The Dolphins of Altair

by Margaret St. Clair

  “Does the navy know you came here?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so. I tried to cover my tracks. I left a letter—but we can talk about that after I’ve taken care of Madelaine.

  “I don’t blame you for distrusting me, Amtor. I am sincere—I’ve made up my mind once and for all—but of course you can’t know that. But let me take care of Madelaine no matter how you feel about me. I’m a physician, after all. And she needs help.”

  I was silent. Pettrus, speaking in the high pitch that is inaudible to human ears, said, “I think we ought to trust him, Amtor. Even if he’s not sincere, he won’t find out anything more than he already knows by taking care of Moonlight. And she’s pretty sick. We ought to let him try to help.”

  “What if he kills her?” I asked. “He betrayed us once before.”

  “Then we can try to kill him. But I think we ought to let him see what he can do for her.”

  “Ivry?” I asked.

  “I agree with Pettrus.”

  Yes, I thought a little bitterly, they are more trustful than I am. No wonder. Neither of them had a mate killed in the attack on the Rock. Aloud I said, “All right.”

  Dr. Lawrence was still standing waiting, with his black bag in his hand. I told him, “Moonlight is under the dock, far back on the sand. We’ll let you go to her. But we’ll be watching what you do.”

  He nodded silently. He stooped and began making his way through the water to where the girl was lying. Her white dress glimmered faintly in the dim light.

  He knelt beside her. He must have touched her, for she mumbled, “Water… water…” and then was silent again.

  We heard a faint clink. We could not see very well, but he seemed to be getting something out of his pocket. There was a gurgle. He must be pouring water from a flask.

  He put his arm under her head and raised her a little. We heard her drinking, and an indistinct “Thanks.” He put her down gently again.

  He opened the black bag and took out a tiny flashlight. He ran the weak beam slowly over Madelaine’s body, pa using a long time at her shoulder. “Is that the only injury she has?” he asked us softly, putting the flashlight down. “I can’t make a real examination here.”

  “Yes, that’s the only place she was hurt,” I answered. “It bled quite a bit.”

  “Un-hunh. She’s pretty sick.” Holding the flashlight in one hand, he began to hunt through his bag with the other.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “Give her as big an injection of penicillin as I think she can take.” He was sterilizing and filling a syringe as he spoke. “The first thing to do is to try to reduce the infection in her arm a bit.”

  He wiped a spot on her arm with cotton and plunged the hypodermic needle in. It took quite a long time for him to empty the syringe. “I’ll give her another shot in four hours,” he said, looking at his watch. “Right now I’m going to clean out her wound and put a bandage on it. There’s too much infection there for me to think of sewing it up.—This is a terrible place to try to take care of a patient in. Not even any lights.”

  Ivry had been swimming around agitatedly while Dr. Lawrence was giving the injection. Now he said, in a low, anxious gabble, “There’s a boat coming. Put out that light, Doctor. Hide.”

  After a very slight hesitation, Dr. Lawrence obeyed. He dropped the flashlight into his bag and stretched himself out on the dank sand in front of Madelaine—thinking, I suppose, that his neutral-colored clothing would be less visible than her whitish dress.

  Almost immediately we heard the putt-putt of a motor, and a little while later a boat—the same boat that had been there earlier—tied up at the dock.

  This time there were two men on her. As they were fastening the ropes, one of them said, “I thought I saw a light back under the dock.”

  “Yeah, so did I,” answered the other. “Sometimes light shines down through the holes in the planking. Or maybe it was the eyes of a rat.”

  “Must have been something like that,” the first man said. We heard him yawn. “Let’s have a can of beer before we go ashore.”

  They stood in the bow of the boat, drinking beer and talking desultorily, for an annoyingly long time. We were all impatient for them to go away, so Dr. Lawrence could get on with his treatment of Madelaine. But when they began to talk about the earthquake, we listened with more interest.

