“What do you mean?” Loomis was confused.
“Nothing.” Dane said.
“We go in thirty minutes,’ Loomis snapped.
“Fine.” He noted Dr. Martsen near the bow of the Grayback, looking down into the water. He walked away, not saying anything else to Loomis, and headed forward. As he got close, he could see Rachel’s dorsal fin cutting through the water and then the dolphin’s head as Martsen tossed a small fish to her.
“Hello,” he said as he walked up. “I’m Eric Dane.”
Martsen was short and slender, with dark hair cut tight against her skull. There were deep lines around her eyes. “So this is your idea?”
“Who told you that?” Dane was taken aback at the anger in her voice.
“I was told you were the expert on that…” she pointed at the gate.
“As much as anyone is an expert,” Dane said.
“So it was your idea to go in there and ask for Rachel to accompany you,” she said.
“I didn’t ask for her,” Dane said. He could pick up the anger from Martsen and realized it mirrored the anger he had just shown toward Loomis. He glanced at the dark wall of the gate and realized being this close was affecting everyone.
The muscles on the side of Martsen’s mouth were working as she tried to control her temper. “Who did then?”
“I don’t know,” Dane lied. “I’m not even sure why the two of you are here, but I think Rachel has an important role to play.’
“Why do you think that?”
Dane told her about what had happened on the beach in Japan. As he spoke, he could sense her relaxing slightly.
“You can read minds?” she asked when he was done.
“I can sense things.”
She nodded. “Sometimes I feel like Rachel is communicating with me.”
“I know Chelsea does with me,” Dane said. He looked down at the water. “To be honest, I don’t know much about dolphins. Aren’t they supposed to be intelligent and able to talk among themselves?”
“Rachel’s a Tursiops truncates,” Martsen said. “What most people call a bottle-nosed dolphin.”
“She’s big,” Dane noted as Rachel surfaced, then dove.
“Three meters,” Martsen said proudly. “I’ve been with her for eight years now.”
“Always with the Navy?” Dane asked.
“It’s the only way to get funded,” Martsen replied defensively. “And our work has been related to submarine rescue and mine mapping. Nothing offensive.”
“How long can she stay under?” Dane asked. He was watching where Rachel had gone under, and she still hadn’t come up yet. Martsen saw him looking.
“She can stay under for fifteen minutes,” she said. “And go down six hundred meters.”
“Isn’t she an air-breather?’ Dane felt ignorant, but he had rarely been to the ocean.
“A mammal, just like you and me. Air-breathing, warm-blooded.”
“How can she dive so deep and stay under so long then?”
“Her lungs are more efficient than ours. She can exchange a much higher percentage of the contents of her lungs than we can.”
“And she’s intelligent,” Dane said.
“More intelligent than humans in some ways,” Martsen said. “They don’t have wars and kill each other.”
“I hear that,” Dane said. “One has to wonder exactly what we mean when we talk about intelligence.”
“A lot of people confuse dolphins with porpoises, but porpoises have a rounded head with no beak, and their dorsal fins are smaller. And dolphins are smarter,” she added.
Rachel surfaced. There was a puff of spray from her blowhole, then she began circling lazily.
“She shuts the blowhole when she dives and has to clear it when she surfaces,” Martsen explained.
Dane’s attention was caught by the FLIP, a quarter mile away and closer to the gate, as a bulbous bow slowly went underwater and the stern lifted. Slowly, the forward end of the ship disappeared below the waves, taking the muon generator down. In less than five minutes, the majority of the ship was underwater, the stern bobbing in the slight swell.
Martsen signed. “I know why the Navy wants her for this mission. Colonel Loomis said that they were going in blind, no electromagnetic emissions. So they’re going to use Rachel as their sonar.”
“What do you mean?” Dane asked.
“Rachel uses sonar, what we call echolocation, to navigate and find prey. She sends out a series of clicks that she makes with the blowhole and emits through her forehead. Then she picks up the bounce-back with her jaw. Her brain can then analyze the information and form a sort of picture of her surroundings using these sound images. There are some researchers who speculate the dolphins can even use their emitter to send high-frequency bursts that stun their prey.”
“Can you communicate with her?” Dane asked.
Martsen tapped a device on her belt. “This holds recordings of sounds that I’ve determined the meaning of. Many researchers say now that dolphins don’t communicate with each other or have a language, but my experience has been that Rachel clearly understands these noises.”
She pushed a button, and a high-pitched whistle came out of the box. Rachel stopped her circling and came over, staring up at them.
Dane could sense the intelligence in Rachel’s eyes, and he had the strange feeling that she was getting a reading on him also.
“That was Rachel’s name,” Martsen said. “Every dolphin has its own name, a specific sound that identifies it. A lot of dolphin language, such as it is, we can’t hear because the frequency’s too high. Rachel can hear up to one hundred fifty kilohertz, far beyond what we can. To give you an idea how far up that is, a bat can only hear up to one-twenty. So there’s a whole spectrum that most researchers ignored for many years.”
“So, how intelligent is she?” Dane remembered the pod of dolphins that had looked at him off the coast of Japan. He had no doubt that they were watching him and evaluating.
Martsen shrugged. “I don’t know. Her world is so different from ours that it’s hard to make an accurate comparison. Just because they haven’t built cities doesn’t mean they aren’t as smart as us. Dolphins live in harmony with their environment, unlike humans. Sometimes I wonder when they made the shift from living on land to water.
“What do you mean?”
“I told you that they’re mammals. They developed on land, and then some time in the course of their evolution they went into the ocean.”
“That’s strange,” Dane said. “Why would they do that?”
‘Maybe to get away from us,” Martsen said.
“Why?”
“Because we’re their worst enemies. It’s amazing that Rachel even works with us.”
“How are we their worst enemies?”
“We kill them, Mr. Dane. By the millions. Commercial fishers set out thousands of kilometers of drift nets that catch everything in their path, including dolphins. It’s estimated over five million have been killed in the last ten years here in the Pacific alone. The Russians have practically wiped out the dolphin population of the Black Sea.”
“That’s present day,” Dane said. “That doesn’t explain millions of years ago.”
Martsen shrugged. “There’s more that we don’t’ know about dolphins than we do know. Sometimes I wish I could escape into the ocean.”
“You don’t like people much, do you?”
“I like people,” Martsen said defensively. “There are some doctors who used dolphins in therapy for cancer patients. I’ve gone with Rachel on some of those missions.”
“What?” Dane’s attention was back on Rachel, the eye closest peering up at him as she swam past.
“There are doctors who think that the dolphin’s echo-sounding ability can affect the brain.”
Now Martsen had his complete attention. “How?”