by Ben Bova
Dorn bit back a sardonic reply. Then he remembered that he was expected at the clinic to donate more blood to Deirdre.
* * *
Andy Corvus, meanwhile, was swimming lazily in the dolphin pool. Fish glided by him, all the colors of the rainbow, swishing their tails mindlessly. Turning his head slightly, Andy saw through his breathing mask two of the dolphins, big as moving vans, sleek and gray, their mouths curved in perpetual grins. Andy waved to them and they chattered and whistled as they effortlessly swooped past him.
Where’s Baby? he wondered. Baby and her parents had been transferred from Australia to this tank in the station. It was much bigger than the tank aboard the torch ship: It took Andy nearly a quarter of an hour to swim its full length.
At last he spotted Baby, down near the bottom, nosing among the artificial coral formations there. Got to think in three dimensions, he told himself. The world of humans is a flatland; dolphins live in three dimensions.
“Hello, Baby,” he said inside his mask. The chip-sized computer built into the mask translated his words into a series of high-pitched chirps.
Baby zoomed up toward him, then swam a circle around Corvus, chattering back at him.
“Hello, Andy,” the computer translated. “Good fishing?”
“I’m not hungry,” Corvus said.
“I am.” And Baby flashed away with a flick of her powerful flukes.
Corvus looked around for Baby’s parents. The youngster’s moving around without them now, he realized. She’s growing up. I wonder if dolphins have a teenaged phase, when they rebel against their parents. Or try to. He remembered his own teen years, how ancient and conservative his parents had seemed.
His wristwatch buzzed. The vibration told Corvus that he’d been in the water with the dolphins for three full hours. He sighed inwardly. Time to get out. Time to return to the dry world of his fellow humans.
Reluctantly he swam to the surface. Suddenly Baby was beside him, smoothly spouting and then sucking in a gulp of air. She chattered briefly.
“More fish?” the computer translated.
Corvus smiled inside his face mask. Yep, he replied silently, I’m going to get me some lunch. Maybe the cooks have made some pseudofish today, instead of the usual soyburgers.
Aloud, he said to the young dolphin, “Time to leave, Baby. I’ll be back soon.”
It took a moment for the computer to translate his words into clicks. Then Baby replied, “Good hunting, Andy.”
“Good hunting, Baby.”
Corvus was surprised at how physically tired he felt once he’d climbed out of the water and planted his feet on the solid deck that ran the circumference of the huge tank.
Lunch sounds like a good idea, he thought as he slowly pulled off his air tank and stowed it in the locker where he kept his swimming gear. The floor of the deck was porous: The water dripping from his body disappeared as the permeable tiles wicked it up. Corvus showered, toweled off, and pulled on his shapeless coveralls. Deirdre had told him they were olive green and didn’t go well with his red hair and fair complexion. The colors meant nothing to him.
He was closing his locker door when he heard voices drifting down the passageway from the direction of the elevators. A woman and a man, he recognized.
Around the curve of the passageway came Dr. Archer and that Mrs. Westfall. Andy instinctively distrusted Katherine Westfall. She had a superior air about her that raised his hackles. Like she thought herself better, more important, than anyone else. Shrugging to himself, he admitted, Well, she sure is more important. But does she have to throw it in your face?
“Ah, Dr. Corvus,” Archer called as they approached. Andy saw that three dark-suited young men trailed behind the pair of them. Westfall’s flunkies, he guessed.
“Dr. Archer,” Corvus replied. “And Mrs. Westfall. Hi. How are you?”
Westfall said, “Dr. Archer has been telling me that you can actually talk with the dolphins.” The tone of her voice clearly said she didn’t believe it.
“Um, to a limited extent, yes.”
“Really?”
Archer, standing slightly behind Westfall, raised his brows in an expression that looked almost beseeching to Andy. Corvus understood: Don’t start an argument with her. Don’t let her get under your skin.
Making himself smile for the IAA councilwoman, Corvus said genially, “Would you like to talk with them?”
