The Dolphins of Altair

by Margaret St. Clair

  “You think that’s where he’s gone?”

  “Yes. He’s probably staying in some cheap hotel there.”

  “There are a lot of cheap hotels just in San Francisco,” the girl said thoughtfully. “And he may not have gone there. He might be in Oakland, or Emeryville, or even someplace down the peninsula.”

  “I know. But we’ve got to try to find him. Perhaps he wants us to find him. There’s really no reason why he should have sent the card otherwise.”

  She sighed heavily. “Oh, you’re right. But I hate being separated from you again. I couldn’t go with you, could I?”

  He was counting the money in his wallet. “Two hundred and thirty bucks. I stole the doctor’s wallet when I knocked him out. He was carrying a lot of the stuff. And I got his credit cards.—Come with me? It would cost twice as much, and you couldn’t really help.”

  He handed her five twenty-dollar bills. “The rent on the cottage is paid for a week. I’ll write or telegraph as soon as I find anything, or even if I don’t.”

  While he was packing a few things in a cloth bag, she came down to the beach to tell us what they had decided to do.

  “We don’t much like it, Maddy,” I said when she had finished.

  “Neither do I, but I think he’s right. We might be able to get back what Lawrence stole.”

  “I could take Sven on my back,” Djuna said. “Pettrus could go along to spell me. I could take him on my back.”

  “It’s quicker this way,” Moonlight answered. “Sven will fly up from San Diego. Be patient, darlings. It’s only for a little while.”

  We were silent. We knew that we would probably be able to keep in mental contact with Sven, and that reassured us. Sven called. “Good—bye, friends!” from the porch of the cottage and waved his hand to us. Then he and Madelaine set out at a fast walk for town again.

  The bus station was crowded now; Sven had to stand in line for his ticket to San Diego. While she was waiting, Madelaine went to the newstand and bought a San Francisco paper. What she saw in the news summary on page one made her turn quickly to page two.

  Her mouth came open. She ran to where Sven was standing, and thrust the paper at him. “Look, Sven, look!”

  “Quake ‘Guilt’ Drives Navy Psychiatrist to Death Jump,” read the headline. “Claiming responsibility for the disastrous March earthquake and predicting worldwide catastrophe to come, Dr. Edward Lawrence, a former navy psychiatrist, committed suicide today by jumping from the window ledge of a Market Street hotel. Dr. Lawrence apparently stayed on the ledge outside his fifth-floor room until he attracted a crowd. To those who attempted to dissuade him from his death jump he insisted that he had been ‘solely responsible’ for the earthquake that shook the California coast last March, and that ‘millions would die’ in a coming catastrophe. When he was asked if he considered himself responsible for the predicted disaster, he answered, ‘I certainly do.’

  “Police cleared the street below the ledge, and the fire department spread safety nets, while two psychiatrists and a minister attempted to persuade Dr. Lawrence to reenter his rooms. All persuasion failed, and Dr. Lawrence jumped from the ledge at 3:20 P.M. HE MISSED THE SAFETY NETS AND WAS INSTANTLY KILLED.

  “Dr. Lawrence, a graduate of the Stanford University Medical School, was formerly employed…”

  Sven’s eyes met Madelaine’s. She was deathly pale. “He’s done it,” she said. “Sven, Sven! How long will it take for the ahln devices to get to the poles?”

  Chapter 18

  Sven stared at her. “You mean—you think Lawrence has started the things on their trip to the poles?”

  “Yes, of course. What else could it be?”

  “But—he didn’t know where to start them from. Only the dolphins know that. Lawrence is no expert on ocean currents.”

  “He did know, though. While we were still on the Naomi, before you came, the dolphins showed him on the chart. All he had to do was to remember two sets of coordinates.”

  “But how would he get the things to the launching spots? He hasn’t got a boat.—Where were the spots, anyhow?”

  “He could hire a plane. One place was a little south of here, about a hundred miles out, and the other was north of Fort Bragg. How long would it take for the ahln devices to reach the poles?”

  Sven considered. Madelaine’s alarm still seemed to him excessive, but he was beginning to be convinced. “Two or three days to reach the edge of the Arctic ice, I guess. Quite a bit longer to get to Antarctica. We’re some distance from the equator here.”

  “Then—we’ve got to warn people!” She started away from him, toward the telephone booth in the corner.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked, leaving his place in the line before the ticket window. (Since Lawrence was a suicide, there was obviously no point in trying to find him.) “Who are you going to call?”

  “Radio station.” She was fumbling with a San Diego telephone directory. “I’m going to try to—yes, here it is.” She went into the telephone booth.

  She was in the booth a long time. Buses came and went. Sven, looking down on her head, saw that her hair had grown out beyond the dark dye, and was blonde again at the roots. At last she came out, even paler than when she had gone in.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. He put his hand under her arm. “Are you OK, kid?”

  “Yes. I called the station. I kept getting a busy signal, but I stayed on the line. Finally somebody answered. I told him I wanted to speak to the station manager, that it was important. He said, ‘Lady, call back some other time. All our lines are jammed with people asking about the Alaska hurricane and flood.’

