Margaret St. Clair (7 page)

“We’re safe now, I think. Only the fringe of it brushed us.”

We were swimming quite slowly now. We sea people have great endurance —we can keep pace with a ship for days —but we were carrying passengers, and we had had to draw on our reserves of energy in a wa y that was unusual even for an emergency. Also, we were beginning to get hungry, and of course we couldn’t hunt fish while we were carrying Sven and Moonlight.

Sven said, “I suppose the magnet in the mine attracted it to the drum. But if the force of the mine was expended against the drum, will there be an earthquake? We hadn’t calculated on the explosion happening that way.”

“I don’t know. Amtor might.”

“Makes no difference,” I answered. “Lateral force is the same. There will be a quake.”

“When?” the young man asked.

“I don’t know. Before we get back to the Rock.”

“Will we know when it happens?” Madelaine asked.

“I don’t think you will,” Djuna replied. “We’ll stay well out at sea.
We Will. The water feels different to us.”

Sven said, “Are you hungry, Madelaine? There’s lots more corned beef.”

“Why—yes, I guess I am. Perhaps the dolphins would like some of it, too.”

Sven broke a piece of meat from the slices he was carrying. He reached over and held it to Djuna’s nose. She sniffed at it.

“We can’t eat it,” she said. “It is too salty for us to handle. But you Splits might as well eat.”

“All right.” Sven and the girl ate the meat and washed it down with water from the canteen.

Madelaine bent over Ivry’s back and dabbled her fingers in t he sea water to clean them. “I’m getting sleepy,” she said, straightening up. “Ivry, when do you sea people sleep?”

“While we are going through the water,” he answered her. “I slept a little just now. That is how we can swim such distances.”

“You mustn‘t go to sleep, Moonlight,” I said. “Talk to Sven. We can listen. Talking will help both of you to stay awake.”

“All right,” Sven said. “When you were washing your hands just now, Maddy, I noticed you were feeling your feet. Are they cold?”

“Cold!” She laughed. “They’re so cold they don’t seem to be my feet any more. They might belong to somebody else. They’re swollen, too, and I ache all over from sitting in one position for so long. And yet I’m happy. I’m always happy when I’m with the people of the s ea. Do you know what I mean, Sven?”

“Of course. I feel it, too. The halves are made whole with them.”

“That’s because you remember the covenant,” I said.

“What do you mean by that?” Sven asked.

“It’s a little difficult to explain. I —excuse me a moment, please.” I had perceived that a fish, large and meaty, was swimming along unconcernedly a few feet away from me.

I was after it in a flash. It took alarm, but of course I was much faster than it, and I caught it with no difficulty at all.

Where there is one fish there are apt to be others, so I gave half my catch to Djuna and the other half to Ivry, and went after another for myself. They were good fish, with plenty of firm fat meat, and we all felt better after the snack.

“When you say you ‘saw a picture’, what do you mean?” Sven was saying when I began listening again. “Do you see a real picture of something happening?”

“No. Not exactly. Sometimes it’s just words. When Amtor was trying to get in touch with me, I heard words. But when I saw the mine exploding, I did see a picture. It was a picture on a black background, with the detail done in faint glowing lines, something like a photographic negative.”

“Do you think the mine and the metal drums really looked like the picture you saw?”

“No, they wouldn’t have been luminous. I don’t suppose there was any light at all at that depth.

“You sound like Dr. Lawrence, Sven. He always wants to know how it is when I see things.”

Sven laughed. “Did you have foreknowledge of it? You were sure we’d need you when we exploded the mine.”

“I guess so. I’m not trying to be mysterious, Sven. I really don’t know.”

“How do you feel about the quake? The dolphins seem sure there’s going to be one.”

“Oh, something is going to happen. I feel anxious a bout it. I said I was happy, but there’s a cloud of fear. Trouble is coming.”

“And after the trouble?” Sven pressed her.

“I can’t see that far. But we’re with the sea people. I feel happy now.”

“I wonder what time it is,” Sven said.

“About ten,” I told him. “We can tell from the tide.”

“Out at sea like this?” he said.

“Oh, yes-s-s. The stars help us, too.”

