Leviathans of Jupiter (19 page)

“Your condition is very serious,” he said, almost accusingly. Then he broke into a dazzling smile. “But we'll take care of you, never fear.”

Deirdre expected to be put through more examinations and scans, but Dr. Mandrill apparently was satisfied with the file from
Australia.
He nodded and muttered to himself as he read Dr. Pohan's report, then finally looked up at Deirdre.

“As long as your friend keeps volunteering his blood, you'll be fine.”

“Dorn,” Deirdre breathed.

“Yes. He's a cyborg, I understand. Interesting case.” Tapping his computer screen, the doctor added, “We're running a series of experiments on him, I see.”

ULTRAHYPERBARIC CHAMBER

The pain was bearable. So far.

Dorn sat alone in the bare, metal-walled chamber. Benches ran along its curved walls, enough room to seat six people. But Dorn was in the chamber alone.

“How do you feel?” The technician's voice coming through the speaker grill in the overhead sounded strangely deep, distorted. It must be the pressure, Dorn told himself.

Aloud, he reported, “Some discomfort in my chest and abdomen.”

His head and body were plastered with sensors, both his metal half and his flesh. Outside the chamber the technicians were monitoring his physical condition: heart rate, breathing, brain wave patterns, electrical conductivity of his wiring, lubrication levels of his servomotors, activity of the digital processors in his prosthetics.

“Can you stand up and walk a few paces, please?”

Dorn got stiffly to his feet and stepped along the narrow aisle between the benches, surprised at how much effort it took. His leg ached; even the prosthetic leg seemed stiff, arthritic.

“Very good. We're going to notch up the pressure slowly. You tell us when you want us to stop.”

Dorn sat down again and gripped the edge of the bench with both his hands. His head began to thrum. It became difficult to draw a breath. The pain ramped upward, slowly but steadily, always worse. Closing his human eye, Dorn sat quietly and took it without complaint.

Suddenly the bench splintered beneath him with an oddly deep crunching noise. Dorn looked down and saw that his prosthetic hand had crushed the plastic.

“That's enough!” the technician's slurred voice bawled. “Take him down.”

They did it slowly, very slowly, but at last the pain eased away entirely. After nearly another hour of sitting alone in the bare, claustrophobic chamber, the hatch creaked open and the chief technician stuck his head in.

“You can come out now, Mr. Dorn. Test's over.”

Dorn got slowly to his feet. He felt a little unsteady. His human leg tingled as if pins and needles were being jabbed into the flesh. Even the prosthetic leg felt balky, stiff, as if somehow its bearings had become infiltrated by grit.

He ducked through the hatch and stepped out onto the laboratory floor. Four technicians were bent over their console screens. Their chief, a round, ruddy-faced man with closely cropped blond hair, gazed at Dorn with unalloyed admiration.

“You took six times normal atmospheric pressure without a peep,” he said, smiling toothily.

“Is that good?” asked Dorn.

“Damned good. Damned good. And that's in air, not the gunk.”

Dorn started to ask what “the gunk” might be, but the tech chief didn't give him time to frame his question.

“Perfluorocarbon,” he explained, still smiling. “They immerse you in the stuff. You breathe it instead of air. Allows you to work in much higher pressures. Much higher.”

Dorn bit back a sardonic reply. Then he remembered that he was expected at the clinic to donate more blood to Deirdre.

*   *   *

Andy Corvus, meanwhile, was swimming lazily in the dolphin pool. Fish glided by him, all the colors of the rainbow, swishing their tails mindlessly. Turning his head slightly, Andy saw through his breathing mask two of the dolphins, big as moving vans, sleek and gray, their mouths curved in perpetual grins. Andy waved to them and they chattered and whistled as they effortlessly swooped past him.

Where's Baby? he wondered. Baby and her parents had been transferred from
Australia
to this tank in the station. It was much bigger than the tank aboard the torch ship: It took Andy nearly a quarter of an hour to swim its full length.

At last he spotted Baby, down near the bottom, nosing among the artificial coral formations there. Got to think in three dimensions, he told himself. The world of humans is a flatland; dolphins live in three dimensions.

