Below were the waters, blue as the blue of oceans painted on old pirate treasure maps. The waters where treasure galleons had sailed and buccaneers had boarded hapless craft in search of—well, treasure—nearly four centuries ago. The same waters were reeling past now at almost four hundred miles an hour under the two thrumming ducted fans that took the place of wings on the flyer.
“. . . A sort,” Robby went on, “of a searching feeling. A digging feeling. An unlocking feeling. A discovery sort of a feeling as if at any minute—”
“Apple pie,” commented Dr. Hoenig, speaking at last. He was seated at the controls of the flyer, beside Robby.
Robby started, and jerked about in surprise. The little copper-colored cap perched on his sun-bleached hair almost fell off. Which would have jarred MacRuffian, the young Steller’s sea lion in the cargo compartment behind. Mac was wearing a cap just like it, tuned to receive what Robby’s cap broadcast. It was one of Dr. Hoenig’s zoological experiments.
“Apple pie?” echoed Robby, suspiciously.
“Absolutely,” said Dr. Hoenig, his lean face lighting up with what seemed to be enthusiasm. He was a doctor, not of medicine, but of science. His field was research in marine biology, and he was given to enthusiasms about finding the reasons for things. "Often, people have strange feelings which turn out to be something they had for lunch. What did Scrooge think Marley’s ghost was? A piece of cheese. Now, there’s are search project for you. Match up famous events with what the outstanding people in them ate just beforehand. What did George Washington eat before crossing the Delaware River?”
“I don’t know,” said Robby.
“What did his cook serve Admiral Rodrigo de Torres y Morales—”
“Who?" said Robby, for his father had rolled the names out in a fine Spanish accent.
“Commander,” explained Dr. Hoenig, “of the wrecked silver fleet, or flota, of New Spain in 1733—which included,” he glanced a little slyly at Robby, “the sunken ship you and I are about to see when we drop in at Bob Clanson’s underwater archeological site in about ten minutes.”
Robby looked even more suspiciously at his father.
“My feeling—” he began stiffly.
“—Is what,” said Dr. Hoenig, “I’m driving at. Now, in the famous event of the present moment we know what you had for lunch in Nassau before we left. You wound up with two pieces of apple pie—”
“I knew it!” shouted Robby. “You’re making fun of me!You’re doing it deliberately! How about all that steak you ate? Just because you don’t like desserts!”
“That is not,” said Dr. Hoenig, “the same thing. However—” he added, as Robby opened his mouth to argue some more. “Peace. Whatever our eating habits, they haven’t made either of us fat, so I guess there’s no harm done.”
That, thought Robby, was the truth. He was tall but skinny for his thirteen years—thirteen and a quarter, to be exact. His father was just plain tall, and lean enough to look almost skinny. However, as Robby knew, Dr. Hoenig, in spite of his leanness, was powerful enough to do things like flip a hundred-pound sea turtle in over the side of a small boat from the water into the boat’s bottom, where it would lie sighing and waving its legs after the mournful fashion of sea turtles, unable to turn right side up again without help.
At that, though, it would be lucky. Dr. Hoenig would only want it so that he could attach a small waterproof tag to its undershell before returning it to the sunlit waves again. Other turtle hunters most likely would have wanted it to take ashore to make into soup—which was admittedly delicious.
But Robby’s father was a marine biologist, more interested in where the Chelonidae—which include the hawksbill, the loggerhead, and the green turtles that are so tasty for soupmaking—wandered, than how they tasted for lunch. Possibly, thought Robby now, if instead his father had become a zoologist ashore, he might have ended up more interested in where the tribe Bovidae, typified by the Bos taurus or common ox, wandered—instead of how these animals tasted ass teaks. But ashore, he could never have met and married Robby’s mother, who was at that time a marine biologist and also employed by the International Department of Fisheries, Salt Water Division, which was the department for which his father still worked.
And Robby would not have been born and he would not behaving, at this precise moment, a sensation that...
“But about this feeling . . ." he said to his father.
“What sort of a feeling? Be specific,” said Dr. Hoenig.
“As if,” said Robby, “something is going to happen.”
