"Follow The Whales"

FOLLOW THE WHALES

by Carl L. Biemiller

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

There was wind on the surface, and banks of heavy wet clouds formed along the western horizon to bulwark off the sky. The swells mounted and adorned their tops with swirls of tiny bubbles as they humped toward the far eastern shoreline.

The automatic sensing systems in the work subs noted the fading light at their depth although visibility within the craft never seemed to alter unless changed manually.

Kim spoke at length. He told Commanders Torrance and Jensen about Genright’s experience with Tube Steak and the arrival of Tube Two. He described their work with, and upon, the old gray bulls. He recounted his theories about recognition by the whales of possibly alien strangers. He told of his checks with Herd Base.

From time to time the others interrupted with their own comments and guesses.

“Interesting,” said Commander Torrance finally, “but you’d be awfully lucky so early in the game to have something really firm--”

“They are lucky,” interrupted Commander Jensen. “They maketh the sea to boil like a pot. But tell me, is it likely that your pets will seek you out again? If so, I’d suggest you mark them somehow. Not a mural, Genright, but vividly so you might be able to follow them visually when the herds go north again for instance.”

“I’m sure they’ll be around again, sir,” said Genright.

“We’ll find a way to mark them,” said Kim.

“Now I have some other news.” Commander Torrance’s voice was almost his command tone. “We had a visitor the night you all heard the door slam here,” he said. “Would any of you know a Warden Second Class Petrie Putnam?”

“No, sir,” said the hydronauts.

Commander Torrance told them as much as he deemed necessary of the consequences of their overheard conversation.

“I want your work to be commendable in all phases,” he added, “and your conduct the same under all circumstances. You know how the Service handles disaffection, and er, umph, any remote implications of tampering with controls and command chains. I won’t even think the word ‘treason.’ But enough for now. Rockwell, don’t drop your theories, try to think them through and document them.

“Check with us again when you can. And it may be that we shall be in touch with you.” “Job forty-one,” said Commander Jensen. “ ‘ He maketh a path to shine after him….’ That’s the next verse. Follow it. Out.”

There was a flickering halt of time as though the hydronauts had simultaneously decided to hold breath for a moment.

“You heard the man,” said Kim, dropping his words carefully. “Any suggestions?”

“Just follow the whales,” muttered Tuktu.

“How do we mark Tube Steak so to bring out the blue in his eyes?” added Genright.

“Make him false eyelashes—red,” Toby Lee said sweetly.

“Dye, just violent yellow dye,” said Kim softly, “right into his old blubber hide and surface. The same stuff we use to mark off sea survey areas or buoy sites for relocation of buoys after storms. We’ve canisters of the stuff, laboratory anilines, and it lasts and lasts. We can try injections—the old tubes won’t feel it—or smear it on around the caudal areas so the south view of northbound whales is very lively.”

“Out for now,” said Genright. “I’m starved.”

They sailed south following the herds, slowly, yet busily, sticking to their work schedules, accumulating data, transmitting reports, frequently checking in with Herd Base to say hello.

They were in the old Tropic of Cancer waters abounding with life: bony fishes in abundance, squid, always the ambling whales, often seals and the sea lions adventuring in open seas, or sea otters tired of the coast. They took to the water often in silco-membrane suits, sometimes with only tanks and fins. They sampled plankton species from oceanic prairies of the stuff that sustained the baleen whales and a thousand other life forms feeding at the bottom of the eternal food chain of the oceans.

They were in the sea working about two weeks after Tube Steak and Tube Two had declined meeting the white shark when the pair of old bulls reappeared before them like instant islands and snorted limp blowhole greetings. Tube Steak drifted to where the work subs were tethered and buoyed and nudged them gently as though examining pups in a whale nursery before he turned again to face the swimmers.

“Greetings,” said Tuktu.

“And hello again,” added Toby Lee, paddling toward a fixed whale eye.

“Big hypos and brushes,” said Kim.

“Back in a minute,” Genright bubbled as he streaked for the diver’s hatch of one of the subs.

Tube Two watched him go with bored, if perceptible, curiosity, then lowered his center of gravity so the sea could cool his back from the sun, and, from all appearances, dozed off awash.

