Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes, Page 4

  On one of the whale’s surfacings for air in the North Pacific, the sight of his high, white exhalation gave rise to a shout which the whale heard. He had come up rather close to a fishing boat, the kind with both sail and motor, the kind not to be feared. But the whale shot himself toward the boat for sport, to hear the men cry out again, and now their yelps sounded frightened. The whale realized that on either side of him the weights that he dragged made a wide fluttering on the water, as if he himself were larger. As he swerved, not touching the boat, he saw the more ominous shape of a whaler. It was probably heading for him, having sighted his blowing.

  The fishing vessel had started its motor.

  The whale headed for the larger vessel with a reckless lunge of mingled anger and pain. He knew that with his weights there would be no escape. Pain from the lances in him made him slow, the fast fishing vessel was going past him, so the whale passed its stern without touching it.

  Seconds later, there was an explosion underwater that gave a sensation of pressure on the whale’s ears. Great splashes followed, objects fell into the sea, then came the sucking sound of a rush of water. The whale saw a hunk of the fishing vessel, one whole end of it, sinking downward, and he swam away.

  Of that eight-man crew there were five survivors, so another story went out: there was a whale in the area with mines attached. Beware! As ever, one survivor said he had seen at least six mines, and the next man said ten. But they agreed that the mines were painted yellow, like some used years ago in the rivers of Korea and Viet Nam. All agreed that the whale had to be destroyed. But no single captain volunteered for the job.

  It would take several boats, whalers with harpoon guns, to kill the whale safely. The whalers said they could do it, if ever enough of them got together in the same area as the whale. Three boats might do it, four certainly. But time passed, the whale was not seen where he had been seen, and the idea of a search was abandoned as unprofitable. Every man thought that some other ship would encounter the whale, not his.

  The whale was still moving north on a pleasant current. It was the only thing pleasant in his existence now. He was alone and in nagging pain from his many slight wounds, and the mines nagged him also, dragging him from side to side. The chain clinked dully on his head, caught in some stub of a harpoon. All this made him hostile to any life he saw. His dives and his surfacings were slowed by the accursed weights, and on his journey north, he forgot that the weights on him had the power to ward off enemies, until he encountered a certain whaling ship. It had sighted his blow, and at once borne down on him.

  Underwater, the whale made a slow arc that would bring him behind the vessel. Then he went on, northward. But the ship was just as near when the whale next came up for air. Without his weights, he thought he could have out-distanced it, been free of it! The ship with its white-frothed prow bore down, and the whale heard the clink of steel and the shouts of men aboard. In anger the whale slashed his tail and aimed for the black hull, but at the last moment he veered nervously left, just brushing the ship with his underbelly, and at once he dived deep.

  He heard the dull crack of a harpoon gun.

  Louder and deeper came an explosion on his right. The loosely dragging mine on his right had struck the hull of the ship. The timed bomb in the harpoon gun went off harmlessly somewhere to one side and beneath the whale.

  The ship had a big rent in it below the water level. It quickly began to sink. Two lifeboats managed to float out, with men aboard, and they picked up other men who were yelling and flailing about in the sea.

  The whale swam away from all the confusion, and went on northward. There was now a perceptible difference in weight between his right and left drags: a mine on his right side had disappeared, maybe two had.

  The whale left a wake of horror stories, each hanging on the story that had gone before. The ship he had hit was Japanese. There were nine survivors out of a crew of twenty, so fast had the whaler gone down. Their radioman tapped out his message until he was drowned in mid-sentence: STRUCK BY WHALE BEARING MINES. RAPIDLY SINKING LATITUDE. . . . He had given his position first and had been repeating it with his SOS but, when rescue came, there was nothing to be found save the two lonely lifeboats and their nine. The local seas were alerted against the killer whale. The rescued sailors could not tell how many mines the whale had been carrying, whole chains of them on both sides of him at any rate.

  Whalers were asked to destroy the whale at any cost, in their own interests. The whale would be slow because of the mines on him, but he was extremely dangerous, like an armed madman. It made a spectacular news story, even though there were no pictures.

  Within twenty-four hours, a hunt was on, and whalers were using searchlights at night to scan the sea’s surface. The strategy of the Japanese and Russian vessels was to keep in touch by radio, to go about their usual business but, if the whale was sighted, to announce it to the other ships at once. Then they would encircle the whale and fire harpoon guns and also possibly detonate some of the mines.

