Margaret St. Clair - The Dolphins of Altair

“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 would 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 adequately 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.

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, who 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 him 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 happen-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 them 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 military 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.

At any rate, we were still at the Rock a little after noon on Monday. Sven and Madelaine had slept for a few hours after our arrival there, and Sven had then gone with Djuna to the big island to bring back some canned goods and drinking water. He did not think there would be any danger of being observed, even in broad daylight, so soon after a major earthquake had shaken the coast. People would be too occupied with their own troubles to notice one man on an unimportant island.

Moonlight—she had grown so tanned from exposure that the name was no longer apt for her—was sitting on the rocky beach talking to us. The sea people had been released from their prisons, but the hardest part of what we had undertaken—making sure that human beings would never molest us again—was still in front of us. As Dr. Lawrence had said, it was a large order. None of us had a clear idea how it was to be done.

Blitta was close beside me in the water. We were so happy to be together again! The sea was too cold for us to think much about mating, but we were planning to slip away for a few days to the warm blue South Pacific. We had been separated for two years.

Abruptly Madelaine got to her feet, pressing her hands against her breast. She seemed to be listening. Then she yelled at us, “Dive, all of you! Swim out and dive! Quick!”

She turned and ran up from the beach toward the rock.

We acted on her warning instantly. But Blitta, who was not used to trusting Splits, was a little slower about obeying than the rest of us. This momentary hesitation of hers was certainly the reason why…

A plane appeared out of the empty sky. It was a very fast reconnaissance plane. It swooped down over the Rock.

It came so low that Madelaine, who had pressed herself against the rock face for protection, said she thought it was going to gut itself on the granite crest. She could see the big navy insignia on its belly and wings.

The plane pulled out of its dive at the last minute. It was only a few yards above the rocky beach. Bullets began to patter. The plane was straffing the water and the shore.

The barrage lasted only an instant. Then the plane was up and high in the air again like a flash of light.

It circled the Rock twice, very high. Madelaine, hugging the granite wall, hoped it was going away. Then it made another swoop. Bullets pocked and whined against the hard surface. This time the plane was straffing the Rock. I don’t know whether or not the pilot saw Madelaine. Probably not, or he would have continued his straffing until he killed her. At any rate, he made one more pass over the top of the crest, while the bullets spatted. Then he shot up and away. In an instant he had vanished in the east.

Madelaine came running down to the water. “Amtor! Blitta! Ivry!” she called. “Are you—”

She stopped. She had seen the pink tinge in the ripples on the little beach. “Who’s hurt?” she demanded anxiously. “Who’s been hurt?”

“It’s Blitta,” I replied after an instant. “She’s—Moonlight, I think she’s dead.”

“Oh, Amtor!”

“The pilot hit her twice. The first bullet went in her back, I think. The second—it must have gone into her heart.”

Madelaine was silent. For the first time since the straffing, I looked at her. Then I saw that she had been wounded. Her left shoulder was streaming with blood.