Dolphin Island (13 page)

“Why is it fantastic?” asked Professor Kazan. “We’re certain now that there is plenty
of intelligent life in the universe, so we’d expect other races to build spaceships.
In fact, it’s been difficult to explain why they
haven’t
come to Earth before now.

“Some scientists consider that we probably did have visitors in the past, but they
came so many thousands of years ago that there’s no evidence for it. Well, now we
may have some evidence.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“There’s nothing we can do at the moment. I’ve questioned Einar, and he hasn’t any
idea where all this happened. We must get hold of one of those dolphin minstrels and
record the complete saga. Let’s hope that it gives more details. Once we know the
approximate area, we should be able to pinpoint the wreck with Geiger counters—even
after ten thousand years. There’s only one thing I’m afraid of.”

“What’s that?”

“The killer whales may have swallowed the information first. And then we’ll never
know the truth.”

No visitor to the island had ever been welcomed with such mixed feelings. Everyone
not out at sea was gathered around the pool when the big cargo-’copter came flying
in from the South, all the way from the Tasmanian Whale Research Station.

It hovered high above the pool, the downblast of its rotors tearing the surface of
the water into fantastic, shifting patterns. Then the hatches in its belly opened,
and a large sling slowly descended. When it hit the pool, there was sudden eruption,
a great flurry of spray and foam—and the sling was empty.

But the pool was not. Cruising around it on a swift voyage of exploration was the
largest and fiercest creature ever to visit Dolphin Island.

Yet at his first sight of the killer whale, Johnny was a little disappointed. It was
smaller than he had expected, even though it was far bigger than any dolphin. He mentioned
his disappointment to Mick, when the cargo-’copter had departed and it became possible
to speak once again without shouting.

“It’s a female,” said Mick. “They’re half the size of the males. Which means that
they’re much more practical to keep in captivity. She’ll eat only a hundredweight
of fish a day.”

Despite his natural prejudice, Johnny had to admit that she was a handsome creature.
Her piebald coloring—white underneath, black above, and with a large white patch behind
each eye—gave her a most striking appearance. These patches were responsible for the
nickname she soon acquired—Snowy.

Now that she had finished inspecting the pool, she started to survey the world around
it. She reared her massive head out of the water, looked at the crowd with keen, intelligent
eyes, and lazily opened her mouth.

At the sight of those terrible, peg-shaped teeth, there was a respectful murmur from
the audience. Perhaps Snowy knew the impression she had created, for she yawned again,
even more widely, giving a still better view of her formidable dentures. Dolphins
have small, pinlike teeth, intended merely for grasping fish before they are swallowed
whole, but
these
teeth were designed to do the same job as a shark’s. They could bite clean through
a seal or a dolphin—or a man.

Now that the island had acquired a killer whale, everyone wanted to see what the Professor
would do with her. For the first three days, he left her alone, until she had become
used to her new surroundings and had recovered from the excitement of the trip. Since
she had already been in captivity for several months, and was quite used to human
beings, she quickly settled down and accepted both live and dead fish when they were
given to her.

The task of feeding the whale was undertaken by Mick’s family, usually by his father
Jo Nauru or his uncle Stephen, skipper of the
Flying Fish
. Though they took on the job merely to earn some extra money, they soon became quite
fond of their charge. She was intelligent, which everyone had expected, but she was
also good-natured—which hardly seemed right for a killer whale. Mick grew particularly
attached to her, and she showed obvious pleasure when he came near the pool—and disappointment
if he left without giving her anything.

When he was quite sure that Snowy had settled down and was taking a healthy interest
in life, the Professor began his first tests. He played some simple phrases of Dolphin
to her through the underwater hydrophones, and studied her reactions.

At first, they were quite violent. She charged around the pool in all directions,
looking for the source of the noise. There was no doubt that she associated dolphin
voices with food, and thought that dinner had been served.

