"Follow The Whales"

FOLLOW THE WHALES

by Carl L. Biemiller

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

They raised Baja on the Service wave length and got Commanders Torrance and Jensen.

“The sea boileth,” said Kim.

“Be right back on the private band,” said Jensen’s voice. And they were, within seconds.

“We had a report on yellow whales,” said Commander Torrance. “Bit gaudy, don’t you think?”

“No sir,” answered Kim. “But that wasn’t why we called.”

He told his story crisply, adding, once more, his own theories, and those of his associates.

“Seems to settle the delphine ideas,” said Commander Jensen, “as to the forms of the aliens, at least.”

“Advice, please, sirs. Do we try to contact Commander Brent through the regular report system or maybe raise the Polaris if he’s using it for headquarters? Or do we just pass our observations along routinely as ordered? We do have records of tonight’s visual contact with our whales.”

“You what?” asked Commander Torrance.

“I thought I told you, sir, that I set all the sensing gear to record. As usual, I might add.”

“Didn’t get through to me, son. One moment. Want to think a bit with Jiggs.”

“Jiggs, yet,” said Genright.

“Heard that, Selsor. You say Jiggs, sir.”

Toby Lee giggled.

“Hear this, Rockwell,” said Commander Torrance. “You start north now from your position. It’s about time for the herds to smell spring in the temperate zones and summer in the Arctic anyhow. Call us when you’re off Baja, and we’ll pick up your records for safekeeping. Meanwhile, we’ll contact Commander Brent somewhat more privately than you can.

“After all, what you’ve put together will sound like crazy speculation to most Service personnel and, perhaps, others who might get the story, no matter what we think. Make that what you think. We don’t know exactly what to think--”

“Although we think you’re thinking straight,” interrupted Commander Jensen. “It’s just that we don’t seem to believe in miracles, especially ones that haven’t had time to happen.”

“Oh, ye of little faith…” muttered Tuktu.

“Using the reading matter too, I gather,” added Commander Torrance. “Anyhow, you have an order. Carry it out. And it’s just possible that you might be hearing from Commander Brent directly.”

“On our very own com system?” wailed Genright.

“Oh no,” added Toby.

“Confidence in superiors is the keystone of the Service,” Jiggs Jensen said serenely.

“I shall pass the word to my staff,” Kim said brightly, if somewhat hollowly. “Good night, sirs.”

“You are not dismissed. One caution. Should any portion on your communications systems develop a need for repairs, I suggest you all find some haven in the Antarctic, preferably beneath the polar cap. Now, good night.”

Commander Torrance was right about the herds. Even as the Adams headed north, there was a stirring among the grays as though some sense of awakening moved throughout the waters. All earthly animals own a biologic clock, the great cetaceans among them. Its alarm, usually triggered by light or perhaps seasons or fruiting glands, alters behavior patterns and changes the rhythms of animal life. Man too is subject to this clock, although man’s own changes of his environmental influences make its working erratic.

But in migrating beasts or birds, when the bell of the biologic clock clangs time to move, movement begins, and the cycle of another year turns onward.

By the time the hydronauts surfaced and hove to off Baja in the comparatively shallow waters, part of a sea buried height of bottom once mapped as a ridge bisecting the entire South Pacific Basin, the nursery waters had been evacuating by the whales.

The vanguard of the herds, mostly “teeny” males from age ten upward, and older bulls as well, were moving toward the northern summer and the chill of seas of the North Pole. Still older males would be continually delayed by thumping, grunting fights, which, picked up by underwater sound detectors, were marked by odd gurgles and odder thumps that sounded like somebody banging sacks of wet sand with sledge hammers.

The herds, divided into squads, platoons, and companies, would move at an increased rate of speed as though already savoring the rich plankter meals off the Aleutians and in the Bering Sea, and the long arctic days where night made only brief courtesy calls.

Commanders Torrance and Jensen made the pickup of the records from Adam I. They arrived by jet-driven, A-powered surface boat about dusk. Kim cracked the seldom used top hatch to let them scramble aboard the gently bobbing work sub. Adam II was buoy-anchored nearby. Genright and Tuktu picked up the surface craft line and tethered it to the same buoy, then swam to Adam I. Kim kept pressure in the boat so the bottom bubble hatch could be opened and two heads could join the conference.

