Dolphin Island (6 page)

I think it’s afraid of the Professor, Johnny decided. He walked along the edge of
the pool until he had put fifty feet between himself and the scientist, then called
to Sputnik again.

His theory worked. The dolphin surveyed the new situation, approved of it, and swam
slowly toward Johnny. It still looked a little suspicious as it raised its snout and
opened its mouth, displaying an alarming number of small but needle-sharp teeth. Johnny
felt distinctly relieved when it took the reward without nipping his fingers. After
all, Sputnik was a carnivore, and Johnny would not care to feed a half-grown lion
cub with his bare hands.

The young dolphin hovered at the edge of the pool, obviously waiting for more. “No,
Sputnik,” said Johnny, remembering the Professor’s words to Susie. “No, Sputnik—food-time
soon.”

The dolphin remained only inches away, so Johnny reached out to stroke it. Though
it shied a little, it did not withdraw, but permitted him to run his hand along its
back. He was surprised to find that the animal’s skin was soft and flexible, like
rubber; nothing could have been more unlike the scaly body of a fish; and no one who
stroked a dolphin could ever again forget that it was a warm-blooded mammal.

Johnny would have liked to remain playing with Sputnik, but the Professor was signaling
to him. As they walked away from the pool, the scientist remarked jokingly: “My feelings
are quite hurt. I’ve never been able to get near Sputnik—and you did it the first
time. You seem to have a way with dolphins; have you ever kept any pets before?”

“No, sir,” said Johnny. “Except polywogs, and that was a long time ago.”

“Well,” the Professor chuckled, “I don’t think we can count
them
.”

They had walked on for a few more yards, when Professor Kazan started speaking in
a completely different tone of voice, addressing Johnny very seriously as an equal,
not as a boy forty years younger.

“I’m a scientist,” he said, “but I’m also a superstitious Russian peasant. Though
logic tells me it’s nonsense, I’m beginning to think that Fate sent you here. First,
there was the way you arrived, like something out of a Greek myth, And now Sputnik
feeds out of your hands. Pure coincidence, of course, but a sensible man makes coincidences
work for him.”

What on earth is he driving at? wondered Johnny. But the Professor said no more until
they were about to re-enter the Tech Block. Then he suddenly remarked, with a slight
chuckle, “I understand that you’re in no great hurry to get home.”

Johnny’s heart skipped a beat.

“That’s right, sir,” he said eagerly. “I want to stay here as long as I can. I’d like
to learn more about your dolphins.”

“Not
mine
,” corrected the Professor firmly. “Every dolphin is a person in his own right, an
individual with more freedom than we can ever know on land. They don’t belong to anyone,
and I hope they never will. I want to help them, not only for science, but because
it’s a privilege to do so. Never think of them as animals; in their language they
call themselves the People of the Sea, and that’s the best name for them.”

It was the first time that Johnny had seen the Professor so animated, but he could
understand his feelings. For he owed his life to the People of the Sea, and it was
a debt he hoped he could repay.

Around Dolphin Island lay a magic kingdom, the reef. In a lifetime, one could not
exhaust its marvels. Johnny had never dreamed that such places existed, crammed with
weird and beautiful creatures in such multitudes that the fields and forests of the
land seemed dead by comparison.

At high tide, the reef was completely covered by the sea, and only the narrow belt
of white sand surrounding the island was left exposed. But a few hours later, the
transformation was incredible. Though the range between high and low tide was only
three feet, the reef was so flat that the water withdrew for miles. Indeed, in some
directions the tide retreated so far that the sea disappeared from sight, and the
coral plateau was uncovered all the way to the horizon.

This was the time to explore the reef; all the equipment needed was a stout pair of
shoes, a broad-rimmed hat to give protection from the sun, and a face mask. The shoes
were far and away the most important item, for the sharp, brittle coral could inflict
scars that easily became infected, and then took weeks to heal.

The first time that Johnny went out onto the reef, Mick was his guide. Because he
had no idea what to expect, everything was very strange—and a little frightening.
He did well to be cautious until he knew his way around. There were things on the
reef—small, innocent-looking things—that could easily kill him if he was careless.

