The tank was so small that Skipper could thrash about and make mini currents in the water. Often, that's just what he would do. He would swim about rapidly and then stop totally in the water, letting the water just toss him about as it rebounded off the nearby walls of the tank. He was here, at the institute as a patient, a mental patient.

Skipper was a psychological casualty of the Navy's Dolphin infantry program. Twenty two dolphins had been trained through the 80's to carry explosives to designated targets. They were the ultimate smart bombs. If they were trained correctly, there would be no risk of failure. Being living creatures, there would be no risk of malfunction. Skipper did circles in the pool rapidly as I stood there watching him through the glass. He then stopped and just floated in the swirling water. He was nearing a therapy session.

The scientists here somehow had to rehabilitate Skipper, but in my opinion it was a feeble effort. I believed that Skipper's psychosis is the result of his captivity, not the trauma of the infantry training. The training was no dolphin boot camp. It was more like a practice for a twisted hoop show at Waterworld. The dolphins would deliver packages to the hulls of ships, attach them and then engage them. They were then rewarded and played with. It was his confinement that was killing him.

"We will be endeavoring to return subject 15, Skipper, to as much as a normal lifestyle as possible, relatively speaking. His therapy session today will consist of inputting 26 colored balls into his tank. Each ball has a colored pair. He will sort the balls into thirteen different barrels, placed near the surface of the water." Draos, a burly German scientist, bellowed when he spoke. He pointed out on the blackboard the diagram of today's therapy session. Four of us sat in the large lab room and listened. I squirmed in my seat.

"Dr. Draos, how will inputting colored balls into Skipper's tank be returning him to a normal lifestyle? That does not seem anyway normal to me."

Draos flipped through a clipboard as he struggled to remember my name. "Mr. Talso? Yes, right. I said relatively speaking. As you know, subject 15 would be unable to care for himself in the wild, so he will be placed in an amusement park for the rest of his life. These measures will make such a change seem more normal."

I caressed the stubble on my unshaven chin. "With all due respect, Doctor. I see nothing normal about this. He is a dolphin. If he has psychological problems here, won't he have them at Waterworld?"

Draos looked straight at me, through his bifocal glasses. "No, it will be a fundamentally different environment."

One of the other assistants, Salla Burjoyce, turned to me. "There is no evidence that Skipper's problems are the result of his captivity, none." She turned back and starred straight at Draos, smiling. The old scientist smiled back and nodded.

In this place. The bottom curves upward. Everywhere I go, there is the bottom. It is all around. I can not even see down here. If I use my voice to see. It comes back and tells me nothing, hurts me. It tells me that I am in a place where the bottom curves upward. It is all around.

Skipper slumped near the side of the tank. He rolled over and scratched his back on the wall. Salla and Marco, another assistant, tossed different colored balls into the tank. Skipper did nothing as the balls entered his domain.

"Kevin," Marco said to me as I watched Skipper. When I looked up I felt the punch of a rubber ball on the side of my head. "Wake up." I smiled and pulled the tape recorder from my pocket. I walked around the side of the pool, close to Skipper. I nudged him farther out into the water.

With a quiet voice I began speaking into the tape recorder. "Therapy session number 8, entry 9. Skipper seems unresponsive to ball therapy. I'm not surprised. He is moving slowly towards the center of the tank. Assistants, Marco Tomlinson, Salla Burjoyce and Bob DeVella are tossing multicolored balls into the water. Skipper has taken to diving to the bottom of the pool. He has been unresponsive to this kind of therapy, only moderately responsive to play and has shown little improvement."

Bob approached me from the other side of the tank. "That seemed pretty grim." He said to me.

"Yhea," was all I replied.

"You don't have a whole lot of confidence in this, do you?"

I shook my head negatively. "I really have to say that. I just don't know what kind of good we are doing him."

Salla approached. "Normally, I would tend to disagree, but I have to say that I think there is something missing. Something big. This dolphin has shown signs of manic depression. That's just plain weird."

