The Dolphins of Altair

Chapter 12

Dr. Lawrence looked around the horizon. Kendry’s rocks were so little elevated above the surface of the sea that he was almost as low as if he sat in a rowboat. He seemed to find no help in the wide, flat prospect, and his gaze returned to Madelaine.

“Kendry says she can’t remember?” he repeated. “She must remember. Getting the ahln is too important to dismiss like this. Can’t you enter her mind, Madelaine, the way you did with me when I couldn’t remember how to get rid of the pyrtrol foam?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s a dolphin, and her brain is much more complex than yours. Besides, she is very old. If I tried to enter her mind, in any but the most superficial way, I would probably kill her.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake, there must be some way of reminding her.”

“Perhaps there is, but it can’t be forced.”

Kendry, though she had not understood Lawrence’s words, had understood his tone and was looking at him intently. To me she said, “This is the Split who betrayed us?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Is he really our friend now?” she asked.

“I think so. We have had no reason to mistrust him since he came back. And Sosa seems to think he is reliable.”

Madelaine, who was following our conversation, nodded her head, though not very enthusiastically. “Tell Kendry he is worried because she can’t remember,” she said.

I relayed this message, adding, “Is there any reference to the ahln in the poem of the covenant, Kendry?”

“There may be,” my great-great-great aunt answered slowly. I seemed to have started her on a new train of thought. “There is that passage about the parting and wasting of the waters that might refer to it. I never thought of it in that light before.”

We were all quiet—even the doctor, though he did not understand what had been said—while Kendry softly recited the verses. At the end, she said, “Yes, I think it does mean the ahln. But I still cannot remember how I was told it is made.”

Moonlight let out her breath in disappointment. She shook her head in response to Lawrence’s look of inquiry. A gull swooped low over her head, and she put up her arm to protect herself. The motion made the loose cap sleeve of her dress fall away from her shoulder.

“How did Sosa get that scar on her arm?” Kendry asked.

“That’s where she was wounded during the attack on Noonday Rock,” I answered. “Don’t you remember our telling you she was hurt in the arm?”

“Yes, I remember. I have seen such a scar before—it was—I—no, it’s gone.”

Madelaine had turned to the doctor. “Give me your hunting knife,” she said in a low voice.

He drew it from the sheath and handed it to her. I thought she seemed a little paler than usual. “Tell Kendry this—this will help her remember,” she told me. She drew the hunting knife forcefully across the barely healed scar.

Blood gushed out. Lawrence jumped to his feet and snatched the knife away from her. “Maddy! What are you doing? What’s the big idea?”

Moonlight was clutching her arm underneath the freely bleeding gash. “I think Kendry can tell us now,” she said.

We were all making noises of distress. “Sosa!” Kendry cried. “I don’t understand! Why did you wound yourself?”

“Amtor, tell her to remember the other time she saw a scar, and it was gashed by a knife.”

Ivry was dashing about wildly; as usual when something went wrong, he was inclined to blame Lawrence. Pettrus and I were relatively calm, and Kendry, though she couldn’t help making the distress signal, was trying to do as Madelaine had bidden her.

“I remember,” she said after a minute. “It happened when I was young, a long, long time ago.

“We were swimming along beside a canoe of the Splits, the brown Splits who live on islands in the big calm ocean. It was a big canoe, filled with people, and we were guiding them to a new island, where they had never been before.

“We sea people talked as we swam along, of course; a very old cousin of mine was telling us about something the Old Ones had had, called the ahln.

“The Split in the prow of the canoe had a scar on his shoulder, very like the one Sosa has. One of the oarsmen began to quarrel with him, and suddenly he jumped up from his oar and slashed at the other Split’s shoulder with his knife.

“Blood ran out over the scar, a lot of blood. The other men in the canoe took sides, and in a minute they were all fighting.

“The canoe upset and they all went in the water, even the women. That would not have been serious; they could all swim, and they could have righted the canoe. But the blood in the water drew sharks, more sharks than I had ever seen at one time, and we sea people had to leave the Splits struggling in the water and swim for our lives.