DOLPHIN TANK
“Me?” Westfall’s hazel eyes went wide. “Talk with a dolphin?”
Corvus opened his locker and pulled out his breathing mask. “The translator’s built into the mask. You’ll have to put it on.”
As she accepted the mask from Corvus’s hand, Westfall asked guardedly, “How does it work?”
“We’ve built up a vocabulary of dolphin sounds and translated some of them into human language. The translator’s set for English, but we can switch it to something else, if you like. Spanish, Chinese, a few others.”
“English will be fine,” Westfall said.
“Just slip the mask over your head,” Corvus said, gesturing.
“But how does it work?” she insisted. “I mean, how can you translate the noises those fish make into meaningful human words?”
Corvus glanced at Archer, then focused again on Mrs. Westfall. “In the first place, ma’am, they’re not fish. They’re mammals, just like you and me. They breathe air. They have brains that are just as complex as our own; a little bigger than ours, actually.”
Archer stepped in. “Over many years we’ve built up a dictionary of dolphin vocalizations and correlated them with human words. It’s been very slow work. The two species live in very different environments.”
“But we’re able to talk back and forth,” Corvus said. “At least, a little bit.” With a little chuckle, he explained, “We don’t discuss philosophy or any abstract subjects. But we can talk about fish, heat and cold, solid objective things.”
Archer added, “This work goes all the way back to when Dr. Wo was running this station, more than twenty years ago. He believed that learning to communicate with the dolphins would help us learn how to communicate with a completely alien species, such as the Jovian leviathans.”
Westfall looked down at the breathing mask she held in her hands. It was still slightly wet, Corvus saw, but he decided not to take it back and wipe it off.
“Do you really believe that you can have a meaningful dialogue with dolphins?” she asked.
“They’re pretty darned smart,” Corvus said. “Of course, we’re dealing with tame ones, dolphins that have been raised in captivity. I’ll bet the wild ones are even smarter. I mean, they’ve got to deal with sharks and all, they have to navigate across whole oceans. Lots more problems for them to handle. And they live in bigger family groups, too.”
Westfall seemed to be trying to digest these new ideas. Corvus thought she looked like a kid facing a plate of spinach.
“You don’t have to try it if you don’t want to,” he said.
That moved her. Without another word Westfall slipped the mask over her tawny hair. Very carefully, Corvus noted. She doesn’t want to mess her ’do.
The mask was loose on her face, but Andy thought that it didn’t matter as long as she wasn’t actually going into the water.
“Now what?” she asked, her voice muffled somewhat by the mask.
Corvus beckoned her to the glassteel wall of the tank, where the fish were swimming by and the dolphins gliding sleekly among them.
“It’ll work best if you press the mask against the tank,” he said to Westfall. “That’ll conduct the sound better.”
Still looking uncertain, Westfall leaned forward until the mask was firmly against the glassteel. Corvus saw one of the adult dolphins swim toward her, curious. Then he caught sight of Baby, a dozen meters or so deeper.
“Say hello to Baby,” he prompted.
“Hello, Baby,” said Westfall.
The young dolphin chattered and Westfall fli
nched away from the tank.
“He answered me!” she exclaimed.
“She.”
“Yes. She’s a female, isn’t she?” Westfall pressed against the glassteel again and asked, “How old are you, Baby?”
Corvus knew that dolphins didn’t keep time the way humans did. Baby clicked and chattered.
Westfall said, “She asked me if I’ve eaten today.”
“Feeding’s important to them,” Andy said.
“Ask her where her mother is,” Archer suggested.
“Where’s your mother?”
More chattering, and an adult dolphin swam up beside Baby, clicking and whistling.
“That’s her mother,” said Westfall.
Corvus watched happily as Baby and Westfall exchanged a few more words. At last the woman stepped back from the tank and pulled the mask off.
“That was…” She seemed to search for a word. “… fascinating.”
Taking the mask from her hands, Andy said, “We’re trying to enlarge our vocabulary of dolphin speech. I wish we could get back to Earth and start talking to some of them in their natural habitat.”
