Dolphin Island (17 page)

It was a wonderful moment when he saw the first pale glow of moonrise in the east.
The clouds were still thick, but though he could not see the Moon itself, its reflected
light began to grow around him. It was too faint to show any details; but merely to
see the horizon made a great difference to his peace of mind. Now he could tell with
his own eyes that there were no rocks or reefs ahead. Susie’s underwater senses were
far keener than his straining vision, but at least he was no longer completely helpless.

Now that they were in deeper water, the annoying, choppy wavelets over which the board
had bumped at the beginning of its journey had been left behind. Instead, they were
skimming across long, rolling waves, hundreds of feet from crest to crest. It was
hard to judge their height; from Johnny’s prone position, they doubtless seemed much
bigger than they really were. Half the time, Susie would be climbing up a long, gentle
slope; then the board would hover for an instant on the summit of the moving hill
of water; then there would be the swoop down into the valley—then the whole sequence
would begin again. Johnny had long since learned to adjust himself to the climb and
the swoop, shifting his weight automatically along the board. Like riding a bicycle,
he did it without conscious thought.

Suddenly the Moon’s waning crescent broke through the clouds. For the first time,
Johnny could see the miles of rolling water around him, the great waves marching endlessly
into the night. Their crests gleamed like silver in the moonlight, making their troughs
all the blacker by contrast. The surfboard’s dive down into the dark valleys and its
slow climb to the peaks of the moving hills were a continual switching from night
to day, day to night.

Johnny looked at his watch; he had been traveling about four hours. That meant, with
any luck, forty miles, and it also meant that dawn could not be far away. That would
help him to fight off sleep. Twice he had dozed, fallen off the board, and found himself
spluttering in the sea. It was not a pleasant feeling floating there in the darkness
while he waited for Susie to circle back and pick him up.

Slowly the eastern sky lightened. As he looked back, waiting for the first sight of
the sun, Johnny remembered the dawn he had watched from the wreckage of the
Santa Anna
. How helpless he had felt then, and how mercilessly the tropical sun had burned him!
Now he was calm and confident, though he had reached the point of no return, with
fifty miles of sea separating him from land in either direction. And the sun could
no longer harm him, for it had already tanned his skin a deep golden brown.

The swift sunrise shouldered away the night, and as he felt the warmth of the new
day on his back, Johnny pressed the STOP button. It was time to give Susie a rest
and a chance to go hunting for her breakfast. He slipped off the surfboard, swam forward,
loosened her harness—and away she went, jumping joyfully in the air as she was released.
There was no sign of Sputnik; he was probably chasing fish somewhere else, but would
come quickly enough when he was called.

Johnny pushed up his face mask, which he had worn all night to keep the spray out
of his eyes, and sat astride the gently rocking board. A banana, two meat rolls, and
a sip of orange juice was all he needed to satisfy him; the rest could wait until
later in the day. Even if everything went well, he still had five or six hours of
traveling ahead of him.

He let the dolphins have a fifteen-minute break while he relaxed on the board, rising
and falling in the swell of the waves. Then he pressed the call button and waited
for them to return.

After five minutes, he began to get a little worried. In that time they could swim
three miles; surely they had not gone so far away? Then he relaxed as he saw a familiar
dorsal fin cutting through the water toward him.

A second later, he sat up with a jerk.
That
fin was certainly familiar, but it was not the one he was expecting. It belonged
to a killer whale.

Those few moments, as Johnny saw sudden death bearing down at thirty knots, seemed
to last forever. Then a faintly reassuring thought struck him, and he dared to hope.
The whale had almost certainly been attracted by his signal; could it possibly be…?

It was. As the huge head surfaced only a few feet away, he recognized the streamlined
box of the control unit, still anchored securely in the massive skull.

“You gave me quite a shock, Snowy,” he said when he had recovered his breath. “Please
don’t do that again.”

Even now, he had no guarantee of safety. According to the last reports, Snowy was
still on an exclusive diet of fish; at least, there had been no complaints from the
dolphins. But he was not a dolphin, nor was he Mick.

