Chapter 8

Dr. Lawrence listened to my accusation without moving. “Your resentment is justified, Amtor,” he said slowly. “What I’ve done is hard to—but my apologies and explanations can come later. I came here to try to help. Madelaine is sick, isn’t she? We got a strong impression that she was sick or hurt.”

I was floating between him and where Moonlight was lying, though of course he could make a dash around me up on the sand. “Who’s ‘We’?” I demanded. “You and the navy? Are you working with the navy to try to trace us down?”

“No. No, I’m not. ‘We’ is Mrs. Casson and I. She’s the psychometrist I told you about when we were on the Rock. It was both our minds, coupled, that you felt today when we were trying to locate you.” He added, with an odd note of pride in his voice, “It’s the first time I was ever able to do anything like that.”

“Does the navy know you came here?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. I tried to cover my tracks. I left a letter—but we can talk about that after I’ve taken care of Madelaine.

“I don’t blame you for distrusting me, Amtor. I am sincere—I’ve made up my mind once and for all—but of course you can’t know that. But let me take care of Madelaine no matter how you feel about me. I’m a physician, after all. And she needs help.”

I was silent. Pettrus, speaking in the high pitch that is inaudible to human ears, said, “I think we ought to trust him, Amtor. Even if he’s not sincere, he won’t find out anything more than he already knows by taking care of Moonlight. And she’s pretty sick. We ought to let him try to help.”

“What if he kills her?” I asked. “He betrayed us once before.”

“Then we can try to kill him. But I think we ought to let him see what he can do for her.”

“Ivry?” I asked.

“I agree with Pettrus.”

Yes, I thought a little bitterly, they are more trustful than I am. No wonder. Neither of them had a mate killed in the attack on the Rock. Aloud I said, “All right.”

Dr. Lawrence was still standing waiting, with his black bag in his hand. I told him, “Moonlight is under the dock, far back on the sand. We’ll let you go to her. But we’ll be watching what you do.”

He nodded silently. He stooped and began making his way through the water to where the girl was lying. Her white dress glimmered faintly in the dim light.

He knelt beside her. He must have touched her, for she mumbled, “Water… water…” and then was silent again.

We heard a faint clink. We could not see very well, but he seemed to be getting something out of his pocket. There was a gurgle. He must be pouring water from a flask.

He put his arm under her head and raised her a little. We heard her drinking, and an indistinct “Thanks.” He put her down gently again.

He opened the black bag and took out a tiny flashlight. He ran the weak beam slowly over Madelaine’s body, pa using a long time at her shoulder. “Is that the only injury she has?” he asked us softly, putting the flashlight down. “I can’t make a real examination here.”

“Yes, that’s the only place she was hurt,” I answered. “It bled quite a bit.”

“Un-hunh. She’s pretty sick.” Holding the flashlight in one hand, he began to hunt through his bag with the other.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Give her as big an injection of penicillin as I think she can take.” He was sterilizing and filling a syringe as he spoke. “The first thing to do is to try to reduce the infection in her arm a bit.”

He wiped a spot on her arm with cotton and plunged the hypodermic needle in. It took quite a long time for him to empty the syringe. “I’ll give her another shot in four hours,” he said, looking at his watch. “Right now I’m going to clean out her wound and put a bandage on it. There’s too much infection there for me to think of sewing it up.—This is a terrible place to try to take care of a patient in. Not even any lights.”

Ivry had been swimming around agitatedly while Dr. Lawrence was giving the injection. Now he said, in a low, anxious gabble, “There’s a boat coming. Put out that light, Doctor. Hide.”

After a very slight hesitation, Dr. Lawrence obeyed. He dropped the flashlight into his bag and stretched himself out on the dank sand in front of Madelaine—thinking, I suppose, that his neutral-colored clothing would be less visible than her whitish dress.

Almost immediately we heard the putt-putt of a motor, and a little while later a boat—the same boat that had been there earlier—tied up at the dock.

This time there were two men on her. As they were fastening the ropes, one of them said, “I thought I saw a light back under the dock.”

