Dolphin Island - Arthur C. Clarke [50]
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.
Though he had never stopped to think about it, the island had become the home he had never known, and the Professor a replacement for the father he could scarcely remember. Here he had felt the security which he had longed for and unconsciously striven to find. Now that security was threatened because no one could get a message across a hundred miles of sea—in this age when moons and planets talked to one another.
Only a hundred miles! Why, he himself had traveled a greater distance, when he first came to the island…
And with that memory, he suddenly knew, beyond all doubt or argument, exactly what he had to do. Dolphins had brought him as far as Dolphin Island; now they could carry him the rest