Margaret St. Clair (17 page)

He took the
Naomi in neatly and tied her up beside the other boat. “You dolphins had better go out to sea,” he told us softly. “Strangers in a place this size a re sure to attract a lot of attention.-Come back tonight, when the lights are out and it’s quiet, and we’ll try this reaching-out-to-Altair bit.”

“All right,” I answered. “Are you sure you can keep Madelaine warm enough, Doctor? Kendry said it was import ant.”

“I think so. It’s warm in the cabin, and I can cover her with my jacket. You’d better go now.”

We swam unobtrusively. The doctor had been right; by the time Madelaine came out on the deck, everybody in the little town had come down to the jetty t o look at the strange boat. They jostled each other, stared with bright dark eyes, and tried to sell the two North Americans baskets, serapes and fruit. Fortunately it was getting dark, and in an hour or so the visitors went home to supper. The Naomi was l eft alone.

“I wish I’d worked harder at Spanish when I was in high school,” Lawrence said. “As it is, ‘buenas dias’ and ‘quanto vale’ are about my limit. Don’t touch that fruit, Maddy, until I’ve dipped it in a sterilizing solution. Lie down on the sette e, and I’ll open something for us to eat.”

“All right. Did you find out what the name of this place is?”

“Bahia something or other.” He was busy with the can opener. “You know, Maddy, there are lots of things in what Kendry told us that I don’t underst and. For instance, how can knowledge of the ahln’s power source be communicated telepathically —I suppose that’s what’s involved in ‘reaching out to Altair’—when the knowledge of how to construct the ahln itself couldn’t be communicated that way.”

“I don’t know either,” Madelaine answered. “I think it must be something quite simple, so simple that telepathic communication will do for it. Of course, it may need telepathy of a special kind.”

“Perhaps.” He plainly wasn’t satisfied. He dumped cold canned cho w mein onto paper plates. “And then, about the ahln itself. We talk about a power source for it, but is the ahln a device for releasing heat from a fuel it destroys in the way that a furnace releases heat from coal, or is the ahln a machine that acts to c r eate heat from a power source that activates it, like an electric heater? Is what we’re going to try to get from Altair knowledge of a fuel, or of a power that can be transformed into great heat? I think these are quite different ideas.”

“It might be neither,” Madelaine answered thoughtfully. “The ahln might be like a pipe that conducts heat from a power source, like a pipe that carries hot water away from a geyser or an underground hot spring. It is possible there are sources of heat in the universe tha t human beings are not aware of,” she said. “I don’t mean atomic energy, I mean —the energy that creates atoms. Perhaps the ahln taps that. Perhaps it goes back in time, to the beginning of the universe, and brings heat back from there. Perhaps —well, I supp ose we will have to wait to find out.”

She hesitated. “Something else is bothering me,” she said. “How are we to reach out to Altair? I mean, to Altair specifically. There are billions and billions of suns in the universe, there are thousands of stars vi sible in the sky. How are Amtor and I to aim for Altair? Surely the name alone isn’t enough!”

“I can show you Altair in the sky, if you don’t know where it is,” the doctor offered. “It’s sure to be visible later in the night. Would that help?”

“It might. I’ll ask Amtor when he conies back. Kendry wouldn’t have told us to do it unless she thought it was possible. Let’s eat, and then try the fruit. It looks good.”

Meantime, we sea people were enjoying good fishing in the warmer-waters. Once or twice we had shark scares, but, since we weren’t carrying passengers, we outdistanced the predators easily. We went back to the Naomi a little before ten.

There were no lights in the village and, except for a dog barking somewhere, no sounds either. Lawrence and Madelaine were out on deck.

“Madelaine!” I called softly.

“Amtor! The doctor has been showing me the star he says is Altair. I’ve been wonderi ng …” She explained her diffi culty to me.

“I don’t think reaching out for Altair will be difficult,” I answered. “It’s one of the stars we sea people navigate by, and we are always aware of where it is. Let me do the reaching out, Sosa. Abandon your mind to me.”

“All right. The doctor thinks I should lie down on the settee in the cabin. Will the reaching out be like Udra?”

I saw she was a little nervous. “It will be like Udra at first,” I told her. “Later —I don’t know. We can’t tell until we try.”

The Splits went into the cabin. I floated in the water near the jetty, Ivry on one side of me and Pettrus on the other, and tried to get into the Udra-state. Moonlight and I had been in psychic contact a number of times before, of course, and she was not unused to Udra, either; but we both felt that this time was going to be different in its nature from anyt h ing before. For one thing, we must try for a more intimate psychic union than any we had had earlier; and then, we had never tried to reach such a target together. Splits say that light from Altair must travel for almost sixteen years to reach our earth.

My mind touched Madelaine’s. Men and dolphins are of one stock, but by now the gulf between us is enormous. It is a constant miracle that we can communicate at all. Our sensory equipment is not identical: we sea people have a pressure sense and a navigati onal sense that seems to have no human analogue; and human color vision is so much better than ours as to be almost a separate sense, though we can see farther into the ultraviolet and infrared regions than Splits can. And there is a constant, basic diffe r ence caused by the human possession of hands.

This gulf between Madelaine and me, this sensory and mental difference, meant that in our knowledge of each other there would be places where we could only be conscious of a terrifying, incomprehensible void. And yet our minds must join, and join very closely, if we were to reach out for Altair.

