The Deep Range - Arthur C. Clarke [48]
“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.
That nervous echo skittering hastily out of range had been nothing less than the Great Sea Serpent.
Indra, who was still doing part-time work at the Hawaii Aquarium when her household duties permitted, was not as impressed as her husband had expected. In fact, her first comment was somewhat deflating.
“Yes, but which sea serpent? You know there are at least three totally different types.”
“I certainly didn’t.”
“Well, first of all there’s a giant eel which has been seen on three or four occasions but never properly identified, though its larvae were caught back in the 1940’s. It’s known to grow up to sixty feet long, and that’s enough of a sea serpent for most people. But the really spectacular one is the oarfish—Regalecus glesne. That’s got a face like a horse, a crest of brilliant red quills like an Indian brave’s headdress—and a snakelike body which may be seventy feet long. Since we know that these things exist, how do you expect us to be surprised at anything the sea can produce?”
“What about the third type you mentioned?”
“That’s the one we haven’t identified or even described. We just call it ‘X’ because people still laugh when you talk about sea serpents. The only thing that we know about it is that it undoubtedly exists, that it’s extremely sly, and that it lives in deep water. One day we’ll catch it, but when we do it will probably be through pure luck.”
Franklin was very thoughtful for the rest of the evening. He did not like to admit that, despite all the instruments that man now used to probe the sea, despite his own continual patrolling of the depths, the ocean still held many secrets and would retain them for ages yet to come. And he knew that, though he might never see it again, he would be haunted all his life by the memory of that distant, tantalizing echo as it descended swiftly into the abyss that was its home.
CHAPTER XIII
THERE ARE MANY misconceptions about the glamour of a warden’s life. Franklin had never shared them, so he was neither surprised nor disappointed that so much of his time was spent on long, uneventful patrols far out at sea. Indeed, he welcomed them. They gave him time to think, yet not time to brood—and it was on these lonely missions in the living heart of the sea that his last fears were shed and his mental scars finally healed.
The warden’s year was dominated by the pattern of whale migration, but that pattern was itself continually changing as new areas of the sea were fenced and fertilized. He might spend summer moving cautiously through the polar ice, and winter beating back and forth across the equator. Sometimes he would operate from shore stations, sometimes from mobile bases like the Rorqual, the Pequod, or the Cachelot. One season he might be wholly concerned with the great whalebone or baleen whales, who literally strained their food from the sea as they swam, mouth open, through the rich plankton soup. And another season he would have to deal with their very different cousins, the fierce, toothed cetaceans of whom the sperm whales were the most important representatives. These were no gentle