C J L MARR

The Guardians
a short story written in 1993

 

"Mr President?  Dr John Cheng here sir.  Yes thank you sir, they're both well, and I trust your good lady is well also?  ... good."

Cheng leaned forward and rested his elbows on his desk, pushing the telephone harder against his ear to try improving the line from Hawaii to washington.

"Sir, I am hoping that you remember that I do not have much of a sense of humour ... yes, I was hoping you'd forgotten that incident, but under the circumstances I'm rather glad you haven't.  The reason I say this is so that you take what I am about to tell you very seriously."

Cheng leaned back in his chair again and closed his eyes.

"The fact is that we have been monitoring an object that entered our scopes some months ago.  It was a very large object travelling very fast and it was on a course that would have taken it through the inner solar system harmlessly and on into deep space, but unfortunately it seems to have collided with an asteroid."

Cheng gulped.

"Yes that's correct, sir."

The astronomer wiped his damp brow with the back of his hand.

"The outcome?  Well put very simply, the object broke up into several smaller objects, one of which is now on a collision course with the Earth, sir."

Cheng leaned forward again.

"No sir, there is no mistake.  We have watched it for two days and calculated and recalculated everything at least twenty times.  There is no doubt in my mind, sir.  I know it sounds like some old movie script, but I assure you I am perfectly serious and I have the calculations to back up my claim."

Cheng listened as the President spoke.

"Yes, sir, we have done some computer predictions, but there are a great many variables.  You see we don't yet know how solid the object is.  I suppose at best the object may destroy itself when it enters our atmosphere but even then with something of that size travelling at that speed there is bound to be major damage and loss of life.  Worst case?  Well I'm afraid if the object survives the atmosphere and hits a landmass, as our current calculations indicate it will, then it will be an extinction event and could even destroy the Earth."

*****

"Caroline, is that you?"  

Dr Frank Kane leaned forward and rested his elbows on his desk, pushing the telephone harder against his ear to try improving the line from Bermuda to Boston.

"Darling, something big is happening out here.  I'm going to stay on for a few days to keep an eye on things.  I love you too honey, but this feels important."

Kane listened to his wife's voice, closing his eyes to picture her in his mind.

"Well, after fifteen years of studying these whales habits and routines, I've finally got a few doing something out of the ordinary and I've just got to track them."

He leaned back in his chair.

"As you know, the last of them has usually left for the Arctic by now.  We thought the last did actually leave three days ago and I was just finishing up here and collating my notes, but this afternoon one returned and Trevor in the spotter plane says that there are now at least three more individuals on their way back here again."

Kane smiled to himself as his wife responded.

"No, this is not just strange honey, this is big.  Whatever's happening out there, we're going to monitor it.  It may mean spending a few days at sea so I may not be able to contact you for a while."

Twelve hours later Kane was in the approximate location of the one humpback whale that had already returned.  The ocean was calm and the wind was a gentle whisper as they floated silently.  Kane dropped his hydrophone over the side of the vessel in the hope of hearing the whale sing.  However all was quiet and there was no sign of the spout of a breathing whale either, so it looked like the whale had moved on.  He prayed that it hadn't simply lost its bearings for a while and was now heading off to join the others on their annual migration north to the great Arctic feeding grounds.  He wanted this to be something definitely unusual in humpback whale activity.

"Dr Kane, Trevor is on the radio," announced a crewman who had run down from the bridge.

Kane followed the man back up and grabbed the microphone.

"What can you tell me Trevor?  Over."

"A group of five, no make that six humpbacks about twelve miles south-east of your position Frank."

"We're on our way."

Kane turned toward the Captain who nodded and immediately the vessel rumbled into life as the powerful engines started up.  Kane next turned to the crewman and asked him to pull the hydrophone up, then he turned back to Trevor.

"Talk to me Trev."

"I can now see six humpbacks together.  They're swimming calmly just at the surface in a sort of rough circle ... this is incredible behaviour ... they're definitely swimming in an anti-clockwise direction, in a clear circle.  There's no sign of any others yet but we've ... hang on."

"What is it?" Asked Kane trying hard to contain his impatience.

"They seem to be forming another pattern, like a star, with their heads in the middle and their tails out as the points of the star.  This is just ... I've never seen anything like this ... woah!"

"What now?"

"The water was very calm, but now it seems to be vibrating like ..."

Kane didn't hear the end of Trevor's sentence.  He was distracted by a trembling beneath his feet which was much stronger than the vibration of the engines.  The rest of the four-man crew felt it as well and they were now looking around at each other in disbelief.   One of them suddenly seemed to go a little pale and rushed out of the bridge.  The Captain grabbed his mic and called down to the engine room to ask what the problem was, but Kane knew it wasn't being caused by the engines.

"We're feeling the vibration now Trevor," announced Kane.

"But you're twelve miles away," responded Trevor.

"This is big mate.  I'll get back to you.  Out."

Kane hung the microphone up and asked the Captain to cut the engines.  He rushed back down to the deck and as soon as the engines died he threw the hydrophone back over the side.  His instruments were registering an amazingly loud and steady noise that was way below the range that human ears could detect, and such was the intensity and volume it was making the water vibrate.  Kane stood and watched, a smile on his face, almost unable to believe what his eyes were telling him.  Something had happened and the whales were finally revealing their massive intelligence and their incredible power.  Why they were doing it and what it was for were questions that were not answerable yet, but his instruments were recording all of it.  The vibration was growing stronger and Kane had to hold on to a railing to keep his footing.  The ocean around the vessel was demonstrating the vibration as a low chop like you might get if you tapped the side of a bucket full of water, and ripples were spreading out from the boat in all directions as it deflected the chop.

