The dolphins also had their storytellers, though the Professor had not yet contacted one. Einar had been able to repeat, in rough outline, some of their tales, which he had heard in his youth. Professor Kazan's translations had convinced him that these dolphin legends contained a wealth of information that could be found nowhere else. They went back earlier than any human myths or folk tales, for some of them contained clear references to the Ice Ages-and the last of those was seventeen thousand years ago.
And there was one tale so extraordinary that Professor Kazan had not trusted his own interpretation of the tape. He had given it to Dr. Keith and asked him to make an independent analysis.
It had taken Keith, who was nothing like as good at translating Dolphin as was the Professor, nearly a month to make some sense of the story. Even then, he was so reluctant to give his version that Professor Kazan practically had to drag it out of him.
"It's a very old legend," he began. "Einar repeats that several times. And it seems to have made a great impression on the dolphins, for they emphasize that nothing like it ever happened before or afterward.
"As I understand it, there was a school of dolphins swimming at night off a large island, when it suddenly became like day and 'the sun came down from the sky.' I'm quite sure of that phrase. The 'sun' landed in the water and went out; at least, it became dark again. But there was an enormous object floating on the sea-as long as 128 dolphins. Am I right so far?"
Professor Kazan nodded.
"I agree with everything except the number. I made it 256, but that's not important. The thing was big, there's no doubt of that."
Dolphins, the Professor had discovered, counted on a scale of two. This was just what one might expect, for they had only two "fingers," or flippers, to count with. Their words for 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000 corresponded to 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, in man's decimal notation. So to them, 128 and 256 were nice round numbers, signifying approximations, not exact measurements.
"The dolphins were frightened, and kept away from the thing," continued Dr. Keith. "As it lay in the water, it made strange noises. Einar imitates some of them; to me they sound like electric motors or compressors at work."
Professor Kazan nodded his agreement, but did not interrupt.
"Then there was a tremendous explosion, and the sea became boiling hot. Everyone within 1,024, or even 2,048, lengths of the object was killed. It sank quickly, and there were more explosions as it went down.
"Even the dolphins who escaped without injury died soon afterward, of an unknown disease. For years, everyone kept away from the area, but as nothing else happened, some inquisitive dolphins went back to investigate. They found a 'place of many caves' resting on the sea bed, and hunted inside it for fish. And then these later visitors died of the same strange disease, so now no one goes near the spot. I think the main purpose of the story is to act as a warning."
"A warning that's been repeated for thousands of years," agreed the Professor. "And a warning against what?"
Dr. Keith stirred uneasily in his chair. "I don't see any way out," he said. "If that legend is based on fact-and it's hard to see how the dolphins could have invented it-a spaceship landed somewhere a few thousand years ago. Then its nuclear engines blew up, poisoning the sea with radioactivity. It's a fantastic theory, but I can't think of a better explanation."
"Why is it fantastic?" asked Professor Kazan. "We're certain now that there is plenty of intelligent life in the universe, so we'd expect other races to build spaceships. In fact, it's been difficult to explain why they haven't come to Earth before now.
"Some scientists consider that we probably did have visitors in the past, but they came so many thousands of years ago that there's no evidence for it. Well, now we may have some evidence."
"What are you going to do about it?"
"There's nothing we can do at the moment. I've questioned Einar, and he hasn't any idea where all this happened. We must get hold of one of those dolphin minstrels and record the complete saga. Let's hope that it gives more details. Once we know the approximate area, we should be able to pinpoint the wreck with Geiger counters-even after ten thousand years. There's only one thing I'm afraid of."
"What's that?"
"The killer whales may have swallowed the information first. And then we'll never know the truth."
Chapter 16
No visitor to the island had ever been welcomed with such mixed feelings. Everyone not out at sea was gathered around the pool when the big cargo-'copter came flying in from the South, all the way from the Tasmanian Whale Research Station.
It hovered high above the pool, the downblast of its rotors tearing the surface of the water into fantastic, shifting patterns. Then the hatches in its belly opened, and a large sling slowly descended. When it hit the pool, there was a sudden eruption, a great flurry of spray and foam- and the sling was empty.
But the pool was not. Cruising around it on a swift voyage of exploration was the largest and fiercest creature ever to visit Dolphin Island.
Yet at his first sight of the killer whale, Johnny was a little disappointed. It was smaller than he had expected, even though it was far bigger than any dolphin. He mentioned his disappointment to Mick, when the cargo-'copter had departed and it became possible to speak once again without shouting.
"It's a female," said Mick. "They're half the size of the males. Which means that they're much more practical to keep in captivity. She'll eat only a hundredweight of fish a day."