"I say we let him go."

Bob shook his head. "And we let him starve? Hell no. I don't care how unhappy he is, I can't support that."

Dr. Draos entered the tank room from the observation overlook. "How do things look today?"

"Not good," Marco responded.

I turned to the Doctor. "I was just suggesting that we release Skipper into the wild."

Draos looked at us all in turn. "And how did the rest of you think of that?" He said in his thick German accent.

Salla looked at me sideways for a moment, raising her eyebrow. "We, for the most part, thought it was a bad idea."

Draos nodded. "Good, so do I." He turned. Shaking my head I watched him go. He turned back just as he reached the door to the observation overlook. "We'll try this again in a few hours."

As the door closed, Salla turned her head to me. "You know, Kevin. I don't know how comfortable I feel, you keeping the logs for us."

"Why is that?" I asked, as Marco and Bob walked off.

"You seem, to be very strong in your views.

"I am. So are you."

"Look, we haven't known each other for long and this is the first subject, but I just don't want to have a biased report when we're done here."

"It won't be biased, I promise you. It isn't about me. It's about him. All of the entries are about him. His performance has been miserable since we began this. There's not a whole lot I can say to make this seem any rosier than it's already not."

Salla sat down, dangled her feet in the water. Just then, Skipper's back was visible in the water. It arched above the surface. A brief spout of water erupted from his blow hole. Slowly he continued to arch through the water. His tail came slightly out of the water but not much. He then disappeared, swimming to the bottom again.

"Both of you seem pretty bummed out about this, you and Skipper."

I sat down too. I think it was right then that I noticed that Salla was attractive. Underneath her scientific method and aggravating tendency to support Draos absolutely and whole heartily, there was a very good-looking women. Through the short sleeve of her T-shirt, I could see her yellow and pink bathing suit. "Dolphin therapy... I just expected to be doing more... Freudian stuff."

Salla laughed momentarily, then looked at me slyly, "Freudian?"

Self consciously, I chuckled, feeling a bit silly. Salla shook her head and stood up. "I'll see you later," she said as she walked away. I waved good-bye. Skipper still hung at the bottom of the tank.

I feel punished by all of this. I move and that is my only thing to do. My movement comes back to me then I move a bit on my own. I turn around look for something out, a way to leave. There is nothing. The more I look, the more it hurts. Like the movement I create, that comes back to me. My sound comes back too. When I try to look, it hurts, comes back and bangs my head. I feel, left out of myself. I feel stranded with no escape. I feel... guilty.

Skipper turned to the side of the pool. He brought himself very, very close to the tank wall. He braced himself then released a sounding against the wall in front of him. He shuddered in pain as it returned to him, ringing through his skull. He shook his head momentarily then did it again. This time he almost knocked himself unconscious. He continued to make soundings against the side of the tank. He was trying to purge himself of his guilt. He hoped that when he had paid the price, the walls of the tank would open up and reveal the soft dark blues of the open sea. The coral and the fishes would be all around him. A pod of others would approach him and carry him away in their wake. They would pull him through the water to a great underwater cavern. They would carry him through the cavern and up to a lagoon. There, he and the other dolphins would flip through the air and rejoice. Skipper would taste his freedom and forget his past, forget his nightmares...

The tank was empty and Skipper rolled on its dry, sand covered bottom. The five figures, the men, stood at the top of the tank, on the ledge. They looked down at Skipper as he laid there. Skipper thought that he should be choking, but he wasn't. Somehow he was able to breath without the moistening affect of the water on his blowhole. One of the figures leaped down into the tank and landed, unharmed just a few feet away from Skipper. The dolphin shook with fright as the old man with glasses hovered close. Three other men leaped down and stood behind the old man. The old man bent close. He slowly open his jaws. Huge, gashing teeth filled his mouth. The old man began to screech in Skipper's language. The soundings reverberated against the tank walls. Out of the water they sounded terribly alien. They sounded like some hideous chord that was strummed over and over again. Skipper rolled his head over and saw that one of the men remained on the edge, looking solemnly downward.

