The Deep Range - Arthur C. Clarke [72]
“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 spilled 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.”
Despite himself, Franklin was fascinated by the idea. It had been suggested, in some form or other, for many years, but Dr. Lundquist seemed to have been the first to do anything about it.
The mother whale and her still somewhat indignant calf had now set out to sea, and were soon spouting and diving noisily beyond the edge of the reef. As Franklin watched them go, he wondered if in a few years’ time he would see hundreds of the great beasts lined up obediently as they swam to the mobile milking plants, each delivering a ton of what was known to be one of the richest foods on earth. But it might remain only a dream; there would be countless practical problems to be faced, and what had been achieved on the laboratory scale with a single animal might prove out of the question in the sea.
“What I’d like you to do,” he said to Lundquist, “is to let me have a report showing what an—er—whale dairy would require in terms of equipment and personnel. Try to give costs wherever you can. And then estimate how much milk it could deliver, and what the processing plants would pay for that. Then we’ll have something definite to work on. At the moment it’s an interesting experiment, but no one can say if it has any practical application.”
Lundquist seemed