Dolphin Island

“I didn’t; Peggy got it, from eighty fathoms in the Marlin Deep. No diver’s ever worked there—it’s too dangerous, even with modern gear. But once after Uncle Henry had gone down in shallow water and showed them what silver-lip oysters were like, Peggy and Susie and Einar pulled up several hundredweight. The Prof says it’ll pay for this trip.”

“What—this pearl?”

“No, stupid—the shell. It’s still the best stuff for buttons and knife handles, and the oyster farms can’t supply enough of it. The Prof believes one could run a nice little pearl-shell industry with a few hundred trained dolphins.”

“Did you find any wrecks?”

“About twenty, though most of them were already marked on the Admiralty charts. But the big experiment was with the fishing trawlers out of Gladstone; we managed to drive two schools of tuna right into their nets.”

“I bet they were pleased.”

“Well, not as much as you might think. They wouldn’t believe the dolphins did it—they claimed it was done by their own electric control fields and sound baits. We know better, and we’ll prove it when we get some more dolphins trained. Then we’ll be able to drive fish just where we like.”

Suddenly, Johnny remembered what Professor Kazan had said to him about dolphins, at their very first meeting. “They have more freedom than we can ever know on land. They don’t belong to anyone, and I hope they never will.”

Were they now about to lose that freedom, and would the Professor himself, for all his good intentions, be the instrument of their loss?

Only the future could tell; but perhaps dolphins had never been as free as men had imagined. For Johnny could not forget the story of that killer whale, with twenty of the People of the Sea in its stomach.

One had to pay for liberty, as for everything else. Perhaps the dolphins would be willing to trade with mankind, exchanging some of their freedom for security. That was a choice that many nations had had to make, and the bargain had not always been a good one.

Professor Kazan, of course, had already thought of this, and much more. He was not worried, for he was still experimenting and collecting information. The decisions had yet to be made; the treaty between man and dolphin, which he dimly envisaged, was still far in the future. It might not even be signed in his lifetime—if, indeed, one could expect dolphins to sign a treaty. But why not? Their mouths were wonderfully dexterous, as they had shown when collecting and transporting those hundreds of silver-lip pearl shells. Teaching dolphins to write, or at least to draw, was another of the Professor’s long-term projects.

One which would take even longer—perhaps centuries —was the History of the Sea. Professor Kazan had always suspected—and now he was certain—that dolphins had marvelous memories. There had been a time, before the invention of writing, when men had carried their own past in their brains. Minstrels and bards memorized millions of words and passed them on from generation to generation. The songs they sang—the legends of gods and heroes and great battles before the beginning of history— were a mixture of fact and imagination. But the facts were there, if one could dig them out—as, in the nineteenth century, Schliemann dug Troy out of its three thousand years of rubble and proved that Homer had spoken the truth.

The dolphins also had their storytellers, though the Professor had not yet contacted one. Einar had been able to repeat, in rough outline, some of their tales, which he had heard in his youth. Professor Kazan’s translations had convinced him that these dolphin legends contained a wealth of information that could be found nowhere else. They went back earlier than any human myths or folk tales, for some of them contained clear references to the Ice Ages—and the last of those was seventeen thousand years ago.

And there was one tale so extraordinary that Professor Kazan had not trusted his own interpretation of the tape. He had given it to Dr. Keith and asked him to make an independent analysis.

It had taken Keith, who was nothing like as good at translating Dolphin as was the Professor, nearly a month to make some sense of the story. Even then, he was so reluctant to give his version that Professor Kazan practically had to drag it out of him.

“It’s a very old legend,” he began. “Einar repeats that several times. And it seems to have made a great impression on the dolphins, for they emphasize that nothing like it ever happened before or afterward.

“As I understand it, there was a school of dolphins swimming at night off a large island, when it suddenly became like day and ‘the sun came down from the sky.’ I’m quite sure of that phrase. The ‘sun’ landed in the water and went out; at least, it became dark again. But there was an enormous object floating on the sea—as long as 128 dolphins. Am I right so far?”

Professor Kazan nodded.

“I agree with everything except the number. I made it 256, but that’s not important. The thing was big, there’s no doubt of that.”