The Dolphins of Altair

by Margaret St. Clair

  About three o’clock, when Regulus was setting, there was a slight earthquake shock, and a few minutes later we felt another one. There were no more shocks after that. The earth had settled down to a new period of repose. We heard planes during the night, too, but I don’t know whether they were navy planes out scouting for us, or just the ordinary air traffic.

  Dawn came. We expected Madelaine from moment to moment, but she didn’t come. It was broad daylight, nearly eight o’clock, before she came wading out through the surf to us.

  “A man saw me,” she said without preamble. Her eyes were large and luminous, and she was trembling. “I went to the fountain for water, and he saw me. I think he works for the park service.

  “He looked at me as if I were a ghost.” She laughed, her teeth chattering. “He asked me what was wrong with my arm—it was bleeding again—and I told him I’d been hurt in the quake. I don’t know whether or not he believed me, but he tied my arm up with his handkerchief.

  “Then he went to call the Highway Patrol to have somebody take me to a hospital. He says I need medical care. We must get away before he gets back.”

  I hesitated. Perhaps it would be better for Moonlight to let herself be taken to a doctor. Certainly she needed medical attention, and perhaps she could join us later, after her wound had been dressed. As to our pursuers being able to extract damaging information from her, she could not tell them anything that Dr. Lawrence would not have already told.

  She seemed to read my thoughts. “Take me with you,” she said urgently. “If we are once separated, we will never be able to find each other again. They’ll hold me without bail once they know who I am, and the navy will be hunting you dolphins all along the coast. Take me with you! I don’t want to leave you. And I can still be of help to you.”

  “All right,” Pettrus said, speaking for us all. “Get on my back. But where shall we go?”

  “To—it’s darkest under the lamp,” Sosa said, climbing on his back. Movement was obviously not easy for her. “To—yes, they say—to Sausalito. It’s not far. We ought to be safe there, for a while. We can hide under the docks.”

  Sausalito is a small city inside San Francisco Bay, more or less opposite the city of San Francisco. It is not a deep-water or industrial port, and its docking facilities are modest. Sosa might be right in thinking we could hide there for a while.

  Nonetheless, as we swam southwards, toward the Golden Gate Bridge, I felt exceedingly uncertain that we were doing the right thing. Madelaine might prefer hiding under the docks to being in jail, but at least they would dress her wound and give her food and water in jail. As far as we sea people ourselves were concerned, we rather dislike getting inside closed bodies of water, even waters as extensive as those of San Francisco bay. We are happier with the open sea before us. We have an animal dislike of anything that might be a trap, and the level of radioactivity in the bay is uncomfortably high.

  We passed under the Gate Bridge. There was no sound of traffic on it at all. Later we learned that the bridge had been closed to traffic ever since the first earth tremor Sunday morning, which had made the whole structure sway dangerously. Subsequent shocks had cracked some of the concrete slabs on the bridge approach straight across. It would be another week before the engineers would decide the big bridge was sound enough to open to traffic again.

  We got to Sausalito a little after nine. Here too there were signs of tidal damage—a boat smashed against the pilings, a slab of concrete broken from a little jetty and hurled high up on land. Nobody at all seemed to be about.

  “Keep on going,” Madelaine said softly, aware of how sound carries over water. “Do you see that boat anchored at the end of the rock? Take me around behind it.” “But—” I answered cautiously.

  “Nobody will think of looking for me behind a boat at anchor. They say, they say… I’ll be safe there.”

  What did she mean? We obeyed her unwillingly. As her feet touched bottom she slipped off Pettrus’ back and staggered toward the dank sand at the end of the striped, fish-smelling darkness.

  “My shoulder hurts so,” she said softly. It was the first time we had heard her complain. “I wish we had Sven.” She lurched a few steps forward and collapsed at the far end of the dock.

  “Madelaine,” I breathed. “Are you—?”

  “Oh, yes, my darlings. I’ll be all right.—Traitor! Traitor! We trusted you!”