Jensen’s huge frame dominated the interior of the boat, which suddenly seemed small with the addition of two more people.

“Whoosh,” he said. “Such a small hole for such a big me, and me no longer young.”

“We brought fresh steaks and fresh milk as our tickets,” said Commander Torrance. “Abalone and whale respectively.”

“Thank you, sir.” Toby smiled. “Nice change.”

“Enough for ten or twelve people?”

“Enough, Genright.”

“Let’s get to it,” said Commander Torrance. “Tapes, video and plain sound tracks, recorder rolls, the works on both your theory, which, I trust, is explained, and that which you saw. You do have the stuff on your duties as whale valets?”

“Include the record of my heroism in chasing the shark away,” said Genright.

Tuktu grinned. “All it shows is you hiding behind a whale.”

“No time. No time,” snapped Commander Torrance. “Play later, if you wish. This is official business.” He paused to gather complete attention.

“You will proceed as originally ordered, and as observers only, doing your daily work, making your usual reports. Commander Brent will get this material directly and not through channels. I am ordered to deliver it personally for his evaluation.

“Now he will have your closed com band, which he promises not to monitor or violate in any way unless he intends to contact you directly and, I imagine, in total privacy at his end. I assume he does intend to make contact, perhaps from the Polaris of some fixed base.

“Now, this is an order. I need not spell out the need for you to carry it out to the letter. You are not to initiate contact with your otter-people, sea men, merfolk, or any other suspects you may turn up. You are not, repeat, not, to make first moves. Should you be contacted or otherwise directly approached, use your best judgment as to procedure.

“That’s it. Now make your second guesses or whatever you have in mind, and we’ll guess along with you.”

“Why doesn’t he want us to make any first moves? Certainly that’s the best way to show friendship and good intentions?” ventured Toby Lee.

“Because the Service doesn’t know yet whether or not the Council wants to be friends,” snapped Kim.

“Seems reasonable,” said Commander Jensen.

“May be that, in view of Warden Petrie Putnam’s big mouth, we aren’t trusted,” suggested Tuktu.

“Afraid we’ll recruit our own Service,” said Genright, grinning.

“Seems reasonable,” Jiggs Jensen said placidly.

The hydronauts looked at the commanders with suspicion.

“Sirs, you aren’t making any guesses at all,” said Kim.

“We’ve made a few, Rockwell.” Commander Torrances’ voice was level.

“First, you must know that this entire search involves many people and much equipment in many places no matter how quietly it is conducted. Should Commander Brent find your reports and your records credible, he would need time to clue in many people about what sort of life form to focus upon, or suggest such a focus without giving a reason for it.

“We can safely guess that he has more problems than we can know about and he doesn’t want the young to slam-bang into any alien contact until he resolves some of those problems. Particularly when you are already a part of them.

“As to trust, you heard your orders. You are trusted to use your own judgment if the sea strangers contact you first. It is assumed that you would report such contact immediately. That’s trust. It is also faith in the fact that you know your own obligations to duty.”

“We’re off,” said Commander Jensen, “and without that nice hot cup of something you were about to offer.”

“Can’t be away from base too long,” added Commander Torrance. “Not even as messenger boys. Good luck, wardens. And no matter what the distances, stay in touch.”

Kim waved Genright and Tuktu out of the bubble hatch, closed it, and dogged it tightly. He cracked the top hatch to let the commanders disembark for their own boat, and moments later, watched it slide into the dark for shore on the vision screen of the com console. He was restless tonight for no reason he could name as he took Adam I down below possible surface turbulence and put her on a slow course northward. He could feel Toby Lee’s eyes upon him and turned to meet them.

They were warm and speculative and questioning. She smiled slowly, kicked off her static-free felt slippers, and padded to him barefooted. She put her hands on his upper arms. Still seated, he leaned and rested his forehead on her chin.

“Back to the search, sir,” she said.

