FRIEND went up again, and again Johnny pressed the button. This time, to his delight, both dolphins started to move toward him. They swam to within only five feet and remained there, looking at him with their dark, intelligent eyes. He had the distinct impression that they had already guessed the purpose of this experiment, and were waiting for the next signal.
That was the word LEFT, which produced a wholly unexpected result. Susie immediately swung around to her left, Sputnik turned to his right, and Professor Kazan started calling himself "idiot" in each of the fourteen languages he spoke fluently. He had just realized that if you give an order, you should make sure that it has only one interpretation. Sputnik had assumed that Johnny meant his own left; the more self-centered Susie had assumed that he meant her left.
There was no ambiguity about the next order-DOWN. With a flurry of flukes, the dolphins dived to the bottom of the pool. They remained there patiently until Johnny gave the signal UP. He wondered how long they would have stayed there if he hadn't given it.
It was obvious that they were enjoying this new and wonderful game. Dolphins are the most playful of all animals, and will invent their own games even if none are shown to them. And perhaps Susie and Sputnik already realized that this was more than fun-it was the beginning of a partnership that might benefit both races.
The first pair of cards went up-GO FAST. Johnny pressed the two buttons one after the other. The second buzz had scarcely ceased to sound in his ears before both Susie and Sputnik were racing across the pool. While they were still traveling at high speed, they obeyed RIGHT and LEFT (their rights and lefts this time), checked for SLOW, and came to a halt for STOP.
The Professor was wild with delight, and even the unemotional Dr. Keith was grinning all over his face as he recorded the scene, while Mick was leaping about the edge of the pool like one of his ancestors at a tribal dance. But suddenly everyone became solemn: the DANGER! card went up.
What would Susie and Sputnik do now? wondered Johnny as he pressed the button.
They just laughed at him. They knew that it was a game, and they weren't fooled. Their reactions were far quicker than his; they were familiar with every inch of the pool, and if there had really been danger here, they would have spotted it long before any sluggish human intelligence could have warned them.
Then Professor Kazan made a slight tactical error. He told Johnny to cancel the previous message by signaling NO DANGER.
At once the two dolphins flew into frantic, panic-stricken activity. They tore around the pool, leaped a good six feet in the air, and charged past Johnny at such speed and at such close quarters that he was scared they would accidentally ram him. This performance lasted for several minutes; then Susie stuck her head out of the water and made a very rude noise at the Professor. Not until then did the watchers realize that the dolphins had been having some fun at their expense.
There was still one signal to test. Would they take this as a joke or treat it seriously? Professor Kazan waved the HELP! sign. Johnny pressed the button and went down, blowing an impressive stream of bubbles.
Two gray meteors raced through the water toward him. He felt a firm but gentle nudge, pushing him back to the surface. Even had he wished to, he could not have stayed under; the dolphins were holding him with his head above the water, just as they had been known to support their own companions when they were injured. Whether that HELP! was genuine or not, they were taking no chances.
The Professor was waving for him to return, and he began to swim back to shore. But now the dolphins' own exuberance had infected him. Out of sheer high spirits, he dived down to the bottom of the pool, looped the loop in the water, and swam on his back, facing up at the surface. He even imitated the animals' own movements, by keeping his legs and flippers together and trying to undulate through the water as they did. Although he made some progress, it was at about a tenth of their speed.
They followed him all the way back, sometimes brushing affectionately against him. As far as Susie and Sputnik were concerned, he knew that he need never press the FRIEND button again.
When he climbed out of the pool, Professor Kazan embraced him like a long-lost son; even Dr. Keith, to Johnny's embarrassment, tried to clutch him with bony arms, and he had to side-step smartly to avoid him. As soon as they had left the silence zone, the two scientists started chattering like excited schoolboys.
"It's too good to be true," said Dr. Keith. "Why, they were one jump ahead of us most of the time!"
"I noticed that," answered the Professor. "I'm not sure whether they're better thinkers than we are, but they're certainly faster ones."
"Can I use that gadget next time, Professor?" asked Mick plaintively.
"Yes," said Professor Kazan at once. "Now we know that they'll co-operate with Johnny, we want to see if they'll do so with other people. I picture trained diver-dolphin teams that can open up new frontiers in the sea for research, salvage-oh, a thousand jobs." He suddenly stopped, in the full flight of his enthusiasm. "I've just remembered two words that should have gone into the communicator; we must put them there at once."
"What are they?" asked Dr. Keith,
"PLEASE and THANK YOU," answered the Professor.
Chapter 13
For more than a hundred years, Dolphin Island had been haunted by a legend. Johnny would have heard of it soon enough, but, as it happened, he made the discovery by himself.
He had been taking a short cut through the forest, which covered three-quarters of the island, and, as usual, it turned out to be not short at all. Almost as soon as he left the path, he lost his direction in the densely packed pandanus and pisonia trees, and was floundering up to his knees in the sandy soil that the muttonbirds had riddled with their burrows.
