by James Wade
“We’ve done a lot of work, following up Lilly’s leads, in recording and analyzing the sounds these beasts make, both under water and in the air: clicks, bleats, whistles, a wide gamut of noises—some of them above the sound spectrum audible to humans. We’ve taped these sounds, coded them, and fed them into computers, but no pattern of language has emerged, outside of certain very obvious signals for pain, distress, mating—signals many kinds of animals make, but which can’t be called real language. And although dolphins will sometimes mimic human speech with a startling clarity, it usually seems to be mere parroting, without real understanding.
“Yet at the same time, our encephalographs show patterns of electrical output in dolphin brains similar to those that occur during human speech, and in parts of the brain analogous to our speech centers^all this while no vocalization of any kind is going on, subsonic or supersonic, airborne or waterborne.
“This led me to a theory that the basic means of dolphin communication may be telepathic, and the conviction that we’ll never get in touch with them any other way.”
I was somewhat taken aback. “Do you have a telepathically sensitive and experienced person on the staff, or are you going to hire such a person?” I queried.
“Even better than that,” rapped Dr. Wilhelm triumphantly, his twin- moon spectacles jiggling with emphasis. “We have a person sensitive and experienced over many months with the animals themselves—someone who knows how dolphins think, feel, and react; someone who has lived with dolphins so closely that she might almost be accepted among them as a dolphin herself.”
“He means me, Mr. Dorn.” Through an open door leading to a dusky hallway stepped the lithe figure of a woman.
III
Glancing sidelong at her across the candlelit dinner table an hour later, I decided that Josephine was striking but not beautiful. Fairly young, with a trim figure, she missed real distinction due to the muddy coloring and rather swarthy texture of her skin, and especially the staring protuberance of her eyes.
Nor was her manner entirely prepossessing. Her melodramatic entrance of Dr. Wilhelm’s office that afternoon I could forgive, even with its implication that she had been listening outside for some time. In subsequent conversation she had proved as much a monomaniac as her employer on the subject of their experiments, and with far less sense of humor—a fitting Trilby to Wilhelm’s benign, avuncular Svengali.
“But of course,” she was addressing me over our coffee, “you know all the old Greek and Roman stories about dolphins, Mr. Dorn. How they herded fish to help fishermen, saved drowning persons, and sometimes even fell in love with attractive boys and carried them off to sea on their backs. There’s a long history of friendly relations between our species, even though the latter type incident seems based on—shall we say, a misunderstanding?”
“I don’t know about that, Miss Gilman,” I riposted. "From what I've seen in California already, some of our modern youth would try anything once.”
“Surf, sand, and sex,” Dr. Wilhelm interjected, like a slogan. “I know what you mean. We have some of that type camped out down the beach tight now, just south around the bend. Hippies, they call themselves these days. But to get back to dolphins, a more intelligent species. I’m not entirely sure that their good ‘PR’, so to speak, through the ages really rings true,” Wilhelm continued. “Sometimes I even imagine it resembles the way superstitious people used to refer to the fairies and trolls as ‘the Good Folk’ to flatter them, out of fear of what they might do. So we get the modern nursery rhyme and Walt Disney-type of fairy instead of the hidden troll races, the menacing, stunted, displaced hill-dwellers that were their real origin.”
Josephine picked up her coffee cup and daintily shrugged, as if to express disagreement.
“No, Jo, there’s something to it,” Wilhelm insisted, getting up and lumbering over to a big bookcase in the shadowed corner of the room. “Let me give you an example from a non-Western tradition.” He searched for a book on one of the upper shelves.
“Sir Arthur Grimble was a colonial governor in the Gilbert Islands not so long ago. He visited an atoll called—what was it?—Butaritari, where there was supposed to be a man who could call dolphins.” Wilhelm located the book he sought and fumbled it open.
“Grimble writes, let’s see, here it is: ‘His spirit went out of his body in a dream; it sought out the porpoise folk in their homes under the western horizon and invited them to a dance, with feasting, in Kuma village. If he spoke the words of the invitation aright (and very few had the secret of them) the porpoises would follow him with cries of joy to the surface.’
