SMILEY THE SEA COW 169
through the hatch and placed in the tank, which was then pumped full of salt water.
As soon as the Sea Hound arrived at Fearing, Tom phoned Chow Winkler at Enterprises and asked him to fly out to the base.
“Pardner, how’d you like to ride herd on this critter and gentle it down for me?” Tom asked, when he showed Chow the porpoise.
It had been transferred to a huge, glass-paneled tank which had been set up just outside Tom’s Fearing Island laboratory during his flight to the Florida Keys.
“Reckon I kin try makin’ friends with it,” Chow declared.
The porpoise stared morosely at Chow. The kindly old Texan’s heart was touched by the odd creature. To his delight, it soon responded to his friendly overtures and quickly recovered its good nature. By the next morning the porpoise was playing catch with Chow, or else swimming over to have its back scratched. The cook named it Smiley.
“She’s kind of a sea cow,” he told Tom, “and you got to talk to my Smiley like any cow!” Tom grinned and refrained from explaining to Chow that a real “sea cow” was a walrus.
Meanwhile, the young inventor was busy with his own experiments. By means of a microphone placed in the tank, he made exact recordings of Smiley’s “talk.” Using Mel Flagler as a subject,
170 THE ELECTRONIC HYDROLUNG
Tom also tape-recorded the sound of a skin diver propelled through the water by ion drive.
The next step was to compare the sound pattern of the tapes. Tom filtered out the difference in the two sounds with the correlation calculator unit of one of his quality analyzer sonars.