Margaret St. Clair - The Dolphins of Altair

“Dr. Lawrence, a graduate of the Stanford University Medical School, was formerly employed…”

Sven’s eyes met Madelaine’s. She was deathly pale. “He’s done it,” she said. “Sven, Sven! How long will it take for the ahln devices to get to the poles?”

Sven stared at her. “You mean—you think Lawrence has started the things on their trip to the poles?”

“Yes, of course. What else could it be?”

“But—he didn’t know where to start them from. Only the dolphins know that. Lawrence is no expert on ocean currents.”

“He did know, though. While we were still on the Naomi , before you came, the dolphins showed him on the chart. All he had to do was to remember two sets of coordinates.”

“But how would he get the things to the launching spots? He hasn’t got a boat.—Where were the spots, anyhow?”

“He could hire a plane. One place was a little south of here, about a hundred miles out, and the other was north of Fort Bragg. How long would it take for the ahln devices to reach the poles?”

Sven considered. Madelaine’s alarm still seemed to him excessive, but he was beginning to be convinced. “Two or three days to reach the edge of the Arctic ice, I guess. Quite a bit longer to get to Antarctica. We’re some distance from the equator here.”

“Then—we’ve got to warn people!” She started away from him, toward the telephone booth in the corner.

“What are you going to do?” he asked, leaving his place in the line before the ticket window. (Since Lawrence was a suicide, there was obviously no point in trying to find him.) “Who are you going to call?”

“Radio station.” She was fumbling with a San Diego telephone directory. “I’m going to try to—yes, here it is.” She went into the telephone booth.

She was in the booth a long time. Buses came and went. Sven, looking down on her head, saw that her hair had grown out beyond the dark dye, and was blonde again at the roots. At last she came out, even paler than when she had gone in.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. He put his hand under her arm. “Are you OK, kid?”

“Yes. I called the station. I kept getting a busy signal, but I stayed on the line. Finally somebody answered. I told him I wanted to speak to the station manager, that it was important. He said, ‘Lady, call back some other time. All our lines are jammed with people asking about the Alaska hurricane and flood.’

“I said, ‘Flood?’ He said, ‘Yeah, half Anchorage is under water, and it’s still rising. Nobody knows why.’ Then he hung up.”

Sven blinked. “It-must have got there,” he said.

“Oh, yes. I suppose it’s causing the hurricane, too. I’ve got to try something else. I—I know, I’ll call the President.” She started toward the booth once more.

Sven held her back. “It’s a waste of time,” he said. “You’d never get through to the President. They’d just think you were some kind of crank.”

“But—we can’t just let it go at this! Millions of people will be killed if they aren’t warned to get to high ground. Everybody in this room will be killed. Descanso is flat as a board. We have to—to keep trying.”

“Take it easy,” he said. “The flood won’t get here for a good many hours.”

“What’s that got to do with it? Every city on the California coast will be flooded. And after the South Polar ice starts to melt, every coastal city in the world. We—I know, Sven. You and I will fly to Washington and insist on seeing the President. We’ll tell him what’s happening.” She started toward the ticket window.

Once more he held her back. “They’d think we were cranks, Maddy. By the time we managed to see anybody important, the flood would already have arrived.”

She shook her head desperately. “We’ve got to do something! Millions of people will die!”

It seemed to Sven that everybody in the bus station was looking at them. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “We’ll try to do something. But there’s nothing we can do by telephoning that will help.”

He started toward the station door and, after a moment, she followed him. When they were walking along the rutted road once more, she said, “We must try the new way of using Udra. We can try to make the President issue a general warning. Or even send the navy out to destroy the three ahln devices.”

He said, “I thought of that. The trouble is, we haven’t a spatial fix on the President. I was able to make the commander of the sub do what I wanted because I knew where he was, visually speaking, and could so rt out his mind from those of the crew members. The same thing was true when we had the gunner direct his cannon at the underwater shelf. But I doubt we can pick up the President, out of all the millions of minds on the Eastern seaboard. You remember, when we tried to pick up Lawrence with Udra, we couldn’t get anything at all.”

“That was because he had the kind of mind that doesn’t leave any traces.”

“Maybe. I think we could have picked him up, though, if we’d known where he was.”

They had got back to the beach cottage. Moonlight went running down over the sand to the water, calling us. When we swam up, she told us what had happened.

The news silenced us for a moment. Then I said, “Yes, he’s done it. The floods are going to be terrible, especially after the Antarctic ice starts to melt. We’re willing to work with you, Sosa, if you want to try to contact the President’s mind and have him issue a warning. Or even have the navy try to find and destroy the three ahln machines. Which do you want to try to do?”

Sven said, “The simpler the action we are trying to make him perform, the greater our chances of success. Issuing a general warning is a good deal simpler than sending the navy out to hunt for the machines. We’d have to make him understand what the machines were, where they would be apt to be found, and what they looked like. Also, I doubt whether the navy could possibly find anything as small as the ahln devices in the midst of the Pacific waters. They’re too small a target. I move we try to make the President issue a general warning and give orders to evacuate all coastal areas.”

Madelaine said, “What about the rest of the world? The flood won’t be confined to the United States.”

“No, but I think this is the best we can do. If the President of the United States says a worldwide flood is coming, the rest of the world will listen. There’s no use trying to get the U.N. Secretary-General to warn people. They wouldn’t listen. And he can’t order an evacuation. He has no real power.”

“Good,” I said after a moment. I do not mind saying that we sea people were relieved. We had no ill-will toward Splits generally. I think we have proved this many times. We regarded them as brothers, albeit brothers with an unfortunate tendency to fratricide.

But the ahln devices were our one real weapon, and if they were destroyed, we should be returned to our former status of experimental animals. Worse, if our part in having caused the Alaskan flood became known, all Splits everywhere would regard us as legitimate prey, and killing us as a virtuous act. It was the same situation, in short, that we had been in when we thought Dr. Lawrence had defected to the navy with the stolen ahln devices in his medical bag; and to be returned to it after an interval of hope was almost more than we could bear.

“The first thing to do,” Sven said, “is to try to get a spatial fix on Washington, where the President probably is. It’s a medium-sized city straight across the continent, and north of here, oh, about three hundred and fifty miles. It’s in somewhat from the coast, and it’s situated on a river. There are a lot of monuments.”