It took her only a few minutes to realize that she had been fooled and that there
weren’t any dolphins in the pool. After that, she listened attentively to the sounds
that were played to her, but refused to go chasing after them. Professor Kazan’s hope
that she would reply to some of the Dolphin talk in her own language was not fulfilled;
she remained stubbornly dumb.

Nevertheless, he was making a little progress in “Orcan,” using tape recordings of
killer-whale sounds. He used OSCAR’s infallible computer memory to hunt through the
mass of material for Dolphin words. He found many. The names of several fish, for
example, were almost the same in Orcan as in Dolphin. Probably both languages—like
English and German, or French and Italian—sprang from some common ancient origin.
Professor Kazan hoped so, for it would greatly simplify his work.

He was not too disappointed by Snowy’s lack of co-operation, for he had other plans
for her, which could be carried out whether she co-operated or not. After she had
been on the island for two weeks, a team of medical technicians arrived from India
and began to install electronic equipment at the edge of the pool. When they were
ready, the water was drained off, and the indignant whale was stranded helplessly
in the shallows.

The next step involved ten men, some strong ropes, and a massive wooden framework
that had been designed to hold the whale’s head clamped in a fixed position. She was
not at all pleased with this, nor was Mick, who had to assist with the project by
playing a hose pipe over Snowy to prevent her skin from drying in the sun.

“No one’s going to hurt you, old girl,” he said reassuringly. “It’ll all be over in
a minute, and you can start swimming around again.”

Then, to Mick’s alarm, one of the technicians approached Snowy with an object that
looked like a cross between a hypodermic needle and an electric drill. With great
care, he selected a spot on the back of the whale’s head, placed the device against
it, and pressed a button. There was a faint, high-pitched whine, and the needle sank
deep into Snowy’s brain, going through the thick bone of the skull as effortlessly
as a hot knife through butter.

The operation upset Mick much more than it did Snowy, who seemed scarcely aware of
the pinprick. This would not have surprised anyone with a knowledge of physiology,
but Mick, like most people, did not know the curious fact that the brain has so sense
of feeling. It can be cut or pierced without any discomfort to its owner.

Altogether, ten probes were sunk into Snowy’s brain. Wires were connected to them
and taken to a flat, streamlined box that was clamped to the top of the whale’s head.
The whole operation took less than an hour. When it was over, the pool was flooded
again and Snowy, puffing and blowing, started to swim lazily back and forth. She was
obviously none the worse for her experience, though it seemed to Mick that she looked
at him with the hurt expression of a person who had been let down by a trusted friend.

The next day, Dr. Saha arrived from New Delhi. As a member of the Institute’s Advisory
Committee, he was an old friend of Professor Kazan’s. He was also a world authority
on that most complex of all organs, the human brain.

“The last time I used this equipment,” said the physiologist, as he watched Snowy
swimming back and forth in the pool, “it was on an elephant. Before I’d finished,
I could control his trunk accurately enough to type with it.”

“We don’t need that sort of virtuosity here,” Professor Kazan answered. “All I want
to do is to control Snowy’s movements and to teach her not to eat dolphins.”

“If my men have put the electrodes in the right area, I think I can promise that.
But not immediately; I’ll have to do some brain-mapping first.”

This “brain-mapping” was slow, delicate work, requiring great patience and skill,
and Saha sat for hours at his instrument panel, observing Snowy’s behavior as she
dived, basked in the sun, swam lazily around the pool, or took the fish that Mick
offered her. All the time her brain was broadcasting like a satellite in orbit, through
the radio transmitter attached to it. The impulses picked up by the probes were recorded
on tape, so that Dr. Saha could see the pattern of electrical activity corresponding
to any particular action.

At last he was ready for the first step. Instead of receiving impulses from Snowy’s
brain, he began to feed electric currents
into
it.

The result was both fascinating and uncanny—more like magic than science. By turning
a knob or closing a switch, Dr. Saha could make the great animal swim to right or
left, describe circles or figure eights, float motionless in the center of the pool,
or carry out any other movement he wished. Johnny’s efforts to control Sputnik and
Susie with the communicator, which had once seemed so impressive, now appeared almost
childish.

