The Dolphins of Altair

by Margaret St. Clair

“Be quiet,” Madelai ne said softly. She had caught at the boat’s railing to steady herself. “Yes, that was another earth quake. But it wasn’t an accident, any more than the first one was.”

  “What do you mean?” Lawrence demanded.

  “The navy has dropped another mine into Bent his Canyon. They wanted to test what Dr. Lawrence had told them. Now they know he was telling the truth.”

  Chapter 10

  “We must separate,” Dr. Lawrence said. Madelaine had only just finished speaking; the water around the Akbar was still arush with motion from the quake. “As long as we Splits are with you sea people,” he went on, “the danger is much greater for both parties than it would be separately. We can make arrangements to meet later. There are sure to be attacks on us, now the government knows I was telling the truth. We must separate.”

  “No,” Ivry said flatly. “Attacks or no attacks. We stay together. You’re trying to get Moonlight away from us.”

  Lawrence bit his lip. “No, I’m not. How could I get Maddy away from you unless she was willing to go? Amtor, see if you can’t reason with him. You’re a sensible person.”

  “It’s not my place to try to reason with Ivry,” I answered. “Why don’t you ask Madelaine what she thinks of your idea?”

  “All right. Maddy, wouldn’t it be wise for us to separate, at least for a while?”

  A pale, strange rain had begun to fall from the charcoal sky. It faintly stung. Madelaine answered flatly. “It doesn’t matter whether or not it would be wise. It’s already too late.”

  “What makes you say that?” Lawrence replied keenly. “Is this more ESP?” He was always markedly and, it seemed, disproportionately interested when Sosa displayed any evidence of paranormal powers; sometimes I thought he was jealous of her, and that his life was motivated by desire for an ability he had good reason to believe existed and yet had never been able to attain.

  “I don’t know,” Madelaine answered. Her voice was high and strained. “More like Udra, I guess. I’ve changed since I was unconscious so much.—Oh, I wish I knew what to do! I can’t think what would help.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lawrence demanded. His voice had risen a little, too, in response to the alarm in hers.

  “Look in the water,” she answered. “The attack has already begun.”

  Lawrence obeyed, looking over the Akbar’s side. “There’s a froth—a thick whitish scum—floating on the water,” he said after a minute. “I don’t know what’s causing it—the latest quake, I suppose. But I don’t see what it has to do with an attack. Froth can’t do any harm.”

  “Can’t it?” Madelaine replied with a strange look at him. “The foam is getting deeper every minute. You can see it grow.”

  “But it’s still just froth—”

  “The dolphins are air-breathers,” Madelaine explained. “They breathe at the surface of the water. What will they do for air when the foam is two or three feet thick?”

  “But—it may not get that thick,” the doctor answered a little stupidly. “Besides, they can always swim out beyond the foam to where the water is clear. They’re fast swimmers. I don’t understand why you’re so alarmed.”

  “Where can they swim to?” Madelaine answered. She was twisting her fingers together. “The navy planes have broadcast the foam-producing chemical all over the bay. The dolphins would choke long before they could get to the open sea.—Oh, if I could only think of something that would help!”

  The foam, which had begun as a mere scum on the water, was puffing up fantastically. It felt warm and rubbery, with a faint oily smell, and even when we arched our bodies in the water, we could not get our heads above it. We were not yet much frightened; it had happened suddenly, and we sea people can hold our breath for quite a time. But we could not breathe foam, any more than a man could. We would have to have air.

  Through the muffling, constantly thickening blanket of the foam, I heard Madelaine say, “Untie the Akbar and take her out from the jetty, Doctor. Hurry! We may be able to use her to clear a swath in the foam.”

  He made no answer, but an instant later we heard the Akbar’s motor begin a dull putt putt putt, and a moment later she swung out from the jetty and started to push the lofty foam aside with her prow.

  It was high time. Already we were having to make short leaps up into the air for breath. What frightened us as much as anything was that our leaps were so short. The layer of foam was like a hand holding us back, and with our best efforts we couldn’t get more than six or seven feet into the air. Ordinarily, we sea people can leap right over the spars of a ship.

