The Dolphins of Altair

Chapter 2

It was a gray day, with the sky lowering and dull and an oily swell on the slate-colored water. Sea gulls wheeled and banked endlessly over the heads of the three Splits who were sitting on the pebbly beach, as close as they could get to us in the water. We—at least a hundred sea people and the three who sat facing us—were holding a council of war.

It had been going on since early morning. There was no disagreement about what we wanted to accomplish; as Madelaine had told Dr. Lawrence, the first thing was to free the imprisoned sea people. But there was much argument as to h ow we could accomplish it.

The dolphin research and training project—DRAT—was top secret. From the land, only a handful of high-ranking navy officers had access to it, and even they had to pass check points and wait for the opening of locked doors. From the sea, a series of concrete walls and baffles cut our people off from contact with their free element. It was not going to be easy to break down those massive concrete walls.

Madelaine listened to the discussion, her head propped on her hand. Dr. Lawrence sat on her left. His rolled-up trouser legs and sprouting beard gave him a raffish appearance, but he still carried the polished briefcase he had had when he came to the Rock.

Sven sat at Madelaine’s right. I was not as used to the faces of Splits th en as I afterwards became, but I thought he looked much happier than he had when I first saw him, though he frowned from time to time at what the speakers said. His eyes were often fixed on the girl.

Djuna had been speaking. She had been describing how armed guards were posted on the seaward parts of the walls. “Nobody could get close enough to the concrete to set off a bomb,” she told us positively. (The bomb had been a suggestion of Sven’s, made about half an hour earlier.) “There are searchlights, and the guards shoot at anything they see in the water. The navy has nets out, too, and an alarm rings if the mesh is broken. But the guards and the lights are the main trouble. They started stationing guards after a couple of us sea people got out of the pools at Capitola.”

Djuna’s high, rapid speech stopped. (When we sea people talk to Splits, we have to take pains to pitch our voices low and speak slowly; our communication with each other is out of human auditory range, and very rapid.) There was a silence. The gulls overhead gave their harsh cries. Then Dr. Lawrence, still holding his briefcase, got to his feet.

He cleared his throat and teetered on the balls of his feet for a moment. Then he said, “It’s obviously impossible to get the dolphins out by land. Transporting three hundred pygmy whales, each seven feet long, back to the water is something that couldn’t possibly be done secretly. We’d be stopped before we got more than a couple out. And Djuna has told us, pretty convincingly, that nobody can get close enough to the sea walls to set off a bomb. But a severe earthquake would break down the walls and give the dolphins access to the sea. We must have an earthquake.”

“You mean that we must have a miracle?” Madelaine asked wonderingly.

“No, we must make it happen,” Dr. Lawrence answered.

Rain began to fall from the leaden sky, at first a soft pattering, and then bigger drops. “How?” Sven asked, over the growing noise of the rain. He glanced at Madelaine. “It seems to me it would be more difficult to cause an earthquake to order than it would be to get through the guards with a bomb.”

Dr. Lawrence squatted down on his heels. He seemed to be uncomfortable standing upright in the increasing rain. “I’m no geologist,” he answered. “But sometimes a small initial cause can create great effects.

“The whole California coast is part of the Pacific ring of fire. The San Andreas Rift—a major fault—runs through the San Francisco Bay area, and can be traced along the coast for about six hundred miles. All the DRAT stations are located within this six-hundred-mile stretch.

“A big quake on this part of the coast is long overdue. Sooner or later there will be a major quake, and without human intervention. But we need not wait for that. A quake is, so to speak, waiting to happen. It is up to us to trigger it.”

Sven was frowning intently. “How?” he asked again.

Dr. Lawrence drew a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped at his streaming face. The rain was coming down steadily now. “With a bomb,” he said.

He coughed. “If a powerful bomb were placed at a suitable spot, a spot underwater, which would augment the force of the explosion, I think it might do the trick. Of course, we can’t be sure till we try it. But I think it would work.”

“What would be a suitable spot?” Sven asked.

Dr. Lawrence rubbed the lower part of his face with his right hand. “Ask your sea people,” he said. “They must be familiar with the edges of the continental shelf. Ask them if they know a suitable spot.”

Through the blur ring rain, I could see that Sven and Madelaine were looking at me. “Amtor, do you know of a place like that?” asked Madelaine.

I would have liked to avoid answering. “Yes,” I replied reluctantly, “I think I do.”

“Where?” Madelaine asked.

“Perhaps—off the coast near Monterey. There’s a submarine canyon there.”

“Would one bomb do it?” Sven inquired. “I think so, if it were powerful.”

“How do you know that the submarine canyon would-be a good place to trigger an earthquake?” Sven asked, frowning. “Ho w can you know a thing like that?”

