Dolphin Island (14 page)

“And you said the Professor was mad!” he exclaimed, when he had got his breath back.
“You aren’t pulling my leg again, are you?” he added suspiciously. By now he could
usually spot one of Mick’s jokes, but this time he seemed to be serious.

Mick shook his head.

“If you don’t believe me, come down to the pool. Oh, I know it sounds crazy, but it’s
really quite safe. The whole thing started by accident: I got careless one day when
I was feeding Snowy, slipped on the edge of the pool, and fell in.”

“Phew!” whistled Johnny. “Bet you thought your last moment had come!”

“I sure did. When I came up, I was looking straight into Snowy’s mouth.” He paused.
“You know, it isn’t true about recalling your past life at moments like this. All
I thought about was those teeth. I wondered if I’d go down in one piece, or whether
she’d bite me in two.”

“And what happened?” asked Johnny breathlessly.

“Well, she
didn’t
bite me in two. She just gave me a gentle nudge with her nose, as if to say, ‘Let’s
be friends.’ And that’s what we’ve been ever since. If I don’t go swimming with her
every day, she gets very upset. Sometimes it’s not easy to manage, because if anyone
sees me, they’ll tell the Prof, and that’ll be the end of it.”

He laughed at Johnny’s expression, which was a mixture of alarm and disapproval.

“It’s a lot safer than lion-taming, and men have been doing that for years. I get
quite a kick out of it, too. Maybe someday I’ll work up to the big whales, like a
hundred-and-fifty ton Blue.”

“Well, at least one of those couldn’t swallow you,” said Johnny, who had learned a
good deal about whales since coming to the island. “Their throats are too small—they
can eat only shrimps and little things like that.”

“All right then—what about a sperm whale—Moby Dick himself?
He
can swallow a thirty-foot squid in one gulp.”

As Mick warmed to his theme, Johnny slowly realized that he was motivated by straightforward
envy. Even now, the dolphins merely tolerated him and never showed any of the affectionate
delight they showered upon Johnny. He felt glad that Mick had at last found a cetacean
friend, but wished it had been a more sensible one.

As it happened, he never had a chance to see Mick and Snowy swimming together, for
Professor Kazan was now ready for his next experiment. He had been working for days,
splicing tapes and composing long sentences in Dolphin; even now he was not certain
whether he could convey the exact meaning he wanted to. He hoped that in the parts
where his translation fell down, the intelligence of the dolphins would bridge the
gap.

He often wondered what they thought of his conversation, built up of words from many
different sources. Each sentence he broadcast into the water must sound as if there
were a dozen or more dolphins, each taking his turn to speak a few words in a different
accent. It must be very puzzling to his listeners, since they could hardly imagine
such things as tape recording and sound-editing. The fact that they made any sense
at all out of his noises was a tribute both to their intelligence and their patience.

As the
Flying Fish
pulled away from her moorings, Professor Kazan was unusually nervous.

“Do you know what I feel like?” he said to Dr. Keith as they stood on the foredeck
together. “It’s as if I’d invited my friends to a party, just to let loose a man-eating
tiger among them.”

“It’s not as bad as that,” laughed Keith. “You’ve given them fair warning, and you
do have the tiger under control.”

“I
hope
,” said the Professor.

Somewhere on board, a loud-speaker announced: “They’re opening the pool gate now.
She doesn’t seem in a hurry to leave.”

Professor Kazan raised a pair of binoculars and stared back at the island.

“I don’t want Saha to control her until we have to,” he said. “Ah, here she comes.”

Snowy was moving down the channel from the pool, swimming very slowly. When the channel
came to an end and she found herself in open water, she seemed quite bewildered and
turned around several times as if finding her bearings. It was a typical reaction
of an animal—or a man—that had spent a long time in captivity and had now been turned
loose into the great outside world.

“Give her a call,” said the Professor. The Dolphin “COME HERE!” signal went out through
the water; even if the phrase was not the same in Snowy’s own language, it was one
of those that she understood. She began to swim toward the
Flying Fish
and kept up with the boat as it drew away from the island, heading out for the deeper
water beyond the reef.

