Dolphin Island (5 page)

“There you are,” said Mick. “That’s what the island is all about.”

Swimming slowly around in the pool, just as he had seen them out in the Pacific, were
two dolphins. Johnny wished he could have examined them more closely, but a wire-mesh
fence made it impossible to get near the pool. On the fence, in large red letters,
was a message which read: QUIET PLEASE—HYDROPHONES IN ACTION.

They tiptoed dutifully past, then Mick explained: “The Prof doesn’t like anyone talking
near the dolphins, says it’s liable to confuse them. One night some crazy fisherman
got drunk, and came and shouted a lot of bad language at them. There was an awful
row—he was chucked out on the next boat.”

“What sort of man is the Prof?” asked Johnny.

“Oh, he’s fine—except on Sunday afternoons.”

“What happens then?”

“Every Sunday morning his old lady calls and tries to talk him into coming home. He
won’t go, says he hates Moscow—it’s too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter.
So they have terrific fights, but every few months they compromise and meet at somewhere
like Yalta.”

Johnny thought this over. He was anxious to learn all that he could about Professor
Kazan, in the hope of improving his chances of staying on the island. Mick’s description
sounded a little alarming; still, as Sunday had just passed, the Professor should
be in a good temper for several days.

“Can he
really
talk dolphin language?” asked Johnny. “I didn’t think anyone could imitate those
weird noises.”

“He can’t speak more than a few words, but he can translate tape recordings, with
the help of computers. And then he can make new tapes and talk back to them. It’s
a complicated business, but it works.”

Johnny was impressed, and his curiosity was aroused. He had always liked to know how
things worked, and he couldn’t imagine how one would even begin to learn dolphin language.

“Well,” said Mick, when he put the question to him, “have you ever stopped to think
how
you
learned to speak?”

“By listening to my mother, I suppose,” Johnny answered, a little sadly; he could
just remember her.

“Of course. So what the Prof did was to take a mother dolphin with a new baby, and
put them into a pool by themselves. Then he listened to the conversation as the baby
grew up; that way, he learned dolphin, just as the baby did.”

“It sounds almost too easy,” said Johnny.

“Oh, it took years, and he’s still learning. But now he has a vocabulary of thousands
of words, and he’s even started to write dolphin history.”

“History?”

“Well, you can call it that. Because they don’t have books, they’ve developed wonderful
memories. They can tell us about things that happened in the sea ages ago—at least,
that’s what the Prof says. And it makes sense; before men invented writing, they had
to carry everything in their own heads. The dolphins have done the same.”

Johnny pondered these surprising facts until they had reached the administrative block
and completed the circuit of the island. At the sight of all these buildings, housing
so many busy workers and complicated machines, he was struck by a more down-to-earth
thought.

“Who pays for all this?” he asked. “It must cost a fortune to run.”

“Not much, compared to the money that goes into space,” Mick answered. “The Prof started
fifteen years ago with about six helpers. When he began getting results, the big science
foundations gave him all the support he needed. So now we have to tidy the place up
every six months for a lot of fossils who call themselves an inspection committee.
I’ve heard the Prof say it was much more fun in the old days.”

That might be true, thought Johnny. But it looked as if it was still a lot of fun
now—and he intended to share it.

The hydrofoil launch
Flying Fish
came scudding out of the west at fifty knots, making the crossing from the Australian
mainland in two hours. When she was near the Dolphin Island reef, she retracted her
huge water skis, settled down like a conventional boat, and finished her journey at
a sedate ten knots.

Johnny knew that she was in sight when the whole population of the island started
to migrate down to the jetty. He followed out of curiosity, and stood watching on
the beach as the white-painted launch came cautiously down the channel blasted through
the coral.

Professor Kazan, wearing a spotlessly white tropical suit and a wide-brimmed hat,
was the first ashore. He was warmly greeted by a reception committee in which technicians,
fishermen, clerical staff, and children were all mixed up together. The island community
was extremely democratic, everyone regarding himself as the equal of everyone else.
But Professor Kazan, as Johnny soon discovered, was in a class of his own, and the
islanders treated him with a curious mixture of respect, affection, and pride.