He cut the constant boat lights from automatic and dimmed them manually, leaving only the com console and the instruments glowing.

“Man has to look,” he muttered.

“Woman too.”

“It’s duty.” He grinned, and a tiny giggle wove around his chuckle.

The grays were not the only whales moving north as the days passed and the seas greened and grew more chill above thirty degrees latitude. Groups and families of sperm whales were also about their migratory journeys.

The size of these giants among the toothed whales with their box-square heads and armed lower jaws awed the hydronauts. If the mutated grays were immense, the sperms were titanic. Many of the males, bound for arctic waters leaving their females and young to rove the warmer depths of lower latitudes, were over ninety feet. When they blew stale air and often spray from their single nostril, the jet stood firm as a geyser before the winds reduced it to a thousand droplets.

The sperm males were wary as the work boats tried to approach them closely. A few were aggressive. They were meat eaters, after all. The hydronauts discouraged them with the pulsars set to nagging low frequencies, which they seemed to find unpleasant.

The hydronauts soon noticed that from time to time single males would vanish for as much as two hours on feeding forays or other mysterious errands into the depths.

One day they followed a prime bull as he slanted from the surface on a seemingly random course into the depths. Moving silently as shadows under the thermocline through the light zones of green and indigo dusks into total blackness, with the sensing equipment tracking the huge sperm whose own sonar clacking was also scanning the depths, they moved steadily deeper. Only streaks of light from luminescent fishes and formless creatures occasionally made exclamation marks in the blackness.

The pressure against the impervious hulls of the work subs measured more than a hundred tons to the square foot.

Simultaneously the sensing systems of the boats and the sonar of the whale picked up another giant object. The sperm had found its prey, a monstrous squid, some seventy feet of arms and tentacles with gripping “suction cups,” with a huge mouth and a razor-edged, parrot-like beak. And it charged to meet it with jaws agape to fix its sixty lower jaw teeth into the rubbery central body of the squid.

Kim ordered lights, which splintered the glow. Boat cameras picked up the desperate clutching of tentacles trying for a grip on the sperm’s box-like head and the beak chipping chunks of flesh from the whale’s hide, now oozing blood.

The fight went on for nearly ten minutes in a froth of heaving bodies. Then the great slab of lower jaw clanged shut in a final grip on the squid’s head, crushing out its life, and leaving its tentacles streaming limp and without direction. They fluttered like pennants of a lost cause as the whale drove for the surface, carrying a giant meal for a hungry warrior.

The hydronauts watched as the whale allowed the carcass to drift and began to breathe as though it intended to consume the sky. It exhaled in a jet of vapor, a blend of stale air and what appeared to be a grayish foam that clung to its head in patches. The sperm inhaled and blew without stopping for minutes, paying the oxygen debt to its great body that it had borrowed from its lungs and tissues in the deep. Then it began to feed, shearing off chunks of squid, which it shoveled down its gullet with its tongue until all that remained of the cephalopod was fleshy rubble for smaller fish. Even the indigestible horny beak vanished.

“You realize that fellow went down almost four thousand feet to pick up that snack?” asked Genright on the intercom. “Think of that pressure, and holding his breath for over an hour--”

“And his only equipment was him,” added Tuktu.

“We know how he does it, but just how does he do it?” whispered Toby Lee.

Man in the sea carries an outside air supply with him, compressed and sometimes mixed with helium, for work in the depths. The air pressure within his diving suit is always greater than the pressure of the water outside it. There is no difficulty in breathing compressed air. Trouble comes when the diver ascends and pressure is eased. During the dive the nitrogen in compressed air dissolves in the blood and body tissues to the saturation limit for the pressure without bothering man. But when he comes up, the nitrogen comes out of solution more quickly than he can get rid of it through his lungs. It forms bubbles in his blood vessels, which stop the blood flow and cause a gas embolism that can be fatal. Even when the gas bubbles do not produce an embolism they cause extreme pain once know as “the bends.” And the only cure is for the diver to be recompressed and for the pressure to be released gradually, usually in a decompression chamber. It is a long process.

