The Dolphins of Altair

Chapter 3

How can an unarmed man get safely away with a bomb from a U.S. Navy arsenal? Sven had devoted a lot of thought to this problem, but the plan of action he had come up with was rudimentary indeed. For the most part, he felt he would have to rely on luck.

He left the Rock before sunset. Madelaine and Dr. Lawrence gave him what money they had with them, and Dr. Lawrence got a prescription pad out of his briefcase and wrote a prescription for a powerful, quick-acting hypnotic.

“I’ve made the signature ‘To be taken as needed’,” he told Sven, unsmiling. “Any drugstore ought to be able to ill it for you.” He put the prescription inside his rubber-lined tobacco pouch and handed it to Sven.

Sven put the pouch in his pants pocket, beside his pocket knife. “Does the stuff dissolve quickly?” he asked.

“Yes. It might taste a little bitter. Beer would be a good medium to administer it in.”

They shook hands. The doctor wished Sven good luck. Madelaine, more demonstrative, kissed him on both cheeks. Then Sven got on Djuna’s back—Djuna and Pettrus were ferrying him to Port Chicago—and was carried away from the Rock. He turned to wave good-bye at Madelaine and Lawrence, standing on the shingle in the glowing light. He was gone.

I should have liked to go with them. A historian ought to be where the action is. But my deformity would have slowed the party down, and three dolphins and a man were a little more apt to attract attention than two dolphins and a man. We didn’t want to attract any attention at all. So I stayed behind, near Noonday Rock.

Sven, astride Djuna’s back, experienced again the extraordinary contentment he had found before in physical contact with one of the sea people. The contentment was always there, like a basic theme in a piece of music, and when he speculated about it, he was always surprised by its intensity. The conscious part of his mind was occupied, however, with the problem of the night: how can an unarmed man get safely away with a bomb from a navy arsenal? Not quite unarmed, perhaps—the knife in his pocket had a sharp two-and-a-half-inch blade. But it was splitting hairs to think of the knife in his dungarees as a weapon. He had never used it for anything more serious than stripping the insulation from electric wires.

Sven had been stationed at Port Chicago for two months’ special training before he had been shipped out to the Middle East. He’d got to know several of the civilian dockside workers well enough to be on drinking terms with them. He’d liked a fellow Scandinavian, a man named Karl Eting, particularly well. If he could find Karl now—but it had been several years; Karl might not be working at the arsenal any more.

Sven shifted his position on Djuna. To cut down wind resistance, he was leaning far forward, like a jockey. Even so, he knew that carrying him had more than halved her normal cruising speed. Pettrus swam beside them silently, making hardly a ripple in the water. And how cold the water was! When they got to Port Chi, Sven thought, he would have to spend some time rubbing his feet before they would be much use for walking.

The man and the dolphins passed under the Golden Gate Bridge. Sven saw the lights and heard the rush of traffic high over his head. Then they were inside the bay. The water was very slightly warmer here.

The moon had come up. San Francisco was a long blaze of light away to the south. Abruptly Djuna’s sleek body shuddered. Sven saw ripples run away from it in the moonlit water. In her high, quick voice she said, “Get on Pettrus’ back. Be quick.”

Sven made the transfer hastily, asking no questions. When Djuna was relieved of his weight, she shot away northeastward in a great burst of speed.

“What’s the trouble?” Sven asked Pettrus. The male dolphin was swimming strongly straight on; Sven had the impression he too was using his reserves of speed.

“Shark,” Pettrus said in his quick gabble. “She’s gone to try to head it off.”

Sven felt a thrill of alarm. He knew, without being told, that the sea people would have nothing to fear from any shark if it were not for him. Their speed, their incredible speed—they were the fastest thing in the whole world of water—was their great safety. But Pettrus was burdened with Sven’s weight. And Djuna had shot unhesitatingly away to try to divert the shark.

Sven swallowed and licked his lips. He had said that he would help the sea people; He had not meant that his friends should run any risk because of him.

He was bent almost flat against Pettrus’ back. The question was no longer, how can an unarmed man get safely away with a bomb? but, more immediately and pressingly, how can a man, armed only with a pocket knife, fight off a shark? His head pressed close to the dolphin’s, Sven said, “I have a pocket knife.”

“Good. Get it ready.” Pettrus plainly didn’t want to waste breath on words.

For a few moments Pettrus swam steadily on to the east. Sven had got the knife from his pocket and was holding it open in his hand. As the moments lengthened, he began to hope that Djuna had succeeded in her mission and that the shark had gone after easier prey. Then a quiver ran through Pettrus’ body. Sven raised his head quickly. To the right, unmistakable in the moonlight, was a triangular fin.

