Dolphin Island (15 page)

Until now, the night had been calm and still, the only sound the murmur of the waves,
lazily rolling against the reef. But in the last hour a wind had come up, blowing
in fitful gusts, and the voice of the sea had acquired an angrier, more determined
note.

Johnny saw the thing first, as he was climbing out of the pool. Beyond the reef, at
a distance that was quite impossible to judge, a faint light was moving slowly across
the waters. For a moment he wondered if it could be a ship; then he realized that
it was too blurred and formless, like a luminous fog.

“Mick,” he whispered urgently, “what’s
that
, out there at sea?”

Mick’s answer was not reassuring. He gave a low whistle of astonishment and moved
closer to Johnny, as if for protection.

Almost unable to believe their eyes, they watched as the mist gathered itself together,
became brighter and more sharp-edged, and climbed higher and higher in the sky. Within
a few minutes, it was no longer a faint glow in the darkness: it was a pillar of fire
walking upon the face of the sea.

It filled them both with superstitious awe—with the fear of the unknown, which men
will never lose, because the wonders of the universe are without end. Their minds
were full of wild explanations, fantastic theories—and then Mick gave a relieved,
though rather shaken, laugh.

“I know what that is, he said. “It’s only a water-spout. I’ve seen them before, but
never at night.”

Like many mysteries, the explanation was simple—once you knew it. But the wonder remained,
and the boys stared in fascination at the spinning column of water as it sucked up
billions of the sea’s luminous creatures and scattered them into the sky. It must
have been many miles away, for Johnny could not hear the roar of its passage over
the waves; and presently it vanished in the direction of the mainland.

When the boys had recovered from their astonishment, the incoming tide had risen to
their knees.

“If we don’t get a move on, we’ll have to swim for it,” said Mick. Then he added thoughtfully,
as he splashed off toward the island, “I don’t like the look of that thing. It’s a
sign of bad weather—bet you ten to one we’re in for a big blow.”

How true that was they began to realize by next morning. Even if one knew nothing
about meteorology, the picture on the television screen was terrifying. A great whirlpool
of cloud, a thousand miles across, covered all the western Pacific. As seen from the
weather satellite’s cameras, looking down upon it from far out in space, it appeared
to be quite motionless. But that was only because of its size. If one watched carefully,
one could see after a few minutes that the spiral bands of cloud were sweeping swiftly
across the face of the globe. The winds that drove them were moving at speeds up to
a hundred and fifty miles an hour, for this was the greatest hurricane to strike the
Queensland coast in a generation.

On Dolphin Island, no one wandered very far from a television screen. Every hour,
revised forecasts came through from the computers that were predicting the progress
of the storm, but there was little change during the day. Meteorology was now an exact
science; the weathermen could state with confidence what was going to happen—though
they could not, as yet, do much about it.

The island had known many other storms, and the prevailing mood was excitement and
alertness, rather than alarm. Luckily, the tide would be out when the hurricane reached
its peak, so there was no danger of waves sweeping over the island—as had happened
elsewhere in the Pacific.

All through the day, Johnny was helping with the safety precautions. Nothing movable
could be left in the open; windows had to be boarded over and boats drawn up as far
as possible on the beach. The
Flying Fish
was secured to four heavy anchors, and to make doubly certain that she did not move,
ropes were taken from her and secured to a group of pandanus trees on the island.
Most of the fishermen, however, were not much worried about their boats, for the harbor
was on the sheltered side of the island. The forest would break the full force of
the gale.

The day was hot and oppressive, without a breath of wind. It scarcely needed the picture
of the television screen and the steady flow of weather reports from the east, to
know that Nature was planning one of her big productions. Moreover, though the sky
was clear and cloudless, the storm had sent its messages ahead of it. All day long,
tremendous waves had been battering against the outer reef, until the whole island
shook beneath their impact.