“Hello, Baby,” he said inside his mask. The chip-sized computer built into the mask translated his words into a series of high-pitched chirps.

Baby zoomed up toward him, then swam a circle around Corvus, chattering back at him.

“Hello, Andy,” the computer translated. “Good fishing?”

“I'm not hungry,” Corvus said.

“I am.” And Baby flashed away with a flick of her powerful flukes.

Corvus looked around for Baby's parents. The youngster's moving around without them now, he realized. She's growing up. I wonder if dolphins have a teenaged phase, when they rebel against their parents. Or try to. He remembered his own teen years, how ancient and conservative his parents had seemed.

His wristwatch buzzed. The vibration told Corvus that he'd been in the water with the dolphins for three full hours. He sighed inwardly. Time to get out. Time to return to the dry world of his fellow humans.

Reluctantly he swam to the surface. Suddenly Baby was beside him, smoothly spouting and then sucking in a gulp of air. She chattered briefly.

“More fish?” the computer translated.

Corvus smiled inside his face mask. Yep, he replied silently, I'm going to get me some lunch. Maybe the cooks have made some pseudofish today, instead of the usual soyburgers.

Aloud, he said to the young dolphin, “Time to leave, Baby. I'll be back soon.”

It took a moment for the computer to translate his words into clicks. Then Baby replied, “Good hunting, Andy.”

“Good hunting, Baby.”

Corvus was surprised at how physically tired he felt once he'd climbed out of the water and planted his feet on the solid deck that ran the circumference of the huge tank.

Lunch sounds like a good idea, he thought as he slowly pulled off his air tank and stowed it in the locker where he kept his swimming gear. The floor of the deck was porous: The water dripping from his body disappeared as the permeable tiles wicked it up. Corvus showered, toweled off, and pulled on his shapeless coveralls. Deirdre had told him they were olive green and didn't go well with his red hair and fair complexion. The colors meant nothing to him.

He was closing his locker door when he heard voices drifting down the passageway from the direction of the elevators. A woman and a man, he recognized.

Around the curve of the passageway came Dr. Archer and that Mrs. Westfall. Andy instinctively distrusted Katherine Westfall. She had a superior air about her that raised his hackles. Like she thought herself better, more important, than anyone else. Shrugging to himself, he admitted, Well, she sure is more important. But does she have to throw it in your face?

“Ah, Dr. Corvus,” Archer called as they approached. Andy saw that three dark-suited young men trailed behind the pair of them. Westfall's flunkies, he guessed.

“Dr. Archer,” Corvus replied. “And Mrs. Westfall. Hi. How are you?”

Westfall said, “Dr. Archer has been telling me that you can actually talk with the dolphins.” The tone of her voice clearly said she didn't believe it.

“Um, to a limited extent, yes.”

“Really?”

Archer, standing slightly behind Westfall, raised his brows in an expression that looked almost beseeching to Andy. Corvus understood: Don't start an argument with her. Don't let her get under your skin.

Making himself smile for the IAA councilwoman, Corvus said genially, “Would you like to talk with them?”

DOLPHIN TANK

“Me?” Westfall's hazel eyes went wide. “Talk with a dolphin?”

Corvus opened his locker and pulled out his breathing mask. “The translator's built into the mask. You'll have to put it on.”

As she accepted the mask from Corvus's hand, Westfall asked guardedly, “How does it work?”

“We've built up a vocabulary of dolphin sounds and translated some of them into human language. The translator's set for English, but we can switch it to something else, if you like. Spanish, Chinese, a few others.”

“English will be fine,” Westfall said.

“Just slip the mask over your head,” Corvus said, gesturing.

“But how does it work?” she insisted. “I mean, how can you translate the noises those fish make into meaningful human words?”

Corvus glanced at Archer, then focused again on Mrs. Westfall. “In the first place, ma'am, they're not fish. They're mammals, just like you and me. They breathe air. They have brains that are just as complex as our own; a little bigger than ours, actually.”

Archer stepped in. “Over many years we've built up a dictionary of dolphin vocalizations and correlated them with human words. It's been very slow work. The two species live in very different environments.”

