The Dolphins of Altair

by Margaret St. Clair

  About three a drizzling rain began to fall, and Sven made Madelaine, who was shivering violently, take his windbreaker. A little later the moon rose, and the light was a comfort to all of us.

  “I wonder if the concrete walls around the training pools have broken yet?” Madelaine said. “And if they have, did the sea people all manage to get out? You know the spiritual, Sven, about how ‘Joshua fit de battle of Jericho’? We started an earthquake. Did ‘de walls come a-tumblin’ down’?”

  “We ought to know pretty soon,” Sven said.

  The east began to lighten. The sun was about half above the horizon when we saw, coming across the water toward us from the north, a marvelous sight.

  It was a flotilla of sea people, more than two hundred of them, and though they were coming very fast, they hardly seemed to move in the water so much as in the air. They leapt and tumbled, they turned head over tail in their exuberance, they seemed to frolic in the air like birds, free creatures in their free element. The light glinted from their glistening bodies. The surface of the water seemed to laugh.

  “What is it?” Madelaine cried. She was leaning forward eagerly, shading her eyes from the rising sun with one hand. “Amtor, Amtor! Is it what I think?”

  “Yes,” I told her. I was so excited I could hardly talk. It was a real effort for me to force my speech into the slow tempo and low pitch of human communication. “They’re free. I think they’re all free, all the dolphins that were in DRAT training centers. They’re saying that the walls broke and crumbled, the walls fell into bits all along the coast. They swam away unhindered. They’re free.”

  The fleet of dolphins was all about us now. I recognized many friends and kinsmen, and among them one who was not a kinsman and who was dearer to me than any friend could be—Blitta, my mate, who had been shut up in a DRAT station for more than two years. Even now, I feel much emotion at her name.

  “It worked, then,” Madelaine said. Her voice was full of astonished fruition. “I didn’t really think it would. You stole the mine, Sven, Amtor dropped it, and now the sea people are free.”

  She drew a deep breath. “Whatever happens, we can always remember this, the morning when the air seemed full of joy like the sound of singing voices. The morning when the sea people were set free.”

  The sun was well up now, golden among clouds in the east. The first shock of delight had abated a little, and we began to swim northward more soberly. Sven looked around at the dolphins in the water.

  “Isn’t that you, Pettrus?” he said. “What happened on Noonday Rock when the quakes came? Where is Doctor Lawrence?”

  “Lawrence is all right,” Pettrus answered. “There were only two little shocks on the Rock, but there were a lot of waves. One big one swept almost over the Rock.

  “When we knew the waves were coming, I had the doctor get on my back and I swam well out to sea with him. He stayed on my back for several hours. He never let go of his briefcase the whole time.” Pettrus made the grunting noise that indicates amusement with us.

  “When the dolphins from the DRAT pens began to arrive on the Rock—oh, we were so excited!—he suggested that we should all go to meet you. I asked him to come with us, but he said he’d had enough of sitting on a dolphin’s back with his legs in the water. He said to leave him on the Rock.

  “We were too excited to argue with him, and we didn’t think there would be any more waves. We were eager to meet you and let you see that the quake had broken down the walls and let our people escape. So we left him there, on the Rock.”

  “Weren’t there more dolphins in the pens at the naval research stations than this?” Madelaine asked.

  “Oh, of course. Only the ones from the northernmost station swam out to the Rock. The others made for the open sea. They must be many miles away from the coast by now.”

  Madelaine did not ask how Pettrus knew this; and indeed, it would have been hard for him to give her an explanation she could understand. Our senses—even our extrasensory senses—are different from those of Splits. As we swam north our entourage of dolphins began to drop away from us. This was partly because we knew that such a large number of sea people would be bound to attract attention, even under post-earthquake conditions, and partly because we knew there weren’t enough fish in these coastal waters to keep such a large group of dolphins fed. It takes a lot of fish to keep a full-grown dolphin adequately nourished. By the time we reached Noonday Rock, there were only about ten sea people still with the party—those of us who had been at the Rock more or less permanently, plus two or three from the DRAT station. My own Blitta stayed, of course.

