The Deep Range - Arthur C. Clarke [8]
One thing was obvious about Franklin at once, and that only added to the mystery. He was a spaceman; you could tell them a mile away. That should make a good opening gambit. Then he remembered that the director had warned him, “Don’t ask Franklin too many questions. I don’t know what his background is, but we’ve been specifically told not to talk about it with him.”
That might make sense, mused Don. Perhaps he was a space pilot who had been grounded after some inexcusable lapse, such as absent-mindedly arriving at Venus when he should have gone to Mars.
“Is this the first time,” Don began cautiously, “that you’ve been to Australia?” It was not a very fortunate opening, and the conversation might have died there and then when Franklin replied: “I was born here.”
Don, however, was not the sort of person who was easily abashed. He merely laughed and said, half-apologetically, “Nobody ever tells me anything, so I usually find out the hard way. I was born on the other side of the world—over in Ireland—but since I’ve been attached to the Pacific branch of the bureau I’ve more or less adopted Australia as a second home. Not that I spend much time ashore! On this job you’re at sea eighty per cent of the time. A lot of people don’t like that, you know.”
“It would suit me,” said Franklin, but left the remark hanging in the air. Burley began to feel exasperated—it was such hard work getting anything out of this fellow. The prospect of working with him for the next few weeks began to look very uninviting, and Don wondered what he had done to deserve such a fate. However, he struggled on manfully.
“The superintendent tells me that you’ve a good scientific and engineering background, so I can assume that you’ll know most of the things that our people spend the first year learning. Have they filled you in on the administrative background?”
“They’ve given me a lot of facts and figures under hypnosis, so I could lecture you for a couple of hours on the Marine Division—its history, organization, and current projects, with particular reference to the Bureau of Whales. But it doesn’t mean anything to me at present.”
Now we seem to be getting somewhere, Don told himself. The fellow can talk after all. A couple more beers, and he might even be human.
“That’s the trouble with hypnotic training,” agreed Don. “They can pump the information into you until it comes out of your ears, but you’re never quite sure how much you really know. And they can’t teach you manual skills, or train you to have the right reactions in emergencies. There’s only one way of learning anything properly—and that’s by actually doing the job.”
He paused, momentarily distracted by a shapely silhouette parading on the other side of the translucent wall. Franklin noticed the direction of his gaze, and his features relaxed into a slight smile. For the first time the tension lifted, and Don began to feel that there was some hope of establishing contact with the enigma who was now his responsibility.
With a beery forefinger, Don started to trace maps on the plastic table top.
“This is the setup,” he began. “Our main training center for shallow-water operations is here in the Capricorn Group, about four hundred miles north of Brisbane and forty miles out from the coast. The South Pacific fence starts here, and runs on east to New Caledonia and Fiji. When the whales migrate north from the polar feeding grounds to have their calves in the tropics, they’re compelled to pass through the gaps we’ve left here. The most important of these gates, from our point of view, is the one right here off the Queensland coast, at the southern entrance to the Great Barrier Reef. The reef provides a kind of natural channel, averaging about fifty miles wide, almost up to the equator. Once we’ve herded the whales