"Ahoy the Whale" (1977)

Jon Nelson
3 hours ago
5 min read

“Accordingly, in this two-cleft arrangement of administrative functions, it is the duty of the technicians to plan the work and to carry it on; and it is the duty of the captains of industry to see that the work will benefit none but the captains and their associated absentee owners, and that it is not pushed beyond the salutary minimum which their commercial traffic will bear. In all that concerns the planning and execution of the work done, the technicians necessarily take the initiative and exercise the necessary creative surveillance and direction; that being what they, and they alone, are good for; whereas the businesslike deputies of the absentee owners sagaciously exercise a running veto power over the technicians and their productive industry.” — Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (1921)

“This is it, this is it!” Josh Brusharbor howled. “This is the cap-stone! This is the critical piece! Everything now falls into place with the rush of ten thousand avalanches.” “Give me that, Josh, you oaf,” Mose ordered. “You couldn’t understand it in a week of study, and you’ve looked at none of it except the covering sheet.” “I couldn’t understand it in a week of study, no, but I see it all in one blinding flash,” Josh gushed. “I understand everything now.” “Give me that, Josh. Then go to the infirmary. You’re sick.”

“Ahoy the Whale” is an unpublished Lafferty story included in The Man Who Talled Tales. The Launchers Institute is a center of scientific thought, where brilliant minds work under a clarified ceiling and north wall. One day, Vida Crossways notices something strange. “There’s a whale in the sky,” she says. Our main character, Mose Gora, a senior scientist at the Institute, replies that he knows—he signed a permit for it. Then he dismisses both Vida’s call and the whale itself. Gora sees such events as childish protests. “Do we not still have the regulation that all revolutions must be held between 7:00 and 8:00 in the morning?” he says. “They should be out of the way before the first period begins.”

But this time, things are different. Unknown to Gora, the whale is a Manifesto Declaration Effigy, symbol of the Holy Whale Movement, which intends to take over the world—today. And more surprisingly, the movement has pronounced the intellectuals at the Launchers Institute to be the Fathers of the Holy Whale.

Hovering in the sky, the whale effigy is both beautiful and menacing. It lurches in the wind, opens its jaws at something unseen, and drips “several liters of what looked like blood.” Gora remarks, “It does look beautifully whaleish and outrageous there in the bluest sky.”

As the senior scientists discuss what to do, Joshua Brusharbor enters. He’s a Scientific Intern of the lowest class, usually tasked with sweeping the floors. But he has a eureka moment while reading a paper about the Coaxiliary Code. “This is it, this is it! This is the capstone! This is the critical piece!” he cries. He sees the Grand Picture in a sudden flash—total understanding. Rushing from the room, “bleeding words from his mouth,” Joshua shouts the slogan, “Ahoy the Whale! Wake the world and tell the people!”

The scientists ignore him, but within minutes, there is a global coup. The world is “submerged . . . in record time.” And with this new world comes a new language. The followers of the movement are called nufters (new illuminated people), and dissenters are threatened with being quaguled. Titles appear quickly. There are MOGS (Masters Of The Great Synthesis) and DOGS (Doctors Of The Great Synthesis). The Whale revolution is part tent revival, part pop fad, and it even has an anthem: the “Mandatory Boogie.”

Former intern and janitor Joshua Brusharbor is now Duke Joshua, the leader of the new world order. Mose Gora refuses to join, so Whale followers come to take his desk, saying, “We are taking your desk to have it bronzed.” Joshua confronts Gora and tells him he will be given a “Moses Grave,” a resting place on the border “just before one comes to the promised land” of the grand synthesis. The point is clear: Gora’s ideas helped build the Whale movement, but he himself is no longer needed. “You did give us all the eloquent idea of the 'Big Picture,'” Joshua says, “but you didn’t understand how it should be used to organize the world and put it to work.”

In their final moments of captivity, Sally Rime stands with Mose. In a quiet protest, she “cut off her heavy golden hair” and “poured ashes over her head.” Mose challenges the crowd: “Do any of you know what 'kritz' or 'faszmork' or 'candula' mean?” Only Sally does.

But Mose refuses to accept the fate the Whale has planned for him. He says, “Where I go, you cannot follow me.” Then he walks out of his restraints. His captors stare at their empty hands. They lose track of him near the Candula station. Lafferty’s narrator ends the story by telling us that Mose is “away somewhere . . . not bothered quite so much by the local, sooty rumble,” still working on the real Grand Synthesis.

This is a story I wish I liked more. There are fascinating ideas at work, but they stop short of catalysis. It’s a clear instance of Lafferty building theotropic dissonance.

It also reads as a kind of literary response to an idea Nietzsche expressed in The Antichrist, if we imagine Nietzsche’s view of science as The Whale, and Mose Gora’s view of science as Lafferty’s alternative.

"Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike—it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!—Moral: science is the forbidden per se; it alone is forbidden. Science is the first of sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there is of morality.—“Thou shall not know”:—the rest follows from that."

Mose Gora is transparently a Moses figure, a leader who has spent forty years in the mathematical and scientific desert awaiting a word that never quite arrives. Lafferty doesn’t even pretend otherwise, writing that Gora “labored in the mathematical and scientific desert for forty years.” His successor, Joshua Brusharbor, is an opportunist in the image of his biblical namesake, charged with leading the people into the Promised Land.

But this Promised Land is no promise at all—it’s a totalitarian parody, a heaven dragged down to earth and spoiled in the process. The Whale movement arrogates to itself the prerogatives of the divine. In Scripture, God alone buries Moses; here, the Whale people boast that they will give Gora a “Moses Grave.” We are dealing with counterfiguration.

Youth culture catches a few brickbats here too, and that is often a warning sign when a Lafferty story turns overtly theological. The rhetoric might just overpower the revelation when political irritations interfere with staging the theophrastic dissonance. Yet, he would not be R. A.L. if he did not do this with such regularity and frequently with success.

The Whale is, of course, an updated Golden Calf, transfigured into the State through the imagination of Hobbes and into the technostate by way of Milovan Djilas, Norbert Wiener, Herbert Simon, Jacques Ellul, and a thousand others. Lafferty occasionally alludes Thorstein Veblen, and the Launchers Institute itself recalls Veblen's witty The Engineers and the Price System (1921). By the time Lafferty writes “Ahoy the Whale,” this is common coin.

The good technocrat Mose Gora neither dies nor is buried by God; instead, he vanishes, presumably to continue his counter-revolutionary labor, the true grand synthesis grounded in divine providence rather than a man-made counterfeit. What begins as a Scientific Ideal becomes an apocalyptic nightmare. Even though the parts themselves are fascinating, even though Lafferty filled the story with Easter eggs, the story is less than the sum of its parts.