Now that we had eaten and rested, we were swimming faster. Madelaine looked up at the sky. “Look, the pointers of the Dipper are pointing s traight down at Polaris. How odd that such an insignificant star should be the pivot of our heavens.”

“I’ve heard it’s a compound star,” Sven answered.

“Is it? That must be Vega, coming up in the northeast, but I don’t see Altair. It must be too early for it yet.” She yawned and shivered.

“Would you like my jacket, Maddy?” Sven said.

“No, thank you. Being cold helps me to stay awake.”

About ten-thirty I took Sven on my back to let Djuna rest. He made the transfer awkwardly, and I realized that his joints were stiff with cold.

Time passed. A little after eleven, Djuna said, “Do you Splits feel any difference in the water on your legs?”

“No,” Madelaine answered, “but my legs are so cold I doubt I could feel anything. How about you, Sven?”

“I don’t notice anything. Is it —?”

“Yes-s,” Djuna answered. “There’s been an earthquake shock.”

Madelaine let out her breath. “I think we’ve all been waiting for it. Now it’s come. Will there be more shocks?”

I “Of course. A lot of pressure had built up in the earth.” “I’m sorry we had to do it,” Madelaine said soberly, “but I don’t regret having done it. How about Noonday Rock? Will the quake be felt there?”

“I don’t think so,” I told her. “It’s not on the San Andreas Rift. There might be heavy wav es sweeping over the Rock. Don’t worry about Dr. Lawrence, Moonlight. If there is any danger, one of our people will have taken the doctor on his back and gone out to open sea with him.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about him.” She laughed. “The doctor impresses me as a person who would always take good care of himself.”

From then on, as we swam up the coast, there was a quake every few minutes, and we reported each of them to our passengers. Out at sea as we were, the only gross sign of the series of earthquak es was the choppy surface of the water, but it must have been a night of increasing terror on land.

About three a drizzling rain began to fall, and Sven made Madelaine, who was shivering violently, take his windbreaker. A little later the moon rose, and the light was a comfort to all of us.

“I wonder if the concrete walls around the training pools have broken yet?” Madelaine said. “And if they have, did the sea people all manage to get out? You know the spiritual, Sven, about how ‘Joshua fit de battle o f Jericho’? We started an earthquake.
Did ‘de walls come a-tumblin’ down’?”

“We ought to know pretty soon,” Sven said.

The east began to lighten. The sun was about half above the horizon when we saw, coming across the water toward us from the north, a marvelous sight.

It was a flotilla of sea people, more than two hundred of them, and though they were coming very fast, they hardly seemed to move in the water so much as in the air. They leapt and tumbled, they turned head over tail in their exuberance, they seemed to frolic in the air like birds, free creatures in their free element. The light glinted from their glistening bodies. The surface of the water seemed to laugh.

“What is it?” Madelaine cried. She was leaning forward eagerly, shading her eyes from the rising sun with one hand. “Amtor, Amtor! Is it what I think?”

“Yes,” I told her. I was so excited I could hardly talk. It was a real effort for me to force my speech into the slow tempo and low pitch of human communication. “They’re free. I thi nk they’re all free, all the dolphins that were in DRAT training centers. They’re saying that the walls broke and crumbled, the walls fell into bits all along the coast. They swam away unhindered. They’re free.”

The fleet of dolphins was all about us now . I recognized many friends and kinsmen, and among them one who was not a kinsman and who was dearer to me than any friend could be —Blitta, my mate, who had been shut up in a DRAT station for more than two years. Even now, I feel much emotion at her name.

“It worked, then,” Madelaine said. Her voice was full of astonished fruition. “I didn’t really think it would. You stole the mine, Sven, Amtor dropped it, and now the sea people are free.”

She drew a deep breath. “Whatever happens, we can always rememb er this, the morning when the air seemed full of joy like the sound of singing voices. The morning when the sea people were set free.”

The sun was well up now, golden among clouds in the east. The first shock of delight had abated a little, and we began to swim northward more soberly. Sven looked around at the dolphins in the water.

“Isn’t that you, Pettrus?” he said. “What happened on Noonday Rock when the quakes came? Where is Doctor Lawrence?”

“Lawrence is all right,” Pettrus answered. “There were only two little shocks on the Rock, but there were a lot of waves. One big one swept almost over the Rock.