  “I said, ‘Flood?’ He said, ‘Yeah, half Anchorage is under water, and it’s still rising. Nobody knows why.’ Then he hung up.”

  Sven blinked. “It-must have got there,” he said.

  “Oh, yes. I suppose it’s causing the hurricane, too. I’ve got to try something else. I—I know, I’ll call the President.” She started toward the booth once more.

  Sven held her back. “It’s a waste of time,” he said. “You’d never get through to the President. They’d just think you were some kind of crank.”

  “But—we can’t just let it go at this! Millions of people will be killed if they aren’t warned to get to high ground. Everybody in this room will be killed. Descanso is flat as a board. We have to—to keep trying.”

  “Take it easy,” he said. “The flood won’t get here for a good many hours.”

  “What’s that got to do with it? Every city on the California coast will be flooded. And after the South Polar ice starts to melt, every coastal city in the world. We—I know, Sven. You and I will fly to Washington and insist on seeing the President. We’ll tell him what’s happening.” She started toward the ticket window.

  Once more he held her back. “They’d think we were cranks, Maddy. By the time we managed to see anybody important, the flood would already have arrived.”

  She shook her head desperately. “We’ve got to do something! Millions of people will die!”

  It seemed to Sven that everybody in the bus station was looking at them. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “We’ll try to do something. But there’s nothing we can do by telephoning that will help.”

  He started toward the station door and, after a moment, she followed him. When they were walking along the rutted road once more, she said, “We must try the new way of using Udra. We can try to make the President issue a general warning. Or even send the navy out to destroy the three ahln devices.”

  He said, “I thought of that. The trouble is, we haven’t a spatial fix on the President. I was able to make the commander of the sub do what I wanted because I knew where he was, visually speaking, and could so rt out his mind from those of the crew members. The same thing was true when we had the gunner direct his cannon at the underwater shelf. But I doubt we can pick up the President, out of all the millions of minds on the Eastern seaboard. You remember, when we
tried to pick up Lawrence with Udra, we couldn’t get anything at all.”

  “That was because he had the kind of mind that doesn’t leave any traces.”

  “Maybe. I think we could have picked him up, though, if we’d known where he was.”

  They had got back to the beach cottage. Moonlight went running down over the sand to the water, calling us. When we swam up, she told us what had happened.

  The news silenced us for a moment. Then I said, “Yes, he’s done it. The floods are going to be terrible, especially after the Antarctic ice starts to melt. We’re willing to work with you, Sosa, if you want to try to contact the President’s mind and have him issue a warning. Or even have the navy try to find and destroy the three ahln machines. Which do you want to try to do?”

  Sven said, “The simpler the action we are trying to make him perform, the greater our chances of success. Issuing a general warning is a good deal simpler than sending the navy out to hunt for the machines. We’d have to make him understand what the machines were, where they would be apt to be found, and what they looked like. Also, I doubt whether the navy could possibly find anything as small as the ahln devices in the midst of the Pacific waters. They’re too small a target. I move we try to make the President issue a general warning and give orders to evacuate all coastal areas.”

  Madelaine said, “What about the rest of the world? The flood won’t be confined to the United States.”

  “No, but I think this is the best we can do. If the President of the United States says a worldwide flood is coming, the rest of the world will listen. There’s no use trying to get the U.N. Secretary-General to warn people. They wouldn’t listen. And he can’t order an evacuation. He has no real power.”

  “Good,” I said after a moment. I do not mind saying that we sea people were relieved. We had no ill-will toward Splits generally. I think we have proved this many times. We regarded them as brothers, albeit brothers with an unfortunate tendency to fratricide.

  But the ahln devices were our one real weapon, and if they were destroyed, we should be returned to our former status of experimental animals. Worse, if our part in having caused the Alaskan flood became known, all Splits everywhere would regard us as legitimate prey, and killing us as a virtuous act. It was the same situation, in short, that we had been in when we thought Dr. Lawrence had defected to the navy with the stolen ahln devices in his medical bag; and to be returned to it after an interval of hope was almost more than we could bear.

  “The first thing to do,” Sven said, “is to try to get a spatial fix on Washington, where the President probably is. It’s a medium-sized city straight across the continent, and north of here, oh, about three hundred and fifty miles. It’s in somewhat from the coast, and it’s situated on a river. There are a lot of monuments.”

  “Good,” I repeated. We all knew that we couldn’t really “see” Washington; but we hoped we would be able to “see” the city, monuments, rivers and all, in the minds of the people who lived in it. The river would be visible as thoughts about a river, and so on.

  “After we get a fix on the city, we’ll try to pick out the mind of the President,” Sven said. “We may be able to identify him from his thoughts. And then we’ll try to give him a simple message, and a simple command: ‘A worldwide flood is coming. Order all coastal areas evacuated.’

  “We can’t make him think what we want him to think—the new way of using Udra is basically motor control. But we may be able to make him do what we want him to do, if only for a short while.”

  The two Splits sat down on the sand, rather high up on the beach. The afternoon sun was warm, but Madelaine was shivering with nervousness. Sven piled the sand up around her legs to make her more comfortable. Then he stretched out on his back, with his arm over his eyes.