“I want plenty of room to maneuver,” said Professor Kazan. “And I’m sure Einar, Peggy,
and Co., would prefer it that way—just in case they have to run.”

“
If
they come. Perhaps they’ll have more sense,” Dr. Keith answered doubtfully.

“Well, we’ll know in a few minutes. The broadcast has been going out all morning,
so every dolphin for miles around must have heard it.”

“Look!” said Keith suddenly, pointing to the west. Half a mile away, a small school
of dolphins was swimming parallel to the ship’s course. “There are your volunteers,
and it doesn’t look as if they’re in a hurry to come closer.”

“This is where the fun begins,” muttered the Professor. “Let’s join Saha up on the
bridge.”

The radio equipment that sent out the signals to the box on Snowy’s head, and received
her brain impulses in return, had been set up near the wheel. This made the
Flying Fish
’s little bridge very crowded, but direct contact between skipper Stephen Nauru and
Dr. Saha was essential. Both men knew exactly what to do, and Professor Kazan had
no intention of interfering, except in case of emergency.

“Snowy’s spotted them,” whispered Keith.

There was no doubt of that. Gone now was the uncertainty she had shown when first
released; she began to move like a speedboat, leaving a foaming wake behind her as
she headed straight for the dolphins.

Understandably, they scattered. With a guilty twinge, the Professor wondered just
what they were thinking about him at this moment, that is, if they were thinking of
anything except Snowy.

She was only thirty feet from one sleek, plump dolphin when she shot into the air,
landed with a crash in the water, and lay there motionless, shaking her head in an
almost human manner.

“Two volts, central punishment area,” said Dr. Saha, taking his finger off the button.
“Wonder if she’ll try it again?”

The dolphins, doubtless surprised and impressed by the demonstration, had re-formed
a few hundred yards away. They, too, were motionless in the water, with their heads
all turned watchfully toward their ancient enemy.

Snowy was getting over her shock and beginning to move once more. This time she swam
quite slowly and did not head toward the dolphins at all. It was some time before
the watchers understood her tactics.

She was swimming in a wide circle, with the still motionless dolphins at its center.
One had to look closely to see that the circle was slowly contracting.

“Thinks she can fool us, does she?” said Professor Kazan admiringly. “I expect she’ll
get as close as she dares, pretending she’s not interested, and then make a dash for
it.”

This was exactly what she did do. The fact that the dolphins stood their ground for
so long was an impressive proof of their confidence in their human friends, and yet
another demonstration of the amazing speed at which they learned. It was seldom necessary
to tell a dolphin anything twice.

The tension grew as Snowy spiraled inward, like an old-time phonograph pickup tracking
in toward the spindle. She was only forty feet from the nearest, and bravest, dolphin
when she made her bid.

A killer whale can accelerate at an unbelievable speed. But Dr. Saha was ready, his
finger only a fraction of an inch from the button. Snowy didn’t have a chance.

She was an intelligent animal—not quite as intelligent as her would-be victims, but
almost in the same class. She knew that she was beaten. When she had recovered from
the second shock, she turned her back on the dolphins and started to swim directly
away from them. As she did so, Dr. Saha’s finger darted toward his panel once more.

“Hey, what are you up to?” asked the
Flying Fish
’s skipper, who had been watching all this with disapproval. Like his nephew Mick,
he did not care to see Snowy pushed around. “Isn’t she doing what you want?”

“I’m not punishing her—I’m rewarding her,” explained Dr. Saha. “As long as I keep
this button down, she’s having a perfectly wonderful time, because I’m putting a few
volts into the pleasure centers of her brain.”

“I think that’s enough for one day,” Professor Kazan said. “Send her back to the pool—she’s
earned her lunch.”

“The same thing tomorrow, Professor?” asked the skipper as the
Flying Fish
headed for home.

“Yes, Steve—the same every day. But I’ll be surprised if we have to keep it up for
more than a week.”

