Margaret St. Clair

by The Dolphins of Altair

  “Get on my back, Sven,” she said after a moment. “Pettrus is tired.”

  Sven was still riding Djuna when they got to their destination. “How will you know when to come for me?” the young man asked as he felt the pebbles of the beach under hi s feet .

  “Don’t worry, we just will,” Djuna replied. Her voice was a little higher than Pettrus’: now that he was used to the sea people, Sven found that their voices were as individual as those of human beings. “But we’ll stay away from shore. We don’t want to be noticed or picked up.” They swam away.

  As he walked up from the beach, Sven realized that the adventure with the shark had shaken him considerably. Odd that in an age of nuclear explosives and biological warfare, a shark’s jaws could s till retain their archaic terribleness.

  His shoes were squelching wetly. He took them off one at a time and drained them. He wrung out his trouser legs. He was wet up to mid-thigh, but the wind ought to dry him. Then he started to look for a pharmacy.

  The clerk looked at him a little oddly as Sven gave the prescription to him. The paper the prescription was written on was a little damp, though the words themselves were legible enough; and Sven’s sneakers left damp spots on the pharmacy’s linoleum floor. But the pharmacist filled the prescription without comment. Sven went out with a plastic vial containing twelve five-grain pale pink tablets, two of which, Dr. Lawrence had said, would be enough to put anyone to sleep for four or five hours.

  The hardware store next door to the pharmacy was still open. Sven went in and bought a hunting knife in a leather sheath, which he hung from his belt. He hoped he’d never tangle with another shark. But if he did, it would be good to have a proper knife.

  He rubbed his hand over his whiskers. Did he look too disreputable to get into a bar? He thought not —Port Chi was an easygoing sort of place. He’d try the Tantivy —he and Karl Eting used to go there for a drink.

  The Tantivy was in the next block. Sven pushed open th e swing doors, glad his torn pants leg was on the side away from the bartender. He walked toward the back of the room. And there, just as if they had had an appointment, was Karl Eting sitting at a table over a bottle of beer.

  Karl looked up as Sven appr oached him. “I’ll be darned,” he said, getting to his feet and extending a hand toward Sven, “if it isn’t Mrs. Erickson’s little boy Sven! Greetings, my pal! What brings you to this neck of the woods?”

  Sven took the outstretched hand and shook it solemnl y. “Glad to see you again, Karl. Oh, I just happened to be in Port Chi.”

  “Girl?” Karl asked, raising his eyebrows. (He was, Sven thought, slightly drunk. The people were haywire who told you you couldn’t get drunk on beer.) “I don’t think much of your ta ste. The girls in this town are pigs.”

  Sven sat down beside Karl. “Not all of them,” he replied mildly. “What about Darken?”

  “Darken and I split up last week,” Karl answered moodily. “Waiter, bring my friend a bottle of eastern beer. I can’t stand a wo man telling me how to spend my money.”

  “Um,” Sven answered. He had worked the cork out of the plastic vial in his pocket and was surreptitiously shaking out a couple of pills from it.

  “This dame you’re chasing must be a hell-cat,” Karl said sourly. “I never knew you to wear a knife before. Or is she married?”

  “I’ve joined the Boy Scouts, that’s all,” Sven answered.

  Karl found this reply excruciatingly funny. He laughed so hard he choked on the beer he was drinking. Sven might have used the distracti on to drop the pills into Karl’s glass, but he wasn’t sure it would do any particular good to drug Karl, and while he was hesitating, the waiter came up with his own bottle of beer.

  “You still working on the dock?” Sven asked as he picked up his glass. “Cheers, Karl.”

  “Yeah, off and on. See my hard hat? They took new pictures of us yesterday for our badges. Do you think I really look like that?” He tipped the badge on his chest forward for Sven to see.

  “It doesn’t look much like you,” Sven answered. “It could be anybody, just about.”

  “Yeah, it looks as much like you as it does like me.”

  “What shift you working?” Sven wanted to know. He must be careful not to act too interested.

  “Graveyard. We’re loading the Mauna Loa III tonight.”

  “That so? Anything new in boom-booms since I was here?”

