There was a dolphin with mechanical equipment attached to it, kinda cyborg like, to communicate with the old scientist.He sends a whale, to Jupiter, in a huge water tank. I believe he is killed by the whale in the tank. There was a younger scientist, maybe a relative of the older scientist, that was against the experiments. Jovian cyborg dolphins, stays in my mind. The battle with the whale reminded me of the Moby Dick conflict.
I read it, overseas, in 1985.
A Deeper Sea by Alexander Jablokov
According to the blurb:
In the year 2015, a dolphin researcher with dubious motives removes the barriers impeding human/delphine communications and transforms the ocean-dwelling creatures into cybernetic weapons of destruction.
Other details from a review:
Five years later, the world's superpowers are at war - and Stasov [the research scientist] has transformed his dolphins into deadly armored cyborgs designed to wreak havoc on the ocean-going vessels of his nation's enemies.
But his control over the events he has set in motion is rapidly eroding. For the dolphins have their own agenda that transcends the petty hostilities and self-serving greed of human beings.
tvtropes briefly mentions the whale and its mission:
The novel involves a whale being turned into a spacefaring cyborg to fulfill a religious prophecy of the dolphins, with whom man has learned to communicate.
Another reviewer sheds a little more light:
A tormented Russian scientist, who drafted dolphins as soldiers in human wars, becomes convinced that a whale and a dolphin are the pre-ordained interpreters who will allow humans to communicate with alien intelligence living near Jupiter.
By creating a cyborg “whale” to survive in Jupiter’s atmosphere, the scientist accomplishes his feat only by deceiving the robotic whale into believing that he is still swimming in an Earthly sea.
That sounds close to the novel Cachalot by Alan Dean Foster. From the wikipedia article:
Cachalot is an ocean planet where humans have begun building floating cities. It is also the same planet where all of Earth’s cetaceans were transplanted six hundred years ago after the Covenant of Peace was enacted with all intelligence-enhanced ocean dwellers. Five of these cities have been destroyed when a middle-aged scientist and her late-teen daughter are dispatched to the planet to discover the source of the attacks.