  Sven, though stiff, managed to clamber off my back and wade ashore. But Moonlight was almost unable to move. He had to lift her off Ivry and half-carry her up on the beach.

  Her feet were no longer swollen, but shrunken and blue. He wanted to help her rub them, but she insisted he take care of himself first. It took a lot of massage before either of them could walk normally.

  “Where’s Dr. Lawrence?” Sven asked as he helped Madelaine to her feet after the rubbing. “I’m surprised he hasn’t come to meet us.”

  “Let’s go look for him.”

  They set off hand in hand to walk around the Rock, stopping now and then to call, “Dr. Lawrence! Dr. Lawrence!” We sea people watched them silently.

  They came back in about fifteen minutes. “He’s not on the Rock,” Sven said positively. “I even climbed up to see if he could be hiding at the top. He’s not here.”

  Madelaine was looking disturbed. “What could have happened to him?” she said. She fingered her lips uncertainly. “Perhaps there was another wave, a big one, and it swept him clean off the Rock. It’s the only thing I can think of. Anyhow, he seems to be gone.”

  “Certainly does,” Sven agreed.

  I said nothing. I did not think Dr. Lawrence had been swept off Noonday Rock. I remembered my earlier mistrust of him.

  Chapter 5

  When I think of what happened next, I always see it against a background of raging waters, a boiling sea whose froth is muddy pink. And that is odd, for it happened a little after noon on a bright, calm, windless day. The pink tinge in the water is an accurate recollection, though. I wish it were not.

  We ought to have left the Rock as soon as we realized Dr. Lawrence was gone, of course. Looking back on it, I find it strange that we took his disappearance so calmly. Even I, who mistrusted him, was not much alarmed. Partly this was because we could not be sure what had happened to him—the little fishing boat that had brought him to Noonday Rock in the first-place might have taken him away again, and in too much of a hurry for him to have left a note—and partly because we sea people were in a mood of great euphoria.

  We dolphins are normally optimistic and good-tempered, and the unexpected rescue of our friends from the DRAT pens had made us feel that nothing bad could ever happen-to us again. Our world has always been a good place, except for sharks.

  Sven and Madelaine, being human, could reasonably have been expected to be more suspicious than we, and Madelaine was certainly apprehensive of trouble to come. But neither of them seemed to connect the danger with Dr. Lawrence at all. Perhaps the navy’s experiments in the use of psi phenomena had something to do with their myopia.

  Dr. Lawrence had told us once that the navy had been investigating psi phenomena with a view to military use. Perhaps an experiment was being carried out that morning that had the unintended effect of blunting Madelaine’s normal perceptiveness. I have never been able to find out for sure.

  At any rate, we were still at the Rock a little after noon on Monday. Sven and Madelaine had slept for a few hours after our arrival there, and Sven had then gone with Djuna to the big island to bring back some canned goods and drinking water. He did not think there would be any danger of being observed, even in broad daylight, so soon after a major earthquake had shaken the coast. People would be too occupied with their own troubles to notice one man on an unimportant island.

>   Moonlight—she had grown so tanned from exposure that the name was no longer apt for her—was sitting on the rocky beach talking to us. The sea people had been released from their prisons, but the hardest part of what we had undertaken—making sure that human beings would never molest us again—was still in front of us. As Dr. Lawrence had said, it was a large order. None of us had a clear idea how it was to be done.

  Blitta was close beside me in the water. We were so happy to be together again! The sea was too cold for us to think much about mating, but we were planning to slip away for a few days to the warm blue South Pacific. We had been separated for two years.

  Abruptly Madelaine got to her feet, pressing her hands against her breast. She seemed to be listening. Then she yelled at us, “Dive, all of you! Swim out and dive! Quick!”

  She turned and ran up from the beach toward the rock.

  We acted on her warning instantly. But Blitta, who was not used to trusting Splits, was a little slower about obeying than the rest of us. This momentary hesitation of hers was certainly the reason why…

  A plane appeared out of the empty sky. It was a very fast reconnaissance plane. It swooped down over the Rock.

