"Follow The Whales"

FOLLOW THE WHALES

by Carl L. Biemiller

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

“All hands rig for in-boat wigwag,” said Genright.

“All hands rig for in-boat lip reading,” muttered Toby Lee.

“Tuktu, jab a pennant in that berg or give it a splash of dye,” ordered Kim. “Our guides look about ready to move. We’ll go with them, and you and Genright follow when ready,”

“Aye, aye, sir,” answered Tuktu.

“You should see what signs he’s making with his hands,” said Genright.

The whales moved northeast on the south side of the island chain through seas with an odd, oily sheen that seemed to struggle to lift waves suddenly weighted. They moved steadily and at a good pace, their yellow sterns bright in the long daylight still strong in a waning afternoon. They continued to move well into bright nightfall until they paused for rest and a feeding session amid pastures of rich plankton.

The hydronauts altered their schedules to keep the bulls always in sensor sight. And with Commander Brent’s warning in mind, they checked and rechecked instruments for bottom shocks, alien sounds, which could not be attributed to animal life, and always for temperature changes.

The cetaceans swam again before daybreak in a sea streaked with dawn mist. They were oddly alone in waters that should have belonged to king salmon, con, hair seals, and other swimmers both fish and Mammals.

The Adams followed steadily at slow boat speed for a work sub. They crossed the midnight depths of the Aleutian Trench again, and recrossed it once more to shallow water. Near noon the whales led them around a headland and along a mountainy mass of shoreline.

Heavy mist hung on that shoreline, the top of its curtain roiled by some wind pouring from a land height. The scanners, penetrating the fog, showed stretches of rocky, cliff-girt beaches and heavy surf.

The whales fluked toward a break in the beach line, and then halted.

“Water temp is up and rising here.” said Tuktu.

“I mean it’s up,” added Genright.

“Confirmed,” said Toby Lee.

“I’m going to topside and crack a hatch,” said Kim. “I want to smell that mist for a second or two and eyeball that land person to person.”

“Feel of the sea and all that, right?”

“You couldn’t be righter, Tuktu.”

“While you smell we’ll run a bottom sample or two. The two tubes seem to be on station.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” said Toby.

The air smelled like cooking chowder, rich and burnt, yet savory with weed spices. It owned an alien warmth that seemed like a blandishment from a misplaced tropic current. The cliffs above the beach line, visible over the mist, were black, showing color only where the high sun lapped them.

Kim closed the hatch, dogged it, and ran an expert eye over its inner fittings to make certain all seals were tight to maintain the integrity of the inner, pressure hull. He had the funny feeling that Adam I, new and sturdy as she was, might be asked to stand strain. Unconsciously he squared his shoulders.

Toby Lee looked at him, and again, as many times before, he felt their oneness.

“Something?” she said softly.

“Something?” he nodded. “The whales.”

“Fidgety, I’d say.”

He walked to the com console and raised Adam II. “Everything all right there?”

“Except the feel of this place,” Tuktu’s deep voice answered calmly.

“Whales have company,” said Genright.

The otter forms were back. Toby Lee counted ten of them. They swarmed over the whales, and one of them stood erect and waved at the work subs, his fur coat gleaming in a sun grown suddenly dimmer as they watched.

“Report,” said Kim. “Time, place, navigation fix, instrument readings. Call Polaris direct as well as the open band monitors, which are already picking us up. I’m going to try to answer contact. Note I said answer, not initiate. We’ve already been waved at, and I call that a direct signal. I’m taking our transmittal up the frequency range, way up, as I speak.”

The private com boomed a command.

“Rockwell,” said Commander Brent’s voice. “Get those boats away from that coast and into a southwest heading for open sea as fast as you can.”

“Sir,” said Kim, “we have been contacted by objects of our search. I am trying to make that contact a two-way one. Adam II is sending a complete report.”

He could hear Tuktu’s voice on both bands and knew that all sensing equipment capable of transmissions was at work.

Commander Brent’s voice snapped into both subs like a living presence.

“Leave that area at once!”

The sea heaved. It exhaled steam, and it tossed both work subs completely out of the water with a stunning shock that was followed by an impact of re-entry that spilled both Kim and Toby Lee against the bunk bulkheads.

They struggled erect and tilted to the com and instrument console, which, despite the blow on the hull, was still functioning. Their viewers showed a section of cliff sliding into the wall of surf, wiping out the beach before it.

Tube Two lay belly up in a foaming wash, its body bent into an obviously fatal angle. Tube Steak seemed inert but unharmed. One of the otter-people swam groggily. The others had vanished into the steam which blanketed the humping swells.

Genright’s voice filled Adam I.

“We’re breaking up, Kim, but Tuktu and I are all right.

There’s a big crack across the weld-glass in the stern, and we think that end of the boat is about to snap off. Tuktu’s loading a sled with gear—shield suits, weapons, communications stuff. We’ll go out the bubble and try for a beach.”