Deep divers like the great sperms withstand great depth pressures, but they never get the bends. The difference between man and whales is that the human takes an unlimited supply of air with him so that nitrogen can dissolve in the blood to the limit of saturation. The whales take only the air contained in their lungs and air passages. Their supply is limited, so, consequently, there is little or no nitrogen to dissolve in their blood.

As to pressure, when a sperm dives, for instance, the water pressure, or hydrostatic pressure, is transmitted to all parts of its body. But the animal’s body consists of 90 percent water, and since water is nearly incompressible, its body is not squashed or deformed.

The air in its lungs is compressible, however. With increasing depths the lungs become more and more collapsed and its air is forced into the windpipe and passages to the blowhole, which are not as well supplied with blood vessels as the lungs. Thus gas exchange from the air to the tissues is reduced.

Whales own safeguards against drowning and the bends. The passage from windpipe to blowhole is a twisting, winding one. It is connected with side passages and with air sacs related to the under parts of the skull. The sacs are filled with foam, an emulsion of water, oil, and air, and the oil absorbs nitrogen.

The head of the sperm whale, which comprises nearly a third of its body, holds much oil and a waxy-solid called spermaceti, which may also absorb nitrogen.

The twisting, winding passageway leading to the blowhole (spiracle) also acts as a valve to prevent the escape of air or the entrance of water during a dive. When a sperm opens his huge mouth to seize food in the depths, water cannot get into its lungs.

The upper end of the windpipe is firmly held by the inner end of the blowhole pipe or internal nostrils into which it projects. The valve system is perfect.

The days lengthened as Adam I and II cruised ever northward. The grays began a westward sweep, keeping an erratic pace which sometimes logged many miles each day and very few on other days, depending upon the richness of the feeding grounds. They raised and swept along the great sickle-shaped chain of the Aleutian Islands, born in volcanic action and still being altered by it. The hydronauts could see coned peaks that were capped in smoke and flame rising as high as nine thousand feet into the sky, their snow fields splattered by ash and cinders.

Most of the islands etched sharp in the sensing instruments, were barren, cleansed by winds that never stopped blowing in any season, although some showed pastures of rank grasses. Many were homes to sea birds in a world bereft of most of its land flyers by the old wars. The identity tapes showed puffins, petrels, which dipped continually into the sea for the same plankters which fed the whales, and cormorants.

Kim was alarmed by the seismic readings picked up by the work subs. If they were correct, the seabed and the islands were made of nervous stuff which twitched in volcanic tremors and shiftings.

“I’d say this whole area could blow wide open at any time,” he told Toby Lee.

“The whales don’t show any fear,” she said. “And I’m sure instinct would warn them of anything serious.”

“Maybe,” he said, “but just maybe.”

They followed the whales through the wider passes of the islands as they picked their way into the Bering Sea, staying strictly away from the narrower straits where racing currents and tides turned the water into hissings of foam and treacherous rips.

Occasionally they left the Adams buoy-tied to explore, and to get what Kim never tired of explaining as “the feel of the sea.” “If you haven’t got it and can’t get it, you don’t belong in this business,” he said solemnly to in-sea buddies that couldn’t have agreed more.

They wore shield suits and went armed, protected by suit heating elements against water chill and the unexpected danger by weaponry. They watched porpoises feed on the small silver fish called “capelin.” They saw bull fur seals cruising alone, perhaps headed for rocky islands where they would haul out for summer. They dived along undersea cliffs where rock cod hunted food in kelp forests, and they saw diving birds like the cormorants plumb the depths for smaller sizes of the same cod. They counted benthic species of crabs, slugs, snails, and urchins. And now and then, they used the pulsar tubes or the handgun lasers to rout bigger predators who inspected the hydronauts.

Always they watched the whale, forever looking for those larger than sea otter, otter forms they had seen with their—somehow they felt like parents—gray bulls.

They had not seen Tube Steak and Tube Two for more than three weeks, no matter how hard they searched for a glimpse of yellow in the emerald waters or among the drifting floes of sun-chipped bergs.