"The dry here. It bothers you?" The old man asked Skipper, his wretched teeth gnashing together.

Skipper struggled to answer, when he finally made a sound it was weak and feeble. "Please, fill the tank!" Skipper pleaded.

"Fill the tank?" The old man asked mockingly. Sand began to fall from the ceiling. "The tank is empty. The tank is full!"

"Sand will kill me."

As the sand continued to rain from above. The four men in the tank looked to the man who stood alone at the top. "You are already dead," the old man muttered to the dolphin as he looked to the top of tank. Sand covered Skipper as he feebly tried to protest. His screams reached nowhere, unable to move through the empty air.

"No, no." He pleaded. "I want to leave here." Sand covered his head and the rest of his body. It reached up past the knees of the four men who stood in the tank. Skipper found himself at the top of the tank balancing on his tail, next to the lone man. He watched as the sand covered his body below and the four men watched.

"You are better then them."

Skipper balanced expertly on his tail. "What are they?"

The lone man smirked absurdly, revealing a less horrific set of teeth then the others. "They are your deciders. They are you captors. Look at yourself, flailing around down there."

Skipper looked with revulsion at the image of himself dying in the tank of sand. "I want to leave."

The man shook his head. "There is only one way out. You have to ask until it hurts too much. Then you stop breathing..."

"How do I?"

"It's just like you're doing now."

Skipper felt his breath leave him. He was no longer able to breath the air around him. He felt his balance leaving. He began to tumble backwards... Awaking he found himself floating in the center of the tank. It was filled with water. Skipper would often mistake his nightmares for his waking life and his fantasies of freedom arrived less and less.

Just as he arrived into consciousness 32 colored balls, 16 different colors fell onto him from above. Still halfway in his sleeping state he began to panic. He thrashed about in the water, squeaking in fright.

"That is really weird." Salla remarked as Skipper rolled over and then plunged to the bottom. "He dove away from the surface in a panic. I feel like we're missing something, something basic."

I shook my head, looking at the dolphin floating pitifully near the bottom. He had swam away from the balls like they were some sort of poison.

I looked up to Draos who was in the soundproof observation overlook. Through a monitoring system, he could hear us, but we couldn't hear him. "Maybe if I enter the water with Skipper, he might get some benefit out of that."

There was a long pause while Draos fiddled with the intercom system. His reply came with one word and a hiss of static. "No."

I could not accept this answer. I looked over at Salla. She was starring up at Draos with a substantial degree of disbelief. "Why?" I asked.

His thick accent aroused by the question, Draos responded. "He is of a state of being potentially dangerous." His aggravation was apparent in his voice as his English faltered. "He may hurt you."

I shuffled on my feet as I looked up at Draos behind the soundproof glass. The arrangement of him up there while we worked below, speaking to us only through the intercom, was disturbing. It was even more disturbing having an altercation with this intimidating man through this medium.

"I don't think so. I have spent almost 30 hours in the water with him engaging in play. He has never shown any aggressive tendencies at all. He is a gentle animal."

"Mr. Talso." The deep accented voice came over the intercom again. "You'll not be entering the tank."

So that was it. We collected the colored balls off of the surface of the water and then closed up the laboratory for the night. What occurred that day could be considered a total failure. There was no progress made in Skipper's therapy.

That night a storm blew in off the Atlantic. As I drove home the dusk sunlight was quickly eliminated by the approaching clouds. I thought about what it would be like for Skipper to be swimming in the ocean tonight, free and with his own kind. It must be hell, I thought, living like he does, away from other dolphins. It was determined that therapy would be conducted in seclusion. That was another one of Draos's theories that I disagreed with. I pulled into my driveway and turned off the car as large drops of rain began falling on my windshield.

