The tension grew as Snowy spiraled inward, like an old-time phonograph pickup tracking in toward the spindle. She was only forty feet from the nearest, and bravest, dolphin when she made her bid.
A killer whale can accelerate at an unbelievable speed. But Dr. Saha was ready, his finger only a fraction of an inch from the button. Snowy didn't have a chance.
She was an intelligent animal—not quite as intelligent as her would-be victims, but almost in the same class. She knew that she was beaten. When she had recovered from the second shock, she turned her back on the dolphins and started to swim directly away from them. As she did so, Dr. Saha's finger darted toward his panel once more.
"Hey, what are you up to?" asked the Flying Fish's skipper, who had been watching all this with disapproval. Like his nephew Mick, he did not care to see Snowy pushed around. "Isn't she doing what you want?"
"I'm not punishing her—I'm rewarding her," explained Dr. Saha. "As long as I keep this button down, she's having a perfectly wonderful time, because I'm putting a few volts into the pleasure centers of her brain."
"I think that's enough for one day," Professor Kazan said. "Send her back to the pool—
she's earned her lunch."
"The same thing tomorrow, Professor?" asked the skipper as the Flying Fish headed for home.
"Yes, Steve—the same every day. But I'll be surprised if we have to keep it up for more than a week."
In fact, after only three days it was obvious that Snowy had learned her lesson. It was no longer necessary to punish her, only to reward her with short spells of electrical ecstasy.
The dolphins lost their fears equally fast, and at the end of a week, they and Snowy were completely at ease with each other. They would hunt around the reef together, sometimes co-operating to trap a school of fish, sometimes foraging independently. A few of the younger dolphins even started their usual horseplay around Snowy, who showed neither annoyance nor uncontrollable hunger when they bumped against her.
On the seventh day, Snowy was not steered back to her pool after her morning romp with the dolphins.
"We've done all we can," said the Professor. "I'm going to turn her loose."
"Isn't that taking a risk?" objected Dr. Keith.
"Of course it is, but we've got to take it sooner or later. Unless we let her run wild again, we'll never know how well her conditioning will last."
"And if she does make a snack of a few dolphins—what then?"
"The rest of them will tell us, soon enough. Then we'll go out and round her up again.
She'll be easy to locate with that radio pack she's carrying."
Stephen Nauru, who had been listening to the conversation as he stood at Flying Fish's wheel, looked back over his shoulder and asked the question that was worrying everybody.
"Even if you turned Snowy into a vegetarian, what about the other millions of the beasts?"
"We mustn't be impatient, Steve," answered the Professor. "I'm still only collecting information, and none of this may ever be the slightest use to man or dolphin. But I'm certain of one thing—the whole talkative dolphin world must know of this experiment by now, and they'll realize that we're doing our best for them. A good bargaining point for your fishermen."
"Hmm—I hadn't thought of that one."
"Anyway, if this works with Snowy, I've a theory that we need condition only a few killers in any one area. And only females—they'll teach their mates and their offspring that if you eat a dolphin, you'll get the most horrible headache."
Steve was not convinced. Had he realized the tremendous, irresistible power of electric brain stimulation, he might have been more impressed.
"I still don't think one vegetarian could make a tribe of cannibals mend their ways," he said.
"You may be quite right," answered the Professor. "That's what I want to find out. Even if the job's possible at all, it may not be worth doing. And even if it's worth doing, it may take several lifetimes. But one has to be an optimist; don't you remember the history of the twentieth century?"
"Which bit of it?" asked Steve. "There was rather a lot."
"The only bit that really matters. Fifty years ago, a great many people refused to believe that all the human nations could live in peace. Well, we know that they were wrong; if they'd been right, you and I wouldn't be here. So don't be too pessimistic about this project."
Suddenly, Steve burst into laughter.
"Now what's so funny?" asked the Professor.
"I was just thinking," said Steve, "that it's been thirty years since they had an excuse for awarding the Nobel Peace Prize. If this plan of yours comes off, you'll be in the running."
Chapter 18
While Professor Kazan experimented and dreamed, forces were gathering in the Pacific that cared nothing for the hopes and fears either of men or of dolphins. Mick and Johnny were among the first to glimpse their power, one moonless night out on the reef.
As usual, they were hunting for crayfish and rare shells, and this time Mick had acquired a new tool to help him. It was a watertight flashlight, somewhat larger than normal, and when Mick switched it on, it produced a very faint blue glow.
