Dolphin Island (10 page)

“Yes sir,” answered Johnny, very proud of himself.

The Professor was carrying a stack of large, white cards, bearing the same words as
the studs on the communicator.

“I’ll hold up each of these in turn,” he said. “When I do so, you press the right
button—and make sure it
is
the right button. If I hold up two cards at once, press the button for the
top
card first, then the button for the lower one immediately afterward. Is that clear?”

Johnny nodded.

“At the very end, I want to try something drastic. We’ll give the DANGER! signal first,
then the HELP! one a few seconds later. When you press that, I want you to splash
around as if you’re drowning, and sink slowly to the bottom. Now, repeat all that
to me.”

When Johnny had finished doing this, they had reached the wire-net fence around the
pool, and all conversation ceased. But there was still plenty of noise, for Susie
and Sputnik welcomed them with loud squeaks and splashings.

Professor Kazan gave Susie her usual titbit, but Sputnik kept his distance and refused
to be tempted. Then Johnny slipped into the water and swam slowly to the center of
the pool.

The two dolphins followed, keeping about twenty feet away. When Johnny looked back,
with his head below the surface, he was able to appreciate for the first time the
graceful way in which their rubbery bodies flexed up and down as their flukes propelled
them through the water.

He floated in mid-pool, one eye on the Professor, the other on the dolphins, waiting
for the cards to go up. The first was FRIEND.

There was no doubt that the dolphins heard that, for they became quite excited. Even
to Johnny’s ears, the buzzing of the communicator was clear enough, though he knew
that he could hear only the low-frequency sounds that it was making, not the ultrasonic
noise that conveyed most of the meaning to the dolphins.

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.

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
běche-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
běche-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
běche-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.