The Deep Range - Arthur C. Clarke [76]
It was not lack of foresight; sometimes the future can be charted in advance, and plans made to meet it. But there are also times in human affairs when events that seem to have no possible connection—to be as remote as if they occurred on different planets—may react upon each other with shattering violence.
The Bureau of Whales was an organization which had taken half a century to build up, and which now employed twenty thousand men and possessed equipment valued at over two billion dollars. It was a typical unit of the scientific world state, with all the power and prestige which that implied.
And now it was to be shaken to its foundations by the gentle words of a man who had lived half a thousand years before the birth of Christ.
Franklin was in London when the first hint of trouble came. It was not unusual for officers of the World Food Organization to bypass his immediate superiors in the Marine Division and to contact him directly. What was unusual, however, was for the secretary of the W.F.O. himself to interfere with the everyday working of the bureau, causing Franklin to cancel all his engagements and to find himself, still a little dazed, flying halfway around the world to a small town in Ceylon of which he had never heard before and whose name he could not even pronounce.
Fortunately, it had been a hot summer in London and the extra ten degrees at Colombo was not unduly oppressive. Franklin was met at the airport by the local W.F.O. representative, looking very cool and comfortable in the sarong which had now been adopted by even the most conservative of westerners. He shook hands with the usual array of minor officials, was relieved to see that there were no reporters around who might tell him more about this mission than he knew himself, and swiftly transferred to the cross-country plane which would take him on the last hundred miles of his journey.
“Now,” he said, when he had recovered his breath and the miles of neatly laid-out automatic tea plantations were flashing past beneath him, “you’d better start briefing me. Why is it so important to rush me to Anna—whatever you call the place?”
“Anuradhapura. Hasn’t the secretary told you?”
“We had just five minutes at London Airport. So you might as well start from scratch.”
“Well, this is something that has been building up for several years. We’ve warned Headquarters, but they’ve never taken us seriously. Now your interview in Earth has brought matters to a head; the Mahanayake Thero of Anuradhapura—he’s the most influential man in the East, and you’re going to hear a lot more about him—read it and promptly asked us to grant him facilities for a tour of the bureau. We can’t refuse, of course, but we know perfectly well what he intends to do. He’ll take a team of cameramen with him and will collect enough material to launch an all-out propaganda campaign against the bureau. Then, when it’s had time to sink in, he’ll demand a referendum. And if that goes against us, we will be in trouble.”
The pieces of the jigsaw fell into place; the pattern was at last clear. For a moment Franklin felt annoyed that he had been diverted across the world to deal with so absurd a challenge. Then he realized that the men who had sent him here did not consider it absurd; they must know, better than he did, the strength of the forces that were being marshaled. It was never wise to underestimate the power of religion, even a religion as pacific and tolerant as Buddhism.
The position was one which, even a hundred years ago, would have seemed unthinkable, but the catastrophic political and social changes of the last century had all combined to give it a certain inevitability. With the failure or weakening of its three great rivals, Buddhism was now the only religion that still possessed any real power over the minds of men.
Christianity, which had never fully