The Ghost From the Grand Banks and the Deep Range

by Arthur C. Clarke

  One of the fundamentals of Buddhism, as Franklin knew well enough, was respect for all other living creatures. It was a law that few Buddhists had ever obeyed to the letter, excusing themselves with the sophistry that it was quite in order to eat the flesh of an animal that someone else had killed. In recent years, however, attempts had been made to enforce this rule more rigorously, and there had been endless debates between vegetarians and meat eaters covering the whole spectrum of crankiness. That these arguments could have any practical effect on the work of the World Food Organization was something that Franklin had never seriously considered.

  “Tell me,” he asked, as the fertile hills rolled swiftly past beneath him, “what sort of man is this Thero you’re taking me to see?”

  “Thero is his title; you can translate it by archbishop if you like. His real name is Alexander Boyce, and he was born in Scotland sixty years ago.”

  “Scotland?”

  “Yes—he was the first westerner ever to reach the top of the Buddhist hierarchy, and he had to overcome a lot of opposition to do it. A bhikku—er, monk—friend of mine once complained that the Maha Thero was a typical elder of the kirk, born a few hundred years too late—so he’d reformed Buddhism instead of the church of Scotland.”

  “How did he get to Ceylon in the first place?”

  “Believe it or not, he came out as a junior technician in a film company. He was about twenty then. The story is that he went to film the statue of the Dying Buddha at the cave temple of Dambulla, and became converted. After that it took him twenty years to rise to the top, and he’s been responsible for most of the reforms that have taken place since then. Religions get corrupt after a couple of thousand years and need a spring-cleaning. The Maha Thero did that job for Buddhism in Ceylon by getting rid of the Hindu gods that had crept into the temples.”

  “And now he’s looking around for fresh worlds to conquer?”

  “It rather seems like it. He pretends to have nothing to do with politics, but he’s thrown out a couple of governments just by raising his finger, and he’s got a huge following in the East. His ‘Voice of Buddha’ programs are listened to by several hundred million people, and it’s estimated that at least a billion are sympathetic toward him even if they won’t go all the way with his views. So you’ll understand why we are taking this seriously.”

  Now that he had penetrated the disguise of an unfamiliar name, Franklin remembered that the Venerable Alexander Boyce had been the subject of a cover story in Earth Magazine two or three years ago. So they had something in common; he wished now that he had read that article, but at the time it had been of no interest to him and he could not even recall the Thero’s appearance.

  “He’s a deceptively quiet little man, very easy to get on with,” was the reply to his question. “You’ll find him reasonable and friendly, but once he’s made up his mind he grinds through all opposition like a glacier. He’s not a fanatic, if that’s what you are thinking. If you can prove to him that any course of action is essential, he won’t stand in the way even though he may not like what you’re doing. He’s not happy about our local drive for increased meat production, but he realizes that everybody can’t be a vegetarian. We compromised with him by not building our new slaughterhouse in either of the sacred cities, as we’d intended to do originally.”

  “Then why should he suddenly have taken an interest in the Bureau of Whales?”

  “He’s probably decided to make a stand somewhere. And besides—don’t you think whales are in a different class from other animals?” The remark was made half apologetically, as if in the expectation of denial or even ridicule.

  Franklin did not answer; it was a question he had been trying to decide for twenty years, and the scene now passing below absolved him from the necessity.

  He was flying over what had once been the greatest city in the world—a city against which Rome and Athens in their prime had been no more than villages—a city unchallenged in size or population until the heydays of London and New York, two thousand years later. A ring of huge artificial lakes, some of them miles across, surrounded the ancient home of the Singhalese kings. Even from the air, the modern town of Anuradhapura showed startling contrasts of old and new. Dotted here and there among the colorful, gossamer buildings of the twenty-first century were the immense, bell-shaped domes of the great dagobas. The mightiest of all—the Abhayagiri Dagoba—was pointed out to Franklin as the plane flew low over it. The brickwork of the dome had long ago been overgrown with grass and even small trees, so that the great temple now appeared no more than a curiously symmetrical hill surmounted by a broken spire. It was a hill exceeded in size by one only of the pyramids that the Pharaohs had built beside the Nile.

