by Ben Bova
The only touch of gratification in Grant’s life was the dolphins. Sleekly streamlined, they glided effortlessly through the big aquarium tanks, permanent grins on their faces, clicking and squeaking to one another like a group of chattering schoolkids.
There were six of them, plus a nursing pup that grew noticeably larger every day. They seemed to watch Grant as he stood outside their tanks and looked at them. He thought he could see their eyes focus on him. Grant would wave to them and get a burst of clicking from them.
“They’re saying hello to you.”
Startled, Grant whirled around to see Lane O’Hara standing a few paces away. Her turtleneck shirt was a warm sunshine yellow, a good complement to her light-brown hair.
“Wave to them again,” she said.
Grant did, and got another burst of chatter from the dolphins.
“Did you hear? The same response, don’t you know.”
“All I heard was a bunch of clicks,” Grant said.
“Aye, but it was the same bunch of clicks. They have their own language, you know.”
“I know they seem to communicate with each other.”
“And we’re trying to communicate with them.”
Grant said, “I’ve read about attempts to speak with dolphins. They go back more than a hundred years.”
“They do,” she said.
“With no success,” Grant added.
“No success, d’you say? Are you certain about that?”
Thrown on the defensive, Grant replied, “I haven’t heard of any.”
“Well, then, listen to this.” Lane walked to a phone built into a metal partition between transparent glassteel sections of the tanks.
With a knowing look toward Grant, she pressed the phone’s ON button and said into its speaker, “Top o’ the morning, Lancelot. And to you, Guinevere.”
Two of the dolphins swam toward O’Hara, bobbing up and down in the water as they emitted a series of rapid clicks and a squealing whistle.
“And how is little Galahad this morning?”
More chatter from the dolphins. The pup came up toward the window, followed by another adult. Grant stood and watched, trying to suppress a growing feeling of annoyance. Either she’s joking with me or she’s fooling herself, he thought.
O’Hara said, “I’ve got to be going now. And it’ll be your feeding time in a few minutes. I’ll be seeing you all again later.”
She jabbed the phone’s off key and turned away from the window. The dolphins chatted for a few moments, then swam away.
O’Hara was smiling impishly, as if she’d won a major debate. “You see?” she said.
Grant tried to be noncommittal. “Well, you spoke and they chattered, but I don’t think you can call that communication. ”
“Can’t you now? Then come with me to the lab.”
She started off down the corridor. There was barely room for the two of them to walk side by side in the narrow corridor of the aquarium. As Grant followed her, he noticed that she was limping slightly.
“Did you hurt your leg?” he asked, coming up beside her.
“Hurt it, yes,” O’Hara replied. “You might say that.”
“How?” he asked. “When?”
“It’s not important.”
That shut off the conversation. Grant trudged along beside her, noticing that she was still wearing the studded black leggings that Muzorawa and a few others always seemed to wear. He wanted to ask about it, but O’Hara’s abrupt cutoff of his questions kept him from speaking.
They ducked through the hatch at the end of the aquarium section and went down the broader main corridor of the station, right past all the biology labs. Grant began to wonder where she was leading him when she stopped and slid open a door marked COMMUNICATIONS LAB AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
Grant followed her into a compartment that looked like the back room of an electronics shop. Computers lined the walls, most of them blank and unattended, but a few technicians were sitting at desks, earphones clamped over their heads and pin microphones almost touching their lips.
O’Hara directed Grant to an unoccupied computer and told him to sit down and boot it up. Once he’d done that, she leaned over his shoulder and picked up the headset resting on the desktop. She was wearing some kind of scent, Grant realized: something herbal that smelled of flowers from a faraway world.
“Well, put it on,” she said, thrusting the headset into his hands.
Grant slipped the set on; the padded earphones blotted out the hum of the machines and the drone of the other subdued voices. As he swung the pin mike close to his mouth, O’Hara doggedly pecked at the keyboard with one extended finger. Her nails were polished a delicate rose pink, he saw.