  Even in the poor light, from the water, we could see a red streak running down her arm from her wound. With a start I realized that her wound was infected, and that she was becoming delirious. It was Dr. Lawrence she was speaking to.

  Our brave dear Moonlight! Had we brought her to this dubious refuge to die? I felt a terrible sense of the biological gulf between us. We had no hands, we could not even bring her water. What were we to do?

  Chapter 7

  There a re billions of minds in the world. Each has its separate individuality and its unique character. But to try to isolate any one from all the rest is like trying to pick out a particular grain of sand from a sandy beach.

  We thought of using Udra, of course, as soon as we realized how much Madelaine needed help. We knew she did not want to be separated from us; she had already made that clear, and now, even in her delirium, she kept saying, “Don’t let them take me away!” and calling us by name over and over again. But how could we get help that would not involve her being taken away, if only to a hospital? Udra seemed the only possible way out. But there were objections to our using it.

  In the first place, the vast majority of Splits are not receptive to Udra at all. Only about one in a hundred thousand makes any response to it. So we would be hunting for one particular grain of sand without having any assurance that the grain really existed.

  In the second place, using Udra takes intense concentration. When a dolphin really exerts this faculty, he loses most of his awareness of the world around him. And he is, of course, much more susceptible to attack by an enemy.

  Finally, we were afraid that the navy would be able to track us down through our use of Udra. Lawrence had mentioned that various government agencies had been working on the military possibilities of ESP. We did not think the danger was very great—it was a risk we were willing to run—but it bothered us.

  We were also bothered by our ignorance of the current state of the navy’s war against the sea people. Probably they were still hunting us; it hardly seemed likely that they would have been satisfied merely to bomb Noonday Rock. But had the navy leaked the substance of Dr. Lawrence’s revelations to the general public? We did not know whether any human being who saw us would feel in duty bound to try to kill us, or whether we dolphins were still among their tolerated animals. We could probably find out by using Udra. But by the time we found out, it might be too late.

  Nonetheless, we decided we must try it. Our hope was that we could draw a physician to the dock and that, after he had attended Madelaine, we might be able to assure his silence by appealing to his professional ethics. We knew there was something called the “Hippocratic Oath.” And we might be able to influence the doctor in the direction of silence by using Udra, too.

  By the time we had come to this decision, Madelaine, who had been talking so much for a while, had fallen into a sort of stupor. Even in the dim light we could see that the red streak down her arm was longer and brighter. We were so worried that it was hard for us to attain the necessary concentration to begin our Udra use.

  I doubt that we would ever have been able to do it, except that the tide began to come in. The radioactivity of the foul water in which we were floating had been a constant vexation to us. The cleaner influx put us more at ease. So our minds were more free.

  We floated silently side by side in the freshening water. The world around us began to grow dim. We were reaching out to review minds.

  We kept on for several hours, getting deeper and deeper into the typical Udra-state of remoteness. About two o’clock we heard steps along the dock—the
y seemed to come from a long way off—and then somebody jumped down on the deck of the boat behind which Moonlight was lying. He cast off the boat’s moorings, and a little later the engine started up.

  The noise partly roused us, though it was pretty obvious that the boat owner hadn’t come in answer to any summons of ours. We swam a little apart for safety, and submerged. He got the boat out without seeing either us or Madelaine, though he went so. close to Pettrus he almost bumped into him.

  We went back to our work. We had an impression that we were contacting somebody. About an hour later we heard wobbling, uneven footsteps on the dock.

  The footsteps stopped. A man leaned over the edge. He cupped his hands and shouted, “You! You there in the water! What do you want?”

  We had been floating under the dock and in its immediate shadow. Now the shout from above roused us. It might be the person we were hunting for. A little doubtfully, I swam into the sunlight and looked up at the man.

  He was barefooted, with a sparse, patchy beard, and his clothes were dungarees and a cotton T-shirt with a hole ripped in the shoulder. He held a wine bottle in one hand.

