There is just about nothing as helpless as a human being in the ocean. Without my ability to morph I would not have lasted an hour.
I felt the change begin as I focused on morphing. At first, I thought it would kill me. I soon had most of the weight of a dolphin, with nothing but my human feet paddling to keep my head above water. My arms had already become flippers.
A wave washed over me, leaving me sputtering from my mouth and my blowhole at the same time.
I realized I could no longer keep my head above water. I took a deep lungful and let myself sink.
As my eyes went from human to dolphin, my underwater vision improved. I could see other figures kicking and writhing in the water around me. Jake, half-changed. Rachel, almost cornplete. Marco, with a dolphin grin, looking amused.
Then, with a kick of my newly completed tail, I knew I was safe. I had made the change. I was a dolphin in a dolphin's world. The human clumsiness, the human cold, the human fear of an alien environment, all evaporated.
I was warm and in control and right where I should be.
"Everyone okay?"
One by one they answered. We had made it. Too bad this was just the easy part of the mission.
"Well, that was fun," Marco said sardonically. "Let's never, ever do it again."
"Cassie?" Jake prodded me.
I tried to relax, to let my human mind recede just a little. I needed to listen to the dolphin instincts. I needed to understand the whale's in structions. Something no human could ever do.
"Not far," I said. "We're just a few . . . urn . . . Forget it, there's no word for it. Just believe me, we're close."
"After you, Cassie," Jake said.
54 It felt strange, taking the lead. But only I knew the way. We traveled near the surface for a while. This made it confusing for me, because whales go deeper, and the world the whale saw and knew was a deeper world than I, as a dolphin, experienced.
And yet, I knew I was going in the right direction. My echolocating clicks painted murky, half- understood pictures in my mind of underwater hills and valleys and rifts. I felt currents tugging at me. I sensed changes in water temperature.
In the end, I just knew.
" Okay , everyone, get a good lungful," I said.
We surfaced, blew out the stale air, and filled our lungs with the good clean ocean air.
"Hey. What's that?" It was Rachel.
"What?" I asked her.
"Over there. It's a helicopter."
We all watched as a helicopter flew low and very slowly over the water. It was just a few hundred yards away, and with our dolphin vision, we couldn't see it as well as we might have with our human eyes.
But as it flew closer, I could see that it was dragging a cable through the water.
"Some sort of sensor," Jake speculated.
"They're looking for something in the water," Marco agreed.
" It's them," I said.
No one argued. We all knew it was true. Controllers were flying that helicopter.
The Yeerks were here.
55 Chapter 17
"Everyone take in as much air as you can," I said again. "We're going deep." We dove and swam almost straight down. Down, down, leaving the bright barrier behind.
Away from the sun. Away from the light. Away from the air that we needed just as much as humans did.
I echolocated a school of fish ahead, just below us. But we weren't there to eat lunch. We swam through the fish and still we headed down. Down until we could see the ocean floor beneath us.
We leveled off and skimmed across the ocean floor, like low-flying jets racing at treetop level. Over waving fields of seaweed. Through darting schools of fish. Over jutting extrusions, of rock, encrusted by barnacles and home to a thousand bizarre crabs and lobsters and urchins and worms and snails.
Ahead was a ridge, a sort of long, low hill. We sailed over it.
" I'm starting to feel like maybe taking a breath would be a good thing," Rachel said. "How much farther - "
We all saw it at the same time.
Saw it, yes, but could hardly believe it.
I've become used to seeing impossible things - aliens, spaceships, my own friends turning into animals. But this was just plain mind-boggling.
It was round. As round as a plate. A very large plate. From one side to the other, the diameter must have been half a mile.
It was covered by a transparent dome. Clear glass, or whatever it is the Andalites use for glass.
And within the dome, protected from the crushing force of the water, was what looked very much like a park.
A park, in a plastic dome, at the bottom of the ocean.
There was grass, more blue than green, but it still looked like grass. There were trees like huge stems of broccoli. And other trees like orange and blue asparagus spears. At the center was a small lake, crystal-clear blue water. From the water grew fantastic, transparent green crystals in shapes like eccentric snowflakes.
"Whoa," Marco said.
"Man," Jake commented.
"I s this what you expected, Cassie?" Rachel asked me.
"I ... I had dreams ... I saw flashes of something . . . but this! This is unbelievable." 56 "l think that may be a hatch down there," Marco said. "You see the part that sticks out?"
"Let's try it," Jake said. "l can't hold my breath much longer." We arced down toward a part of the glass dome that seemed different from the rest. As we got closer, we could really begin to feel the size of the dome. It was like approaching one of those huge stadiums where they play football. But even bigger, if you can imagine that.
"It is a hatch," Rachel reported. She was a little ahead of the rest of us. " It's some kind of a glass door. On the other side there's a little room, then another door that leads into the dome.
There's a little red panel beside the outer door."
"Let's either try it or surface," Marco said urgently.
"That red panel. That's got to be the door-knob," Jake said. "Here goes. Let's hope this works." He pressed his beak against the panel.
Instantly the outer door opened.
"We should try this one at a time, see if it's safe," Marco said.
"Not enough time," I said. My lungs were burning. I needed air.
The four of us swam in through the outer door. There was a second red panel. I punched it with my beak and the door closed, sealing us into a small, glass room. We could see out and up into the ocean all around. But the side leading into the dome was opaque.
"l knew we'd end up in an aquarium sooner or later," Marco said.
The water began to drain from the room, slowly, a little at a time. This opened an area of air at the top of the enclosure. I raised my blow hole and sucked in blessed oxygen.
" Okay , let's morph," Jake said.
I had already started. By the time the enclosure was half drained, I could stand on my own human feet.
"We made it," Marco said after his human mouth reformed. "I don't know where we made it to, but we made it."
The enclosure was empty now. The four of us stood there barefoot, dressed only in our soggy morphing outfits. There was one last red panel beside the door leading into the dome.