“We?” Westfall asked.
With a self-deprecating little smile, Corvus said, “I’m just the tip of the iceberg in this. There’s a whole slew of people back at the University of Rome and a half-dozen other research institutions.”
Archer said, “Scripps, Woods Hole, several others.”
Westfall’s expression hardened slightly. “But how do you know you’re really communicating with them? Mightn’t your so-called vocabulary simply be words you’ve placed as definitions of their noises? Mightn’t you be fooling yourselves?”
Shaking his head, Andy countered, “We’ve done some pretty strict tests. Not just gabbing at each other, but asking the dolphins to find specific objects in the water, asking them to perform some acrobatics. It’s a real language and we’re getting the hang of it. It’s pretty slow, I admit, but we’re learning.”
Before Westfall could reply, Archer said, “This work goes back more than twenty years, as I said. Dr. O’Hara was really the pioneer in this area.”
“Elaine O’Hara.” Westfall’s expression suddenly turned glacial.
“Lane O’Hara,” Archer said. “She was a fine, wonderful person. Do you know her?”
“I never had the chance to meet her,” Westfall said, her tone dripping acid.
GRANT ARCHER’S OFFICE
Max Yeager felt nervous.
“I appreciate your coming with me,” he said as he and Dorn headed along the passageway toward Dr. Archer’s office.
The cyborg replied gravely, “I have nothing to do this afternoon. The medics are reviewing the data on the pressure tests they ran on me.”
Yeager had his pocketphone in one hand and every few steps glanced at the colored map it displayed to make sure they were on the right path. They passed a solitary woman in drab coveralls walking in the other direction. Up ahead a pair of men in virtually identical dark blue tunics and slacks were heading in the same direction as they. Yeager guessed that they too were looking for Archer’s office.
The doors along the passageway bore small nameplates next to their keypads. This whole section of the station looked obviously older than the third wheel, worn, almost shabby. A quarter century of hard use, Yeager said to himself. It shows.
“May I ask why you want me to accompany you?”
Yeager was on Dorn’s mechanical side. There was no discernable expression on the etched metal of his face, but the engineer heard the curiosity in his tone.
Feeling more fidgety as they got closer to Archer’s office, Yeager admitted, “I … uh … I get kinda jumpy when a big shot like Archer calls me into a meeting. I’m a lot happier down in the labs, or getting my hands dirty on the hardware.”
“You want moral support,” Dorn said emotionlessly.
Yeager bobbed his head up and down. “Yeah. Something like that.”
Sure enough, the two suits ahead of them stopped at a door and tapped on it for entrance.
As the two of them stepped in, Yeager and Dorn got close enough to see Grant Archer standing inside, welcoming them.
Licking his lips nervously, Yeager said, “This is it.”
Dorn agreed with a solemn nod, and gestured with his human hand for Yeager to go in ahead of him.
The engineer hesitated. “Maybe we oughtta knock or something.”
Before Dorn could reply, Archer looked past the two arrivals and spotted Yeager just outside the doorway.
“Dr. Yeager,” he called. “Right on time. And you brought Dorn with you. Good!”
Archer came up and shook hands with Yeager, then with Dorn. Yeager saw there was no desk in the office, no hierarchical arrangement of any sort. Just an assortment of chairs that looked as if they’d been cribbed from a used furniture store.
“Make yourselves comfortable,” Archer said, taking one of the recliners. He introduced the two other men as Michael Johansen, head of the station’s Jovian studies department, and Isaac Lowenstien, chief of the safety and life-support department.
Mike and Ike? Yeager asked himself. Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?
It wasn’t. Johansen was tall, his long legs stretching under the coffee table in the middle of their chairs. He had a long, narrow face with sharp, angular features and a scattering of freckles so pale they were almost yellow. His hair was the color of straw and baby-fine, wispy. His eyes were steel blue. A Viking’s eyes, Yeager thought. Piercing. No nonsense.
