Dolphin Island

Suddenly the Moon’s waning crescent broke through the clouds. For the first time, Johnny could see the miles of rolling water arould him, the great waves marching endlessly into the night. Their crests gleamed like silver in the moonlight, making their troughs all the blacker by contrast. The surfboard’s dive down into the dark valleys and its slow climb to the peaks of the moving hills were a continual switching from night to day, day to night.

Johnny looked at his watch; he had been traveling about four hours. That meant, with any luck, forty miles, and it also meant that dawn could not be far away. That would help him to fight off sleep. Twice he had dozed, fallen off the board, and found himself spluttering in the sea. It was not a pleasant feeling, floating there in the darkness while he waited for Susie to circle back and pick him up.

Slowly the eastern sky lightened. As he looked back, waiting for the first sight of the sun, Johnny remembered the dawn he had watched from the wreckage of the Santa Anna. How helpless he had felt then, and how mercilessly the tropical sun had burned him! Now he was calm and confident, though he had reached the point of no return, with fifty miles of sea separating him from land in either direction. And the sun could no longer harm him, for it had already tanned his skin a deep golden brown.

The swift sunrise shouldered away the night, and as he felt the warmth of the new day on his back, Johnny pressed the STOP button. It was time to give Susie a rest and a chance to go hunting for her breakfast. He slipped off the surfboard, swam forward, loosened her harness—and away she went, jumping joyfully in the air as she was released. There was no sign of Sputnik; he was probably chasing fish somewhere else, but would come quickly enough when he was called.

Johnny pushed up his face mask, which he had worn all night to keep the spray out of his eyes, and sat astride the gently rocking board. A banana, two meat rolls, and a sip of orange juice was all he needed to satisfy him; the rest could wait until later in the day. Even if everything went well, he still had five or six hours of traveling ahead of him.

He let the dolphins have a fifteen-minute break while he relaxed on the board, rising and falling in the swell of the waves. Then he pressed the call button and waited for them to return.

After five minutes, he began to get a little worried. In that time they could swim three miles; surely they had not gone so far away? Then he relaxed as he saw a familiar dorsal fin cutting through the water toward him.

A second later, he sat up with a jerk. That fin was certainly familiar, but it was not the one he was expecting. It belonged to a killer whale.

Those few moments, as Johnny saw sudden death bearing down at thirty knots, seemed to last forever. Then a faintly reassuring thought struck him, and he dared to hope. The whale had almost certainly been attracted by his signal; could it possibly be… ?

It was. As the huge head surfaced only a few feet away, he recognized the streamlined box of the control unit, still anchored securely in the massive skull.

“You gave me quite a shock, Snowy,” he said when he had recovered his breath. “Please don’t do that again.”

Even now, he had no guarantee of safety. According to the last reports, Snowy was still on an exclusive diet of fish; at least, there had been no complaints from the dolphins. But he was not a dolphin, nor was he Mick.

The board rocked violently as Snowy rubbed herself against it, and it was all that Johnny could do to keep himself from being thrown into the water. But it was a gentle rub—the gentlest that fifteen feet of killer whale could manage—and when she turned to repeat the maneuver on the other side, Johnny felt a good deal better. There was no doubt that she only wanted to be friendly, and he breathed a silent but fervent “thank you” to Mick.

Still a little shaken, Johnny reached out and patted her as she slid by, so silently and effortlessly. Her skin had the typical, rubbery dolphin feel—which, of course, was natural enough. It was easy to forget that this terror of the seas was-just another dolphin, only on a slightly bigger scale.

She seemed to appreciate Johnny’s rather nervous stroking of her flank, for she came back for more.

“I guess you must be lonely, all by yourself,” said Johnny sympathetically. Then he froze in utter horror.

Snowy wasn’t by herself, and she had no need to be lonely. Her boy friend was making a leisurely approach— all thirty feet of him.

Only a male killer had that enormous dorsal fin, taller than a man. The huge black triangle, like the sail of a boat, came slowly up to the surfboard upon which Johnny was sitting, quite unable to move. All he could think was, “You’ve had no conditioning—no friendly swimming with Mick.”