"Follow The Whales"

FOLLOW THE WHALES

by Carl L. Biemiller

Published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York.

The next morning, they were in fatigues, the shapeless work clothes of the Base, noodling about one of the coquina-cement docks, occasionally throwing a line to the wardens stowing gear aboard the small work subs used in the bay. The tank divers wearing shield suits had long gone. This group of shark handlers was going out to repair the nets set to divert beef herds from cruising into the lower bay nursery pens.

“Have a nice day,” said Genright to one of the workmen.

“Watch out for the ones who want to play kissie-kissie,” added Tuktu.

“And don't invite anybody to lunch,” said Toby Lee, smiling sweetly.

“And never bite back,” added Kim. “A shark is a valuable animal. Wardens? We have wardens to spare.”

The boat loaders grinned. One of them made a rude noise.

“Yeh, I hear you experts were so great down there the sardines chased you home every night,” he said.

Tuktu laughed. “You're half right,” he said. “There was us about a length ahead of the sardines, which were about four inches ahead of the baddies.”

“Oh, well,” said the boat loader. “Next year the laboratory promises to breed 'em without teeth. But,” he added reflectively, “they'll have very fierce gums, no doubt.”

No one ever doubted that the work in the shark pens, which included most of the two-hundred-mile stretch of Jewel Bay, was hard and dangerous.

Kim thought about their own time with the herds. He was still thinking when they were hailed by two strangers approaching them from the shore end of the dock.

They were stringy types, easy-moving men with light smiles and horizon-seeking eyes. It would have been hard to guess their ages.

“Commander Torrance asked us to look you up,” said one of them. “You Rockwell, Lee, Barnes, and Selsor?”

“Right,” said Tuktu.

“I'm Flake Kellog and this is Randy Deems. Base boss says you're going to make some schoolbook surveys of whales and want to know something about sonics. That right?”

“Yes, sir,” said Kim. “We're assigned to the grays as of now or whenever we sail. I guess you've worked a lot with them.”

“We've worked a lot with all of them,” grunted Flake Kellog. “And right now I'm sick of 'em, but I guess a half hour out of our playtime won't hurt. But let's find some shade.”

They angled off the dock to an open-ended equipment shed and sat on some baled seaweed awaiting freight-rocket shipment to medical labs of the Denver hive.

“What I really wanted to know,” said Kim, “is can you communicate with whales the same way we do with our dolphins?”

“Answer is no,” said Randy Deems. “We cracked the sonic codes of the dolphins twenty centuries ago or more. They were the first cetaceans we worked with, as you know, and maybe the smartest we'll ever work with, although the bigger types aren't unintelligent. “But being cetaceans, they certainly live in a world of sound, much of it their own making. And they surely use a fine system of echo location to navigate, find food, exchange warnings—"

“And to gossip,” added Flake Kellog. “You mentioned the grays,” he continued. “You'll hear 'em right enough. Mostly a series of high-frequency clicks which they bounce off moving fish, shoals, sea mounts—all sorts of possible hazards. Pretty monotonous string of clicks—"

“Flake's right,” interrupted Randy. “You'll get sick of hearing it…click, click, click…. Now we could duplicate those clicks, and we have, but we don't seem to find any two-way code that we could use from us to them and them to us.”

“We've heard some of the archive recordings of whale sounds,” said Tuktu. “Some man way before the wars taped a humpback whale that sounded like an orchestra mixing up oboes, cornets, and bagpipes. At least, that’s what it said on the info flow.”

Flake nodded. “Wait until your hear a sperm whale. He clacks, and loud enough to shatter your eardrums. And there’s one called the sea canary, a beluga whale, that trills.”

“Commander Torrance said you’d worked here in the bay and also in the kelp forests, so you know that the ocean is a mighty noisy place,” said Randy Deems. “A pod of whales doesn’t exactly produce a lullaby.”

Kim was thoughtful a moment.

“Then we think that the sounds made by whales are used as echo-location signals and that they communicate among themselves with them as well. Is that right?”

“Go on,” said Flake curiously.

“Well, could they make sounds that we couldn’t hear? Or could something else make sounds that we couldn’t hear but that whales could?”

“Smart, smart,” said Randy Deems. “And the answer is maybe. The big thinkers in the cities, the anatomists and the lab behavior wizards, indicate that some cetaceans are sensitive to frequencies as high as two hundred kilohertz compared to human ears with an upper hearing limit of about twenty. We’ve wondered about that ourselves.”

