Margaret St. Clair - The Dolphins of Altair

The clerk looked at him a little oddly as Sven gave the prescription to him. The paper the prescription was written on was a little damp, though the words themselves were legible enough; and Sven’s sneakers left damp spots on the pharmacy’s linoleum floor. But the pharmacist filled the prescription without comment. Sven went out with a plastic vial containing twelve five-grain pale pink tablets, two of which, Dr. Lawrence had said, would be enough to put anyone to sleep for four or five hours.

The hardware store next door to the pharmacy was still open. Sven went in and bought a hunting knife in a leather sheath, which he hung from his belt. He hoped he’d never tangle with another shark. But if he did, it would be good to have a proper knife.

He rubbed his hand over his whiskers. Did he look too disreputable to get into a bar? He thought not—Port Chi was an easygoing sort of place. He’d try the Tantivy—he and Karl Eting used to go there for a drink.

The Tantivy was in the next block. Sven pushed open the swing doors, glad his torn pants leg was on the side away from the bartender. He walked toward the back of the room. And there, just as if they had had an appointment, was Karl Eting sitting at a table over a bottle of beer.

Karl looked up as Sven approached him. “I’ll be darned,” he said, getting to his feet and extending a hand toward Sven, “if it isn’t Mrs. Erickson’s little boy Sven! Greetings, my pal! What brings you to this neck of the woods?”

Sven took the outstretched hand and shook it solemnly. “Glad to see you again, Karl. Oh, I just happened to be in Port Chi.”

“Girl?” Karl asked, raising his eyebrows. (He was, Sven thought, slightly drunk. The people were haywire who told you you couldn’t get drunk on beer.) “I don’t think much of your taste. The girls in this town are pigs.”

Sven sat down beside Karl. “Not all of them,” he replied mildly. “What about Darken?”

“Darken and I split up last week,” Karl answered moodily. “Waiter, bring my friend a bottle of eastern beer. I can’t stand a woman telling me how to spend my money.”

“Um,” Sven answered. He had worked the cork out of the plastic vial in his pocket and was surreptitiously shaking out a couple of pills from it.

“This dame you’re chasing must be a hell-cat,” Karl said sourly. “I never knew you to wear a knife before. Or is she married?”

“I’ve joined the Boy Scouts, that’s all,” Sven answered.

Karl found this reply excruciatingly funny. He laughed so hard he choked on the beer he was drinking. Sven might have used the distraction to drop the pills into Karl’s glass, but he wasn’t sure it would do any particular good to drug Karl, and while he was hesitating, the waiter came up with his own bottle of beer.

“You still working on the dock?” Sven asked as he picked up his glass. “Cheers, Karl.”

“Yeah, off and on. See my hard hat? They took new pictures of us yesterday for our badges. Do you think I really look like that?” He tipped the badge on his chest forward for Sven to see.

“It doesn’t look much like you,” Sven answered. “It could be anybody, just about.”

“Yeah, it looks as much like you as it does like me.”

“What shift you working?” Sven wanted to know. He must be careful not to act too interested.

“Graveyard. We’re loading the Mauna Loa III tonight.”

“That so? Anything new in boom-booms since I was here?”

Karl finished his beer. “Well, they do say some of the new little ones are mighty powerful stuff.”

“Nuclear, you mean? They would be.”

“Naw, I don’t think so. Just conventional, but awfully, awfully hot. The y’re underwater mines in pretty little gold cases, about so size.” Karl sketched a four-inch shape on the tabletop. “I heard they were a sort of takeoff on cyclonite.”

Sven swallowed. It sounded like what he was looking for. Nuclear explosives were put, because they might leave a radioactive residue in the water. It would never do for anybody to suspect a link between a stolen bomb, an underwater commotion, and an earthquake.

“They think up new stuff all the time,” he said idly, “Waiter, two more of the same.” to see what the trouble was. Sven tried to whistle ingratiatingly. “Here, boy!” he called, “Good fellow! Whew-whew-whew!”

The sound seemed to infuriate the animal. It began barking in paroxysms, its stiff forelegs bouncing up from the sidewalk with the fury of each outburst. Sven felt sweat trickling down his sides.

What was he to do? He couldn’t throttle the animal with one hand, and that one his left, and the same objection applied to trying to use the hunting knife. Sven couldn’t even kick out at the miserable yapper without overbalancing. Was he, who had blinded a hungry shark with a weapon no more substantial than a penknife, to fail because of a bad-tempered terrier?

Inspiration came. Sven pulled Dr. Lawrence’s tobacco pouch out of his pocket. He shifted his grip on Karl from his friend’s shoulders to his waist, and bent forward. Then he slapped out at the dog’s nose with the tobacco pouch.

The animal jumped back, growling, and then leaped forward again, barking more wildly than ever. Sven repeated the slap. This time, when the dog jumped forward after its recoil, Sven drew back as if frightened. The dog jumped in. And Sven crammed the tobacco pouch into its mouth.

The dog made a choking noise. It began to roll on the ground and paw at its face. Sven was able to get Karl back into position and walk him across the street and into the park. There was still no sound from the dog except muffled gasps.

Sven grinned. He didn’t think he had done the dog any real harm; in fact, he had probably improved its manners. If it was still in a barking mood after it got rid of the tobacco pouch, he thought he’d be able to deal with it.

He sat Karl down on a picnic bench. He started to unpin Karl’s identification badge, and then paused. Better take Karl’s jacket, too—Karl usually wore it to work, and the guard might associate a gray windbreaker with badge number 583. The jacket wasn’t exactly a disguise, but it might help.

He worked Karl’s lax arms out of the jacket sleeves and put on the garment hims elf. He felt in Karl’s hip pocket, and appropriated the pair of cotton work gloves he found there. Karl’s wallet was in the inside pocket of the windbreaker; Sven put the wallet in Karl’s shirt pocket, and carefully buttoned the pocket flap. He put Karl’s hard hat on his head. Then he rolled Karl gently off the picnic bench and under the picnic table. Somebody had left a copy of the Richmond Independent on the table, and Sven covered “his friend up with the sheets of newspaper. He didn’t want Karl to catch cold.

Sven left the park. As he passed the cross street, he saw the tobacco pouch, wet with saliva, lying on the pavement. The dog was nowhere to be seen.

What time was it getting to be? Sven’s watch, not being waterproof, had stopped running shortly after Djuna had first taken him to Noonday Rock, but he thought it must be somewhat after eleven. If he walked slowly, he’d get to the dock just about the right time.

There was a crowd of men waiting outside the dock gate. Sven joined it, feeling inconspicuous enough in the poor fight The real test would be when he went past the guards.

The crowd of waiting workers was not a talkative one. People who work graveyard are usually sleepy and morose when they go on shift. Some loudmouth was carrying on a monologue about the Giants, but nobody seemed to be listening to him.

The whistle for the end of swing shift blew. The exit gate opened and people came hurrying out. A little later, the entrance gate was opened. The men of the next shift began to file in.