Margaret St. Clair: The Dolphins of Altair

“All right. Good luck. I hope you know what you’re doing.” He started the engine, and the broad-beamed little boat moved off.

Lawrence watched him go. He felt an instant of panic. Had he marooned himself on this barren rock with only the water in a quart canteen? Five days in this wild spot because a clairvoyant had said something that might mean the girl he was hunting might be here? Then a patch of white moved round the edge of the rock, and his heart steadied.

“Hello,” he said when she was near enough. “I thought you’d be here.”

“Dr. Lawrence! How did you know where to look for me?”

“A clairvoyant told me,” he answered absently. “What do you do for water and food? There’s nothing at all here.”

“Oh, we go over to the big island—the one with the automatic lighthouse—at night and bring back water and canned food. There’s a cistern there for rainwater, and a shed with lots of surplus canned stuff.”

“Who’s ‘we’? Is there anybody here besides yourself?”

“One man.” She looked at him steadily. “Dr. Lawrence, will you help us? We can’t have anybody knowing about us who isn’t on our side.”

Lawrence bent over and began wringing water out of his pants cuffs. “That’s something I can’t answer until I know what you’re trying to do,” he said, straightening up.

“We want to free the sea people who are in the research stations. That’s the first thing. Then we want to make sure that human beings will never molest them again.”

“A large order,” Lawrence answered, unsmiling. “Yesss, I’ll help you. But I’d like to point out, young lady, that what you have said amounts to a declaration of war on the whole human race.”

“Does it? I’m sorry. But we can’t help that.”

It was a gray day, with the sky lowering and dull and an oily swell on the slate-colored water. Sea gulls wheeled and banked endlessly over the heads of the three Splits who were sitting on the pebbly beach, as close as they could get to us in the water. We—at least a hundred sea people and the three who sat facing us—were holding a council of war.

It had been going on since early morning. There was no disagreement about what we wanted to accomplish; as Madelaine had told Dr. Lawrence, the first thing was to free the imprisoned sea people. But there was much argument as to h ow we could accomplish it.

The dolphin research and training project—DRAT—was top secret. From the land, only a handful of high-ranking navy officers had access to it, and even they had to pass check points and wait for the opening of locked doors. From the sea, a series of concrete walls and baffles cut our people off from contact with their free element. It was not going to be easy to break down those massive concrete walls.

Madelaine listened to the discussion, her head propped on her hand. Dr. Lawrence sat on her left. His rolled-up trouser legs and sprouting beard gave him a raffish appearance, but he still carried the polished briefcase he had had when he came to the Rock.

Sven sat at Madelaine’s right. I was not as used to the faces of Splits th en as I afterwards became, but I thought he looked much happier than he had when I first saw him, though he frowned from time to time at what the speakers said. His eyes were often fixed on the girl.

Djuna had been speaking. She had been describing how armed guards were posted on the seaward parts of the walls. “Nobody could get close enough to the concrete to set off a bomb,” she told us positively. (The bomb had been a suggestion of Sven’s, made about half an hour earlier.) “There are searchlights, and the guards shoot at anything they see in the water. The navy has nets out, too, and an alarm rings if the mesh is broken. But the guards and the lights are the main trouble. They started stationing guards after a couple of us sea people got out of the pools at Capitola.”

Djuna’s high, rapid speech stopped. (When we sea people talk to Splits, we have to take pains to pitch our voices low and speak slowly; our communication with each other is out of human auditory range, and very rapid.) There was a silence. The gulls overhead gave their harsh cries. Then Dr. Lawrence, still holding his briefcase, got to his feet.

He cleared his throat and teetered on the balls of his feet for a moment. Then he said, “It’s obviously impossible to get the dolphins out by land. Transporting three hundred pygmy whales, each seven feet long, back to the water is something that couldn’t possibly be done secretly. We’d be stopped before we got more than a couple out. And Djuna has told us, pretty convincingly, that nobody can get close enough to the sea walls to set off a bomb. But a severe earthquake would break down the walls and give the dolphins access to the sea. We must have an earthquake.”

“You mean that we must have a miracle?” Madelaine asked wonderingly.

“No, we must make it happen,” Dr. Lawrence answered.

Rain began to fall from the leaden sky, at first a soft pattering, and then bigger drops. “How?” Sven asked, over the growing noise of the rain. He glanced at Madelaine. “It seems to me it would be more difficult to cause an earthquake to order than it would be to get through the guards with a bomb.”

Dr. Lawrence squatted down on his heels. He seemed to be uncomfortable standing upright in the increasing rain. “I’m no geologist,” he answered. “But sometimes a small initial cause can create great effects.

“The whole California coast is part of the Pacific ring of fire. The San Andreas Rift—a major fault—runs through the San Francisco Bay area, and can be traced along the coast for about six hundred miles. All the DRAT stations are located within this six-hundred-mile stretch.

“A big quake on this part of the coast is long overdue. Sooner or later there will be a major quake, and without human intervention. But we need not wait for that. A quake is, so to speak, waiting to happen. It is up to us to trigger it.”

Sven was frowning intently. “How?” he asked again.

Dr. Lawrence drew a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped at his streaming face. The rain was coming down steadily now. “With a bomb,” he said.

He coughed. “If a powerful bomb were placed at a suitable spot, a spot underwater, which would augment the force of the explosion, I think it might do the trick. Of course, we can’t be sure till we try it. But I think it would work.”

“What would be a suitable spot?” Sven asked.

Dr. Lawrence rubbed the lower part of his face with his right hand. “Ask your sea people,” he said. “They must be familiar with the edges of the continental shelf. Ask them if they know a suitable spot.”

Through the blur ring rain, I could see that Sven and Madelaine were looking at me. “Amtor, do you know of a place like that?” asked Madelaine.

I would have liked to avoid answering. “Yes,” I replied reluctantly, “I think I do.”

“Where?” Madelaine asked.

“Perhaps—off the coast near Monterey. There’s a submarine canyon there.”

“Would one bomb do it?” Sven inquired. “I think so, if it were powerful.”

“How do you know that the submarine canyon would-be a good place to trigger an earthquake?” Sven asked, frowning. “Ho w can you know a thing like that?”

I was silent, baffled by the impossibility of communicating to him any of the grounds for my belief. Sven was an ally, and almost as close to us psychologically as Madelaine. Even so, our contacts were contacts between a “human” species and a nonhuman one. We communicated across a narrow bridge.

“Our senses are different from yours,” I said at last. “You would have to be one of us to know how we know. But we have been aware for a long time that in the canyon was a sensitive spot.”