Dolphin Island

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-by 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. “Well have to send a boat across.”

Both technicians laughed bitterly.

“Hadn’t you heard!” said one. “Flying Fish is upside down, and all the other boats are in the middle of the island, parked in the trees.”

As Tessie absorbed this report—slightly, but only slightly, exaggerated—she felt more helpless than she had ever been since that time Matron had ticked her off as a raw probationer. She could only hope that everyone would keep healthy until communications were restored.

But by evening she had attended to one injured foot that looked gangrenous; and then the Professor, pale and shaky, came to see her.

“Tessie,” he said, “you’d better take my temperature. I think I’ve got a fever.”

Before midnight, she was sure that it was pneumonia.

Chapter 19

The news that Professor Kazan was seriously ill, and that there was no way of treating him adequately, caused more dismay than all the damage wrought by the hurricane. And it hit no one harder than Johnny.