But it also produced a powerful beam of ultraviolet light, invisible to the human eye.
When this fell upon many varieties of corals and shells, they seemed to burst into fire, blazing with fluorescent blues and golds and greens in the darkness. The invisible beam was a magic wand, revealing objects that were otherwise hidden and that could not be seen even by ordinary light. Where the sand had been disturbed by a burrowing mollusk, for example, the ultraviolet beam betrayed the tiny furrow—and Mick had another victim.
Underwater, the effect was astonishing. When the boys dived in the coral pools near the edge of the reef, the dim blue light sliced ahead for fantastic distances. They could see corals fluorescing a dozen yards away, like stars or nebulae in the deeps of space. The natural luminosity of the sea, beautiful and striking though it was, could not compare with this.
Fascinated by their wonderful new toy, Mick and Johnny dived longer than they had intended. When they prepared to go home, they found that the weather had changed.
Until now, the night had been calm and still, the only sound the murmur of the waves, lazily rolling against the reef. But in the last hour a wind had come up, blowing in fitful gusts, and the voice of the sea had acquired an angrier, more determined note.
Johnny saw the thing first, as he was climbing out of the pool. Beyond the reef, at a distance that was quite impossible to judge, a faint light was moving slowly across the waters. For a moment he wondered if it could be a ship; then he realized that it was too blurred and formless, like a luminous fog.
"Mick," he whispered urgently, "what's that, out there at sea?"
Mick's answer was not reassuring. He gave a low whistle of astonishment and moved closer to Johnny, as if for protection.
Almost unable to believe their eyes, they watched as the mist gathered itself together, became brighter and more sharp-edged, and climbed higher and higher in the sky.
Within a few minutes, it was no longer a faint glow in the darkness: it was a pillar of fire walking upon the face of the sea.
It filled them both with superstitious awe—with the fear of the unknown, which men will never lose, because the wonders of the universe are without end. Their minds were full of wild explanations, fantastic theories—and then Mick gave a relieved, though rather shaken, laugh.
"I know what that is," he said. "It's only a water-spout I've seen them before, but never at night."
Like many mysteries, the explanation was simple—once you knew it. But the wonder remained, and the boys stared in fascination at the spinning column of water as it sucked up billions of the sea's luminous creatures and scattered them into the sky. It must have been many miles away, for Johnny could not hear the roar of its passage over the waves; and presently it vanished in the direction of the mainland.
When the boys had recovered from t
heir astonishment, the incoming tide had risen to their knees.
"If we don't get a move on, We'll have to swim for it," said Mick. Then he added thoughtfully, as he splashed off toward the island, "I don't like the look of that thing. It's a sign of bad weather—bet you ten to one we're in for a big blow."
How true that was they began to realize by next morning. Even if one knew nothing about meteorology, the picture on the television screen was terrifying. A great whirlpool of cloud, a thousand miles across, covered all the western Pacific. As seen from the weather satellite's cameras, looking down upon it from far out in space, it appeared to be quite motionless. But that was only because of its size. If one watched carefully, one could see after a few minutes that the spiral bands of cloud were sweeping swiftly across the face of the globe. The winds that drove them were moving at speeds up to a hundred and fifty miles an hour, for this was the greatest hurricane to strike the Queensland coast in a generation.
On Dolphin Island, no one wandered very far from a television screen. Every hour, revised forecasts came through from the computers that were predicting the progress of the storm, but there was little change during the day. Meteorology was now an exact science; the weathermen could state with confidence what was going to happen —
though they could not, as yet, do much about it.
The island had known many other storms, and the prevailing mood was excitement and alertness, rather than alarm. Luckily, the tide would be out when the hurricane reached its peak, so there was no danger of waves sweeping over the island—as had happened elsewhere in the Pacific. All through the day, Johnny was helping with the safety precautions. Nothing movable could be left in the open; windows had to be boarded over and boats drawn up as far as possible on the beach. The Flying Fish was secured to four heavy anchors, and to make doubly certain that she did not move, ropes were taken from her and secured to a group, of pandanus trees on the island. Most of the fishermen, however, were not much worried about their boats, for the harbor was on the sheltered side of the island. The forest would break the full force of the gale.
The day was hot and oppressive, without a breath of wind. It scarcely needed the picture on the television screen and the steady flow of weather reports from the east, to know that Nature was planning one of her big productions. Moreover, though the sky was clear and cloudless, the storm had sent its messages ahead of it. All day long, tremendous waves had been battering against the outer reef, until the whole island shook beneath their impact.
