need for me to warn you, Walter,” said his ex-chief, “that you are taking over the bureau at a very tricky time. Sometime in the next five years we’re going to have a showdown with the farms. Unless we can improve our efficiency, plankton-derived proteins will soon be substantially cheaper than any we can deliver.

  “And that’s only one of our problems. The staff position is getting more difficult every year—and this sort of thing isn’t going to help.”

  He pushed a folder across to Franklin, who smiled wryly when he saw what it contained. The advertisement was familiar enough; it had appeared in all the major magazines during the past week, and must have cost the Space Department a small fortune.

  An underwater scene of improbable clarity and color was spread across two pages. Vast scaly monsters, more huge and hideous than any that had lived on Earth since the Jurassic period, were battling each other in the crystalline depths. Franklin knew, from the photographs he had seen, that they were very accurately painted, and he did not grudge the illustrator his artistic license in the matter of underwater clarity.

  The text was dignified and avoided sensationalism; the painting was sensational enough and needed no embellishment. The Space Department, he read, urgently needed young men as wardens and food production experts for the exploitation of the seas of Venus. The work, it was added, was probably the most exciting and rewarding to be found anywhere in the Solar System; pay was good and the qualifications were not as high as those needed for space pilot or astrogator. After the short list of physical and educational requirements, the advertisement ended with the words which the Venus Commission had been plugging for the last six months, and which Franklin had grown heartily tired of seeing: HELP TO BUILD A SECOND EARTH.

  “Meanwhile,” said the ex-director, “our problem is to keep the first one going, when the bright youngsters who might be joining us are running away to Venus. And between you and me, I shouldn’t be surprised if the Space Department has been after some of our men.”

  “They wouldn’t do a thing like that!”

  “Wouldn’t they now? Anyway, there’s a transfer application in from First Warden McRae; if you can’t talk him out of it, try to find what made him want to leave.”

  Life was certainly going to be difficult, Franklin thought. Joe McRae was an old friend; could he impose on that friendship now that he was Joe’s boss?

  “Another of your little problems is going to be keeping the scientists under control. Lundquist is worse than Roberts ever was; he’s got about six crazy schemes going, and at least Roberts only had one brainstorm at a time. He spends half his time over on Heron Island. It might be a good idea to fly over and have a look at him. That was something I never had a chance to get around to.”

  Franklin was still listening politely as his predecessor continued, with obvious relish, to point out the many disadvantages of his new post. Most of them he already knew, and his mind was now far away. He was thinking how pleasant it would be to begin his directorate with an official visit to Heron Island, which he had not seen for nearly five years, and which had so many memories of his first days in the bureau.

  • • •

  Dr. Lundquist was flattered by the new director’s visit, being innocent enough to hope that it might lead to increased support for his activities. He would not have been so enthusiastic had he guessed that the opposite was more likely to be the case. No one could have been more sympathetic than Franklin to scientific research, but now that he had to approve the bills himself he found that his point of view was subtly altered. Whatever Lundquist was doing would have to be of direct value to the bureau. Otherwise it was out—unless the Department of Scientific Research could be talked into taking it over.

  Lundquist was a small, intense little man whose rapid and somewhat jerky movements reminded Franklin of a sparrow. He was an enthusiast of a type seldom met these days, and he combined a sound scientific background with an unfettered imagination. How unfettered, Franklin was soon to discover.

  Yet at first sight it seemed that most of the work going on at the lab was of a fairly routine nature. Franklin spent a dull half-hour while two young scientists explained the methods they were developing to keep whales free of the many parasites that plagued them, and then escaped by the skin of his teeth from a lecture on cetacean obstetrics. He listened with rare interest to the latest work on artificial insemination, having in the past helped with some of the early—and often hilariously unsuccessful—experiments along this line. He sniffed cautiously at some synthetic ambergris, and agreed that it seemed just like the real thing. And he listened to the recorded heartbeat of a whale before and after the cardiac operation that had saved its life, and pretended that he could hear the difference.

