Arthur C Clarke - Dolphin Island

by Dolphin Island(lit)

  It was not as bad as that, though it was bad enough.

  Nurse cheered up a little, putting on her professional face when he knocked softly and entered the office. She would probably have thrown out anyone else who bothered her at this time of night, but she had always had a soft spot in her heart for Johnny.

  "He's very ill," she said in a whisper. "With the right drugs, I could clear it up in a few hours. But as it is." She shrugged her massive shoulders helplessly, then added, "It's not only the Professor; I've two other patients who should have antitetanus shots."

  "If we don't get help," whispered Johnny, "do you think he'll pull through?"

  She did not answer; her silence was enough, and Johnny waited no longer. Luckily, she was too tired to notice that he did not say goodnight but good-by.

  When Johnny got back to the beach, he found that Susie was already harnessed to the surfboard, and Sputnik was waiting patiendy beside her.

  "They got here in five minutes," said Mick. "Gave me a fright, too, when they came up in the darkness-I wasn't expecting them so soon."

  Johnny stroked the two wetly gleaming bodies, and the dolphins rubbed affectionately against him. He wondered where and how they had ridden out the storm, for he could not imagine any creature surviving in the seas that must have raged around the island. There was a cut behind Sputnik's dorsal fin that had not been there before, but otherwise neither dolphin seemed any the worse for its experience.

  Water flask, compass, flashlight, sealed food container, flippers, face mask, snorkel, communicator-Johnny checked them all. Then he said, "Thanks for everything, Mick-I'll be back soon."

  "I still wish I could go with you," Mick answered huskily.

  "There's nothing to worry about," said Johnny, though he no longer felt quite so sure. "Sputnik and Susie will look after me, won't you?" He could think of no more to say, so he climbed onto the board, called "Let's go," and waved to the disconsolate Mick as Susie pulled him out to sea.

  He had made it just in time, for he could see lanterns moving down the beach. As he slipped away into the night, he felt sorry that he had left Mick to face the music.

  Perhaps from this very beach, a century and a half ago, Mary Watson had set off in her ill-fated bid for rescue, floating in that tiny iron box with her baby and dying servant. How strange it was that in this age of spaceships and atomic energy and colonies on the planets, he should be doing almost the same thing, from the same island!"

  Yet perhaps it was not so strange, after all. If he had never heard of her example, he might not have been inspired to repeat it. And if he succeeded, she would not have died in vain, on that lonely reef forty miles to the north.

  Chapter 20

  Johnny was content to let the dolphins do all the navigating until he was well clear of the reef. Their wonderful sonar system, filling the dark sea with echoes beyond his hearing, told them exactly where they were. It revealed to them all the obstacles and all the larger fish for a hundred feet around. Millions of years before men invented radar, dolphins (as well as bats) had perfected it in almost every detail. True, they used sound waves and not radio waves, but the principle was the same.

  The sea was choppy, but not too rough. Sometimes spray would break over him, and occasionally the board would nose down into a wave, but most of the time he skimmed comfortably across the surface. It was difficult to judge his speed in the darkness. When he switched on his flashlight, the water seemed to be racing past him at a tremendous rate, but he knew that it could not be much more than ten miles an hour.

  Johnny looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes had already passed, and when he glanced back, there was no sign of the island. He had expected to see a few lights, but even these were gone. Already he was miles from land, racing through the night on a mission that would have terrified him only a year ago. Yet he was unafraid-or at least he could control his fears, for he knew that he was with friends who would protect him from harm.

  It was time he set his course. Navigation was no problem. If he traveled even approximately west, he was bound to hit somewhere on the thousands of miles of Australian coastline, sooner or later. When he glanced at his compass, he saw, to his surprise, that there was no need to make any change of direction. Susie was already on course, heading due west

  It was the clearest and most direct proof of her intelligence that he had ever received. Mick's "HELP!" signal had been enough. There was no need to point to the one direction in which help could be found; she already knew it, as she probably knew every inch of the Queensland coastline.

  But was she traveling as swiftly as she could? Johnny wondered whether to leave that to her, or whether to impress upon her the urgency of the mission. Finally he decided that it would do no harm to press the FAST button.

  He felt the board jerk slightly when he did so, but he could not tell whether there had been any appreciable increase in speed. The hint should be sufficient. He was sure now that Susie knew exactly what she was doing and was operating at her best cruising speed. If he insisted that she go faster, she would only tire herself.

  The night was very dark, for the moon had not yet risen, and low clouds left behind by the storm hid almost all the stars. Even the usual phosphorescence of the sea was absent; perhaps the luminous creatures of the deep were still recovering from the impact of the hurricane and would not shine again until they had got over their shock. Johnny would have welcomed their gentle radiance, for there were moments when he felt scared by this headlong race through pitch-black darkness. Suppose a huge wave--or even a rock-was rearing up invisibly ahead of him as he skimmed along with his nose only three inches from the water? Despite his faith in Susie, these fears crept up on him from time to time, and he had to fight them down.

