Margaret St. Clair - The Dolphins of Altair

We kept on for several hours, getting deeper and deeper into the typical Udra-state of remoteness. About two o’clock we heard steps along the dock—they seemed to come from a long way off—and then somebody jumped down on the deck of the boat behind which Moonlight was lying. He cast off the boat’s moorings, and a little later the engine started up.

The noise partly roused us, though it was pretty obvious that the boat owner hadn’t come in answer to any summons of ours. We swam a little apart for safety, and submerged. He got the boat out without seeing either us or Madelaine, though he went so. close to Pettrus he almost bumped into him.

We went back to our work. We had an impression that we were contacting somebody. About an hour later we heard wobbling, uneven footsteps on the dock.

The footsteps stopped. A man leaned over the edge. He cupped his hands and shouted, “You! You there in the water! What do you want?”

We had been floating under the dock and in its immediate shadow. Now the shout from above roused us. It might be the person we were hunting for. A little doubtfully, I swam into the sunlight and looked up at the man.

He was barefooted, with a sparse, patchy beard, and his clothes were dungarees and a cotton T-shirt with a hole ripped in the shoulder. He held a wine bottle in one hand.

“Why, it’s a dolphin!” he said, regarding me. “Porpp—purpp—anyhow, a dolphin. Smart animals. Can you talk?”

He didn’t seem to be automatically alarmed at seeing me, so perhaps the navy had kept Dr. Lawrence’s revelations to itself. “Yes-s,” I said.

He sat down on the edge of the dock, letting his feet dangle over the side. He took a drink from the bottle he was holding. “Sherry,” he said. ” ‘Oud you like some?”

“No, thank you.” I was still uncertain whether to ask him to help Madelaine.

“Well, what would you like?” he asked. “I heard you calling and calling. Crying, really. Is something wrong?”

I decided to trust him. “Yes-s. We need help. Come down under the dock, and I’ll show you.”

“Help?” he said, drinking again. “I couldn’t help anybody. I’m—even my girl calls me a bum. I drink sherry because it makes me number than pot.—All right. You don’t need to keep asking. I ‘ll come down.”

He rose, walked back along the dock, and rather unsteadily let himself down into the shallow water. “What’re you talking about?” he demanded. “I don’t see anything.”

“Under the dock,” I said. “Go on back. You’ll see.”

He bent over and obeyed. It seemed to take a little while for his eyes to get adjusted to the light. Then he saw Madelaine.

“Why, it’s a girl!” he exclaimed. “Wha’s she doing here? Is she sick?”

“Not sick, hurt. We want to get help for her.”

He drank from the bottle, a long drink. I had the idea that he would always take a long drink from the bottle in an emergency. “Wha’ do you want me to do?” he asked.

“Get a doctor. Bring him here. Tell him—tell him he must promise not to take her to a hospital of turn her over to the police. She has a wound in the shoulder. It’s infected. The doctor must sew it up and give her medicine. He must promise not to call the police.”

“The police! Wha’ she done?” He giggled and drank more wine. He must have emptied the bottle, for he shook it ruefully and then tossed it out into the water. “She mus’ be some sort of public en’my.”

“Never mind that. She doesn’t want to be separated from us. Go get a doctor. We have money.” Madelaine did indeed have about five dollars in the bosom of her bloodstained dress. “We can pay.”

“Public en’my!” he repeated. “Well, I guess I’m a sort public en’my myself. I’ll try get doctor. I know one hangs out at ba r. He—broad-minded chap.”

The man in the dungarees wobbled out from under the dock—once he banged his head on a cross-timber—and then clambered up onto the structure. “Don’t forget,” I said from the water. “And don’t tell anyone except the doctor.”

“Eh ? Oh, sure. Get doctor. Won’t tell. Be back.”

We heard his feet retreating landward. They did not go very far before they hesitated and stopped. Then we heard a noise that might have been made by a man falling. We did not know much about the drinking habits of Splits, but it was all too clear that he had collapsed on the dock.

When he came to, would he remember his mission? Probably not; and if we tried to contact him a second time, he would, in all likelihood, only pass out again. He had seemed friendly and well-disposed to us. But nobody could have taken him for a reliable man. There was no hope of Madelaine’s getting help from him.

Yet the episode had not been entirely wasted. We had learned that the navy had apparently not yet given the signal for a general dolphin hunt. And we had found that a Split, though a drunken one, could respond to Udra in considerably less time than it had taken us to call Madelaine to us originally. Really, we would have felt encouraged except that Madelaine seemed to be getting steadily worse. We must hurry and try what we could do with Udra again.

It was not so hard for us to withdraw our attention from our surroundings this time, at least at first. But getting into the later stages of concentration proved remarkably difficult. There was opposition from somewhere, and after about half an hour I realized what it was. An alien mind was trying to contact me.

I say “alien,” but the word is not really accurate. “Odd” or “extraordinary” would be a better characterization. And the peculiarity was that, though the mind seemed familiar enough to me, I never could identify it. I was always on the edge of recognizing it, and yet I always failed.

It disturbed me. I let my Udra efforts lapse, and returned to full awareness of where I was. Ivry was looking at me questioningly.

“Did you feel it?” I asked.

“Yes. A mind—a Split, I think, but I’m not quite sure. There’s something odd about it. It’s a mind—a mind that’s carrying a passenger.”

That was exactly it. Ivry had expressed it very well. I said, “Is it Sven?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’m sure I’d recognize him. But it’s a familiar mind. Or it seemed familiar, part of the time.”

Pettrus was still in the Udra-state. We nudged him from either side until his expression showed that he realized where he was.

“Did you feel it?” he asked. “Somebody’s trying to contact us.”

“Yes, we know. Did you accept contact with it, Pettrus?”

“No. It was a peculiar mind. I got a feeling of doubled-ness.”

I said, “We can’t get anywhere with Udra as long as it’s trying to contact us. Perhaps we—”

We were interrupted by a wail from Madelaine. She had raised herself on one elbow and was staring up at the timbers of the dock. “Can’t I have water?” she said wildly. “I’m so thirsty. Oh, please, no matter how much you hate us, can’t I have a drink?”

Her face was dusky red. We were silent for a moment. Then Pettrus said, “We’d better accept contact, no matter who it is. Moonlight needs help too much for us to be particular. And I did get an impression of helpfulness from the alien mind, once or twice.”

He was right, we agreed wordlessly. Once more we settled down to the state of physical withdrawal and psychological reaching-out that initiates genuine Udra-use. Madelaine had fallen back into a stupor. I remember being thankful, as I tried to concentrate, that Blitta had not had time to suffer very much.

The contact, when it came, was very brief—a quick glancing, almost a flickering, as the mind with a passenger brushed us and then darted aside. It was gone. But whoever it was seemed to have been satisfied.