Dolphin Island

The boys started to walk along the sand dunes between the edge of the forest and the coral-covered beach. Mick was searching, and presently he found what he was looking for.

Something large had crawled up out of the sea, leaving what looked like tank tracks in the sand. At the end of the tracks, high above the water level, there was an area of flattened sand in which Mick commenced to dig with his hands.

Johnny helped him, and about a foot down they came across dozens of eggs the size and shape of table-tennis balls. They were not hard shelled, however, but leathery and flexible. Mick took off his shirt, made a bag out of it, and packed in all the eggs he could.

“D’ya know what they are?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Johnny promptly, to Mick’s obvious disappointment. “Turtle eggs. I saw a movie on television once, showing how the baby turtles hatch and then dig themselves out of the sand. What are you going to do with these?”

“Eat them, of course. They’re fine, fried with rice.”

“Ugh!” said Johnny. “You won’t catch me trying it.”

“You won’t know,” answered Mick. “We’ve got a very clever cook.”

They followed the curve of the beach around the north of the island, then the west, before coming back to the settlement. Just before they reached it, they encountered a large pool, or tank, connected to the sea by a canal. As the tide was now out, the canal was closed by a lock gate, which trapped water in the pool until the sea returned.

“There you are,” said Mick. “That’s what the island is all about.”

Swimming slowly around in the pool, just as he had seen them out in the Pacific, were two dolphins. Johnny wished he could have examined them more closely, but a wire-mesh fence made it impossible to get near the pool. On the fence, in large red letters, was a message which read: QUIET PLEASE—HYDROPHONES IN ACTION.

They tiptoed dutifully past, then Mick explained: “The Prof doesn’t like anyone talking near the dolphins, says it’s liable to confuse them. One night some crazy fisherman got drunk, and came and shouted a lot of bad language at them. There was an awful row—he was chucked out on the next boat.”

“What sort of man is the Prof?” asked Johnny.

“Oh, he’s fine—except on Sunday afternoons.”

“What happens then?”

“Every Sunday morning his old lady calls and tries to talk him into coming home. He won’t go, says he hates Moscow—it’s too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. So they have terrific fights, but every few months they compromise and meet at somewhere like Yalta.”

Johnny thought this over. He was anxious to learn all that he could about Professor Kazan, in the hope of improving his chances of staying on the island. Mick’s description sounded a little alarming; still, as Sunday had just passed, the Professor should be in a good temper for several days.

“Can he really talk dolphin language?” asked Johnny. “I didn’t think anyone could imitate those weird noises.”

“He can’t speak more than a few words, but he can translate tape recordings, with the help of computers. And then he can make new tapes and talk back to them. It’s a complicated business, but it works.”

Johnny was impressed, and his curiosity was aroused. He had always liked to know how things worked, and he couldn’t imagine how one would even begin to learn dolphin language.

“Well,” said Mick, when he put the question to him, “have you ever stopped to think how you learned to speak?”

“By listening to my mother, I suppose,” Johnny answered, a little sadly; he could just remember her.

“Of course. So what the Prof did was to take a mother dolphin with a new baby, and put them into a pool by themselves. Then he listened to the conversation as the baby grew up; that way, he learned dolphin, just as the baby did.”

“It sounds almost too easy,” said Johnny.

“Oh, it took years, and he’s still learning. But now he has a vocabulary of thousands of words, and he’s even started to write dolphin history.”

“History?”

“Well, you can call it that. Because they don’t have books, they’ve developed wonderful memories. They can tell us about things that happened in the sea ages ago—at least, that’s what the Prof says. And it makes sense; before men invented writing, they had to carry everything in their own heads. The dolphins have done the same.”

Johnny pondered these surprising facts until they had reached the administrative block and completed the circuit of the island. At the sight of all these buildings, housing so many busy workers and complicated machines, he was struck by a more down-to-earth thought.

“Who pays for all this?” he asked. “It must cost a fortune to run.”

“Not much, compared to the money that goes into space,” Mick answered. “The Prof started fifteen years ago with about six helpers. When he began getting results, the big science foundations gave him all the support he needed. So now we have to tidy the place up every six months for a lot of fossils who call themselves an inspection committee. I’ve heard the Prof say it was much more fun in the old days.”