  It was a wonderful moment when he saw the first pale glow of moonrise in the east. The clouds were still thick, but though he could not see the Moon itself, its reflected light began to grow around him. It was too faint to show any details; but merely to see the horizon made a great difference to his peace of mind. Now he could tell with his own eyes that there were no rocks or reefs ahead. Susie's underwater senses were far keener than his straining vision, but at least he was no longer completely helpless.

  Now that they were in deeper water, the annoying, choppy wavelets over which the board had bumped at the beginning of its journey had been left behind. Instead, they were skimming across long, rolling waves, hundreds of feet from crest to crest. It was hard to judge their height; from Johnny's prone position, they doubtless seemed much bigger than they really were. Half the time, Susie would be climbing up a long, gentle slope; then the board would hover for an instant on the summit of the moving hill of water; then there would be the swoop down into the valley-then the whole sequence would begin again. Johnny had long since learned to adjust himself to the climb and the swoop, shifting his weight automatically along the board. Like riding a bicycle, he did it without conscious thought.

  Suddenly the Moon's waning crescent broke through the clouds. For the first time, Johnny could see the miles of rolling water arould him, the great waves marching endlessly into the night. Their crests gleamed like silver in the moonlight, making their troughs all the blacker by contrast. The surfboard's dive down into the dark valleys and its slow climb to the peaks of the moving hills were a continual switching from night to day, day to night.

  Johnny looked at his watch; he had been traveling about four hours. That meant, with any luck, forty miles, and it also meant that dawn could not be far away. That would help him to fight off sleep. Twice he had dozed, fallen off the board, and found himself spluttering in the sea. It was not a pleasant feeling, floating there in the darkness while he waited for Susie to circle back and pick him up.

  Slowly the eastern sky lightened. As he looked back, waiting for the first sight of the sun, Johnny remembered the dawn he had watched from the wreckage of the Santa Anna. How helpless he had felt then, and how mercilessly the tropical sun had burned him! Now he was calm
and confident, though he had reached the point of no return, with fifty miles of sea separating him from land in either direction. And the sun could no longer harm him, for it had already tanned his skin a deep golden brown.

  The swift sunrise shouldered away the night, and as he felt the warmth of the new day on his back, Johnny pressed the STOP button. It was time to give Susie a rest and a chance to go hunting for her breakfast. He slipped off the surfboard, swam forward, loosened her harness-and away she went, jumping joyfully in the air as she was released. There was no sign of Sputnik; he was probably chasing fish somewhere else, but would come quickly enough when he was called.

  Johnny pushed up his face mask, which he had worn all night to keep the spray out of his eyes, and sat astride the gently rocking board. A banana, two meat rolls, and a sip of orange juice was all he needed to satisfy him; the rest could wait until later in the day. Even if everything went well, he still had five or six hours of traveling ahead of him.

  He let the dolphins have a fifteen-minute break while he relaxed on the board, rising and falling in the swell of the waves. Then he pressed the call button and waited for them to return.

  After five minutes, he began to get a little worried. In that time they could swim three miles; surely they had not gone so far away? Then he relaxed as he saw a familiar dorsal fin cutting through the water toward him.

  A second later, he sat up with a jerk. That fin was certainly familiar, but it was not the one he was expecting. It belonged to a killer whale.

  Those few moments, as Johnny saw sudden death bearing down at thirty knots, seemed to last forever. Then a faintly reassuring thought struck him, and he dared to hope. The whale had almost certainly been attracted by his signal; could it possibly be. ?

  It was. As the huge head surfaced only a few feet away, he recognized the streamlined box of the control unit, still anchored securely in the massive skull.

  "You gave me quite a shock, Snowy," he said when he had recovered his breath. "Please don't do that again."

  Even now, he had no guarantee of safety. According to the last reports, Snowy was still on an exclusive diet of fish; at least, there had been no complaints from the dolphins. But he was not a dolphin, nor was he Mick.

  The board rocked violently as Snowy rubbed herself against it, and it was all that Johnny could do to keep himself from being thrown into the water. But it was a gentle rub-the gentlest that fifteen feet of killer whale could manage-and when she turned to repeat the maneuver on the other side, Johnny felt a good deal better. There was no doubt that she only wanted to be friendly, and he breathed a silent but fervent "thank you" to Mick.

  Still a little shaken, Johnny reached out and patted her as she slid by, so silently and effortlessly. Her skin had the typical, rubbery dolphin feel-which, of course, was natural enough. It was easy to forget that this terror of the seas was-just another dolphin, only on a slightly bigger scale.

  She seemed to appreciate Johnny's rather nervous stroking of her flank, for she came back for more.

  "I guess you must be lonely, all by yourself," said Johnny sympathetically. Then he froze in utter horror.

  Snowy wasn't by herself, and she had no need to be lonely. Her boy friend was making a leisurely approach- all thirty feet of him.