“But we're able to talk back and forth,” Corvus said. “At least, a little bit.” With a little chuckle, he explained, “We don't discuss philosophy or any abstract subjects. But we can talk about fish, heat and cold, solid objective things.”

Archer added, “This work goes all the way back to when Dr. Wo was running this station, more than twenty years ago. He believed that learning to communicate with the dolphins would help us learn how to communicate with a completely alien species, such as the Jovian leviathans.”

Westfall looked down at the breathing mask she held in her hands. It was still slightly wet, Corvus saw, but he decided not to take it back and wipe it off.

“Do you really believe that you can have a meaningful dialogue with dolphins?” she asked.

“They're pretty darned smart,” Corvus said. “Of course, we're dealing with tame ones, dolphins that have been raised in captivity. I'll bet the wild ones are even smarter. I mean, they've got to deal with sharks and all, they have to navigate across whole oceans. Lots more problems for them to handle. And they live in bigger family groups, too.”

Westfall seemed to be trying to digest these new ideas. Corvus thought she looked like a kid facing a plate of spinach.

“You don't have to try it if you don't want to,” he said.

That moved her. Without another word Westfall slipped the mask over her tawny hair. Very carefully, Corvus noted. She doesn't want to mess her 'do.

The mask was loose on her face, but Andy thought that it didn't matter as long as she wasn't actually going into the water.

“Now what?” she asked, her voice muffled somewhat by the mask.

Corvus beckoned her to the glassteel wall of the tank, where the fish were swimming by and the dolphins gliding sleekly among them.

“It'll work best if you press the mask against the tank,” he said to Westfall. “That'll conduct the sound better.”

Still looking uncertain, Westfall leaned forward until the mask was firmly against the glassteel. Corvus saw one of the adult dolphins swim toward her, curious. Then he caught sight of Baby, a dozen meters or so deeper.

“Say hello to Baby,” he prompted.

“Hello, Baby,” said Westfall.

The young dolphin chattered and Westfall flinched away from the tank.

“He answered me!” she exclaimed.

“She.”

“Yes. She's a female, isn't she?” Westfall pressed against the glassteel again and asked, “How old are you, Baby?”

Corvus knew that dolphins didn't keep time the way humans did. Baby clicked and chattered.

Westfall said, “She asked me if I've eaten today.”

“Feeding's important to them,” Andy said.

“Ask her where her mother is,” Archer suggested.

“Where's your mother?”

More chattering, and an adult dolphin swam up beside Baby, clicking and whistling.

“That's her mother,” said Westfall.

Corvus watched happily as Baby and Westfall exchanged a few more words. At last the woman stepped back from the tank and pulled the mask off.

“That was…” She seemed to search for a word. “… fascinating.”

Taking the mask from her hands, Andy said, “We're trying to enlarge our vocabulary of dolphin speech. I wish we could get back to Earth and start talking to some of them in their natural habitat.”

“We?” Westfall asked.

With a self-deprecating little smile, Corvus said, “I'm just the tip of the iceberg in this. There's a whole slew of people back at the University of Rome and a half-dozen other research institutions.”

Archer said, “Scripps, Woods Hole, several others.”

Westfall's expression hardened slightly. “But how do you know you're really communicating with them? Mightn't your so-called vocabulary simply be words you've placed as definitions of their noises? Mightn't you be fooling yourselves?”

Shaking his head, Andy countered, “We've done some pretty strict tests. Not just gabbing at each other, but asking the dolphins to find specific objects in the water, asking them to perform some acrobatics. It's a real language and we're getting the hang of it. It's pretty slow, I admit, but we're learning.”

Before Westfall could reply, Archer said, “This work goes back more than twenty years, as I said. Dr. O'Hara was really the pioneer in this area.”

“Elaine O'Hara.” Westfall's expression suddenly turned glacial.

“Lane O'Hara,” Archer said. “She was a fine, wonderful person. Do you know her?”

“I never had the chance to meet her,” Westfall said, her tone dripping acid.

GRANT ARCHER'S OFFICE

Max Yeager felt nervous.