“Just how am I supposed to climb up on you, you monster?” asked Toby, speaking into the eye. She surged toward Tube Steak’s balancing pectoral sweep and pushed down upon it. As though asked prettily, Tube Steak sank lower into the sea. As Toby, Kim, and Tuktu swam over his back, he rose again, leaving them on the expansive shin-patio of his back.

“You think he knows what I said to him?” asked Toby suspiciously.

“Training,” said Kim.

“He wants his back rubbed, that’s all,” Tuktu snorted. “And here comes Warden Three, Low Grade.”

Genright was riding a portable sled, or rather being towed by it, because the sled was laden with canisters of dye, some oversized hypodermic needles that looked like syringes, and a collection of paint brushes.

He cruised in to dock beside Tube Steak and hurled some of his cargo to the waiting hydronauts.

“Color him gorgeous, he’s mine. How do I get up there? Not enough barnacles for a handhold on this side.”

“Knock on a pectoral and ask old TS nicely.”

“You kidding me, buddy, square-shaped buddy?”

“Stay wet then, dolt.”

Genright swam gingerly to the whale’s flipper.

“May I board, sir?”

Tube Steak obliged.

“You’ve been teaching my whale tricks behind my back,” Genright accused the others when he joined them. “I do the work around here. You play the funnies.”

“Work now,” ordered Kim.

The blubber of all cetaceans is fatty tissue in which cells full of oil drops are bound together by tough, fibrous tissue. It is not soft or like pudding. It is hard, firm, and compact. It may vary from an inch in thickness in porpoises to more than a foot in the large rorquals such as the blue whales, and even more than that in sperm and right whales.

Blubber is an insulating layer to prevent the loss of heat from the warm body inside to the cold water outside. But whales exercise as violently as land animals, and their body heat rises with such exertion. They cannot sweat or pant to get rid of excess heat like land animals. So blubber is traversed by many blood vessels, which bring the blood close to the surface of the skin for cooling. The flow through these blood vessels is controlled automatically by their muscular skin coats, thus regulating temperatures when the blubber layer keeps too much heat in the body.

“I think we stick the hypos in about an inch and inject the dye just around the stern area,” said Kim. “It ought to color the skin internally. Then we smear the dye on the outside for luck, and hope it doesn’t wear off in the traffic. The combination of methods ought to get us a bright yellow whale.”

“We ought to divide and work on Tube Two at the same time,” suggested Tuktu. “He may get bored if we coddle his friend and ignore him.”

“Sing to him. Play with his fins, and make him go up and down, bouncy, bouncy then, old square buddy. None of you would have any whales to play with if it weren’t for me, you know.

“Stow it,” snapped Kim.

It took the hydronauts a half-hour to adorn the two docile bulls. The great creatures seemed to enjoy the attention. Fortunately they couldn’t see themselves. Science has not detected any particular sense of vanity among cetaceans, but creatures of the same species do better when they look like their peers. Tube Steak and Tube Two did not, as presently painted.

Two thirds of their great bodies were mottled black and gray, with the wrinkled hide scarred by time and environmental wounds. The stern third, with the exception of their restless flukes, bloomed against the blue sea like daffodils pictured in the hive city picture books.

The hydronauts, for once as gleeful as their years, were pleased with their efforts.

“I love them,” cooed Toby Lee.

“Oh, so vast and so vastly improved,” sang Kim.

Tuktu beamed, and Genright danced on Tube Two’s slippery back.

Apparently annoyed by such hilarity, TT sank and moved off, and a moment later TS joined him, leaving the laughing artists swimming.

“Back to the boats,” said Kim. “I want to see if they show in color on the sensing equipment. Think I ought to check in with Herd base, too. Don’t forget the sled.”

Sometime later, dried, comfortable in boat fatigues or scrap clothing, and seated at the com console of Adam I, Kim and Toby Lee had no difficulty in picking up the redone whales. They were not very far away anyhow. Each of them was scooping furrows of lunch from the bottom in about ninety feet of water.

“In deeper water our lights will make them glow,” Kim said thoughtfully.

“You want Herd Base?”

“Yes.”

“Have you Adam One,” said the silky tones of Herd Command. “Any trouble?”

“We just dyed some of your whales,” said Kim.

“You mean you killed some of our herds?”

“No. Dyed. As in color. Those two bulls I mentioned before.”

“It was one, wasn’t it?”

“Two now. Well, they are bright yellow in the stern sections now. Thought you ought to know in case some of your people expressed surprise.”