“I suppose they were all killed. I am not surprised I couldn’t remember about the ahln. Seeing a Split hurt is very shocking to one of the sea people.”

“But she remembers now?” Moonlight asked. She was still clutching her arm underneath the wound, to check the bleeding. The blood ran out over her fing ers and down her arm.

Kendry blew a long jet of air after I relayed the question. “Yes, I think so. I am not sure of the names of the metal, but perhaps Amtor can help with them.—It is at least a hundred years since I had thought of it.”

Lawrence had taken off his life jacket and was tearing a strip from the bottom of his shirt to serve as a bandage. He began tying the cloth around Madelaine’s arm. “Did your self-mutilation succeed in jogging Kendry’s memory?” he asked.

“She believes so.”

“Good,” Lawrence answered. “When we get back to the Naomi, you must tell me how you knew it would have that effect. Meantime, see if you can get her to dictate the details of the ahln’s construction to you.” He tied the ends of his bandage in a neat knot, “All right.”

Lawrence got a writing pad and pencil from his pocket and handed them to her. Madelaine seated herself on the rocky surface, the writing pad on her knee and Kendry in the water close to her feet. The tide was rising, and there was less of the rock above water than there had been.

“I can’t tell you how to draw the ahln, Sosa,” Kendry said, faintly distressed. “I shall have to use Udra to make you draw the ahln as it is in my mind. Then you can ask me questions about what you have drawn. Will you object to this?”

“Tell her, not at all,” Madelaine said to me. “She is welcome to use my arm, or my whole body, as she pleases. I don’t find Udra frightening.”

There was a silence. Madelaine sat relaxed, her shoulders drooping, while blood seeped through the bandage on her arm. Her eyes did not seem to be focused on anything. Lawrence lit cigarette after cigarette. The rock area above water diminished steadily.

Slowly Moonlight’s hand began to move. She drew on the writing pad for about fifteen minutes, slowly and steadily, going back occasionally over what she had already drawn.

Her hand stopped moving. She gave a deep sigh. “That’s the ahln,” she said. “Take the pad, Doctor, and take good care of it. I can’t see to hand it to you.”

Lawrence’s hand had gone out to the note pad, but now he stopped, divided between curiosity over the drawing and solicitude for the girl.

“Can’t see to hand it to me?” he said. “What do you mean by that? Is something wrong with your eyes?”

“No. I mean, yes, there is, but I think it will pass. Translating Kendry’s multidimensional picture into human, two-dimensional terms has affected my vision. But I think it will pass. Take the pad, Doctor. Take good care of it.”

He obeyed. Madelaine was rubbing the back of her neck and sighing. He looked at the drawing thoughtfully.

“What are the wires in the upper left corner made of?” he asked after an instant.

“Cy—copper, I think.”

“And what’s that prism-thing in the middle? It doesn’t seem to be glass.”

“No, it’s not,” the girl answered. “Amtor, ask Kendry what the prism is.”

“She says it’s a heavy dull metal that’s quite soft,” I reported. “She says Splits use it on fishing lines. I think she means lead.”

“What’s the purpose of the prism, though?” Lawrence asked.

“Kendry says it regulates the amount of heat that is produced,” I reported.

“Um. And the little helix down on the right? Is it the same as the copper wire?”

“No, it’s not,” Madelaine said after I had put the question to Kendry. “It’s a silvery metal, very heavy, that’s resistant to almost everything. It’s hard to work. Kendry has never seen a specimen of it.”

“She must mean platinum,” Dr. Lawrence said. He was still studying the drawing. “Well, I guess we could make this thing without too much trou ble. Even the platinum wire wouldn’t be impossible.

“But I don’t see what it would do after we made it. For one thing, there’s no indication of a power source on the drawing. It isn’t self-powered, is it? Where does the power come from?” He gave the draw ing a final dissatisfied glance and put it in his breast pocket, under his life jacket.

“Ask Kendry, Amtor,” Madelaine said. She was rubbing her eyes.

“She says it is not self-powered. It has to have an external source of power.”

“Well, what is it? A battery? Electric current? What?”