Lowenstien, on the other hand, was a small, swarthy, intense man with tightly curled midnight-dark hair, smoldering jet-black eyes and a six-pointed star tattooed on the back of his right hand. Refugee, Yeager recognized. Must be third generation: His grandparents probably got killed when Israel was wiped out. They never forget.
Both Mike and Ike were staring hard at Yeager, like a pair of police detectives about to grill a suspect. Yeager felt as if he were sitting on a hard cement block instead of a cushioned armchair. Perspiration trickled down his ribs. This is going to be an inquisition, he knew.
Archer was sitting straight up in his recliner. But he smiled easily as he said, “We’re here to review the status of the submersible and see if it’s ready for a crewed mission.”
Lowenstien immediately said, “The vehicle hasn’t been flown yet. You can’t risk a human crew in an untried vehicle.” His voice was sharp, cutting.
Before Yeager could object, Johansen clasped his bony hands around his knees and looked up at the ceiling as he said in a slow drawl, “We’ve obtained as much data as we can from uncrewed missions. If we’re to make any progress in understanding the leviathans we need a human mission.”
Archer scratched at his trim little beard. “I find that I agree with both of you.” He turned to Yeager. “Dr. Yeager, what do you have to say?”
Max had to swallow hard before he could find his voice. So what do I have to say?
“As you know,” he began, stalling for time to arrange his thoughts, “I’ve spent the past five years in Selene designing the Faraday and supervising its construction.”
“From four hundred million kilometers away,” said Lowenstien.
“The data’s the same, no matter what the distance,” Yeager shot back. “But, you’re right, yesterday was the first time I’ve seen the ship firsthand.”
“And?” Archer prompted.
“She’s a beauty,” said Yeager.
“Have you gone aboard it?” Lowenstien demanded.
“Not yet. But I checked out all her systems from the command center. She’s ready to fly.”
Johansen said, “Then we should start the procedures to pick a crew.”
Lowenstien objected. “We shouldn’t risk a crew until the vehicle has demonstrated that it’s safe to operate.”
Archer said, “There’s some urgency in this. We need to get a team down there before the IAA decides to hold us up.”
“For very valid safe
ty reasons,” Lowenstien said.
“But if all the ship’s systems check out,” Archer countered, “then why should we hesitate? This isn’t the dark ages, when test pilots had to try out new aircraft because they didn’t have computers to simulate their performance.”
“Simulations,” Lowenstien said, “are not actualities.”
Yeager said, “Now wait a minute. The whole point of this exercise is to send a human team down to the level where those giant whales live.”
“And get them back alive,” Lowenstien added. Johansen nodded.
“And get them back alive,” Archer said, “before the IAA steps in and strangles us with red tape.”
Johansen looked worried. “Do you think they would really try to stop us? Why?”
“We’re risking human lives here,” Lowenstien said.
Archer said, “Mrs. Westfall seems to be afraid of that. She’s just as much as told me that she’ll do everything she can to stop us from sending a human team in.”
“May I say something?” Dorn asked.
They all turned toward the cyborg.
“I presume that I will be one of the crew,” he said.
“You don’t have any scientific training,” Johansen objected.
“Yes, but I’ve had considerable experience piloting spacecraft.”
“Not the same thing at all,” said Johansen.
“And,” Dorn added, “I apparently am better able than others to withstand the pressures that the crew will face.”
That stopped them. For several moments the office was dead quiet.
Then Archer asked, “What is it you want to say?”
“I’m willing to ride in Dr. Yeager’s vessel. I have confidence in his design.”
Johansen smiled palely at the cyborg. Lowenstien looked faintly disgusted.
“We appreciate your courage,” said Archer.
“Not courage,” Dorn corrected. “Curiosity. I want to learn about those gigantic creatures. I want to see them face to face.”
The discussion droned on for more than an hour. Johansen even began to argue that they should be spending more time on classifying the various species living in Jupiter’s atmosphere, rather than focusing all their efforts on the leviathans. Yeager decided to head them off before they got themselves too deeply involved in what he considered to be a sideline issue.