Then she lifted one of his earphones slightly and said, “There’s no visual. You’ll just be getting the audio recording.”
Grant nodded as she let the earphone snap itself back in place. The computer screen showed the day’s date and a time; Grant realized it was just a few minutes ago. This must be a recording of her talking to the dolphins, he thought.
Sure enough, he heard O’Hara’s voice: “Top o’ the morning, Lancelot. And to you, Guinevere.”
Then he heard the clicks and whistles of the dolphins. The computer screen printed: GREETINGS O’HARA.
“And how is little Galahad this morning?”
BABY IS GROWING.
O’Hara said, “I’ve got to be going now. And it’ll be your feeding time in a few minutes. I’ll be seeing you all again later.”
GOOD-BYE O’HARA. GOOD FEEDING.
The screen went blank.
Grant pulled off the headset and looked up at O’Hara. She had an expectant grin on her face. He noticed for the first time that her mouth had just a trace of an overbite; it looked strangely sensuous.
“Well now,” O’Hara said. “What do you think of that?”
Grant knew he should be diplomatic, but he heard himself say, “I think the computer could have printed out those responses no matter what kinds of noises the dolphins made.”
Her eyes flashed for a moment, but then she nodded thoughtfully. “All right, then. You’ll make a fine scientist someday. Skeptical. That’s good.”
“I mean—”
“Oh, I know what you mean, Mr. Archer. And you’d be right, except for the fact that the computer has stored thousands of the dolphins’ responses and categorized them and cross-indexed them very thoroughly.”
“That still doesn’t mean it’s translating what those noises actually mean to the dolphins.”
“Doesn’t it now? Then how do you explain the fact that every time I say ‘good morning’ to them they respond with exactly the same expression?”
“How do you know their expression means that they understood what you said and returned your greeting?”
“The phone translates my words into their language, of course.”
“Still…”
She seemed delighted with Grant’s disbelief. Eagerly O’Hara snatched a headset from the computer next to the one Grant was using, slipped it over her chestnut hair, and said into the microphone, “Language demonstration one seventeen, please”
Grant didn’t realize he was staring at her until she unceremoniously took him by the chin and pointed his face back to the display screen.
A QUESTION OF INTELLIGENCE
It wasn’t a demonstration so much as a tutorial. By Dr. Wo, no less.
Grant sat and watched and listened. And learned. Building on nearly a century of researchers’ attempts to communicate meaningfully with dolphins, Wo and a handful of the station’s biologists—including Lane O’Hara—had created a dictionary of dolphin phrases.
“If the same phrase is used in the same situation every time,” Wo’s voice was saying over a video scene of three dolphins swimming in lazy circles, “then one may conclude that the phrase represents an actual word, constructed from actual phonemes—deliberate sounds intended to convey a meaning.”
As G
rant watched, two human figures clad in black wet-suits entered the tank, trailing sets of bubbles from the transparent helmets that encased their heads. Grant could not make out their faces, but one of them had the supple, slim figure of O’Hara.
The human swimmers bore oblong boxes of metal or plastic strapped to their chests. Dolphinlike clicks and whistles came from them, and the dolphins responded with chatter of their own.
“One may conclude,” said Wo’s off-camera voice, “that the dolphins have developed a true language. We have been able to transliterate a few of their phrases into human speech sounds, and vice versa.”
There was something strange about Wo’s voice, Grant thought. It seemed richer, deeper than he remembered it from his one stressful meeting with the director. Then Wo’s voice had seemed harsh, strained, labored. Listening to the director on this video presentation, though, his voice came through relaxed and smooth. Maybe it’s just me, Grant thought. Maybe he sounded worse to me than he actually was. Still, the difference nagged at him.
“… conclusive evidence that the dolphins truly use language can be seen in this demonstration,” Wo was saying.
Another human voice—O’Hara’s, it sounded like-asked, “Can you blow a ring for me?”
