Margaret St. Clair - The Dolphins of Altair

“Yes, but—”

“And what about the dolphins? At least half of those that were at the first meeting on the Rock have been killed. Don’t they have any right to survive, compared with human beings? For somebody who was willing to declare war upon the human race, Madelaine, you have too damned many scruples. Or aren’t you really serious?”

Before she could answer, I said, “Why don’t you ask us what we think, Dr. Lawrence? We have a more vital interest in how the ahln is used than you do, or even Madelaine.”

“You think I haven’t a vital interest?” he said. “I’ve given up my profession, my future, all the things human beings live for, in order to help you. But it’s true, you dolphins do have the strongest immediate interest of any of us. Well, then, what do you say about how the ahln should be used?”

“Even a gradual melting of the ice at the poles ought to provide the Splits with plenty to keep them busy,” I said. “A quick melting has some advantages, but one disadvantage is that it would change the salt content of ocean water overnight. We could adjust to it, but it would be annoying. On the whole, then—what was that noise?”

“I didn’t hear anything,” Lawrence said.

“It’s coming nearer, a kind of splashing. Don’t you hear it, really?”

We all listened. The splashing stopped; we felt a ripple in the water. And now we saw a darker outline against the dimly illuminated walls of the cavern, the silhouette of a man. Somebody had got past the watchful submarine, and he did not need to speak for us to know who he was.

Madelaine had jumped to her feet. “Sven!” she cried. Even in her excitement she remembered to speak softly. “Is it really you? And Djuna with you? Oh, how glad I am! What all’s been happening? How did you get past the submarine?”

There was a note in her voice that was always absent when she spoke to the doctor, and I realized how ill at ease she had been with him. Moonlight and Sven were two of the same kind. Lawrence was somebody on the outside.

“Yes, it’s me,” the man in the water answered. His voice was a little deeper than it had been. “And Djuna’s with me, though she can’t swim quite as well as she used to. About the sub, Djuna and I sent it away. It’s a new way of using Udra we learned when I was in the synthi-womb.

“But we haven’t time now for talking. We’ve got to get out of here quick. The sub is sure to be back.”

Madelaine had fallen asleep beside the worktable, worn out. They had been living in the beach cottage in Descanso for three days now, working on the construction and regulation of the new ahln devices, and in all that time Madelaine had been unable to sleep. The sleeping pills Dr. Lawrence had dosed her with had only increased her fatigue, without giving her rest; but now that the three ahln devices were finished and lay ready in their aluminum casings for their journey to the poles, sleep had come over her irresistibly. Her arms were on the table and her head was pillowed on them. She had only meant to sit down for an instant.

She was alone in the room. Sven had gone out for groceries, and the doctor was bathing and shaving in the little bath. At first she slept dreamlessly, but later—perhaps as the sound of the bath water running partly roused her— she began to relive, in confused and temporally anarchic fashion, the events of the last few days.

Once again she struggled through the cavern’s underwater entrance, walked across the sand to the rented Mexican beach cottage, changed the color of her hair with the dye Sven had bought at Descanso’s one farmacia. Once more she wondered why the navy’s attacks had ceased. Sometimes she shared Sven’s adventures, too—she lay in the synthi-womb, or found Djuna, wounded but healed, faithfully waiting. But usually it was of what she had really experienced that she dreamed.

The sub exploded behind her eyelids, the sun shone. She drank water thirstily. Water and guilt. The men in the sub had died. She saw their limbs floating slowly up through the turbulent green water, as if they still swam or tried to swim. But they were dead. The sub had killed itself.

Neither she nor Sven had meant it to happen. They had been emerging from the cavern’s underwater entrance, almost at the surface, when the returning sub had poked its nose around the edge of the rock shelf. She and Sven had tried to project a phantom at a distance, a phantom of a man with dolphins, but the gunner in the sub had not been deceived. The muzzles of the sub’s antipersonnel guns had turned inexorably toward where the Splits and dolphins actually were.

There had been no time for consideration. Madelaine and Sven had had to take control of the gunner’s body and make him turn his fire elsewhere. The heavy shells, designed to fragment powerfully even underwater, had exploded against the rocky shelf.

This first strain the sub would have survived. The compressive force of the shock waves, though so close to it, would not have broken it. But the helmsman, amazed at the gunner’s incomprehensible action, had sent the sub into a wild turn just as the gunner had released his heaviest antipersonnel missile straight at the rock. The abrupt extra strain on the already maltreated hull had been as final as a hit by a depth bomb. Safe on the surface, at a good distance, Madelaine and the others had seen the signs of the submarine’s death.

But the guilt for this was less than another guilt, the crushing guilt Lawrence had tried to persuade them to assume. Madelaine heard his arguments endlessly, and over and over she tried to answer him. Her mind, even in sleep, drew back from his rightness, and she clung desperately to the decision that had actually been made.

The dream changed. She still heard Lawrence’s voice, but it receded to a distressing murmur. She knew that she had a problem to solve.

It was important; it concerned the doctor. But she couldn’t remember what it was. And how could she solve it unless she knew what it was? It wasn’t fair to make her responsible for solving an unknown problem in her sleep.

She told me later that her sleeping mind entangled itself here with an old problem in geometry, and she spent what seemed a long time trying to prove Euclid’s famous Pythagorean theorem. But the words, “the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle equals the sum of the squares on the other sides,” seemed to provide a clue, and at last she decided that the square metal casings of the ahln devices held her problem. It was for her to contrive a means by which the devices, slowly turning the ice of the polar caps to water, might go undiscovered for a long, long time.

(In fact, the liability of the devices to discovery during a protracted melting period had been one of Lawrence’s strongest arguments for trying to melt the caps with maximum speed. He had pointed out over and over again that the Splits would not remain quiet while the waters rose and their seaports were drowned. They would try to find out what was causing it. And it was all too probable that they would find and destroy the devices that were melting the polar ice.)

Now that she knew what her problem was, Madelaine’s sleeping mind felt a certain relief. For a little while, she said, she dreamed of riding with us sea people to a green tropic island. The water was a deep royal blue, the soft air bathed her limbs deliciously.

It must have been about this time that Dr. Lawrence came in the room. I think he was surprised to find her asleep. He had not counted on it, and I think he took it as an omen. At any rate, he picked her up, with some difficulty, and carried her over to the day bed. He laid her down on it gently and drew a blanket over her. I don’t know whether he moved her because she was in his way, or because he wanted to test the depth of her sleep, or merely because he was sorry for her to be sleeping so uncomfortably.