When darkness fell, the sky was still clear and the stars seemed abnormally brilliant.
Johnny was standing outside the Naurus' concrete-and-alurninium bungalow, taking a last look at the sky before turning in, when he became aware of a new sound above the thunder of the waves. It was a sound such as he had never heard before, as of a monstrous animal moaning in pain, and even on that hot, sultry evening, it seemed to chill his blood.
And then he saw something to the east that broke his nerve completely. An unbroken wall of utter blackness was riding up the sky, climbing visibly even as he watched. He had heard and seen the onset of the hurricane, and he did not wait for more.
"I was just coming to get you," said Mick, when Johnny closed the door thankfully behind him. Those were the last words that he heard for many hours. Seconds later, the whole house gave a shudder. Then came a noise which, despite its incredible violence, was startlingly familiar. For a moment it took Johnny back to the very beginning of his adventures; he remembered the thunder of the Santa Anna jets, only a few feet beneath him, as he climbed aboard the hovership, half a world away and a seeming lifetime ago.
The roar of the hurricane had already made speech impossible. Yet now, unbelievably, the sound level became even higher, for such a deluge as Johnny had never imagined was descending upon the house. The feeble word "rain" could not begin to describe it.
Judging by the sound that was coming through roof and walls, a man in the open would be drowned by the sheer mass of descending water—if he was not crushed first.
Yet Mick's family was taking all this quite calmly. The younger children were even gathered around the television set, watching the pictures, though they could not hear a word of the sound. Mrs. Nauru was placidly knitting—a rare accomplishment which she had learned in her youth and which normally fascinated Johnny because he had never seen anyone doing it before. But now he was too disturbed to watch the intricate movement of the needles and the magical transformation of wool into sock or sweater.
He tried to guess, from the uproar around him, what was happening outside. Surely, trees were being torn up by their roots; boats and eve'n houses scattered by the gale! But the howl of the wind and the deafening, unending crash of water masked all other sounds.
Guns might be booming outside the door, and no one would ever hear them.
Johnny looked at Mick for reassurance; he wanted some sign that everything was all right, that it would soon be over and everything would be normal. But Mick shrugged his shoulders, then made a pantomime of putting on a face mask and breathing from an Aqualung mouthpiece, which Johnny did not think at all funny in the circumstances.
He wondered what was happening to the rest of the island, but somehow nothing seemed real except this one room and the people in it. It was as if they alone existed now, and the hurricane was launching its attack upon them personally. So might Noah and his family have waited for the flood to rise around them, the sole survivors of their world.
Johnny had never thought that a storm on land could frighten him; after all, it was "only"
wind and rain. But the demonic fury raving around the frail fortress in which he was sheltering was something beyond all his experience and imagination. If he had been told that the whole island was about to be blown into the sea, he would have believed it Suddenly, even above the roar of the storm, there came the sound of a mighty crash—
though whether it was close at hand or far away it was impossible to tell. At the same instant, the lights went out.
That moment of utter darkness, at the height of the storm, was one of the most terrifying that Johnny had ever experienced. As long as he had been able to see his friends, even if he could not talk with them, he had felt reasonably safe. Now he was alone in the screaming night, helpless before natural forces that he had never known existed.
Luckily, the darkness lasted for only a few seconds. Mr. Nauru had been expecting the worst; he had an electric lantern ready, and when its light came on, showing everything quite unchanged, Johnny felt ashamed of his fright.
Even in a hurricane, life continues. Now that they had lost the television, the younger children started to play with their toys or read picture books. Mrs. Nauru continued placidly knitting, while her husband began to plow through a thick World Food Organization report on Australian fisheries, full of charts, statistics, and maps. When Mick set up a game of checkers, Johnny did not feel much like challenging him, but he realized that it was the sensible thing to do.
So the night dragged on. Sometimes the hurricane slackened for a moment, and the roar of the wind dropped to a level at which one could make oneself heard by shouting. But nobody made the effort, for there was nothing to say, and very quickly the noise returned to its former volume.
Around midnight, Mrs. Nauru got up, disappeared into the kitchen, and came back a few minutes later with a jug of hot coffee, half a dozen tin mugs, and an assorted collection of cakes. Johnny wondered if this was the last snack he would ever eat; nevertheless, he enjoyed it, and then went on losing games to Mick.
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 battere
d 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"