“Yeah, so did I,” answered the other. “Sometimes light shines down through the holes in the planking. Or maybe it was the eyes of a rat.”

“Must have been something like that,” the first man said. We heard him yawn. “Let’s have a can of beer before we go ashore.”

They stood in the bow of the boat, drinking beer and talking desultorily, for an annoyingly long time. We were all impatient for them to go away, so Dr. Lawrence could get on with his treatment of Madelaine. But when they began to talk about the earthquake, we listened with more interest.

“For a big quake, it didn’t kill many people,” the man who seemed to own the boat was saying. “Millions and millions of dollars’ worth of property damage, though. Suppose it had happened in the daytime on a working day! There’d have been thousands killed.”

“Yeah, the timing was lucky. Did it damage your house much?”

“Shook the chimney down, that was all. How about that four-plex you own?”

“It did a lot of damage, Bill, but I think the insurance company will cover most of it. Say, did you see that thing in the Chronicle gossip-column about the admiral?”

“No, what did it say?”

“Oh, that some navy big-shot had an idea about what caused the quake he was trying to sell his superiors on making public. It was headed, ‘The Softly-Flapping Admiral’.”

“I don’t see what could have caused the quake, except stresses building up in the earth.” There was a plop as he tossed his empty beer can in the water. “The air force is usually the goofy service, though. I wonder what the admiral meant.”

“Well, whatever caused it, I guess we’re safe for another fifty years. Let’s get going, Bill. We’ve got a big day in front of us.”

“OK.” He finished his beer and threw the can out to bob beside the other one. The two men scrambled up on the dock. We heard them walking away.

Dr. Lawrence sat up, brushing sand from Ms jacket. He said nothing, but we felt he was annoyed. He turned the flashlight on and began to get things out of his bag.

When he had cleaned and dressed Sosa’s wound, he gave her another drink. Then, still stooping, he waded out toward where we were.

“Madelaine can’t stay here,” he said softly. “She ought to be in a hospital, or at least in a decent bed. This is a hell of a place for a sick woman. I want to take her away.”

“No. We forbid you to.” I knew I spoke for all of us.

“Why? It would be better for her.”

“Would it? As long as she was conscious, she said she wanted to stay with us. She begged us not to let us be separated. If we let you take her away, how do we know we’ll ever see her again?”

“But I promise—”

“I’m sorry. I’m afraid we just don’t trust you that much.”

He was silent, his head bent. “It’s very difficult for me to take proper care of her here,” he said at last.

“Whose fault is it she’s lying there?” Ivry asked.

Lawrence sighed. “While we’re on this subject,” Pettrus said, “what about the explanations and apologies you were going to give us? Now would be a good time for them.”

“Yes.” Lawrence waded back up under the dock and sat down on the dank sand.

“I’ve always been a believer in luck and fate,” he said slowly, as if he were arranging his ideas. “The unexpected seems to me more important in human affairs than the expected and the rational. It’s a gambler’s temperament, in a way. Or perhaps it’s what Madelaine meant when she said I had an appetite for the marvelous.

“At any rate, when I decided to try to get to Noonday Rock, I had no way of knowing what I should find there. I thought it was likely—or at least possible—that Madelaine was on the Rock, and that dolphins had taken her there. But I didn’t know how many other people were there with her, or what their attitude to an intruder would be.

“I was willing to risk it. The possibilities were too interesting to be ignored. But I thought it was wise to try to reduce the risk.”

“Do you call that gambling?” I said. “It’s the action of a cautious man.”

“There was an element of gambling in it,” he protested. “There was less than one chance in three that what I brought with me would work.”

“Well, go on. What did you bring with you when you came to Noonday Rock?”

“A communication device.”

“You didn’t mention this when you told us about your preparations for coming to the Rock. Why, after you found we were friendly, were you so secretive?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Perhaps I wasn’t quite sure.”

“I know why you didn’t tell us,” Ivry said. (Ivry was the most excitable of the three of us, just as Pettrus was the biggest and I was the one who knew the most genealogies.) “You were spying on us for the navy the whole time!” Emotion overcame him, and he flapped his tail furiously.