Johnny also discovered that if you came down to the beach to watch the
Flying Fish
arrive, you were expected to help unload her. For the next hour, he assisted an impressive
flow of parcels and packing cases on its way from boat to “Stores.” The job had just
been finished, and he was having a welcome cool drink, when the public address system
asked him if he would kindly report to Tech Block as soon as possible.

When he arrived, he was shown into a large room full of electronic equipment. Professor
Kazan and Dr. Keith were sitting at an elaborate control desk, and took no notice
of him at all. Johnny didn’t mind; he was too fascinated at what was going on.

A strange series of sounds, repeated over and over again, was coming from a loud-speaker.
It was like the dolphin noises that Johnny had already heard, but there was a subtle
difference. After about a dozen repeats, he realized what this was. The sounds had
been slowed down considerably, to allow sluggish human ears to appreciate their fine
details.

But this was not all. Each time the string of dolphin noises came from the speaker,
it also appeared as a pattern of light and shade on a large television screen. The
pattern of bright lines and dark bands looked like a kind of map, and though it meant
nothing to Johnny’s untrained eye, it obviously conveyed a good deal to the scientists.
They watched it intently every time it flashed on the screen, and occasionally they
adjusted controls that brightened some areas and darkened others.

Suddenly, the Professor noticed Johnny, turned off the sound, and swiveled around
in his seat. However, he did not switch off the picture, which continued flashing
silently and steadily with such hypnotic rhythm that Johnny’s eyes kept coming back
to it.

All the same, he made the most of this first opportunity of studying Professor Kazan.
The scientist was a plump, gray-haired man in his late fifties; he had a kindly but
rather distant expression, as if he wanted to be friends with everyone, yet preferred
to be left with his own thoughts. As Johnny was to discover, he could be excellent
company when he relaxed, but at other times he would seem to be somewhere else altogether,
even when he was talking to you. It was not that he bore much resemblance to the “absent-minded
professor” of the popular imagination; no one could be less absent-minded than Professor
Kazan when it came to dealing with practical matters. He seemed to be able to operate
on two levels at once: part of his mind would be coping with the affairs of everyday
life, and another part would be wrestling with some profound scientific problem. No
wonder, therefore, that he often appeared to be listening to some inner voice that
no one else could hear.

“Sit down, Johnny,” he began. “Dr. Keith radioed about you while I was over on the
mainland. I suppose you realize just how lucky you’ve been?”

“Yes, sir,” answered Johnny, with considerable feeling.

“We’ve known for centuries that dolphins sometimes help humans to shore—in fact, such
legends go back for over two thousand years, though no one took them very seriously
until our time. But you weren’t merely pushed to land; you were carried a hundred
miles.

“On top of that, you were brought directly to
us
. But why? This is what we’d very much like to know. I don’t suppose you have any
ideas?”

Johnny was flattered by the question, but could do little to answer it.

“Well,” he said slowly, “they must have known that you were working with dolphins,
though I can’t imagine how they found out.”

“That’s easy to answer,” Dr. Keith interjected. “The dolphins we’ve released must
have told them. Remember, Johnny recognized five of them from photographs I showed
him when he first arrived.”

Professor Kazan nodded.

“Yes—and that gives us some valuable information. It means that the coastal species
we work with and their deep-sea cousins speak the same language. We didn’t know
that
before.”

“But we’re still in the dark about their motives,” said Dr. Keith. “If wild dolphins
that have never had any direct contact with men go to all this trouble, it suggests
that they want something from us—and want it badly. Perhaps rescuing Johnny meant
something like, ‘We’ve helped you—now help us.’”

“It’s a plausible theory,” agreed Professor Kazan. “But we won’t find the answer by
talking. There’s only one way to discover what Johnny’s friends were driving at—and
that’s to ask them.”

“
If
we can find them.”

“Well, if they really want something, they won’t be too far away. We may be able to
contact them without leaving this room.”

The Professor threw a switch, and once more the air was full of sound. But this time,
Johnny soon realized, he was not listening to the voice of a single dolphin, but to
all the voices of the sea.