One of the dolphins swam toward her and expelled a set of bubbles from its blowhole that formed a wobbly but recognizable ring. As the circle of bubbles expanded and drifted toward the tank’s surface, the dolphin nosed upward and swam through it, squeaking and clicking rapidly.
“Observe,” said Wo’s voice, “that no reward has been offered for this performance. The only exchange between the human experimenter and the dolphin subject was an audible communication.”
At the end of the video Wo appeared in his office, sitting at his desk, peering intently into the camera.
“While much of the dolphins’ language remains beyond our grasp, for reasons that are undoubtedly due to the wide gap in environment and socialization between our two species, we have succeeded in creating a primitive dictionary of dolphin speech. That is, we can accurately and repeatedly transliterate human speech sounds into dolphin phonemes, and vice versa. While this is limited to a dozen or so phrases, the work continues and the dictionary will grow.”
Wo got up to his feet and walked slowly around his desk. “Our aim, as stated at the outset of this demonstration, is to understand the intellectual workings of an alien intelligence. Thank you for your attention.”
The screen went dark, but Grant continued staring at it for several moments more. In the video, Dr. Wo could stand and walk. Yet when Grant had seen him, his legs had been terribly wasted, useless; the man had to stay in a powered wheelchair. But in this video his legs were strong, normal.
As Grant pulled the headset off, O’Hara asked smilingly, “Well, are you convinced now, Mr. Skeptic?”
“What happened to Dr. Wo?”
Her smile winked off. “Ah, yes. That video was made before the accident.”
“What accident?”
Her lips tightened, almost as if she were biting them. With a shake of her head, O’Hara replied, “That’s best left unsaid, Mr. Archer. Sensitive information, don’t you know.”
Grant leaned back in the wheeled typist’s chair to look up into her brilliant green eyes. “What can be so all-hallowed sensitive? Who am I going to tell? I’m locked up in this station, the only people I see already know all about all this dratted sensitive stuff!”
O’Hara started to reply, then apparently thought better of it. She took a breath, then said, “Those are Dr. Wo’s orders. Information is sensitive if he says it is. He’s the director and we do what he tells us … or else.”
“Or else what?” Grant snapped, feeling more irked by the second. “What can he do to us? We’re stuck out here already. What’s he going to do, send us home with a bad report card?”
She gave him a pitying look. “You don’t really want to know what he can do to you, believe me, Mr. Archer.”
“Grant,” he said automatically. It came out surly, almost a growl.
“Grant,” she agreed. “And my friends call me Lane.” He knew she was trying to mollify him, trying to get his mind off the issue of sensitive information and Dr. Wo’s powers as director of the station.
But there’s something going on here that Wo is keeping secret. He’s not even letting the IAA know what he’s doing. Is that because the New Morality has its own representatives on the IAA’s council?
With a glance at her wrist, O’Hara said, “It’s almost past time for lunch. Come on, let’s get to the cafeteria before they close it.”
Grant followed her through the humming, quietly intense communications laboratory and out into the main corridor. It was bustling with people going back and forth.
Walking alongside Lane, Grant again noticed her limp. But if I ask her about it she’ll tell me to mind my own business, he thought. Maybe that’s sensitive information, too.
Instead he asked, “You said your friends call you Lane?”
“That’s right.” She nodded.
“I heard someone refer to you as Lainie.”
Her eyes flicked toward him for just an instant. “And who might that be?” she asked coolly.
Grant hesitated a moment, thinking. “Egon, if I remember correctly.”
“Dear old Egon,” she murmured.
“Is Lainie a special name? I mean, well…”
“It’s not a name I prefer. Call me Lane, if you please.”
Grant nodded as they continued walking toward the cafeteria. They seemed to be swimming upstream; a tide of people were heading in the opposite direction, coming out of the cafeteria.
“What else did Egon say about me?” O’Hara asked.