  “Why, it’s a dolphin!” he said, regarding me. “Porpp—purpp—anyhow, a dolphin. Smart animals. Can you talk?”

  He didn’t seem to be automatically alarmed at seeing me, so perhaps the navy had kept Dr. Lawrence’s revelations to itself. “Yes-s,” I said.

  He sat down on the edge of the dock, letting his feet dangle over the side. He took a drink from the bottle he was holding. “Sherry,” he said. ” ‘Oud you like some?”

  “No, thank you.” I was still uncertain whether to ask him to help Madelaine.

  “Well, what would you like?” he asked. “I heard you calling and calling. Crying, really. Is something wrong?”

  I decided to trust him. “Yes-s. We need help. Come down under the dock, and I’ll show you.”

  “Help?” he said, drinking again. “I couldn’t help anybody. I’m—even my girl calls me a bum. I drink sherry because it makes me number than pot.—All right. You don’t need to keep asking. I ‘ll come down.”

  He rose, walked back along the dock, and rather unsteadily let himself down into the shallow water. “What’re you talking about?” he demanded. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Under the dock,” I said. “Go on back. You’ll see.”

  He bent over and obeyed. It seemed to take a little while for his eyes to get adjusted to the light. Then he saw Madelaine.

  “Why, it’s a girl!” he exclaimed. “Wha’s she doing here? Is she sick?”

  “Not sick, hurt. We want to get help for her.”

  He drank from the bottle, a long drink. I had the idea that he would always take a long drink from the bottle in an emergency. “Wha’ do you want me to do?” he asked.

  “Get a doctor. Bring him here. Tell him—tell him he must promise not to take her to a hospital of turn her over to the police. She has a wound in the shoulder. It’s infected. The doctor must sew it up and give her medicine. He must promise not to call the police.”

  “The police! Wha’ she done?” He giggled and drank more wine. He must have emptied the bottle, for he shook it ruefully and then tossed it out into the water. “She mus’ be some sort of public en’my.”

  “Never mind that. She doesn’t want to be separated from us. Go get a doctor. We have money.” Madelaine did indeed have about five dollars in the bosom of her bloodstained dress. “We can pay.”

  “Public en’my!” he repeated. “Well, I guess I’m a sort public en’my myself. I’ll try get doctor. I know one hangs out at ba r. He—broad-minded chap.”

  The man in the dungarees wobbled out from under the dock—once he banged his head on a cross-timber—and then clambered up onto the structure. “Don’t forget,” I said from the water. “And don’t tell anyone except the doctor.”

  “Eh ? Oh, sure. Get doctor. Won’t tell. Be back.”

  We heard his feet retreating landward. They did not go very far before they hesitated and stopped. Then we heard a noise that might have been made by a man falling. We did not know much about the drinking habits of Splits, but it was all too clear that he had collapsed on the dock.

  When he came to, would he remember his mission? Probably not; and if we tried to contact him a second time, he would, in all likelihood, only pass out again. He had seemed friendly and well-disposed to us. But nobody could have taken him for a reliable man. There was no hope of Madelaine’s getting help from him.

  Yet the episode had not been entirely wasted. We had learned that the navy had apparently not yet given the signal for a general dolphin hunt. And we had found that a Split, though a drunken one, could respond to Udra in considerably less time than it had taken us to call Madelaine to us originally. Really, we would have felt encouraged except that Madelaine seemed to be getting steadily worse. We must hurry and try what we could do with Udra again.

  It was not so hard for us to withdraw our attention from our surroundings this time, at least at first. But getting into the later stages of concentration proved remarkably difficult. There was opposition from somewhere, and after about half an hour I realized what it was. An alien mind was trying to contact me.

  I say “alien,” but the word is not really accurate. “Odd” or “extraordinary” would be a better characterization. And the peculiarity was that, though the mind seemed familiar enough to me, I never could identify it. I was always on the edge of recognizing it, and yet I always failed.