  The Akbar was flat-bottomed and broad in the beam. She did a better job of clearing the foam than a smarter craft would have done. All the same, the swath she made was only about two feet wide, and it closed behind her rapidly. We swam in a narrow wake, with the tall, choking foam constantly threatening to cave in on us.

  Even now, I am not quite certain why the government did not announce our responsibility for the quake to the general public, and proceed to launch a Jihad against us. There must have been a great deal of debate in high places. Long afterwards, when I discussed the matter with a top-ranking naval officer, he told me that they had been affected by a number of things—the wish to avoid a public panic, the feeling that unarmed sea creatures could not be really dangerous, and the fear that the dolphins’ attack might be a communist feint, designed to distract attention from more serious attempts—but that the final consideration had been the fact that it was an election year. They decided to eliminate us quietly. It never occurred to them that they would have any real difficulty in doing it.

  The Akbar had passed the Diamond Lil and was moving out into slightly broader waters. We leaped up several times, but the foam was a solid sheet as far as we could see. It reached right up on the shore and was clinging close around the hulls of the boats we passed.

  We heard Madelaine say to Lawrence, who was at the helm of the Akbar, “How much gas have we got?”

  “Not—very much,” he answered. “Enough for about half an hour more cruising.”

  Half an hour—it wasn’t nearly enough. The Akbar was a slow craft. She couldn’t get through to clear water in three times the time.

  “I know what this stuff on the water is,” Lawrence said after a brief silence. “It’s called pyrtrol and was invented for dealing with fires at sea. It’s a chemical that reacts with moisture—the moisture from a fire hose, or in sea water, or even the moisture in the air—to form a thick blanket of foam. Somebody was smart to think of using it against the dolphins. I wonder what the dockside workers in the bay ports think of it.”

  Moonlight made no answer. “It evaporates in four or five hours,” he went on. “That’s too long, of course. There’s a simple way of dealing with it—one of the crewmen told me about it once—if I could only think what it is.”

  Madelaine was still silent. I think she was looking at him steadily. After a moment he put his right hand up to his head. “Don’t,” he said sharply. “That hurts.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Lawrence. You’ll have to stand it. I do not like it either. But it is important that you remember how to get rid of the foam.”

  He made an inarticulate sound. He had left the helm and was standing with both hands pressed to his head. Madelaine had taken the wheel. “Well?” she said after a moment or two.

  We were listening avidly; after all, our lives depended on whether Lawrence could remember what the crewman had told him. “Not yet,” Lawrence answered. “Christ, how it hurts!”

  “I’m sorry. Try to relax. That’s causing part of your distress.”

  It occurred to me that Sosa’s new abilities were, as she had said, something like our Udra, and that the trouble was coming from her trying to use them with an unsuitable subject. If she had been trying with Sven, for example, it would have caused him no distress.

  The broad sheet of foam, whitish, like dirty snow, reflected the light from the sky and greatly increased t
he visibility of the objects around us; but it muffled and deadened sound. For us dolphins, swimming slowly in the Akbar’s narrow wake, it was as if we swam inside a small box, barely large enough for the three of us. It made us feel claustrophobic.

  We heard Lawrence grunt again. “I am trying to relax, but it hurts so much that—wait now. I think I’m getting it Can’t you ease up a bit, Maddy?”

  “All right.”

  “That’s better,” he said. “Thanks for stopping. I couldn’t have stood it much longer. But I’ve remembered how to deal with the foam.”

  We heard him go into the deckhouse. He came out after a minute with a plastic squeeze bottle of detergent in his hand. “This is going to look funny,” he told her. “But unless the crewman was mistaken, it will work.”

  He went to the Akbar’s rail, leaned over, and began to squirt the detergent out of the bottle in long spurts, so that it landed on the sheet of foam. He walked slowly around the Akbar’s deck, squeezing the bottle, and when it was empty he tossed it into the froth ahead of the little houseboat.