“She says it is none of these,” I reported after I had relayed Lawrence’s question. “She says she cannot tell us how it is powered, though she knows it is something Splits do not have. But what it is exactly, she has never known. She was never told.”

Dr. Lawrence grew rigid. “Why didn’t the old lady tell us this before?” he demanded angrily. “It would have saved us all trouble, and Madelaine needn’t have that nasty cut on her arm. I don’t see how this contraption could do anything anyhow. But it’s perfectly useless if it can’t be powered.” He gave an exasperated snort.

“Maybe not useless,” Madelaine answered. She reached out her hand gropingly and laid it on the doctor’s arm. “Be patient a little.—Amtor, ask Kendry ab out this.”

Kendry and I talked for several minutes. Madelaine listened carefully, but Lawrence, of course, could only wait.

At last I said, “She says Madelaine and I must unite our minds to try to find out how to power it. We must unite our minds and r each out.”

“Reach out? To where?” Lawrence was still fuming with exasperation.

“She says it will not be easy, but Madelaine has become enough like one of the sea people to make-it possible. We must unite our minds and reach out with all our strength to the sun from which the Old Ones came. We must reach out to Altair.”

“A storm is coming up,” Kendry continued. “Sosa must have a place where she can be quiet and warm before she and Amtor try what they have to do. Sail your boat south, down the coast, and try to find a quiet anchorage.”

Dr. Lawrence, though the water was lapping around his knees when this message was relayed to him, sat motionless. “Before we go off on another wild-goose chase,” he said, “find out from Kendry why she thinks the ahln is powered by something Splits don’t currently have. I don’t want Madelaine to knock herself out only to discover that the ahln is powered by something on the order of a flashlight battery. Ask her, Amtor.”

It occurred to me that Lawrence’s appetite for marvels was temporarily satiated; the idea of trying to make psychic contact with Altair seemed to annoy him.

“She says that ‘powered’ is not exactly the right word,” I reported. “She says that what the ahln needs to be effective might be something Splits do have; she isn’t sure. But the secret lies in how it is used. And she is sure Splits have no knowledge of the principle of the ahln, or they would have made great changes in their environment.

“She thinks we had better start south, before the storm comes up.” I did not repeat the last part of Kendry’s reply, which Sosa had heard as well as I had: that we must use all care to prevent the knowledge of the ahln from coming into the hands of other Splits. There was too much power represented in. it to be trusted to the good intentions of humanity.

“Very well,” Lawrence said. “I suppose we’d better try it, anyhow. Ivry, may I ride on your back till we get to the Naomi?”

“All right,” Ivry agreed without enthusiasm. Sosa was already astride me. She leaned forward and caressed Kendry’s head delicately.

“Tell her good-bye, and that we will hope to see her again,” she said.

Kendry answered, “Yes, we can hope. But I am getting old. Sosa, if I never see you again, remember how happy I am that you came to help us in our need. Good-bye, dear Sosa.”

We began to swim away. Moonlight waved her hand in farewell. As we looked back at Kendry’s rocks from a distance, we saw that the water had almost closed over them.

By the time we got back to the Naomi, the first drops of rain had begun to fall. The doctor had Madelaine lie down on the settee in the cabin. Then he sent me down to bring up the anchor, while he laid a course to the south.

“Can you dolphins swim ahead and warn me of any rocks?” he asked. “I want to sail close to the coast, so I can see if we get near a suitable anchorage.”

This was agreed, and Lawrence had Sosa take the wheel briefly while he put a better bandage on her arm and gave her an injection of penicillin. Then he took the helm again.

We soon left the storm behind us, except for brief squalls and bursts of rain. A little before dusk, the doctor saw a small circular bay ahead of us. It seemed to be the site of a village: small craft were drawn up on the beach, and there was a tiny jetty where a larger boat was moored. It was obviously the place he had been looking for.

He took the Naomi in neatly and tied her up beside the other boat. “You dolphins had better go out to sea,” he told us softly. “Strangers in a place this size a re sure to attract a lot of attention.-Come back tonight, when the lights are out and it’s quiet, and we’ll try this reaching-out-to-Altair bit.”

“All right,” I answered. “Are you sure you can keep Madelaine warm enough, Doctor? Kendry said it was import ant.”

