Margaret St. Clair (8 page)

At any rate, we were still at the Rock a little after noon on Monday. Sven and Madelaine had slept for a few hours after our arrival there, and Sven had then gone with Djuna to the big island to bring back some canned goods and drinking water. He did not think there would be any danger of being observed, even in b road daylight, so soon after a major earthquake had shaken the coast. People would be too occupied with their own troubles to notice one man on an unimportant island.

Moonlight—she had grown so tanned from exposure that the name was no longer apt for her —was sitting on the rocky beach talking to us. The sea people had been released from their prisons, but the hardest part of what we had undertaken —making sure that human beings would never molest us again —was still in front of us. As Dr. Lawrence had said, it was a large order. None of us had a clear idea how it was to be done.

Blitta was close beside me in the water. We were so happy to be together again! The sea was too cold for us to think much about mating, but we were planning to slip away for a few days to the warm blue South Pacific. We had been separated for two years.

Abruptly Madelaine got t o her feet, pressing her hands against her breast. She seemed to be listening. Then she yelled at us, “Dive, all of you! Swim out and dive! Quick!”

She turned and ran up from the beach toward the rock.

We acted on her warning instantly. But Blitta, who was not used to trusting Splits, was a little slower about obeying than the rest of us. This momentary hesitation of hers was certainly the reason why …

A plane appeared out of the empty sky. It was a very fast reconnaissance plane. It swooped down over the Rock.

It came so low that Madelaine, who had pressed herself against the rock face for protection, said she thought it was going to gut itself on t he granite crest. She could see the big navy insignia on its belly and wings.

The plane pulled out of its dive at the last minute. It was only a few yards above the rocky beach. Bullets began to patter. The plane was straffing the water and the shore.

The barrage lasted only an instant. Then the plane was up and high in the air again like a flash of light.

It circled the Rock twice, very high. Madelaine, hugging the granite wall, hoped it was going away. Then it made another swoop. Bullets pocked and whined against the hard surface. This time the plane was straffing the Rock. I don’t know whether or not the pilot saw Madelaine. Probably not, or he would have continued his straffing until he killed her. At any rate, he made one more pass over the top o f the crest, while the bullets spatted. Then he shot up and away. In an instant he had vanished in the east.

Madelaine came running down to the water. “Amtor! Blitta! Ivry!” she called. “Are you —”

She stopped. She had seen the pink tinge in the ripples on the little beach. “Who’s hurt?” she demanded anxiously. “Who’s been hurt?”

“It’s Blitta,” I replied after an instant. “She’s —Moonlight, I think she’s dead.”

“Oh, Amtor!”

“The pilot hit her twice. The first bullet went in her back, I think. The second —it must have gone into her heart.”

Madelaine was silent. For the first time since the straffing, I looked at her. Then I saw that she had been wounded. Her left shoulder was streaming with blood.

“Maddy, you’ve been wounded,” I said.

“Have I?” she replied absently. “It doesn’t hurt.”

“It will. We must get Sven and have him bandage it for you.”

“There’s no time,” she answered. “There’s not time for anything, Amtor. We haven’t even time to warn Sven. Dr. Lawrence has betrayed us. That was a navy scouting plane. There’ll be fifty planes here soon. We must leave the Rock.”

Was this the trouble Madelaine had forseen for us? There was no time for speculation —no time even for grief. She was right. The air would be full of bombers in a few minutes. Lawrence had betrayed us. We must leave the Rock.

-

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 sou t h, along the coast, the nearest place where we could put Madelaine ashore was the Channel Islands, and that was much too far.

That le ft 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 ea r thquake. 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 bo mbers 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 sa i d. 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. “Som ething 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 t hey 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 breat h. 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. Sh e 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 sh e 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 breathin g 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 tr y 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 coa ls 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 thi n king, 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 u p 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 hi m 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 mor e 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 foun tain 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 do n’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. Perha ps 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 c ity 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 sout hwards, 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 w e 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, wh ich 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 traff i c 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.