Margaret St. Clair - The Dolphins of Altair

We tried to go on with Udra, but couldn’t. Whether we were too excited or whether that brief contact with the odd mind was responsible, I don’t know. But we never could manage it, though we kept trying for what must have been more than an hour.

At last I said, “We’d better swim along the shore and try to attract the attention of a Split. We can make the sort of noises people expect from dolphins, and lead him or her to where Moonlight it. It would be better to have her taken away from us than to have her die from fever and thirst where she is.”

“Perhaps she wouldn’t think so,” Pettrus answered slowly. “Perhaps not. But can we stand staying here and watching her die?”

Before Pettrus could answer, there came the sound of footsteps on the dock overhead. They got to the edge of the dock and then we heard a splash in the water.

It had begun to get dark, but we could make out the silhouette of a man with a little bag in one hand. It looked like the triangular-topped bags doctors carry, and I felt a flash of hope. Had we succeeded in getting help for Sosa after all?

“I got here as soon as I could,” the man said.

I knew the voice instantly. It was Doctor Lawrence who was standing there.

I felt an unspeakable bitterness. He had been behind the strangely familiar mind that had sought contact with us, he had used that contact to track us down. It was our fault that he knew where Madelaine was.

“So, you traitor, you came,” I said when I could command myself enough to speak. “Did you come to make sure of her death this time?”

Dr. Lawrence listened to my accusation without moving. “Your resentment is justified, Amtor,” he said slowly. “What I’ve done is hard to—but my apologies and explanations can come later. I came here to try to help. Madelaine is sick, isn’t she? We got a strong impression that she was sick or hurt.”

I was floating between him and where Moonlight was lying, though of course he could make a dash around me up on the sand. “Who’s ‘We’?” I demanded. “You and the navy? Are you working with the navy to try to trace us down?”

“No. No, I’m not. ‘We’ is Mrs. Casson and I. She’s the psychometrist I told you about when we were on the Rock. It was both our minds, coupled, that you felt today when we were trying to locate you.” He added, with an odd note of pride in his voice, “It’s the first time I was ever able to do anything like that.”

“Does the navy know you came here?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. I tried to cover my tracks. I left a letter—but we can talk about that after I’ve taken care of Madelaine.

“I don’t blame you for distrusting me, Amtor. I am sincere—I’ve made up my mind once and for all—but of course you can’t know that. But let me take care of Madelaine no matter how you feel about me. I’m a physician, after all. And she needs help.”

I was silent. Pettrus, speaking in the high pitch that is inaudible to human ears, said, “I think we ought to trust him, Amtor. Even if he’s not sincere, he won’t find out anything more than he already knows by taking care of Moonlight. And she’s pretty sick. We ought to let him try to help.”

“What if he kills her?” I asked. “He betrayed us once before.”

“Then we can try to kill him. But I think we ought to let him see what he can do for her.”

“Ivry?” I asked.

“I agree with Pettrus.”

Yes, I thought a little bitterly, they are more trustful than I am. No wonder. Neither of them had a mate killed in the attack on the Rock. Aloud I said, “All right.”

Dr. Lawrence was still standing waiting, with his black bag in his hand. I told him, “Moonlight is under the dock, far back on the sand. We’ll let you go to her. But we’ll be watching what you do.”

He nodded silently. He stooped and began making his way through the water to where the girl was lying. Her white dress glimmered faintly in the dim light.

He knelt beside her. He must have touched her, for she mumbled, “Water… water…” and then was silent again.

We heard a faint clink. We could not see very well, but he seemed to be getting something out of his pocket. There was a gurgle. He must be pouring water from a flask.

He put his arm under her head and raised her a little. We heard her drinking, and an indistinct “Thanks.” He put her down gently again.

He opened the black bag and took out a tiny flashlight. He ran the weak beam slowly over Madelaine’s body, pa using a long time at her shoulder. “Is that the only injury she has?” he asked us softly, putting the flashlight down. “I can’t make a real examination here.”

“Yes, that’s the only place she was hurt,” I answered. “It bled quite a bit.”

“Un-hunh. She’s pretty sick.” Holding the flashlight in one hand, he began to hunt through his bag with the other.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Give her as big an injection of penicillin as I think she can take.” He was sterilizing and filling a syringe as he spoke. “The first thing to do is to try to reduce the infection in her arm a bit.”

He wiped a spot on her arm with cotton and plunged the hypodermic needle in. It took quite a long time for him to empty the syringe. “I’ll give her another shot in four hours,” he said, looking at his watch. “Right now I’m going to clean out her wound and put a bandage on it. There’s too much infection there for me to think of sewing it up.—This is a terrible place to try to take care of a patient in. Not even any lights.”

Ivry had been swimming around agitatedly while Dr. Lawrence was giving the injection. Now he said, in a low, anxious gabble, “There’s a boat coming. Put out that light, Doctor. Hide.”

After a very slight hesitation, Dr. Lawrence obeyed. He dropped the flashlight into his bag and stretched himself out on the dank sand in front of Madelaine—thinking, I suppose, that his neutral-colored clothing would be less visible than her whitish dress.

Almost immediately we heard the putt-putt of a motor, and a little while later a boat—the same boat that had been there earlier—tied up at the dock.

This time there were two men on her. As they were fastening the ropes, one of them said, “I thought I saw a light back under the dock.”

“Yeah, so did I,” answered the other. “Sometimes light shines down through the holes in the planking. Or maybe it was the eyes of a rat.”

“Must have been something like that,” the first man said. We heard him yawn. “Let’s have a can of beer before we go ashore.”

They stood in the bow of the boat, drinking beer and talking desultorily, for an annoyingly long time. We were all impatient for them to go away, so Dr. Lawrence could get on with his treatment of Madelaine. But when they began to talk about the earthquake, we listened with more interest.

“For a big quake, it didn’t kill many people,” the man who seemed to own the boat was saying. “Millions and millions of dollars’ worth of property damage, though. Suppose it had happened in the daytime on a working day! There’d have been thousands killed.”

“Yeah, the timing was lucky. Did it damage your house much?”

“Shook the chimney down, that was all. How about that four-plex you own?”

“It did a lot of damage, Bill, but I think the insurance company will cover most of it. Say, did you see that thing in the Chronicle gossip-column about the admiral?”

“No, what did it say?”

“Oh, that some navy big-shot had an idea about what caused the quake he was trying to sell his superiors on making public. It was headed, ‘The Softly-Flapping Admiral’.”

“I don’t see what could have caused the quake, except stresses building up in the earth.” There was a plop as he tossed his empty beer can in the water. “The air force is usually the goofy service, though. I wonder what the admiral meant.”