“I think so. It’s warm in the cabin, and I can cover her with my jacket. You’d better go now.”

We swam unobtrusively. The doctor had been right; by the time Madelaine came out on the deck, everybody in the little town had come down to the jetty to look at the strange boat. They jostled each other, stared with bright dark eyes, and tried to sell the two North Americans baskets, serapes and fruit. Fortunately it was getting dark, and in an hour or so the visitors went home to supper. The Naomi was left alone.

“I wish I’d worked harder at Spanish when I was in high school,” Lawrence said. “As it is, ‘buenas dias’ and ‘quanto vale’ are about my limit. Don’t touch that fruit, Maddy, until I’ve dipped it in a sterilizing solution. Lie down on the settee, and I’ll open something for us to eat.”

“All right. Did you find out what the name of this place is?”

“Bahia something or other.” He was busy with the can opener. “You know, Maddy, there are lots of things in what Kendry told us that I don’t understand. For instance, how can knowledge of the ahln’s power source be communicated telepathically—I suppose that’s what’s involved in ‘reaching out to Altair’—when the knowledge of how to construct the ahln itself couldn’t be communicated that way.”

“I don’t know either,” Madelaine answered. “I think it must be something quite simple, so simple that telepathic communication will do for it. Of course, it may need telepathy of a special kind.”

“Perhaps.” He plainly wasn’t satisfied. He dumped cold canned chow mein onto paper plates. “And then, about the ahln itself. We talk about a power source for it, but is the ahln a device for releasing heat from a fuel it destroys in the way that a furnace releases heat from coal, or is the ahln a machine that acts to create heat from a power source that activates it, like an electric heater? Is what we’re going to try to get from Altair knowledge of a fuel, or of a power that can be transformed into great heat? I think these are quite different ideas.”

“It might be neither,” Madelaine answered thoughtfully. “The ahln might be like a pipe that conducts heat from a power source, like a pipe that carries hot water away from a geyser or an underground hot spring. It is possible there are sources of heat in the universe that human beings are not aware of,” she said. “I don’t mean atomic energy, I mean—the energy that creates atoms. Perhaps the ahln taps that. Perhaps it goes back in time, to the beginning of the universe, and brings heat back from there. Perhaps—well, I suppose we will have to wait to find out.”

She hesitated. “Something else is bothering me,” she said. “How are we to reach out to Altair? I mean, to Altair specifically. There are billions and billions of suns in the universe, there are thousands of stars visible in the sky. How are Amtor and I to aim for Altair? Surely the name alone isn’t enough!”

“I can show you Altair in the sky, if you don’t know where it is,” the doctor offered. “It’s sure to be visible later in the night. Would that help?”

“It might. I’ll ask Amtor when he conies back. Kendry wouldn’t have told us to do it unless she thought it was possible. Let’s eat, and then try the fruit. It looks good.”

Meantime, we sea people were enjoying good fishing in the warmer-waters. Once or twice we had shark scares, but, since we weren’t carrying passengers, we outdistanced the predators easily. We went back to the Naomi a little before ten.

There were no lights in the village and, except for a dog barking somewhere, no sounds either. Lawrence and Madelaine were out on deck.

“Madelaine!” I called softly.

“Amtor! The doctor has been showing me the star he says is Altair. I’ve been wondering…” She explained her difficulty to me.

“I don’t think reaching out for Altair will be difficult,” I answered. “It’s one of the stars we sea people navigate by, and we are always aware of where it is. Let me do the reaching out, Sosa. Abandon your mind to me.”

“All right. The doctor thinks I should lie down on the settee in the cabin. Will the reaching out be like Udra?”

I saw she was a little nervous. “It will be like Udra at first,” I told her. “Later—I don’t know. We can’t tell until we try.”

The Splits went into the cabin. I floated in the water near the jetty, Ivry on one side of me and Pettrus on the other, and tried to get into the Udra-state. Moonlight and I had been in psychic contact a number of times before, of course, and she was not unused to Udra, either; but we both felt that this time was going to be different in its nature from anything before. For one thing, we must try for a more intimate psychic union than any we had had earlier; and then, we had never tried to reach such a target together. Splits say that light from Altair must travel for almost sixteen years to reach our earth.

