The Message (11 page)

I
’ve made up my mind what to do with you, Visser Three said.

He rushed at us.

We rushed at him.

Something dark came hurtling up from the ocean floor.

Something dark and long and bigger even than the mardrut.

FWOOOMP!

Visser Three shuddered and stopped dead in the water.

A second dark shape, as fast as the first.

FWOOOMP!

great ones,>
I whispered.

Marco yelled.

There were five of them in the water.

The two big males who had struck first had heads like sledgehammers. Sperm whales. Sixty feet long. Forty-five tons. The weight of twenty cars.

They had dived deep and come tearing up at awesome velocity to slam into the creature from another world’s ocean.

The mardrut was big. The mardrut was strong. But nothing living can survive for long, being slammed by creatures weighing a hundred and thirty thousand pounds.

Then, the whale—my whale, because that’s how I thought of him — began to lash the mardrut with his tail. Hammer blows. Hits that could have knocked walls down. Again and again, as two smaller females joined in and the two sperm whales circled back for another attack.

Visser Three’s cry of pain and fury echoed in my brain.

Jake crowed.

Rachel said.

Marco yelled.

The whales chased him for a while, but they let him go in the end.

Whales are not very good at killing. They don’t really have much of a talent for hating and destroying.

My whale, the big humpback, returned in a few minutes and rested in the water beside me.

I wanted to thank him, but, as I said, whales don’t think in human words or human thoughts. Still, I tried, anyway.

Thanks, big guy.

People who argue about how smart whales are, or whether they are as smart as humans, kind of miss the point. Whales will never read books or build rockets or do algebra. In all those areas, humans are smarter. Humans are the great brains of planet Earth.

But it isn’t necessary to believe whales are as smart as humans to believe that they are great. They don’t have to know words to sing songs. They don’t have to be anything but what they are to be magnificent. And even though I don’t really know what a soul is, I know this—if humans have them, then so do whales.

I wanted to thank him for responding to my call for help. But I had a strange feeling, as he opened his great heart to the dolphin mind that was in my own, that he hadn’t just come in response to me.

I had the feeling — and that’s all it was, a feeling—that in some way the sea itself had called him to respond to the presence of an abomination.

Of course I never told that to Jake or any of the others. They would have laughed. At least, Marco would have.

Ax said.

I said.

So we morphed back to our human bodies, and Ax morphed to his Andalite body, and we crawled up on the whale’s huge back.

I fell asleep. I know that sounds pretty incredible, but I did. I was exhausted. Physically. Emotionally. In every way you can be tired, I was tired.

When I woke up, it was sunset. We were near shore. I could see the beach, and just a little farther down the shore, the mouth of the river.

We were wet, of course, covered with splashing water and the spray from the whale’s blowhole. It was a little cold, especially now that the sun was going down.

But then again, I wasn’t Visser Three’s lunch, so I wasn’t going to complain.

Jake was sitting cross-legged on the whale’s back, smiling at me.

“Some day, huh?” he said.

I smiled. “Yeah.”

“We did it. We saved the Andalite. And we got out alive.”

“Barely,” I said.

“You know something? You were right. You trusted your feelings and we followed you and we’re all safe.”

I nodded. “Yes, I guess so. Only … as Marco would say, let’s not do this again any time soon, okay?”

Jake smiled his slow smile. “It’s fun being a dolphin, though, isn’t it? I know you were worried about it. You know, thinking maybe it wasn’t right and all.”

I shook my head slowly. “I’m still not sure it’s right. But I guess we don’t have much of a choice. The Yeerks started this fight, not us. And after what Ax said … I guess it’s not just about one species, human beings. It’s about all the animals. It’s about all of Earth.”

Jake nodded. “I think if you could ask the dolphins, they would say it’s all right to use them. Since what you’re trying to do is save them.”

“Nah, they would just think it was all a big game. They would never understand.”

We both laughed. Even if they could talk, the dolphins would never really understand what we were so upset about. We knew that better than anyone.

“I guess that’s true,” Jake said. “But we do understand.” He met my gaze. “We do understand what’s at stake. And we’ll do whatever we have to do to win.”

I knew what he was trying to tell me. We’d used the dolphins to save them. We’d used other animals to save them, too. And that made it okay.