Margaret St. Clair - The Dolphins of Altair

The guards, Marines armed with rifles, stood one on either side of the gate, and the men went past them two abreast. Sven was familiar with the procedure from the time he had spent at Port Chi earlier; he did not think the identity check would be a severe one. Nonetheless, he was considerably relieved when the guard on his side, glancing quickly from Sven’s badge to his face, let him by without remark.

The check-in booth, plastered with no smoking signs, was just ahead. Here too another Marine with a rifle stood on guard. Sven passed him, found his time card in the rack inside the booth, and punched it in the time clock. He put the punched card in the appropriate place in the “Out” rack, dropped the two folders of matches Karl’s windbreaker had contained in the box labeled “Leave Matches Here,” and walked on out. So far so good.

But now he was confronted with a really acute problem.

The Mauna Loa III, brilliant with floodlights and temporary lights, was just ahead. Should Sven report for work to Abrams, Karl’s lead man, or make himself busy on the dock, or go up the gangplank onto the ship? The proper answer to these questions depended on something he had no way of knowing—whether Karl had been on Abrams’ crew long enough for Abrams to associate badge number 583 with Karl’s face. Sven couldn’t possibly be mistaken for Karl by anybody who knew him well.

On the other hand, if he made a show of activity on the dock, say in the warehouse, piling cases of ammo on pallets for the fork-lift operators, he might be able to escape attention for a good while, and he ought to have a chance of locating one of the mines Karl had told him about. He’d try that.

He walked toward the warehouse on the left. A lot of men were busy there. He was just inside the door when a man whose hard hat bore the insigne of a supervisor spoke to him.

“Where you going, man?”

Sven’s heart was beating fast. If he answered that he’d been told to work in the warehouse, the supervisor would ask who told him to, and—“Looking for Abrams, sir,” Sven replied.

“He’s behind you, on the dock.” The supervisor pointed.

“Thank you, sir.” Sven turned around and walked toward the man the supervisor had indicated. There was no help for It, The superior was watching him. He’d have to risk speaking to Abrams.

Abrams—he really did look a lot like a gorilla in a comic strip—had his hands full of papers. He was frowning and preoccupied. When he looked up, Sven said, “I’m on your crew, Mr. Abrams.”

“New man?” Abrams answered, hardly looking at him.

“Transfer from day, sir.”

“What’s your name?”

“Harry Olsen.”

“I guess your transfer slip hasn’t come through yet. Well, Harry, go down in number two hold and help unload the skips.”

“Yessir.”

Sven went up the gangplank, crossed the ammunition ship’s deck, and clambered down into the hold. Whew, But he was all right now.

The men in the hold were moving cases of mortar shells from the skip and stacking them in tiers parallel to the bulkhead. Sven pulled on his cotton work gloves and began stacking cases like the others. The only trouble with his present situation was that he wasn’t interested in mortar shells. What he wanted was one of the mines Karl had described to him.

The skip was emptied. The crane took it away. The next load, to Sven’s disappointment, was more mortar shells, and after that a skip full of machine-gun rounds.

Time passed. It must be getting near the lunch hour, Karl would be beginning to wake up in thirty minutes or so. And still nothing but ammunition for guns of one or another sort.

The crane let down another load. “Mines,” said one of Sven’s fellow workers. “Well, it’s a change. They don’t weigh as much as those damned mortar shells.”

Sven licked his lips. Yes, this was what Karl had been talking about. The mines were packed in shallow trays molded to fit them, rather like lidless egg cartons, six to a tray. Each mine appeared to be encapsuled in transparent plastic, with a plastic ring at one end for ease of handling. They were rather pretty, really—elongated spheres of gold-colored metal, gleaming softly through their transparent covering. They reminded Sven of overgrown hand grenades.

“I’ve never loaded mines before,” Sven said to the man who had spoken. “How come they don’t have covers on the boxes?”

“Oh, we put plastic dividers between the rows when we load them. I guess it’s because when you need mines you don’t want to have to waste time taking covers off cases. Or maybe some contractor sold the navy a bill of goods. Who knows why the navy does anything?”

Sven nodded. He picked up a case of mines and carried it over to where the others were putting the cases down. He didn’t know what to do. It would be easy enough to pick up one of the mines and put it inside his windbreaker; the hold was full of shadows, and he could take the bomb while he was laying down the plastic divider. His jacket had an elastic strip at the bottom that would help keep the thing in place.

The trouble was the size of the mine. Inside his windbreaker—or anywhere else on his person—it would make a large, prominent, unnatural bulge. The first person who glanced at him would say, “What the hell have you got inside your shirt?”

And yet, he had to act quickly. Karl would be waking up in the next few minutes, and as soon as he realized what had happened, he would go to the police. He would tell them that his jacket, his identification badge and his hard hat had been stolen. It shouldn’t take even a Port Chicago policeman more than a few minutes to locate Sven, illegally working in a U.S. Navy arsenal.

The crane lowered another skip into the hold. This time the skip’s load was cases of mortar shells. It looked as if no more mines would be coming down for a while.

He’d have to risk it. It might be his only opportunity. Sven began laying down the plastic divider over the top of the last row of mines. When he got to the third box he picked up a mine by the plastic ring and put it in the front of his windbreaker. It was even more prominent than he had thought it would be. It made him look pigeon-breasted. He’d have to try to stay in the shadows. It was the best he could do.

Abrams stuck his head over the hatch coaming. “See if you can’t get those shells off the skip before lunch, men,” he yelled. “You, Harry—aren’t you done with the mines yet?”

“In a minute, sir,” Sven answered, “I—” The whistle blew for lunch.

Sven felt an intense relief. At the first note of the whistle everybody had put his load down and hurried toward the foot of the hatch ladder. Now they were swarming up it, one after the other. It would take only a reasonable amount of dawdling for Sven to manage to be the last man out of the hatch.

It worked. Everyone was in a hurry to be off the ship and start eating lunch. Sven got out of the hold and up on deck without anyone seeming to notice him. But as he started to go behind the deckhouse, where he would be safe from observation by anybody on the dock, Abrams, who was going down the gangplank, turned and caught sight of him.

“Harry! Where are you going?” he yelled.

“After my lunch, sir. I left it on the deck.”

“OK. Remember, you’re not supposed to eat on the ship.”

“Yessir.”

He hadn’t seemed to notice the unnatural bulge of Sven’s chest. Perhaps Abrams was nearsighted, perhaps he was in too much of a hurry for his lunch to be observant. It didn’t matter. Sven had no time to waste in speculation.

The Mauna Loa was riding lower in the water now. Sven stepped over the deck rail. He hesitated for the fraction of a second. Then he let himself down into the water as noiselessly as he could. He began to swim away from the ship.