“No,” Lawrence answered. “The navy didn’t even know I had the device. I stole it, actually.”

“What was the name of the device?” I asked. “Where did you have it hidden?”

“It’s something called COLABS—collimated laser beam signal. What I stole was an experimental model, very much miniaturized. I had it in my briefcase.”

“So that’s why you kept such a hold on the briefcase,” I said. “When did you decide to use the COLABS thing?”

“It wasn’t really a decision,” he said. “I’d promised to help Madelaine in her war against the human race. But I’m a human being myself. I couldn’t help feeling, part of the time, that I was engaged in something treasonable.”

“You were the most bitter against Splits of any of us!” Ivry gabbled. “Whenever we had scruples, you argued us out of them!”

“Oh, I know. I expect I was trying to repress my own doubts.”

“Well, go on. You sent out a signal with the COLABS thing, didn’t you?” I said.

“I tried the COLABS to see if it would send out a signal,” he corrected.

“You mean you never sent out a message at all?” I asked, puzzled at what he meant.

“Oh, I sent out a message. But it was only because…”

“Dr. Lawrence, you said you had an explanation to make. You’re not explaining anything, or even apologizing. Tell us what your actions were, what you actually did.”

“All right.” It was obviously hard for Mm to speak.

“On Sunday morning,” he said finally, “after the worst part of the quake was over, the dolphins left me alone on the Rock.”

“They left you because you told them to!” Ivry said. “You sound as if they’d deserted you!”

“Do I? I didn’t mean to. Anyhow, I was alone for the first time in several days, with an opportunity to think.

“It seemed to me that I’d done a terrible thing. I thought of all the damage I’d helped to cause, of all the people who’d been hurt or killed. On impulse—useful word, impulse,” he said wryly, “I opened my briefcase and took the COLABS out. I set it up on the Rock, and turned the switch. The monitor light came on. And I knew it would work.

“Up until that time, I hadn’t been sure what I meant to do. But this seemed like a—a nudge from fate. I thought, I’ll go ahead and see if anybody answers my signal. Because, if there was only about one chance in three that the COLABS was capable of sending out a focused signal, it was even more uncertain that anybody would be listening.”

“Why was it so unlikely that the COLABS device would work?” Pettrus asked. “Don’t communication devices generally work?”

“I suppose it seems like that, to a dolphin. Actually, they had all sorts of trouble with the power source. I had one of the engineers in therapy with me for a couple of months because he was so upset over the difficulties. And the adjustment of such a small mechanism was delicate. Carrying it around in my briefcase might have jarred it loose.

“Anyhow, I pressed the signal button. It sends out an impulse that is received by the beamed station as a steady buzzing.

“I held the button down for about a minute and a half, and nothing happened. I was just about to take my finger off it, and forget the whole thing and pack the COLABS device back in my briefcase, when I heard a voice say, ‘COLABS 32! COLABS 32! We get your signal! Where are you speaking from?’”

Dr. Lawrence sighed. “I could have refused to answer, of course,” he said. “But that my signal had been received at all seemed a kind of miracle. Nobody was regularly stationed at the receptor; it wasn’t even turned on most of the time. I found out later that a technician had just happened to go into that lab to do some soldering on an electrical connection. While he was waiting for the soldering iron to warm up, he’d switched the receptor on. And he heard my signal coming out of it. If the timing had been off a little, nobody would have heard me.”

“It was bad luck for us that he did,” I said.

“Yes. But he answered me. And again, I felt it was fate. I—well, that’s the way it was.

“I told him where I was speaking from, and said that I knew something about the earthquake. He called somebody, and that person called somebody else. They sent a ’copter out to the Rock for me. By nine o’clock, I was telling my story to a rear admiral.”

“The admiral that was mentioned in the piece in the Chronicle?” Pettrus asked.

“Yes. I was surprised how easily he believed me. The quake had damaged a good many of the craft in his command, and I suppose he was rather shaken up.”

“Did you advise him to strafe and bomb the rock ?” I asked.

“I wasn’t responsible for the measures he took,” Lawrence replied evasively.