  The whale was next sighted two hundred nautical miles north of where the Japanese vessel had sunk. The time was 2 in the morning, the dead of night in November in the northern hemisphere, and there was no moon. But the converging ships, some at greater distance than others from their objective, made the seascape almost light, or at least as if flooded with moonlight, milky, grey. The port lights of the little ships weaved and bobbed like drops of blood in the eerie theater of battle, which covered hundreds of meters at first.

  The whale was aware of the lights above him, of the churning noises of the ships’ motors which came gradually closer, louder in his ears. He was tired to the point of illogic and desperation. First one ship had pursued him, then a second, and now perhaps there were eight or nine. He was aware that they formed a ring around him. Nothing like this had ever happened before. He breathed while he could, in snatches, preparing himself for a dash to freedom. The circle of light was after all loose and some distance away. Here came the first ship, hard for him.

  The whale dived with a flash of his tail in the air. Above and behind him a harpoon gun went off in the water. He swam straight on under and beyond the ring, but the weights hurt him, and finally he had to come up, had to exhale, marking his position, he knew.

  And the ships came on quite fast, circling him easily, as if he had covered no distance at all. He would fight. The wind blew hard and cold, and the ships bobbed as they came cautiously toward him. The whale could actually see a harpoon gun swing on one ship, and he dived at once and headed for this vessel. Just at the point of ramming—which the whale would not have done because the ship had a metal hull—the whale swerved left.

  Alongside and behind him the weights followed, and one struck the whaler’s side below the surface.

  A gun-fired harpoon sped through the water above the whale’s back, and exploded a few seconds later. The whale rose briefly, seeking a gap through which to escape, but the ships were even closer together. The whale impulsively charged a ship’s side, and at the last moment dived under it. There followed another subaqueous boom that wounded a fin of the whale’s tail. In fact, the whale began to bleed from this and badly. The sudden pain made the whale veer left, back into the deadly circle. By accident, a mine among those on the whale’s left side struck a keel at its exact center, and tore a hole.

  The men on the ships screamed and shouted like mad things. Harpoon guns went off as if fired at random. Two Russian and two Japanese ships were now sinking. The men only half understood one another, but their goal was in common, or had been, to kill the whale. But some commanding officers were now ready to halt the chase in favor of getting out lifeboats and saving their men by transferring them to vessels still afloat.

  One man on a Russian ship saw the dread swath of ripples heading directly for his ship and cried out.

  The whale was aiming with a painful slowness for the Russian vessel, dived under its hull, and one, maybe two explosions followed as soon as the whale had
cleared the other side. This tipped the Russian whaler almost on its beam end, causing a harpoon gun to miss its aim, and the harpoon pierced the breast of a Japanese captain who stood boldly on his tossing deck thirty meters away. The distracted Russian sailor started the winch, and the remains of the Japanese captain were dragged overboard and hauled toward the Russian vessel which was beginning to sink.

  “There’s two whales!” yelled a man in Russian.

  “No! NO!” came a shrill Japanese voice in Russian. “Look! There he is again!”

  A mine exploded.

  As if in retaliation, harpoon guns went off, but they were as likely to hit a man in the water as they were the threshing whale, who had lost his sense of direction, even his picture of the ring now.

  The whale charged anywhere. The mines attached to him were still exploding, wherever he struck.

  Then a harpoon hit the whale. Internally he burst, and he began to writhe in pain and death, inhaling water.

  The winch on the vessel which had fired that harpoon began to turn, dragging the dying whale’s body closer. The impact of the mortally wounded whale against the ship’s side made hardly a thump, the happy sailor’s shouts of triumph rose, then came a terrible boom! The handsome brass rail around the gunwale, pride of the Japanese captain, cracked before the eyes of the sailor at the winch, then the deck broke and came up to hit him in the face. Seconds later he slid into the cold sea.

  There was nothing of the whale to capture, even to salvage. His tail had been blown off, his vitals scattered by a second harpoon gun. His heavy head had parted from his spinal column, the great head, so full of sperm oil that had been the most valuable part of a whale before the era of petroleum products, sank slowly down, and the human eyes left to see it were not looking.