The two boys walked straight out from the beach on the western side of the island,
where the exposed reef was only half a mile wide. At first they crossed an uninteresting
no man’s land of dead, broken coral—shattered fragments cast up by the storms of centuries.
The whole island was built of such fragments, which the ages had covered with a thin
layer of earth, then with grass and weeds, and at last with trees.

They were soon beyond the zone of dead coral, and it seemed to Johnny that he was
moving through a garden of strange, petrified plants. There were delicate twigs and
branches of colored stone, and more massive shapes like giant mushrooms or fungi,
so solid that it was safe to walk on them. Yet despite their appearance, these were
not plants, but the creations of animal life. When Johnny bent down to examine them,
he could see that their surfaces were pierced by thousands of tiny holes. Each was
the cell of a single coral polyp—a little creature like a small sea anemone—and each
cell had been built of lime secreted by the animal during its lifetime. When it died,
the empty cell would remain, and the next generation would build upon it. And so the
reef would grow, year by year, century by century. Everything that Johnny saw—the
miles upon miles of flat tableland, glistening beneath the sun—was the work of creatures
smaller than his fingernail.

And this was only one patch of coral in the whole immensity of the Great Barrier Reef,
which stretched for more than a thousand miles along the Australian coast. Now Johnny
understood a remark that he had heard Professor Kazan make—that the Reef was the mightiest
single work of living creatures on the face of the Earth.

It did not take Johnny long to discover that he was walking on other creatures besides
corals. Suddenly, without the slightest warning, a jet of water shot into the air,
only a few feet in front of him.

“Whatever did that?” he gasped.

Mick laughed at his amazement.

“Clam,” he answered briefly. “It heard you coming.”

Johnny caught the next one in time to watch it in action. The clam was about a foot
across, embedded vertically in the coral so that only its open lips were showing.
The body of the creature (partly out of its shell), looked like a beautifully colored
piece of velvet, dyed the richest of emeralds and blues. When Mick stamped on the
rock beside it, the clam instantly snapped shut in alarm—and the water it shot upward
just missed Johnny’s face.

“This is only a little feller,” said Mick contemptuously. “You have to go deep to
find the big ones—they grow up to four, five feet across. My grandfather says that
when he was working on a pearling lugger out of Cooktown, he met a clam twelve feet
across. But he’s famous for his tall stories, so I don’t believe it.”

Johnny didn’t believe in the five-foot clams either; but, as he found later, this
time Mick was speaking the exact truth. It wasn’t safe to dismiss
any
story about the reef and its creatures as pure imagination.

They had walked another hundred yards, accompanied by occasional squirts from annoyed
clams, when they came to a small rock-pool. Because there was no wind to ruffle the
surface, Johnny could see the fish darting through the depths as clearly as if they
had been suspended in air.

They were all the colors of the rainbow, patterned in stripes and circles and spots
as if some mad painter had run amok with his palette. Not even the most garish butterflies
were more colorful and striking than the fish flitting in and out of the corals.

And the pool held many other inhabitants. When Mick pointed them out to him, Johnny
saw two long feelers protruding from the entrance of a little cave; they were waving
anxiously to and fro as if making a survey of the outside world.

“Painted Crayfish,” said Mick. “Maybe we’ll catch him on the way back. They’re very
good eating—barbecued with lots of butter.”

In the next five minutes, he had shown Johnny a score of different creatures. There
were several kinds of beautifully patterned shells; five-armed starfish crawling slowly
along the bottom in search of prey; hermit crabs hiding in the shells that they had
made their homes; and a thing like a giant slug, which squirted out a cloud of purple
ink when Mick prodded it.

There was also an octopus, the first that Johnny had ever seen. It was a baby, a few
inches across, and it was lurking shyly in the shadows, where only an expert like
Mick could have spotted it. When he scared it out into the open, it slithered over
the corals with a graceful flowing motion, changing its color from dull gray to a
delicate pink as it did so. Much to his surprise, Johnny decided that it was quite
a pretty little creature, though he expected that he would change his views if he
met a really large specimen.