When darkness fell, the sky was still clear and the stars seemed abnormally brilliant.
Johnny was standing outside the Naurus’ concrete-and-aluminum bungalow, taking a last
look at the sky before turning in, when he became aware of a new sound above the thunder
of the waves. It was a sound such as he had never heard before, as of a monstrous
animal moaning in pain, and even on that hot, sultry evening, it seemed to chill his
blood.

And then he saw something to the east that broke his nerve completely. An unbroken
wall of utter blackness was riding up the sky, climbing visibly even as he watched.
He had heard and seen the onset of the hurricane, and he did not wait for more.

“I was just coming to get you,” said Mick, when Johnny closed the door thankfully
behind him. Those were the last words that he heard for many hours.

Seconds later, the whole house gave a shudder. Then came a noise which, despite its
incredible violence, was startlingly familiar. For a moment it took Johnny back to
the very beginning of his adventures; he remembered the thunder of the
Santa Anna
jets, only a few feet beneath him, as he climbed aboard the hovership, half a world
away and a seeming lifetime ago.

The roar of the hurricane had already made speech impossible. Yet now, unbelievably,
the sound level became even higher, for such a deluge as Johnny had never imagined
was descending upon the house. The feeble word “rain” could not begin to describe
it. Judging by the sound that was coming through roof and walls, a man in the open
would be drowned by the sheer mass of descending water—if he was not crushed first.

Yet Mick’s family was taking all this quite calmly. The younger children were even
gathered around the television set, watching the pictures, though they could not hear
a word of the sound. Mrs. Nauru was placidly knitting—a rare accomplishment which
she had learned in her youth and which normally fascinated Johnny because he had never
seen anyone doing it before. But now he was too disturbed to watch the intricate movement
of the needles and the magical transformation of wool into sock or sweater.

He tried to guess, from the uproar around him, what was happening outside. Surely,
trees were being torn up by their roots; boats and even houses scattered by the gale!
But the howl of the wind and the deafening, unending crash of water masked all other
sounds. Guns might be booming outside the door, and no one would ever hear them.

Johnny looked at Mick for reassurance; he wanted some sign that everything was all
right, that it would soon be over and everything would be normal. But Mick shrugged
his shoulders, then made a pantomime of putting on a face mask and breathing from
an Aqualung mouthpiece, which Johnny did not think at all funny in the circumstances.

He wondered what was happening to the rest of the island, but somehow nothing seemed
real except this one room and the people in it. It was as if they alone existed now,
and the hurricane was launching its attack upon them personally. So might Noah and
his family have waited for the flood to rise around them, the sole survivors of their
world.

Johnny had never thought that a storm on land could frighten him; after all, it was
“only” wind and rain. But the demonic fury raving around the frail fortress in which
he was sheltering was something beyond all his experience and imagination. If he had
been told that the whole island was about to be blown into the sea, he would have
believed it.

Suddenly, even above the roar of the storm, there came the sound of a mighty crash—though
whether it was close at hand or far away it was impossible to tell. At the same instant,
the lights went out.

That moment of utter darkness, at the height of the storm, was one of the most terrifying
that Johnny had ever experienced. As long as he had been able to see his friends,
even if he could not talk with them, he had felt reasonably safe. Now he was alone
in the screaming night, helpless before natural forces that he had never known existed.

Luckily, the darkness lasted for only a few seconds. Mr. Nauru had been expecting
the worst; he had an electric lantern ready, and when its light came on, showing everything
quite unchanged, Johnny felt ashamed of his fright.

Even in a hurricane, life continues. Now that they had lost the television, the younger
children started to play with their toys or read picture books. Mrs. Nauru continued
placidly knitting, while her husband began to plow through a thick World Food Organization
report on Australian fisheries, full of charts, statistics, and maps. When Mick set
up a game of checkers, Johnny did not feel much like challenging him, but he realized
that it was the sensible thing to do.