Well, but it might not attack; sharks were cautious, wary animals. It might find a man on a dolphin’s back a combination too disconcerting to molest, it might not attack, it might not… might not…

Pettrus appeared to share Sven’s uncertainty as to the predator’s intentions. He had almost ceased to move through the water. Then the fin cut sharply across Pettrus’ forward path. It banked, returned, banked, and came back again, each time closer to Pettrus and Sven. The shark was moving in.

There wasn’t much doubt now what it intended. Sven felt an odd sort of pressure inside his head, over his eyeballs. It wasn’t fear, it came from outside; and Sven, though he disliked it, had sense enough not to resist. He open ed his mind to it.

The shark made another pass at them, this time so close that Sven felt the water it disturbed churn around his legs. In a moment it would turn belly up and—Pettrus attacked. He gave Sven no instructions; it wasn’t necessary. Sven knew he must try for the enemy’s eyes.

He bent far over, his arm outstretched. Even burdened with a rider, Pettrus could get up a very respectable speed. He had launched himself toward the shark like an arrow shot from a bow.

The shark—angry?, frightened ?—had stopped its ominous cruising and was bearing down on them with equal speed. At the last moment Pettrus winced aside. Sven leaned over and struck.

Even a shark’s eye is tough. But Sven’s knife had the whole force of Pettrus’ muscular body behind it. The blade drove in.

The force of the impact almost wrenched the knife from Sven’s hand. He held on, gripping Pettrus with his knees. The dolphin turned sharply, at an angle to his former course, and the knife was dragged out of the eye again. A gush of blood followed it.

The shark had gone wild with pain and rage. The water frothed white with the fury of its movements. But it still had one eye left; Sven and Pettrus must try again.

The shark had turned belly up and was driving at them. Sven caught a glimpse of its enormous open shearing jaws. Pettrus veered accurately, at the last moment, but Sven’s blow went wild. The shark’s file-rough hide took off part of his trouser leg.

Once more. The shark was losing blood, but this did not make it any less formidable an antagonist. Pettrus had been motionless for an instant, trying, Sven thought, to guess what the enemy would do next. Now he gathered himself and drove toward the shark’s tail.

It was a feint. Pettrus turned, raking his velvet body against the cruel integument. Sven struck. The knife went deep into the eye. Sven felt it grate against the bone of the eye socket.

Pettrus made a quick turn. The knife stayed in the eye. But this time it did not matter. The enemy was blind. The shark could not even track them by smell; the water was too full of the smell of its own blood.

Sven drew a deep breath. The sense of pressure in his head relaxed. Pettrus began to swim eastward again, toward Port Chicago. They left the shark behind them, churning the water dirty white with its furious blood.

“That was good, Sven,” Pettrus said after a little while.

Sven did not answer immediately. He felt that in the struggle just over he had been as much a part of Pettrus as if he had been an arm the dolphin had grown to help in the fight.

“Was it Udra?” he asked at last.

“Yes-s-s. Something like Udra, anyhow. I’m sorry I had to do it so quickly. There wasn’t time to ask your permission, Sven. It was an emergency.”

“I’m glad you did it,” Sven answered sincerely. “How about you? I notice you’re swimming a little less smoothly than usual.”

Pettrus made a blowing noise with his lips. “I lost some skin that last time, when you put out the other eye. That’s one reason we sea people hate the sharks—their hides are so rough. But it’s not serious, only unpleasant. It will grow back.”

“Is Djuna all right?”

“I think so. There was only the one shark. I think—Yes-s, she’s coming this way. She ought to be here in a little while.”

Sure enough, in two or three minutes Djuna came coasting up. She nuzzled Sven’s bare leg interestedly, and ran her snout along Pettrus’ side. She said nothing that was audible to Sven’s ears, but he was sure that she was in possession of a full account of the encounter with the shark.

“Get on my back, Sven,” she said after a moment. “Pettrus is tired.”

Sven was still riding Djuna when they got to their destination. “How will you know when to come for me?” the young man asked as he felt the pebbles of the beach under his feet.

“Don’t worry, we just will,” Djuna replied. Her voice was a little higher than Pettrus’: now that he was used to the sea people, Sven found that their voices were as individual as those of human beings. “But we’ll stay away from shore. We don’t want to be noticed or picked up.” They swam away.

As he walked up from the beach, Sven realized that the adventure with the shark had shaken him considerably. Odd that in an age of nuclear explosives and biological warfare, a shark’s jaws could still retain their archaic terribleness.

His shoes were squelching wetly. He took them off one at a time and drained them. He wrung out his trouser legs. He was wet up to mid-thigh, but the wind ought to dry him. Then he started to look for a pharmacy.

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.

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.