Dolphin Island

“Well, it’s obvious what he’s up to. If he can keep Snowy from eating jacks, he can keep her from eating dolphins. But what good will that be? There are millions of killer x whales—he can’t condition them all!”

“Whatever the Profs doing,” said Johnny stubbornly, “there’s a good reason for it. Wait and see.”

“All the same, I wish they’d stop bothering Snowy. I’m afraid it’ll make her bad-tempered.”

That was an odd thing to say about a killer whale, thought Johnny.

“I don’t see that that matters very much,” be said.

Mick grinned rather shamefacedly and scuffed the ground with his feet.

“You promise you won’t tell anyone?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“Well, I’ve been swimming with her a good deal. She’s more fun than your little tadpoles.”

Johnny stared at him in utter amazement, quite ignoring the insult to Susie and Sputnik.

“And you said the Professor was mad!” he exclaimed, when he had got his breath back. “You aren’t pulling my leg again, are you?” he added suspiciously. By now he could usually spot one of Mick’s jokes, but this time he seemed to be serious.

Mick shook his head.

“If you don’t believe me, come down to the pool. Oh, I know it sounds crazy, but it’s really quite safe. The whole thing started by accident: I got careless one day when I was feeding Snowy, slipped on the edge of the pool, and fell in.”

“Phew!” whistled Johnny. “Bet you thought your last moment had come!”

“I sure did. When I came up, I was looking straight into Snowy’s mouth.” He paused. “You know, it isn’t true about recalling your past life at moments like this. All I thought about was those teeth. I wondered if I’d go down in one piece, or whether she’d bite me in two.”

“‘And what happened?” asked Johnny breathlessly.

“Well, she didn’t bite me in two. She just gave me a gentle nudge with her nose, as if to say, ‘Let’s be friends.’ And that’s what we’ve been ever since. If I don’t go swimming with her every day, she gets very upset. Sometimes it’s not easy to manage, because if anyone sees me, they’ll tell the Prof, and that’ll be the end of it”

He laughed at Johnny’s expression, which was a mixture of alarm and disapproval.

“It’s a lot safer than lion-taming, and men have been doing that for years. I get quite a kick out of it, too. Maybe someday I’ll work up to the big whales, like a hundred-and-fifty ton Blue.”

“Well, at least one of those couldn’t swallow you,” said Johnny, who had learned a good deal about whales since coming to the island. “Their throats are too small—they can eat only shrimps and little things like that.”

“All right then—what about a sperm whale—Moby Dick himself? He can swallow a thirty-foot squid in one gulp.”

As Mick warmed to his theme, Johnny slowly realized that he was motivated by straightforward envy. Even now, the dolphins merely tolerated him and never showed any of the affectionate delight they showered upon Johnny. He felt glad that Mick had at last found a cetacean friend, but wished it had been a more sensible one.

As it happened, he never had a chance to see Mick and Snowy swimming together, for Professor Kazan was now ready for his next experiment. He had been working for days, splicing tapes and composing long sentences in Dolphin; even now he was not certain whether he could convey the exact meaning he wanted to. He hoped that in the parts where his translation fell down, the intelligence of the dolphins would bridge the gap.

He often wondered what they thought of his conversation, built up of words from many different sources. Each sentence he broadcast into the water must sound as if there were a dozen or more dolphins, each taking his turn to speak a few words in a different accent. It must be very puzzling to his listeners, since they could hardly imagine such things as tape recording and sound-editing. The fact that they made any sense at all out of his noises was a tribute both to their intelligence and their patience.

As the Flying Fish pulled away from her moorings, Professor Kazan was unusually nervous.

“Do you know what I feel like?” he said to Dr. Keith as they stood on the foredeck together. “It’s as if I’d invited my friends to a party, just to let loose a man-eating tiger among them.”

“It’s not as bad as that,” laughed Keith. “You’ve given them fair warning, and you do have the tiger under control.”

“I hope” said the Professor.

Somewhere on board, a loud-speaker announced: “They’re opening the pool gate now. She doesn’t seem in a hurry to leave.”

Professor Kazan raised a pair of binoculars and stared back at the island.

“I don’t want Saha to control her until we have to,” he said. “Ah, here she comes.”

Snowy was moving down the channel from the pool, swimming very slowly. When the channel came to an end and she found herself in open water, she seemed quite bewildered and turned around several times as if finding her bearings. It was a typical reaction of an animal—or a man—that had spent a long time in captivity and had now been turned loose into the great outside world.