An image of her swimming naked with Karlstad amid the dolphins flashed through Grant’s mind. But he said, “Um, nothing much.”
“Egon has a way of talking about his fantasies as if they were real, don’t you know.”
“Oh, sure.”
She stopped and pulled Grant over to one side of the corridor, practically pinning him against the wall. He felt the strength of her grip against his biceps, the intensity of the glare in her eyes.
“He’s said things about me before, you know. Things that are utterly untrue.”
Grant looked up into those green eyes and saw smoldering anger.
“What did he tell you?” she demanded.
Shaking his head, Grant said, “I … uh, I don’t really remember. It was my first day here. Maybe it wasn’t him who said it, there were several others around the table.”
“And he mouthed off to all of them.”
“I don’t recall,” Grant lied.
“As bad as that, is it?”
Grant had no idea of what to say. He certainly had no intention of repeating what Karlstad had said— boasted about, now that he thought of it.
O’Hara stomped off toward the cafeteria, hurrying through the crowd despite her limp. Grant headed after her.
Sure enough, Karlstad was sitting at a big table, with Patti Buono, Nacho, and several others. Quintero was regaling them with some story that had them all laughing hard. O’Hara seemed to ignore them; she went to the steam table and began filling her tray with a bowl of soup, a sandwich, fruit cup, and soda.
Feeling somewhat relieved but still cautious, Grant slid his tray toward her, grabbing a sandwich and a salad. As he was filling a mug with fruit juice, O’Hara carried her tray toward Karlstad’s table.
Grant followed her as O’Hara headed to their table. Karlstad and the others looked up as she approached. Their laughter died away. Grant thought they looked kind of guilty, although that might have been just his overworked imagination.
Karlstad smiled up at O’Hara as she put her tray on the table next to him. Then she picked up her bowl of soup and emptied it onto his head.
Everything stopped. The cafeteria went completely silent, except for Karlstad’s shocked sputtering. He sat there with soup dripping from his ears
, his nose, his chin; soggy noodles festooned his thin silver hair.
O’Hara said absolutely nothing. She merely smiled, nodded as if she were satisfied with her work, then picked up her tray and limped off to a different table.
Quintero burst into roaring laughter. Karlstad scowled at him, but the others started to laugh, too.
Grant left his tray and headed out of the cafeteria. He had no desire to be caught in any crossfire.
SUMMONED
For several days Grant steered clear of both Karlstad and O’Hara. He became something of a recluse, avoiding everyone, taking his meals in his quarters, coming out only for his hours of work. But it was impossible to escape the gossip flickering all through the station.
It was a lovers’ spat, some said. Other maintained that O’Hara had somehow been wronged by Karlstad and the soup dumping had been her revenge. No, still others insisted: He had rejected her, and she’d humiliated him because he had humiliated her.
He saw O’Hara now and then, despite his best efforts not to. She was constantly working with the dolphins, swimming with them, talking with them. Grant tried to head the other way whenever he saw her, but there was no way to avoid all contact. She seemed cheerful and friendly, though, as if nothing had happened. For that matter, so did Karlstad, when Grant saw him—usually at a distance, in the cafeteria or in passing along the main corridor.
One night, when he couldn’t sleep despite watching Marjorie’s two latest messages and reading from the Book of Job for what seemed like hours, Grant pulled on a pair of slacks, stuffed a shirt into its waistband, and padded barefoot out to the empty, darkened cafeteria.
He punched the automated dispenser for a cup of hot cocoa. The machine seemed to take longer now to make the brew than it did during the busy hours of the day.
“Can’t sleep, hey?”
Startled, Grant spun around to see Red Devlin standing beside him. The Red Devil’s bristling hair and mustache stood out even in the shadows of the dimly lit cafeteria. His white jacket was limp, sweaty, unbuttoned all the way down, revealing Devlin’s olive-drab undershirt.
“You’re up pretty late yourself,” Grant replied.