“Does anything happen when you change the frequency of the sounds you beam to them? Say, when you go way up the ultrahigh range?” asked Kim.

“Nothing we know of,” said Randy, “but then, we’re working people, not experimenters. It’s enough to do our job taking care of those monsters.”

“If you could talk to a whale, what would you say?”

“I ain’t no snack.”

“You think that’s intelligent conversation?”

“Meaningful,” said Tuktu.

The pelagic herdsmen rose, made their good-byes, and left.

“Good luck,” they said. “Maybe we’ll see you out there.”

“Thanks,” said Kim.

The young hydronauts watched them out of sight.

“Why are you rubbing your ear, Kim?” asked Toby.

He stared at her. He was rubbing the ear unconsciously, then deliberately as though some alien sound had penetrated without his knowledge. He frowned. There was a sound, a chittering, trilling squeak of sorts, not definitely heard as normal hearing, but there. It was a signal of distress.

He spun on his heel and looked down the dock. A giant dolphin was broaching, leaping out of water as though clamoring for attention. He ran toward it as his companions looked at him with astonishment.

“Punch the hospital button on that emergency post,” he commanded. “Get an ambulance squad down here. Tuktu, push the dockside alert for a fast first-aid work sub. No questions. Get going. There’s trouble.”

He sprinted toward the broaching dolphin. It looked like old Pudge, maybe it was Pudge, and all of them had worked with him in the kelp forests and the shark pens. But even if it weren’t Pudge, it was telling him something important.

The squeaks and whistles ran down the sound range as Kim neared it, and, at this distance, he didn’t need any reception device to hear. He decoded automatically from long practice.

“Trouble,” said the bottlenose. “net collapsed at end of Pen Area One. All divers outside work sub. One under attack and bleeding. Send help fast.”

“Wait here and lead,” said Kim, warbling with his mouth as he had done many times in the past without the usual undersea equipment that increased the range of messages. At this distance, almost head to head, he didn’t need it.

There was a whoosh of water behind him as an emergency work sub ejected from its dockside ramp and slid to a wave halt beside the dolphin.

Kim shouted at the heads popped from its open hatch.

“Trouble, bad trouble. Follow the dolph, and get cracking!”

Sub and cetacean vanished, and only two arrowing ripples marked their going. The nooning sun turned the subsiding wake into silver spear points, shining markers as direction clues into the seemingly peaceful bay.

There was much to be said for in-sea training and the deep, perceptive, twin-like intimacies of in-sea work teams sharing hard-tried friendships with their peers. Tuktu, Genright, and Toby Lee were relaxed and silent. They had functioned. They stayed loose and ready to act again. Whatever they thought remembering their own dangerous days beneath those pastel waters, they stayed mute. They didn’t even turn when the hushed ambulance, moving on its solar powered batteries, whispered to a stop beside them.

One of its attendants, noticing the extra little rank chevron on Kim’s fatigues, moved toward him.

“You put the call in?”

“Right,” snapped Kim.

“Funny we didn’t get the emergency message from the bay.”

“All outside the boat and very busy defending,” answered Kim. “According to the dolphin. He brought the word.”

“And just lucky you were here and knew the language, eh?”

“You’ll get a report.”

“Dolphin checked in, huh? And you with no face-mask receiver or anything, huh? You better make that report to the office. I think I’ll take the ambulance home in case it’s needed somewhere.”

The attendant’s voice was decidedly unpleasant. His shoulders humped in an ugly, defiant bunching.

“That doctor with you a good one?” asked Kim.

“What do you care?”

“Well, I hope so, because if you touch that ambulance control, you’ll need him real badly, and I want all his attention on the patients coming in.”

It was more than a half-hour before the emergency work sub homed in to the dock and cracked its plexiglass hull. The men in it worked a stretcher litter out and up the ramp to the waiting ambulance, carefully and gently.

Kim watched the doctor make his preliminary inspection, then moved to see the occupant. Tuktu, Genright, and Toby Lee moved with him.

Together they saw the drawn, pale face of the boat loader they’d helped just a few hours earlier. He recognized them and tried to smile.

He waved toward the end of the litter. “Forgot to watch the one that wanted to play kissie-kissie, “ he whispered.

The blanket which covered him flattened abruptly at his right knee.