“Maybe their bosses gave ‘em orders to stay away from us,” suggested Genright.

“If they were around, we’d have picked them up one way or another,” said Tuktu.

“Maybe they’ve got a hideaway in these waters,” murmured Toby Lee.

“Ummm,” agreed Kim, “but they’ll show.”

They did—off the Pribilofs, shining like polished fruit and blowing limp fountains of greeting immediately in front of the surfaced subs.

“Tuktu, let’s look ‘em over,” said Kim. “Toby and Genright, stay with the boats. Shield suits and tanks, assorted gear, in case they’ve forgotten their friends. Make it fast, eh?”

The grays had not forgotten. They were amiable as Tuktu and Kim swam around them. Tube Steak allowed his nose to be patted, and Tube Two even nudged Tuktu in a most gentle surge that sent the hydronauts washing ten feet below the surface with both arms and legs disorganized.

“They look awfully clean to me somehow,” said Kim.

“You notice that?” he asked both boats.

“No growths,” reported Toby.

“I’d say they’ve been in fresh water for a time to get that scrubbed look,” added Genright.

“I’m going up for a better look,” said Kim, swimming close to Tube Steak and pushing against his huge pectoral.

The gray accommodated him by settling while he swam across its back and knelt while TS rose again.

“Whoosh,” he said. “Mighty slippery, and his skin looks fresh and new as it can get with all those old scars. You don’t suppose these animals have had a hot bath?”

“They’re fatter too,” contributed Tuktu. “At least, I think so. Maybe shore duty? Rest and recreation leave?”

The whales drifted over and touched heads with the boats.

“You think they’re trying to tell us something?” asked Toby.

“We’re coming in,” said Kim suddenly, and slid off TS’s back into the sea.

He closed the bubble hatch and dogged it tightly behind him as he entered the boat and stripped off his gear, which he exchanged for scant work shorts before joining Toby at the instrument console.

The whales were circling both Adams tightly as if waiting for Kim and Tuktu to rejoin the boats and ready them for movement. Then they moved off, circling once more as though rounding up the subs, and set out south for the Aleutians.

“I’d say they wanted to be followed,” murmured Tuktu over the com system.

“Well, why not?” asked Kim. “Let’s go.”

The whales swam resolutely, pausing only to feed, and the boats dawdled in their wake, continually observing the waters. As though anti-season, the bulls went south, slanting through Bering waters that averaged little more than one hundred feet in depth. They crossed the island chain and swam east on the surface of the four-thousand-foot waters, which the old charts once showed as the Aleutian Trench. They veered east close to the landmass, and there they slowed for a few days to feed, almost aimlessly.

The hydronauts went about their daily routines.

One day a huge berg shining like a great blue-green jewel towered into view, a slice of crystal ice sheared from some monstrous glacier. It glistened with surface moisture, its compressed hardness nearly impervious to sun. The Adams surfaced and cruised around it, wary of any unseen extrusions at its base.

And as the sensing gear sent visual probes into its transparent interior, the hydronauts saw an amazing tableau. Frozen in the glacier were two adults, a man and a woman, holding hands with a child between them. The tiny group stood erect, faces lifted toward some ancient sky, their bodies poised defiantly.

There was a strange peace on those faces, even small smiles at the corners of the mouths. The eyes were wide open, the man’s blue, the woman’s blue, and the child’s, a girl, green.

The man was blond and fair. He looked amazingly like Kim. All of the group were clad in some sort of uniform, skirted for the females. But all were lightly clad as though they were locked in an eternal summer preserved forever in the ice.

“Cryos,” said Tuktu.

“I don’t think so,” said Kim. “Or at least, not deliberate Cryos placed there for posterity by some government for the future to revive and use again.”

“I’ve never seen anything like them on the history scanners,” added Toby Lee.

“Maybe they’re older than our histories, way older,” muttered Genright.

“White people, Caucasian, and probably out of place.”

“Out of time too…time lost, Kim,” said Toby.

“Decisions, decisions. Do we follow our whales or report the Cryos and stay with them until something arrives to pick them up?”

“Wait until we get an order,” flipped Genright.

