Margaret St. Clair (21 page)

“I’d rather stay here with the dolphins,” she answered slowly. “I’m tired of running and trying to save myself. Amtor, what do you and the others say?”

I consulted with them briefly, in our high-pitched speech. “We feel the way you do, Sosa,” I said. “We’d rather stay with our Split friends. So many of the sea people have already been killed that it doesn’t seem worthwhile for us to try to save our own lives.”

So the decision was made. If our passivity in the face of coming attack seems strange, it should be considered that we were all in a state of emotional shock. We had overcome so many difficulties, we had succeeded, incredibly, in actually building thermal devices to melt the ice at the earth’s poles, that to be thrown back into a state of helplessness, a position worse than when Madelaine had first come to Noonday Rock, numbed us. If the danger had been immediate, we might have roused ourselves to meet it. But we did not know when the attack would come.

Sven and Moonlight slept on the beach that night, to be near us. When morning came and we were all still safe, an intoxicating light-heartedness took possession of us. Madelaine and Sven spent the day in th e water with us, playing with us or riding on our backs; and if every noise in the sky made us start with alarm, the fear was soon gone. When I look back on that time, an interval of forty hours or so, it seems to have a magical quality. It was an enchant e d space of happiness in the midst of struggle and distress.

By noon on the second day, Sven had begun to grow thoughtful. “It’s almost two days now since Lawrence went off with the ahln things,” he said, wiping his fingers on a paper napkin (he and Madel aine were eating a picnic lunch on the beach, about a mile from the cottage). “Nothing has happened. It looks as if he hadn’t gone to the navy with his prize, after all.”

“Yes. I can’t explain their leaving us in peace otherwise.”

“If he hasn’t gone to the navy, he must be holed up somewhere, trying to decide what to do.” (This was partly correct.) “He might even be considering coming back to us.”

“Not that,” Madelaine said dryly.

“I suppose not,” Sven said laughing. “But if he hasn’t gone to them yet, it might be possible for us to find him and make him give what he stole back to us.”

“Find him?” Madelaine repeated. “We’re not detectives. And I don’t suppose he wants to be found. There are so many places where he could have gone!”

“Well, if the navy didn’t pick him up, say with a plane or a sub, he must have got out of Descanso somehow. Let’s go check at the bus station.”

“That’s a good idea,” Madelaine answered. She was packin g the remains of the lunch back in the box. “The dolphins can take us back to the cottage, and we can walk into town from there.”

Sven did not speak much Spanish, and the clerk at the ticket window did not speak much English. Nevertheless, after ten minu tes or so, the clerk assured Sven positively that no such “North American gentlemen” had taken the bus out of Descanso in the last two days. He hadn’t, he said, had any North American passengers at all.

“No dice,” Sven reported to Madelaine, who was stan ding beside the pinball machine. “Let’s try the taxi company.”

Here they had better luck. The manager, an elderly man with gallant manners, said he had himself driven just such a gentleman as Sven described over the border and up to San Diego two nights before. The gentleman had been carrying a black medical bag.

“Do you know where he went after you left him in San Diego?” Sven asked.

“No, s
e ñ or.
He said nothing about his plans. I let him out downtown.”

“So we know he’s back in the United States,” Sven said as they walked along the rutted road in the direction of the cottage. “That’s something.”

“It’s a large area,” Madelaine answered. “He could be anywhere in it.”

A plane passed overhead and Sven, who was holding her hand, felt her fingers tremb le within his. He glanced at her quickly, but she was smiling. “We were talking about Lawrence, Sven,” she said.

“Yes. Well, actually, his range of action is pretty limited. For one thing, he hasn’t much money, and for another, he’ll want to be near his contacts in the navy, the people he already knows. He’s probably somewhere along the California coast.”

Before she could answer, the postman turned out of the yard of the beach cottage and spoke to them.
“Buenas dias s se ñ or, se ñ orita.
Postal card for you . In box.”

The card was a picture postcard, with a view of the Gate Bridge, and in the message space “Take care of yourselves,” had been neatly printed. The message was signed “E.L.”

” ‘Take care of yourselves’,” Madelaine repeated slowly. “I wonder wh at he means by that.”