  Only a male killer had that enormous dorsal fin, taller than a man. The huge black triangle, like the sail of a boat, came slowly up to the surfboard upon which Johnny was sitting, quite unable to move. All he could think was, "You've had no conditioning-no friendly swimming with Mick."

  This was far and away the largest animal that he had ever seen-it looked as big as a boat-and Snowy had suddenly shrunk to dolphin size by contrast. But she was the master-or mistress-of the situation, for as her huge mate patrolled slowly around the board, she circled on an inner orbit, always keeping between him and Johnny.

  Once he stopped, reared his head a good six feet out of the water, and stared straight at Johnny across Snowy's back. There was hunger, intelligence, and ferocity in those eyes-or so it seemed to Johnny's heightened imagination -but no trace of friendliness. And all the time he was spiraling in toward the surfboard; in a very few minutes he would be squeezing Snowy against it.

  Snowy, however, had other ideas. When her companion was only ten feet away and filling the whole of Johnny's field of view, she suddenly turned on him and gave him a nudge amidships. Johnny could hear the "thump" clearly through the water; the impact would have been enough to stave in the side of a small boat.

  The big whale took the gentle hint, and to Johnny's vast relief began to move farther outward. Fifty feet away there was another slight disagreement, and another thump. That was the end of it. Within minutes, Snowy and her escort had vanished from sight, heading due north. As he watched them go, Johnny realized that he had just seen a ferocious monster converted into a henpecked husband, forbidden to take snacks between meals. The snack concerned was devoutly grateful.

  For a long time, Johnny sat on the board, trying to regain control of his nerves. He had never been so scared in his life, and he was not ashamed of it, for he had had plenty to be scared about. But at last he stopped looking over his shoulder every few seconds to see what was coming up from behind, and began to get organized. The first order of business was: Where were Susie and Sputnik?

  There had been no sign of them, and Johnny was not surprised. Undoubtedly, they had detected the killers and had wisely kept their distance. Even if they trusted Snowy, they would know better than to come near her mate.

  Had they been scared completely away, or-horrible thought-had the killers already caught them? If they did not return, Johnny knew that he was finished, for he must still be at least forty miles from the Australian coast.

  He was afraid to press the calling button a second time; it might bring back the killer whales, and he had no wish to go through that again, even if he could be sure that it would have the same happy ending. There was nothing he could do but sit and wait, scanning the sea around him for the first sign of a reasonable-sized dorsal fin, not more than a foot high.

  Fifteen endless minutes later, Sputnik and Susie came swimming up out of the south. They probably had been waiting for the coast to clear. Johnny had never been so pleased to see any humans as he was to greet the two dolphins. As he slipped off the board to fix the harness, he gave them the little pats and caresses they enjoyed, and talked to them just as if they could understand him. As, indeed, they certainly did, for though they knew only a few words of English, they were very sensitive to his tone of voice. They could always tell when he was pleased or angry, and now they must surely share his own feeling of overwhelming relief.

  He tightened the buckles of Sputnik's harness, checked that blowhole and flippers were clear of the straps, and climbed back onto the board. As soon as he was lying flat and properly balanced, Sputnik started to move.

  This time he did not continue westward toward Australia; instead, he headed south. "Hey!" said Johnny. "That's the wrong direction!" Then he thought of the killer whales and realized that this was not such a bad idea after all. He would let Sputnik have his head and see what happened.

  They were going faster than Johnny had ever traveled on the board before. Speed so close to the water was very deceptive, but he would not be surprised if they were doing fifteen knots. Sputnik kept it up for twenty minutes; then, as Johnny had hoped and expected, they turned west. With any luck now, it would be a clear run to Australia.

  From time to time he glanced back to see if they were followed, but no tall dorsal fin broke the emptiness behind them. Once, a big manta ray leaped clear out of the sea a few hundred yards away, hung in the air for a second like an enormous black bat, then fell back with a crash that could have been heard for miles. It was the only sign of the ocean's teeming life that he saw on the second lap of his journey.

  Toward midmorning, Sputnik began to slacken, but continued to pull gamely. Johnny was anxious not to halt again until the coast was in sight; then he inten
ded to switch back to Susie, who would have had a good rest by that time. If his guesses of speed were correct, Australia could not be much more than ten miles away, and should be appearing at any moment.

  He remembered how he had first glimpsed Dolphin Island, in circumstances which were so similar-yet so dif-ferent. It had been like a small cloud on the horizon, trembling in the heat haze. What he was approaching now was no island but a vast continent with a coastline thousands of miles long. Even the worst navigator could hardly miss such a target-and he had two of the best. He had not the slightest worry on this score, but he was getting a little impatient.

  His first glimpse of the coast came when an unusually large roller lifted the surfboard. He glanced up, without thinking, when he was poised for a moment on the crest of the wave. And there, far ahead, was a line of white, stretching the full length of the horizon.