There seemed no particular point in trying to get an admission of guilt from him. “Do you know what’s happened to Sven?” I said.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Lawrence replied quickly. He seemed relieved to change the subject. “I heard that a man had been picked up near the lighthouse.”

“Where is he now?”

“They have him in custody.”

“How about Djuna?”

“I’m not sure. I heard that a dolphin that was swimming near the big island had been wounded but had managed to get away.”

Djuna wounded, and Sven in custody. If Dr. Lawrence had been in the water at that moment, I am sure Pettrus and Ivry and I would have managed to MB him. Our armament is not much, compared to that of a shark, but we do have over a hundred strong sharp teeth. We were so angry we had even forgotten about Madelaine.

Dr. Lawrence was speaking. “It was learning that Sven had been captured that made me realize what I’d done,” he said slowly. “Fate and chance? No, I’d done it. If I’d felt a sort of traitor to join Madelaine’s war on humanity, I knew now that I was a real traitor. I’d betrayed people who trusted me.

“I don’t expect you to believe me. I’ve forfeited your confidence. I’ll have to try to earn it back. But I am on your side.”

Pettrus made a blowing noise. I don’t know how it would have sounded to a Split, but a dolphin would have translated it as the acoustical equivalent of, “Well, well! You don’t say !”

“How did you get away from the navy?” I asked the doctor. “You said you thought you had covered your tracks.”

Lawrence looked at his watch. “It’s time to give Madelaine more penicillin,” he said. “I’ll tell you about my escape—evasion is a better word—after I take care of her.”

He went back to where she was lying. After he had made the injection, he took her temperature and then gave her another drink. He turned the flask upside down to get the last few drops.

“How is she?” I asked when he came back to the water.

“A little better. Not as much better as I would have liked. Even finding out how much fever she has is difficult, she’s in such an awkward place.”

“You were going to tell us about how you got away,” I prompted him.

“Yes. It was easy, actually. They kept me on the flag ship until dark, asking me questions and making me go through my story several times. I gathered my admiral had got into a certain amount of trouble with his superiors for having sent out bombers before he consulted them.

“Then they took me back to my office in the DRAT station and left me there, with a marine on guard in front of the door. I’d already decided that I wanted to get away.

“My private lavatory had a door that communicated with the main corridor. The door was always kept bolted, so I suppose they forgot it was there. All I did was go in the lavatory, unbolt the door, and walk out. It was simple. I left a note on my desk.”

“What did you say in the note?” I asked.

“I told them that I’d been feeling disturbed for a long time, and that I was going to consult a professional colleague and have him examine me. Do you understand? I wanted them to think I was doubtful about my own sanity.

“I underlined everything, and ended all my sentences with exclamation marks. I finished by saying that I hated to leave in such a sneaky way, but that my voices had told me to. It was a very disturbed-sounding note.”

“You were trying to convince them that everything you’d said about the earthquake was imagination?”

“Yes. I wanted them to think my whole story was delusional. It might work. The idea of dolphins causing an earthquake is pretty wild.”

“What about Sven?” Pettrus asked. “The fact that they’ve picked him up would tend to bear out your story.”

“Yes,” Lawrence agreed, rather uncomfortably, “but Sven’s intelligent. He won’t admit anything if he can help it.”

He stood up. “Where are you going?” I asked.

“I’m going to fill my flask and give Madelaine more water. Then I’m going to hunt a decent place to sleep tonight.”

“You’re not staying here?” Ivry asked. He was becoming agitated.

“No; why should I? It won’t do Maddy any good to have me sleep on damp sand. I can’t give her another shot until morning anyhow.”

He clambered up on the dock. We waited. In about five minutes he came back and gave the girl more water.

“What if she gets thirsty during the night?” Ivry asked. “We can’t give her a drink.”

Lawrence may have shrugged. “I’ll be able to do more for per tomorrow if I get some sleep tonight. You ought to let me take her out from under the dock. I promise—” “No.”

Lawrence sighed. “I’ll be back tomorrow about seven,” he said. “Good night.” “Good night.”

