The Deep Range - Arthur C. Clarke [79]
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 across 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 XX
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 barriers 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