Dolphin Island - Arthur C. Clarke [36]
Sharks were, of course, the commonest prowlers of the reef. Johnny never forgot the first he met, one day when he and Mick had given their escorts the slip by going out an hour earlier than usual. He never saw it coming; it was suddenly there, a gray, superbly streamlined torpedo, moving slowly and effortlessly toward him. It was so beautiful and so graceful that it was impossible to think of it as dangerous. Not until it had approached to within twenty feet did Johnny look around anxiously for Mick. He was relieved to find his friend snorkling immediately above him, eying the situation calmly but with loaded spear gun at the ready.
The shark, like almost all sharks, was merely inquisitive. It looked Johnny over with its cold, staring eyes—so different from the friendly, intelligent eyes of the dolphins —and swerved off to the right when it was ten feet away. Johnny had a perfect view of the pilot fish swimming in front of its nose, and the remora, or sucker fish, clamped onto its back
—an ocean-going hitchhiker, using his suction pad to give him a free ride through life.
There was nothing that a diver could do about sharks, except to watch out for them and to leave them alone, in the hope that they would do the same to him. If you faced up to them, they would always go away. But if you lost your nerve and tried to run—well, anyone who was stupid enough to run deserved little sympathy, for a shark could swim thirty miles per hour to a skin-diver's three, without even exerting himself.
More unnerving than any sharks were the packs of barracuda that roamed along the edge of the reef. Johnny was very glad that the surfboard was floating overhead the first time he discovered that the water around him was full of the silver sea pike, with their hostile eyes and aggressive, underslung jaws. They were not very large—three feet long at the most—but there were hundreds of them, and they formed a circular wall, with Johnny at the center. It was a wall that came closer and closer as the barracuda spiraled in to get a better look at him, until presently he could see nothing but their glittering bodies.
Though he waved his arms and shouted into the water, it made not the slightest difference: they inspected him at their leisure— then, for no reason that he could see, turned suddenly away and disappeared into the blue.
Johnny surfaced, grabbed the board, and held an anxious conference with Mick across it Every few seconds he kept bobbing his head underwater, to see if the wolf pack had returned.
"They won't bother you," said Mick reassuringly. "'Cuda are cowards. If you shoot one, all the others will run away."
Johnny was glad to know it and took the next meeting more calmly. All the same, he never felt quite happy when the silver hunters closed in on him, like a fleet of spaceships from an alien world. Perhaps some day, one of them would risk a nibble, and then the whole pack would move in…
There was one serious difficulty about exploring the reef: it was too big. Most of it was far beyond comfortable swimming range, and there were areas out toward the horizon that had never been visited. Often Johnny wished he could have gone farther into unknown territory, but he had been forced to save his strength for the long swim home.
It was on one of these weary return journeys, as he helped Mick to push the surfboard loaded with at least a hundred pounds of fish, that the answer occurred to him.
Mick was skeptical, but agreed that the idea would be splendid—if it worked. "It's not going to be easy," he said, "to make a harness that will fit a dolphin. They're so streamlined that it will slide off them."
"I'm thinking of a kind of elastic collar, just ahead of the flippers. If it's broad enough and