preserved in the year 4000?
The great flagstones in the courtyard were burning hot, and he was glad that he had retained his stockings when he left his shoes at the gate. At the base of the dome, which rose like a shining mountain toward the cloudless blue sky, was a single-storied modern building whose clean lines and white plastic walls harmonized well with the work of architects who had died a hundred years before the beginning of the Christian era.
A saffron-robed bhikku led Franklin into the Thero’s neat and comfortably air-conditioned office. It might have been that of any busy administrator, anywhere in the world, and the sense of strangeness, which had made him ill at ease ever since he had entered the courtyard of the temple, began to fade.
The Maha Thero rose to greet him; he was a small man, his head barely reaching the level of Franklin’s shoulders. His gleaming, shaven scalp somehow depersonalized him, making it hard to judge what he was thinking and harder still to fit him into any familiar categories. At first sight, Franklin was not impressed; then he remembered how many small men had been movers and shakers of the world.
Even after forty years, the Mahanayake Thero had not lost the accent of his birth. At first it seemed incongruous, if not slightly comic, in these surroundings, but within a few minutes Franklin was completely unaware of it.
“It’s very good of you to come all this way to see me, Mr. Franklin,” said the Thero affably as he shook hands. “I must admit that I hardly expected my request to be dealt with quite so promptly. It hasn’t inconvenienced you, I trust?”
“No,” replied Franklin manfully. “In fact,” he added with rather more truth, “this visit is a novel experience, and I’m grateful for the opportunity of making it.”
“Excellent!” said the Thero, apparently with genuine pleasure. “I feel just the same way about my trip down to your South Georgia base, though I don’t suppose I’ll enjoy the weather there.”
Franklin remembered his instructions — ‘Head him off if you possibly can, but don’t try to put any fast ones across on him.” Well, he had been given an opening here.
“That’s one point I wanted to raise with you, Your Reverence,” he answered, hoping he had chosen the correct honorific. “It’s midwinter in South Georgia, and the base is virtually closed down until the late spring. It won’t be operating again for about five months.”
“How foolish of me — I should have remembered. But I’ve never been to the Antarctic and I’ve always wanted to; I suppose I was trying to give myself an excuse. Well — it will have to be one of the northern bases. Which do you suggest — Greenland or Iceland? Just tell me which is more convenient. We don’t want to cause any trouble.”
It was that last phrase which defeated Franklin before the battle had fairly begun. He knew now that he was dealing with an adversary who could be neither fooled nor deflected from his course. He would simply have to go along with the Thero, dragging his heels as hard as he could, and hoping for the best.
CHAPTER XX
The wide bay was dotted with feathery plumes of mist as the great herd milled around in uncertain circles, not alarmed by the voices that had called it to this spot between the mountains, but merely undecided as to their meaning. All their lives the whales had obeyed the orders that came, sometimes in the form of water-borne vibrations, sometimes in electric shocks, from the small creatures whom they recognized as masters. Those orders, they had come to learn, had never harmed them; often, indeed, they had led them to fertile pastures which they would never have found unaided, for they were in regions of the sea which all their experience and the memories of a million years told them should be barren. And sometimes the small masters had protected them from the killers, turning aside the ravening packs before they could tear their living victims into fragments.
They had no enemies and no fears. For generations now they had roamed the peaceful oceans of the world, growing fatter and sleeker and more contented than all their ancestors back to the beginning of time. In fifty years they had grown, on an average, ten per cent longer and thirty per cent heavier, thanks to the careful stewardship of the masters. Even now the lord of all their race, the hundred-and-fifty-one-foot blue whale B.69322, universally known as Leviathan, was sporting in the Gulf Stream with his mate and newborn calf. Leviathan could never have reached his present size in any earlier age; though such matters were beyond proof, he was probably the largest animal that had ever existed in the entire history of Earth. Order was emerging out of chaos as the directing fields started to guide the herd along invisible channels. Presently the electric barrier gave way to concrete ones; the whales were swimming along four parallel canals, too narrow for more than one to pass at a time. Automatic senses weighed and measured them, rejecting all those below a certain size and diverting them back into the sea — doubtless a little puzzled, and quite unaware how seriously their numbers had been depleted.
The whales that had passed the test swam on trustfully along the two remaining channels until presently they came to a large lagoon. Some tasks could not be left entirely to machines; there were human inspectors here to see that no mistakes had been made, to check the condition of the animals, and to log the numbers of the doomed beasts as they left the lagoon on their last, short swim into the killing pens.
“B.52111 coming up,” said Franklin to the Thero as they stood together in the observation chamber. “Seventy-foot female, known to have had five calves — past the best age for breeding.” Behind him, he knew the cameras were silently recording the scene as their ivory-skulled, saffron-robed operators handled them with a professional skill which had surprised him until he learned that they had all been trained in Hollywood.
The whale never had any warning; it probably never even felt the gentle touch of the flexible copper fingers as they brushed its body. One moment it was swimming quietly along the pen; a second later it was a lifeless hulk, continuing to move forward under its own momentum. The fifty-thousand-ampere current, passing through the heart like a stroke of lightning, had not even allowed time for a final convulsion.
At the end of the killing pen, the wide conveyor belt took the weight of the immense body and carried it up a short slope until it was completely clear of the water. Then it began to move slowly forward along an endless series of spinning rollers which seemed to stretch halfway to the horizon.
“This is the longest conveyor of its kind in the world,” Franklin explained with justifiable pride. “It may have as many as ten whales — say a thousand tons — on it at one time. Although it involves us in considerable expense, and greatly restricts our choice of site, we always have the processing plant at least half a mile from the pens, so there is no danger of the whales being frightened by the smell of blood. I think you’ll agree that not only is the slaughtering instantaneous but the animals show no alarm whatsoever right up to the end.”
“Perfectly true,” said the Thero. “It all seems very humane. Still, if the whales did get frightened it would be very difficult to handle them, wouldn’t it? I wonder if you would go to all this trouble merely to spare their feelings?”
It was a shrewd question, and like a good many he had been asked in the last few days Franklin was not quite sure how to answer it.
“I suppose,” he said slowly, “that would depend on whether we could get the money. It would be up to the World Assembly, in the final analysis. The finance committees would have to decide how kind we could afford to be. It’s a theoretical question, anyway.”
“Of course — but other questions aren’t so theoretical,” answered the Venerable Boyce, looking thoughtfully at the eighty tons of flesh and bone moving away into the distance. “Shall we get back to the car? I want to see what happens at the other end.”
And I, thought Franklin grimly, will be very interested to see how you and your colleagues take it. Most visitors who went through the processing yards emerged rather pale and shaken, and quite a few had been known to faint. It was a standard joke in the bureau that this lesson in food production removed the appetites of all who watched it for several hours after the experience.
The stench hit them while they were still a hundred yards away. Out of the corner of his eye, Franklin could see that the young bhikku carrying the sound recorder was already showing signs of distress, but the Maha Thero seemed completely unaffected. He was still calm and dispassionate five minutes later as he stared down into the reeking inferno where the great carcasses were torn asunder into mountains of meat and bone and guts.
“Just think of it,” said Franklin, “for almost two hundred years this job was done by men, often working on board a pitching deck in filthy weather. It’s not pretty to watch even now, but can you imagine being down there