My mind touched Madelaine’s. Men and dolphins are of one stock, but by now the gulf between us is enormous. It is a constant miracle that we can communicate at all. Our sensory equipment is not identical: we sea people have a pressure sense and a navigational sense that seems to have no human analogue; and human color vision is so much better than ours as to be almost a separate sense, though we can see farther into the ultraviolet and infrared regions than Splits can. And there is a constant, basic difference caused by the human possession of hands.

This gulf between Madelaine and me, this sensory and mental difference, meant that in our knowledge of each other there would be places where we could only be conscious of a terrifying, incomprehensible void. And yet our minds must join, and join very closely, if we were to reach out for Altair.

Time passed. The edges of Sosa’s mind and mine, despite our mutual fear, began to overlap. We were getting closer and closer. And then, like a diamond blade cutting into my brain, I got a violent psychic shock.

It was different from, and worse than, the shock I had had in Sausalito when I was in the Udra-state and the dolphins near Hawaii were killed. Ivry and Pettrus say I gave a scream, so high-pitched that they could hardly hear it They were thoroughly alarmed.

My first thought was that Dr. Lawrence had taken advantage of Sosa’s being in a trance state to attack her with his hunting knife. It was the kind of idea Ivry would have had, but I had it.

What had really happened was something different. Madelaine, in the Naomi’s cabin, was breathing quietly, her eyes closed, when Lawrence saw, or thought he saw, two fine greyish threads rising into the air from her breasts. The threads joined together about a foot above her chest and curled away in a thicker strand into the darkness of the ceiling.

This was not very different from the kind of thing Lawrence had often encountered in his study of the literature of spiritualism, but he was startled to see it actually happen. He took the girl’s pulse—it was very slow and weak—and then put a thermometer in her arm pit. She had felt cold to his touch, and when he read the thermometer, the mercury was so low that he decided he had better try to get her back to normal consciousness at once. It was this abrupt withdrawal of Sosa from her psychic contact with me that had shocked me so.

I soon realized that Moonlight was alive and conscious, but I wanted to know what had happened. I called softly until Dr. Lawrence came out on deck. He explained what had happened, and added, “Tomorrow I’ll get some sort of heater from the village—a charcoal brazier, if they don’t have any better means of warming themselves—and we’ll try again. Madelaine has to be kept warmer during the reaching-out ramp than I realized.”

Ivry said, “We want to see Moonlight.”

“She’s still weak—”

“You can carry her, can’t you?” Ivry was getting excited. “Bring her out on the deck!”

Lawrence shrugged. In a minute he came back carrying Madelaine in his arms. She was a small light girl, but he was a small man; he was panting when he put her down.

“I’m all right,” she told us. “The doctor was right to rouse me when he did, but it must have been horrid for you, Amtor.”

She had answered my not quite conscious fear that Lawrence had roused her when he did to damage us both. “We’ll try again tomorrow,” I said, not much liking the idea.

She was silent for a perceptible length of time before she said, “Yes.”

Early next morning Lawrence went shopping in the village and came back with a brazier, a basket of charcoal, and a machine-made serape. “Half the population was following me,” he told Madelaine as he put his purchases away. “They watched every move I made. I never was more stared at in my life.”

“Why do you think that was?” the girl asked from the settee. She was still lying down; Lawrence insisted on her getting as much rest as she could.

“I don’t know enough Spanish to be sure, but I gather they’re puzzled why anybody should stay in Bahia what’s-its-name any longer than he has to. They think something funny is going on, and they’re curious. I hope their curiosity gets satisfied before tonight.”

Madelaine was twisting her fingers together nervously. “Doctor,” she said, “I’m—I’m afraid.”

“Afraid? You mean, of this reaching-out-to-Altair stuff?”

“Yes.”

He sat down on the cabin floor facing her, in a languid pose. It was odd, Madelaine said later, to observe how this avowal of fear on her part had returned him to his role of psychotherapist, and her self to the place of his patient.