So the night dragged on. Sometimes the hurricane slackened for a moment, and the roar
of the wind dropped to a level at which one could make oneself heard by shouting.
But nobody made the effort, for there was nothing to say, and very quickly the noise
returned to its former volume.

Around midnight, Mrs. Nauru got up, disappeared into the kitchen, and came back a
few minutes later with a jug of hot coffee, half a dozen tin mugs, and an assorted
collection of cakes. Johnny wondered if this was the last snack he would ever eat;
nevertheless, he enjoyed it, and then went on losing games to Mick.

Not until four in the morning, a bare two hours before dawn, did the fury of the storm
begin to abate. Slowly its strength ebbed, until presently it was no more than an
ordinary howling gale. At the same time the rain slackened, so that they no longer
seemed to be living beneath a waterfall. Around five, there were a few isolated gusts,
as violent as anything that had gone before, but they were the hurricane’s dying spasms.
By the time the sun rose over the battered island, it was possible to venture out
of doors.

Johnny had expected disaster, and he was not disappointed. As he and Mick scrambled
over the dozens of fallen trees that were blocking once familiar paths, they met the
other islanders wandering around, like the dazed inhabitants of a bombed city. Many
of them were injured, with heads bandaged or arms in slings, but by good planning
and good luck, there had been no serious casualties.

The real damage was to property. All the power lines were down, but they could be
quickly replaced. Much more serious was the fact that the electric generating plant
was ruined. It had been wrecked by a tree that had not merely fallen, but had walked
end over end for a hundred yards and then smashed into the power building like a giant
club. Even the stand-up Diesel plant had been involved in the catastrophe.

There was worse to come. Sometime during the night, defying all predictions, the wind
had shifted around to the west and attacked the island from its normally sheltered
side. Of the fishing fleet, half had been sunk, while the other half had been hurled
up on the beach and smashed into firewood. The
Flying Fish
lay on her side, partly submerged. She could be salvaged, but it would be weeks before
she would sail again.

Yet despite all the ruin and havoc, no one seemed too depressed. At first Johnny was
astonished by this; then he slowly came to understand the reason. Hurricanes were
one of the basic, unavoidable facts of life on the Great Barrier Reef. Anyone who
chose to make his home here must be prepared to pay the price. If he couldn’t take
it, he had a simple remedy; he could always move somewhere else.

Professor Kazan put it in a different way, when Johnny and Mick found him examining
the blown-down fence around the dolphin pool.

“Perhaps this has put us back six months,” he said. “But we’ll get over it. Equipment
can always be replaced—men and knowledge can’t. And we’ve lost neither of those.”

“What about OSCAR?” Mick asked.

“Dead—until we get power again, but all his memory circuits are intact.”

That means no lessons for a while, thought Johnny. The ill wind had blown some good,
after all.

But it had also blown more harm than anyone yet appreciated—anyone except Nurse Tessie.
That large and efficient woman was now looking, with utter dismay, at the soaking
wreckage of her medical stores.

Cuts, bruises, even broken limbs, she could deal with, as she had been doing ever
since dawn. But anything more serious was now beyond her control; she did not have
even an ampoule of penicillin that she could trust.

In the cold and miserable aftermath of the storm, she could count on several chills
and fevers and perhaps more serious complaints. Well, she had better waste no time
radioing for fresh supplies.

Quickly she made a list of the drugs which, she knew from earlier experience, she
would be needing in the next few days. Then she hurried to the Message Center, and
received a second shock.

Two disheartened electronics technicians were toasting their soldering irons on a
Primus stove. Around them was a shambles of wires and broken instrument racks, impaled
by the branch of a pandanus tree that had come straight through the roof.

“Sorry, Tess,” they said. “If we can raise the mainland by the end of the week, it’ll
be a miracle. We’re back to smoke signals, as of now.”

Tessie thought that over.

“I can’t take any chances,” she said. “We’ll have to send a boat across.”

Both technicians laughed bitterly.