“You asked permission to dye them?”

“Should we have?”

There was a long sigh. “Probably not. It would have been denied. Part of your work, I suppose?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Instant identification. That sort of thing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ll so record it and pass along the word. And speaking of dyed whales, as sort of a joke, of course. About twenty miles south of you is one of our processing plants, a seabed complex where we convert the livestock into end products for the cities. You and your teammates might want to visit it. Come in from the south. There’s in-bubble docking for both your boats, and surface atmosphere so you won’t need breathing gear. Just call Factory Six when you decide to visit and let ‘em know when to expect you. Can’t miss the place. There’s a half-mile of it along the bottom at about five hundred feet.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I’ll alert the troops to watch over the yellow fellows. And one more word. You’ll be in the birthing shallows soon. Lots of mating as well as touchy cows dropping young. Do nothing there abnormal. Move quietly. Observe. But, I emphasize, do not innovate anything no matter how special your assignment may be. Do you read?”

“Yes, sir.”

The days spun by in the routines of their instructions: sediment studies seeking radioactive wastes of the old war, plankton analysis for future cultures, census of the animal life about them, mapping of sea changes by comparison with the old charts, temperature studies and thermocline readings, interminable probings with the sensing equipment. But always they watched the whales.

They saw cows calve in glassine shallows and the new babies nurse. Often they saw the autopods controlled by the herdsmen butt the young aside to attach and electronically suckle the cows for milk for the cities, taking only pre-set quotas so that the babies never went hungry. The autopods looked surprisingly like baby whales. The hydronauts doubted whether the whale mothers ever knew the difference between them and their own young.

They saw the young bulls frolic and breach for sport, heaving their tons into the air seemingly for pure muscular joy. They watched matings and sporadic herd fights.

Occasionally they saw giant splashes of primrose glint under an equally yellow sun and knew that Tube Steak and Tube Two were in the vicinity. And once in a while the two bulls nosed by for a visit.

They did call at Factory Six, in essence and purpose a whaling factory much like those described in the ancient history tapes, but, in operation, a sterile, ruthlessly efficient process which gave instant death to selected stock and then reduced that stock to a maximum variety of components for use by the burrow cities. These components--meat, oils, bones, organic chemicals—entered great compressed-air viaducts and were shunted, station by station, to the coast for shipment, mostly by airpod freight shuttles jetted into missile flight for a distant hive.

The four young wardens stayed lean and muscle-tight by exercise in the boats and much swimming. Kim spent much time, some of it with Toby Lee’s help, in tinkering with the sonic equipment running up and down frequency ranges to that unbearable point where he could “hear” sound that certainly Toby could not detect as time went by. Toby Lee spent much time reading the Bible, and, surprisingly, so did Genright and Tuktu.

“It’s a survival story,” explained Tuktu, “a life pattern designed for a harsh land with codes and conducts to match.”

“More, and much more than that,” added Toby Lee and Genright.

“It’s a why for being, if you read it right, an affirmation of life that goes far beyond mere existence. It’s sort of a simple master plan for mankind that makes every individual count as an individual, not as a number or a work unit in a group or, let’s say, a city dweller,” said Genright.

“It’s a love story,” added Toby Lee.

“A what story?” asked Kim.

“Well, nothing taught in our conditioning programs,” snapped Toby, “but you are closer to that what story than you think, I think.”

At night when the ocean was pond still, its darkness broken by light pools of fluorescence, the hydronauts sometimes broke out inflatable rafts just wide enough for two, tethered them to the work subs, and floated, wide-eyed, looking at the stars. They took hand lasers against prowling sharks, and lights to attract swarms of small fish to the surface for a change in diet when the mood took them.

Kim and Toby Lee, hand in hand and warmed by each other, never knew that some of the stars they watched had once been made by man at his technical best to lift the species beyond earth into the mysteries of space. The men who had created them were lost in time, but the machines they wrought still moved in forgotten orbits reflecting earth light, moonglow, and the space-bent rays of the sun. And some of those machines still contained the ancients who made and controlled them, frozen forever as they once were by the airless cold of space.

Much of their science endured in the histories and retrieval banks of the cities. Nuclear war and the instability of metals caused by radiation, even unknown gaps in the mathematics of the past, barred its use. Not until the earth made habitable could the recycling of civilizations make star travel a hope once more.