It was a strange feeling, being "lost" only a few hundred feet from the crowded settlement and all his friends. He could easily imagine that he was in the heart of some vast jungle, a thousand miles from civilization. There was all the loneliness and mystery of the untamed wild, with none of its danger, for if he pushed on in any direction, he would be out of the tiny forest in five minutes. True, he wouldn't come out in the place he had intended, but that hardly mattered on so small an island.
Suddenly he became aware of something odd about the patch of jungle into which he had blundered. The trees were smaller and farther apart than elsewhere, and as he looked around him, Johnny slowly realized that this had once been a clearing in the forest. It must have been abandoned a long, long time ago, for it had become almost completely overgrown. In a few more years, all trace of it would be lost.
Who could have lived here, he wondered, years before radio and aircraft had brought the Great Barrier Reef into contact with the world? Criminals? Pirates? All sorts of romantic ideas flashed through his mind, and he began to poke around among the roots of the trees to see what he could find.
He had become a little discouraged, and was wondering if he was simply imagining things, when he came across some smoke-blackened stones half covered by leaves and earth. A fireplace, he decided, and redoubled his efforts. Almost at once, he found some pieces of rusty iron, a cup that had lost its handle, and a broken spoon.
That was all. It was not a very exciting treasure trove, but it did prove that civilized people, not savages, had been here long ago. No one would come to Dolphin Island, so far from land, merely to have a picnic; whoever they were, they must have had a good reason.
Taking the spoon as a souvenir, Johnny left the clearing, and ten minutes later was back on the beach. He went in search of Mick, whom he found in the classroom, nearing the end of Mathematics II, tape 3. As soon as Mick had finished, switched off the teaching machine, and thumbed his nose at it, Johnny showed him the spoon and described where he had found it.
To his surprise, Mick seemed ill at ease.
"I wish you hadn't taken that," he said. "Better put it back."
"But why?" asked Johnny in amazement.
Mick was quite embarrassed. He scuffed
his large, bare feet on the polished plastic floor and did not answer directly.
"Of course," he said, "I don't really believe in ghosts, but I'd hate to be there by myself on a dark night."
Johnny was now getting a little exasperated, but he knew that he'd have to let Mick tell the story in his own way. Mick began by taking Johnny to the Message Center, putting through a local call to the Brisbane Museum, and speaking a few words to the Assistant Curator of the Queensland History Department.
A few seconds later, a strange object appeared on the vision screen. It was a small iron tank, or cistern, about four feet square and two feet deep, standing in a glass display case. Beside it were two crude oars.
"What do you think that is?" asked Mick.
"It looks like a water tank to me," said Johnny.
"Yes," said Mick, "but it was a boat, too, and it sailed from this island a hundred and thirty years ago-with three people in it."
"Three people-in a thing that size!"
"Well, one was a baby. The grownups were an Englishwoman, Mary Watson, and her Chinese cook, whose name I don't remember-it was Ah Something."
As the strange story unfolded, Johnny was transported back in time to an age that he could scarcely imagine. Yet it was only 1881-not yet a century and a half ago. There had been telephones and steam engines then, and Albert Einstein had already been born. But along the Great Barrier Reef, cannibals still paddled their war canoes.
Despite this, the young husband, Captain Watson had set up his home on Dolphin Island. His business was collecting and selling sea cucumbers, or bˆche-de-mer, the ugly, sausagelike creatures that crawled sluggishly in every coral pool. The Chinese paid high prices for the dried skins, which they valued for medical purposes.
Soon the island's supplies of bˆche-de-mer were exhausted, and the Captain had to search farther and farther from home. He was away in his small ship for weeks at a time, leaving his young wife to look after the house and their newborn son, with the help of two Chinese servants.
It was while the Captain was away that the savages landed. They killed one of the Chinese houseboys and seriously injured the other, before Mary Watson drove them off with rifle and revolver. But she knew that they would return-and that her husband's ship would not be back for another month.
The situation was desperate, but Mary Watson was a brave and resourceful woman. She decided to escape from the island, with the baby and the houseboy, in a small iron tank used for boiling bˆche-de-mer, hoping to be picked up by one of the ships plying along the Reef.
She stocked her tiny, unstable craft with food and water, and paddled away from her home. The houseboy was gravely injured and could give her little help, and her four-month-old son must have needed constant attention. She had just one stroke of luck, without which the voyage would not have lasted ten minutes: the sea was perfectly calm.
The next day they grounded on a neighboring reef and remained there for two days, hoping to see a boat. But no ships came in sight, so they pushed off again and eventually reached a small island, forty-two miles from their starting point.
And it was from this island that they saw a steamer going by, but no one on board noticed Mrs. Watson frantically waving her baby's shawl.
Now they had exhausted all their water, and there was none on the island. Yet they survived another four days, slowly dying of thirst, hoping for rains that never came and for ships that never appeared.
