The Deep Range - Arthur C. Clarke [81]
“I think I could,” answered the Thero, “but I’d prefer not to.” He turned to his cameramen and gave some brief instructions, then watched intently as the next whale arrived on the conveyer belt.
The great body had already been scanned by photo-electric eyes and its dimensions fed in the computer controlling the operations. Even when one knew how it was done, it was uncanny to watch the precision with which the knives and saws moved out on their extensible arms, made their carefully planned pattern of cuts, and then retreated again. Huge grabs seized the foot-thick blanket of blubber and stripped it off as a man peels a banana, leaving the naked, bleeding carcass to move on along the conveyer to the first stage of its dismemberment.
The whale traveled as fast as a man could comfortable walk, and disintegrated before the eyes of the watchers as they kept pace with it. Slabs of meat as large as elephants were torn away and went sliding down side chutes; circular saws whirred through the scaffolding of ribs in a cloud of bone dust; the interlinked plastic bags of the intestines, stuffed with perhaps a ton of shrimps and plankton from the whale’s last meal, were dragged away in noisome heaps.
It had taken less than two minutes to reduce a lord of the sea to a bloody shambles which no one but an expert could have recognized. Not even the bones were wasted; at the end of the conveyer belt, the disarticulated skeleton fell into a pit where it would be ground into fertilizer.
“This is the end of the line,” said Franklin, “but as far as the processing side is concerned it’s only the beginning. The oil has to be extracted from the blubber you saw peeled off in stage one; the meat has to be cut down into more manageable portions and sterilized—we use a high-intensity neutron source for that—and about ten other basic products have to be sorted out and packed for shipment. I’ll be glad to show you around any part of the factory you’d like to see. It won’t be quite so gruesome as the operations we’ve just been watching.”
The Thero stood for a moment in thoughtful silence, studying the notes he had been making in his incredibly tiny handwriting. Then he looked back along the blood-stained quarter-mile of moving belt, toward the next whale arriving from the killing pen.
“There’s one sequence I’m not sure we managed to film properly,” he said, coming to a sudden decision. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go back to the beginning and start again.”
Franklin caught the recorder as the young monk dropped it. “Never mind, son,” he said reassuringly, “the first time is always the worst. When you’ve been here a few days, you’ll be quite puzzled when newcomers complain of the stink.”
That was hard to believe, but the permanent staff had assured him that it was perfectly true. He only hoped that the Venerable Boyce was not so thoroughgoing that he would have a chance of putting it to the proof.
“And now, Your Reverence,” said Franklin, as the plane lifted above the snow-covered mountains and began the homeward flight to London and Ceylon, “do you mind if I ask how you intend to use all the material you’ve gathered?”
During the two days they had been together, priest and administrator had established a degree of friendship and mutual respect that Franklin, for his part, still found as surprising as it was pleasant. He considered—as who does not?—that he was good at summing men up, but there were depths in the Mahanayake Thero beyond his powers of analysis. It did not matter; he now knew instinctively that he was in the presence not only of power but also of—there was no escaping from that trite and jejune word—goodness. He had even begun to wonder, with a mounting awe that at any moment might deepen into certainty, if the man who was now his companion would go down into history as a saint.
“I have nothing to hide,” said the Thero gently, “and, as you know, deceit is contrary to the teachings of the Buddha. Our position