Dolphin Island (12 page)

He ignored the jokes and suggestions from the crowd as he buckled the straps around
the dolphin. She was so trusting that she made no objection, being quite confident
that Johnny would do nothing to harm her. This was a strange new game, and she was
willing to learn the rules.

The harness fitted over the front part of the dolphin’s tapering body, being prevented
from slipping back (so Johnny hoped) by the flippers and dorsal fin. He had been very
careful to keep the straps clear of the single blowhole on the back of the head, through
which the dolphin breathed when it surfaced, and which closed automatically when it
dived.

Johnny attached the two nylon traces to the harness and gave them a good tug. Everything
seemed to be staying in place, so he fastened the other ends to Mick’s surfboard and
climbed on top of it.

There was an ironic cheer from the crowd as Susie pulled him away from shore. She
had needed no orders; with her usual swift grasp of the situation, she understood
exactly what Johnny was trying to do.

He let her drag him out for a hundred yards, then pressed the LEFT button on the communicator.
Susie responded at once; he tried RIGHT, and again she obeyed. The surfboard was already
moving faster than he could have swum, yet the dolphin was barely exerting herself.

They were heading straight out to sea, when Johnny muttered: “I’ll show them!” and
signaled FAST. The board gave a little jump and started to fly across the waves as
Susie went into top gear. Johnny slid back a little, so that the board planed properly
and did not nose down into the water. He felt very excited and proud of himself, and
wondered how fast he was traveling. Flat out, Susie could do at least thirty miles
an hour; even with the drag of the board and the restriction of the harness, she was
probably touching fifteen or twenty. And that was quite a speed, when you were lying
flat on the water with the spray blowing in your face.

There was a sudden “snap,” the board jerked wildly to one side, and Johnny flew to
the other. When he came to the surface, spluttering, he found that nothing had broken;
Susie had just popped out of her harness like a cork out of a bottle.

Well, one expected these little technical difficulties on the first trials. Though
it was a long swim back to shore, where lots of people would be waiting to pull his
leg, Johnny felt quite content. He had acquired a new mastery over the sea, that would
allow him to roam the reef with far greater ease; and he had invented a new sport
that would one day bring pleasure to thousands of men and dolphins alike.

Professor Kazan was delighted when he heard of Johnny’s invention; it fell neatly
into line with his own plans. Those plans were still rather vague, but they were beginning
to take shape, and in another few weeks he would be able to go to his Advisory Committee
with some ideas that would really make it sit up.

The Professor was not one of those scientists—like some pure mathematicians—who are
unhappy if their work turns out to be of practical value. Though he would be quite
content to study the dolphin language for the rest of his life, without attempting
to use his knowledge, he knew that the time had come to apply it. The dolphins themselves
had forced his hand.

He still had no idea what could, or even what
should
, be done about the killer-whale problem. But he knew very well that if the dolphins
expected to get much help from mankind, they would have to prove that they could do
something in return.

As far back as the 1960s, Dr. John Lilly, the first scientist to attempt communication
with dolphins, had suggested ways in which they might co-operate with man. They could
rescue survivors from shipwrecks—as they had demonstrated with Johnny—and they could
help immeasurably in extending knowledge of the oceans. They must know of creatures
never seen by man, and they might even settle the still-unsolved mystery of the Great
Sea Serpent. If they would help fishermen on a large scale, as they had done occasionally
on a small one, they might play an important role in feeding the Earth’s six billion
hungry mouths.

All these ideas were worth investigating, and Professor Kazan had some new ideas of
his own. There was not a wreck in the world’s oceans that dolphins could not locate
and examine, down to their ultimate diving depth of at least a thousand feet. Even
when a ship had been broken up centuries ago and covered with mud or coral, they could
still spot it. They had a wonderfully developed sense of smell—or, rather, of taste—and
could detect faint traces of metal, oil, or wood in the water. Dolphin trackers, sniffing
like bloodhounds across the sea bed, might revolutionize marine archaeology. Professor
Kazan sometimes wondered, a little wistfully, if they could be trained to follow the
scent of gold….