Three months later, quite by chance, a passing schooner sent men ashore to search for food. Instead, they found the body of the Chinese cook, and, hidden in the undergrowth, the iron tank. Huddled inside it was Mary Watson, with her baby son still in her arms. And beside her was the log of the eight-day voyage, which she had kept to the very end.
"I've seen it in the Museum," said Mick, very solemnly. "It's on half a dozen sheets of paper, torn out of a notebook. You can still read most of it, and I'll never forget the last entry. It just says: "No water-nearly dead with thirst."
For a long time, neither boy said anything. Then Johnny looked at the broken spoon he was still holding. It was foolish, of course, but he would put it back, out of respect for Mary Watson's gallant ghost. He could understand the feelings of Mick and his people toward her memory. He wondered how often, on moonlit nights, the more imaginative islanders did believe that they had seen a young woman pushing an iron box out to sea.
Then another, and much more disturbing, thought suddenly struck him. He turned toward Mick, wondering just how to put the question. But it was not necessary, for Mick answered without prompting.
"I feel pretty bad about the whole thing," he said, "even though it was such a long time ago. You see, I know for a fact that my grandfather's grandfather helped to eat the other Chinaman."
Chapter 14
Every day now, Johnny and Mick would go swimming with the two dolphins, trying to find the limits of their intelligence and their co-operation. They now tolerated Mick and would obey his requests when he was using the communicator, but they remained unfriendly to him. Sometimes they would try to scare him, by charging him with teeth showing, then turning aside at the last possible moment. They never played such tricks with Johnny, though they would often nibble at his flippers or rub gently against him, expecting to be tickled and stroked in return.
This prejudice upset Mick, who couldn't see why Susie and Sputnik preferred, as he put it, "an undersized little pale-skin" like Johnny. But dolphins are as temperamental as human people, and there is no accounting for tastes. Mick's opportunity was to come later, though in a way that no one could have guessed.
Despite occasional arguments and quarrels, the boys were now firm friends and were seldom far apart. Mick was, indeed, the first really close friend that Johnny had ever made. There was good reason for this, though he did not know it. After losing both his parents, at such an early age, he had been afraid to risk his affections elsewhere, but now the break with his past was so complete that it had lost much of its power over him.
Besides, Mick was someone whom anybody could admire. Like most of the islanders, he had a splendid physique; generations of sea-battling forefathers had made sure of that. He was alert and intelligent and full of information about things of which Johnny had never heard. His faults were minor ones-rashness, exaggeration, and a fondness for practical jokes, which sometimes got him into trouble.
Toward Johnny he felt protective, almost fatherly, as a big man can often be toward a much smaller one. And perhaps the warmhearted island boy, with his four brothers, three sisters, and scores of aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, and nieces, felt the inner loneliness of this runaway orphan from the other side of the world.
Ever since he had mastered the basic technique of diving, Johnny had been pestering Mick to take him exploring off the edge of the reef, where he could test his new skills in deep water and among big fish. But Mick had taken his time. Though he was impatient in small matters, he could be cautious in big ones. He knew that diving in a small, safe pool, or close to the jetty, was very different from operating in the open sea. So many things could go wrong: there were powerful currents, unexpected storms might spring up, sharks might make a nuisance of themselves-the sea was full of surprises, even for the most experienced diver. It was merciless to those who made mistakes and did not give them a second chance.
Johnny's opportunity came in a way that he had not expected. Susie and Sputnik were responsible. Professor Kazan had decided that it was time they went out into the world to earn their own living. He never kept a pair of dolphins longer than a year, believing that it was not fair to do so. They were social creatures and needed to make contact with their own kind. Most of his subjects, when he released them, remained close to the island and could always be called through the underwater loud-speakers. He was quite sure that Susie and Sputnik would behave in the same way.
In fact, they simply refused to leave. When the gate of the pool was opened, they swam a little way down the channel leading into the sea, the
n darted back as if afraid that they would be shut outside.
"I know what's wrong," said Mick in disgust. "They're so used to being fed by us that they're too lazy to catch their own fish."
There might have been some truth in that, but it was not the whole explanation. For when Professor Kazan asked Johnny to swim down the channel, they followed him out to sea. He did not even have to press any of the buttons on the communicator.
After that, there was no more swimming in the deserted pool, for which, though no one knew it, Professor Kazan now had other purposes in mind. Every morning, immediately after their first session at school, Mick and Johnny would meet the two dolphins and head out to the reef. Usually they took Mick's surfboard with them, as a floating base on which they could load their gear and any fish that they caught.
Mick told a hair-raising tale of sitting on this same board while a tiger shark prowled around, trying to take a bite out of a thirty-pound barracuda he'd shot and foolishly left dangling in the water. "If you want to live a long time on the Great Barrier Reef," he said, "get your speared fish out of the sea as quickly as you can. Australian sharks are the meanest in the world-they grab three or four divers every year."
Arthur C Clarke - Dolphin Island Page 8