Genright stretched an impulsive hand to his shoulder.

“They’ll give you a nifty new one like my arm,” he said. “Ask for a black one.”

The young warden was smiling faintly as the ambulance swished off, trailing a white wisp of coquina dust.

“Where are the rest of the net tenders?” Kim asked the rescue crew.

“Swimming in under their own steam,” answered their leader. “Sub’s tangled under the net and will have to be handled later. Swimmers have pulsars and hand laser units just in case, and they’ve got a hefty brace of dolphin escorts.

Good thing you were around. Your alert was the only one we had, but then I imagine things got awfully busy very quickly down there at the time.

“Help us with the report, will you?” He grinned. “I guess the Base Commander already has it, knowing him.”

“You can bet on it,” said Toby Lee. “But we’ll help.”

“We’ll be here until everybody’s home,” added Tuktu.

“They’re not too far away,” said one of the rescue team. “Shouldn’t be long.”

They weren’t. The dolphins arrived first, and the big male was Pudge. Toby Lee recognized him by a dimple under his chin, a dimple with a shadowy goatee.

“How could you not know him?” she reproved Kim.

“Yeh, how could you not know him?” asked Genright. “How could you not know the female too? It’s Peggy. She’s got a dimple right under her chin with a tiny goatee.”

The four of them hung over the dock and spoke eeeks and whistles with their old friends as the three other weary net tenders slopped out of the water and huddled with the rescue crew. They gave their heartfelt thanks to Kim and Tuktu and Genright and Toby Lee and made their way to the medical building adjacent to the docks.

“That’s that,” said Kim absently.

“He felt Toby’s hand slide into his. Tuktu’s heavy arm suddenly weighed upon his shoulder, and Genright’s black satin face moved against his nose.

“That is not that,” they said in unison.

“We’d said good-bye to the open-range types, right? Right! You spun, started to run, and issued orders at the same time. Right? Right! You heard something we didn’t, and our ears are as good, if not better than yours. Right? Right! You heard that dolphin, that’s what. And you heard him just when I asked why you were rubbing your ear, I’ll bet. So talk,” demanded Toby.

“Maybe I wouldn’t make so much of this,” said Tuktu, “but these whale nurses had just finished talking about animal sound frequencies.”

“High, low, detected and undetected ranges,” added Genright.

“I think you heard something you couldn’t hear,” snapped Toby Lee.

“Well, I can hear Genright because his nose is rubbing mine,” said Kim, shoving him away and pulling Toby closer so he could drape an arm across her. “But I think you all may be right, because I don’t know exactly how I heard Pudge’s signal, except I did.”

“Then I think it might be useful if we sort of messed around the acoustical laboratories here this afternoon for a while,” said Toby Lee. “You might have a special gift.”

“I agree, and for some other reasons,” said Kim. “What I would like, if it’s possible, is some way to gimmick the communications between our boats, assuming that we’re ordered to cruise and work together, so that we could have a com system of our very own. Commander Brent has already indicated that we’ll be monitored, and that we’ll have a set channel for our reports to the mother ship or another base. That make sense to us?”

“Does to me,” said Tuktu. “We’re all pretty good with the sensing business, but Genright’s special with a lot of instruments. And he hung around with all those super-experts a lot while we were aboard that fancy Polaris when we were on Hawaii Search, you remember.”

“Might be something I could pinch from the lab,” Genright suggested sweetly.

“Not with my knowledge,” Kim said firmly.

“Well, let’s go,” snorted Toby Lee. “I have a feeling we aren’t going to be on the base much longer.”

Genright held up a warning hand. “Aren’t we forgetting the one thing that would have the most influence on our futures?”

“I know,” said Tuktu, “but only because I’ve lived with you so long. Lunch!”

Toby Lee giggled.

“Okay,” said Kim. “Might as well go by the routines. And I think it might make sense to check by Commander Torrance’s office for permission to use the sound labs as well. What’s more, you know he’ll want our version of this morning’s emergency operations. You know him and Jiggs Jensen. They don’t miss anything.”

Kim was right. They had just finished their meal when the audio system summoned them to the headquarters office, where the two top Base executives awaited them.

