Margaret St. Clair - The Dolphins of Altair

“Maddy, you’ve been wounded,” I said.

“Have I?” she replied absently. “It doesn’t hurt.”

“It will. We must get Sven and have him bandage it for you.”

“There’s no time,” she answered. “There’s not time for anything, Amtor. We haven’t even time to warn Sven. Dr. Lawrence has betrayed us. That was a navy scouting plane. There’ll be fifty planes here soon. We must leave the Rock.”

Was this the trouble Madelaine had forseen for us? There was no time for speculation—no time even for grief. She was right. The air would be full of bombers in a few minutes. Lawrence had betrayed us. We must leave the Rock.

Madelaine’s shoulder kept bleeding. The left side of her dress was soaked with blood. From the look of the wound and what happened later, I think it mu st have been made by a flying rock splinter chipped off one of the places where the sea gulls used to perch. It was a long gash, not very deep, but it ought to have been stitched up by a doctor.

We did not discuss where we should go. Really, we had little choice. It was plainly impossible to take Sosa (we called Madelaine that sometimes, after a dolphin heroine) westward, to the open sea. The nearest land in that direction was China. North or south, along the coast, the nearest place where we could put Madelaine ashore was the Channel Islands, and that was much too far.

That left the east, back to the shaken California coast, with forty miles of water between us and the mainland. What place should we head for? Sosa, on Ivry’s back, said, “Try for Drake’s Bay. There’s water there.” She passed her tongue over her lips.

Her wound, I thought, was making her thirsty. But Drake’s Bay seemed a good idea. Since it was a public beach, there would be drinking fountains with fresh water, and it was most unlikely anybody would be there, bathing or fishing, on the day after a full-scale earthquake. Sosa-Madelaine could rest there for a day or two. She could even make a fire without rousing suspicion, and do a little cooking. We could catch fish for her.

My mind held other thoughts than these, of course—concern for Sven, worry about the bombers that were certainly approaching, and constant, not yet fully apprehended grief for Blitta’s death. As we began to leave the Farallons behind, Sosa turned to look at the lighthouse, still visible above the horizon. “I hope Sven saw the plane,” she said. She swallowed. “If he did, he’ll realize what happened. Can any of you make mental contact with him?”

“No,” Pettrus answered. “Or with Djuna, either.”

The girl sighed. “I ought to have realized the navy plane was coming before I did,” she said. “Something is getting in the way of our minds.”

Nobody said anything for a while. Ivry was swimming in the middle, with Pettrus on his right and me on his left. I began to wonder why we hadn’t heard the bombers yet. Would they see us from the air, or would they be so intent on their target, Noonday Rock, that we could hope to go unnoticed? Moonlight’s shoulder had stopped bleeding, anyhow.

She stirred uneasily on Ivry’s back. “I think—yes, yes, they’re coming. Dive, all of you! Ivry, too. I’ll hold my breath. Don’t come up until I kick you, Ivry. Dive!”

She filled her lungs. Ivry and the rest of us went under as smoothly as we could.

Ivry said afterwards that he was torn between a wish to go as deep as he could and a fear that Sosa couldn’t stand the sud den increase in pressure. We all were afraid the bombers would see the disturbance in the water and drop explosives on us. One bomb in the right place, and Madeline’s “war against the human race” would have come to an end then and there.

Under the water, I looked anxiously at Madelaine. She had gripped her legs hard against Ivry’s sides and was bent over against him with her hands behind his flukes. I didn’t know how much air her lungs could hold. Blood from her shoulder made a faint haze in the water. She was very pale.

We could hear the roar of the planes overhead. It seemed to go on for a long time. We didn’t know whether or not the girl could hear it. Ivry said he thought she was never going to give him the signal to go up. We were all afraid that she might faint. But at last I saw her left foot move against Ivry. It was the sign to surface. We could go back to the air.

We had been swimming forward while we were under water. We came up a good many yards from where we had submerged. Sosa was breathing in deep gasps. The blood stains on her white dress had turned to a rusty pink. But we seemed to be safe for a while.

Then I saw that the submersion had washed the blood clot from her shoulder. The wound was bleeding again. She lost more blood before a new clot formed.

We got to Drake’s Bay a little before sunset. As far as we could see from the water, there was nobody at all there. Madelaine got off Ivry’s back and walked unsteadily through the surf to the beach.

“I’m so thirsty,” she said. “I’ll try to get a drink. I’ll be back.”

We waited silently. In about five minutes she came out into the surf again, still walking unsteadily.

“The drinking fountain was working,” she said “I was afraid the pipes might have broken in the quake, but they hadn’t. I had a big drink.” She giggled. I thought she sounded a little light-headed.

“There must have been a big wave here last night,” she said. “Wood’s been washed high up on the beach. But I found a place, sheltered from the wind, where there are still coals from a picnic fire. I can bring wood and make up a fire. I can sleep in the sand. There’s nobody here.”

“Would you like us to bring you fish to cook?” I asked. The broad red disk of the sun was almost under the horizon.

“No, I’m not hungry. Water is all I want.” She looked at us thoughtfully, pinching her lip. “Don’t go back to the Rock tonight, any of you,” she said. “I don’t know what’s happened to Sven. I wish I knew. But you mustn’t go back to find out about him or—or for anything.” (She was thinking, I knew, about Blitta.) “The navy will be sweeping the water around the Rock and the other islands, trying to catch any of the sea people they can. Don’t go.”

“All right.”

“Tomorrow,” she said, swallowing—her throat was dry again—“we’ll talk about what to do. Tonight—I’m too dizzy. My head’s not clear;”

We were all nuzzling her hands. “Good night, dear Amtor,” she said. “Good night, dear Ivry, dear Pettrus. Good night.”

“Good night.”

After she had been gone a while, we saw a red glow spring up under the cliffs to the right of where we had put Madelaine ashore. So we knew she had managed to make her fire.

The night passed. We caught fish, we slept in snatches, we talked a good deal. I kept thinking about Blitta, wondering whether her body was still rolling in the water near Noonday Rock, or whether the navy had found her and had taken her away to dissect. They were always eager to dissect us, so they could find out more about how our bodies worked.

Several times during the night we tried to make mental contact with Sven, but we always failed. We couldn’t reach Djuna either, and that made us afraid of what might have happened to them. We discussed Dr. Lawrence’s defection, too. We speculated about how he had left the Rock, and what had led him to betray us, when he had seemed less disturbed by the prospect of the earthquake than the rest of us had.

About three o’clock, when Regulus was setting, there was a slight earthquake shock, and a few minutes later we felt another one. There were no more shocks after that. The earth had settled down to a new period of repose. We heard planes during the night, too, but I don’t know whether they were navy planes out scouting for us, or just the ordinary air traffic.