"They won't bother you," said Mick reassuringly. "'Cuda are cowards. If you shoot one, all the others will run away."
Johnny was glad to know it and took the next meeting more calmly. All the same, he never felt quite happy when the silver hunters closed in on him, like a fleet of spaceships from an alien world. Perhaps some day, one of them would risk a nibble, and then the whole pack would move in…
There was one serious difficulty about exploring the reef: it was too big. Most of it was far beyond comfortable swimming range, and there were areas out toward the horizon that had never been visited. Often Johnny wished he could have gone farther into unknown territory, but he had been forced to save his strength for the long swim home.
It was on one of these weary return journeys, as he helped Mick to push the surfboard loaded with at least a hundred pounds of fish, that the answer occurred to him.
Mick was skeptical, but agreed that the idea would be splendid—if it worked. "It's not going to be easy," he said, "to make a harness that will fit a dolphin. They're so streamlined that it will slide off them."
"I'm thinking of a kind of elastic collar, just ahead of the flippers. If it's broad enough and tight enough, it should stay on. Let's not talk about it, though—people will only laugh at us."
This was good advice, but impossible to carry out. Everyone wanted to know why they needed sponge rubber, elastic webbing, nylon cord, and oddly shaped pieces of plastic, and they had to confess the truth. There was no hope of carrying out the first trials in secrecy, and Johnny had an embarrassingly large audience when he fitted his harness on Susie.
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.
Chapter 15
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 1960's, 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 even 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."
"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."
/> Chapter 16
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 a 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.
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