  Everything here was perfectly in order, and just as he had expected. Then Lundquist steered him out of the lab and down to the big pool, saying as he did so: “I think you’ll find this more interesting. It’s only in the experimental stage, of course, but it has possibilities.”

  The scientist looked at his watch and muttered to himself, “Two minutes to go; she’s usually in sight by now.” He glanced out beyond the reef, then said with satisfaction, “Ah—there she is!”

  A long black mound was moving in toward the island and a moment later Franklin saw the typical stubby spout of vapor which identified the humpback whale. Almost at once he saw a second, much smaller spout, and realized that he was watching a female and her calf. Without hesitation, both animals came in through the narrow channel that had been blasted through the coral years ago so that small boats could come up to the lab. They turned left into a large tidal pool that had not been here on Franklin’s last visit, and remained there waiting patiently like well-trained dogs.

  Two lab technicians, wearing oilskins, were trundling something that looked like a fire extinguisher to the edge of the pool. Lundquist and Franklin hurried to join them, and it was soon obvious why the oilskins were necessary on this bright and cloudless day. Every time the whales spouted there was a miniature rainstorm, and Franklin was glad to borrow protection from the descending and nauseous spray.

  Even a warden seldom saw a live whale at such close quarters, and under such ideal conditions. The mother was about fifty feet long, and, like all humpbacks, very massively built. She was no beauty, Franklin decided, and the large, irregular warts along the leading edges of her flippers did nothing to add to her appearance. The little calf was about twenty feet in length, and did not appear to be too happy in its confined quarters, for it was anxiously circling its stolid mother.

  One of the scientists gave a curious, high-pitched shout, and at once the whale rolled over on her side, bringing half of her pleated belly out of the water. She did not seem to mind when a large rubber cup was placed over the now-exposed teat; indeed, she was obviously cooperating, for the meter on the collecting tank was recording an astonishing rate of flow.

  “You know, of course,” explained Lundquist, “that the cows eject their milk under pressure, so that the calves can feed when the teats are submerged without getting water in their mouths. But when the calves are very young, the mother rolls over like this so that the baby can feed above water. It makes things a lot simpler for us.”

  The obedient whale, without any instructions that Franklin could detect, had now circled round in her pen and was rolling over on the other side, so that her second teat could be milked. He looked at the meter; it now registered just under fifty gallons, and was still rising. The calf was obviously getting worried, or perhaps it had become excited by the milk that had accidentally spi
lled into the water. It made several attempts to bunt its mechanical rival out of the way, and had to be discouraged by a few sharp smacks.

  Franklin was impressed, but not surprised. He knew that this was not the first time that whales had been milked, though he did not know that it could now be done with such neatness and dispatch. But where was it leading? Knowing Dr. Lundquist, he could guess.

  “Now,” said the scientist, obviously hoping that the demonstration had made its desired impact, “we can get at least five hundred pounds of milk a day from a cow without interfering with the calf’s growth. And if we start breeding for milk as the farmers have done on land, we should be able to get a ton a day without any trouble. You think that’s a lot? I regard it as quite a modest target. After all, prize cattle have given over a hundred pounds of milk a day—and a whale weighs a good deal more than twenty times as much as a cow!”

  Franklin did his best to interrupt the statistics.

  “That’s all very well,” he said. “I don’t doubt your figures. And equally I don’t doubt that you can process the milk to remove that oily taste—yes, I’ve tried it, thanks. But how the devil are you going to round up all the cows in a herd—especially a herd that migrates ten thousand miles a year?”

  “Oh, we’ve worked all that out. It’s partly a matter of training, and we’ve learned a lot getting Susan here to obey our underwater recordings. Have you ever been to a dairy farm and watched how the cows walk into the autolactor at milking time and walk out again—without a human being coming within miles of the place? And believe me, whales are a lot smarter and more easily trained than cows! I’ve sketched out the rough designs for a milk tanker that can deal with four whales at once, and could follow the herd as it migrates. In any case, now that we can control the plankton yield we can stop migration if we want to, and keep the whales in the tropics without them getting hungry. The whole thing’s quite practical, I assure you.”