Despite his natural prejudice, Johnny had to admit that she was a handsome creature. Her piebald coloring-white underneath, black above, and with a large white patch behind each eye-gave her a most striking appearance. These patches were responsible for the nickname she soon acquired-Snowy.
Now that she had finished inspecting the pool, she started to survey the world around it. She reared her massive head out of the water, looked at the crowd with keen, intelligent eyes, and lazily opened her mouth.
At the sight of those terrible, peg-shaped teeth, there was a respectful murmur from the audience. Perhaps Snowy knew the impression she had created, for she yawned again, even more widely, giving a still better view of her formidable dentures. Dolphins have small, pinlike teeth, intended merely for grasping fish before they are swallowed whole, but these teeth were designed to do the same job as a shark's. They could bite clean through a seal or a dolphin-or a man.
Now that the island had acquired a killer whale, everyone wanted to see what the Professor would do with her. For the first three days, he left her alone, until she had become used to her new surroundings and had recovered from the excitement of the trip. Since she had already been in captivity for several months, and was quite used to human beings, she quickly settled down and accepted both live and dead fish when they were given to her.
The task of feeding the whale was undertaken by Mick's family, usually by his father Jo Nauru or his uncle Stephen, skipper of the Flying Fish. Though they took on the job merely to earn some extra money, they soon became quite fond of their charge. She was intelligent, which everyone had expected, but she was also good-natured-which hardly seemed right for a killer whale. Mick grew particularly attached to her, and she showed obvious pleasure when he came near the pool-and disappointment if he left without giving her anything.
When he was quite sure that Snowy had settled down and was taking a healthy interest in life, the Professor began his first tests. He played some simple phrases of Dolphin to her through the underwater hydrophones, and studied her reactions.
At first, they were quite violent. She charged around the pool in all directions, looking for the source of the noise. There was no doubt that she associated dolphin voices with food, and thought that dinner had been served.
It took her only a few minutes to realize that she had been fooled and that there weren't any dolphins in the pool. After that, she listened attentively to the sounds that were played to her, but refused to go chasing after them. Professor Kazan's hope that she wou
ld reply to some of the Dolphin talk in her own language was not fulfilled; she remained stubbornly dumb.
Nevertheless, he was making a little progress in "Orcan," using tape recordings of killer-whale sounds. He used OSCAR's infallible computer memory to hunt through the mass of material for Dolphin words. He found many. The names of several fish, for example, were almost the same in Orcan as in Dolphin. Probably both languages-like English and German, or French and Italian-sprang from some common ancient origin. Professor Kazan hoped so, for it would greatly simplify his work.
He was not too disappointed by Snowy's lack of cooperation, for he had other plans for her, which could be carried out whether she co-operated or not. After she had been on the island for two weeks, a team of medical technicians arrived from India and began to install electronic equipment at the edge of the pool. When they were ready, the water was drained off, and the indignant whale was stranded helplessly in the shallows.
The next step involved ten men, some strong ropes, and a massive wooden framework that had been designed to hold the whale's head clamped in a fixed position. She was not at all pleased with this, nor was Mick, who had to assist with the project by playing a hose pipe over Snowy to, prevent her skin from drying in the sun.
"No one's going to hurt you, old girl," he said reassuringly. "It'll all be over in a minute, and you can start swimming around again."
Then, to Mick's alarm, one of the technicians approached Snowy with an object that looked like a cross between a hypodermic needle and an electric drill. With great care, he selected a spot on the back of the whale's head, placed the device against it, and pressed a button. There was a faint, high-pitched whine, and the needle sank deep into Snowy's brain, going through the thick bone of the skull as effortlessly as a hot knife through butter.
The operation upset Mick much more than it did Snowy, who seemed scarcely aware of the pinprick. This would not have surprised anyone with a knowledge of physiology, but Mick, like most people, did not know the curious fact that the brain has no sense of feeling. It can be cut or pierced without any discomfort to its owner.
Altogether, ten probes were sunk into Snowy's brain. Wires were connected to them and taken to a flat, streamlined box that was clamped to the top of the whale's head. The whole operation took less than an hour. When it was over, the pool was flooded again and Snowy, puffing and blowing, started to swim lazily back and forth. She was obviously none the worse for her experience, though it seemed to Mick that she looked at him with the hurt expression of a person who had been let down by a trusted friend.
The next day, Dr. Saha arrived from New Delhi. As a member of the Institute's Advisory Committee, he was an old friend of Professor Kazan's. He was also a world authority on that most complex of all organs, the human brain.
"The last time I used this equipment," said the physiologist, as he watched Snowy swimming back and forth in the pool, "it was on an elephant. Before I'd finished, I could control his trunk accurately enough to type with it."
