Applegate, K A - Animorphs 04 - The Message Page 4

  "Okay, now that was weird," Rachel said. "It was like he was answering Jake."

  53 "Are you so sure he wasn't?" I asked. "Dolphins are very intelligent. Not our kind of intelligence, but still, I guess they're one of the two or three smartest animals around."

  "It will be strange morphing something so in telligent," Rachel said.

  "Yes," I agreed. Strange, and . . . wrong, somehow. I felt a twisting in my stomach. "How is doing this any different than what the Yeerks do?"

  Rachel looked surprised. "Yeerks take over humans," she said. "Besides, they don't morph, they infest. We don't take over the actual animal, we just copy his DNA pattern, create a totally new animal, and then - "

  "And then control the new animal," I said.

  "It's not the same," Rachel insisted. But she looked troubled.

  "It's something I'll have to think about," I said. "It's kind of been bothering me."

  Jake joined Rachel and me. "We'd better do it."

  I nodded. "Yes, we should, before we run out of fish to feed these guys." I leaned over the side of the tank and patted the head of the nearest dolphin. Her skin was rubbery, but not at all slimy. Just like a wet rubber ball.

  She grinned up at me, fixing me with one eye as she cocked her head to see me.

  54 I pushed away my doubts, closed my eyes, and concentrated on the dolphin. She became peaceful and calm, as animals always do during the acquiring process.

  May I? I asked her silently. But of course she couldn't answer. . . .

  55

  T hat night I dreamed again of the voice un der the sea, calling for help. Only this time it sounded faint. Like a radio with the batteries growing weak. I wasn't sure if it was just a regular dream this time. A dream of a memory that might or might not be real.

  And I dreamed of the dolphin in her tank at the wildlife park. The one they called Monica, al though who knew if she had a true name of her own? How long had she been in that tank? How long since she had been free in the open sea?

  The next day was Friday. There was no school because of some teacher conference, so we had a three-day weekend ahead of us.

  56 I called Jake. "Hi, Jake. Are we going to the beach today like we planned?"

  We were always very careful about anything we said over the telephone. Phone lines can be tapped. Besides, Tom, Jake's brother, could lis ten in on an extension and overhear something we didn't want him to hear.

  "Actually, I was thinking the beach will be re ally crowded today," Jake said, sounding very casual. "I was talking to Marco and he said maybe we should go down to the river instead."

  It was a good suggestion. We couldn't exactly morph on a beach full of people.

  "I'll be there in two hours, okay? I have some chores to do."

  I ended up being a little late. They were all waiting for me.

  It was an area I had been to before with my dad. It's a little park near a bridge. A good place for fishing. About half a mile away, the river empties into the ocean. The river is lined with trees along most of its length. Here and there are homes and private docks, but the spot we'd cho sen was hidden from the bridge and from any houses.

  "Hi, Cassie," Jake said, smiling at me.

  "Hi, everyone," I said. I spotted a movement in one of the tree branches. "Hey up there, To bias. How's it going?"

  57 «The same old thing. You know how it is. It's a hawk-eat-mouse world out there.»

  I laughed, pleased to hear that Tobias was learning to be at peace with the fact that, at least for a while, he was as much a hawk as he was a boy.

  « I'm going to be the timekeeper, watching the deadly two-hour limit,» Tobias said. « I'm the only bird in the world with his own watch.»

  I looked closer and saw a very small digital timer strapped to one of his legs.

  «Rachel put it on for me,» he explained. « I'll be over water the whole time, so I figured it was fairly safe. No bird watchers around to see me and wonder 'Hmmm, when did red-tails start wearing Timexes?'»

  Jake said, "I figured we'd hide our clothes, then wade into the river a little way, then start morphing."

  "Sounds good," Rachel said.

  "Cassie? Will you go first?" Jake asked.

  I nodded. "Sure." For some reason everyone has decided that I am the best morpher. I think it's mostly silly. We can all morph fine.

  But the first time we morph a new animal it's always kind of tense. You never know what it's going to be like. You never know how much the animal's instincts and mind will resist you.

