Dolphin Island - Arthur C. Clarke [54]
It was a wonderful moment when he saw the first pale glow of moonrise in the east. The clouds were still thick, but though he could not see the Moon itself, its reflected light began to grow around him. It was too faint to show any details; but merely to see the horizon made a great difference to his peace of mind. Now he could tell with his own eyes that there were no rocks or reefs ahead. Susie's underwater senses were far keener than his straining vision, but at least he was no longer completely helpless.
Now that they were in deeper water, the annoying, choppy wavelets over which the board had bumped at the beginning of its journey had been left behind. Instead, they were skimming across long, rolling waves, hundreds of feet from crest to crest. It was hard to judge their height; from Johnny's prone position, they doubtless seemed much bigger than they really were. Half the time, Susie would be climbing up a long, gentle slope; then the board would hover for an instant on the summit of the moving hill of water; then there would be the swoop down into the valley—then the whole sequence would begin again. Johnny had long since learned to adjust himself to the climb and the swoop, shifting his weight automatically along the board. Like riding a bicycle, he did it without conscious thought.
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,