“We’ll pick you up,” Kim said steadily.

“Don’t think there’s time for the swim to you,” continued Genright. “Water temp is up to high eighties and rising. That shock has a brother coming any time now if the instruments are right. It’s a big bottom eruption and what Brent was giving orders about, so leave now. We couldn’t find you visually from the water anyhow once we leave the boat.”

“That otter is waving again, said Toby Lee.

The thin, piercing verge of sound pitch entered Kim’s head from the all-band speaker, which had ranged into the ultrahigh frequencies before the shock hit the boat. It hurt as it probed, but suddenly it made distinguishable words.

“Follow the whale,” it said. “Hole under land. Take you to sea people and safety.”

“That otter or whatever is hurt, and Tube Steak’s moving,” said Toby.

Somewhere below them and traveling the contours of the ocean bed, was a low growling as though a titanic organ trembled before sounding a bass note.

“We’re out and leaving,” panted Genright’s voice. “See you later. Luck.”

Kim put Adam I into a small surge of movement.

“We’re going to pick up that otter,” he said. “You take the boat. I’m going out the bubble for him. I heard him, Toby. He said to follow Tube Steak to a hole in the cliff.”

“Don’t go.”

“No choice. We need him, and we can’t do anything for Tuktu and Genright now.”

“Stay with the boat till I tell you to go,” said Toby.

The water was oily, and it reeked of a thousand sulphurous stinks as it laved Kim’s body. The otter-like creature moved limply as Kim turned it to a back position in the water. There was clearly gratitude in its deep-set eyes as he began the tow back to Adam I, where Toby Lee helped him move it gently into the boat.

They placed it on the deck.

“Get a blanket and stimulant from the big kit,” ordered Kim. “I want a look at Tube Steak.”

The great bull was moving off toward the shoreline, and as Kim watched, it dived. Adam I followed.

As they made the descent Kim spoke into the instrument panel.

“Calling Polaris. Calling Polaris…” He gave his report, position fix, and requested the search for Tuktu and Genright. “Have sea person aboard, and at person’s instruction am following gray whale to unknown tunnel through cliff. Am expecting new eruptions and seismic action momentarily. Make sure you get Tuktu and Genright. Out.”

The whale headed for what was apparently a fold in the sea bed, a V notched into rock which glowed a sudden red as Adam I’s light picked it up, and then leveled to find the flash of yellow that was Tube Steak. Depth readings measured three hundred feet as the V developed an overhand and became a black hole in the land face.

The big gray swam steadily as though impelled with some driving purpose and Adam I surged in its wake.

The tunnel was a perfect circle cored smoothly through the rock as though cut by some machine. Kim sensed a strong current in the water flow, which led him to think that Adam I, if held to course, could make the passage without any power but that of the stream itself.

The passage went on and on, and ahead of the hydronauts the whale seemed to falter as it swam.

“This is a long dive for a gray,” whispered Toby.

Then the core sloped upward. The streaked rock ended, and Adam I entered a stretch of tunnel walled with ice. The lights became a glare, a crystal dazzle, and the walls turned deep green, electric blue, then clear as though no walls existed at all, and only the emerald jet of water sustained their movement.

Kim grunted, and a small whimper broke from Toby Lee’s throat. For nearly a hundred yards on either side of Adam I, locked deep within the embrace of the ice, were people like the prisoners they had seen in the floating berg. They were fair people, again in some uniform. There were, perhaps, fifty of them, some of them children, and the boat’s sensing equipment picked them up and ticked them away in the visual data banks of the boat.

“A colony? Some shore detail? The personnel of a forgotten mission? What, Kim? What?”

“Maybe the people who made this tunnel,” he guessed. “It doesn’t seem to be a natural one.”

Far behind them there was an echoing boom, followed nearly two minutes later by a sudden surge in the water around them, which nearly slammed Adam I into the ice walls.

Toby looked at Kim and shuddered.

“Closed?” she asked.

“Maybe,” he said, and smiled suddenly. “We’re still fine.”

The tunnel widened and vanished.

The whale angled upward and surfaced.

And moments later, Adam I bobbed upon still waters in daylight.

Kim cracked the top hatch, and fresh air spilled into the boat around them. They mounted the fold ladder and poked their heads into the sky.

They were in a lake, a crater so vast they could not see its far shore. They tilted their heads and saw a ring of remote peaks, mountains which humped so high that they found their own horizons, and the sun against their shoulders turned great snow fields a thousand hues of violet and crimson.

A quarter of a mile away Tube Steak heaved and blew and blew for new air.

Behind them, clustered by the hundreds on rock platforms, many wet and shining, were the otter-people, the sea persons, all of them patiently watching Adam I and the hydronauts.

“Lets see to our friend,” said Kim.

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

Back toThe Reunion

Back to Book One, The Hydronauts

To Book Three, Escape From The Crater

To the Harvest of Memories

C.L. Biemiller's Home