to every problem. One might not suspect that such a big and intimidating man would be able to make something as small and complicated as Anna’s shark alarm, but Ton had delicate fingers. He could build or repair even the most sensitive electronic equipment – things that couldn’t be bought in shops.
He also played the violin.
No one knew where he had learnt all these skills, and Ton avoided answering questions about his past.
Anna peered into a dark crevice at the bottom of a staghorn coral, where a grumpy old moray eel lived. He knew her well, but didn’t welcome her visits. Anna liked to tease him, but she knew better than to poke her fingers into his cave. His mouth was full of small, sharp teeth, ready to snap.
Suddenly the shark alarm on her wrist began to beep urgently.
But at the same moment, Anna’s eye caught the glimmer of something shiny on the sea floor, and she decided to ignore the alarm.
Probably just those rays I saw just now, she thought, swimming towards the shiny object.
A piece of metal was sticking out from underneath some broken coral. It was wedged firmly into the sea floor, and she could see that the tide had worked the sand loose around it.
I must have swum over it a hundred times, she thought, and never noticed it. She tugged at the coral-encrusted metal.
The smooth blade of a dagger slid out of the sand, a final ray of the sinking sun glinting on the metal.
The huge hammerhead shark rushed towards her.
As it passed over her like a deadly black submarine, its charging body created an underwater current that lifted Anna’s short, dark hair from her scalp. The shark turned and circled back.
Hammerhead sharks are ugly. Their eyes bulge from the sides of their T-shaped heads and rows of vicious triangular teeth protrude from their mouths. They are dangerous and vicious.
Anna knew that, and her blood turned to ice. This one was big, and it looked hungry.
The shark aimed its attack at the glint of sunlight in the girl’s hand. Anna lost her grip on the dagger as the shark bumped her arm, its great mouth closing on the blade.
That was a stupid mistake, even for a dumb shark. The sharp metal edge cut deeply into its lower jaw. The hammerhead shook its head in frustration and pain, and spit out the dagger in disgust. Trailing blood, it slunk away to look for more harmless prey.
Through a wave of relief, Anna realised that she was yet not out of danger: the blood in the water would attract more sharks. Already the alarm on her arm was beeping.
Despite her fear, she darted over to pick up the dagger from where it was resting on the sea floor.
You’re not going to let me lose this, mister shark! she thought as she tucked the hilt of the dagger into the neckline of her swimming costume. Then she turned and swam towards the shore as fast as her fins could propel her.
Mutt was waiting for her on the beach. He barked excitedly and hopped around, making triangular footprints in the sand. His steel paws had rubber soles for better traction and to make less noise when he ran along the wooden-floored corridors of the Atom family house.
The little robotic dog was crammed with sophisticated hardware and advanced computer programmes. His manufacturers may have had a spaniel in mind when they designed him: he had long rubber ears that flopped down around his round silver body, and his glass eyes seemed to droop just right.
Anna loved Mutt. For her, he was better than any real puppy.
Just like a real dog, Mutt sniffed at the coral-encrusted dagger Anna was holding. His electronic sensors detected the smell of seawater mixed with a faint trace of shark blood, so he growled. The dagger also had a strong scent of his favourite person, Anna. The familiar smell made him wag his rubber tail with joy.
Anna was feeling shaky after her encounter with the shark. With Mutt at her feet, she sat down on a rock and watched the daylight drain from the sky. The sea shimmered like molten lead as the first stars pierced the sky. Soon, the tiny island would be covered by the ink-black blanket of night.
Anna fingered the cold metal dagger. What a treasure – and it had saved her life! Excitement flood over her, quickly erasing the memory of the shark.
As she walked home with Mutt, the Milky Way turned the dark sky into a blaze of starlight. Nowhere on Earth are the heavens so beautiful as over a tiny island in the middle of a great ocean, far away from the constant flickering lights of big cities.
Behind them the sea, now dim and mysterious, heaved a low sigh.
Chapter 2
TROUBLE IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC
In her laboratory in a cave deep under Monpetit Island, Professor Sabatina was staring at a spot in the South Pacific Ocean on the enormous hologram of the earth. She frowned. Something was wrong.
The 3D globe projected by the Global Environator was as tall as a house and took up most of the space of the subterranean laboratory. A hologram may be nothing but a dazzling display of laser light, but the projection of Earth looked very real as it floated above a silver platform. It was wonderful to see! The ice cap of the North Pole almost touched the dark ceiling above. In real time, the pale blue-and-green globe slowly spun on its axis. One half glowed with sunlight, and on the dark side bright lights sparkled from the positions of large Northern-hemisphere cities like clusters of diamonds.
Professor Sabatina hovered over the shimmering globe like a giant in space. Then her seat slid gracefully sideways along a circular tract: by swivelling a lever on the control panel in front of her, she could adjust her position towards any point on the hologram that she wanted to inspect more closely.
The deep shadow of night crept slowly across the Indian Ocean towards the Horn of Africa. As it crossed the little island of Monpetit, a row of small porthole windows high in the northern wall of the laboratory also turned dark. But the professor was too busy with her work to notice. On the sunny side of the planet, the dry red sand of a great desert covered the northern part of the African continent, snow-white clouds were being driven by an invisible wind over the Atlantic Ocean, and the rough ridges of the Andes Mountains gave way to the rainforests of Bolivia and Brazil in South America.
Sabatina spent most of her days in the laboratory, working tirelessly with this great invention, the Global Environator. And she loved every moment. Nowhere else in the world was there a piece of equipment as sophisticated or as wonderful.
The purpose of the Environator was to monitor the environmental conditions of the earth. It could give early warning of natural disasters such as hurricanes, tsunamis or floods. The Global Environator was controlled by a supercomputer that was fed data by satellites orbiting in space, and weather stations from Arkansas to Antarctica, from Berlin to Beijing, and from Cuba to Cairo contributed to this great project. The international network of collaboration extended to zoologists counting elephants in Africa, entomologists looking for new insect species in the deepest jungle of the Amazon, and marine scientists measuring the pollution levels of the Red Sea. The great computer used all of this data to keep track of the state of the planet.
The supercomputer was so enormously intelligent that it had a personality all of its own. Not only could it figure out almost anything, and find solutions to the most complex of problems, but it also communicated to Sabatina by speech. The only problem was that its grammar circuits were a bit neglected: it muddled the plural with the singular, and jumbled grammatical rules of various languages to create a language all of its own. The result was that when it talked, it didn’t sound very clever at all.
Professor Sabatina was employed by an organisation called United Surveillance, better known as US. It was an international network of scientists that combined their efforts to monitor the planet’s ecology. The Global Environator