But Johnny did not mind, Susie and Sputnik were his friends, and he preferred to leave
them freedom of choice. If they did not wish to obey him—as was often the case—that
was their privilege. Snowy had no alternative; the electric currents fed into her
brain had turned her into a living robot, with no will of her own, compelled to carry
out the orders Dr. Saha gave her.

The more that Johnny thought about this, the more uncomfortable he became. Could the
same control be applied to me? When he made inquiries, he found that this had indeed
been done, many times, in laboratory experiments. Here was a scientific tool that
might be as dangerous as atomic energy if used for evil instead of good.

There was no doubt that Professor Kazan intended to use it for good—at least, for
the good of dolphins—but
how
he intended to use it still puzzled Johnny. He was not very much wiser even when
the experiment moved into its next stage, with the arrival on the island of a most
peculiar object—a life-size mechanical dolphin, driven by electric motors.

It had been built twenty years ago by a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratories,
who couldn’t understand how dolphins managed to swim as fast as they did. According
to his calculations, their muscles should not be able to drive them at much more than
ten miles an hour—yet they could cruise comfortably at twice that speed.

So the scientist had built a model dolphin and studied its behavior as it swam up
and down, loaded with instruments. The project had been a failure, but the model was
so beautifully made and performed so well that no one had had the heart to destroy
it, even when its designer had given up in disgust. From time to time the Lab technicians
dusted it off for public demonstrations, and thus the Professor had come to hear of
it. In its small way, it was quite famous.

It would have fooled any human observer, but when it was lowered into Snowy’s tank,
before scores of fascinated spectators, the result was an utter anticlimax. The whale
took one contemptuous glance at the mechanical toy and then ignored it completely.

“Just what I was afraid of,” said the Professor, without too much disappointment.
Like all scientists, he had long ago learned that most experiments are failures, and
he was not ashamed to make a fool of himself, even in public. (After all, the great
Darwin once spent hours playing the trumpet in a vegetable garden, to see if sound
affected plant growth.) “She probably heard the electric motor and knew the thing
was a fake. Well, there’s no alternative. We’ll have to use real dolphins as bait.”

“Are you going to call for volunteers?” asked Dr. Saha, jokingly.

The joke, however, backfired on him. Professor Kazan considered the suggestion carefully,
then nodded his head in agreement.

“I’ll do exactly that,” he said.

“There’s a general feeling around the island,” said Mick, “that the Prof has gone
stark, staring mad.”

“You know that’s nonsense,” retorted Johnny, springing to the defense of his hero.
“What’s he done now?”

“He’s been using that brain-wave gadget to control Snowy’s feeding. He tells me to
offer her one kind of fish, and then Dr. Saha stops her from eating it; after he’s
given her several jabs, she doesn’t even try any more. He calls it ‘conditioning.’
Now there are four or five big jacks swimming round in the pool, but she won’t look
at them. She’ll eat any other fish, though.”

“Why does that make the Prof crazy?”

“Well, it’s obvious what he’s up to. If he can keep Snowy from eating jacks, he can
keep her from eating dolphins. But what good will
that
be? There are millions of killer whales—he can’t condition them all!”

“Whatever the Prof’s doing,” said Johnny stubbornly, “there’s a good reason for it.
Wait and see.”

“All the same, I wish they’d stop bothering Snowy. I’m afraid it’ll make her bad-tempered.”

That was an odd thing to say about a killer whale, thought Johnny.

“I don’t see that
that
matters very much,” he said.

Mick grinned rather shamefacedly and scuffed the ground with his feet.

“You promise you won’t tell anyone?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“Well, I’ve been swimming with her a good deal. She’s more fun than your little tadpoles.”

Johnny stared at him in utter amazement, quite ignoring the insult to Susie and Sputnik.