  It came so low that Madelaine, who had pressed herself against the rock face for protection, said she thought it was going to gut itself on the granite crest. She could see the big navy insignia on its belly and wings.

  The plane pulled out of its dive at the last minute. It was only a few yards above the rocky beach. Bullets began to patter. The plane was straffing the water and the shore.

  The barrage lasted only an instant. Then the plane was up and high in the air again like a flash of light.

  It circled the Rock twice, very high. Madelaine, hugging the granite wall, hoped it was going away. Then it made another swoop. Bullets pocked and whined against the hard surface. This time the plane was straffing the Rock. I don’t know whether or not the pilot saw Madelaine. Probably not, or he would have continued his straffing until he killed her. At any rate, he made one more pass over the top of the crest, while the bullets spatted. Then he shot up and away. In an instant he had vanished in the east.

  Madelaine came running down to the water. “Amtor! Blitta! Ivry!” she called. “Are you—”

  She stopped. She had seen the pink tinge in the ripples on the little beach. “Who’s hurt?” she demanded anxiously. “Who’s been hurt?”

  “It’s Blitta,” I replied after an instant. “She’s—Moonlight, I think she’s dead.”

  “Oh, Amtor!”

  “The pilot hit her twice. The first bullet went in her back, I think. The second—it must have gone into her heart.”

  Madelaine was silent. For the first time since the straffing, I looked at her. Then I saw that she had been wounded. Her left shoulder was streaming with blood.

  “Maddy, you’ve been wounded,” I said.

  “Have I?” she replied absently. “It doesn’t hurt.”

  “It will. We must get Sven and have him bandage it for you.”

  “There’s no time,” she answered. “There’s not time for anything, Amtor. We haven’t even time to warn Sven. Dr. Lawrence has betrayed us. That was a navy scouting plane. There’ll be fifty planes here soon. We must leave the Rock.”

  Was this the trouble Madelaine had forseen for us? There was no time for speculation—no time even for grief. She was right. The air would be full of bombers in a few minutes. Lawrence had betrayed us. We must leave the Rock.

  Chapter 6

  Madelaine’s shoulder kept bleeding. The left side of her dress was soaked with blood. From the look of the wound and what happened later, I think it mu st have been made by a flying rock splinter chipped off one of the places where the sea gulls used to perch. It was a long gash, not very deep, but it ought to have been stitched up by a doctor.

  We did not discuss where we should go. Really, we had little choice. It was plainly impossible to take Sosa (we called Madelaine that sometimes, after a dolphin heroine) westward, to the open sea. The nearest land in that direction was China. North or south, along the coast, the nearest place where we could put Madelaine ashore was the Channel Islands, and that was much too far.

  That left the east, back to the shaken California coast, with forty miles of water between us and the mainland. What place should we head for? Sosa, on Ivry’s back, said, “Try for Drake’s Bay. There’s water there.” She passed her tongue over her lips.

  Her wound, I thought, was making her thirsty. But Drake’s Bay seemed a good idea. Since it was a public beach, there would be drinking fountains with fresh water, and it was most unlikely anybody would be there, bathing or fishing, on the day after a full-scale earthquake. Sosa-Madelaine could rest there for a day or two. She could even make a fire without rousing suspicion, and do a little cooking. We could catch fish for her.

  My mind held other thoughts than these, of course—concern for Sven, worry about the bombers that were certainly approaching, and constant, not yet fully apprehended grief for Blitta’s death. As we began to leave the Farallons behind, Sosa turned to look at the lighthouse, still visible above the horizon. “I hope Sven saw the plane,” she said. She swallowed. “If he did, he’ll realize what happened. Can any of you make mental contact with him?”

  “No,” Pettrus answered. “Or with Djuna, either.”

  The girl sighed. “I ought to have realized the navy plane was coming before I did,” she said. “Something is getting in the way of our minds.”