“Well, Grimble had him try it. The place was dead quiet that afternoon under the palm trees, the way he describes it, and the children had been gathered in under the thatches; the women were absorbed in plaiting garlands of flowers, and the men were silently polishing their ceremonial ornaments of shell. The makings of a feast lay ready in baskets. Suddenly—wait till I find it—'a strangled howl burst from the dreamer’s hut. He dashed into the open and stood a while clawing at the air,’ says Grimble, and ‘whining on a queer high note like a puppy’s. The words came out “Teiraki! Teiraki!”, which means “Arise! Arise!” Our friends from the west Let us go down and greet them.’
“A roar went up from the village, and everyone rushed over to the beach on the atoll’s ocean side. They strung themselves out and splashed through the shallows, all wearing the garlands woven that afternoon. Breast deep the porpoises appeared, ‘gamboling toward us at a fine clip.’ Everyone was screaming hard. When the porpoises reached the edge of the reef they slackened speed, spread out, and started cruising back and forth in front of the human line. Then suddenly they vanished."
Dr. Wilhelm brought the book to the table, sat down, and finished his remaining coffee. “Grimble thought they had gone away. But in a moment the dreamer pointed downward, muttering, ‘The King out of the West comes to greet me.’ There, not ten yards away, was the great shape of a porpoise, ‘poised like a glimmering shadow in the glass-green water. Behind it followed a whole dusky flotilla of them.’
“The porpoises seemed to be hung in a trance. Their leader came slowly to the caller’s legs. As we approached the emerald shallows, the keels of the creatures began to take the sand: They flapped gently, as if asking for help. The men leaned down to throw their arms around the great barrels and ease them over the ridges. They showed no sign of alarm. It was as if their single wish was to get to the beach.’
‘“When the water stood only thigh deep, the men crowded around the porpoises, ten or more to each beast. Then “Lift!” shouted the dreamer, and the ponderous black shapes were half dragged, half carried, unresisting, to the lip of the tide. There they settled down, those beautiful, dignified shapes, utterly at peace, while all hell broke loose around them.’”
Wilhelm’s glasses caught the twin candle flames from the table; his eyes were impossible to see. Was this wild account, I found myself wondering, the real basis for his belief in the possibility of man’s telepathic communication with dolphins?
“Men, women, and children,” he continued, “leaping and posturing with shrieks that tore the sky, stripped off their garlands and flung them around the still bodies, in a sudden and dreadful fury of boastfulness and derision. ‘My mind,’ says Grimble, ‘still shrinks from that last scene—the raving humans, the beasts so triumphantly at rest.’ There, what do you think of that?” He closed the book.
"It seems,” I responded, “that the islanders made the dolphins the object of some sort of religious ritual, and that the dolphins enjoyed the proceedings. Sounds like something our hippie neighbors might go in for.”
“You’re wrong about that part,” Josephine told me solemnly. “Those people out on the beach there hate the dolphins. Either that, or they’re afraid of them.”
IV
The next morning dawned damp and cloudy. As I breakfasted in the glass-enclosed patio outside my quarters, which overlooked the surging gr
ay- green waves of the Pacific across a narrow stretch of sand, I saw Dr. Wilhelm sauntering along the beach on what seemed a morning constitutional. Suddenly I was aware that he was not alone; slogging across the sand to meet him came a fantastic figure: a booted, bearded, fur-clad man with bulbous features and tangled masses of hair surmounted by a big, bright red beret—a coarse caricature, he appeared to me, of the well known bust of the composer Wagner. One of the hippies!
Some impulse, perhaps simple curiosity, moved me to bolt down the eggs and toast which the early-arriving housekeeper had brought me on a tray, and to rush out onto the beach through the storm door of my entryway and join that strange colloquy shaping up under the striated silver-gray clouds as Wilhelm closed with his odd visitor.
