The Dolphins of Altair

Chapter 6

Madelaine’s shoulder kept bleeding. The left side of her dress was soaked with blood. From the look of the wound and what happened later, I think it mu st have been made by a flying rock splinter chipped off one of the places where the sea gulls used to perch. It was a long gash, not very deep, but it ought to have been stitched up by a doctor.

We did not discuss where we should go. Really, we had little choice. It was plainly impossible to take Sosa (we called Madelaine that sometimes, after a dolphin heroine) westward, to the open sea. The nearest land in that direction was China. North or south, along the coast, the nearest place where we could put Madelaine ashore was the Channel Islands, and that was much too far.

That left the east, back to the shaken California coast, with forty miles of water between us and the mainland. What place should we head for? Sosa, on Ivry’s back, said, “Try for Drake’s Bay. There’s water there.” She passed her tongue over her lips.

Her wound, I thought, was making her thirsty. But Drake’s Bay seemed a good idea. Since it was a public beach, there would be drinking fountains with fresh water, and it was most unlikely anybody would be there, bathing or fishing, on the day after a full-scale earthquake. Sosa-Madelaine could rest there for a day or two. She could even make a fire without rousing suspicion, and do a little cooking. We could catch fish for her.

My mind held other thoughts than these, of course—concern for Sven, worry about the bombers that were certainly approaching, and constant, not yet fully apprehended grief for Blitta’s death. As we began to leave the Farallons behind, Sosa turned to look at the lighthouse, still visible above the horizon. “I hope Sven saw the plane,” she said. She swallowed. “If he did, he’ll realize what happened. Can any of you make mental contact with him?”

“No,” Pettrus answered. “Or with Djuna, either.”

The girl sighed. “I ought to have realized the navy plane was coming before I did,” she said. “Something is getting in the way of our minds.”

Nobody said anything for a while. Ivry was swimming in the middle, with Pettrus on his right and me on his left. I began to wonder why we hadn’t heard the bombers yet. Would they see us from the air, or would they be so intent on their target, Noonday Rock, that we could hope to go unnoticed? Moonlight’s shoulder had stopped bleeding, anyhow.

She stirred uneasily on Ivry’s back. “I think—yes, yes, they’re coming. Dive, all of you! Ivry, too. I’ll hold my breath. Don’t come up until I kick you, Ivry. Dive!”

She filled her lungs. Ivry and the rest of us went under as smoothly as we could.

Ivry said afterwards that he was torn between a wish to go as deep as he could and a fear that Sosa couldn’t stand the sud den increase in pressure. We all were afraid the bombers would see the disturbance in the water and drop explosives on us. One bomb in the right place, and Madeline’s “war against the human race” would have come to an end then and there.

Under the water, I looked anxiously at Madelaine. She had gripped her legs hard against Ivry’s sides and was bent over against him with her hands behind his flukes. I didn’t know how much air her lungs could hold. Blood from her shoulder made a faint haze in the water. She was very pale.

We could hear the roar of the planes overhead. It seemed to go on for a long time. We didn’t know whether or not the girl could hear it. Ivry said he thought she was never going to give him the signal to go up. We were all afraid that she might faint. But at last I saw her left foot move against Ivry. It was the sign to surface. We could go back to the air.

We had been swimming forward while we were under water. We came up a good many yards from where we had submerged. Sosa was breathing in deep gasps. The blood stains on her white dress had turned to a rusty pink. But we seemed to be safe for a while.

Then I saw that the submersion had washed the blood clot from her shoulder. The wound was bleeding again. She lost more blood before a new clot formed.

We got to Drake’s Bay a little before sunset. As far as we could see from the water, there was nobody at all there. Madelaine got off Ivry’s back and walked unsteadily through the surf to the beach.

“I’m so thirsty,” she said. “I’ll try to get a drink. I’ll be back.”

We waited silently. In about five minutes she came out into the surf again, still walking unsteadily.

“The drinking fountain was working,” she said “I was afraid the pipes might have broken in the quake, but they hadn’t. I had a big drink.” She giggled. I thought she sounded a little light-headed.

“There must have been a big wave here last night,” she said. “Wood’s been washed high up on the beach. But I found a place, sheltered from the wind, where there are still coals from a picnic fire. I can bring wood and make up a fire. I can sleep in the sand. There’s nobody here.”

“Would you like us to bring you fish to cook?” I asked. The broad red disk of the sun was almost under the horizon.

“No, I’m not hungry. Water is all I want.” She looked at us thoughtfully, pinching her lip. “Don’t go back to the Rock tonight, any of you,” she said. “I don’t know what’s happened to Sven. I wish I knew. But you mustn’t go back to find out about him or—or for anything.” (She was thinking, I knew, about Blitta.) “The navy will be sweeping the water around the Rock and the other islands, trying to catch any of the sea people they can. Don’t go.”

“All right.”

“Tomorrow,” she said, swallowing—her throat was dry again—“we’ll talk about what to do. Tonight—I’m too dizzy. My head’s not clear;”

We were all nuzzling her hands. “Good night, dear Amtor,” she said. “Good night, dear Ivry, dear Pettrus. Good night.”