  “For a big quake, it didn’t kill many people,” the man who seemed to own the boat was saying. “Millions and millions of dollars’ worth of property damage, though. Suppose it had happened in the daytime on a working day! There’d have been thousands killed.”

  “Yeah, the timing was lucky. Did it damage your house much?”

  “Shook the chimney down, that was all. How about that four-plex you own?”

  “It did a lot of damage, Bill, but I think the insurance company will cover most of it. Say, did you see that thing in the Chronicle gossip-column about the admiral?”

  “No, what did it say?”

  “Oh, that some navy big-shot had an idea about what caused the quake he was trying to sell his superiors on making public. It was headed, ‘The Softly-Flapping Admiral’.”

  “I don’t see what could have caused the quake, except stresses building up in the earth.” There was a plop as he tossed his empty beer can in the water. “The air force is usually the goofy service, though. I wonder what the admiral meant.”

  “Well, whatever caused it, I guess we’re safe for another fifty years. Let’s get going, Bill. We’ve got a big day in front of us.”

  “OK.” He finished his beer and threw the can out to bob beside the other one. The two men scrambled up on the dock. We heard them walking away.

  Dr. Lawrence sat up, brushing sand from Ms jacket. He said nothing, but we felt he was annoyed. He turned the flashlight on and began to get things out of his bag.

  When he had cleaned and dressed Sosa’s wound, he gave her another drink. Then, still stooping, he waded out toward where we were.

  “Madelaine can’t stay here,” he said softly. “She ought to be in a hospital, or at least in a decent bed. This is a hell of a place for a sick woman. I want to take her away.”

  “No. We forbid you to.” I knew I spoke for all of us.

  “Why? It would be better for her.”

  “Would it? As long as she was conscious, she said she wanted to stay with us. She begged us not to let us be separated. If we let you take her away, how do we know we’ll ever see her again?”

  “But I promise—”

  “I’m sorry. I’m afraid we just don’t trust you that much.”

  He was silent, his head bent. “It’s very difficult for me to take proper care of her here,” he said at last.

  “Whose fault is it she’s lying there?” Ivry asked.

  Lawrence sighed. “While we’re on this subject,” Pettrus said, “what about the explanations and apologies you were going to give us? Now would be a good time for them.”

  “Yes.” Lawrence waded back up under the dock and sat down on the dank sand.

  “I’ve always been a believer in luck and fate,” he said slowly, as if he were arranging his ideas. “The unexpected seems to me more important in human affairs than the expected and the rational. It’s a gambler’s temperament, in a way. Or perhaps it’s what Madelaine meant when she said I had an appetite for the marvelous.

  “At any rate, when I decided to try to get to Noonday Rock, I had no way of knowing what I should find there. I thought it was likely—or at least possible—that Madelaine was on the Rock, and that dolphins had taken her there. But I didn’t know how many other people were there with her, or what their attitude to an intruder would be.

  “I was willing to risk it. The possibilities were too interesting to be ignored. But I thought it was wise to try to reduce the risk.”

  “Do you call that gambling?” I said. “It’s the action of a cautious man.”

  “There was an element of gambling in it,”
he protested. “There was less than one chance in three that what I brought with me would work.”

  “Well, go on. What did you bring with you when you came to Noonday Rock?”

  “A communication device.”

  “You didn’t mention this when you told us about your preparations for coming to the Rock. Why, after you found we were friendly, were you so secretive?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “Perhaps I wasn’t quite sure.”

  “I know why you didn’t tell us,” Ivry said. (Ivry was the most excitable of the three of us, just as Pettrus was the biggest and I was the one who knew the most genealogies.) “You were spying on us for the navy the whole time!” Emotion overcame him, and he flapped his tail furiously.

  “No,” Lawrence answered. “The navy didn’t even know I had the device. I stole it, actually.”

  “What was the name of the device?” I asked. “Where did you have it hidden?”

  “It’s something called COLABS—collimated laser beam signal. What I stole was an experimental model, very much miniaturized. I had it in my briefcase.”