He was gone, taking his little black satchel with him. But oddly enough, his refusal to stay with Sosa had increased our confidence in him. We felt that if he were planning to betray us again, he would make a greater show of devotion to her.

We were hungry; we had had nothing to eat all day. One at a time we went out to get food for ourselves, leaving two of us always on guard near Sosa. We thought that if a Split tried to molest her, we might be able to scare him off.

There are plenty of fish in San Francisco Bay, though not all of them are considered fit to eat by Splits. None of us had any difficulty getting a good meal. When I came back from my fishing, Ivry and Pettrus told me that Madelaine had asked for water once, but not urgently. “After she asked for water, she laughed,” Pettrus said. “And then she said, ‘It’s lovely here.’”

“Lovely?” I was puzzled. “What do you think she meant by that? Is she delirious?”

“I don’t think so. She sounded as if she were having pleasant dreams.”

Though we were no longer really hungry, we did a good deal of fishing during the night. This was partly for exercise and diversion, and partly because the dirty water around the dock was a constant vexation to us. It was wonderfully refreshing to swim in clean water again.

The two men came down to the boat quite early, while it was still dark, and cast off. About two hours later Dr. Lawrence appeared.

He was wearing inconspicuous informal clothing—slacks, beach shirt and sandals—and he carried a large paper bag with his doctor’s satchel and street clothing inside. He said, “Good morning” to us curtly, and then went to where Sosa was.

He gave her water from his flask and then, taking advantage of the improved light, examined her with some thoroughness. He finished by giving her another injection of penicillin.

“How is she?” I asked when he came to where we were waiting.

“Some better. Her fever’s down. She’s not as much better as she should be—I’ve given her a lot of penicillin. What I don’t understand is why she’s so comatose. I don’t find anything to account for it. Did she get a blow on the head?”

“Not as far as we know,” I answered.

He was silent. “You’ve got to let me get her out from under there,” he said finally. “It’s not only that I can’t take proper care of her—if I keep going under the dock, I’m sure to be noticed eventually, and then the fat will be in the fire. They’ll put Madelaine in the hospital, and the navy will pick me up again. You don’t want that to happen, do you?”

“We don’t care much about what happens to you,” I told him frankly, “but we don’t want to be separated from her.”

“Fair enough,” he replied. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve come up with an idea I think is pretty good.” He began to clamber up on the dock.

“Where are you going?” Ivry quacked anxiously.

Dr. Lawrence grinned, and for the first time since I had seen him, I felt a liking for him. “I’m going to buy a boat,” he said.

He came back about noon, at the helm of an odd flat-bottomed craft. He made his purchase fast to the dock and then came down in the water where we were.

“What do you think of the boat?” he asked. He sounded pleased with himself. “It’s called the Akbar. I can take care of Madelaine on board, and you won’t be separated from her.”

“Fine,” Pettrus said. “What kind of a boat is it? I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“You could call it a scaled-down houseboat. A doll’s houseboat. I’ve rented mooring space for it about a mile from here. You won’t object to my putting Maddy on board?”

“No,” I said. “But you’re going to have trouble getting her on it.”

This proved to be correct. It was obviously impossible for Lawrence, standing in the water, to lift Moonlight at arm’s length above his head and lower her over the side of the Akbar; and carrying her up on the dock and then putting her down on the Akbar’s deck was going to be almost as difficult. Madelaine was neither a tall nor heavy woman, put she was only semiconscious, and Lawrence was a smallish man.

After some thought he dragged her down to the edge of the water, where he could stand upright, and picked her up in his arms. When he got around to the side of the dock, he shifted her so that she was lying across his shoulders, and he was holding her in place by her ankles and wrists, He wriggled her about until he could hold her opposite wrist and ankle in one hand, and then started up. He wobbled alarmingly. He was almost at the top when Madelaine began to stir, and he had to use both hands to keep her from falling off his back.

That left him badly unbalanced, with no point of contact width the dock timbers except his feet. We were sure he was going over backward into the water. But he took a long step upward with his right foot, into the next crotch in the dock timbering, and at the same time threw himself forward onto the surface of the dock. He landed on the planking on both knees, with two bruised sh ins.