I was silent, baffled by the impossibility of communicating to him any of the grounds for my belief. Sven was an ally, and almost as close to us psychologically as Madelaine. Even so, our contacts were contacts between a “human” species and a nonhuman one. We communicated across a narrow bridge.

“Our senses are different from yours,” I said at last. “You would have to be one of us to know how we know. But we have been aware for a long time that in the canyon was a sensitive spot.”

“You didn’t mention this when we were discussing how to break down the sea walls on the pools,” Dr. Lawrence observed mildly.

“Of course not,” I answered. “To cause a quake deliberately would be a violation of the covenant”

Pettrus—a half-brother of mine, and the other dolphin who had escaped with Djuna from the pools at Capitola—came coasting through the water and stopped as close as he could get to where the Splits were sitting on the beach. “A violation of the covenant would be justified in self-defense,” he said in his high-pitched voice. “But a quake would kill people, perhaps millions of them, who haven’t harmed us and whose deaths wouldn’t benefit us. We can’t do that.”

“But it—” said Dr. Lawrence, and then stopped. He got to his feet, peering through the blur of raindrops toward a commotion in the distant water, a hundred yards or so from the rocky shore. Madelaine had risen, too, and was pressing her hands to her head. She told me afterwards that she had had a sharp, sudden impression of urgency and distress.

We had all turned and were swimming outward. The water held the smell of suffering. Djuna and I bore the messenger—it was Baldus, a full brother of mine—up between our bodies and swam gently with him through the parting ranks of the sea people toward the beach. He was hurt; he would have drowned without our help.

“What is it?” Sven asked. “What’s happening?”

No one answered him immediately. We were all clustered around Baldus, listening to his painfully gasped message. Then his body relaxed, and Djuna and I knew he was dead. The smell of death spread through the sea.

“What is it?” Sven repeated. “What’s happening?”

We let his body drop gently to the bottom. We would take Baldus later to one of the places where we leave our dead.

“He was a messenger,” I told the Splits, who were looking eagerly toward us. “He came to say that the navy has been hunting down sea people with an electric shock device. They have captured about fifty more of us. He was hurt, but managed to escape to tell us what was happening. Now—he is dead.”

Dr. Lawrence coughed. The rain showed no sign of slackening. “There’s your answer,” he said. “If your scruples still bother you, let me point out that human beings wouldn’t be bothered by them for an instant. Generally speaking, they are not deterred from an action by respect for their own or any other sort of life.”

“Yes,” Pettrus answered, rather wobblingly (Baldus had been his half-brother, too, and we sea people love one another), “but we have rather higher standards of conduct for ourselves than Splits do.”

Madelaine had been standing immobile, her hands pressed to her breast. Now she said, in a low, carrying voice, “There must be a quake.”

We were all looking at her, sea people and Splits alike, “Dr. Lawrence forgot the final argument,” she went on slowly. “He says that a quake is long overdue, that it may happen at any time. That means—there might be a quake on a weekday, when children were in school, the stores full of people, the freeways roaring with traffic. But if we make the quake, we can choose the time for it. We can select a time for it when the loss of life will be kept to a minimum, “Late Sunday night—before sunrise Monday morning—would be best, I think. Yes, that would be a good time. But we must have a quake.”

“I ought to have thought of that,” Dr. Lawrence said in a rather dissatisfied voice. “But she’s right, of course. There will be much less destruction this way than if we merely leave it to nature.”

“Can’t we warn them a quake is coming?” Pettrus asked hesitantly.

“No. If we warned them, they would strengthen the walls or evacuate the dolphins,” Madelaine answered. There was something odd in her voice—there had been something odd ever since she had said, “There must be a quake”—and she stood in the pouring rain without appearing to notice it at all. I did not realize until much later what was affecting her.

“Let’s have a vote on it,” Dr. Lawrence said, stepping forward. “We three are in favor of having a quake, I kn ow. Amtor, what do your sea people say?”

I felt their minds. It seemed to be unanimous, but I wanted to be positive. “Is there anyone opposed to triggering an earthquake by exploding a bomb in Benthis Canyon?” I asked in the high pitch that is inaudible to human ears.

Silence. “We all think we should try to cause the quake,” Pettrus said after a minute. “But it must be on Sunday night, as Moonlight” (that was one of the names we had for Madelaine) “said.”

“We are all in favor of the earthquake,” I reported. “But it must be on Sunday night.”

“Good,” said Dr. Lawrence. “Today is Thursday. Sven, you used to be a demolitions expert. Do you think you can get a bomb for us, perhaps from Port Chicago or Benecia, by sometime on Saturday?”

The doctor seemed to have elected himself our leader. He was intelligent, his plans were realistic, And yet, I did not trust him. I did not trust him at all.