Margaret St. Clair - The Dolphins of Altair

“Fair enough,” he replied. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve come up with an idea I think is pretty good.” He began to clamber up on the dock.

“Where are you going?” Ivry quacked anxiously.

Dr. Lawrence grinned, and for the first time since I had seen him, I felt a liking for him. “I’m going to buy a boat,” he said.

He came back about noon, at the helm of an odd flat-bottomed craft. He made his purchase fast to the dock and then came down in the water where we were.

“What do you think of the boat?” he asked. He sounded pleased with himself. “It’s called the Akbar . I can take care of Madelaine on board, and you won’t be separated from her.”

“Fine,” Pettrus said. “What kind of a boat is it? I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“You could call it a scaled-down houseboat. A doll’s houseboat. I’ve rented mooring space for it about a mile from here. You won’t object to my putting Maddy on board?”

“No,” I said. “But you’re going to have trouble getting her on it.”

This proved to be correct. It was obviously impossible for Lawrence, standing in the water, to lift Moonlight at arm’s length above his head and lower her over the side of the Akbar ; and carrying her up on the dock and then putting her down on the Akbar ’s deck was going to be almost as difficult. Madelaine was neither a tall nor heavy woman, put she was only semiconscious, and Lawrence was a smallish man.

After some thought he dragged her down to the edge of the water, where he could stand upright, and picked her up in his arms. When he got around to the side of the dock, he shifted her so that she was lying across his shoulders, and he was holding her in place by her ankles and wrists, He wriggled her about until he could hold her opposite wrist and ankle in one hand, and then started up. He wobbled alarmingly. He was almost at the top when Madelaine began to stir, and he had to use both hands to keep her from falling off his back.

That left him badly unbalanced, with no point of contact width the dock timbers except his feet. We were sure he was going over backward into the water. But he took a long step upward with his right foot, into the next crotch in the dock timbering, and at the same time threw himself forward onto the surface of the dock. He landed on the planking on both knees, with two bruised sh ins.

“Made it,” he said, looking down at us. He got to his feet, moved Moonlight around in front of him, and carried her over, limping, to the Akbar . It was easy enough to put per down on the boat’s small deck.

We waited. He carried her into the deckhouse. About an hour later he came out. “I undressed her, gave her a bath, and put her to bed,” he told us. “She ought to do better, now she’s comfortable and dry. Her fever’s down.”

“How is her shoulder?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Healing. Not much use in sewing it up now. But it’s going to leave a scar. What I don’t understand is that she’s unconscious so much.

“Well, I’d better be moving the Akbar to her new location. I hope nobody saw me climbing about with Madelaine, If they did, I’ll get a visit from the police.”

He cast off the Akbar ’s moorings, started up her engine, and was soon putt-putting over the turbid water to the new anchorage. We followed discreetly. We were all relieved that Madelaine was better. He r unconsciousness did not seem so odd to us as it did to Lawrence, since we were not familiar with the physiology of Splits.

The Akbar ’s new location was a pleasant place. Trees were growing in a sort of park behind the little jetty that ran out into the water, and the only sign of damage from the quake was some floating planks from what might have been a rowboat. Another craft, also a houseboat, but at least twice as big as the Akbar , was tied up at the jetty. Except for that, no other boats were anchored there.

The girl on the deck of the bigger craft looked up and waved as Lawrence brought the Akbar in. Lawrence nodded unsmilingly. It was plain he did not want to encourage a potentially inquisitive friendliness.

He tied the Akbar up at the landward end of the jetty, as far away from the other houseboat as he could get. Then he went ashore. He couldn’t, of course, tell us where he was going, while the woman on the other craft was watching, but we supposed he was going after food.

Floating side by side in the shadow of the Akbar , under the jetty, we held a consultation. I think I have said before that we sea people ordinarily communicate with each other in frequencies that are outside the range of human hearing. It seemed to us both unnecessary and undesirable that all three of us should remain near the houseboat during the day. One dolphin can usually escape notice, especially in turbid water, but three is a different matter. We decided that one of us should stay near the Akbar during the daylight hours, while the other two tried to pick up some trace of Djuna.

Djuna might, of course, have been so severely wounded as to be dead, but we thought not. Our “telepathic” communication with each other (this is not Udra, though somewhat re lated to it) is somewhat more reliable than the ESP of Splits and, even though it is far from perfect, we thought we would have been aware of such a serious psychic event as her death.

Ivry and Pettrus then went off on their scouting trip and I was left behind, on watch near the Akbar . I was restless and bored. It seemed to me that Dr. Lawrence might have chosen a better anchorage for the Akbar than this one, where we were constantly under scrutiny from another boat and it would be difficult for him to communicate with us. He obviously couldn’t sit on the railing of the Akbar during the daytime, talking to a dolphin; and at night, even if he waited until the people on the bigger houseboat were in bed, we would all have to speak softly, since sound carries so well over water. I wondered whether he had done it on purpose, with the ultimate aim of detaching us from Madelaine.

I may say here that our anger for the attack on Noonday Rock was directed not so much toward the navy as toward Lawrence. If one declares war on the human race, one may expect the human race to retaliate. But we had trusted Dr. Lawrence, despite my doubts about him—he had instigated us to try to trigger an earthquake—and this lent a particular bitterness to our feelings toward him.

Lawrence came back after a while, carrying a bag of groceries, a bag from a department store, and another, smaller parcel that I couldn’t identify. He went into the Akbar ’s deckhouse, and in a little while I smelled food cooking.

I listened, but couldn’t tell whether or not he was feeding Madelaine. Neither of them said anything. Once or twice I heard her moving in her bunk.

He washed a few dishes. Then I heard a click, and the squawk of a radio. A radio—that must have been what was in the smaller parcel he had brought back.

He seemed to be listening to the news. After a while he shut the radio off, and seemed to be doing something near Madelaine. Then he came on deck with a bag of scraps and trash, which he took on shore and dropped in a big tr ash can.

I noticed all these details so sharply because I really had not much else to notice. I did not want to start thinking about Blitta again. Once or twice, as the afternoon drew on, I tried to use Udra, but I was too restless to have any success with it.

Darkness fell. The doctor cooked some sort of meal. It sounded as if he took something to Madelaine. At last, about three hours after dark, Ivry and Pettrus came back.

They had been a long way, down the coast to Point Sur and back, but they had found no sign of Djuna. They had talked to two or three other sea people, too. But when they were near Benthis Canyon, the spot off Monterey where I dropped Sven’s stolen mine, they had seen a number of navy ships at anchor.