  By the time that Franklin had reached the local Food Production office, conferred with the superintendent, donated a few platitudes to a reporter who had somehow discovered his presence, and eaten a leisurely meal, he felt that he knew how to handle the situation. It was, after all, merely another public-relations problem; there had been a very similar one about three weeks ago, when a sensational and quite inaccurate newspaper story about methods of whale slaughtering had brought a dozen Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty down upon his head. A fact-finding commission had disposed of the charges very quickly, and no permanent damage had been done to anybody except the reporter concerned.

  He did not feel quite so confident, a few hours later, as he stood looking up at the soaring, gilded spire of the Ruanveliseya Dagoba. The immense white dome had been so skillfully restored that it seemed inconceivable that almost twenty-two centuries had passed since its foundations were laid. Completely surrounding the paved courtyard of the temple was a line of life-sized elephants, forming a wall more than a quarter of a mile long. Art and faith had united here to produce one of the world’s masterpieces of architecture, and the sense of antiquity was overwhelming. How many of the creations of modern man, wondered Franklin, would be so perfectly preserved in the year 4000?

  The great flagstones in the courtyard were burning hot, and he was glad that he had retained his stockings when he left his shoes at the gate. At the base of the dome, which rose like a shining mountain toward the cloudless blue sky, was a single-storied modern building whose clean lines and white plastic walls harmonized well with the work of architects who had died a hundred years before the beginning of the Christian era.

  A saffron-robed bhikku led Franklin into the Thero’s neat and comfortably air-conditioned office. It might have been that of any busy administrator, anywhere in the world, and the sense of strangeness, which had made him ill at ease ever since he had entered the courtyard of the temple, began to fade.

  The Maha Thero rose to greet him; he was a small man, his head barely reaching the level of Franklin’s shoulders. His gleaming, shaven scalp somehow depersonalized him, making it hard to judge what he was thinking and harder still to fit him into any familiar categories. At first sight, Franklin was not impressed; then he remembered how many small men had been movers and shakers of the world.

  Even after forty years, the Mahanayake Thero had not lost the accent of his birth. At first it seemed incongruous, if not slightly comic, in these surroundings, but within a few minutes Franklin was completely unaware of it.

  “It’s very good of you to come all this way to see me, Mr. Franklin,” said the Thero affably as he shook hands. “I must admit that I hardly expected my request to be dealt with quite so promptly. It hasn’t inconvenienced you, I trust?”

  “No,” replied Franklin manfully. “In fact,” he added with rather more truth, “this visit is a novel experience, and I’m grateful for the opportunity of making it.”

  “Excellent!” said the Thero, apparently with genuine pleasure. “I feel just the same way about my trip down to your South Georgia base, though I don’t suppose I’ll enjoy the weather there.”

  Franklin remembered his instructions—“Head him off if you possibly can, but don’t try to put any fast ones acros
s on him.” Well, he had been given an opening here.

  “That’s one point I wanted to raise with you, Your Reverence,” he answered, hoping he had chosen the correct honorific. “It’s midwinter in South Georgia, and the base is virtually closed down until the late spring. It won’t be operating again for about five months.”

  “How foolish of me—I should have remembered. But I’ve never been to the Antarctic and I’ve always wanted to; I suppose I was trying to give myself an excuse. Well—it will have to be one of the northern bases. Which do you suggest—Greenland or Iceland? Just tell me which is more convenient. We don’t want to cause any trouble.”

  It was that last phrase which defeated Franklin before the battle had fairly begun. He knew now that he was dealing with an adversary who could be neither fooled nor deflected from his course. He would simply have to go along with the Thero, dragging his heels as hard as he could, and hoping for the best.

  CHAPTER

  20

  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 recognize
d. 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?”