Against this background, the sounds of the natural world stood out sharp and clear. From all directions, with never a moment’s silence, came the shrill shrieks and squealings of the whales as they talked to one another or merely gave vent to their high spirits and enjoyment. Franklin could distinguish between the voices of the males and the females, but he was not one of those experts who could identify individuals and even interpret what they were trying to express.
There is no more eerie sound in all the world than the screaming of a herd of whales, when one moves among it in the depths of the sea. Franklin had only to close his eyes and he could imagine that he was lost in some demon-haunted forest, while ghosts and goblins closed in upon him. Could Hector Berlioz have heard this banshee chorus, he would have known that Nature had already anticipated his “Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath.”
But weirdness lies only in unfamiliarity, and this sound was now part of Franklin’s life. It no longer gave him nightmares, as it had sometimes done in his early days. Indeed, the main emotion that it now inspired in him was an affectionate amusement, together with a slight surprise that such enormous animals produced such falsetto screams.
Yet there was a memory that the sound of the sea sometimes evoked. It no longer had power to hurt him, though it could still fill his heart with a wistful sadness. He remembered all the times he had spent in the signals rooms of space ships or space stations, listening to the radio waves coming in as the monitors combed the spectrum in their automatic search. Sometimes there had been, like these same ghostly voices calling in the night, the sound of distant ships or beacons, or the torrents of high-speed code as the colonies talked with Mother Earth. And always one could hear a perpetual murmuring background to man’s feeble transmitters, the endless susurration of the stars and galaxies themselves as they drenched the whole universe with radiation.
The chronometer hand came around to zero. It had not scythed away the first second before the sea erupted in a hellish cacophony of sound — a rising and falling ululation that made Franklin reach swiftly for the volume control. The sonic mines had been dropped, and he felt sorry for any whales who were unlucky enough to be near them. Almost at once the pattern of echoes on the screen began to change, as the terrified beasts started to flee in panic toward the west. Franklin watched closely, preparing to head off any part of the herd that looked like it would miss the gap in the fence and turn back into the farms.
The noise generators must have been improved, he decided, since the last time this trick had been tried — or else these whales were more amenable. Only a few strugglers tried to break away, and it was no more than ten minutes’ work to round them up on the right path and scare them back with the subs’ own sirens. Half an hour after the mines had been dropped, the entire herd had been funneled back through the invisible gap in the fence, and was milling around inside the narrow corridor. There was nothing for the subs to do but to stand by until the engineers had carried out their repairs and the curtain of sound was once more complete.
No one could claim that it was a famous victory. It was just another day’s work, a minor battle in an endless campaign. Already the excitement of the chase had died away, and Franklin was wondering how long it would be before the freighter could hoist them out of the ocean and fly them back to Hawaii. This was, after all, supposed to be his day off, and he had promised to take Peter down to Waikiki and start teaching him how to swim.
Even when he is merely standing by, a good warden never lets his attention stray for long from his sonar screen. Every three minutes, without any conscious thought, Franklin switched to the long-range scan and tilted the transmitter down toward the seabed, just to keep track of what was going on around him. He did not doubt that his colleagues were doing exactly the same, between wondering how long it would be before they were relieved…
At the very limit of his range, ten miles away and almost two miles down, a faint echo had crawled onto the edge of the screen. Franklin looked at it with mild interest; then his brows knit in perplexity. It must be an unusually large object to be visible at such a distance — something quite as large as a whale. But no whale could be swimming at such a depth; though sperm whales had been encountered almost a mile down, this was beyond the limits at which they could operate, fabulous divers though they were. A deep-sea shark? Possibly, thought Franklin; it would do no harm to have a closer look at it.
He locked the scanner onto the distant echo and expanded the image as far as the screen magnification would allow. It was too far away to make out any detail, but he could see now that he was looking at a long, thin object — and that it was moving quite rapidly. He stared at it for a moment, then called his colleagues. Unnecessary chatter was discouraged on operations, but here was a minor mystery that intrigued him.
“Sub Two calling,” he said. “I’ve a large echo bearing 185 degrees, range 9.7 miles, depth 1.8 miles. Looks like another sub. You know if anyone else is operating around here?”
“Sub One calling Sub Two,” came the first reply. “That’s outside my range. Could be a Research Department sub down there. How big would you say your echo is?”
“About a hundred feet long. Maybe more. It’s doing over ten knots.”
“Sub Three calling. There’s no research vessel around here. The Nautilus IV is laid up for repairs, and the Cousteau’s in the Atlantic. Must be a fish you’ve got hold of.”
“There aren’t any fish this size. Have I permission to go after it? I think we ought to check up.”
“Permission granted,” answered Sub One. “We’ll hold the gap here. Keep in touch.”
Franklin swung the sub around to the south, and brought the little vessel up to maximum speed with a smooth rush of power. The echo he was chasing was already too deep for him to reach, but there was always the chance that it might come back to the surface. Even if it did not, he would be able to get a much clearer image when he had shortened his range.
He had traveled only two miles when he saw that the chase was hopeless. There could be no doubt; his quarry had detected either the vibrations of his motor or his sonar and was plunging at full speed straight down to the bottom. He managed to get within four miles, and then the signal was lost in the confused maze of echoes from the ocean bed. His last glimpse of it confirmed his earlier impression of great length and relative thinness, but he was still unable to make out any details of its structure.
“So it got away from you,” said Sub One. “I thought it would.”
“Then you know what it was?”
“No — nor does anyone else. And if you’ll take my advice, you won’t talk to any reporters about it. If you do, you’ll never live it down.”
Momentarily frozen with astonishment, Franklin stared at the little loudspeaker from which the words had just come. So they had not been pulling his leg, as he had always assumed. He remembered some of the tales he had heard in the bar at Heron Island and wherever wardens gathered together after duty. He had laughed at them then, but now he knew that the tales were true.