  “So that’s why you kept such a hold on the briefcase,” I said. “When did you decide to use the COLABS thing?”

  “It wasn’t really a decision,” he said. “I’d promised to help Madelaine in her war against the human race. But I’m a human being myself. I couldn’t help feeling, part of the time, that I was engaged in something treasonable.”

  “You were the most bitter against Splits of any of us!” Ivry gabbled. “Whenever we had scruples, you argued us out of them!”

  “Oh, I know. I expect I was trying to repress my own doubts.”

  “Well, go on. You sent out a signal with the COLABS thing, didn’t you?” I said.

  “I tried the COLABS to see if it would send out a signal,” he corrected.

  “You mean you never sent out a message at all?” I asked, puzzled at what he meant.

  “Oh, I sent out a message. But it was only because…”

  “Dr. Lawrence, you said you had an explanation to make. You’re not explaining anything, or even apologizing. Tell us what your actions were, what you actually did.”

  “All right.” It was obviously hard for Mm to speak.

  “On Sunday morning,” he said finally, “after the worst part of the quake was over, the dolphins left me alone on the Rock.”

  “They left you because you told them to!” Ivry said. “You sound as if they’d deserted you!”

  “Do I? I didn’t mean to. Anyhow, I was alone for the first time in several days, with an opportunity to think.

  “It seemed to me that I’d done a terrible thing. I thought of all the damage I’d helped to cause, of all the people who’d been hurt or killed. On impulse—useful word, impulse,” he said wryly, “I opened my briefcase and took the COLABS out. I set it up on the Rock, and turned the switch. The monitor light came on. And I knew it would work.

  “Up until that time, I hadn’t been sure what I meant to do. But this seemed like a—a nudge from fate. I thought, I’ll go ahead and see if anybody answers my signal. Because, if there was only about one chance in three that the COLABS was capable of sending out a focused signal, it was even more uncertain that anybody would be listening.”

  “Why was it so unlikely that the COLABS device would work?” Pettrus asked. “Don’t communication devices generally work?”

  “I suppose it seems like that, to a dolphin. Actually, they had all sorts of trouble with the power source. I had one of the engineers in therapy with me for a couple of months because he was so upset over the difficulties. And the adjustment of such a small mechanism was delicate. Carrying it around in my briefcase might have jarred it loose.

  “Anyhow, I pressed the signal button. It sends out an impulse that is received by the beamed station as a steady buzzing.

  “I held the button down for about a minute and a half, and nothing happened. I was just about to take my finger off it, and forget the whole thing and pack the COLABS device back in my briefcase, when I heard a voice say, ‘COLABS 32! COLABS 32! We get your signal! Where are you speaking from?’”

  Dr. Lawrence sighed. “I could have refused to answer, of course,” he said. “But that my signal had been received at all seemed a kind of miracle. Nobody was regularly stationed at the receptor; it wasn’t even turned on most of the time. I found out later that a technician had just happened to go into that lab to do some soldering on an electrical connection. While he was waiting for the soldering iron to warm up, he’d switched the receptor on. And he heard my signal coming out of it. If the timing had been off a little, nobody would have heard me.”

  “It was bad luck for us that he did,” I said.

  “Yes. But he answered me. And again, I felt it was fate. I—well, that’s the way it was.

  “I told him where I was speaking from, and said that I knew something about the earthquake. He called somebody, and that person called somebody else. They sent a ’copter out to the Rock for me. By nine o’clock, I was telling my story to a rear admiral.”

  “The admiral that was mentioned in the piece in the Chronicle?” Pettrus asked.

  “Yes. I was surprised how easily he believed me. The quake had damaged a good many of the craft in his command, and I suppose he was rather shaken up.”

  “Did you advise him to strafe and bomb the rock ?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t responsible for the measures he took,” Lawrence replied evasively.