The board rocked violently as Snowy rubbed herself against it, and it was all that
Johnny could do to keep himself from being thrown into the water. But it was a gentle
rub—the gentlest that fifteen feet of killer whale could manage—and when she turned
to repeat the maneuver on the other side, Johnny felt a good deal better. There was
no doubt that she only wanted to be friendly, and he breathed a silent but fervent
“thank you” to Mick.

Still a little shaken, Johnny reached out and patted her as she slid by, so silently
and effortlessly. Her skin had the typical, rubbery dolphin feel—which, of course,
was natural enough. It was easy to forget that this terror of the seas was just another
dolphin, only on a slightly bigger scale.

She seemed to appreciate Johnny’s rather nervous stroking of her flank, for she came
back for more.

“I guess you must be lonely, all by yourself,” said Johnny sympathetically. Then he
froze in utter horror.

Snowy wasn’t by herself, and she had no need to be lonely. Her boy friend was making
a leisurely approach—all thirty feet of him.

Only a male killer had that enormous dorsal fin, taller than a man. The huge black
triangle, like the sail of a boat, came slowly up to the surfboard upon which Johnny
was sitting, quite unable to move. All he could think was, “
You’ve
had no conditioning—no friendly swimming with Mick.”

This was far and away the largest animal that he had ever seen—it looked as big as
a boat—and Snowy had suddenly shrunk to dolphin size by contrast. But she was the
master—or mistress—of the situation, for as her huge mate patrolled slowly around
the board, she circled on an inner orbit, always keeping between him and Johnny.

Once he stopped, reared his head a good six feet out of the water, and stared straight
at Johnny across Snowy’s back. There was hunger, intelligence, and ferocity in those
eyes—or so it seemed to Johnny’s heightened imagination—but no trace of friendliness.
And all the time he was spiraling in toward the surfboard; in a very few minutes he
would be squeezing Snowy against it.

Snowy, however, had other ideas. When her companion was only ten feet away and filling
the whole of Johnny’s field of view, she suddenly turned on him and gave him a nudge
amidships. Johnny could hear the “thump” clearly through the water; the impact would
have been enough to stave in the side of a small boat.

The big whale took the gentle hint, and to Johnny’s vast relief began to move farther
outward. Fifty feet away there was another slight disagreement, and another thump.
That was the end of it. Within minutes, Snowy and her escort had vanished from sight,
heading due north. As he watched them go, Johnny realized that he had just seen a
ferocious monster converted into a henpecked husband, forbidden to take snacks between
meals. The snack concerned was devoutly grateful.

For a long time, Johnny sat on the board, trying to regain control of his nerves.
He had never been so scared in his life, and he was not ashamed of it, for he had
had plenty to be scared about. But at last he stopped looking over his shoulder every
few seconds to see what was coming up from behind, and began to get organized. The
first order of business was: Where were Susie and Sputnik?

There had been no sign of them, and Johnny was not surprised. Undoubtedly, they had
detected the killers and had wisely kept their distance. Even if they trusted Snowy,
they would know better than to come near her mate.

Had they been scared completely away, or—horrible thought—had the killers already
caught them? If they did not return, Johnny knew that he was finished, for he must
still be at least forty miles from the Australian coast.

He was afraid to press the calling button a second time; it might bring back the killer
whales, and he had no wish to go through
that
again, even if he could be sure that it would have the same happy ending. There was
nothing he could do but sit and wait, scanning the sea around him for the first sign
of a reasonable-sized dorsal fin, not more than a foot high.

Fifteen endless minutes later, Sputnik and Susie came swimming up out of the south.
They probably had been waiting for the coast to clear. Johnny had never been so pleased
to see any humans as he was to greet the two dolphins. As he slipped off the board
to fix the harness, he gave them the little pats and caresses they enjoyed, and talked
to them just as if they could understand him. As, indeed, they certainly did, for
though they knew only a few words of English, they were very sensitive to his tone
of voice. They could always tell when he was pleased or angry, and now they must surely
share his own feeling of overwhelming relief.