In fact, after only three days it was obvious that Snowy had learned her lesson. It
was no longer necessary to punish her, only to reward her with short spells of electrical
ecstasy. The dolphins lost their fears equally fast, and at the end of a week, they
and Snowy were completely at ease with each other. They would hunt around the reef
together, sometimes co-operating to trap a school of fish, sometimes foraging independently.
A few of the younger dolphins even started their usual horseplay around Snowy, who
showed neither annoyance nor uncontrollable hunger when they bumped against her.

On the seventh day, Snowy was not steered back to her pool after her morning romp
with the dolphins.

“We’ve done all we can,” said the Professor. “I’m going to turn her loose.”

“Isn’t that taking a risk?” objected Dr. Keith.

“Of course it is, but we’ve got to take it sooner or later. Unless we let her run
wild again, we’ll never know how well her conditioning will last.”

“And if she does make a snack of a few dolphins—what then?”

“The rest of them will tell us, soon enough. Then we’ll go out and round her up again.
She’ll be easy to locate with that radio pack she’s carrying.”

Stephen Nauru, who had been listening to the conversation as he stood at
Flying Fish
’s wheel, looked back over his shoulder and asked the question that was worrying everybody.

“Even if you turned Snowy into a vegetarian, what about the other millions of the
beasts?”

“We mustn’t be impatient, Steve,” answered the Professor. “I’m still only collecting
information, and none of this may ever be the slightest use to man or dolphin. But
I’m certain of one thing—the whole talkative dolphin world must know of this experiment
by now, and they’ll realize that we’re doing our best for them. A good bargaining
point for your fishermen.”

“Hmm—I hadn’t thought of that one.”

“Anyway, if this works with Snowy, I’ve a theory that we need condition only a few
killers in any one area. And only females—they’ll teach their mates and their offspring
that if you eat a dolphin, you’ll get the most horrible headache.”

Steve was not convinced. Had he realized the tremendous, irresistible power of electric
brain stimulation, he might have been more impressed.

“I still don’t think one vegetarian could make a tribe of cannibals mend their ways,”
he said.

“You may be quite right,” answered the Professor. “That’s what I want to find out.
Even if the job’s possible at all, it may be worth doing. And even if it’s worth doing,
it may take several lifetimes. But one has to be an optimist; don’t you remember the
history of the twentieth century?”

“Which bit of it?” asked Steve. “There was rather a lot.”

“The only bit that really matters. Fifty years ago, a great many people refused to
believe that all the
human
nations could live in peace. Well, we know that they were wrong; if they’d been right,
you and I wouldn’t be here. So don’t be too pessimistic about this project.”

Suddenly, Steve burst into laughter.

“Now what’s so funny?” asked the Professor.

“I was just thinking,” said Steve, “that it’s been thirty years since they had an
excuse for awarding the Nobel Peace Prize. If this plan of yours comes off, you’ll
be in the running.”

While Professor Kazan experimented and dreamed, forces were gathering in the Pacific
that cared nothing for the hopes and fears either of men or of dolphins. Mick and
Johnny were among the first to glimpse their power, one moonless night out on the
reef.

As usual, they were hunting for crayfish and rare shells, and this time Mick had acquired
a new tool to help him. It was a watertight flashlight, somewhat larger than normal,
and when Mick switched it on, it produced a very faint blue glow.

But it also produced a powerful beam of ultraviolet light, invisible to the human
eye. When this fell upon many varieties of corals and shells, they seemed to burst
into fire, blazing with fluorescent blues and golds and greens in the darkness. The
invisible beam was a magic wand, revealing objects that were otherwise hidden and
that could not be seen even by ordinary light. Where the sand had been disturbed by
a burrowing mollusk, for example, the ultraviolet beam betrayed the tiny furrow—and
Mick had another victim.

Underwater, the effect was astonishing. When the boys dived in the coral pools near
the edge of the reef, the dim blue light sliced ahead for fantastic distances. They
could see corals fluorescing a dozen yards away, like stars or nebulae in the deeps
of space. The natural luminosity of the sea, beautiful and striking though it was,
could not compare with this.

Fascinated by their wonderful new toy, Mick and Johnny dived longer than they had
intended. When they prepared to go home, they found that the weather had changed.