“Made it,” he said, looking down at us. He got to his feet, moved Moonlight around in front of him, and carried her over, limping, to the Akbar. It was easy enough to put per down on the boat’s small deck.

We waited. He carried her into the deckhouse. About an hour later he came out. “I undressed her, gave her a bath, and put her to bed,” he told us. “She ought to do better, now she’s comfortable and dry. Her fever’s down.”

“How is her shoulder?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Healing. Not much use in sewing it up now. But it’s going to leave a scar. What I don’t understand is that she’s unconscious so much.

“Well, I’d better be moving the Akbar to her new location. I hope nobody saw me climbing about with Madelaine, If they did, I’ll get a visit from the police.”

He cast off the Akbar’s moorings, started up her engine, and was soon putt-putting over the turbid water to the new anchorage. We followed discreetly. We were all relieved that Madelaine was better. He r unconsciousness did not seem so odd to us as it did to Lawrence, since we were not familiar with the physiology of Splits.

The Akbar’s new location was a pleasant place. Trees were growing in a sort of park behind the little jetty that ran out into the water, and the only sign of damage from the quake was some floating planks from what might have been a rowboat. Another craft, also a houseboat, but at least twice as big as the Akbar, was tied up at the jetty. Except for that, no other boats were anchored there.

The girl on the deck of the bigger craft looked up and waved as Lawrence brought the Akbar in. Lawrence nodded unsmilingly. It was plain he did not want to encourage a potentially inquisitive friendliness.

He tied the Akbar up at the landward end of the jetty, as far away from the other houseboat as he could get. Then he went ashore. He couldn’t, of course, tell us where he was going, while the woman on the other craft was watching, but we supposed he was going after food.

Floating side by side in the shadow of the Akbar, under the jetty, we held a consultation. I think I have said before that we sea people ordinarily communicate with each other in frequencies that are outside the range of human hearing. It seemed to us both unnecessary and undesirable that all three of us should remain near the houseboat during the day. One dolphin can usually escape notice, especially in turbid water, but three is a different matter. We decided that one of us should stay near the Akbar during the daylight hours, while the other two tried to pick up some trace of Djuna.

Djuna might, of course, have been so severely wounded as to be dead, but we thought not. Our “telepathic” communication with each other (this is not Udra, though somewhat re lated to it) is somewhat more reliable than the ESP of Splits and, even though it is far from perfect, we thought we would have been aware of such a serious psychic event as her death.

Ivry and Pettrus then went off on their scouting trip and I was left behind, on watch near the Akbar. I was restless and bored. It seemed to me that Dr. Lawrence might have chosen a better anchorage for the Akbar than this one, where we were constantly under scrutiny from another boat and it would be difficult for him to communicate with us. He obviously couldn’t sit on the railing of the Akbar during the daytime, talking to a dolphin; and at night, even if he waited until the people on the bigger houseboat were in bed, we would all have to speak softly, since sound carries so well over water. I wondered whether he had done it on purpose, with the ultimate aim of detaching us from Madelaine.

I may say here that our anger for the attack on Noonday Rock was directed not so much toward the navy as toward Lawrence. If one declares war on the human race, one may expect the human race to retaliate. But we had trusted Dr. Lawrence, despite my doubts about him—he had instigated us to try to trigger an earthquake—and this lent a particular bitterness to our feelings toward him.

Lawrence came back after a while, carrying a bag of groceries, a bag from a department store, and another, smaller parcel that I couldn’t identify. He went into the Akbar’s deckhouse, and in a little while I smelled food cooking.

I listened, but couldn’t tell whether or not he was feeding Madelaine. Neither of them said anything. Once or twice I heard her moving in her bunk.

He washed a few dishes. Then I heard a click, and the squawk of a radio. A radio—that must have been what was in the smaller parcel he had brought back.

He seemed to be listening to the news. After a while he shut the radio off, and seemed to be doing something near Madelaine. Then he came on deck with a bag of scraps and trash, which he took on shore and dropped in a big tr ash can.