  Nothing happened. The Akbar continued to move slowly through the. water, and we followed behind her. “It will take a little while,” the doctor said, “ten or fifteen minutes, and when the foam goes, it will go all at once, all over the bay. It’s a one-piece sheet of foam, you see, even though it’s so large, and will respond all in one piece. At least, that’s what the crewman said.—I hope we don’t run out of gas.”

  He took the helm from Madelaine. She went aft, where the foam was piled up almost as high as her shoulders, and stood looking down at us. “Don’t be frightened,” she told us softly. “I think it’s going to be all right. I don’t mean that our troubles are over, of course. But perhaps this one is.”

  It would be dramatic to report that the foam lifted just as the Akbar’s motor gave its last cough and stopped from lack of gas. That is not what happened. Quite suddenly, as she was still moving forward and had still a few minutes’ fuel left, the whole sheet of froth lifted up from the water and hung suspended two or three feet above it. Then it disappeared. There was nothing gradual about the disappearance—one moment the thick froth was there, inexplicably floating, and the next it had gone. It left an oily, unpleasant smell in the air.

  Madelaine drew a deep breath. “If navy planes have been monitoring this—and I think they have, very high up—they will have seen the foam lift and disappear. They won’t be sure what caused it, of course. Anybody who happened to spill enough detergent on the foam could have done it. The navy can’t have been watching everything that took place on San Francisco Bay.

  “But tomorrow the planes will fly over, looking for the dead bodies of dolphins. When they don’t find any, and nobody reports finding any, they’ll be pretty certain we got away. We can expect more attacks to be made.”

  The Akbar tied up almost at her old anchorage, the dock where Sosa had taken refuge when she was wounded and delirious. There was no other craft tied up there now.

  The rest of the night I spent in the Udra-state, trying, with Madelaine’s help, to contact Sven. Ivry and Pettrus had gone fishing; Lawrence sat on the deck smoking and seeming to think.

  Madelaine was not really in Udra, of course; her mind, though it had changed since her long semiconsciousness, was still essentially the mind of a Split. But she did what she could do to help. We both thought a Split working with a dolphin would be more apt to contact the mind of a Split.

  I never made a contact with a mind that was clearly Sven’s, though over and over I had impressions of stress and helplessness. It was about four o’clock in the morning according to Madelaine, when I gave a loud, gurgling cry.

  What had happened was that, deep in the Udra-state as I was, I had received an exceedingly unpleasant shock. It was dangerous, too—I have known of sea people to be knocked unconscious, or even to have a heart attack, from such a shock. Ivry and Pettrus, off fishing, felt it too, but not nearly so severely. The Udra-state makes one vulnerable.

  “What’s the matter?” Sosa cried. “Something has happened. What was it?”

  “A lot of the sea people have been killed.”

  “How many? Oh, Amtor! Where was it! How?”

  “I don’t know how many,” I said miserably. I was still badly shaken. “Quite a few. It was out at sea, near Hawaii. They were leaping up in the air because they were happy. A navy bomber saw them and dropped bombs on them.”

  “I knew trouble was coming,” Madelaine said desolately. She looked briefly at Lawrence, and I knew she was thinking that it was he who was responsible for so much pain. And yet, if it had not been for him, the sea people would still have been confined in the navy’s training stations. Dr. Lawrence was always ambiguous.

  Lawrence got to his feet and came toward Madelaine. He flipped his cigarette over the side of the Akbar. “A direct attack,” he said, “and there’re going to be more of them. The only reason we’ve survived so far is that the navy isn’t sure where to look for us. There’d have been no nonsense about a sheet of pyrtrol foam if they had.

  “It’ll get worse. They can’t afford to let us go on living. Maddy’s ‘war against the human race’ is enough to make Homo sapiens, with his guilty conscience, acutely nervous. Before things get really desperate, we’d better find a way of getting the heat off ourselves.”

  Ivry and Pettrus swam up and listened.

  I noticed he said nothing more about dolphins and Splits separating. “Getting the heat off is a good idea,” Madelaine said, a little dryly. “Do you have any idea how it can be done?”