“When we knew the waves were coming, I had the doctor get on my back and I swam well out to sea with him. He stayed on my back for several hours. He never let go of his briefcase the whole time.” Pettrus made the grunting noise that indicates amusement with us.

“When the dolphins from the DRAT pens began to arrive on the Rock —oh, we were so excited!—he suggested that we should all go to meet you. I asked him to come with us, but he said he’d had enough of sitting on a dolphin’s back with his legs in the water. He said to leave him on the Rock.

“We were too excited to argue with him, and we didn’t think there would be any more waves. We were eager to meet you and let you see that the quake had broken down the walls and let our people escape. So we left him there, on the Rock.”

“Weren’t there more dolphins in the pens at the naval research stations than this?” Madelaine asked.

“Oh, of course. Only the ones from the northernmost station swam out to the Rock. The others made for the open sea. They must be many miles away from the coast by now.”

Madelaine did not ask how Pettrus knew this; and indeed, it would have been hard for him to give her an explanation she could understand. Our senses —even our extrasensory senses —are different from those of Splits. As we swam north our entourage of dolphins began to drop away from us. This was partly because we knew that such a large number of sea people wou ld be bound to attract attention, even under post-earthquake conditions, and partly because we knew there weren’t enough fish in these coastal waters to keep such a large group of dolphins fed. It takes a lot of fish to keep a full-grown dolphin adequatel y nourished. By the time we reached Noonday Rock, there were only about ten sea people still with the party —those of us who had been at the Rock more or less permanently, plus two or three from the DRAT station. My own Blitta stayed, of course.

Sven, though stiff, managed to clamber off my back and wade ashore. But Moonlight was almost unable to move. He had to lift her off Ivry and half-carry her up on the beach.

Her feet were no longer swollen, but shrunken and blue. He wanted to help her rub them, but she insisted he take care of himself first. It took a lot of massage before either of them could walk normally.

“Where’s Dr. Lawrence?” Sven asked as he helped Madelaine to her feet after the rubbing. “I’m surprised he hasn’t come to meet us.”

“Let’s go look for him.”

They set off hand in hand to walk around the Rock, stopping now and then to call, “Dr. Lawrence! Dr. Lawrence!” We sea people watched them silently.

They came back in about fifteen minutes. “He’s not on the Rock,” Sven said positively . “I even climbed up to see if he could be hiding at the top. He’s not here.”

Madelaine was looking disturbed. “What could have happened to him?” she said. She fingered her lips uncertainly. “Perhaps there was another wave, a big one, and it swept him clean off the Rock. It’s the only thing I can think of. Anyhow, he seems to be gone.”

“Certainly does,” Sven agreed.

I said nothing. I did not think Dr. Lawrence had been swept off Noonday Rock. I remembered my earlier mistrust of him.

-

Chapter 5

When I think of what happened next, I always see it against a background of raging waters, a boiling sea whose froth is muddy pink. And that is odd, for it happened a little after noon on a bright, calm, windless day. The pink tinge in the water is an accurate recollection, though. I wish it were not.

We ought to have left the Rock as soon as we realized Dr. Lawrence was gone, of course. Looking back on it, I find it strange that we took his disappearance so calmly. Even I, w ho mistrusted him, was not much alarmed. Partly this was because we could not be sure what had happened to him —the little fishing boat that had brought him to Noonday Rock in the first-place might have taken him away again, and in too much of a hurry for h im to have left a note —and partly because we sea people were in a mood of great euphoria.

We dolphins are normally optimistic and good-tempered, and the unexpected rescue of our friends from the DRAT pens had made us feel that nothing bad could ever happ en-to us again. Our world has always been a good place, except for sharks.

Sven and Madelaine, being human, could reasonably have been expected to be more suspicious than we, and Madelaine was certainly apprehensive of trouble to come. But neither of the m seemed to connect the danger with Dr. Lawrence at all. Perhaps the navy’s experiments in the use of psi phenomena had something to do with their myopia.

Dr. Lawrence had told us once that the navy had been investigating psi phenomena with a view to mil itary use. Perhaps an experiment was being carried out that morning that had the unintended effect of blunting Madelaine’s normal perceptiveness. I have never been able to find out for sure.