I noticed all these details so sharply because I really had not much else to notice. I did not want to start thinking about Blitta again. Once or twice, as the afternoon drew on, I tried to use Udra, but I was too restless to have any success with it.

Darkness fell. The doctor cooked some sort of meal. It sounded as if he took something to Madelaine. At last, about three hours after dark, Ivry and Pettrus came back.

They had been a long way, down the coast to Point Sur and back, but they had found no sign of Djuna. They had talked to two or three other sea people, too. But when they were near Benthis Canyon, the spot off Monterey where I dropped Sven’s stolen mine, they had seen a number of navy ships at anchor.

“They had men out in boats,” Ivry said agitatedly. “They seemed to be taking samples of the water. They had two men in diving suits, too.”

None of us said anything. It was perfectly plain that the navy was trying to get some objective corroboration of Dr. Lawrence’s story. The water over Benthis Canyon was probably still abnormally radioactive, but they might not draw the proper conclusion from this. Dr. Lawrence couldn’t have told them about Sven’s mine breaking the drums of radioactive wastes, since he hadn’t known about it. He had left Noonday Rock before we returned from our mission.

People began to walk along the jetty and get aboard the bigger houseboat. We heard the sound of laughter and talking. Somebody started to play the guitar and sing, and other voices joined in the mus ic.

About ten-thirty Dr. Lawrence came out on deck and whistled softly.

“Are you there?” he said in a low voice. “I think it’s all right for us to talk now. They’re having a party on board the Diamond Lil, and won’t notice anything.

“The Diamond Lil?” I asked. “Is that the name of the other houseboat?”

“Yes. Can’t you read?”

“Only a little,” I answered, feeling rather ashamed. “Books go to pieces in the water, you see, and we haven’t any way of turning the pages.”

“You needn’t apologize,” Dr. Lawrence answered. “That a dolphin can read at all is so extraordinary that—well, never mind. I came out to tell you the news.

“In the first place, Madelaine is better. Her shoulder is healing nicely, and her temperature is almost normal. But she is still comatose most of the time. She rouses a little when I feed and bathe her and so on, but she goes back again into her coma, if that’s what it is.

“If she isn’t better soon, I’m going to call another doctor. I’m a psychiatrist, not a general practitioner.

“The other piece of news is that, though I listened a good deal to the radio today, I didn’t hear anything about the navy making a disclosure about the cause of the earthquake. There was still plenty about the quake, of course, but it was the ordinary stuff one would expect—statistics about losses and damages.”

“That’s good,” Ivry said.

“Yes-s-s. Actually, I’m not so sure. This feels like the lull before the storm. I don’t think my rear admiral would give up so easily.”

“We went down to Point Sur today,” Ivry said. He went on to tell Lawrence what he and Pettrus had seen.

“H’um,” the doctor said when he had finished. “Let’s hope they don’t find anything. A piece of the casing of the mine that was dropped would be pretty good evidence, but they’re not very likely to find such a piece.”

We dolphins were silent. We saw no point in telling Lawrence about the radioactivity the explosion of the mine had released into the water. It was always possible Lawrence might defect from us again, and he knew too much already.

“By the way, Doctor,” I said, “what happened after you got past the marine who was stationed in front of your office? You didn’t tell us about that.”

Lawrence laughed a little wryly. “You still don’t trust me, do you?” he said. “Well, I have no objection to telling you.

“After I left my office, I drove to the house of a friend of mine, an astrologer, and spent the night with him. Next morning I went to the bank and drew out all the money that was in my account. I was afraid the navy might be watching for a withdrawal, but I don’t think they were.

“Then I drove my car to a used-ca r dealer and sold it. I telephoned the clairvoyant I told you about, made an appointment with her, and took the bus to her house. After she and I made contact with you dolphins, I used public transportation to get to Sausalito. Is that all clear? I hope you’re satisfied.”

Before we could answer, there were footsteps coming along the jetty from the Diamond Lil. We swam under the planking of the jetty and floated quietly.

“Good evening,” a male voice said. “Nice weather for this time of year.”

“Yes, it is,” Lawrence agreed. He stood up, yawning. “Makes me sleepy. I think I’ll turn in.”