“Nonsense,” said his father. “What could happen?”—and of course, just then, something did.
There was a bang like a cannon going off from the cargo compartment behind them. A howling noise like a hurricane and a sea lion roaring together. The flyer dragged sideways, as if it were going to flip over.
“It’s Mac!” shouted Dr. Hoenig, wrestling with the controls to keep the flyer level. “Go see what’s wrong!”
But Robby was already out of his seat and struggling to open the door to the rear compartment against the hurricane.He got the door partly open and looked through to see the bellowing young sea lion half wedged in the open cargo door in one side of the flyer. Mac was fighting to keep from being sucked through it, to perish in a fall to the ocean, three thousand feet below. Robby turned his head to shout at his father.
“The cargo door’s open,” he yelled, “and Mac’s falling out of it. Can you turn the ship so he’ll fall back in?”
Dr. Hoenig nodded. Robby could see his father leaning against the controls and the cords standing out on the back of his long, brown hands. Then the flyer shuddered, and twisted half over with a wrench, so that one side of the front compartment became the floor and the floor became a wall to Robby’s left. Robby overbalanced, slid down the floor (that was now a wall) and landed flat on the wall (that was now a floor). Dr. Hoenig, braced in his seat, stayed put.
From the cargo compartment came another cannon like bang,followed by a thud against the opposite side of the flyer that again made it shudder. Mac weighed three hundred pounds and he had evidently fallen back from the door and clear across the compartment. But the wind noises had now stopped.
“The door’s closed!” shouted Dr. Hoenig. “Go check on Mac, and lock the door—but be careful!”
“I will!” Robby yelled back, pitching his voice over the bellows of Mac, who, if unharmed, was evidently eager to get back at the cargo door for what it had tried to do to him.Robby crawled back to the cargo compartment door and let himself through it. Inside he found Mac safe and the outer door closed but unlatched. By standing on tiptoe against the floor-wall and jumping up, Robby was able to catch and flip the latch into locked position.
“It’s all right, Dad,” shouted Robby. “Quiet, Mac!” Mac stopped roaring abruptly, taking Robby unaware as he, himself, was roaring for a second time, “I say it's all right back here now, Dad!”
“You don’t have to shout!” called Dr. Hoenig. “I heard you the first time.” The flyer rolled back to its proper position, and Robby looked severely at Mac.
“How’d you open that door?” demanded Robby. “Aren’t you ashamed?”
Mac barked with a note that rang with no ashamedness at all. He came of fighting stock; and his reply to any threat of danger was like that of Sir Bleoberis, whom Robby had read about recently in King Arthur and His Knights.
". . .I dread,” announced Sir Bleoberis to Sir Tristan in that book, “no Cornish Knight!’’ Neither did Mac. Nor did the young sea lion dread anything else—and that went double for the cargo doors on flyers.
He was a handsome young Steller’s, a close relative of the cow California sea lions seen doing tricks in circuses and usually miscalled performing “seals.” Two-year-old Mac had just grown the rough gold-and-brown back hair of a maturing bull sea lion. In three more years he would weigh nearly twelve hundred pounds or more, three times the size of his California relatives, and fear noth
ing that swam in his home of the Bering Sea, but the twenty to thirty-five foot killer whale. And, when he had a few friends of his own age and weight with him, not even the killer.
Adult male Steller’s, as Robby had learned, when in their native rookeries, had even been observed to get together and swim out to attack killer whales who approached too close to the rookeries. “Come on, hey guys!” those watching seem to hear the Steller’s barking to each other. “There’s one of those killer whales. Let’s go get him!”
And off they go. But the killer whale, accustomed as he is to seeing all sea creatures flee from his permanently grinning mouth and his great black-and-yellow, lightning-fast body,turns the other way. When he sees the big Steller’s forging toward him he casually swings around as he swims until he is going in the other direction, as if it had never crossed his hungry mind in the first place to snap up one of the yelping, slate-gray Steller’s pups, or one of the dark brown Steller’s yearlings not too much smaller than Mac.
