“There it is, Doc.”
The island had been loaned to us by Alejandro Martinez, the nitrate millionaire who was even now on his deathbed in Mexico City. It was a mile-long teardrop of rock, inhabited at one end by seals and at the other by the gray (dolphin-colored, I realized for the first time) fiberglass modulars of the Project.
Doug brought the little 172 straight in to the short strip bulldozed out of the side of a hill. I wondered how he managed in a fog or a wind. There were only about ten feet left at the end, when he snubbed the brakes hard to keep the prop out of the rocks.
Beth was waiting in the jeep with the engine running. Seeing the radiant smile on her broad, plain face, I wondered what my life would have been like if I had married not for beauty but for harmony. She and Leonard were partners before anything else.
“Welcome!” she shouted over the wind and crashing surf. “Want to join us, Doug? This is our big day!”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he said, shutting down the engine. “Where’s the fish?”
“Down in the pool, I imagine,” Beth said. “Comes and goes. What kind of intelligent creature would communicate with us if we kept it confined?”
“He’s pulling your leg,” I told her. “He’s talking about Leonard.”
“So am I,” she laughed.
Expertly, terrifyingly (“This
Leonard was on the sheltered upper deck, dripping in the wet suit he always wore, munching a seaweed sandwich and staring at a computer screen.
“It came?” I asked.
“The message. It came,” he said, looking up at me, his face shining with either sea water or tears.
We embraced, and Beth joined us both. It was a shared triumph. Leonard and I had started the Project twelve years before. He had done the undersea field work, she had designed and built the voice synthesizer, and I had written the program.
While I got into my wet suit, Beth explained to a puzzled Doug what we had done. It had all been top secret until now.
“The previous attempts to communicate with dolphins always failed because of the time factor,” she said. “It was Doc who figured out that they think not as individuals but collectively. The first problem was to convince them that we, a race that lives and dies as individuals, is even capable of thought, much less communication. Their feeling was, I think, that all our activity was reactive behavior.”
“What about cities? Ships?” said Doug. “We’ve been active on the sea for centuries.”
“Oh, they know that. But they have seen coral reefs and seashells, all built objects. The Australian Barrier Reef, for example, is a made object, and it’s vaster than all our cities put together. They don’t make things. They don’t put value in things.”
“The work of their civilization is thought,” put in Leonard. “They are building a thought, a concept that they have been working out over the millennia. It’s a grand project beyond anything we could imagine.”
“So they think they’re too good to talk to us,” said Doug.
“Don’t get your fur up,” said Beth, laughing. “They don’t think in words, like we do. Words are an extension of the hand—a grasping mechanism, and they don’t grasp and manipulate ideas in the way we do. So what we’ve been working to do over the years is to try and break their concepts down into words.”
I was almost ready. I had another gulp of coffee. My hand was shaking.
“The main problem was the time frame,” Leonard said. “We talk in bites. Their conversations run in long, centuries-old strings. They are not interested in communicating individual to individual. They communicate with their own developing selves and their descendants. Ready?”
This last was to me. I nodded.
Leonard led me down the stairs to the pool level. Beth and Doug followed. The surf outside was booming like a great heart.
“It still sounds like what you’re saying is that they don’t want to talk to us,” Doug protested.
“Oh, they do, as it turns out,” Leonard said. “They were very glad to hear from us. You see, they know who we are.”
“They remember,” said Beth.
“They have a message for us,” said Leonard.
“It took thirty-one months for them to say it,” said Beth. “It was the work of thousands of individuals.”
“So let’s have it!” said Doug. We all laughed at his impatience, so typically human.
“Doc first,” said Leonard. “The synthesizer only works under the water.” He led me to the end of the pool, where several dolphins, dignified and pearl-gray, waited like envoys in the reception room of an embassy.
I slipped into the water. It was cold but it felt good. The dolphins nuzzled at me, then dove. I felt like diving with them, but I had only my wet suit and no breathing gear.
“Ready?” Leonard asked.
I nodded.
“Put your head under, and listen.”
I floated. A deep, slow voice echoed through my bones, like the voice I remembered from a long-ago dream:
“Come home. All is forgiven.”
ENGLAND UNDERWAY
Mr. Fox was, he realized afterward, with a shudder of sudden recognition like that of the man who gives a cup of water to a stranger and finds out hours, or even years later, that it was Napoleon, perhaps the first to notice. Perhaps.
At least no one else in Brighton seemed to be looking at the sea that day. He was taking his constitutional on the Boardwalk, thinking of Lizzie Eustace and her diamonds, the people in novels becoming increasingly more real to him as the people in the everyday (or “real”) world grew more remote, when he noticed that the waves seemed funny.
“Look,” he said to Anthony, who accompanied him everywhere, which was not far, his customary world being circumscribed by the Boardwalk to the south, Mrs. Oldenshield’s to the east, the cricket grounds to the north, and the Pig & Thistle, where he kept a room—or more precisely, a room kept him, and had since 1956—to the west.
“Woof?” said Anthony, in what might have been a quizzical tone.
“The waves,” said Mr. Fox. “They seem—well, odd, don’t they? Closer together?”
“Woof.”
“Well, perhaps not. Could be just my imagination.”
Fact is, waves had always looked odd to Mr. Fox. Odd and tiresome and sinister. He enjoyed the Boardwalk but he never walked on the beach proper, not only because he disliked the shifty quality of the sand but because of the waves with their ceaseless back-and-forth. He didn’t understand why the sea had to toss about so. Rivers didn’t make all that fuss, and they were actually going somewhere. The movement of the waves seemed to suggest that something was stirring things up, just beyond the horizon. Which was what Mr. Fox had always suspected in his heart; which was why he had never visited his sister in America.
“Perhaps the waves have always looked funny and I have just never noticed,” said Mr. Fox. If indeed “funny” was the word for something so odd.
At any rate, it was almost half past four. Mr. Fox went to Mrs. Oldenshield’s, and with a pot of tea and a plate of shortbread biscuits placed in front of him, read his daily Trollope—he had long ago decided to read all forty-seven novels in exactly the order, and at about the rate, in which they had been written—then fell asleep for twenty minutes.
When he awoke (and no one but he knew he was sleeping) and closed the book, Mrs. Oldenshield put it away