“It’s not what he means that’s important,” Sven said. “Look at the postmark, Maddy. The card was mailed from San Francisco.”

“You think that’s where he’s gone?”

“Yes. He’s probably staying in some cheap hotel there.”

“There are a lot of cheap hotels just in San Francisco,” the girl said thoughtfully. “And he may not have gone there. He might be in Oakland, or Emeryville, or even someplace down the peninsula.”

“I know. But we’ve got to try to find him. Perhaps he wants us to f ind him. There’s really no reason why he should have sent the card otherwise.”

She sighed heavily. “Oh, you’re right. But I hate being separated from you again. I couldn’t go with you, could I?”

He was counting the money in his wallet. “Two hundred and thirty bucks. I stole the doctor’s wallet when I knocked him out. He was carrying a lot of the stuff. And I got his credit cards. —Come with me? It would cost twice as much, and you couldn’t really help.”

He handed her five twenty-dollar bills. “The ren t on the cottage is paid for a week. I’ll write or telegraph as soon as I find anything, or even if I don’t.”

While he was packing a few things in a cloth bag, she came down to the beach to tell us what they had decided to do.

“We don’t much like it, Maddy,” I said when she had finished.

“Neither do I, but I think he’s right. We might be able to get back what Lawrence stole.”

“I
could take Sven on my back,” Djuna said. “Pettrus could go along to spell me. I could take him on my back.”

“It’s quicker this way,” Moonlight answered. “Sven will fly up from San Diego. Be patient, darlings. It’s only for a little while.”

We were silent. We knew that we would probably be able to keep in mental contact with Sven, and that reassured us. Sven called. “Good—bye, friends!” from the porch of the cottage and waved his hand to us. Then he and Madelaine set out at a fast walk for town again.

The bus station was crowded now; Sven had to stand in line for his ticket to San Diego. While she was waiting, Madelaine w ent to the newstand and bought a San Francisco paper. What she saw in the news summary on page one made her turn quickly to page two.

Her mouth came open. She ran to where Sven was standing, and thrust the paper at him. “Look, Sven, look!”

“Quake ‘Guilt’ Drives Navy Psychiatrist to Death Jump,” read the headline. “Claiming responsibility for the disastrous March earthquake and predicting worldwide catastrophe to come, Dr. Edward Lawrence, a former navy psychiatrist, committed suicide today by jumping f r om the window ledge of a Market Street hotel. Dr. Lawrence apparently stayed on the ledge outside his fifth-floor room until he attracted a crowd. To those who attempted to dissuade him from his death jump he insisted that he had been ‘solely responsible’ for the earthquake that shook the California coast last March, and that ‘millions would die’ in a coming catastrophe. When he was asked if he considered himself responsible for the predicted disaster, he answered, ‘I certainly do.’

“Police cleared the st reet below the ledge, and the fire department spread safety nets, while two psychiatrists and a minister attempted to persuade Dr. Lawrence to reenter his rooms. All persuasion failed, and Dr. Lawrence jumped from the ledge at 3:20
P.M .
H
E MISSED THE SAFET Y NETS AND WAS INSTANTLY KILLED.

“Dr. Lawrence, a graduate of the Stanford University Medical School, was formerly employed …”

Sven’s eyes met Madelaine’s. She was deathly pale. “He’s done it,” she said. “Sven, Sven! How long will it take for the ahl n devices to get to the poles?”

-

Chapter 18

Sven stared at her. “You mean —you think Lawrence has started the things on their trip to the poles?”

“Yes, of course. What else could it be?”

“But—he didn’t know where to start them from. Only the dolphins know that. Lawrence is no expert on ocean currents.”

“He did know, though. While we were still on the Naomi, before you came, the dolphins showed him on the chart. All he had to do was to remembe r two sets of coordinates.”

“But how would he get the things to the launching spots? He hasn’t got a boat.—Where were the spots, anyhow?”

“He could hire a plane. One place was a little south of here, about a hundred miles out, and the other was north o f Fort Bragg. How long would it take for the ahln devices to reach the poles?”