This phenomenon of the adult Steller’s swimming out after killer whales who approach the rookeries was the reason for the experiment with the caps Robby and Mac wore. They were called rapport caps—rap caps for short. They made use of recent developments in radio telemetry and medical brain mapping to establish emotional contact between Mac and Robby. Robby’s rap cap recorded the electrical activity of the emotional centers located in that part of the mid-brain known as the hypothalamus. It then coded these impulses and transmitted them by radio beam to the rap cap on Mac. Mac’s cap decoded and broadcast them as electrical stimulations to the emotional centers of Mac’s brain. So that when Robby felt excited about something like pirate treasure, Mac was made to feel excited also. And when Robby felt kindly toward something, Mac would find himself feeling kind, though he would have to decide for himself what he was feeling kind towards.
There was some evidence he did. On Robby’s mother’s birthday, when Robby gave her her present, Dr. Hoenig observed Mac nuzzling a sofa pillow and cuddling up to it in loving fashion.
It was for this reason that Dr. Hoenig thought the rap caps might provide a way of answering a question about the Steller’s chasing killer whales. The question interesting him, and other zoologists as well, concerned the reason why Steller’s should go out of their way to attack a dangerous enemy like the killer whale. Were they simply responding to the impulse to gang up on an enemy, the way wolves have been known to gang upon a bear, or dogs in a pack attack wild boar? Or was it an impulse to protect the rookeries that sent the big adults swimming out to battle?
The rap caps, and Mac and Robby wearing them, could provide the answer. The reason was that it had already been proved it was not normal behavior for Steller’s to come to the assistance of a human acquaintance. This was evidently not because of any lack of affection for the human, but because of the Steller’s inborn nature.
Mac could hardly bear to be parted from Robby. But while Balthasar, Robby’s dolphin at the Point Loma Station, always pushed Robby away from the neighborhood of passing sharks or the dens of moray eels and so forth, such actions never seemed to occur to Mac. Was this because Mac was not bothered by the sight of a shark or a moray eel, and therefore it did not occur to him that Robby should be? (Robby wasn’t. He often got exasperated with Balthasar’s attempts to shield him from danger.) Or was it because Mac, unlike the dolphin, lacked a protective instinct?
Mac was a happy, wild, adventurous, almost cocksure individual. So, said Dr. Hoenig, was Robby. They were emotionally alike. The only difference was that Robby had a human’s protective impulses. Mac appeared to have none. If this was so, then the reason the Steller’s would swim out to attack the killer whales was simply the urge to attack a known enemy. Dr. Hoenig, in spite of hoping this was otherwise, thought it the most likely answer.
However, if the reason was the urging of a protective impulse toward the Steller’s young, then the rap caps might prove it. Mac, being constantly exposed to Robby’s emotions, might some day be stimulated to come to what he thought was Robby’s rescue. If this happened, then it was a pretty sure bet that, if a Steller’s could be protective to a human, they were probably being protective when they sallied out toward the killer whales from their rookeries. This was what Robby believed was true.
At any rate, if Mac was not feeling protective now, neither was he feeling very disturbed by the situation. Robby went back to the pilot’s compartment.
“What happened back there?” asked Dr. Hoenig.
“Mac must have gotten the door open,” answered Robby,sitting down again in the copilot’s seat. “He must have been really working at it to do that.”
“He’s keyed up,” said Robby’s father. “That’s one trouble with this team cap project. When I get a geared-up Robertson Alan Hoenig, I have a geared-up Mac RuffianEumetopias stelleri. Excitement jumps like a spark between you two.”
“Well, anyway,” said Robby, “it’s all, all right now.”
“Not so all, all right as you may think,” replied Dr. Hoenig a trifle grimly. “That door slamming open didn’t do the flyer any good. The controls are mushy and the flyer’s dragging sideways. We may have to skip Bob and go on direct to Miami.”
“Dad!” cried Robby.
“Can’t help it,” said his father. “I didn’t count on any-thing like this when I said we could drop by and see Bob’s site.”
“But I’ll probably never have a chance to see a real Spanish treasure ship again!”
“Of course you will,” said Dr. Hoenig. “You can see it along with everyone else at the University of Florida Marine Museum after they move it ashore there next week.”