He could have spent all day exploring this one small pool, but Mick was in a hurry
to move along. So they continued their trek toward the distant line of the sea, zigzagging
to avoid areas of coral too fragile to bear their weight.

Once, Mick stopped to collect a spotted shell the size and shape of a fir cone. “Look
at this,” he said, holding it up to Johnny.

A black, pointed hook, like a tiny sickle, was vainly stabbing at him from one end
of the shell.

“Poisonous,” said Mick. “If
that
gets you, you’ll be very sick. You could even die.”

He put the shell back on the rocks while Johnny looked at it thoughtfully. Such a
beautiful, innocent-looking object—yet it contained death! He did not forget that
lesson in a hurry.

But he also learned that the reef was perfectly safe to explore if you followed two
common-sense rules. The first was to watch where you were stepping; the second was
never to touch anything unless you
knew
that it was harmless.

At last they reached the edge of the reef and stood looking down into the gently heaving
sea. The tide was still going out, and water was pouring off the exposed coral down
hundreds of little valleys it had carved in the living rock. There were large, deep
pools here, open to the sea, and in them swam fish much bigger than any Johnny had
seen before.

“Come along,” said Mick, adjusting his face mask. With scarcely a ripple, he slipped
into the nearest pool, not even looking back to see if Johnny was following him.

Johnny hesitated for a moment, decided that he did not want to appear a coward, and
lowered himself gingerly over the brittle coral. As soon as the water rose above his
face mask, he forgot all his fears. The submarine world into which he had looked from
above was even more beautiful, now that he was actually floating face down on the
surface. He seemed like a fish himself, swimming in a giant aquarium, and able to
see everything with crystal clarity through the window of his mask.

Very slowly, he followed Mick along the winding walls, between coral cliffs that grew
farther and farther apart as they approached the sea. At first the water was only
two or three feet deep; then, quite abruptly, the bottom fell away almost vertically,
and before Johnny realized what had happened, he was in water twenty feet deep. He
had swum off the great plateau of the reef, and was heading for the open sea.

For a moment he was really frightened. He stopped swimming and marked time in the
water, looking back over his shoulder to check that safety was only a few yards behind
him. Then he looked ahead once more—ahead and downward.

It was impossible to guess how far he could see into the depths—a hundred feet, at
least. He was looking down a long, steep slope that led into a realm completely different
from the brightly lit, colorful pools which he had just left. From a world sparkling
with sunlight, he was staring into a blue, mysterious gloom. And far down in that
gloom, huge shapes were moving back and forth in a stately dance.

“What are they?” he whispered to his companion.

“Groupers,” said Mick. “Watch.” Then, to Johnny’s alarm, he slipped beneath the surface
and arrowed down into the depths, as swiftly and gracefully as any fish.

He became smaller and smaller as he approached those moving shapes, and they seemed
to grow in size by comparison. When he stopped, perhaps fifty feet down, he was floating
just above them. He reached out, trying to touch one of the huge fish, but it gave
a flick of its tail and eluded him.

Mick seemed in no hurry to return to the surface, but Johnny had taken at least a
dozen breaths while he was watching the performance. At last, to the great relief
of his audience, Mick began to swim slowly upward, waving good-by to the groupers
as he did so.

“How big were those fish?” asked Johnny when Mick had popped out of the water and
recovered his breath.

“Oh, only eighty, a hundred pounds. You should see the really big ones up north. My
grandfather hooked an eight-hundred-pounder off Cairns.”

“But you don’t believe him.” Johnny grinned.

“But I do,” Mick said, grinning back. “
That
time he had a photograph to show it.”

As they swam back to the edge of the reef, Johnny glanced down once more into the
blue depths, with their coral boulders, their overhanging terraces, and the ponderous
shapes swimming slowly among them. It was a world as alien as another planet, even
though it was here on his own Earth. And it was a world that, because it was so utterly
strange, filled him with curiosity and with fear.