“Afraid,” he said thoughtfully. “What does it seem to you that you’re afraid of?”

“I don’t know. Of nothing. I mean, of nothingness.”

“Can you pinpoint your fear a little more exactly?”

“I’ll try. I’m afraid of getting so far away from my body. It’s such a long way to Altair!” She tried to laugh.

“It sounds as if you were afraid of dying,” Lawrence offered.

“I don’t think it’s that. I mean, you’re a doctor. You’d keep me from dying, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d certainly try to. I doubt there’s really much danger of your dying.”

She sighed. Before she could say anything more, they both heard footsteps on the jetty. Somebody peeked in at the cabin window and then, when they looked up, quickly withdrew.

“Peeping Tom,” Lawrence said. “—If you don’t think you’re afraid of dying, what do you think it is?”

“It frightens me to think of what I’m afraid of.”

“We get this sort of thing in therapy all the time,” he observed. “If we had plenty of time to put in on it, I could probably get you over being frightened to think of the cause of your fear. As it is, I recommend that you endure being frightened, and try to tell me what frightens you.”

“All right. I’m afraid of being all alone in the abyss of space.”

“Um. Will you be all alone? I thought Amtor would be with you.”

“Amtor!” Her face relaxed a little. “Yes, but that’s not enough. Perhaps the abyss in him is what I’m afraid of. I’m not sure. It seemed like that, last night.

“After all, Doctor, nobody has ever done anything like this before. It’s natural I should be afraid.”

“I suppose you mean that your fear is something there’s no use in trying to deal with by psychotherapy,” Lawrence said. “You may be right. Are you too afraid to try the reaching-out -to-Altair stunt, though?”

“Ye—No. Kendry wouldn’t have told us to try it unless it were possible. I’m frightened. But I’ll try.”

At ten o’clock that night the Naomi was still under surveillance by the villagers. Ivry and Pettrus and I, back from our fishing, could see the dark shapes of men along the beach and hear the low murmur of talk. Now and then somebody would run up on the jetty, peer in the Naomi’s window, and then run away again.

We were all getting restless. Lawrence had made a fire in the brazier, and the cabin was suitably warm. But Madelaine was keyed-up and tense, a bad mood in which to attempt telepathic contacts or Udra; and we sea people wanted to consult with our Split friend before making a second attempt at what Lawrence called “the Altair bit.” We waited impatiently.

“Let’s put out the light in the cabin,” the doctor suggested to Madelaine. “If they think we’ve gone to bed, they may go away.”

“All right. I wonder why they’re so suspicious of us? Our behavior hasn’t been peculiar enough to account for all this. Something unpleasant must have happened here recently. I can almost pick up what it was.”

Lawrence switched off the light and sat down on the cabin floor. Time passed. Madelaine coughed nervously. At last the doctor rose and softly went to the cabin window. He peered out just as one of the villagers, who had tiptoed along the jetty, peered in.

For a moment the two shadowy faces stared at each other, locked in mutual consternation. Then the villager broke away. His running feet pounded along the jetty and out on the sand.

“‘Das ist der Teufel, sicherlich,’” said Lawrence, sitting down again on the floor. “Now I know what Papageno felt when he encountered the villainous Monostatos unexpectedly. But the worst of it is, our watchers now are sure we aren’t asleep. Who will out-wait whom?”

“I wish we could get started,” Sosa said. “Amtor’s getting impatient, too. But I want to talk to him before we try it. It’s going to be hard enough anyhow.”

“Yes. Maddy, had it occurred to you to wonder what the nature of the force is that you’re going to use in the reaching-out process?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Well, I suppose it will be basically telepathic. Amtor said it would be something like Udra at first—”

“Yes.”

“But what is Udra. Or, for that matter, telepathy? It’s always assumed that telepathy operates instantaneously. But on a terrestrial scale, that could mean it operates at the speed of light. Nobody has timed telepathic experiments to be sure there’s not that much of a time lag.

“But when it comes to contacting Altair, the force must be instantaneous. Otherwise, it would take Amtor and you fifteen and a half years to get there with your question, and fifteen and a half years to get back with the answer. Now, what is it that, over a space which light takes almost sixteen years to span, can be instantaneous? What is the nature of the force?”

