Dolphin Island by Arthur C. Clarke Page A

his nerves. The sight of Mick’s exploring
     beam of light, flashing and flickering through the submarine darkness a few yards
     away, reminded him that he was not alone. He began to enjoy peeping into caves and
     under ledges and coming face to face with startled fish. Once he met a beautifully
     patterned moray eel that snapped at him angrily from its hole in the rocks and waved
     its snakelike body in the water. Johnny did not care for those pointed teeth, but
     he knew that morays never attacked unless they were molested—and he had no intention
     of making enemies on this dive.
    The pool was full of strange noises, as well as strange creatures. Every time Mick
     banged his spear against a rock, Johnny could hear the sound more loudly than if he
     had been in air. He could also hear—and sometimes feel through the water—the thudding
     of the waves against the edge of the reef only a few yards away.
    Suddenly he became aware of the new sound, like the patter of tiny hailstones. It
     was faint, but very clear, and seemed to come from close at hand. At the same moment,
     he noticed that the beam of his flashlight was beginning to fill with swirling fog.
    Millions of little creatures, most of them no larger than grains of sand, had been
     attracted by the light and were hurling themselves against the lens, like moths into
     a candle. Soon they were coming in such countless number that the beam was completely
     blocked; those that missed the flashlight made Johnny’s exposed skin tingle as they
     battered against him. They were moving at such a speed that he could not be certain
     of their shapes, though he thought that some of them looked rather like tiny shrimps
     about the size of rice grains.
    These creatures, Johnny knew, must be the larger and more active of the plankton animals,
     the basic food of almost all the fish in the sea. He was forced to switch off his
     light until they had dispersed and he could no longer hear—or feel—the patter of their
     myriad bodies. As he waited for the living fog to drift away, he wondered if any larger
     creatures might be attracted by his light—sharks, for example. He was quite prepared
     to face them in the daytime, but it was a very different matter after sunset….
    When Mick started to climb out of the pool, he was glad to follow. Yet he would not
     have missed this experience for anything; it had shown him another of the sea’s many
     faces. Night could transform the world below the waves, as it transformed the world
     above. No one knew the sea who explored it only by daylight.
    Indeed, only a small part of the sea ever knew daylight. Most of it was a realm of
     eternal darkness, for the rays of the sun could reach only a few hundred feet into
     its depths before being utterly absorbed. No light ever shone in the abyss—except
     the cold luminescence of the nightmare creatures who lived there, in a world without
     sun or seasons.
    “What have you caught?” Johnny asked Mick when they had both clambered out of the
     pool.
    “Six crayfish, two tiger cowries, three spider shells, and a volute I’ve never seen
     before. Not a bad haul—though there was a big cray I couldn’t reach. I could see his
     feelers, but he backed into a cave.”
    They started to walk homeward across the great plateau of living coral, using the
     beacon on the radio mast as their guide. That bright red star seemed miles away in
     the darkness, and Johnny was uncomfortably aware that the water through which he was
     wading had become much deeper while they had been exploring the pool. The tide was
     returning; it would be very unpleasant to be caught here, so far from land, while
     the sea went pouring in ahead of them.
    But there was no danger of that; Mick had planned the excursion carefully. He had
     also, quite deliberately, used it to test his new friend, and Johnny had passed with
     flying colors.
    There were some people whose nerves would never allow them to dive at night, when