  Operation Balsam; or Touch-Me-Not

  Three Mile Island had been a catastrophe, a nearly fatal setback, no doubt about that and no use mincing words. It had alerted the American people not only to the fact that nuclear power plants could break down and release radioactive gases into the atmosphere, but also to the fact that government nuclear control authorities gave out lies to the public.

  “Nothing to worry about, folks. Everything’s under control,” TV and radio had said during the first anxious days, and for weeks afterward too. What American in the country at the time could forget or forgive that? Or the fact that four years later cleanup men could still not enter the chamber where the damaged core was? And that when four men, dressed as if for a moon-walk, did enter the chamber, one collapsed after a few minutes, gripped his head and said he felt awful? Only one sample of nuclear waste, not the desired four, had been snatched from the floor in this costly endeavor.

  The fact was that Three Mile Island wasn’t cleaned up yet. The fact was the plant owners and regulatory committees were sick of it, and wished it would disappear. But there the towers stood, one of them hopelessly out of commission and even inaccessible.

  As if that weren’t bad enough for the Nuclear Control Commission, the public had focused its attention on their bureau. The NCC had also lied. No longer could nuclear plants sneak huge trucks by dead of night to garbage dumps in other states, and get back home unnoticed. The trucks might bear a logo of Tidy-Baby Paper Products or Frozen Fish Straight to Your Table, the little old ladies in small towns were looking out of their windows. What were those enormous trucks doing at 3 in the morning creeping through their tiny town? The little old ladies and the Boy Scouts wrote letters to their local papers, and things went on from there to the NCC. The NCC had been caught out a few times and reproached by Washington for permitting dumping too close to inhabited areas.

  For Benjamin M. Jackson, head of the NCC, existence had become a tightening vice. For the past year, he had had an ulcer which he was only half nursing, because he would not, could not give up his brace of Scotches at the end of the day (if his day had an end) which he felt he had earned and merited. And he could not stop worrying about his job which was damned well-paid and which he didn’t want to lose by reminding Washington too often that there simply weren’t enough places that he and his staff could okay as dumps for the goddam radioactive crap.

  The seas were out of the question, because departing cargoes were too well inspected in case sensitive items got to Russia. Forests had government patrols pretty thick on the ground. One man in the Environmental Watch Agency would have given Benny Jackson the nod for a dumping in Oregon State Park, but he had never been able to guarantee passage through specific patrols at the park, even though Benny had promised to see that the stuff was buried.

  Benny was on paper and by oath pledged to guard against careless disposal of nuclear waste, but in fact his job had almost at once turned into one of finding by hook or by crook any place at all where waste could be got rid of. In one of his dreams, Benny had seen himself assigning each man on his Commission—and there were a hundred and thirty-seven—a container of nuclear plant waste to take home every evening and flush down the toilet, but unfortunately radioactive stuff couldn’t be handled like that. The public’s opinion of nuclear power plants and respect for their efficiency was low and sinking daily. New plants could not easily be built now, because of the intensity of local protests.

  Then some genius in Washington, whose name Benny never learned, maybe because it was top-secret, came up with an idea: Washington would donate a football stadium with a track oval and bleachers and a roof to a certain Midwestern university, and under this stadium, below its underground carpark even, radioactive waste would be stored in lead containers, sealed in vast concrete chambers, and be forgotten. “The area is free from earthquake . . .” read Benny’s private memo on the plan. He was to keep this quiet from even his closest colleagues for the nonce. The project was going to be rushed through with no expense spared by the Well-Bilt Construction Company of Minnesota. In a very few months, the memo said, trucks could begin rolling into the sub-basements, because the underground structure would be Well-Bilt’s priority.

  Benny Jackson’s ulcer got a bit better at once. The Well-Bilt people were going to work round the clock and seven days a week.

  It was amazing to Benny to read about the stadium-to-be in the newspapers. The university had been quite surprised by the gift from Washington, since the present administration was not known for its generosity to educational institutions. The faculty and students, learning of the size and beauty of their future stadium, sent a huge wreath of flowers to Washington with a ribbon on it saying: “Mr. President, we thank you!” Benny had tears of relief, amusement and nervousness in his eyes when he read that.

  Now Benny could afford to say on the telephone, to the requests for dumping sites, that in about two months he would be able to provide space. “Can you hold it that long?” He knew they would have to hold it longer, that was the way things always went, but it was nice to be able to write or say anything with a ring of truth in it.

