Margaret St. Clair - The Dolphins of Altair

“Good,” I repeated. We all knew that we couldn’t really “see” Washington; but we hoped we would be able to “see” the city, monuments, rivers and all, in the minds of the people who lived in it. The river would be visible as thoughts about a river, and so on.

“After we get a fix on the city, we’ll try to pick out the mind of the President,” Sven said. “We may be able to identify him from his thoughts. And then we’ll try to give him a simple message, and a simple command: ‘A worldwide flood is coming. Order all coastal areas evacuated.’

“We can’t make him think what we want him to think—the new way of using Udra is basically motor control. But we may be able to make him do what we want him to do, if only for a short while.”

The two Splits sat down on the sand, rather high up on the beach. The afternoon sun was warm, but Madelaine was shivering with nervousness. Sven piled the sand up around her legs to make her more comfortable. Then he stretched out on his back, with his arm over his eyes.

It was difficult for us to get into the Udra-state. We were all anxious and upset, apprehensive for the future, and we had been through sharp emotional reversals in the last few days. On the other hand, we were learning how to help each other. So, after the first resistance, we made good progress. We were deeply into the state in three-quarters of an hour.

It was when we began looking for the city in the District of Columbia that we understood what Sven had meant about the importance of getting a spatial fix. We had no difficulty discerning the clustering of minds that marks a city. But there were so many clusterings! How were we to know which was the one we were hunting? People almost never think of the name of the place where they are; and it seemed that the inhabitants of every urban nucleus on the Eastern seaboard were thinking of rivers—or at any rate of water—and monuments. I suppose the Alaskan floods were responsible for all the watery thoughts we got.

At last we found a smallish conurbation that seemed to be the right one. We couldn’t be sure it was located on a river, but we got constant impressions of movement and traffic around monuments, and a large proportion of the minds we sampled seemed to be concerned with the making of decisions and with administration. We could tick off minds almost as fast as a computer eliminates possibilities, and we began to move in from the periphery of the city, hunting the mind of the President of the United States.

We settled on three men as probables. They seemed to be in physical proximity to each other, per haps in adjoining rooms, and from their thoughts they all had power and were concerned about using it wisely.

Which one? It was hard to tell, from their thoughts, which of the three was the most powerful, and the field of their thinking appeared almost identical. But one of them was more serious and impersonal than the others. We all four thought he must be the man. We stretched out toward him and began to send Sven’s message to him.

I don’t want to give the impression that this use of Udra is merely telepathy. The “message” was only the first part of it. We were trying to take over our man’s nervous system and make him issue an order, not merely to put an idea into his mind. That meant we should have to have him in a tight grip, and keep that grip up for some time.

We had less trouble with him than we had anticipated. This was because the man we thought was the President was already deeply concerned about the Alaskan floods. The Eastern coast was beginning to get violent wind storms, and Canada, east and west, was suffering from floods almost as severe as those in Alaska. The scale of the disasters was unique, and our man was already disposed to act as we wanted him to.

We closed our four minds over him. With us urging him, he got up (we could sense his movements and be aware of what his muscles did), walked a few steps, and picked up something. I think it was a telephone. But we didn’t learn until later whether or not we had succeeded in making him give the order we wanted, because at that moment the unity of our psychic quartet was abruptly disturbed. This is always a shocking experience, and it must have been somewhat shocking to the man we thought was the President.

What had happened was that Sven, lying on the beach, had sat up suddenly, sputtering water and gasping for breath. The water had risen while he was in the Udra-state and had been almost over his face. His last breath had taken in more water than air.

As soon as he could breathe normally again, he ran to Madelaine. The girl, lying a little higher on the beach than he, was having no trouble breathing; but her legs and waist were submerged, and her hair floated loose over the sand.

He put his arm under her shoulders and pulled her into a sitting position. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “The water’s rising. The flood’s begun.”

“The flood?” she said dazedly. She was still partly in the Udra-state. “No, it’s the tide. The tide always comes in. And what about the warning we were trying to get that man in Washington to issue?”

“Never mind him. We’ve done all we can. It’s not the tide. We’ve got to get out ourselves, the dolphins and us, while we still can.

“Help me get food and water from the cottage. There’s no time to go inland to high ground. We’ll have to try to ride out the floods at sea, on the dolphins’ backs.”

Our great fear was that our passengers would be swept off our backs. The water was already rough, with a stiff wind, and big pattering drops of rain were falling from the threatening sky. The weather was bound to get worse; we did not know how bad it would get. In really angry water, retrieving Sven or Madelaine would be almost impossible.

Madelaine was riding Ivry, and Sven was on Pettrus’ back. This was not as we would have preferred it—Sven by choice rode Djuna, and Moonlight and I were always happiest together. There was a particular bond between the four of us because of our common Udra experience. But Djuna and I—she because of the ways in which her wounds had healed, I because of my rudimentary hand—were weaker swimmers than the others. We were in for an ordeal, and we all knew it. It seemed best to let the stronger two carry our friends’ weight.

We had been swimming straight out to sea. Now Sven said, “I think we should head northwest.” He had to speak loudly, for the wind carried his words away. “We may be at sea for days and above all things we don’t want to be caught between the flood water from the two polar melts. That would be turbulent. But if we can get over the hump of the advancing water from the north, we should be all right. What do you think, Amtor?”

“Yes,” I said after a moment. I was thinking that the traditional knowledge we sea people had of the ocean currents would be of no use to us now. Nothing would flow as it had flowed before. The avalanches of unlocked water had put everything awry. “Yes, once we are really out to sea, we shouldn’t even notice the rise in the water. The weather is something else, but there’s nothing we can do about it. We’ll head northwest.”

The change of course was made. We dolphins were beginning to notice a slight lack of buoyancy in our swimming as the fresh water began to dilute the salt; and this, plus the fact that the waves were getting bigger, increased our anxiety for our passengers.

That this fear was not groundless was shown about half an hour later. The waves had been getting bigger, and when an extraordinarily large one came, Ivry made the mistake of taking it broadside, instead of meeting it obliquely. Moonlight, who had perhaps not had her hands as tightly under his flukes as she might have, was swept straight off his back, clutching desperately at his sleek sides.