  And this time there was a new fear, at least

  58 for me. What sort of mind would I find? Would it be just the dolphin instincts, or would I encounter a true dolphin mind, with thoughts and ideas of its own?

  I shed my overalls and kicked off my shoes, leaving just the leotard that I thought of as my morphing outfit. See, it's possible to morph some clothing along with you, but only something skintight. Anything bulky you try to morph just ends up as rags. And shoes? Forget shoes. We've all tried morphing shoes and it never works.

  I stepped into the water. "Cold," I reported. The current tugged at my ankles.

  I waded in a little farther, up to my waist.

  Then I focused on the dolphin that was now a part of me.

  The first change was my skin. It lightened from brown to pale gray. It was like rubber, tough but springy.

  That was good. I wanted to hang on to my legs as long as I could. I wanted to change as many other aspects as I could before I had to drop down into the water.

  I felt the odd crunching sound you get sometimes when bones are stretched or compressed. And right before my eyes - literally - my face bulged out and out and out still farther.

  "Oh, man, that's definitely not attractive,"

  59 Marco groaned from the shore. "Not a good look for you, Cassie."

  Morphing isn't usually very pretty. In fact, it's the kind of thing that, if you didn't know it was going to be all right, would freak you out. I mean, I've watched while Rachel does her elephant morph, and I can tell you, it is the creepiest, scariest, most disgusting thing you'll ever want to see. Let alone watching people go from human to fish. Truly gross.

  I didn't have a mirror, but I could guess how gross I looked. I had this huge, long bottlenose sticking out of my otherwise normal face. My skin was gray rubber. And when I felt behind me with my rapidly shriveling hands, I could feel the triangular blade of a dorsal fin rising out of my spine.

  My arms were gone, replaced by two flat flippers, and I was now standing about ten feet tall, wobbling on my puny human-sized legs.

  It was time to let the rest of the morph proceed. I surrendered my human legs. Instantly I fell face forward into the water.

  I looked down and saw my tail. I was corn plete. The water was too shallow, though, and I was barely afloat. I kicked my tail, scraped across the sandy bottom, and finally surged out into deeper water.

  60 I waited for the moment when the dolphin brain would surface, full of instinct-driven need and hunger and fear. The way it had always been before.

  But it wasn't like that. It wasn't like a squirrel or even a horse.

  This mind was not filled with fear and need.

  This mind was ... I know this sounds strange, but it was like a little kid. I tried to listen to it, to understand its needs and wants. To prepare my self for a sudden onslaught of crude, primitive animal demands. Flee! Fight! Eat!

  But that didn't happen. I felt hunger, yes. But not the screaming, obsessive need that Jake felt when he morphed a lizard or when Rachel be came a shrew.

  There was no fear. None.

  And fortunately, I did not find a true thinking, conscious mind. I breathed a sigh of relief. Just - again, I know it sounds strange - but I just found this feeling, like she wanted to play. Like a little kid who wants to play. I wanted to chase fish, catch them, and eat them, but that would be a game. I wanted to race across the sur face of the sea, and that would be a game, too.

 
«Cassie?» I heard Tobias's thought-speech in my head. «Are you okay?»

  Was I okay? I asked myself. «Yes, Tobias.

  61 I'm ... happy. I feel like . . . like I don't know. Like I want you to come and play with me.»

  «Play with you? Mmmm, I don't think so, Cassie. Hawks don't do water.»

  «Come on, everyone!» I called to the others. «Come on! Let's go! Let's swim to the ocean! I want to play!»

  62

  «Le t's go! Come on, you guys, let's go!»

  I didn't like the river. I wanted the ocean. I could feel it close by. I could feel it in the way the current rushed me forward. I could feel it in some deep, hidden part of my dolphin being.

  The ocean. I wanted it. It was my place. It was where I should be.

  We swam in a school, the four of us, with To bias flying overhead.

  We raced the river's current, and soon I could taste the salt. I could feel the saltwater on my skin. It was as if I had opened the door of a toy store with every toy on Earth, and I had all the time in the world to play.