He tightened the buckles of Sputnik’s harness, checked that blowhole and flippers
were clear of the straps, and climbed back onto the board. As soon as he was lying
flat and properly balanced, Sputnik started to move.

This time he did not continue westward toward Australia; instead, he headed south.
“Hey!” said Johnny. “That’s the wrong direction!” Then he thought of the killer whales
and realized that this was not such a bad idea after all. He would let Sputnik have
his head and see what happened.

They were going faster than Johnny had ever traveled on the board before. Speed so
close to the water was very deceptive, but he would not be surprised if they were
doing fifteen knots. Sputnik kept it up for twenty minutes; then, as Johnny had hoped
and expected, they turned west. With any luck now, it would be a clear run to Australia.

From time to time he glanced back to see if they were followed, but no tall dorsal
fin broke the emptiness behind them. Once, a big manta ray leaped clear out of the
sea a few hundred yards away, hung in the air for a second like an enormous black
bat, then fell back with a crash that could have been heard for miles. It was the
only sign of the ocean’s teeming life that he saw on the second lap of his journey.

Toward midmorning, Sputnik began to slacken, but continued to pull gamely. Johnny
was anxious not to halt again until the coast was in sight; then he intended to switch
back to Susie, who would have had a good rest by that time. If his guesses of speed
were correct, Australia could not be much more than ten miles away, and should be
appearing at any moment.

He remembered how he had first glimpsed Dolphin Island, in circumstances which were
so similar—yet so different. It had been like a small cloud on the horizon, trembling
in the heat haze. What he was approaching now was no island but a vast continent with
a coastline thousands of miles long. Even the worst navigator could hardly miss such
a target—and he had two of the best. He had not the slightest worry on this score,
but he was getting a little impatient.

His first glimpse of the coast came when an unusually large roller lifted the surfboard.
He glanced up, without thinking, when he was poised for a moment on the crest of the
wave. And there, far ahead, was a line of white, stretching the full length of the
horizon….

His breath caught in his throat, and he felt the blood pounding in his cheeks. Only
an hour or two away was safety for himself and help for the Professor. His long sleigh
ride across the ocean was nearly over.

Thirty minutes later, a bigger wave gave him a better view of the coast ahead. And
then he knew that the sea had not yet finished playing with him; his worst ordeal
was still to come.

The hurricane had passed two days ago, but the sea still remembered it. As he neared
the coast, Johnny could make out individual trees and houses, and the faint blue humps
of the inland hills. He also saw and heard the tremendous waves ahead. Their thunder
filled the air; all along the coast, from north to south, white-capped mountains were
moving against the land. The great waves were breaking a thousand feet out, as they
hit the shelving beach. Like a man tripping and falling, they gained speed as they
toppled, and when they finally crashed, they left behind them smoking clouds of spray.

Johnny looked in vain for a break somewhere along those moving, thundering walls of
water. But as far as he could see—and when he stood up on the board, he could see
for miles—the whole coastline was the same. He might waste hours hunting along it
for sheltered bays or river mouths where he could make a safe landfall. It would be
best to go straight through, and to do it quickly before he lost his nerve.

He had with him the tool for the job, but he had never used it. The hard, flat coral
so close to shore made surf-riding impossible at Dolphin Island; there was no gentle
underwater slope up which the breakers could come rolling into land. But Mick had
often talked enthusiastically to him about the technique of “catching a wave,” and
it did not sound too difficult. You waited out where the waves were beginning to break,
then paddled like mad when you saw one coming up behind you. Then all you had to do
was to hang onto the board and pray that you wouldn’t get dumped. The wave would do
the rest.

Yes, it sounded simple enough—but could he manage it? He remembered that silly joke:
“Can you play the violin?” “I don’t know—I’ve never tried.” Failure here could have
much more serious consequences than a few sour notes.