My employer’s stance seemed brusque and unfriendly as he listened to whatever the bearded man was saying to him. I slowed and approached the pair, as if on a casual stroll; until I came up to them, all I could hear was the sibilance of surf hissing over the sand almost at our feet.
“Good morning, Mr. Dorn,” Wilhelm snapped, obviously not pleased to see me. “Perhaps you ought to meet Mr. Alonzo Waite, since he’s our neighbor. Mr. Waite is the high priest, or whatever he calls himself, of that hippie bunch down the way.”
“I call myself nothing,” the other responded quickly. “My disciples have awarded me the title of guru, or spiritual leader, since I have spent more time in mystic exercises than they. But I neither seek nor accept any preeminence among them. We are all fellow pilgrims on the sacred quest for truth." His voice was hollow, deep, strangely impressive; and his words, while eccentric, seemed more urbanely civilized than I had expected.
“All very well, perhaps,” Wilhelm put in testily, “but your quest for truth seems determined to interfere with mine.”
“I am simply warning you, as I have warned you before, that your work with the dolphins is potentially very dangerous, to yourselves and others. You should give up these studies and release the beasts before great harm results.”
“And on what evidence do you base this remarkable prophecy?” Wilhelm inquired acidly. “Tell Mr. Dorn; I’ve heard all this before.”
Waite’s cavernous voice descended even deeper. “As you may know, the League for Spiritual Discovery has been working with mind-expanding substances—not drugs, in the proper sense—that produce intuitions and perceptions unattainable to the ordinary brain. We are not of that group, but we too claim that such states are true ecstatic trances, comparable or superior to those that have always played such a vital part in all the Eastern religions, and which modern science would do well to recognize and investigate.”
“This is more Mr. Dorn’s field than mine,” Wilhelm said uneasily. “He’s in parapsychology. I know nothing about such matters, but none of this sounds at all plausible to me.”
“But what has all this to do with dolphins?” I asked the bearded guru. “Our dreams and visions lately have been troubled by the presence of great, white, menacing shapes, cutting across and blocking out the sacred color patterns and animated mandalas that lead us to greater spiritual understanding,” Waite boomed. "These are vibrations emanating from the creatures you have penned here, which you call dolphins, but which we know by an older name. These creatures are evil, strong and evil. As your experiments have progressed, so have the disturbing manifestations intensified. These vibrations are terribly destructive, not only mentally but physically. For your own good, I warn you to desist before it is too late.”
“If what we’re doing upsets your pipe dreams,” Wilhelm remarked with ill-concealed contempt, “why don’t you move elsewhere and get out of range?”
The tall, bearded man blinked and gazed into the distance. “We must remain and concentrate our psychic powers on combating the evil vibrations,” he said quietly. “There are certain spiritual exercises and ceremonies we can undertake that may help curb or deflect the danger for a while. In fact, we are planning such a ceremony for tonight. But the only sure way to safety is for you to release these ancient, wickedly wise creatures, and to give up your experiment.”
Waite stood solemnly staring out to sea, a grotesque, foreboding and somehow dignified figure in his oversized beret and flapping fur robe.
V
“A scene right out of a Hollywood science fiction thriller,” Wilhelm muttered angrily as he led me through the barn-like, high-ceilinged main laboratory and out a rear door. He couldn’t seem to get the encounter on the beach out of his mind, and it bothered him more than I could well understand. As for me, I had put Waite down as just a typical California nut, though more intelligent than most, and doubted that we would have any real trouble with him.
“You’ve seen our sound recording equipment, both atmospheric and underwater,” Wilhelm said, finally changing the subject. “Now you must see where most of it is used, and where your own work will be concentrated.” The back of the lab looked out over the beach; near the water’s edge stood a smaller windowless structure—long, low, and plastered with white cement like the others. Wilhelm led the way to it and opened its single heavy metal door with a key from his pocket.