  I saw my friends around me, swift, pale

  63 shapes in the water. Sleek gray torpedoes as they rose to breathe.

  I lived in both worlds - the sea and the air. I saw the blue-green of the ocean, the pale blue and white of the sky. I slipped back and forth through the bright barrier that separated them.

  Jake went zipping by, shooting up from beneath me to explode into the air. I heard the slap of his belly as he landed. It was a game! I dove deep, down to where the sandy floor sloped toward depths even I could not explore. Then I powered my tail, steadied my flippers, and drove hard toward the surface. Above me I could see the shimmering, silver border between water and air.

  Faster! Faster! I was a missile.

  «Yah haaaaah!»

  I shattered the barrier of the sea and hurtled up into the sky. I felt warm wind on my skin, in stead of cold water. I hung, poised in midair, almost floating above the surface of the water. Now the barrier was beneath me. I pointed my nose toward it and dropped from the sky.

  «Aaaaah!»

  The water wrapped around me, welcoming me back.

  «ls this cool, or what?» Marco laughed in my head.

  «This is cool,» I answered.

  64 «This is beyond cool,» Rachel chimed in.

  «Let's all do it at the same time!» Jake said.

  The four of us dove deep. The ocean floor was still far below us, rippling sand dotted with rocks and clumps of seaweed.

  Near the ocean floor we leveled off, practi cally scraping our bellies on the bottom. And then, aiming at the silver barrier once again, we shot upward, racing each other, ecstatic from the joy of our own bodies' strength.

  We launched into the air like a well-trained team of acrobats.

  We flew, side by side, exhaling and refilling our lungs with warm air.

  Life was joy. Life was a game. I wanted to dance. I wanted to dance through the sea.

  So I did.

  There was nothing I could not do. There was nothing I could ask of my body that it would not give me. Racing, spinning, turning, diving, skim ming the surface, flying up into the sky.

  I wasn't just in the sea. I was the sea.

  «Are you guys just going to play all day?» It was Tobias. «You realize you've wasted forty-five minutes already?»

  Minutes? I laughed. Who cared about min utes?

  «Look, guys? I know you think the dolphin

  65 mind hasn't affected you, but it has. You need to get a grip. You have a reason for being here.»

  Reason? What was that?

  «You're supposed to be looking for ... well, for something,» Tobias said. «Something un usual. An Andalite spaceship or something.»

  Yes, he was right. He was definitely right. But would it be fun? Would it be a game?

  «Find the spaceship. Cool,» Rachel said. «l bet I can find it first!»

  «No way!» Jake said instantly. «l'll find it.»

  «Where is it? Let's go look!» Marco said.

  «Good grief,» Tobias said. «You're like a bunch of five-year-olds.»

  But I was too distracted to care. «Hey. Can you guys do this?» I concentrated, and suddenly, from someplace in my forehead, came a series of loud, very rapid clicks, almost like loud static.

  «Whoa! What was that?»

  Then, to my total surprise, I heard something in those clicks. It was weird. It was kind of like hearing, only not. The clicking noises had hit something, far off in deeper water. I sort of felt the sounds as they came back to me, like scattered echoes.

  There was a universe of information in that echo. Some of that information made me uneasy.

  «You guys?» I said. «l know this is crazy, but

  66 I feel like there's something out there. Some thing ... I don't know. But I don't like it.»

  The others immediately began firing off the clicking noise that is the dolphin's underwater radar. It's called echolocation.

  «Yeah,» Marco said. «Now I see it. I mean, I don't see it, but you know what I mean.»

  I searched in my dolphin mind, deep down in the places where instinct had been hidden be neath layers of intelligence.

  Then a picture just popped into my con sciousness.

  «l know!» I cried, as if I had just won a con test. « It's a shark!»

  Suddenly we weren't playing anymore. The others had all found the same instinct in themselves. The echolocation indicated that there was a large shark nearby.

  And we knew one thing for sure. We didn't like sharks.

  67

  «Y ou know, I hate to sound like the only sensible person - so to speak - » Tobias said, «but you aren't here to fight sharks!»