“Good night.”

After she had been gone a while, we saw a red glow spring up under the cliffs to the right of where we had put Madelaine ashore. So we knew she had managed to make her fire.

The night passed. We caught fish, we slept in snatches, we talked a good deal. I kept thinking about Blitta, wondering whether her body was still rolling in the water near Noonday Rock, or whether the navy had found her and had taken her away to dissect. They were always eager to dissect us, so they could find out more about how our bodies worked.

Several times during the night we tried to make mental contact with Sven, but we always failed. We couldn’t reach Djuna either, and that made us afraid of what might have happened to them. We discussed Dr. Lawrence’s defection, too. We speculated about how he had left the Rock, and what had led him to betray us, when he had seemed less disturbed by the prospect of the earthquake than the rest of us had.

About three o’clock, when Regulus was setting, there was a slight earthquake shock, and a few minutes later we felt another one. There were no more shocks after that. The earth had settled down to a new period of repose. We heard planes during the night, too, but I don’t know whether they were navy planes out scouting for us, or just the ordinary air traffic.

Dawn came. We expected Madelaine from moment to moment, but she didn’t come. It was broad daylight, nearly eight o’clock, before she came wading out through the surf to us.

“A man saw me,” she said without preamble. Her eyes were large and luminous, and she was trembling. “I went to the fountain for water, and he saw me. I think he works for the park service.

“He looked at me as if I were a ghost.” She laughed, her teeth chattering. “He asked me what was wrong with my arm—it was bleeding again—and I told him I’d been hurt in the quake. I don’t know whether or not he believed me, but he tied my arm up with his handkerchief.

“Then he went to call the Highway Patrol to have somebody take me to a hospital. He says I need medical care. We must get away before he gets back.”

I hesitated. Perhaps it would be better for Moonlight to let herself be taken to a doctor. Certainly she needed medical attention, and perhaps she could join us later, after her wound had been dressed. As to our pursuers being able to extract damaging information from her, she could not tell them anything that Dr. Lawrence would not have already told.

She seemed to read my thoughts. “Take me with you,” she said urgently. “If we are once separated, we will never be able to find each other again. They’ll hold me without bail once they know who I am, and the navy will be hunting you dolphins all along the coast. Take me with you! I don’t want to leave you. And I can still be of help to you.”

“All right,” Pettrus said, speaking for us all. “Get on my back. But where shall we go?”

“To—it’s darkest under the lamp,” Sosa said, climbing on his back. Movement was obviously not easy for her. “To—yes, they say—to Sausalito. It’s not far. We ought to be safe there, for a while. We can hide under the docks.”

Sausalito is a small city inside San Francisco Bay, more or less opposite the city of San Francisco. It is not a deep-water or industrial port, and its docking facilities are modest. Sosa might be right in thinking we could hide there for a while.

Nonetheless, as we swam southwards, toward the Golden Gate Bridge, I felt exceedingly uncertain that we were doing the right thing. Madelaine might prefer hiding under the docks to being in jail, but at least they would dress her wound and give her food and water in jail. As far as we sea people ourselves were concerned, we rather dislike getting inside closed bodies of water, even waters as extensive as those of San Francisco bay. We are happier with the open sea before us. We have an animal dislike of anything that might be a trap, and the level of radioactivity in the bay is uncomfortably high.

We passed under the Gate Bridge. There was no sound of traffic on it at all. Later we learned that the bridge had been closed to traffic ever since the first earth tremor Sunday morning, which had made the whole structure sway dangerously. Subsequent shocks had cracked some of the concrete slabs on the bridge approach straight across. It would be another week before the engineers would decide the big bridge was sound enough to open to traffic again.

We got to Sausalito a little after nine. Here too there were signs of tidal damage—a boat smashed against the pilings, a slab of concrete broken from a little jetty and hurled high up on land. Nobody at all seemed to be about.

“Keep on going,” Madelaine said softly, aware of how sound carries over water. “Do you see that boat anchored at the end of the rock? Take me around behind it.” “But—” I answered cautiously.

“Nobody will think of looking for me behind a boat at anchor. They say, they say… I’ll be safe there.”

What did she mean? We obeyed her unwillingly. As her feet touched bottom she slipped off Pettrus’ back and staggered toward the dank sand at the end of the striped, fish-smelling darkness.

“My shoulder hurts so,” she said softly. It was the first time we had heard her complain. “I wish we had Sven.” She lurched a few steps forward and collapsed at the far end of the dock.

“Madelaine,” I breathed. “Are you—?”

“Oh, yes, my darlings. I’ll be all right.—Traitor! Traitor! We trusted you!”

Even in the poor light, from the water, we could see a red streak running down her arm from her wound. With a start I realized that her wound was infected, and that she was becoming delirious. It was Dr. Lawrence she was speaking to.

Our brave dear Moonlight! Had we brought her to this dubious refuge to die? I felt a terrible sense of the biological gulf between us. We had no hands, we could not even bring her water. What were we to do?