*****

Away from human eyes, pods of whales had assumed the star-shaped patterns all over the world.  In the Indian Ocean it was a group of sperm whales that had gathered together.  In the south Pacific it was blue whales, and in the north it was grey whales.  In the Arctic it was orcas, and in the Southern Ocean it was right whales.  In each case instruments would have detected the same sound that Kane's revealed to him, and within minutes this incredible sound had pervaded every connected ocean and sea on the globe.  The effect that the noise had on most creatures it touched was not noticeable, but each time a cetacean heard the sound, the effect was electric and the creature surfaced immediately and waited.

Wally was an orca who had been in the Marineworld sea park for four years.  He had been part of the show for almost three of those years and performed with the dolphins twice a day.  He had just jumped high into the air to touch a ball above his pool when the sound reached him, despite the fact that Marineworld was almost two miles inland from the ocean.   His trainer was announcing to the crowd that Wally was a bit of a bell-ringer and that he would now leap from the pool and ring the bell which hung ten metres above the surface.

The signal was given to Wally and the trainer and the crowd waited silently for the huge creature to leap.  After a few moments of nothing, the trainer gave Wally the signal again.  It was then that the crowd of about two hundred people and the trainers and everybody else in a radius of about a mile from the pool thought they heard somebody say : "Wait!".  A lot of people looked around to see who might have said it but in each case they got a similar puzzled look back.  Wally drifted to the surface and waited.

*****

The sound had been registering on Kane's instruments for about fifteen minutes when Trevor demanded to speak to him again.

"We've got to leave the area Frank," he announced.

"Why?  I need you to watch what's going on," answered Kane.

"No, you don't understand, we've got to leave."

Kane stared at the mic in his hand for a moment.

"Are you okay Trevor?"  He asked.

"Yes, fine.  We've just got to leave."

Kane was still puzzled.

"Who told you to leave?"

"I ... I'll explain when I see you Frank.  Trust me, we've got to go."

The radio fell silent and didn't respond to Kane's requests.  He had never heard Trevor sound so strange.  He was desparate to know what was going on out there, but would just have to wait.  Hopefully Trevor had got some of it film.  Kane returned to his scopes and watched the steady note drone on for another couple of minutes before it suddenly changed to an even lower note, and then abruptly stopped.  The vibration stopped immediately and Kane instinctively glanced down at his feet.  He looked back in time to see another note, a little lower than the last one, register for a second then die.  A moment later there was an even lower note for a second, then silence.  Kane was tempted to leave his instruments and step to the side of the vessel to look at the ocean but he resisted.  There would be nothing to see and he might miss something significant.  

In fact he wouldn't have missed anything because there would be no more sounds.  There were no instruments that could detect the aura which slowly encircled the planet.  Even from space it would not have been possible to see the intensity of power that built up over the north Atlantic, being fed from every part of every ocean, including input from Marineworld's orca pool.

The power formed itself into a ball about twenty metres in diameter which hovered just above the group of whales holding their star formation a few miles off the coast of Bermuda.  If it could have been harnessed, the energy in the ball could have supplied the needs of the entire planet for several years, yet it was invisible and it was still growing.  That is until it suddenly reached its required limit and was hurled silently into space.  It was now a ball  of ultra high-powered energy that would have a massively devastating effect on anything that strayed into its path.

The ball streaked out toward the object that was hurtling toward the Earth, and the two met in the cold darkness of space where there were no witnesses.

*****

"Mr President?  Dr John Cheng here sir."

Cheng leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk in front of him, pushing the telephone tightly to his ear to try improving the line from Hawaii to washington.

"I have to report that the object has changed course, sir."

He listened for a moment with a gentle smile on his face.

"That's correct sir.  We think it collided with another asteroid, but whatever the reason it has changed course and will now pass harmlessly by us.  In fact it will pass close enough for us to study it and hopefully learn quite a bit from it."

Cheng sat back.

"Out of interest Mr President, do you think we could have defended ourselves against it if it had maintained its course?"

The politician's answer was probably a confident confirmation that we would have been safe, but the incident and humankind's possible defences were never made public, so Frank Kane never knew that it had happened and never managed to figure out what had prompted the humpback whales to act so strangely that day.  Even though it was now in the text books, since Kane never managed to record the strange sounds again, most of the scientific community dismissed his findings as instrument malfunction.  Even Trevor hadn't been able to provide any evidence since he had never thought to turn on the camera, and he was quite unable to explain what had made it so imperative for him to leave the scene of the energy ball, except to say that he felt they were in danger and something (he assumed his sixth sense) told him he should leave the area.

None of the visitors to Marineworld ever found out who had told them to wait, but it was never considered by any of them to be important and certainly wasn't connected by any of them to the saving of the planet from almost certain destruction.

The incident came and went without any humans realising the full import and the world's cetaceans were able to resume their normal existance.  Their secret remained safe.  Humankind continued blindly on in the belief that it was the most advanced lifeform on the planet.  Those humans that killed cetaceans continued the killing.  Those humans that fought against the killing continued to fight.  The vast majority of humans who didn't care one way or the other as long as their own little world wasn't affected continued to not care.

The cetaceans had the power to change human thinking but it was against their teachings.  The omnipotent one had placed them in the oceans as the guardians of the environment in which his great experiment was taking place.  Their role was to ensure that the human experiment was not interrupted by outside influences.  They could foresee that they would be needed to protect the environment from the experiment itself before too long, but in the meantime they were happy to have fulfilled their raison d'etre.

As the humpbacks broke formation and turned north to the feeding grounds of the Arctic, one of them thought aloud of a concern that was troubling all of them.

"That energy ball was only just powerful enough," he thought.  "If we allow them to kill many more of us, next time we might not have sufficient numbers to protect them."