  Nobody said anything for a while. Ivry was swimming in the middle, with Pettrus on his right and me on his left. I began to wonder why we hadn’t heard the bombers yet. Would they see us from the air, or would they be so intent on their target, Noonday Rock, that we could hope to go unnoticed? Moonlight’s shoulder had stopped bleeding, anyhow.

  She stirred uneasily on Ivry’s back. “I think—yes, yes, they’re coming. Dive, all of you! Ivry, too. I’ll hold my breath. Don’t come up until I kick you, Ivry. Dive!”

  She filled her lungs. Ivry and the rest of us went under as smoothly as we could.

  Ivry said afterwards that he was torn between a wish to go as deep as he could and a fear that Sosa couldn’t stand the sud den increase in pressure. We all were afraid the bombers would see the disturbance in the water and drop explosives on us. One bomb in the right place, and Madeline’s “war against the human race” would have come to an end then and there.

  Under the water, I looked anxiously at Madelaine. She had gripped her legs hard against Ivry’s sides and was bent over against him with her hands behind his flukes. I didn’t know how much air her lungs could hold. Blood from her shoulder made a faint haze in the water. She was very pale.

  We could hear the roar of the planes overhead. It seemed to go on for a long time. We didn’t know whether or not the girl could hear it. Ivry said he thought she was never going to give him the signal to go up. We were all afraid that she might faint. But at last I saw her left foot move against Ivry. It was the sign to surface. We could go back to the air.

  We had been swimming forward while we were under water. We came up a good many yards from where we had submerged. Sosa was breathing in deep gasps. The blood stains on her white dress had turned to a rusty pink. But we seemed to be safe for a while.

  Then I saw that the submersion had washed the blood clot from her shoulder. The wound was bleeding again. She lost more blood before a new clot formed.

  We got to Drake’s Bay a little before sunset. As far as we could see from the water, there was nobody at all there. Madelaine got off Ivry’s back and walked unsteadily through the surf to the beach.

  “I’m so thirsty,” she said. “I’ll try to get a drink. I’ll be back.”

  We waited silently. In about five minutes she came out into the surf again, still walking unsteadily.

  “The drinking fountain was working,” she said “I was afraid the pipes might have broken in the quake, but they hadn’t. I had a big drink.” She giggled. I thought she s
ounded a little light-headed.

  “There must have been a big wave here last night,” she said. “Wood’s been washed high up on the beach. But I found a place, sheltered from the wind, where there are still coals from a picnic fire. I can bring wood and make up a fire. I can sleep in the sand. There’s nobody here.”

  “Would you like us to bring you fish to cook?” I asked. The broad red disk of the sun was almost under the horizon.

  “No, I’m not hungry. Water is all I want.” She looked at us thoughtfully, pinching her lip. “Don’t go back to the Rock tonight, any of you,” she said. “I don’t know what’s happened to Sven. I wish I knew. But you mustn’t go back to find out about him or—or for anything.” (She was thinking, I knew, about Blitta.) “The navy will be sweeping the water around the Rock and the other islands, trying to catch any of the sea people they can. Don’t go.”

  “All right.”

  “Tomorrow,” she said, swallowing—her throat was dry again—“we’ll talk about what to do. Tonight—I’m too dizzy. My head’s not clear;”

  We were all nuzzling her hands. “Good night, dear Amtor,” she said. “Good night, dear Ivry, dear Pettrus. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  After she had been gone a while, we saw a red glow spring up under the cliffs to the right of where we had put Madelaine ashore. So we knew she had managed to make her fire.

  The night passed. We caught fish, we slept in snatches, we talked a good deal. I kept thinking about Blitta, wondering whether her body was still rolling in the water near Noonday Rock, or whether the navy had found her and had taken her away to dissect. They were always eager to dissect us, so they could find out more about how our bodies worked.

  Several times during the night we tried to make mental contact with Sven, but we always failed. We couldn’t reach Djuna either, and that made us afraid of what might have happened to them. We discussed Dr. Lawrence’s defection, too. We speculated about how he had left the Rock, and what had led him to betray us, when he had seemed less disturbed by the prospect of the earthquake than the rest of us had.