Franklin had never even seen a whale, dead or alive, and that first encounter was something that Don looked forward to witnessing. At such a moment one could learn all that one needed to know about a man’s fitness for this job.
They had done two weeks’ hard work together before Don first took Franklin under water. By this time they had established a curious relationship which was at once friendly and remote. Though they had long since ceased to call each other by their surnames. “Don’ and “Walt’ was as far as their intimacy went. Burley still knew absolutely nothing about Franklin’s past, though he had evolved a good many theories. The one which he most favored was that his pupil was an extremely talented criminal being rehabilitated after total therapy. He wondered if Franklin was a murderer, which was a stimulating thought, and half hoped that this exciting hypothesis was true.
Franklin no longer showed any of the obvious peculiarities he had revealed on their first meeting, though he was undoubtedly more nervous and highly strung than the average. Since this was the case with many of the best wardens, it did not worry Don. Even his curiosity about Franklin’s past had somewhat lessened, for he was far too busy to bother about it. He had learned to be patient when there was no alternative, and he did not doubt that sooner or later he would discover the whole story. Once or twice, he was almost certain, Franklin had been on the verge of some revelation, but then had drawn back. Each time Don had pretended that nothing had happened, and they had resumed their old, impersonal relationship.
It was a clear morning, with only a slow swell moving across the face of the sea, as they walked along the narrow jetty that stretched from the western end of the island out to the edge of the reef. The tide was in, but though the reef flat was completely submerged the great plateau of coral was nowhere more than five or six feet below the surface, and its every detail was clearly visible through the crystal water. Neither Franklin nor Burley spared more than a few glances for the natural aquarium above which they were walking. It was too familiar to them both, and they knew that the real beauty and wonder of the reef lay in the deeper waters farther out to sea.
Two hundred yards out from the island, the coral landscape suddenly dropped off into the depths, but the jetty continued upon taller stilts until it ended in a small group of sheds and offices. A valiant, and fairly successful, attempt had been made to avoid the grime and chaos usually inseparable from dockyards and piers; even the cranes had been designed so that they would not offend the eye. One of the terms under which the Queensland government had reluctantly leased the Capricorn Group to the World Food Organization was that the beauty of the islands would not be jeopardized. On the whole, this part of the agreement had been well kept.
“I’ve ordered two torpedoes from the garage,” said Burley as they walked down the flight of stairs at the end of the jetty and passed through the double doors of a large air lock. Franklin’s ears gave the disconcerting internal “click’ as they adjusted themselves to the increased pressure; he guessed that he was now about twenty feet below the water line. Around him was a brightly lighted chamber crammed with various types of underwater equipment, from simple lungs to elaborate propulsion devices. The two torpedoes that Don had requisitioned were lying in their cradles on a sloping ramp leading down into the still water at the far end of the chamber. They were painted the bright yellow reserved for training equipment, and Don looked at them with some distaste.
“It’s a couple of years since I used one of these things,” he said to Franklin. “You’ll probably be better at it than I am. When I get myself wet, I like to be under my own power.”
They stripped to swim trunks and pull-overs, then fastened on the harness of their breathing equipment. Don picked up one of the small but surprisingly heavy plastic cylinders and handed it to Franklin.
“These are the high-pressure jobs that I told you about,” he said. “They’re pumped to a thousand atmospheres, so the air in them is denser than water. Hence these buoyancy tanks at either end to keep them in neutral. The automatic adjustment is pretty good; as you use up your air the tanks slowly flood so that the cylinder stays just about weightless. Otherwise you’d come up to the surface like a cork whether you wanted to or not.”
He looked at the pressure gauges on the tanks and gave a satisfied nod.
“They’re nearly half charged,” he said. “That’s far more than we need. You can stay down for a day on one of these tanks when it’s really pumped up, and we won’t be gone more than an hour.”
They adjusted the new, full-face masks that had already been checked for leaks and comfortable fitting. These would be as much their personal property as their toothbrushes while they were on the station, for no two people’s faces were exactly the same shape, and even the slightest leak could be disastrous.
When they had checked the air supply and the short-range underwater radio sets, they lay almost flat along the slim torpedoes, heads down behind the low, transparent shields which would protect them from the rush of water sweeping past at speeds of up to thirty knots. Franklin settled his feet comfortably in the stirrups, feeling for the throttle and jet reversal controls with his toes. The little joy stick which allowed him to “fly’ the torpedo like a plane was just in front of his face, in the center of the instrument board. Apart from a few switches, the compass, and the meters giving speed, depth, and battery charge, there were no other controls.
Don gave Franklin his final instructions, ending with the words: “Keep about twenty feet away on my right, so that I can see you all the time. If anything goes wrong and you do have to dump the torp, for heaven’s sake remember to cut the motor. We don’t want it charging all over the reef. All set?”
“Yes — I’m ready,” Franklin answered into his little microphone.
“Right — here we go.”
The torpedoes slid easily down the ramps, and the water rose above their heads. This was no new experience to Franklin; like most other people in the world, he had occasionally tried his hand at underwater swimming and had sometimes used a lung just to see what it was like. He felt nothing but a pleasant sense of anticipation as the little turbine started to whir beneath him and the walls of the submerged chamber slid slowly past.
The light strengthened around them as they emerged into the open and pulled away from the piles of the jetty. Visibility was not very good — thirty feet at the most — but it would improve as they came to deeper water. Don swung his torpedo at right angles to the edge of the reef and headed out to sea at a leisurely five knots.
“The biggest danger with these toys,” said Don’s voice from the tiny loudspeaker by Franklin’s ear, “is going too fast and running into something. It takes a lot of experience to judge underwater visibility. See what I mean?”
He banked steeply to avoid a towering mass of coral which had suddenly appeared ahead of them. If the demonstration had been planned, thought Franklin, Don had timed it beautifully. As the living mountain swept past, not more than ten feet away, he caught a glimpse of a myriad brilliantly colored fish staring at him with apparent unconcern. By this time, he assumed, they must be so used to torpedoes and subs that they were quite unexcited by them. And since this entire area was rigidly protected, they had no reason to fear man.
A few minutes at cruising speed brought them out into the open water of the channel between the island and the adjacent reefs. Now they had room to maneuver, and Franklin followed his mentor in a series of rolls and loops and great submarine switchbacks that soon had him hopelessly lost. Sometimes they shot down to the seabed, a hundred feet below, then broke surface like flying fish to check their position. All the time Don kept up a running commentary, interspersed with questions designed to see how Franklin was reacting to the ride.
It was one of the most exhilarating experiences he had ever known. The water was much clearer out here in the channel, and one could see for almost a hundred feet. Once they ran into a great school of bonitos, which formed an inquisitive escort until Don put on speed and left them behind. They saw no sharks, as Franklin had half expected, and he commented to Don on their absence.
“You won’t see many while you’re riding a torp,” the other replied. “The noise of the jet scares them. If you want to meet the local sharks, you’ll have to go swimming in the old-fashioned way — or cut your motor and wait until they come to look at you.”
A dark mass was looming indistinctly from the seabed, and they reduced speed to a gentle drift as they approached a little range of coral hills, twenty or thirty feet high.
“An old friend of mine lives around here,” said Don. “I wonder if he’s home? It’s been about four years since I saw him last, but that won’t seem much to him. He’s been around for a couple of centuries.”
They were now skirting the edge of a huge green-clad mushroom of coral, and Franklin peered into the shadows beneath it. There were a few large boulders there, and a pair of elegant angelfish which almost disappeared when they turned edge on to him. But he could see nothing else to justify Burley’s interest.