When he was ready to test some of his theories, the
Flying Fish
sailed north, carrying Einar, Peggy, Susie, and Sputnik in newly installed tanks.
She also carried a good deal of special equipment; but she did not, to his bitter
disappointment, carry Johnny. OSCAR had forbidden it.

“I’m sorry, Johnny,” said the Professor, glumly examining the typed card that the
computer had flicked at him. “You’ve A for Biology, A-minus for Chemistry, B-plus
for Physics, and only B-minus for English, Mathematics, and History. That really isn’t
good enough. How much time do you spend diving?”

“I didn’t go out at all yesterday,” Johnny answered evasively.

“Since it never stopped raining, I’m not surprised. I’m thinking of the
average
day.”

“Oh, a couple of hours.”

“Morning
and
afternoon, I’m quite sure. Well, OSCAR has worked out a new schedule for you, concentrating
on your bad subjects. I’m afraid you’ll slip back even further if you come cruising
with us. We’ll be gone two weeks, and you can’t afford to lose any more time.”

And that was that. It was no good arguing, even if he dared, for he knew that the
Professor was right. In some ways, a coral island was the worst place in the world
to study.

It was a long two weeks before the
Flying Fish
came back, after making several stops at the mainland. She had gone as far north
as Cooktown, where the great Captain Cook had landed in 1770 to repair his damaged
Endeavour
.

From time to time, news of the expedition’s progress came over the radio, but Johnny
did not hear the full story until Mick reported to him on his return. The fact that
Mick had gone on the voyage was a great help to Johnny’s studies, for there was no
one to lure him away from his tutors and teaching machines. He made remarkable progress
in that two weeks, and the Professor was very pleased.

The first souvenir of the trip that Mick showed Johnny was a cloudy-white stone, slightly
egg shaped and the size of a small pea.

“What is it?” asked Johnny, unimpressed.

“Don’t you
know
?” said Mick. “It’s a pearl. And quite a good one.”

Johnny still didn’t think much of it, but he had no desire to hurt Mick’s feelings—or
to show his ignorance.

“Where did you find it?” he asked.

“I didn’t; Peggy got it, from eighty fathoms in the Marlin Deep. No diver’s ever worked
there—it’s too dangerous, even with modern gear. But once after Uncle Henry had gone
down in shallow water and showed them what silver-lip oysters were like, Peggy and
Susie and Einar pulled up several hundredweight. The Prof says it’ll pay for this
trip.”

“What—this pearl?”

“No, stupid—the shell. It’s still the best stuff for buttons and knife handles, and
the oyster farms can’t supply enough of it. The Prof believes one could run a nice
little pearl-shell industry with a few hundred trained dolphins.”

“Did you find any wrecks?”

“About twenty, though most of them were already marked on the Admiralty charts. But
the big experiment was with the fishing trawlers out of Gladstone; we managed to drive
two schools of tuna right into their nets.”

“I bet they were pleased.”

“Well, not as much as you might think. They wouldn’t believe the dolphins did it—they
claimed it was done by their own electric control fields and sound baits. We know
better, and we’ll prove it when we get some more dolphins trained. Then we’ll be able
to drive fish just where we like.”

Suddenly, Johnny remembered what Professor Kazan had said to him about dolphins, at
their very first meeting. “They have more freedom than we can ever know on land. They
don’t belong to anyone, and I hope they never will.”

Were they now about to lose that freedom, and would the Professor himself, for all
his good intentions, be the instrument of their loss?

Only the future could tell; but perhaps dolphins had never been as free as men had
imagined. For Johnny could not forget the story of that killer whale, with twenty
of the People of the Sea in its stomach.

One had to pay for liberty, as for everything else. Perhaps the dolphins would be
willing to trade with mankind, exchanging some of their freedom for security. That
was a choice that many nations had had to make, and the bargain had not always been
a good one.