With a unearthly boom, the telephone pole in front of my apartment building exploded in a hail of splinters and sparks. A lightning bolt had obliterated the top half of the pole. My reaction sent me under the steering column in fright. Slowly I raised my head up to see the electric wire dangling in the street. The front porch light that burned eternally outside of my building was dark. "Jesus." I muttered. I opened the door and stepped out. I felt a slight electric sizzle as I stepped in a puddle. I froze, not knowing whether to keep stepping through the puddles to my front door. I looked over at the wire. It was still sizzling and sending out sparks. I felt the tingle of tiny pins up my leg. I leaped the few steps to my front porch and opened the door. I entered and closed the door behind me, thankful I hadn't been electrocuted.

In the tank, Skipper lulled about the bottom. He looked up at the fluorescent light that burned constantly above his head. He remembered when he was in the sea that another kind of light burned above the water. It was a warm light, a friendly light. It was a light that new no boundaries and spread itself out across the sky. Skipper could hear a faint hypnotic tapping high above him. He came to the surface and listened hard. Skipper could hear the millions of tiny water needles knocking on the outside of the tank. The tapping resounded through the tank. Suddenly a hideous boom thundered around him. It came from outside of the tank, outside of the mini world in which he lived. Skipper thrashed about in panic, creating a mini-current that he let toss him about for a few seconds. Suddenly the cold fluorescent lights dimmed. They brightened for a second then shut off completely. Skipper floated there in the darkness, looking about. He squeaked hoping that there was someone around who could do something about the lights. Along with the balls that the men entered into the tank and the men themselves, Skipper was also afraid of the dark. Darkness had invited his psychosis.

During his Commando training, Skipper swam with a platoon of 5 other dolphins. They had around their necks control collars, with which the men on the boats could communicate with them. There were several simple commands that could be conveyed. The commands came in the form of vibrations that the dolphins felt against their skin. Sound commands could have been intercepted or detected by the enemy.

Three quick vibrations meant dive. They got that message and hurtled themselves to the bottom. When there they received the next signal. 5 quick vibrations, that meant search, search for a ship. The six spread out and just a few seconds later one of them located a submarine hanging ominously in the water. They all converged on the vessel and planted their dummy charges along the hull. The 5 other dolphins sped off, as they had been trained. Skipper remained though, he was ordered to. The man who was sending the signals had unintentionally locked a command into the system. It was one long, uninterrupted vibration. It told Skipper to hold his position and under no circumstances was he to leave. He hung in the water, doing mini circles directly under the submarine.

The minutes passed, and Skipper began to lose his breath. He considered swimming to the surface, but thought otherwise. The vibration ordered him to remain. The vibrations were the cornerstone of his training and the cornerstone of his contract of trust with the men. He struggled there to hold his breath, in a terrible darkness that seemed to envelop him. He shut his eyes as he struggled to hold his breath. What have I done? What have I done? He asked.

His darkness grew cold, he felt the pain in his lungs. He tasted blood as it entered into his mouth. He felt unable to control his limbs. They began flapping about and thrashing. He bumped his head on the bottom of the submarine. The next thing he knew he was rising through the water. He bobbed to the surface into the presence of several rescue boats. Hurriedly he was lifted out of the water and placed into an emergency tank. His darkness still held him as the men struggled to make him breath again. In the corner of the darkness he saw a faint light, he began moving towards it. Suddenly his darkness vanished, he found himself looking up at man faces, and them looking down at him. Air filled his tired lungs as he thrashed about in the shallow water of the emergency tank..

Darkness, no Darkness. Not like before. Skipper thought as the lights over the tank went out. He swam about in a panic and called out, hoping someone would hear but no one responded. I have done something against my deciders. Skipper struggled to think. What it could have been?

They needed me to do for them. I failed. Now they keep me here. I have become a shame, a failure. Now this visit of darkness. It is my doom returning. It comes with my voice to hurt me. No, no, no.

Skipper's nightmare came flooding back to him. It told him to escape. He saw no alternative to the torture that was being visited upon him. The men will destroy me slowly. I must get out.