  Benjamin Jackson was thirty-six, with a small bald spot on his head which otherwise grew straight dark hair. Slender by nature, he was nevertheless developing a paunch. He had a civil engineer’s degree from Cornell, and was married with two children. Two years ago, on his appointment as head of the NCC after a reshuffle of its top men, Benny had quit his job in New Jersey with an ecology department and moved with his family to their present home in West Virginia, two miles away from the handsome headquarters of the NCC, which was a two-storey building, formerly a private prep school.

  “So the touch-me-not can now be touched,” said Gerald Mc-Whirty when Benny told him about the stadium project. “Comforting news.”

  Gerry McWhirty did not look as pleased as Benny had hoped, but then Gerry wasn’t the type to get excited about anything. Gerry hated stalling and lying, and Benny often felt that Gerry didn’t like his job. Gerry had a doctorate in physics, but he liked the quiet life, gardening, tinkering with something in his garage, fixing his neighbor’s video or anything else that got broken. He was good at plant inspection, though a bit
too fussy in Benny’s opinion, and Benny had toned down Gerry’s reports many a time. Coolant deficiency at a plant in Wilkes-Barre, Benny remembered, and a couple of “night supervisors” at a plant in Sacramento who Gerry said “didn’t know straight up” about emergency procedures and ought to be replaced. Benny had concurred in regard to the supervisors, but deleted the coolant complaint, because Gerry’s figures hadn’t seemed to Benny impressive enough for the NCC to mention.

  McWhirty often flew with a small staff on inspection tours all over the country. But Benny went alone and incognito to the Midwestern stadium project, because he was curious about its progress.

  What Benny saw was gratifying indeed. A vast oval had been dynamited in the earth, earth-moving machines were busy scooping, trucks rolled away laden with soil and rock, and a couple of hundred workmen swarmed at the scene like bees around a hive. And this was a Saturday afternoon.

  “Dressing rooms and showers underneath, I suppose,” said Benny to a hard-hat workman, just to get his answer.

  “Air-raid shelters too,” replied the workman. “I should say atomic fallout shelters.” He grinned as if it would never happen.

  Benny nodded in a friendly manner. “Mighty big project. It’s gonna be great.”

  “You one of the architects?”

  “No-o. Just one of the alumni from here.” Benny cast his gaze toward the distant campus on his left as if he loved it. Then, with a good-bye wave to the workman, he went back to his taxi, and returned to the airport.

  A month or so later, when Benny thought his ulcer had all but vanished, Love Canal kicked up again. The Environmental Watch Agency reported “unexpected leakage of chemical waste” from upstream in Love Canal at the city of Niagara Falls, and Benny received a personal letter from some hothead in Washington, DC named Robert V. Clarke, who wrote like a zealot trying to climb the ladder of promotion. Benny would have been willing to bet that Clarke would be bounced off the bottom rung of the ladder very soon, but the letter had been signed also by one of the higher-ups at EWA, because the Love Canal mess contained nuclear wastes as well as “chemical wastes,” a term often used to cover radioactive wastes if a report didn’t want to admit outright to radioactivity. The higher-up’s signature meant that the NCC had to do something. Some men from the NCC had gone up to examine the Love Canal air and water a year or so ago, had stayed for lunch, Benny recalled, and had okayed what they had seen and analyzed: the area was more than safe for human habitation again. Hundreds of families had been evacuated from the area in 1980, when a federal emergency had been declared due to wastes dumped during the 1940s and 1950s. Now Benny’s discouraged brain produced, as its first thought: here goes a lot of money if the NCC and the EWA have to launch a new cleanup program, with more tests to justify a cleanup, and so on. Bloody, effing mess! The only thing good about the letter was the last paragraph which said the “total review” by the EWA would not be ready before sixteen months from now. But meanwhile the NCC’s co-operation and attention was requested. Love Canal, Benny knew, had been taking in thousands of dollars per month as a tourist attraction. Lots of motels, restaurants and foodshops and filling stations were there now and hadn’t been there before the hoo-hah. Couldn’t the EWA let well enough alone? Benny swallowed a little white pill for his ulcer, just in case. At least the owners of the motels and restaurants weren’t going to complain about the latest bad news!