  There seemed no particular point in trying to get an admission of guilt from him. “Do you know what’s happened to Sven?” I said.

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” Lawrence replied quickly. He seemed relieved to change the subject. “I heard that a man had been picked up near the lighthouse.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “They have him in custody.”

  “How about Djuna?”

  “I’m not sure. I heard that a dolphin that was swimming near the big island had been wounded but had managed to get away.”

  Djuna wounded, and Sven in custody. If Dr. Lawrence had been in the water at that moment, I am sure Pettrus and Ivry and I would have managed to MB him. Our armament is not much, compared to that of a shark, but we do have over a hundred strong sharp teeth. We were so angry we had even forgotten about Madelaine.

  Dr. Lawrence was speaking. “It was learning that Sven had been captured that made me realize what I’d done,” he said slowly. “Fate and chance? No, I’d done it. If I’d felt a sort of traitor to join Madelaine’s war on humanity, I knew now that I was a real traitor. I’d betrayed people who trusted me.

  “I don’t expect you to believe me. I’ve forfeited your confidence. I’ll have to try to earn it back. But I am on your side.”

  Pettrus made a blowing noise. I don’t know how it would have sounded to a Split, but a dolphin would have translated it as the acoustical equivalent of, “Well, well! You don’t say !”

  “How did you get away from the navy?” I asked the doctor. “You said you thought you had covered your tracks.”

  Lawrence looked at his watch. “It’s time to give Madelaine more penicillin,” he said. “I’ll tell you about my escape—evasion is a better word—after I take care of her.”

  He went back to where she was lying. After he had made the injection, he took her temperature and then gave her another drink. He turned the flask upside down to get the last few drops.

  “How is she?” I asked when he came back to the water.

  “A little better. Not as much better as I would have liked. Even finding out how much fever she has is difficult, she’s in such an awkward place.”

  “You were going to tell us about how you got away,” I prompted him.

  “Yes. It was easy, actually. They kept me on the flag ship until dark, asking me questions and making me go through my story several times. I gathered my admiral had got into a certain amount of trouble with his superiors for having sent out bombers before he consulted them.


  “Then they took me back to my office in the DRAT station and left me there, with a marine on guard in front of the door. I’d already decided that I wanted to get away.

  “My private lavatory had a door that communicated with the main corridor. The door was always kept bolted, so I suppose they forgot it was there. All I did was go in the lavatory, unbolt the door, and walk out. It was simple. I left a note on my desk.”

  “What did you say in the note?” I asked.

  “I told them that I’d been feeling disturbed for a long time, and that I was going to consult a professional colleague and have him examine me. Do you understand? I wanted them to think I was doubtful about my own sanity.

  “I underlined everything, and ended all my sentences with exclamation marks. I finished by saying that I hated to leave in such a sneaky way, but that my voices had told me to. It was a very disturbed-sounding note.”

  “You were trying to convince them that everything you’d said about the earthquake was imagination?”

  “Yes. I wanted them to think my whole story was delusional. It might work. The idea of dolphins causing an earthquake is pretty wild.”

  “What about Sven?” Pettrus asked. “The fact that they’ve picked him up would tend to bear out your story.”

  “Yes,” Lawrence agreed, rather uncomfortably, “but Sven’s intelligent. He won’t admit anything if he can help it.”

  He stood up. “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “I’m going to fill my flask and give Madelaine more water. Then I’m going to hunt a decent place to sleep tonight.”

  “You’re not staying here?” Ivry asked. He was becoming agitated.

  “No; why should I? It won’t do Maddy any good to have me sleep on damp sand. I can’t give her another shot until morning anyhow.”

  He clambered up on the dock. We waited. In about five minutes he came back and gave the girl more water.

  “What if she gets thirsty during the night?” Ivry asked. “We can’t give her a drink.”

  Lawrence may have shrugged. “I’ll be able to do more for per tomorrow if I get some sleep tonight. You ought to let me take her out from under the dock. I promise—” “No.”