  Karl finished his beer. “Well, they do say some of the new little ones are mighty powerful stuff.”

  “Nuclear, you mean? They would be.”

  “Naw, I don’t think so. Just conventional, but awfully, awfully hot. The y’re underwater mines in pretty little gold cases, about so size.” Karl sketched a four-inch shape on the tabletop. “I heard they were a sort of takeoff on cyclonite.”

  Sven swallowed. It sounded like what he was looking for. Nuclear explosives were put, because they might leave a radioactive residue in the water. It would never do for anybody to suspect a link between a stolen bomb, an underwater commotion, and an earthquake.

  “They think up new stuff all the time,” he said idly, “Waiter, two more of the same.” to see what the trouble was. Sven tried to whistle ingratiatingly. “Here, boy!” he called, “Good fellow! Whew-whew-whew!”

  The sound seemed to infuriate the animal. It began barking in paroxysms, its stiff forelegs bouncing up from the sidewalk wi th the fury of each outburst. Sven felt sweat trickling down his sides.

  What was he to do? He couldn’t throttle the animal with one hand, and that one his left, and the same objection applied to trying to use the hunting knife. Sven couldn’t even kick ou t at the miserable yapper without overbalancing. Was he, who had blinded a hungry shark with a weapon no more substantial than a penknife, to fail because of a bad-tempered terrier?

  Inspiration came. Sven pulled Dr. Lawrence’s tobacco pouch out of his po cket. He shifted his grip on Karl from his friend’s shoulders to his waist, and bent forward. Then he slapped out at the dog’s nose with the tobacco pouch.

  The animal jumped back, growling, and then leaped forward again, barking more wildly than ever. Sv en repeated the slap. This time, when the dog jumped forward after its recoil, Sven drew back as if frightened. The dog jumped in. And Sven crammed the tobacco pouch into its mouth.

  The dog made a choking noise. It began to roll on the ground and paw at its face. Sven was able to get Karl back into position and walk him across the street and into the park. There was still no sound from the dog except muffled gasps.

  Sven grinned. He didn’t think he had done the dog any real harm; in fact, he had probably improved its manners. If it was still in a barking mood after it got rid of the tobacco pouch, he thought he’d be able to deal with it.

  He sat Karl down on a picnic bench. He started to unpin Karl’s identification badge, and then paused. Better take Kar l’s jacket, too —Karl usually wore it to work, and the guard might associate a gray windbreaker with badge number 583. The jacket wasn’t exactly a disguise, but it might help.

  He worked Karl’s lax arms out of the jacket sleeves and put on the garment hims elf. He felt in Karl’s hip pocket, and appropriated the pair of cotton work gloves he found there. Karl’s wallet was in the inside pocket of the windbreaker; Sven put the wallet in Karl’s shirt pocket, and carefully buttoned the pocket flap. He put Karl’s hard hat on his head. Then he rolled Karl gently off the picnic bench and under the picnic table. Somebody had left a copy of the Richmond Independent on the table, and Sven covered “his friend up with the sheets of newspaper. He didn’t want Karl to catc h cold.

  Sven left the park. As he passed the cross street, he saw the tobacco pouch, wet with saliva, lying on the pavement. The dog was nowhere to be seen.

  What time was it getting to be? Sven’s watch, not being waterproof, had stopped running shortly after Djuna had first taken him to Noonday Rock, but he thought it must be somewhat after eleven. If he walked slowly, he’d get to the dock just about the
right time.

  There was a crowd of men waiting outside the dock gate. Sven joined it, feeling incons picuous enough in the poor fight The real test would be when he went past the guards.

  The crowd of waiting workers was not a talkative one. People who work graveyard are usually sleepy and morose when they go on shift. Some loudmouth was carrying on a mo nologue about the Giants, but nobody seemed to be listening to him.

  The whistle for the end of swing shift blew. The exit gate opened and people came hurrying out. A little later, the entrance gate was opened. The men of the next shift began to file in.

  The guards, Marines armed with rifles, stood one on either side of the gate, and the men went past them two abreast. Sven was familiar with the procedure from the time he had spent at Port Chi earlier; he did not think the identity check would be a sever e one. Nonetheless, he was considerably relieved when the guard on his side, glancing quickly from Sven’s badge to his face, let him by without remark.

