Dolphin Island

“We don’t need that sort of virtuosity here,” Professor Kazan answered. “All I want to do is to control Snowy’s movements and to teach her not to eat dolphins.”

“If my men have put the electrodes in the right area, I think I can promise that. But not immediately; I’ll have to do some brain-mapping first.”

This “brain-mapping” was slow, delicate work, requiring great patience and skill, and Saha sat for hours at his instrument panel, observing Snowy’s behavior as she dived, basked in the sun, swam lazily around the pool, or took the fish that Mick offered her. All the time her brain was broadcasting like a satellite in orbit, through the radio transmitter attached to it. The impulses picked up by the probes were recorded on tape, so that Dr. Saha could see the pattern of electrical activity corresponding to any particular action.

At last he was ready for the first step. Instead of receiving impulses from Snowy’s brain, he began to feed electric currents into it.

The result was both fascinating and uncanny—more like magic than science. By turning a knob or closing a switch, Dr. Saha could make the great animal swim to right or left, describe circles or figure eights, float motionless in the center of the pool, or carry out any other movement he wished. Johnny’s efforts to control Sputnik and Susie with the communicator, which had once seemed so impressive, now appeared almost childish.

But Johnny did not mind, Susie and Sputnik were his friends, and he preferred to leave them freedom of choice. If they did not wish to obey him—as was often the case— that was their privilege. Snowy had no alternative; the electric currents fed into her brain had turned her into a living robot, with no will of her own, compelled to carry out the orders Dr. Saha gave her.

The more that Johnny thought about this, the more uncomfortable he became. Could the same control be applied to me? When he made inquiries, he found that this had indeed been done, many times, in laboratory experiments. Here was a scientific tool that might be as dangerous as atomic energy if used for evil instead of good.

There was no doubt that Professor Kazan intended to use it for good—at least, for the good of dolphins—but how he intended to use it still puzzled Johnny. He was not very much wiser even when the experiment moved into its next stage, with the arrival on the island of a most peculiar object—a life-size mechanical dolphin, driven by electric motors.

It had been built twenty years ago by a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratories, who couldn’t understand how dolphins managed to swim as fast as they did. According to his calculations, their muscles should not be able to drive them at much more than ten miles an hour— yet they could cruise comfortably at twice that speed.

So the scientist had built a model dolphin and studied its behavior as it swam up and down, loaded with instruments. The project had been a failure, but the model was so beautifully made and performed so well that no one had had the heart to destroy it, even when its designer had given up in disgust. From time to time the Lab technicians dusted it off for public demonstrations, and thus the Professor had come to hear of it. In its small way, it was quite famous.

It would have fooled any human observer, but when it was lowered into Snowy’s tank, before scores of fascinated spectators, the result was an utter anticlimax. The whale took one contemptuous glance at the mechanical toy and then ignored it completely.

“Just what I was afraid of,” said the Professor, without too much disappointment. Like all scientists, he had long ago learned that most experiments are failures, and he was not ashamed to make a fool of himself, even in public. (After all, the great Darwin once spent hours playing the trumpet in a vegetable garden, to see if sound affected plant growth.) “She probably heard the electric motor and knew the thing was a fake. Well, there’s no alternative. We’ll have to use real dolphins as bait.”

“Are you going to call for volunteers?” asked Dr. Saha, jokingly.

The joke, however, backfired on him. Professor Kazan considered the suggestion carefully, then nodded his head in agreement.

“I’ll do exactly that,” he said.

Chapter 17

“There’s a general feeling around the island,” said Mick, “that the Prof has gone stark, staring mad.”

“You know that’s nonsense,” retorted Johnny, springing to the defense of his hero. “What’s he done now?”

“He’s been using that brain-wave gadget to control Snowy’s feeding. He tells me to offer her one kind of fish, and then Dr. Saha stops her from eating it; after he’s given her several jabs, she doesn’t even try any more. He calls it ‘conditioning.’ Now there are four or five big jacks swirrirning round in the pool, but she won’t look at them. She’ll eat any other fish, though.”

“Why does that make the Prof crazy?”