Margaret St. Clair (14 page)

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 se ven 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 b eam. 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 threaten i ng 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 a fterwards, 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 tha t 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 an d 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 fi res 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 i t 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 Sos a’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 the 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 slo wly 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 littl e 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 s aid. —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 righ t. 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 th i ck 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 l ift 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 wi ll 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 S
osa 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 d eck 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 wor king 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 Mad elaine, 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 att ack, 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 c onfined 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 o nly 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’ i s 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 dolph ins 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 w o uld 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 f ew 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 exe rcise. 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 sa id, “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 entire l y. 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 pola r 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, nourishing 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 qu ake 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 w a s 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 hav e 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 g etting 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 hand s. 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.”

“Can you contact her telepathically and find out what she knows?” Lawrence asked.