Professor Kazan, of course, had already thought of this, and much more. He was not
worried, for he was still experimenting and collecting information. The decisions
had yet to be made; the treaty between man and dolphin, which he dimly envisaged,
was still far in the future. It might not even be signed in his lifetime—if, indeed,
one could expect dolphins to sign a treaty. But why not? Their mouths were wonderfully
dexterous, as they had shown when collecting and transporting those hundreds of silver-lip
pearl shells. Teaching dolphins to write, or at least to draw, was another of the
Professor’s long-term projects.

One which would take longer—perhaps centuries—was the History of the Sea. Professor
Kazan had always suspected—and now he was certain—that dolphins had marvelous memories.
There had been a time, before the invention of writing, when men had carried their
own past in their brains. Minstrels and bards memorized millions of words and passed
them on from generation to generation. The songs they sang—the legends of gods and
heroes and great battles before the beginning of history—were a mixture of fact and
imagination. But the facts were there, if one could dig them out—as, in the nineteenth
century, Schliemann dug Troy out of its three thousand years of rubble and proved
that Homer had spoken the truth.

The dolphins also had their storytellers, though the Professor had not yet contacted
one. Einar had been able to repeat, in rough outline, some of their tales, which he
had heard in his youth. Professor Kazan’s translations had convinced him that these
dolphin legends contained a wealth of information that could be found nowhere else.
They went back earlier than any human myths or folk tales, for some of them contained
clear references to the Ice Ages—and the last of those was seventeen thousand years
ago.

And there was one tale so extraordinary that Professor Kazan had not trusted his own
interpretation of the tape. He had given it to Dr. Keith and asked him to make an
independent analysis.

It had taken Keith, who was nothing like as good at translating Dolphin as was the
Professor, nearly a month to make some sense of the story. Even then, he was so reluctant
to give his version that Professor Kazan practically had to drag it out of him.

“It’s a very old legend,” he began. “Einar repeats that several times. And it seems
to have made a great impression on the dolphins, for they emphasize that nothing like
it ever happened before or afterward.

“As I understand it, there was a school of dolphins swimming at night off a large
island, when it suddenly became like day and ‘the sun came down from the sky.’ I’m
quite sure of
that
phrase. The ‘sun’ landed in the water and went out; at least, it became dark again.
But there was an enormous object floating on the sea—as long as 128 dolphins. Am I
right so far?”

Professor Kazan nodded.

“I agree with everything except the number. I made it 256, but that’s not important.
The thing was
big
, there’s no doubt of that.”

Dolphins, the Professor had discovered, counted on a scale of two. This was just what
one might expect, for they had only two “fingers,” or flippers, to count with. Their
words for 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000 corresponded to 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, in man’s decimal
notation. So to them, 128 and 256 were nice round numbers, signifying approximations,
not exact measurements.

“The dolphins were frightened, and kept away from the thing,” continued Dr. Keith.
“As it lay in the water, it made strange noises. Einar imitates some of them; to me
they sound like electric motors or compressors at work.”

Professor Kazan nodded his agreement, but did not interrupt.

“Then there was a tremendous explosion, and the sea became boiling hot. Everyone within
1,024, or even 2,048, lengths of the object was killed. It sank quickly, and there
were more explosions as it went down.

“Even the dolphins who escaped without injury died soon afterward, of an unknown disease.
For years, everyone kept away from the area, but as nothing else happened, some inquisitive
dolphins went back to investigate. They found a ‘place of many caves’ resting on the
sea bed, and hunted inside it for fish. And then these later visitors died of the
same strange disease, so now no one goes near the spot. I think the main purpose of
the story is to act as a warning.”

“A warning that’s been repeated for thousands of years,” agreed the Professor. “And
a warning against
what
?”

Dr. Keith stirred uneasily in his chair. “I don’t see any way out,” he said. “If that
legend is based on fact—and it’s hard to see how the dolphins could have invented
it—a spaceship landed somewhere a few thousand years ago. Then its nuclear engines
blew up, poisoning the sea with radioactivity. It’s a fantastic theory, but I can’t
think of a better explanation.”