“I don’t know,” Madelaine answered. “I wish you’d stop, Doctor.”

“Why? Am I making you nervous?”

“Yes. Uncomfortable. It’s like a surgeon discussing the technique of an operation with the patient he’s going to operate on. I—what was that?”

Something had struck the Naomi’s hull a sharp blow. “I think somebody threw a rock at us,” Lawrence answered. “I’m going outside.”

There was nobody on the jetty, but he could see, dimly outlined against the sky, the shapes of men. “Hey!” he shouted in English into the darkness, “Who threw that rock?”

There was no answer, but, after a moment, another rock whizzed past his head.

Lawrence could see no point in staying longer at such a hostile anchorage; with what dignity he could muster, he untied the Naomi and started her motor. “Buenas noches!” He shouted ironically to the faceless men in the dark. The Naomi moved away from the jetty, to the accompaniment of a muttering from the men on the shore. She turned in the little bay and headed straight out to sea.

We sea people followed, of course. It was a very dark night. When we were out of earshot of the village, Lawrence cut the little craft’s speed. “Amtor! Could one of you dolphins find out what the bottom’s like here? I’ll anchor if it’s suitable.”

“I’ll go,” Pettrus said from the water in his loud, gabbling voice. Pettrus had an acute pressure sense and was the best of us three when it came to gauging depth.

When he came back with the news that the bottom was quite suitable, Moonlight was standing by the rail, talking to me.

“Are you afraid, Amtor?” she asked. “Yes, Sosa.”

“What of? Or do you know?”

“Of—of the terrible gulf of space. Of bottomless space.”

“The inner space, or outer space?”

“Both,” I replied.

“But we’ll be together in outer space, won’t we?” she asked.

“Yes, of course. And we may not even perceive it as outer space.”

“So all we have to worry about is the inner space!” She laughed though she did not sound particularly amused. “Amtor, I’ve be en thinking that perhaps you ought to be kept warm, too, when we try to reach out.”

“I expect I should. But the water here is warm, much warmer than I’m used to, and Ivry and Pettrus will be beside me in case my body loses buoyancy. Don’t worry about it, Moonlight. As to the inner gulf that frightens us both—”

“Well?”

“I think there is a way to bridge it.”

“What?”

“Don’t you know, Sosa?”

“Yes, I think I do. Love is the bridge over the gulf.” She leaned far over the rail, so that her fingertips were in the water, and I nuzzled them. “You and I were in close contact that time before, when Dr. Lawrence thought he had to rouse me. What comes after that stage?”

“I expect we must lose all sense of our, separate identity. Don’t be frightened, Sosa. Trust yourself to me. I’ll do the reaching-out toward our home star.”

“All right.” She went into the cabin. Lawrence had put more charcoal in the brazier, and the cabin, though he had left the door ajar for ventilation, was very warm. He had her lie down and covered her with the serape he had bought. He took her pulse, listened to her heart, and read her temperature. “All OK,” he said. “You and Amtor can begin.” He sat down beside her on the floor.

The first stages of contact were easier than they had been last time. The Naomi slewed about occasionally; she was more in motion than she would have been at the jetty in Bahia what-have-you. It did not disturb Madelaine unduly, though once or twice she sighed. I think Lawrence found the loose motion more disturbing than she did.

Abruptly, her mind and mine were coterminous. Lawrence said a gray wisp came out of her mouth. And then she and I both felt, not a sense of gulfs and emptiness, but a dreadful sense of pressure.

For me, it was like making a very deep dive much too fast. That is a translation into physical terms, of course. Moonlight said she felt as if her mind, her personality, had become an exquisitely sensitive bladder, and the bladder were being insupportably compressed on all sides.

It was not only psychologically painful, but it frightened us besides. We both realized it was because, though our minds were coterminous, they were not really united yet. We exerted pressure on each other because we were still separate. There was an embrace yet to be made that we both shrank from; and only our affection for each other could make us brave enough to dare the gulf.

The pressure increased. Painful as it was, we hesitated an instant longer. But we were committed, and the love between the woman and the dolphin was perfectly real. The union could, and must, be made.