  The check-in booth, plastered with no smoking signs, was just ahead. Here too another Marine with a ri fle stood on guard. Sven passed him, found his time card in the rack inside the booth, and punched it in the time clock. He put the punched card in the appropriate place in the “Out” rack, dropped the two folders of matches Karl’s windbreaker had contain e d in the box labeled “Leave Matches Here,” and walked on out. So far so good.

  But now he was confronted with a really acute problem.

  The Mauna Loa III, brilliant with floodlights and temporary lights, was just ahead. Should Sven report for work to Abra ms, Karl’s lead man, or make himself busy on the dock, or go up the gangplank onto the ship? The proper answer to these questions depended on something he had no way of knowing —whether Karl had been on Abrams’ crew long enough for Abrams to associate badg e number 583 with Karl’s face. Sven couldn’t possibly be mistaken for Karl by anybody who knew him well.

  On the other hand, if he made a show of activity on the dock, say in the warehouse, piling cases of ammo on pallets for the fork-lift operators, he mi ght be able to escape attention for a good while, and he ought to have a chance of locating one of the mines Karl had told him about. He’d try that.

  He walked toward the warehouse on the left. A lot of men were busy there. He was just inside the door whe n a man whose hard hat bore the insigne of a supervisor spoke to him.

  “Where you going, man?”

  Sven’s heart was beating fast. If he answered that he’d been told to work in the warehouse, the supervisor would ask who told him to, and —“Looking for Abrams, sir,” Sven replied.

  “He’s behind you, on the dock.” The supervisor pointed.

  “Thank you, sir.” Sven turned around and walked toward the man the supervisor had indicated. There was no help for It, The superior was watching him. He’d have to risk speakin g to Abrams.

  Abrams—he really did look a lot like a gorilla in a comic strip —had his hands full of papers. He was frowning and preoccupied. When he looked up, Sven said, “I’m on your crew, Mr. Abrams.”

  “New man?” Abrams answered, hardly looking at hi m.

  “Transfer from day, sir.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Harry Olsen.”

  “I guess your transfer slip hasn’t come through yet. Well, Harry, go down in number two hold and help unload the skips.”

  “Yessir.”

  Sven went up the gangplank, crossed the ammunitio n ship’s deck, and clambered down into the hold. Whew, But he was all right now.

  The men in the hold were moving cases of mortar shells from the skip and stacking them in tiers parallel to the bulkhead. Sven pulled on his cotton work gloves and began sta cking cases like the others. The only trouble with his present situation was that he wasn’t interested in mortar shells. What he wanted was one of the mines Karl had described to him.

  The skip was emptied. The crane took it away. The next load, to Sven’s disappointment, was more mortar shells, and after that a skip full of machine-gun rounds.

  Time passed. It must be getting near the lunch hour, Karl would be beginning to wake up in thirty minutes or so. And still nothing but ammunition for guns of one o r another sort.

  The crane let down another load. “Mines,” said one of Sven’s fellow workers. “Well, it’s a change. They don’t weigh as much as those damned mortar shells.”

  Sven licked his lips. Yes, this was what Karl had been talking about. The mines were packed in shallow trays molded to fit them, rather like lidless egg cartons, six to a tray. Each mine appeared to be encapsuled in transparent plastic, with a plastic ring at one end for ease of handling. They were rather pretty, really —elongated sph e res of gold-colored metal, gleaming softly through their transparent covering. They reminded Sven of overgrown hand grenades.

  “I’ve never loaded mines before,” Sven said to the man who had spoken. “How come they don’t have covers on the boxes?”

  “Oh, we put plastic dividers between the rows when we load them. I guess it’s because when you need mines you don’t want to have to waste time taking covers off cases. Or maybe some contractor sold the navy a bill of goods. Who knows why the navy does anything?”

  Sven nodded. He picked up a case of mines and carried it over to where the others were putting the cases down. He didn’t know what to do. It would be easy enough to pick up one of the mines and put it inside his windbreaker; the hold was full of shadows, and he could take the bomb while he was laying down the plastic divider. His jacket had an elastic strip at the bottom that would help keep the thing in place.