  It disturbed me. I let my Udra efforts lapse, and returned to full awareness of where I was. Ivry was looking at me questioningly.

  “Did you feel it?” I asked.

  “Yes. A mind—a Split, I think, but I’m not quite sure. There’s something odd about it. It’s a mind—a mind that’s carrying a passenger.”

  That was exactly it. Ivry had expressed it very well. I said, “Is it Sven?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’m sure I’d recognize him. But it’s a familiar mind. Or it seemed familiar, part of the time.”

  Pettrus was still in the Udra-state. We nudged him from either side until his expression showed that he realized where he was.

  “Did you feel it?” he asked. “Somebody’s trying to contact us.”

  “Yes, we know. Did you accept contact with it, Pettrus?”

  “No. It was a peculiar mind. I got a feeling of doubled-ness.”

  I said, “We can’t get anywhere with Udra as long as it’s trying to contact us. Perhaps we—”

  We were interrupted by a wail from Madelaine. She had raised herself on one elbow and was staring up at the timbers of the dock. “Can’t I have water?” she said wildly. “I’m so thirsty. Oh, please, no matter how much you hate us, can’t I have a drink?”

  Her face was dusky red. We were silent for a moment. Then Pettrus said, “We’d better accept contact, no matter who it is. Moonlight needs help too much for us to be particular. And I did get an impression of helpfulness from the alien mind, once or twice.”

  He was right, we agreed wordlessly. Once more we settled down to the state of physical withdrawal and psychological reaching-out that initiates genuine Udra-use. Madelaine had fallen back into a stupor. I remember being thankful, as I tried to concentrate, that Blitta had not had time to suffer very much.

  The contact, when it came, was very brief—a quick glancing, almost a flickering, as the mind with a passenger brushed us and then darted aside. It was gone. But whoever it was seemed to have been satisfied.

  We tried to go on with Udra, but couldn’t. Whether we were too excited or whether that brief contact with the odd mind was responsible, I don’t know. But we never could manage it, though we kept trying for what must have been more than an hour.

  At last I said, “We’d better swim along the shore and try to attract the attention of a Split. We can make the sort of noises people expect from dolphins, and lead him or her to where Moonlight it. It would be better to have her taken away from us than to have
her die from fever and thirst where she is.”

  “Perhaps she wouldn’t think so,” Pettrus answered slowly. “Perhaps not. But can we stand staying here and watching her die?”

  Before Pettrus could answer, there came the sound of footsteps on the dock overhead. They got to the edge of the dock and then we heard a splash in the water.

  It had begun to get dark, but we could make out the silhouette of a man with a little bag in one hand. It looked like the triangular-topped bags doctors carry, and I felt a flash of hope. Had we succeeded in getting help for Sosa after all?

  “I got here as soon as I could,” the man said.

  I knew the voice instantly. It was Doctor Lawrence who was standing there.

  I felt an unspeakable bitterness. He had been behind the strangely familiar mind that had sought contact with us, he had used that contact to track us down. It was our fault that he knew where Madelaine was.

  “So, you traitor, you came,” I said when I could command myself enough to speak. “Did you come to make sure of her death this time?”

  Chapter 8

  Dr. Lawrence listened to my accusation without moving. “Your resentment is justified, Amtor,” he said slowly. “What I’ve done is hard to—but my apologies and explanations can come later. I came here to try to help. Madelaine is sick, isn’t she? We got a strong impression that she was sick or hurt.”

  I was floating between him and where Moonlight was lying, though of course he could make a dash around me up on the sand. “Who’s ‘We’?” I demanded. “You and the navy? Are you working with the navy to try to trace us down?”

  “No. No, I’m not. ‘We’ is Mrs. Casson and I. She’s the psychometrist I told you about when we were on the Rock. It was both our minds, coupled, that you felt today when we were trying to locate you.” He added, with an odd note of pride in his voice, “It’s the first time I was ever able to do anything like that.”