"We don't need that sort of virtuosity here," Professor Kazan answered. "All I want to do is to control Snowy's movements and to teach her not to eat dolphins."
"If my men have put the electrodes in the right area, I think I can promise that. But not immediately; I'll have to do some brain-mapping first."
This "brain-mapping" was slow, delicate work, requiring great patience and skill, and Saha sat for hours at his instrument panel, observing Snowy's behavior as she dived, basked in the sun, swam lazily around the pool, or took the fish that Mick offered her. All the time her brain was broadcasting like a satellite in orbit, through the radio transmitter attached to it. The impulses picked up by the probes were recorded on tape, so that Dr. Saha could see the pattern of electrical activity corresponding to any particular action.
At last he was ready for the first step. Instead of receiving impulses from Snowy's brain, he began to feed electric currents into it.
The result was both fascinating and uncanny-more like magic than science. By turning a knob or closing a switch, Dr. Saha could make the great animal swim to right or left, describe circles or figure eights, float motionless in the center of the pool, or carry out any other movement he wished. Johnny's efforts to control Sputnik and Susie with the communicator, which had once seemed so impressive, now appeared almost childish.
But Johnny did not mind, Susie and Sputnik were his friends, and he preferred to leave them freedom of choice. If they did not wish to obey him-as was often the case- that was their privilege. Snowy had no alternative; the electric currents fed into her brain had turned her into a living robot, with no will of her own, compelled to carry out the orders Dr. Saha gave her.
The more that Johnny thought about this, the more uncomfortable he became. Could the same control be applied to me? When he made inquiries, he found that this had indeed been done, many times, in laboratory experiments. Here was a scientific tool that might be as dangerous as atomic energy if used for evil instead of good.
There was no doubt that Professor Kazan intended to use it for good-at least, for the good of dolphins-but how he intended to use it still puzzled Johnny. He was not very much wiser even when the experiment moved into its next stage, with the arrival on the island of a most peculiar object-a life-size mechanical dolphin, driven by electric motors.
It had been built twenty years ago by a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratories, who couldn't understand how dolphins managed to swim as fast as they did. According to his calculations, their muscles should not be able to drive them at much more than ten miles an hour- yet they could cruise comfortably at twice that speed.
So the scientist had built a model dolphin and studied its behavior as it swam up and down, loaded with instruments. The project had been a failure, but the model was so beautifully made and performed so well that no one had had the heart to destroy it, even when its designer had given up in disgust. From time to time the Lab technicians dusted it off for public demonstrations, and thus the Professor had come to hear of it. In its small way, it was quite famous.
It would have fooled any human observer, but when it was lowered into Snowy's tank, before scores of fascinated spectators, the result was an utter anticlimax. The whale took one contemptuous glance at the mechanical toy and then ignored it completely.
"Just what I was afraid of," said the Professor, without too much disappointment. Like all scientists, he had long ago learned that most experiments are failures, and he was not ashamed to make a fool of himself, even in public. (After all, the great Darwin once spent hours playing the trumpet in a vegetable garden, to see if sound affected plant growth.) "She probably heard the electric motor and knew the thing was a fake. Well, there's no alternative. We'll have to use real dolphins as bait."
"Are you going to call for volunteers?" asked Dr. Saha, jokingly.
The joke, however, backfired on him. Professor Kazan considered the suggestion carefully, then nodded his head in agreement.
"I'll do exactly that," he said.
Chapter 17
"There's a general feeling around the island," said Mick, "that the Prof has gone stark, staring mad."
"You know that's nonsense," retorted Johnny, springing to the defense of his hero. "What's he done now?"
"He's been using that brain-wave gadget to control Snowy's feeding. He tells me to offer her one kind of fish, and then Dr. Saha stops her from eating it; after he's given her several jabs, she doesn't even try any more. He calls it 'conditioning.' Now there are four or five big jacks swirrirning round in the pool, but she won't look at them. She'll eat any other fish, though."
"Why does that make the Prof crazy?"
"Well, it's obvious what he's up to. If he can keep Snowy from eating jacks, he can keep her from eating dolphins. But what good will that be? There are millions of killer x whales-he can't condition them all!"
"Whatever the Profs doing," said Johnny stubbornly, "there's a good reason for it. Wait and see."
"All th
e same, I wish they'd stop bothering Snowy. I'm afraid it'll make her bad-tempered."
That was an odd thing to say about a killer whale, thought Johnny.
"I don't see that that matters very much," be said.
Mick grinned rather shamefacedly and scuffed the ground with his feet.
"You promise you won't tell anyone?" he asked.
"Of course."
"Well, I've been swimming with her a good deal. She's more fun than your little tadpoles."
Arthur C Clarke - Dolphin Island Page 10