  The trouble was the size of the mine. Inside his windbreaker —or anywhere else on his person —it would make a large, prominent, unnatural bulge. The first person who glanced at him would say, “What the hell have you got inside your shirt?”

  And yet, he had to act quickly. Karl would be waking up in the next few minutes, and as soon as he realized what had happened, he would go to the police. He would tell them that his jacket, his identification badge and his hard hat had been stolen. It shouldn’t take even a Port Chicago policeman more than a few minutes to locate Sven, illegally working in a U.S. Navy arsenal.

  The crane lowered another skip into the hold. This time the skip’s load was cases of mortar shells. It looked as if no more mines would be coming down for a while.

  He’d have to risk it. It might be his only opportunity. Sven began laying down the plastic divider over the top of the last row of mines. When he got to the third box he picked up a mine by the plastic ring and put it in the front of his windbreaker. It was even more prominent than he had thought it would be. It made him look p igeon-breasted. He’d have to try to stay in the shadows. It was the best he could do.

  Abrams stuck his head over the hatch coaming. “See if you can’t get those shells off the skip before lunch, men,” he yelled. “You, Harry —aren’t you done with the mines yet?”

  “In a minute, sir,” Sven answered, “I —” The whistle blew for lunch.

  Sven felt an intense relief. At the first note of the whistle everybody had put his load down and hurried toward the foot of the hatch ladder. Now they were swarming up it, one after the other. It would take only a reasonable amount of dawdling for Sven to manage to be the last man out of the hatch.

  It worked. Everyone was in a hurry to be off the ship and start eating lunch. Sven got out of the hold and up on deck without anyo ne seeming to notice him. But as he started to go behind the deckhouse, where he would be safe from observation by anybody on the dock, Abrams, who was going down the gangplank, turned and caught sight of him.

  “Harry! Where are you going?” he yelled.

  “After my lunch, sir. I left it on the deck.”

  “OK. Remember, you’re not supposed to eat on the ship.”

  “Yessir.”

  He hadn’t seemed to notice the unnatural bulge of Sven’s chest. Perhaps Abrams was nearsighted, perhaps he was in too much of a hurry for his lunch to be observant. It didn�
��t matter. Sven had no time to waste in speculation.

  The Mauna Loa was riding lower in the water now. Sven stepped over the deck rail. He hesitated for the fraction of a second. Then he let himself down into the water as noiselessly as he could. He began to swim away from the ship.

  -

  Chapter 4

  “Do you see the little knob, there, inside of the plastic?” Sven asked. Djuna and Pettrus had brought him safely back to the Rock about dawn; and now, late Saturday afternoon, he was explaining to us the working of what he had stolen.

  “Pulling the knob out activates the mine. If it’s pulled out only a little way, the explosion takes place at the end of ninety seconds. If the knob’s pulled out fully, the mine goes off in about ten minutes. Of course, we want to delay the explosion as long as we can, so th a t whoever drops the mine into the submarine canyon will have time to get as far away as he can, to avoid the shock waves.

  “Pulling out the knob also activates a magnet, so the mine will adhere to a metallic surface. We don’t have to worry about that one way or the other. Until the knob is pulled —and it takes a considerable tug to start these things ticking —the mine is as harmless as a block of wood.”

  Sven had been showing the mine to us sea people, who were clustered around him in the shallow water. Now he turned and waded back to the rocky beach, where the other two’ Splits were. He laid the mine down on the sand, among the pebbles, and looked at it a little ruefully.

  “I wish we didn’t have to use it,” he said. “I don’t suppose any other mine in history has caused as much damage as this one will. It’s in a good cause, of course. But human history is full of people hurting other people for what they considered good reason s .”

  Dr. Lawrence raised his eyebrows a little. “How high-minded you all are,” he said mockingly. “Even the dolphins, whose very existence is at stake, have scruples about incidentally killing some of their enemies. Speaking personally, I can regard the el imination of half the human species without emotion. If we don’t do it, they’ll do it themselves. Are you trying to tell us, Sven, that you object to detonating the mine?”