Margaret St. Clair: The Dolphins of Altair

He drew a deep breath. He felt sick and dizzy. In a minute, he realized, he was going to vomit.

With some foggy idea of not fouling up the sidewalk, Sven walked wobblingly over to the edge of the dock. Much better, if one had to vomit, to do it in the water.

There was a wooden railing, not quite waist-high, at the edge of the concrete. Sven leaned on it, waiting for the spasm to take him. He must have black ed out for a moment. The next thing he knew, he was struggling in the cold, filthy water of the slip.

He got to the surface and gasped for air. He must have struck his head on a floating piece of wood; there was a sharp pain behind his ear, and he went under once more.

He tried for the surface again, but couldn’t make it. A noise of roaring filled his ears. Impersonally, he decided that he was going to drown. The knowledge did not bother him. He felt objective and detached about the whole thing.

Abruptly he was borne up from below. A broad smooth curving surface was between his legs. A voice—high-pitched, quick, and slightly gobbling—said, ‘Take it easy, now. You’re all right.”

Dazed and half-drowned as he was, Sven felt a thrill run down his spine. It must be the night watchman, attracted by the sound of his splashing. But the voice had seemed to come from below him.

He drew in air pantingly. When he could talk, he said, “Who are you? Where are you speaking from?”

“I’m in the water,” the voice answered. “My name is Djuna. I was following you.”

“Following? But—”

“Can you hold on now?” said the voice. “Lean forward and put your hands under my flukes. You’ll be better balanced that way.”

Sven obeyed. The flukes must be those triangular fleshy flaps, and that meant—“Why, you’re a dolphin!” he said. He did not know why the realization should please him so much.

“Yesss. We call ourselves the sea people, though.”

“You can talk!”

“Yes. The navy was training me. But I managed to get away.”

The dolphin had turned around, noiselessly and effortlessly, and was swimming out through the slip into the bay. “Where are you taking me?” Sven asked.

“Where do you want to go?” Djuna replied.

“To Fisherman’s Wharf, I guess. I think I could climb up on the pier there. Or—where are you going?”

“To the Farallons, to meet some—” The animal was moving more slowly now. “I know quite a lot about you,” it said in what seemed to be a thoughtful tone. “When you were playing darts in the bar, I was helping you.”

“You were? Well, I’m not surprised. I didn’t think I could throw that well by myself. But I don’t know how you did it.”

“It’s called Udra,” Djuna answered. “We can do it with people sometimes, the right kind of people. You don’t like human beings very much, do you?”

“No. Whatever we do, it always seems to end up in hurting somebody. With the best motives, of course. But I’m sick of it.”

“If you only hurt other human beings, Splits, it wouldn’t matter.” Djuna was swimming even more slowly now.

Abruptly the animal seemed to have made up its—her?—mind. “Look here, would you like to come with me?” it said. “We won’t hurt anybody if we can possibly help it But the sea people are in danger. We need allies.”

For a moment Sven hesitated. He didn’t know what he might be letting himself in for, and—then his caution was washed out by an irresistible attraction. “Yes, I’d like to go with you,” he said. “I’ll help you all I can. Yes.”

They got to Noonday Rock about four, when the late-rising moon was filling the sky with light. Djuna had been unable to make her accustomed speed with Sven on her back, and she had had to make wide detours around shipping for fear he might be seen.

“Here we are,” she said in her high, somewhat gobbling voice. “This is Noonday Rock. Nobody comes here, ordinarily.” Sven felt sand under his feet. He put his legs down, and Djuna slid out from under him. “Is there anybody else here now?” he asked the animal as he regarded the rock’s black, steep bulk.

“Lots of sea people. Only one other Split. Here she comes now.”

A girl was coming toward him. She wore a white dress; her pale hair was loose about he r shoulders; in the moonlight she seemed made of silver.

“Hello,” she said. “Djuna brought you?”

“Yes. My name is Sven Erickson.”

“You’ll help us? My name is Madelaine. The world is at the hinge of time, I think.”

Dr. Lawrence’s case was the strangest of the three. When it became plain that Madelaine Paxton had disappeared (she did not show up for work at the research station, she was not at her apartment, and her car had been found abandoned at Drake’s Bay), the navy assigned an investigator to try to find out what had become of her. This was not because Madelaine’s work had brought her into contact with anything in the least secret—the investigation was routine, part of a general navy policy.

The investigator, after talking to Madelaine’s friends in the office, had an interview with Dr. Lawrence.

“I see by her record that you were giving her psychiatric treatment,” the investigator said.

“Yes. She was suffering from acute amnesia at first. Then she began to hear voices.”

“What does that indicate?”

“Amnesia, when it’s genuine, is usually the result of a serious psychic conflict. As to the voices, I am inclined to think they were nothing more than a projection onto the external world of Miss Paxton’s thoughts.

“Joan of Arc, for example, claimed to hear voices. Most historians think that she expressed her own sense of her historic mission by speaking of it in this way.”

“I don’t quite understand you.”

“Well, if I feel an impulse to steal something, and my super-ego forbids me to, I may say, ‘My conscience told me not to.’ With most people that’s just a way of speaking. But with certain individuals there may actually be an impression of a voice coming from outside.” This was not quite what Dr. Lawrence had said to Madelaine herself about the voices; but, since he was fairly certain his office wasn’t bugged, he saw no reason to strain for consistency.

“Um. You know her car was found abandoned at Drake’s Bay?”

“So I’ve been informed.”

“What do you think happened to her? Do you think she has committed suicide?”

“It’s possible. She didn’t seem suicidal to me the last time I saw her, on the morning of the 26th. She left the office saying that she’d remembered what she had to do, which could mean just about anything.”

“Don’t most suicides leave notes?”

“Yes. It’s possible that she decided to go swimming, went out too far, and drowned.”

“No normal person would go swimming in March at Drake’s Bay.”

“I didn’t say she was normal,” Dr. Lawrence replied, scoring a minor point. “I said I didn’t think she was suicidal the last time I saw her.”

The investigator moved uneasily in his chair. “But what do you think has happened, Dr. Lawrence? I mean, what’s your best guess?”

“I think she was on the point of remembering what the conflict was that had caused her amnesia. Perhaps the conflict was too painful for her to handle, and she became amnesiac again. In that case, she may have wandered out on the highway, hitched a ride with somebody, and might be anywhere by now.”

The investigator was silent. Perhaps he was reflecting that the fact that Madelaine’s shoes and stockings had been found in her car made it unlikely that she had walked very far. At last he said, “Well, thank you, Doctor. If you think of anything that might be helpful, you’ll let me know, won’t you?”