The obedient whale, without any instructions that Franklin could detect, had now circled round in her pen and was rolling over on the other side, so that her second teat could be milked. He looked at the meter; it now registered just under fifty gallons, and was still rising. The calf was obviously getting worried, or perhaps it had become excited by the milk that had accidentally spilled into the water. It made several attempts to bunt its mechanical rival out of the way, and had to be discouraged by a few sharp smacks.
Franklin was impressed, but not surprised. He knew that this was not the first time that whales had been milked, though he did not know that it could now be done with such neatness and dispatch. But where was it leading? Knowing Dr. Lundquist, he could guess.
“Now,” said the scientist, obviously hoping that the demonstration had made its desired impact, “we can get at least five hundred pounds of milk a day from a cow without interfering with the calf’s growth. And if we start breeding for milk as the farmers have done on land, we should be able to get a ton a day without any trouble. You think that’s a lot? I regard it as quite a modest target. After all, prize cattle have given over a hundred pounds of milk a day — and a whale weighs a good deal more than twenty times as much as a cow!”
Franklin did his best to interrupt the statistics.
“That’s all very well,” he said. “I don’t doubt your figures. And equally I don’t doubt that you can process the milk to remove that oily taste — yes, I’ve tried it, thanks. But how the devil are you going to round up all the cows in a herd — especially a herd that migrates ten thousand miles a year?”
“Oh, we’ve worked all that out. It’s partly a matter of training, and we’ve learned a lot getting Susan here to obey our underwater recordings. Have you ever been to a dairy farm and watched how the cows walk into the autolactor at milking time and walk out again — without a human being coming within miles of the place? And believe me, whales are a lot smarter and more easily trained than cows! I’ve sketched out the rough designs for a milk tanker that can deal with four whales at once, and could follow the herd as it migrates. In any case, now that we can control the plankton yield we can stop migration if we want to, and keep the whales in the tropics without them getting hungry. The whole thing’s quite practical, I assure you.”
Despite himself, Franklin was fascinated by the idea. It had been suggested, in some form or other, for many years, but Dr. Lundquist seemed to have been the first to do anything about it.
The mother whale and her still somewhat indignant calf had now set out to sea, and were soon spouting and diving noisily beyond the edge of the reef. As Franklin watched them go, he wondered if in a few years’ time he would see hundreds of the great beasts lined up obediently as they swam to the mobile milking plants, each delivering a ton of what was known to be one of the richest foods on earth. But it might remain only a dream; there would be countless practical problems to be faced, and what had been achieved on the laboratory scale with a single animal might prove out of the question in the sea.
“What I’d like you to do,” he said to Lundquist, “is to let me have a report showing what an — er — whale dairy would require in terms of equipment and personnel. Try to give costs wherever you can. And then estimate how much milk it could deliver, and what the processing plants would pay for that. Then we’ll have something definite to work on. At the moment it’s an interesting experiment, but no one can say if it has any practical application.”
Lundquist seemed slightly disappointed at Franklin’s lack of enthusiasm, but rapidly warmed up again as they walked away from the pool. If Franklin had thought that a little project like setting up a whale dairy had exhausted Lundquist’s powers of extrapolation, he was going to learn better.
“The next proposal I want to talk about,” began the scientist, “is still entirely in the planning stage. I know that one of our most serious problems is staff shortage, and I’ve been trying to think of ways in which we can improve efficiency by releasing men from routine jobs.”
“Surely that process has gone about as far as it can, short of making everything completely automatic? Anyway it’s less than a year since the last team of efficiency experts went over us.” (And, added Franklin to himself, the bureau isn’t quite back to normal yet.)
“My approach to the problem,” explained Lundquist, “is a little unconventional, and as an ex-warden yourself I think you’ll be particularly interested in it. As you know, it normally takes two or even three subs to round up a large school of whales; if a single sub tries it, they’ll scatter in all directions. Now this has often seemed to me a shocking waste of manpower and equipment, since all the thinking could be done by a single warden. He only needs his partners to make the right noises in the right places — something a machine could do just as well.”
“If you’re thinking of automatic slave subs,” said Franklin, “it’s been tried — and it didn’t work. A warden can’t handle two ships at once, let alone three.”
“I know all about that experiment,” answered Lundquist. “It could have been a success if they’d tackled it properly. But my idea is much more revolutionary. Tell me — does the name “sheep dog’ mean anything to you?”
Franklin wrinkled his brow. “I think so,” he replied. “Weren’t they dogs that the old-time shepherds used to protect their flocks, a few hundred years ago?”
“It happened until less than a hundred years ago. And “protect’ is an understatement with a vengeance. I’ve been looking at film records of sheep dogs in action, and no one who hadn’t seen them would believe some of the things they could do. Those dogs were so intelligent and so well-trained that they could make a flock of sheep do anything the shepherd wanted, merely at a word of command from him. They could split a flock into sections, single out one solitary sheep from its fellows, or keep a flock motionless in one spot as long as their master ordered.
“Do you see what I am driving at? We’ve been training dogs for centuries, so such a performance doesn’t seem miraculous to us. What I am suggesting is that we repeat the pattern in the sea. We know that a good many marine mammals — seals and porpoises, for instance — are at least as intelligent as dogs, but except in circuses and places like Marineland there’s been no attempt to train them. You’ve seen the tricks our porpoises here can do, and you know how affectionate and friendly they are. When you’ve watched these old films of sheep-dog trials, you’ll agree that anything a dog could do a hundred years ago we can teach a porpoise to do today.”
“Just a minute,” said Franklin, a little overwhelmed. “Let me get this straight. Are you proposing that every warden should have a couple of — er — hounds working with him when he rounds up a school of whales?”
“For certain operations, yes. Of course, the technique would have limitations; no marine animal has the speed and range of a sub, and the hounds, as you’ve called them, couldn’t always get to the places where they were needed. But I’ve done some studies and I think it would be possible to double the effectiveness of our wardens in this way, by eliminating the times when they had to work in pairs or trios.”
“But,” protested Franklin, “what notice would whales take of porpoises? They’d ignore them completely.”
“Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that we should use porpoises, that was merely an example. You’re quite right — the whales wouldn’t even notice them. We’ll have to use an animal that’s fairly large, at least as intelligent as the porpoise, and which whales will pay a great deal of attention to indeed. There’s only one animal that fills the bill, and I’d like your authority to catch one and train it.”
“Go on,” said Franklin, with such a note of resignation in his voice that even Lundquist, who had little sense of humor, was forced to smile.
“What I want to do,” he continued, “is to catch a couple of killer whales and train them to work with one of our wardens.”
Franklin thought of the thirty-foot torpedoes of ravening power he had so often chased and slaughtered in the frozen polar seas. It was hard to picture one of these ferocious beasts tamed to man’s bidding; then he remembered the chasm between the sheep dog and the wolf, and how that had long ago been bridged. Yes, it could be done again — if it was worthwhile.
When in doubt, ask for a report, one of his superiors had once told him. Well, he was going to bring back at least two from Heron Island, and they would both make very thought-provoking reading. But Lundquist’s schemes, exciting though they were, belonged to the future; Franklin had to run the bureau as it was here and now. He would prefer to avoid drastic changes for a few years, until he had learned his way about. Besides, even if Lundquist’s ideas could be proved practical, it would be a long, stiff battle selling them to the people who approved the funds. “I want to buy fifty milking machines for whales, please.” Yes, Franklin could picture the reaction in certain conservative quarters. And as for training killer whales — why, they would think he had gone completely crazy.
He watched the island fall away as the plane lifted him toward home (strange, after all his travels, that he