The inside was taken up mostly by a sunken tank that resembled a small indoor swimming pool. The narrow verge that surrounded the tank on three sides was cluttered with electrical control panels, head sets, and other paraphernalia connected with the main tape recording and computer banks in the big lab. The ocean side of the building consisted mostly of a sort of sea gate that could be opened on a cove communicating with the ocean itself, as I learned later, so that the water might be cleaned and freshened at need. Harsh fluorescent lamps played over the glittering surface of the pool, sending rippling whorls of reflected light into every corner of the room; there was a low hissing sound from the steam radiators run by thermostats that kept both the air and water temperatures constant and controllable.
None of this attracted my immediate attention, for here I was at last confronted with the subject of the experiment itself: A lithe, bulky, yet graceful shape—mottled gray above, dirty white below, with a long sawtoothed snout and deep-set, intelligent eyes—hung motionless in the shallow water on its slowly fanning flippers.
And not alone, for the dolphin shared its pool with Josephine, clad in a bright red bathing suit that set off her striking figure in an arresting manner. Indeed, I found myself staring more intently at Josephine than at her aquatic companion.
“Hi.” Josephine’s greeting was bland, but suggested a veiled irony, as if she were conscious of my covert gaze.
“Jo has been more or less living in this pool for the last two and a half months,” Dr. Wilhelm explained. “The purpose is to get into complete rapport with Flip—that’s the dolphin—and encourage any attempts at communication on his part.”
“Flip,” Josephine interjected, “is short for Flipper, of course, the dolphin hero of that old movie and TV series that was the first sign of popular awareness of the animal’s intelligence.”
Jo laughed, heaving herself adroitly onto the tiled edge of the pool. “The show was just a seagoing Lassie, of course.” She reached out for and wrapped herself snugly within a heavy terrycloth towel. “Anybody for coffee? It’s a bit chilly today for these early morning aquatics.”
As Jo served coffee from a sideboard silex, Wilhelm was priming me with data on Flip.
“He’s a prime specimen of Tursiops truncata, though a bit smaller than average—about six and a half feet, actually. The brain weighs an average of 1700 grams, 350 grams more than the human brain, with comparable density of cell count.
“We’ve had this fellow for over a year now, and though he’ll make every noise they’re noted for—barks, grunts, clicks and scrapes and whistles—and even mimic human speech, we can’t dope out a language pattern. Yet they must talk to each other. My first interest in delphinology was aroused by a report on sonar charts that Navy boats made near Ponape in the South Pacific. The charts showed orderly discipline in their undersea movements over a distance
amounting to miles, and something more: a pattern or formation of mathematically precise movements that suggests either elaborate play or some sort of ritual.”
“Maybe,” I interrupted facetiously, “they were practicing for the ceremony that so impressed Gov. Grimble.”
“Anyway,” said Jo, putting aside her cup and straightening a strap on her bathing suit, “in ten weeks I haven’t gotten to first base with Flip here, and now you’re supposed to get us onto the proper wave length. Also, you’ll have to provide some hints about what to look for and concentrate on in telepathic communication attempts. Frankly, I don’t put much faith in it, but if Fred wants to try, I’ll cooperate with as few mental reservations as possible.
Remembering a passage from Dr. Lilly’s pioneer book on dolphins, I asked Wilhelm, “Have you implanted electrodes in the beast’s brain for pleasure-stimulus experiments?”
“We’re beyond all that," Wilhelm replied impatiently. “It’s been known for years that they’ll learn the most complex reaction patterns almost immediately to achieve the stimulus, far beyond what any lower animal can manage. Besides, it’s crude—a kind of electrical masturbation, or LSD, like our friends out there on the beach favor. It doesn’t show a proper respect for our basic equality with the dolphin—or his superiority over us, as the case may be.”
While this conversation progressed, my attention was gradually distracted by the animal itself, floating in the pool beside us. It was obviously following our talk, though I assumed without any degree of verbal comprehension. The single visible eye, set in a convoluted socket behind the rather menacing snout, moved from one to the other of us with lively interest. I even caught myself reading human expressions into it: proprietary interest when turned on Josephine, tolerant amusement in regard to Dr. Wilhelm, and toward myself, what? Resentment, animosity, jealousy? What fancies were these I was weaving, under the glaring lights of a scientific laboratory?