The Deep Range - Arthur C. Clarke [88]
The parting smile of the Thero suddenly floated up into his memory. Had that extraordinary man foreseen that he would win him around to his point of view? If his gentle persuasiveness—which he had not hesitated to combine with the shock tactics of that bloodstained television program—could work with Franklin himself, then the battle was already half over.
CHAPTER XXII
LIFE WAS A good deal simpler in the old days, thought Indra with a sigh. It was true that Peter and Anne were both at school or college most of the time, but somehow that had given her none of the additional leisure she had expected. There was so much entertaining and visiting to do, now that Walter had moved into the upper echelons of the state. Though perhaps that was exaggerating a little; the director of the Bureau of Whales was still a long way—at least six steps—down from the rarefied heights in which the president and his advisers dwelt.
But there were some things that cut right across official rank. No one could deny that there was a glamour about Walt’s job and an interest in his activities that had made him known to a far wider circle than the other directors of the Marine Division, even before the Earth Magazine article or the present controversy over whale slaughtering. How many people could name the director of Plankton Farms or of Fresh-Water Food Production? Not one to every hundred that had heard of Walter. It was a fact that made her proud, even though at the same time it exposed Walter to a good deal of interdepartmental jealousy.
Now, however, it seemed likely to expose him to worse than that. So far, no one in the bureau, still less any of the higher officials of the Marine Division or the World Food Organization imagined for one moment that Walter had any private doubts or that he was not wholeheartedly in support of the status quo.
Her attempts to read the current Nature were interrupted by the private-line viewphone. It had been installed, despite her bitter protests, the day that Walter had become director. The public service, it seemed, was not good enough; now the office could get hold of Walter whenever it liked, unless he took precautions to frustrate it.
“Oh, good morning, Mrs. Franklin,” said the operator, who was now practically a friend of the family. “Is the director in?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Indra with satisfaction. “He hasn’t had a day off for about a month, and he’s out sailing in the bay with Peter. If you want to catch him, you’ll have to send a plane out; J.94’s radio has broken down again.”
“Both sets? That’s odd. Still, it’s not urgent. When he comes in, will you give him this memo?”
There was a barely audible click, and a sheet of paper drifted down into the extra large-sized memorandum basket. Indra read it, gave the operator an absent-minded farewell, and at once called Franklin on his perfectly serviceable radio.
The creak of the rigging, the soft rush of water past the smooth hull—even the occasional cry of a sea bird—these sounds came clearly from the speaker and transported her at once out into Moreton Bay.
“I thought you’d like to know, Walter,” she said, “the Policy Board is having its special meeting next Wednesday, here in Brisbane. That gives you three days to decide what you’re going to tell them.”
There was a slight pause during which she could hear her husband moving about the boat; then Franklin answered: “Thanks, dear. I know what I’ve got to say—I just don’t know how to say it. But there’s something I’ve thought of that you can do to help. You know all the wardens’ wives—suppose you call up as many as you can, and try to find what their husbands feel about this business. Can you do that without making it look too obvious? It’s not so easy for me, nowadays, to find what the men in the field are thinking. They’re too liable to tell me what they imagine I want to know.”
There was a wistful note in Franklin’s voice which Indra had been hearing more and more frequently these days, though