“Oh, good morning, Mrs. Franklin,” said the operator, who was now practically a friend of the family. “Is the director in?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Indra with satisfaction. “He hasn’t had a day off for about a month, and he’s out sailing in the bay with Peter. If you want to catch him, you’ll have to send a plane out; J.94’s radio has broken down again.”
“Both sets? That’s odd. Still, it’s not urgent. When he comes in, will you give him this memo?”
There was a barely audible click, and a sheet of paper drifted down into the extra large-sized memorandum basket. Indra read it, gave the operator an absent-minded farewell, and at once called Franklin on his perfectly serviceable radio.
The creak of the rigging, the soft rush of water past the smooth hull — even the occasional cry of a sea bird — these sounds came clearly from the speaker and transported her at once out into Moreton Bay.
“I thought you’d like to know, Walter,” she said, “the Policy Board is having its special meeting next Wednesday, here in Brisbane. That gives you three days to decide what you’re going to tell them.”
There was a slight pause during which she could hear her husband moving about the boat; then Franklin answered: “Thanks, dear. I know what I’ve got to say — I just don’t know how to say it. But there’s something I’ve thought of that you can do to help. You know all the warden’s wives — suppose you call up as many as you can, and try to find what their husbands feel about this business. Can you do that without making it look too obvious? It’s not so easy for me, nowadays, to find what the men in the field are thinking. They’re too liable to tell me what they imagine I want to know.”
There was a wistful note in Franklin’s voice which Indra had been hearing more and more frequently these days, though she knew her husband well enough to be quite sure that he had no real regrets for having taken on his present responsibilities.
“That’s a good idea,” she said. “There are at least a dozen people I should have called up weeks ago, and this will give me an excuse. It probably means that we’ll have to have another party though.”
“I don’t mind that, as long as I’m still director and can afford to pay for it. But if I revert to a warden’s pay in a month or so, we’ll have to cut out the entertaining.”
“You don’t really think — ‘
“Oh, it won’t be as bad as that. But they may shift me to some nice safe job, though I can’t imagine what use I am now outside the bureau. GET OUT OF THE WAY, YOU BLASTED FOOL–CAN’T YOU SEE WHERE YOU’RE GOING? Sorry, dear — too many week-end sailors around. We’ll be back in ninety minutes, unless some idiot rams us. Pete says he wants honey for tea. Bye now.”
Indra looked thoughtfully at the radio as the sounds of the distant boat ceased abruptly. She half wished that she had accompanied Walter and Pete on their cruise out into the bay, but she had faced the fact that her son now needed his father’s company rather than hers. There were times when she grudged this, realizing that in a few months they would both lose the boy whose mind and body they had formed, but who was now slipping from their grasp.
It was inevitable, of course; the ties that bound father and son together must now drive them apart. She doubted if Peter realized why he was so determined to get into space; after all, it was a common enough ambition among boys of his age. But he was one of the youngest ever to obtain a triplanetary scholarship, and it was easy to understand why. He was determined to conquer the element that had defeated his father.
But enough of this daydreaming, she told herself. She got out her file of visiphone numbers, and began to tick off the names of all the wardens’ wives who would be at home.
The Policy Board normally met twice a year, and very seldom had much policy to discuss, since most of the bureau’s work was satisfactorily taken care of by the committees dealing with finance, production, staff, and technical development. Franklin served on all of these, though only as an ordinary member, since the chairman was always someone from the Marine Division or the World Secretariat. He sometimes came back from the meetings depressed and discouraged; what was very unusual was for him to come back in a bad temper as well.
Indra knew that something had gone wrong the moment he entered the house. “Let me know the worst,” she said resignedly as her exhausted husband flopped into the most comfortable chair in sight. “Do you have to find a new job?”
She was only half joking, and Franklin managed a wan smile. “It’s not as bad as that,” he answered, “but there’s more in this business than I thought. Old Burrows had got it all worked out before he took the chair; someone in the Secretariat had briefed him pretty thoroughly. What it comes to is this: Unless it can be proved that food production from whale milk and synthetics will be drastically cheaper than the present method, whale slaughtering will continue. Even a ten percent saving isn’t regarded as good enough to justify a switch-over. As Burrows put it, we’re concerned with cost accounting, not abstruse philosophical principles like justice to animals.
“That’s reasonable enough, I suppose, and certainly I wouldn’t try to fight it. The trouble started during the break for coffee, when Burrows got me into a corner and asked me what the wardens thought about the whole business. So I told him that eighty per cent of them would like to see slaughtering stopped, even if it meant a rise in food costs. I don’t know why he asked me this particular question, unless news of our little survey has leaked out.
“Anyway, it upset him a bit and I could see him trying to get around to something. Then he put it bluntly that I’d be a key witness when the inquiry started, and that the Marine Division wouldn’t like me to plead the Thero’s case in open court with a few million people watching. “Suppose I’m asked for my personal opinion?” I said. “No one’s worked harder than me to increase whale-meat and oil production, but as soon as it’s possible I’d like to see the bureau become a purely conservation service.” He asked if this was my considered viewpoint and I told him that it was.
“Then things got a bit personal, though still in a friendly sort of way, and we agreed that there was a distinct cleavage of opinion between the people who handled whales as whales and those who saw them only as statistics on food-production charts. After that Burrows went off and made some phone calls, and kept us all waiting around for half an hour while he talked to a few people up in the Secretariat. He finally came back with what were virtually my orders, though he was careful not to put it that way. It comes to this: I’ve got to be an obedient little ventriloquist’s dummy at the inquiry.”
“But suppose the other side asks you outright for your personal views?”
“Our counsel will try to head them off, and if he fails I’m not supposed to have any personal views.”
“And what’s the point of all this?”
“That’s what I asked Burrows, and I finally managed to get it out of him. There are political issues involved. The Secretariat is afraid that the Maha Thero will get too powerful if he wins this case, so it’s going to be fought whatever its merits.”
“Now I understand,” said Indra slowly. “Do you think that the Thero is after political power?”
“For its own sake — no. But he may be trying to gain influence to put across his religious ideas, and that’s what the Secretariat’s afraid of.”
“And what are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” Franklin answered. “I really don’t know.”
He was still undecided when the hearings began and the Maha Thero made his first personal appearance before a worldwide audience. He was not, Franklin could not help thinking as he looked at the small, yellow-robed figure with his gleaming skull, very impressive at first sight. Indeed, there was something almost comic about him — until he began to speak, and one knew without any doubt that one was in the presence both of power and conviction.