“But that’s not like seeing it on the bottom of the sea at the exact point where they excavated it!” cried Robby. “They’ll probably never excavate another treasure galleon like that again.”
“Now, I told you, Robby. It’s no galleon. It’s a sloop, La Floridana, like the sloop in which Commander Maynard sailed to attack and kill Blackbeard the pirate in 1718. You’ve seen a picture of a similar ship in the Mariners Museum at Newport News, Virginia. It’s a small boat, rigged fore-and-aft with mainsail and jib, and designed for scout or patrol duty. And it carried, as far as Bob’s team has found, no treasure—which,” continued Dr. Hoenig with a severe glance, “is what I think you’re really interested in at this site. Not underwater archeology."
“Well,” said Robby. “There could be treasure and the archeologists just didn’t find it. You said so, yourself!”
“I said so?” echoed Dr. Hoenig, his eyebrows shooting up.
“The other day,” said Robby. “You told me it was knowledge Bob and his team were interested in—not treasure.”
“A team of men seeking knowledge at a spot like that could hardly miss any treasure that was also on the site,” said Dr. Hoenig, dryly. “Treasure’s much easier to uncover than knowledge as it is less valuable.”
“Less valuable?” Robby stared at his father. “Treasure—gold and silver—less valuable than knowledge?”
“Much less valuable.”
“Prove it to me,” Robby demanded, skeptically.
“Robertson,” said his father, “if you’ve convinced yourself that gold, silver, or any such thing is more valuable than what you can store in your head, I’m not going to be able to argue you out of it. You’re going to have to discover I’m right, for yourself. And I can only hope,” said Dr. Hoenig piously, “that the discovery may not prove a painful one.”
“That’s what you said about my eating the second slice of apple pie,” pointed out Robby. “And I feel fine. No stomachache at all!”
“The truth about knowledge and treasure,” said his father,“is a lot more of a chunk to digest than an extra slice of apple pie. Meanwhile, what to do about this flyer? There’s Alligator Reef and Bob’s site, just ahead; but I can’t just drop a wrecked flyer on a scientific team and expect repairs. Possibly if we turned in to land at Upper Matecumbe Key—”
But that was one �
��possibly” that was fated never to be resolved. For at that moment there was a tearing screech to their left. The port ducted fan jammed and stopped. The flyer whirled into a spin, now that the starboard ducted fan was no longer balanced by the push from the fan at port. And the push of the unbalanced, single fan sent them twisting, cartwheeling, before Dr. Hoenig could balance the push, tumbling out of control toward the sea and the coral rocks and reefs of the waters of the Florida Straits below.
The Ghost Captain
“Sit tight!”
It was Dr. Hoenig’s voice, coining calmly and quietly through all the turmoil to Robby. So might Commander Maynard have spoken to his crew as they sailed in to join battle with the pirate Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard.Robby trusted the voice, and obeyed it. He clung to his seat in the spinning flyer while the sky and the sea went wheeling dizzily about them and the single unbalanced fan screamed,trying to tear itself loose.
Then there was a sudden wrench, and a shudder. The screaming dropped to a steady hum of power. The flyer leaned heavily to one side and came out of its spin. A moment later, with a single hard bounce, the flyer smacked down on the surface of the heaving ocean waves.
Dr. Hoenig shut the motors off and sat back with a sigh.
“All right?” he asked, looking over at Robby.
“All right,” said Robby.
“Good boy,” said his father. He leaned forward to the radiophone and pressed the “send” button on its instrument panel.
“Mayday!” he said crisply into the microphone grille of the panel. "Mayday. Ducted fan flyer number zc346 0729, flyer number—” But at that point a strong, cheerful voice from the phone speaker broke in on him.
“Jim? Is that you, Jim Hoenig? This is Bob Clanson. Can you hear me?”
“I hear you, Bob,” answered Dr. Hoenig. “We’re down—”
“I know. We saw you go down from the site, here. Hello,Coast Guard? This is Dr. Robert Clanson, leader of the University of Florida archeological team at Alligator Reef. We can probably reach the downed flyer before you can.We’re heading for it now in a skimmer.”
Secrets of the Deep Page 18