Kim was brief with his report of the dockside events. The others were equally so with their affirmation of the same activities. But Kim was uneasy as they spoke. It was one thing to sense that he’d heard a normally unhearable sound from the dolphin and to share that suspicion with his brother-bonded friends and with Toby. He could never successfully hide anything from her anyhow. But Service training and Service conditioning was strong. Should he speculate with his commanding officers, even those as understanding as Commanders Torrance and Jensen? He felt that old warm intrusion of Toby’s mind with his, felt her sympathetic concern. He also felt a deeper, more probing regard in the steady eyes of Commanders Torrance and Jensen. Not for the first time he realized that long years, and active years, in the Service builds strong intuitions.

“Fine,” said Commander Torrance when Tuktu ended his report. “I’m putting you all in for a commendation on the venerable fitness records. You were there. You acted properly.”

He paused. “Rockwell, you were quite a distance away from that dolphin when he surfaced, and, according to all of you, your back was turned away from him, so you couldn’t see him broach. Did you just happen to turn around by accident and catch a look?”

“What we mean,” said Commander Jensen amiably, “is there anything else you want to tell us?”

Unconsciously Kim rubbed his ear. He made his decision. But there was a thin needle of sensation in his head that broke into tiny splinters of sound, and the sound stretched, snapped, stretched and snapped almost as though it were patterned into code.

“He heard that dolphin,” said Toby Lee firmly.

“He’s hearing something else right now,” said Commander Jensen.

“You,” muttered Tuktu.

“No, he’s right,” said Kim. “But not hearing exactly, like, very like, but, but…”

“Out of human sound range, however, well above,” said Commander Jensen. He stuck a huge hand into a capacious pocket and pulled out a boxlike cube. “Transmitter set about one twenty kilocycles. We got to thinking about that incident on the dock.. Then we got to thinking about your conversation with the herdsmen we sent down to chat with you about sound.

“We did ask them to check back with us, you know.

“Then, I guess, we just got to thinking in general. We do a lot more of that around here, in case you ever get to wondering why we sit so much. And when we added up that dock story, it added up to some super-hearing acuity for Rockwell.

“We’re not stupid as in plain stupid. This thing could be a freak, a one-time happening, or anything. That’s why we ran the little transmitter test.

“And you, Rockwell, heard it. Not me. Nobody else. Just you. Right?” Commander Jensen was downright accusing.

“I’m not really sure, sir,” said Kim. “It’s more like the suspicion of hearing than…well, I’m not convinced I’m hearing. And while we’re on the subject, we were going to ask if we might use the acoustical labs this afternoon, just sort of to noodle with things?”

“Permission granted,” said Commander Torrance. He swiveled in his chair and looked through his window to the sea. He grunted. “If you want something, requisition it even if it’s small enough to fit in a pocket.” He grunted again, turned, and faced them. His thin face looked suddenly older, somehow more tired.

“Orders,” he said. “You are leaving here tomorrow early for Olympia Base again to pick up your boats and equipment. Commander Brent will meet you there for final briefings and final sea checks on boat and equipment handling.

“One word. Don’t let the inventory clerks check off your gear. Do it yourself with them, especially your personal diving suits and weaponry.

“And another word, and strictly in this office. We don’t have to tell you how important this over-all mission is. If there are sea-adapted people in major numbers using the oceans, they’ll be allies or enemies, depending upon our treatment of them. It’s all right for us to say that they are human in everything but form and that they have a right to survival. They were created to be men of the world’s waters because some of our best ancestors thought there could no longer be men of land.”

Commander Torrance made a small honking noise.

“So, as far as the record goes, men created these men because they were men and wanted to assure the life of their own kind. Well, Jiggs and I want to tell you that the micro-archives and history tapes of the cities aren’t exactly complete. An awful lot of good stuff was cut out of the history books to justify an awful lot of the bad necessary to save humanity. But some of it was saved, and is still believed.”

He patted a small glassine-bound old-fashioned book, a book with real pages designed to be read.

“There are more of these around than you might think,” he said. “I have one for each of your teams. The Book was once called the Bible. I guess you could call it a fairy tale history of a very ancient people who thought that man needed something more to think about than his own manhood.

“Read it or not as you please. Jiggs and I are pretty fond of you kids, and it gets mighty big and lonesome out where you’re going. Good luck.”

Commander Jensen’s voice was lazy at their backs.

“If we find out whether or not we had a visitor the other night, we’ll ask him why he came to call,” it said.

Chapter One	Chapter Two	Chapter Four	Chapter Five	Chapter Six
Chapter Seven	Chapter Eight	Chapter Nine	Chapter Ten

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