We dared it. It gave immediate relief from the pressure, but we had barely enough time to realize that our minds were truly joined before the whirling began. We went whirling over and over like a patchwork pinwheel, a hand-standing harlequin, a gaudy double tumbler. There was something joyous in our intoxicated mental motion, and if I was a tumbler doing cartwheels, Madelaine was a dolphin leaping in the sun. Actually, we both were each other.

The giddy whirling stopped. No time to waste. The duad of Sosa and Amtor must reach out. It knew its goal.

It must have been about this time that Lawrence, in the well-heated little cabin, took Madelaine’s body temperature. It was below normal, but not dangerously so, and he felt that the “reaching-out-to-Altair bit” could be allowed to go on. Ivry and Pettrus, who floated beside me during the whole experiment, said that my breathing had become noticeably slow.

To “reach out” meant that the Sosa-Amtor duad had to extricate itself from the grip, of which people are ordinarily quite unconscious, of all the billions of minds on our one earth. Usually dolphins and men are stuck in a sort of psychic glue. That is what the duad now experienced.

We churned helplessly in the grip of this mental adhesive until we—the duad—realized it must draw in on itself, become hard and smooth and small. It must encapsulate itself, like a seed. Then it would be out, and free.

I don’t know why this was easy, but it was. As soon as we thought of it, it happened. The duad was on its way.

It takes light almost sixteen years to reach the earth from Altair, The duad would have been there instantly, without regard for the distance—space is nothing—but there were interstellar magnetic fields in the way. I do not mean to give the impression that there was any visual awareness of this. That was not how the duad knew of the existence of the fields. But our progress was slowed.

Slowed and stopped. This was the isolation Sosa and I had feared, the terrible gulf of outer space. We were mere points, the duad was one point. But its duality comforted itself.

The fields must be overleaped somehow. Here, I think, the duad drew without knowing it on the same force that powers the ahln. But here it was volitional and personal.

Other stars’ clutched at us. The duad might, even now, have been deflected. But our old home star was reaching out its hands to help; there are billions of minds on that sun’s planet. They are different from the minds of dolphins or men, of course. The million years between have made much difference. But the Sosa-Amtor duad could not only communicate with the minds of Altair’s planet, it was also expected there and welcome. Those minds had had something to do with Madelaine before, when she slept so long.

Now those minds impressed our single consciousness as a wavering, patterned brightness. It seemed to advance and withdraw continually. When Madelaine and I discussed this later, we agreed that the minds of Altair’s planet had been afraid of distressing their duad visitor, and that they had hidden from it something of what they were, under this image of fire.

What were the people of that planet like physically? (They weren’t, of course, disembodied intelligences.) Here Madelaine and I disagree, she thinking them to be like Splits, and I like the sea people. Perhaps some day we shall really find out.

At any rate, the duad could communicate with them. They knew why it had come. There was no need to argue or beg. Someone—they—many people—the wavering brightness—told the duad what it wanted to know: the secret of powering the ahln.

It was simple, a thing to be learned instantly and remembered easily. And now that it was learned, the Sosa-Amtor duad wanted to get back. Bodies cannot last long without their psychic tenants; our bodies, back on earth, drew us powerfully. And earth herself, with all the kindred minds, called like a familiar voice.

Once more the duad had to overleap the magnetic fields. It must make haste. But the way back was easier. Earth pulled her exiles as the planet of Altair had not.

Sosa’s mind and mine fell away from each other suddenly. The duad was two separate beings now. The strange identity was over. We were back on earth.

Madelaine stirred on the little couch in the Naomi’s cabin, and then sat up. She was shivering violently. Lawrence, who was hovering over her, was rubbing her arms and hands. “Did you do it?” he asked eagerly. “Your heart was so slow I was afraid you weren’t all right.”

She yawned and smoothed her hair. “Yes, we’ve been there,” she answered soberly. “We got what we went for. It’s easy to use. It frightens me that they trusted us with it.

“We learned other things too, I think. There may be at least one useful side product. But the chief thing is, we know how to power the ahln.”