  It was difficult for us to get into the Udra-state. We were all anxious and upset, apprehensive for the future, and we had been through sharp emotional reversals in the last few days. On the other hand, we were learning how to help each other. So, after the first resistance, we made good progress. We were deeply into the state in three-quarters of an hour.

  It was when we began looking for the city in the District of Columbia that we understood what Sven had meant about the importance of getting a spatial fix. We had no difficulty discerning the clustering of minds that marks a city. But there were so many clusterings! How were we to know which was the one we were hunting? People almost never think of the name of the place where they are; and it seemed that the inhabitants of every urban nucleus on the Eastern seaboard were thinking of rivers—or at any rate of water—and monuments. I suppose the Alaskan floods were responsible for all the watery thoughts we got.

  At last we found a smallish conurbation that seemed to be the right one. We couldn’t be sure it was located on a river, but we got constant impressions of movement and traffic around monuments, and a large proportion of the minds we sampled seemed to be concerned with the making of decisions and with administration. We could tick off minds almost as fast as a computer eliminates possibilities, and we began to move in from the periphery of the city, hunting the mind of the President of the United States.

  We settled on three men as probables. They seemed to be in physical proximity to each other, per haps in adjoining rooms, and from their thoughts they all had power and were concerned about using it wisely.

  Which one? It was hard to tell, from their thoughts, which of the three was the most powerful, and the field of their thinking appeared almost identical. But one of them was more serious and impersonal than the others. We all four thought he must be the man. We stretched out toward him and began to send Sven’s message to him.

  I don’t want to give the impression that this use of Udra is merely telepathy. The “message” was only the first part of it. We were trying to take over our man’s nervous system and make him issue an order, not merely to put an idea into his mind. That meant we should have to have him in a tight grip, and keep that grip up for some time.

  We had less trouble with him than we had anticipated. This was because the man we thought was the President was already deeply concerned about the Alaskan floods. The Eastern coast was beginning to get violent wind storms, and Canada, east and west, was suffering from floods almost as severe as those in Alaska. The scale of the disasters was unique, and our man was already disposed to act as we wanted him to.

  We closed our four minds over him. With us urging him, he got up (we could sense his movements and be aware of what his muscles did), walked a few steps, and picked up something. I think it was a telephone. But we didn’t learn until later whether or not we had succeeded in making him give the order we wanted, because at that moment the unity of our psychic quartet was abruptly disturbed. This is always a shocking experience, and it must have been somewhat shocking to the man we thought was the President.

  What had happened was that Sven, lying on the beach, had sat up suddenly, sputtering water and gasping for breath. The water had risen while he was in the Udra-state and had been almost over his face. His last breath had taken in more water than air.

  As soon as he could breathe normally again, he ran to Madelaine. The girl, lying a little higher on the beach than he, was having no trouble breathing; but her legs and waist were submerged, and her hair floated loose over the sand.

  He put his arm under her shoulders and pulled her into a sitting position. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “The water’s rising. The flood’s begun.”

  “The flood?” she said dazedly. She was still partly in the Udra-state. “No, it’s the tide. The tide always comes in. And what about the warning we were trying to get that man in Washington to issue?”

  “Never mind him. We’ve done all we can. It’s not the tide. We’ve got to get out ourselves, the dolphins and us, while we still can.

  “Help me get food and water from the cottage. There’s no time to go inland to high ground. We’ll have to try to ride out the floods at sea, on the dolphins’
backs.”

  Chapter 19

  Our great fear was that our passengers would be swept off our backs. The water was already rough, with a stiff wind, and big pattering drops of rain were falling from the threatening sky. The weather was bound to get worse; we did not know how bad it would get. In really angry water, retrieving Sven or Madelaine would be almost impossible.

  Madelaine was riding Ivry, and Sven was on Pettrus’ back. This was not as we would have preferred it—Sven by choice rode Djuna, and Moonlight and I were always happiest together. There was a particular bond between the four of us because of our common Udra experience. But Djuna and I—she because of the ways in which her wounds had healed, I because of my rudimentary hand—were weaker swimmers than the others. We were in for an ordeal, and we all knew it. It seemed best to let the stronger two carry our friends’ weight.

  We had been swimming straight out to sea. Now Sven said, “I think we should head northwest.” He had to speak loudly, for the wind carried his words away. “We may be at sea for days and above all things we don’t want to be caught between the flood water from the two polar melts. That would be turbulent. But if we can get over the hump of the advancing water from the north, we should be all right. What do you think, Amtor?”

  “Yes,” I said after a moment. I was thinking that the traditional knowledge we sea people had of the ocean currents would be of no use to us now. Nothing would flow as it had flowed before. The avalanches of unlocked water had put everything awry. “Yes, once we are really out to sea, we shouldn’t even notice the rise in the water. The weather is something else, but there’s nothing we can do about it. We’ll head northwest.”

  The change of course was made. We dolphins were beginning to notice a slight lack of buoyancy in our swimming as the fresh water began to dilute the salt; and this, plus the fact that the waves were getting bigger, increased our anxiety for our passengers.