Skipper dove to the bottom and rested in the darkness for a bit. He uttered out loud, for someone to hear, a few words. I feel like I haven't been. I feel like I haven't been a real thing. I am giving myself back to whoever has put me here. I have failed at living. With frightening power, Skipper released a sounding against the wall. It stunned him, crashing back into his skull harshly. He sent out another sounding, and another. Each sounding hurt him more. A tear of pain slipped out of his eye and floated off into the dark water. Skipper gathered his strength and released the most ferocious sounding he could. The pain hurled him backwards and drove him into unconsciousness. He slipped into a darkness that was cold and ungiving. He was unconscious when his lungs started to bleed, he was in another place. Gradually the cold darkness turned to a warm light. Skipper floated towards the light and it took him in, embraced him. I am home.

The next day the three other assistants and I arrived at 9 a.m. I was the first to see Skipper floating on the surface of the water, lifeless. I didn't say a word. I just stood there iron jawed. "Oh my god," Salla remarked, covering her mouth in disbelief. Marco gently pulled Skipper over to the side with a hook.

"I think he died of asphyxiation. Maybe the power outage confused him."

I shook my head as the others began looking over Skipper's body for signs of death. "He might have done this to himself." The three looked up at me in disbelief.

"I'm going to forget you said that." Bob said as he examined Skipper's pupils.

I found myself in a corner, speaking into the tape recorder. "March 14, subject 15 affectionately know as Skipper was found dead this morning of asphyxiation. The other assistants do not think so, but I think that what happened to Skipper was self inflicted. I believe that his unhappiness was the direct result of his captivity and that he saw no other option but this."

"You're putting that in the log?" Salla said, approaching me with her arms crossed.

"Yhea, it's my..."

"I know, you are free to input any observations you want, but we do not want to look stupid."

"This is my observation. I think he killed himself."

"With all due respect, Kevin, he's a dolphin. If you think that a dolphin can even conceive of suicide than you're going out without a net."

"You don't need a net when you're right."

Salla looked back at the pitiful sight. Marco and Bob were raising Skipper out of the water and onto a sort of stretcher. I coughed as a felt a sourness behind my eye. "Do you have a tissue?" I asked her.

She pulled a tissue out of her pocket and handed it to me. "It really doesn't matter. When someone dies, then how they got there is secondary. He is a real loss."

"He's more than that, he was a victim."

"Journal entry number 196. We have arrived at the terminus of our program and have succeeded in rehabilitating 18 of the 21 remaining dolphins. At the end now, I'm reminded of an old friend. It turns out that the tank in which Skipper was being held was made of an acoustically reflective allow, super reflective. His soundings, what he was using to examine his tiny environment, were impacting right back on him and most likely causing him extreme pain, but what else was it? On subsequent dolphins, the therapy was relatively successful. Most of the subjects were relieved of their depression and were delivered to Waterworld for the rest of their lives. There was something different about Skipper though, he seemed shell shocked, like something happened to him that we didn't know about, maybe something in his infantry training, I don't know and the Navy isn't talking."

Loss is a cruel reminder of our mortality. I think Skipper did what he did because he didn't understand what was happening to him. He was scared of the horrible unknown that held him in its grasp. He must have looked up at us, standing above him in the tank and asked what he had done to deserve this. I feel kind of bad, now that I think about it. He was an innocent trusting animal that just couldn't stand to be confined. I don't know. This is all over now and there's a lousy taste in my mouth. We removed an intelligent animal from his regular habitat and expected him to just adjust. That was stupid. That was playing someting like a god. And I know none of us were gods. I wonder what kind of a place he's in now, if dolphins move on.

The walls of the tank opened up and revealed the soft dark blues of the open sea. The coral and the fishes were all around him. A pod of others approached him and carried him away in their wake. They pulled him through the water to a great underwater cavern. They then carried him through the cavern and up to a lagoon. There, he and the other dolphins flipped through the air and rejoiced. Skipper tasteed freedom.