“Oh. Good night.”

“Good night.”

* * *

Next morning Lawrence went ashore again for food. While he was gone, a man walked out on the jetty to the Akbar, jumped down on he r deck, and knocked on the door of the deckhouse.

Neither Pettrus nor I was on guard. We had gone north together, still trying to pick up a trace of Djuna, and Ivry had been left behind to watch over Madelaine. When Ivry tried to tell us what happened, he got excited and was difficult to understand.

The man knocked again on the deckhouse. Ivry, who was listening intently, thought he heard somebody (it could only have been Madelaine) moving about inside the cabin. The visitor waited for a while, and then knocked for the third time.

There was another wait, and Ivry wondered if the man was going away. But the door opened, and Ivry, though he could not hear very well, heard the man introduce himself, say he was from (mumble) intelligence agency, and that he was making inquiries in regard to a Dr. Edward Lawrence (Ivry got the name clearly enough).

Madelaine answered something. She seemed to be asking the visitor inside. At any rate, they both went into the deck house. Here, for some reason, Ivry could hear them rather more plainly.

“No, I don’t know any Dr. Lawrence,” Madelaine was saying. “We’ve only just bought this boat and come here. We don’t know many people in Sausalito anyway.”

“We?” the visitor asked.

“My brother and I. I’ve had the flu, and he’s been taking care of me.”

“I see. Do you mind telling me your brother’s name, Miss—?”

“Oh, no, not at all. It’s Gordon. My brother’s first name is Bill.”

“Thank you. Is he employed locally?”

“Not exactly. He’s an artist—I mean, he wants to be an artist. He does odd jobs, and I work as a part-time secretary. You know, I fill in when somebody’s sick or they need extra help. I haven’t been working lately. We get by.”

“I see. Well, thank you very much, Miss Gordon. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“Oh, that’s all right.”

The visitor left the Akbar. Ivry heard him walking on down the jetty and going aboard the Diamond Lil, where he presumably asked the same questions. A few minutes later he left the jetty, and didn’t come back. He missed encountering Lawrence, returning from his shopping, by about half an hour.

Ivry had plenty of time to think about the meaning of what he had heard. Obviously the navy was still looking for Lawrence, but whether they had actually traced him to Sausalito or were merely checking through all the coastal communities was impossible to say. When Pettrus and I got back from our trip up north—we had been as far as Point Arena, but had not learned anything of Djuna—Ivry gave us an excited account of what had occurred.

We didn’t like it. The intelligence man hadn’t seemed suspicious, but that didn’t mean he was satisfied with what Madelaine had said. One thing was certain, that it had been exceedingly fortunate Madelaine had answered his knock. Otherwise he would have waited until Lawrence came back, and the ambiguous doctor would by now be in naval custody again.

The Diamond Lil’s owners went to bed early that night. As soon as the bigger houseboat’s lights were out, Lawrence came out on the Akbar’s deck and whistled to us.

“What’s been happening?” he asked without preamble. “Has Madelaine been out of bed? I found my medical bag under her bunk, and the dressing gown I bought her has been worn.”

“Yes,” Ivry said. He related the incident.

“Madelaine did all that?” Lawrence said when he had finished. “She couldn’t have. She’s not only comatose most of the time, she’s far too weak to stand up for more than a minute.”

“She did, though,” Ivry answered. “But I don’t know whether or not the man believed her.”

“Um. The navy may have traced me here, or they may just have been making a routine check, as you said. In either case, there’s no use worrying about it.”

“You’re taking it very calmly,” Ivry said.

Lawrence shrugged. “What else can I do ? The Akbar’s no ocean-going craft. I can’t sail her away from Sausalito. We’ll have to stay here and see what happens. Incidentally, Gordon is the name I used when I was buying her.”

“How is Moonlight now?” I asked.

“Semiconscious. She spoke to me when I was changing the dressing on her arm just now.”

“What did she say?” I wanted to know.

“She said, ‘Something has happened about Sven’,” Lawrence answered slowly. “She didn’t even open her eyes when she said it.

“There is something very peculiar about this semiconsciousness of hers.”

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