It was an incredibly complex mixture of hissings and cracklings and rumblings. Mingled
with these, there were chirps that might have been made by birds, faint and distant
moans, and the murmur of a million waves.

They listened for several minutes to this fascinating medley of noises; then the Professor
turned another switch on the huge machine.

“That was Hydrophone West,” he explained to Johnny. “Now we’ll try Hydro East. It’s
in deeper water, right off the edge of the Reef.”

The sound picture changed; the noise of the waves was fainter, but the moanings and
creakings from the unknown creatures of the sea were much louder. Once more the Professor
listened for several minutes, then he switched to North, and finally to South.

“Run the tapes through the analyzer, will you?” he asked Dr. Keith. “But I’d be willing
to bet, even now, that there’s no large school of dolphins within twenty miles.”

“In that case, bang goes my theory.”

“Not necessarily; twenty miles is nothing to dolphins. And they’re hunters, remember,
so they can’t stay in one place. They have to follow their food wherever it goes.
The school that rescued Johnny would soon vacuum clean all the fish off our reef.”

The Professor rose to his feet, then continued:

“I’ll leave you to run the analysis; it’s time I went down to the pool. Come along,
Johnny, I want you to meet some of my best friends.”

As they walked toward the beach, the Professor seemed to fall into a reverie. Then
he startled Johnny by suddenly and skillfully producing a string of rapidly modulated
whistles.

He laughed at Johnny’s surprised expression.

“No human being will ever speak fluent Dolphin,” he said, “but I can make a fair attempt
at a dozen of the commoner phrases. I have to keep working at them, though, and I’m
afraid my accent’s pretty terrible. Only dolphins that know me well can understand
what I’m trying to say. And sometimes I think they’re just being polite.”

The Professor unlocked the gate to the pool, and then carefully locked it behind him.

“Everyone wants to play with Susie and Sputnik, but I can’t allow it,” he explained.
“At least, not while I’m trying to teach them English.”

Susie was a sleek, excited matron of some three hundred pounds, who reared herself
half out of the water as they approached. Sputnik, her nine-month-old son, was more
reserved, or perhaps more shy; he kept his mother between himself and the visitors.

“Hello, Susie,” said the Professor, speaking with exaggerated clarity. “Hello, Sputnik.”
Then he pursed his lips and let fly with that complicated whistle. Something went
wrong halfway through, and he swore softly under his breath before going back to start
afresh.

Susie thought this was very funny. She gave several yelps of dolphin laughter, then
squirted a jet of water at her visitors, though she was polite enough to miss them.
Then she swam up to the Professor, who reached into his pocket and produced a plastic
bag full of titbits.

He held one piece high in the air, whereupon Susie backed away a few yards, came shooting
out of the water like a rocket, took the food neatly from the Professor’s fingers,
and dived back into the pool with scarcely a splash. Then she emerged again and said
distinctly, “Thank you, ’fessor.”

She was obviously waiting for more, but Professor Kazan shook his head.

“No, Susie,” he said, patting her on the back. “No more; food-time soon.”

She gave a snort that seemed to express disgust, then went racing around the pool
like a motor boat, clearly showing off.

As Sputnik followed her, the Professor said to Johnny:

“See if you can feed him—I’m afraid he doesn’t trust me.”

Johnny took the titbit, which smelled to high heaven of fish, oil, and chemicals.
It was, he found later, the dolphin equivalent of tobacco or candy. The Professor
had concocted it only after years of research; the animals loved the stuff so much
that they would do almost anything to earn some.

Johnny knelt at the edge of the pool and waved the bait.

“Sputnik!” he called. “Here, Sputnik!”

The little dolphin reared out of the water and regarded him doubtfully. It looked
at its mother, it looked at Professor Kazan and then again at Johnny. Though it appeared
tempted, it would not approach him; instead, it gave a snort and promptly submerged,
after which it started tearing around in the depths of the pool. It did not seem to
be going anywhere in particular; like some human beings who cannot make up their minds,
it was simply galloping off in all directions.