Sven considered. Madelaine’s alarm still seemed to him excessive, but he was beginning to be convinced. “Two or three days to reach the edge of the Arctic ice, I guess. Quite a bit longer to get to Antarctica. We’re some distance from the equator here.”

“Then—we’ve got to warn people!” She started away from him, toward the telephone booth in the corner.

“What are you going to do?” he asked, leaving his place in the line bef ore the ticket window. (Since Lawrence was a suicide, there was obviously no point in trying to find him.) “Who are you going to call?”

“Radio station.” She was fumbling with a San Diego telephone directory. “I’m going to try to —yes, here it is.” She went into the telephone booth.

She was in the booth a long time. Buses came and went. Sven, looking down on her head, saw that her hair had grown out beyond the dark dye, and was blonde again at the roots. At last she came out, even paler than when she had gone in.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. He put his hand under her arm. “Are you OK, kid?”

“Yes. I called the station. I kept getting a busy signal, but I stayed on the line. Finally somebody answered. I told him I wanted to spe ak to the station manager, that it was important. He said, ‘Lady, call back some other time. All our lines are jammed with people asking about the Alaska hurricane and flood.’

“I said, ‘Flood?’ He said, ‘Yeah, half Anchorage is under water, and it’s stil l rising. Nobody knows why.’ Then he hung up.”

Sven blinked. “It-must have got there,” he said.

“Oh, yes. I suppose it’s causing the hurricane, too. I’ve got to try something else. I —I know, I’ll call the President.” She started toward the booth once more.

Sven held her back. “It’s a waste of time,” he said. “You’d never get through to the President. They’d just think you were some kind of crank.”

“But—we can’t just let it go at this! Millions of people will be killed if they aren’t warned to get t o high ground. Everybody in this room will be killed. Descanso is flat as a board. We have to —to keep trying.”

“Take it easy,” he said. “The flood won’t get here for a good many hours.”

“What’s that got to do with it? Every city on the California coast will be flooded. And after the South Polar ice starts to melt, every coastal city in the world. We —I know, Sven. You and I will fly to Washington and insist on seeing the President. We’ll t ell him what’s happening.” She started toward the ticket window.

Once more he held her back. “They’d think we were cranks, Maddy. By the time we managed to see anybody important, the flood would already have arrived.”

She shook her head desperately. “We’ve got to do something! Millions of people will die!”

It seemed to Sven that everybody in the bus station was looking at them. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “We’ll try to do something. But there’s nothing we can do by telephoning that will help.”

He started toward the station door and, after a moment, she followed him. When they were walking along the rutted road once more, she said, “We must try the new way of using Udra. We can try to make the President issue a general warning. Or even send the navy out to destroy the three ahln devices.”

He said, “I thought of that. The trouble is, we haven’t a spatial fix on the President. I was able to make the commander of the sub do what I wanted because I knew where he was, visually speaking, and could so rt out his mind from those of the crew members. The same thing was true when we had the gunner direct his cannon at the underwater shelf. But I doubt we can pick up the President, out of all the millions of minds on the Eastern seaboard. You remember, whe n we tried to pick up Lawrence with Udra, we couldn’t get anything at all.”

“That was because he had the kind of mind that doesn’t leave any traces.”

“Maybe. I think we could have picked him up, though, if we’d known where he was.”

They had got back to the beach cottage. Moonlight went running down over the sand to the water, calling us. When we swam up, she told us what had happened.

The news silenced us for a moment. Then I said, “Yes, he’s done it. The floods are going to be terrible, especially a fter the Antarctic ice starts to melt. We’re willing to work with you, Sosa, if you want to try to contact the President’s mind and have him issue a warning. Or even have the navy try to find and destroy the three ahln machines. Which do you want to try t o do?”

Sven said, “The simpler the action we are trying to make him perform, the greater our chances of success. Issuing a general warning is a good deal simpler than sending the navy out to hunt for the machines. We’d have to make him understand what the machines were, where they would be apt to be found, and what they looked like. Also, I doubt whether the navy could possibly find anything as small as the ahln devices in the midst of the Pacific waters. They’re too small a target. I move we try to make t he President issue a general warning and give orders to evacuate all coastal areas.”

Madelaine said, “What about the rest of the world? The flood won’t be confined to the United States.”