That was nice to know; Johnny wondered how long it would take a shark to chew through the two inches of foam-and-Fiberglas in Mick's board, if it really tried.
But with Susie and Sputnik as escorts, there was no danger from sharks; indeed, they hardly ever saw one. The presence of the two dolphins gave them a wonderful sense of security, such as no diver in the open sea could ever have felt before. Sometimes Susie and Sputnik were joined by Einar and Peggy, and once a school of at least fifty dolphins accompanied them on one of their swims. This was too much of a good thing, for the water was so crowded that visibility was almost zero; but Johnny could not bring himself to hurt their feelings by pressing the GO button.
He had swum often enough in the shallow pools on the great coral plateau around the island, but to dive off the reefs outer edge was a much more awe-inspiring experience. The water was sometimes so clear that Johnny felt he was floating in mid-air, with no means of support. He could look down and see absolutely nothing between himself and a jagged coral landscape forty feet below, and he had to keep reminding himself that it was impossible to fall.
In some areas the great fringing reef around the island ended sharply in an almost vertical wall of coral. It was fascinating to sink slowly down the face of this wall, surprising the gorgeously colored fish that lived in its cracks and recesses. At the end of a dive, Johnny would try to identify the most striking of the reef butterflies in the Institute's reference books, but he usually found that they had no popular names, only unpronounceable Latin ones. Almost everywhere one might run into isolated boulders and pinnacles, rising suddenly out of the sea bed and reaching almost to the surface. Mick called these "bommies," and sometimes they reminded Johnny of the carved rock formations in the Grand Canyon. These, however, had not been shaped by the forces of erosion; they had grown into their present forms, for they were the accumulated skeletons of countless coral animals. Only the thin surface was now alive, over a massive core of dead limestone weighing many tons, and ten or twenty feet high. When the underwater visibility was poor, as was sometimes the case after a storm or rain shower, it was startling to come across one of these stone monsters looming suddenly out of the mist.
Many of them were riddled with caves, and these caves were always inhabited; it was not a good idea to enter them until you had discovered who was at home. It might be a moray eel, constantly snapping his hideous jaws; it might be a family of friendly but dangerous scorpion fish, waving their poison-tipped spines like a bundle of turkey feathers; and if the cave was a large one, it would usually be a rock cod, or grouper. Some of these were much bigger than Johnny, but they were quite harmless and backed nervously away when he approached them.
In a surprisingly short time he grew to recognize individual fish and to know where to find them. The groupers never strayed far from their own particular caves, and Johnny soon began to look on some of them as personal friends. One scarred veteran had a fishhook embedded in his lower lip, with a piece of line still hanging from it. Despite his unfortunate experience with mankind, he was not unfriendly and even allowed Johnny to come close enough to stroke him.
The groupers, the morays, the scorpion fish-these were the permanent residents of the submarine landscape that Johnny was beginning to know and love. But sometimes there would be unexpected and exciting visitors swimming in from deeper water. It was part of the reefs attraction that you never knew what you would meet on any given dive, even in an area that you had visited a dozen times before and knew like the proverbial back of your hand.
Sharks were, of course, the commonest prowlers of the reef. Johnny never forgot the first he met, one day when he and Mick had given their escorts the slip by going out an hour earlier than usual. He never saw it coming; it was suddenly there, a gray, superbly streamlined torpedo, moving slowly and effortlessly toward him. It was so beautiful and so graceful that it was impossible to think of it as dangerous. Not until it had approached to within twenty feet did Johnny look around anxiously for Mick. He was relieved to find his friend snorkling immediately above him, eying the situation calmly but with loaded spear gun at the ready.
The shark, like almost all sharks, was merely inquisitive. It looked Johnny over with its cold, staring eyes-so different from the friendly, intelligent eyes of the dolphins -and swerved off to the right when it was ten feet away. Johnny had a perfect view of the pilot fish swimming in front of its nose, and the remora, or sucker fish, clamped onto its back-an ocean-going hitchhiker, using his suction pad to give him a free ride through life.
There was nothing that a diver could do about sharks, except to watch out for them and to leave them alone, in the hope that they would do the same to him. If you faced up to them, they would always go away. But if you lost your nerve and tried to run-well, anyone who was stupid enough to run deserved little sympathy, for a shark could swim thirty miles per hour to a skin-diver's three, without even exerting himself.
More unnerving than any sharks were the packs of barracuda that roamed along the edge of the reef. Johnny was very glad that the surfboard was floating overhead the first time he discovered that the water around him was full of the silver sea pike, with their hostile eyes and aggressive, underslung jaws. They were not very large-three feet long at the most-but there were hundreds of them, and they formed a circular wall, with Johnny at the center. It was a wall that came closer and closer as the barracuda spiraled in to get a better look at him, until presently he could see nothing but their glittering bodies. Though he waved his arms and shouted into the water, it made not the slightest difference: they inspected him at their leisure- then, for no reason that he could see, turned suddenly away and disappeared into the blue.
Johnny surfaced, grabbed the board, and held an anxious conference with Mick across it Every few seconds he kept bobbing his head underwater, to see if the wolf pack had returned.
"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 sur
faced, 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, exch
anging 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.
Arthur C Clarke - Dolphin Island Page 9