Margaret St. Clair - The Dolphins of Altair

“Maybe not useless,” Madelaine answered. She reached out her hand gropingly and laid it on the doctor’s arm. “Be patient a little.—Amtor, ask Kendry ab out this.”

Kendry and I talked for several minutes. Madelaine listened carefully, but Lawrence, of course, could only wait.

At last I said, “She says Madelaine and I must unite our minds to try to find out how to power it. We must unite our minds and r each out.”

“Reach out? To where?” Lawrence was still fuming with exasperation.

“She says it will not be easy, but Madelaine has become enough like one of the sea people to make-it possible. We must unite our minds and reach out with all our strength to the sun from which the Old Ones came. We must reach out to Altair.”

“A storm is coming up,” Kendry continued. “Sosa must have a place where she can be quiet and warm before she and Amtor try what they have to do. Sail your boat south, down the coast, and try to find a quiet anchorage.”

Dr. Lawrence, though the water was lapping around his knees when this message was relayed to him, sat motionless. “Before we go off on another wild-goose chase,” he said, “find out from Kendry why she thinks the ahln is powered by something Splits don’t currently have. I don’t want Madelaine to knock herself out only to discover that the ahln is powered by something on the order of a flashlight battery. Ask her, Amtor.”

It occurred to me that Lawrence’s appetite for marvels was temporarily satiated; the idea of trying to make psychic contact with Altair seemed to annoy him.

“She says that ‘powered’ is not exactly the right word,” I reported. “She says that what the ahln needs to be effective might be something Splits do have; she isn’t sure. But the secret lies in how it is used. And she is sure Splits have no knowledge of the principle of the ahln, or they would have made great changes in their environment.

“She thinks we had better start south, before the storm comes up.” I did not repeat the last part of Kendry’s reply, which Sosa had heard as well as I had: that we must use all care to prevent the knowledge of the ahln from coming into the hands of other Splits. There was too much power represented in. it to be trusted to the good intentions of humanity.

“Very well,” Lawrence said. “I suppose we’d better try it, anyhow. Ivry, may I ride on your back till we get to the Naomi ?”

“All right,” Ivry agreed without enthusiasm. Sosa was already astride me. She leaned forward and caressed Kendry’s head delicately.

“Tell her good-bye, and that we will hope to see her again,” she said.

Kendry answered, “Yes, we can hope. But I am getting old. Sosa, if I never see you again, remember how happy I am that you came to help us in our need. Good-bye, dear Sosa.”

We began to swim away. Moonlight waved her hand in farewell. As we looked back at Kendry’s rocks from a distance, we saw that the water had almost closed over them.

By the time we got back to the Naomi, the first drops of rain had begun to fall. The doctor had Madelaine lie down on the settee in the cabin. Then he sent me down to bring up the anchor, while he laid a course to the south.

“Can you dolphins swim ahead and warn me of any rocks?” he asked. “I want to sail close to the coast, so I can see if we get near a suitable anchorage.”

This was agreed, and Lawrence had Sosa take the wheel briefly while he put a better bandage on her arm and gave her an injection of penicillin. Then he took the helm again.

We soon left the storm behind us, except for brief squalls and bursts of rain. A little before dusk, the doctor saw a small circular bay ahead of us. It seemed to be the site of a village: small craft were drawn up on the beach, and there was a tiny jetty where a larger boat was moored. It was obviously the place he had been looking for.

He took the Naomi in neatly and tied her up beside the other boat. “You dolphins had better go out to sea,” he told us softly. “Strangers in a place this size a re sure to attract a lot of attention.-Come back tonight, when the lights are out and it’s quiet, and we’ll try this reaching-out-to-Altair bit.”

“All right,” I answered. “Are you sure you can keep Madelaine warm enough, Doctor? Kendry said it was import ant.”

“I think so. It’s warm in the cabin, and I can cover her with my jacket. You’d better go now.”

We swam unobtrusively. The doctor had been right; by the time Madelaine came out on the deck, everybody in the little town had come down to the jetty to look at the strange boat. They jostled each other, stared with bright dark eyes, and tried to sell the two North Americans baskets, serapes and fruit. Fortunately it was getting dark, and in an hour or so the visitors went home to supper. The Naomi was left alone.

“I wish I’d worked harder at Spanish when I was in high school,” Lawrence said. “As it is, ‘buenas dias’ and ‘quanto vale’ are about my limit. Don’t touch that fruit, Maddy, until I’ve dipped it in a sterilizing solution. Lie down on the settee, and I’ll open something for us to eat.”

“All right. Did you find out what the name of this place is?”

“Bahia something or other.” He was busy with the can opener. “You know, Maddy, there are lots of things in what Kendry told us that I don’t understand. For instance, how can knowledge of the ahln’s power source be communicated telepathically—I suppose that’s what’s involved in ‘reaching out to Altair’—when the knowledge of how to construct the ahln itself couldn’t be communicated that way.”

“I don’t know either,” Madelaine answered. “I think it must be something quite simple, so simple that telepathic communication will do for it. Of course, it may need telepathy of a special kind.”

“Perhaps.” He plainly wasn’t satisfied. He dumped cold canned chow mein onto paper plates. “And then, about the ahln itself. We talk about a power source for it, but is the ahln a device for releasing heat from a fuel it destroys in the way that a furnace releases heat from coal, or is the ahln a machine that acts to create heat from a power source that activates it, like an electric heater? Is what we’re going to try to get from Altair knowledge of a fuel, or of a power that can be transformed into great heat? I think these are quite different ideas.”

“It might be neither,” Madelaine answered thoughtfully. “The ahln might be like a pipe that conducts heat from a power source, like a pipe that carries hot water away from a geyser or an underground hot spring. It is possible there are sources of heat in the universe that human beings are not aware of,” she said. “I don’t mean atomic energy, I mean—the energy that creates atoms. Perhaps the ahln taps that. Perhaps it goes back in time, to the beginning of the universe, and brings heat back from there. Perhaps—well, I suppose we will have to wait to find out.”

She hesitated. “Something else is bothering me,” she said. “How are we to reach out to Altair? I mean, to Altair specifically. There are billions and billions of suns in the universe, there are thousands of stars visible in the sky. How are Amtor and I to aim for Altair? Surely the name alone isn’t enough!”

“I can show you Altair in the sky, if you don’t know where it is,” the doctor offered. “It’s sure to be visible later in the night. Would that help?”

“It might. I’ll ask Amtor when he conies back. Kendry wouldn’t have told us to do it unless she thought it was possible. Let’s eat, and then try the fruit. It looks good.”

Meantime, we sea people were enjoying good fishing in the warmer-waters. Once or twice we had shark scares, but, since we weren’t carrying passengers, we outdistanced the predators easily. We went back to the Naomi a little before ten.