  “Yes.” He hesitated. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot It would take the heat off the sea people and their human allies—if the polar ice caps were to melt.”

  Chapter 11

  I think we would have laughed at him, except that, after all, he had already engineered an earthquake. As it was, the idea of melting the polar ice caps reduced us to a flabbergasted silence. Finally Madelaine said, “Well, if the level of the oceans were to rise even a few feet, it would certainly give human beings something more immediate to worry about than the existence of the dolphins. And more water in the oceans would dilute the radioactivity of the water that’s already there. The radioactivity must be reduced if the dolphins are to survive.

  “But what makes you think we can do it, Ted?” (This was one of the very few times Madelaine called Dr. Lawrence by his first name.) “Melting the polar ice caps—it’s a grandiose idea.”

  “Grandiose?” he repeated thoughtfully. He laughed. “I suppose it does sound a little like the CIA. But when I’m with the dolphins, I have a fee ling of limitlessness, of space and freedom and power.”

  “They don’t feel like that about themselves,” Sosa answered.

  “Perhaps they have more powers than they know,” Lawrence replied. “Human beings have more psychic abilities than those they usually exercise. It could be the same with the sea people.”

  “Maybe so. But you still haven’t told me how you think two human beings and a varying number of dolphins are going to be able to melt the polar ice.”

  “When Amtor told us about the covenant,” Lawrence said, “he implied that the Old Ones had an advanced scientific technology. Those of the colonists who stayed on land went downhill rapidly, and lost their scientific culture; and those that adapted to life in the water had to give up material culture entirely. But Amtor says he knows dolphin genealogies reaching back for a million years. Does he know anything—has he heard of any dolphin tradition—about a technique, a device, I don’t know exactly what it would be—but something that would help us melt the polar ice?”

  I said, “It’s an interesting idea. Before I try to do anything with it, I want to go fishing. I’m hungry. It’s been a lot longer than I usually go without food.”

  “Very well.” Lawrence was obviously annoyed, but he tried to be polite. “Get back as quick as you can, though—it will be getting light in a little while.”

  I got three large, nou
rishing fish in a little more than twenty minutes. When I got back to the Akbar, the radio had been turned on and the four were listening to it.

  “Another quake shook the San Francisco Bay area at 1:17 this morning,” the radio was saying. “Property damage was negligible, but a welder, making repairs on the damaged Gate Bridge, was shaken from his perch on the span and fell 370 feet to the water below. Death was instantaneous.

  “A mysterious foam that blanketed Bay waters for several hours very early this morning disappeared as abruptly as it came. It is thought that several drums of concentrated detergent, stored in a waterfront warehouse, may have been responsible.

  “The U.S. Department of Commerce weather bureau predicts…”

  Dr. Lawrence switched off the radio. “That’s that,” he said. “The foam is neatly, if not convincingly, accounted for.—Amtor, Pettrus says you once told him about a thermal device the Old Ones had—something called ahln.”

  I puffed a few fish scales from my lips. “Oh, the ahln. Yes, there is said to have been such a thing. I’d forgotten about it.”

  “How much do you know a bout it?” the doctor asked. “How do you know that such a thing ever existed?”

  “I don’t know much about it,” I said. “It’s a tradition among the sea people that the Old Ones had the ahln. A dolphin called Kendry told me the little I know.”

  “Kendry?”

  “Kendry is a female, a sort of great-great-great aunt of mine. She’s the oldest dolphin I’ve ever known. All her ancestors lived to be very old. I learned a lot of the genealogies from her.”

  “Does Kendry know how to make this ahln thing?” The doctor was getting excited. He lit a cigarette, drew on it twice, and then tossed it over the Akbar’s side.

  I considered. “I suppose it’s possible. Knowing how to make the ahln wouldn’t be of any use to the sea people; you can’t make a mechanism unless you have hands. But it’s possible that a bit of useless information like that might have been handed down, if only as a curiosity. Kendry knows a lot of things.”