“And how is little Galahad this morning?”
More chatter from the dolphins. The pup came up toward the window, followed by another adult. Grant stood and watched, trying to suppress a growing feeling of annoyance. Either she’s joking with me or she’s fooling herself, he thought.
O’Hara said, “I’ve got to be going now. And it’ll be your feeding time in a few minutes. I’ll be seeing you all again later.”
She jabbed the phone’s off key and turned away from the window. The dolphins chatted for a few moments, then swam away.
O’Hara was smiling impishly, as if she’d won a major debate. “You see?” she said.
Grant tried to be noncommittal. “Well, you spoke and they chattered, but I don’t think you can call that communication. ”
“Can’t you now? Then come with me to the lab.”
She started off down the corridor. There was barely room for the two of them to walk side by side in the narrow corridor of the aquarium. As Grant followed her, he noticed that she was limping slightly.
“Did you hurt your leg?” he asked, coming up beside her.
“Hurt it, yes,” O’Hara replied. “You might say that.”
“How?” he asked. “When?”
“It’s not important.”
That shut off the conversation. Grant trudged along beside her, noticing that she was still wearing the studded black leggings that Muzorawa and a few others always seemed to wear. He wanted to ask about it, but O’Hara’s abrupt cutoff of his questions kept him from speaking.
They ducked through the hatch at the end of the aquarium section and went down the broader main corridor of the station, right past all the biology labs. Grant began to wonder where she was leading him when she stopped and slid open a door marked COMMUNICATIONS LAB AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
Grant followed her into a compartment that looked like the back room of an electronics shop. Computers lined the walls, most of them blank and unattended, but a few technicians were sitting at desks, earphones clamped over their heads and pin microphones almost touching their lips.
O’Hara directed Grant to an unoccupied computer and told him to sit down and boot it up. Once he’d done that, she leaned over his shoulder and picked up the headset resting on the desktop. She was wearing some kind of scent, Grant realized: something herbal that smelled of flowers from a faraway world.
“Well, put it on,” she said, thrusting the headset into his hands.
Grant slipped the set on; the padded earphones blotted out the hum of the machines and the drone of the other subdued voices. As he swung the pin mike close to his mouth, O’Hara doggedly pecked at the keyboard with one extended finger. Her nails were polished a delicate rose pink, he saw.
Then she lifted one of his earphones slightly and said, “There’s no visual. You’ll just be getting the audio recording.”
Grant nodded as she let the earphone snap itself back in place. The computer screen showed the day’s date and a time; Grant realized it was just a few minutes ago. This must be a recording of her talking to the dolphins, he thought.
Sure enough, he heard O’Hara’s voice: “Top o’ the morning, Lancelot. And to you, Guinevere.”
Then he heard the clicks and whistles of the dolphins. The computer screen printed: GREETINGS O’HARA.
“And how is little Galahad this morning?”
BABY IS GROWING.
O’Hara said, “I’ve got to be going now. And it’ll be your feeding time in a few minutes. I’ll be seeing you all again later.”
GOOD-BYE O’HARA. GOOD FEEDING.
The screen went blank.
Grant pulled off the headset and looked up at O’Hara. She had an expectant grin on her face. He noticed for the first time that her mouth had just a trace of an overbite; it looked strangely sensuous.
“Well now,” O’Hara said. “What do you think of that?”
Grant knew he should be diplomatic, but he heard himself say, “I think the computer could have printed out those responses no matter what kinds of noises the dolphins made.”
Her eyes flashed for a moment, but then she nodded thoughtfully. “All right, then. You’ll make a fine scientist someday. Skeptical. That’s good.”
“I mean—”
“Oh, I know what you mean, Mr. Archer. And you’d be right, except for the fact that the computer has stored thousands of the dolphins’ responses and categorized them and cross-indexed them very thoroughly.”
“That still doesn’t mean it’s translating what those noises actually mean to the dolphins.”
“Doesn’t it now? Then how do you explain the fact that every time I say ‘good morning’ to them they respond with exactly the same expression?”
“How do you know their expression means that they understood what you said and returned your greeting?”
“The phone translates my words into their language, of course.”
“Still…”
She seemed delighted with Grant’s disbelief. Eagerly O’Hara snatched a headset from the computer next to the one Grant was using, slipped it over her chestnut hair, and said into the microphone, “Language demonstration one seventeen, please”
Grant didn’t realize he was staring at her until she unceremoniously took him by the chin and pointed his face back to the display screen.
A QUESTION OF INTELLIGENCE
It wasn’t a demonstration so much as a tutorial. By Dr. Wo, no less.
Grant sat and watched and listened. And learned. Building on nearly a century of researchers’ attempts to communicate meaningfully with dolphins, Wo and a handful of the station’s biologists—including Lane O’Hara—had created a dictionary of dolphin phrases.
“If the same phrase is used in the same situation every time,” Wo’s voice was saying over a video scene of three dolphins swimming in lazy circles, “then one may conclude that the phrase represents an actual word, constructed from actual phonemes—deliberate sounds intended to convey a meaning.”
As Grant watched, two human figures clad in black wet-suits entered the tank, trailing sets of bubbles from the transparent helmets that encased their heads. Grant could not make out their faces, but one of them had the supple, slim figure of O’Hara.
The human swimmers bore oblong boxes of metal or plastic strapped to their chests. Dolphinlike clicks and whistles came from them, and the dolphins responded with chatter of their own.
“One may conclude,” said Wo’s off-camera voice, “that the dolphins have developed a true language. We have been able to transliterate a few of their phrases into human speech sounds, and vice versa.”
There was something strange about Wo’s voice, Grant thought. It seemed richer, deeper than he remembered it from his one stressful meeting with the director. Then Wo’s voice had seemed harsh, strained, labored. Listening to the director on this video presentation, though, his voice came through relaxed and smooth. Maybe it’s just me, Grant thought. Maybe he sounded worse to me than he actually was. Still, the difference nagged at him.
“… conclusive evidence that the dolphins truly use language can be seen in this demonstration,” Wo was saying.
Another human voice—O’Hara’s, it sounded like-asked, “Can you blow a ring for me?”
One of the dolphins swam toward her and expelled a set of bubbles from its blowhole that formed a wobbly but recognizable ring. As the circle of bubbles expanded and drifted toward the tank’s surface, the dolphin nosed upward and swam through it, squeaking and clicking rapidly.
“Observe,” said Wo’s voice, “that no reward has been offered for this performance. The only exchange between the human experimenter and the dolphin subject was an audible communication.”
At the end of the video Wo appeared in his office, sitting at his desk, peering intently into the camera.