The burrow cities and the seas were the present, and unsparing discipline and control of humanity, the reality.

One night as the hydronauts enjoyed the rafts, a glint of moonlight picked out two distinct patches of yellow about a half-mile away across the flat sea.

Genright spotted them first.

“Twelve o’clock due west,” he said. “There are the tubes.”

The silhouettes were plain and the yellow vivid as they stared over the open water. The color seemed to flicker like an arctic aurora as the whales drifted through the cold green patches of washed light generated by billions of micro-organisms.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” shouted Genright, “but isn’t there something moving with those bulls? Even a figure on one of their backs?”

“Not sure, but I think so,” cried Tuktu.

Kim wasted no time looking harder. He rolled off the raft and swam for Adam I and its sensing console. He popped through the sub’s bottom bubble and sloshed to his instruments.

Sonar, radar, the laser cameras on recording circuits, infrared detectors, thermal probes, and open sound pickups—all the customary sensors, and all of them working—picked up the whales plainly at this comparatively short range. Kim made certain that all recording and filing instruments were collecting data.

There was something moving around the old bulls. There were two somethings, four-legged somethings with short, strong swimmer’s tails and webbed swimmer’s paws clad in sleek, furred coats topped by round, whiskered heads and stubbed ears. They looked very much like sea otters, but about three times the size of the normal members of that merry clan. And as Kim watched, one of them stood erect on one of the whale backs and moved awkwardly, but surely, in a walking motion.

As it did so, it turned and faced the work subs as though it watched the boats, which could have been barely visible, if at all, in the deceptive light across the open water.

Kim made small manual adjustments in the visual equipment, increasing magnification of the zoom lenses.

The whiskered face showed a clearly lipped, generous mouth with slightly protruding carnivore’s teeth, a widespread nose, nostriled, certainly for air breathing. The face, although flat, held eyes protected by a bony-ridged forehead. The range was too far to catch expression, but Kim had a distinct impression that, at closer distance, those eyes would show intelligence, perhaps distinctly human intelligence.

On a hunch he set the boat’s pulsar beams to frequency just above the waves of human hearing and sent the sound skipping across open water. As he did so, he adjusted the audio receivers for vocal reception, leaving the sonar detectors alone.

The figure on the whale seemed to stiffen. It lifted a forepaw and seemed to wave it. And as it did so, Kim “heard” again a “sound” above sound, an inner voice for a micron of time, and felt the illusion that the “voice” spoke his own language.

The otter-like creature dived. The whales sounded, and the work sub’s instruments recorded their going until they vanished from scan range many miles away.

It made sense, thought Kim, his green eyes aglow with discovery. It made sense—some sense?—nonsense? No. Plain sense, common variety, to him.

He shared it with heads in the hatch moments later.

“Figure it this way,” he said. “The lab wizards of Hive Hawaii, working against time because their city was doomed, created their first hatch working from vision and chemical genius, perhaps, as a blueprint, an experiment, for a human designed to live in the sea.

“Then, thinking things through the centuries of human heritage factors, they had to compromise. They thought of the land masses still remaining, which might again sustain humanity one day. They had to come to an amphibian form, but an improved pelagic amphibian. It had to have more ties to the oceans, yet still be able to exist, if the need arose, to use the land, particularly land bordering the seas. Rocks, beaches, islands … watery lands that would be first cleansed from radiation and nukie damage…. And, again, because time was a factor for them, they put their big bet on the second hatch, the amphibs … these otter-types or whatever we find them to be. The third hatch, our sea babies, was a reach for the absolute, total sea form. Maybe they couldn’t make it, but their creators had to try while they had time to try. We may never know.

“But my bet is on the second hatch.”

“Only a guess,” Toby Lee said softly.

“All I know is, I never saw an otter, a real one, standing on a whale’s back. I never saw or heard of any seal, sea lion, walrus, otter, or manatee messing around with any whales. I know what I saw tonight even if I don’t know what it was I saw,” said Genright firmly.

“Well, what we saw, thought, didn’t see, or guessed, is all on the sensing records in this boat. And I’m going to raise Baja Base and talk to our friendly brass before I report it officially. It’s all going to sound might silly anyhow.

“Okay, back, pick up the gear out there, and man the boats for conference. Ten minutes give you enough time?”

The three nodded. Toby smiled.

“Be right back, sir,” she said.

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

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