  «He's right,» I agreed. «Dolphins don't attack sharks unless the sharks attack first.»

  «Wait ... I'm getting more echoes,» Rachel interrupted. «There's more than one shark. And there's something bigger, too.»

  I reached out with my echolocation sense and "felt" the sea ahead of me. «You're right,» I said. «Several sharks. And a great one.»

  «A what?» Tobias asked.

  I was confused. What did I mean? The words great one had just popped into my mind. «l

  68 mean there's a whale. A whale. Being attacked by sharks.»

  «A great one being attacked?» Marco asked. He sounded upset. It was strange, because we were all upset. More than we should have been.

  «You guys do what you want,» Rachel said. « I'm going in.»

  « Oh , there's a big surprise,» Tobias said with weary affection.

  The four of us lanced forward, faster than ever, toward the whale in distress.

  «l see them,» Tobias reported from the sky above. «Straight ahead of you. Looks like four, maybe five sharks and a big - really, really big - whale. Did I mention big? Wow. Big.»

  We were steaming through the water when I caught sight of my first shark. He was bigger than me, maybe twelve feet long, with faint vertical stripes.

  He was too excited by the hunt to notice me. Until it was too late. With every bit of speed and power I could get from my tail, I rammed the tiger shark in his gill slits.

  WHOOOOMP!

  It was like hitting a brick wall. My beak was strong, but the shark was made of steel or some thing.

  I fell back, dazed. But as I tried to collect my-

  69 self I saw that a trail of blood was billowing from the shark's gills.

  I swam beneath him, and then I saw the huge shape of the whale. He was a humpback, more than forty feet long. Each of his long, barnacle-encrusted flukes was bigger than me.

  He was trying to surface to breathe, but sharks were attacking, tearing at the soft, vulner able flesh of his mouth.

  It made me angry. Very angry.

  Suddenly, from the murky depths, Jake and Rachel zoomed upward, like missiles aimed at the sharks.

  WHOOMP! Rachel hit her target.

  Jake's shark twisted just in time. Jake scraped across the shark's
sandpaper skin, and before he could get clear, the shark was after him.

  «Jake! He's on your tail!»

  «l got him!»

  «Look out! Conning up on your left, Marco!»

  They were as fast as we were, as maneuver-able as we were, and the sharks had one terrifying advantage - they did not know fear.

  «He's on me! He's on me!»

  «Aaaaarrrrggghh!»

  «Marco!»

  «l can't see! Where is he?»

  70 «Cassie! Below you, lookout! Look out!»

  It was no longer a game. I had gone rushing into a fight full of confidence and determined to help the whale. But now I was in a war. The sharks were killing machines. They seemed to be nothing but armored skin and razor-sharp fins and wide jaws with row after row of serrated teeth.

  The water was boiling with twisting, turning, speeding sharks and us dolphins, locked in a high-speed battle to the death.

  It suddenly occurred to me that we might lose. We might be killed.

  I might be killed.

  The water was dark with blood, still billowing from the shark I had hammered.

  Suddenly two of the sharks turned away. They just turned and swam away. At first, I didn't know why.

  Then I saw that they were following the shark I had wounded.

  They were following the trail of blood.

  They were at the limits of my sight when they struck. They ripped into the injured shark with wild, uncontrolled fury.

  The last shark turned from the battle and went after them. Robbed of his meal of whale meat, he would feast on his brother instead.

  «Everyone okay?» Jake asked.

  71 «l have some cuts, but I'm okay,» I said.

  «Same here,» Rachel said. She sounded tired. I guess I did, too. I felt exhausted and drained. The fight had probably only lasted two minutes from beginning to end. But it had been a long two minutes.

  «Marco?»

  « I...I think I'm hurt,» he said.

  I looked for him. He was drifting in the water, almost motionless, twenty yards away. We all swam over, crowding around him.

  Then I saw the wound. I think I would have screamed, if I could have. His tail had almost been bitten off. It was hanging by a few jagged threads. It was useless.

  We were miles out in the ocean. And Marco could not hope to swim back.