“Well, we can mark the berg, then report and go on,” said Kim.

“TS and TT aren’t in any hurry,” noted Toby.

They reported—and almost immediately received another surprise. They raised the Polaris. They raised Commander Brent. His voice was crisp. It was also formal.

“Thank you for the report, Rockwell, and wardens. Stand by. I shall be back to you immediately.”

“But not on open band length I’ll bet,” muttered Kim.

He was right. Their private communications system winked alert, and Commander Brent’s voice entered both work subs.

“The Polaris will pick up the Cryos, and within approximately forty-eight hours. We are not far from you at our speed range, and the work is delicate. Meanwhile, you will surface, and I assume you have, and transmit camera readings, using both infrared and normal scanning processes, to the Polaris on these settings.”

The commander gave them.

“Now listen carefully. I don’t have much time. You know of the Putnam report of that business at Baja. It is still in my custody, but there is a chance that it will be reopened as a matter of routine rechecking, and you will be ordered back to Olympia Base until the matter is disposed. Commanders Torrance and Jensen have also been notified. It could be a little sticky, but unless something untoward happens, I don’t anticipate too much trouble.

“I have passed the word concerning your otter-people, and the search is focusing upon them. I commend you for your records and your thinking about them, although I suggest that the subject is still highly speculative.

“The Polaris is in these waters because this is sea otter and amphibious mammal country in general.

“I am taking you into my complete confidence, perhaps foolishly, but I am now convinced for reasons of my own that should we locate the so-called Hawaiian second hatch we shall be ordered by the Council of Cities to destroy as much of it as we can find.”

There was silence in Adam I, an equal hush in Adam II.

Commander Brent’s even voice went on:

“You disregarded similar orders once before in the case of the sea babies. I disapproved at the time despite my personal feelings. You got away with your action. While not all of the council knows all of the reasons for our current mission, I can tell you that those of it who do know are resolute men dedicated only to the survival of the hive cities and the status quo.

“You now stand in danger of disrepute or worse should the Putnam report result in hearings. I need not remind you of consequences should we find the new race and you disregard orders concerning it.”

“Blessed are the peacemakers,” muttered Genright.

“The literature from which you quote is classified and decreed officially lost,” continued Commander Brent.

“You seem familiar with it, sir,” added Toby Lee firmly.

“I am indeed. But again, my time is short. I have your information on the reappearance of your two grays and their condition. That condition suggests drastically altered environment, changed waters. I don’t pretend to understand you young, but I gather from your information that you seem to think those whales want you to follow them?

“Then let us say I read more into the transmittal than you actually said, and correctly.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Were that not true, I should order you out of your present position. Again, because I have taken you into my complete confidence, you should know that I may be risking your lives because of my own curiosity, and telling myself I am risking your safety because of the success of the mission.

“The Polaris carries instruments denied your work subs. Your own sensors have doubtless recorded seismic disturbances, and, right now, your temperature gauges show a reading of some two degrees above what your sea heat should be if normal.”

“We are in comparatively shallow ocean, sir,” said Kim.

“The berg that holds the Cryos is sweating, isn’t it?

“The sun is warmish, sir.”

“None the less, Rockwell, what the Polaris probes indicate is sea-bed heat and tremors too fine for your sensors to read. You are in a most unstable volcanic area with a long history of unpredictable violence, and we are reading the first faint signs of possible disruptions. By the time your own instruments, good as they are, confirmed and recorded such signs, you could be in big trouble.”

“Would the whales know that, sir?”

“The Service does not yet know all there is to know about the power of instinct. Nor, I might add, do those responsible for our own life conditioning and our imposed psychic patterns know either.”

“Treason?” muttered Genright.

“Isn’t it?” remarked Commander Brent, and his voice scarcely concealed his broken-twig chuckle.

“But mark your berg for the Polaris, and follow the bulls. Further, this is an order. Leave both your Service communications and your own private com system open until I contact you personally or, perhaps, Commanders Torrance and Jensen. Just remember that both frequencies may be heard, your own by me or persons I can trust completely. Out.”

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

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