Margaret St. Clair (22 page)

“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 pr e y, 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 alm o st 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 m iles. 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, w e’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. Th e 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 wer e 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 clusterin g 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 Ea s tern 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 a s 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 i dentical. 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 te lepathy. 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 f o r 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 a nd 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 h is 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, sputteri ng 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 li ttle 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 th e floods at sea, on the dolphins’ backs.”

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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 heale d , 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 ove r 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.

That this fear was not groundless was shown about half an hour later. The waves had been getting bigger, and when an extraordinarily large one came, Ivry made the mistake of taking it broadside, instead of meeting it obliquely. Moonlight, who had perhap s not had her hands as tightly under his flukes as she might have, was swept straight off his back, clutching desperately at his sleek sides.

Ivry was after her like a flash, and I followed him. We bore her up strongly, my back under her legs, and got he r to the surface quickly. All the same, she was gasping and weak when she clambered on Ivry’s back again, and vomited salt water for a while. If the sea had been rougher, we knew we could never have saved her.

“This won’t do,” Sven said, looking at the g irl. “Night’s coming on, and we’re bound to doze occasionally. We’d better try to tie our legs together under the dolphins’ bellies.”

“What can we use for ropes?” Moonlight answered faintly.

“The straps from the canteens,” Sven replied. “They’re fairly strong, and if it keeps raining we’re not going to have any lack of fresh water. We’ll empty one canteen and throw it away, and I’ll take the strap off the other and stash the canteen away in my jacket with the food. That will give us two straps.”

Moonlight nodded. She drank from the canteen she was carrying, and then passed it over to Sven. He finished the water in it, took the strap off, and tossed the empty canteen into the sea. Then he took the strap from the second canteen, and put the canteen in h i s jacket.

Now began a complicated maneuver. For a Split to tie his feet together under the belly of a full-grown dolphin, and with a rather short strap, is no simple thing. Once Madelaine dropped her strap, and I had to dive for it. But they managed it a t last, with a good deal of bending and twisting, and I went under to check the soundness of their knots and pull them as tight as I could with my rudimentary hand. Whether Sven and Madelaine would be safe through the night depended on how strong the leat h er of the straps was.

The sun sank. The moon was already up in the eastern sky. It gave a certain lurid glow, but it was only occasionally visible through the wind-driven clouds. We kept swimming northwest steadily.

The night wore on. It was a long nig ht. Ivry said that Madelaine was shivering with cold, but when the clouds would part for a moment, we saw that she was smiling. Once she bent over and caressed his cheek. “Dear Ivry —and Amtor, of course, and the others —I’m glad you called me to you at Dra k e’s Bay,” she said. “I’ve been happy with you sea people. However much longer my life may be, it’s something I’ll never regret.”

Her words had been muffled by the driving rain, but Ivry got their sense clearly enough. “We’re glad too, Sosa,” he said.

Two or three hours after that, when the moon had begun to sink in the west, The Wave came at us unexpectedly. Even now I dislike thinking about it. I had been having a dolphin nap as I swam, and I woke only an instant before the wave slammed into me. It tu r ned me end over end for I don’t know how many times, and for the first time in my life, I was afraid of drowning. It was a behemoth of a wave.

The others were more fortunate. They saw the wave moving on them like a mountain, and they dived under it —thou gh not, as Pettrus said, without “worrying a little” about the safety of the two Splits. But the leather straps held, and when they surfaced, everybody was still there, except me. I was about a quarter of a mile behind, still being whirled about by that a b ominable wave. It was full of wreckage. It must have represented half the volume of the water in the North Polar ice cap.

Eventually I got some of my wits back, and dived through it. The others had missed me and were beginning to be anxious. When I came swimming up, battered and breathing hard, they were so glad to see me it almost made the wave seem worthwhile. Not quite, though. It had been too big a wave for that.

From then on, the sea slowly improved. It kept on raining, but the wind was less strong . The sun rose, pale in the clouds that scudded across it. We were still swimming northwest.

As the air grew warmer, Sven and Madelaine roused themselves to eat and drink. They were sagging with fatigue. Djuna and I went fishing and had very good luck. The change in the salinity of the water and the disturbance of the ocean currents apparently had thoroughly confused the salmon. Djuna and I satisfied our first sharp hunger, took ample fish back to Pettrus and Ivry, and then caught more for ourselves. We f elt much better after our meal.

“Maddy,” Sven said about midday, “do you think the water is getting warmer?” He sounded a little hoarse.

Moonlight had been bent over, rubbing her legs with her hands to help circulation. “Yes, I’d noticed it,” she said, straightening.

“Will it keep on—“he said, and stopped. There was no need to complete the sentence. The prospect was a disconcerting one.

“I don’t think so,” the girl answered. “The quartz crystals in the ahln devices are conduits for the power, of cou rse. But they are eroded and finally used up by conducting it. When the crystals are consumed, the production of heat will stop. The water won’t keep heating up indefinitely.”

So at least we didn’t have that to worry about. The day passed. In late aftern oon Djuna called my attention to something odd in the sea a mile or so to the east. We leaped up out of the water, for a better view, and saw a surface current, thirty or forty feet broad, running in great loops like a river and sharply marked out by the f reight it bore.