Time passed. The edges of Sosa’s mind and mine, despite our mutual fear, began to overlap. We were getting closer and closer. And then, like a diamond blade cutting into my brain, I got a violent psychic shock.

It was different from, and worse than, the shock I had had in Sausalito when I was in the Udra-state and the dolphins near Hawaii were killed. Ivry and Pettrus say I gave a scream, so high-pitched that they c ould hardly hear it They were thoroughly alarmed.

My first thought was that Dr. Lawrence had taken advantage of Sosa’s being in a trance state to attack her with his hunting knife. It was the kind of idea Ivry would have had, but I had it.

What had really happened was something different. Madelaine, in the Naomi’s cabin, was breathing quietly, her eyes closed, when Lawrence saw, or thought he saw, two fine greyish threads rising into the air from her breasts. The threads joined together about a foot abo ve her chest and curled away in a thicker strand into the darkness of the ceiling.

This was not very different from the kind of thing Lawrence had often encountered in his study of the literature of spiritualism, but he was startled to see it actually ha ppen. He took the girl’s pulse —it was very slow and weak —and then put a thermometer in her arm pit. She had felt cold to his touch, and when he read the thermometer, the mercury was so low that he decided he had better try to get her back to normal consc i ousness at once. It was this abrupt withdrawal of Sosa from her psychic contact with me that had shocked me so.

I soon realized that Moonlight was alive and conscious, but I wanted to know what had happened. I called softly until Dr. Lawrence came out on deck. He explained what had happened, and added, “Tomorrow I’ll get some sort of heater from the village —a charcoal brazier, if they don’t have any better means of warming themselves —and we’ll try again. Madelaine has to be kept warmer during the reachin g -out ramp than I realized.”

Ivry said, “We want to see Moonlight.”

“She’s still weak—”

“You can carry her, can’t you?” Ivry was getting excited. “Bring her out on the deck!”

Lawrence shrugged. In a minute he came back carrying Madelaine in his arms . She was a small light girl, but he was a small man; he was panting when he put her down.

“I’m all right,” she told us. “The doctor was right to rouse me when he did, but it must have been horrid for you, Amtor.”

She had answered my not quite consciou s fear that Lawrence had roused her when he did to damage us both. “We’ll try again tomorrow,” I said, not much liking the idea.

She was silent for a perceptible length of time before she said, “Yes.”

Early next morning Lawrence went shopping in the vi llage and came back with a brazier, a basket of charcoal, and a machine-made serape. “Half the population was following me,” he told Madelaine as he put his purchases away. “They watched every move I made. I never was more stared at in my life.”

“Why do you think that was?” the girl asked from the settee. She was still lying down; Lawrence insisted on her getting as much rest as she could.

“I don’t know enough Spanish to be sure, but I gather they’re puzzled why anybody should stay in Bahia what’s-its-n ame any longer than he has to. They think something funny is going on, and they’re curious. I hope their curiosity gets satisfied before tonight.”

Madelaine was twisting her fingers together nervously. “Doctor,” she said, “I’m —I’m afraid.”

“Afraid? You mean, of this reaching-out-to-Altair stuff?”

“Yes.”

He sat down on the cabin floor facing her, in a languid pose. It was odd, Madelaine said later, to observe how this avowal of fear on her part had returned him to his role of psychotherapist, and her self to the place of his patient.

“Afraid,” he said thoughtfully. “What does it seem to you that you’re afraid of?”

“I don’t know. Of nothing. I mean, of nothingness.”

“Can you pinpoint your fear a little more exactly?”

“I’ll try. I’m afraid of getting so far away from my body. It’s such a long way to Altair!” She tried to laugh.

“It sounds as if you were afraid of dying,” Lawrence offered.

“I don’t think it’s that. I mean, you’re a doctor. You’d keep me from dying, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d certainly try to. I doubt there’s really much danger of your dying.”

She sighed. Before she could say anything more, they both heard footsteps on the jetty. Somebody peeked in at the cabin window and then, when they looked up, quickly withdrew.

“Peeping Tom,” Lawrence said. “—If you don’t think you’re afraid of dying, what do you think it is?”

“It frightens me to think of what I’m afraid of.”

“We get this sort of thing in therapy all the time,” he observed. “If we had plenty of time to put in o n it, I could probably get you over being frightened to think of the cause of your fear. As it is, I recommend that you endure being frightened, and try to tell me what frightens you.”

“All right. I’m afraid of being all alone in the abyss of space.”

“Um. Will you be all alone? I thought Amtor would be with you.”

“Amtor!” Her face relaxed a little. “Yes, but that’s not enough. Perhaps the abyss in him is what I’m afraid of. I’m not sure. It seemed like that, last night.

“After all, Doctor, nobody has ever done anything like this before. It’s natural I should be afraid.”

“I suppose you mean that your fear is something there’s no use in trying to deal with by psychotherapy,” Lawrence said. “You may be right. Are you too afraid to try the reaching-out -to-Altair stunt, though?”

“Ye—No. Kendry wouldn’t have told us to try it unless it were possible. I’m frightened. But I’ll try.”

At ten o’clock that night the
Naomi was still under surveillance by the villagers. Ivry and Pettrus and I, back from our f ishing, could see the dark shapes of men along the beach and hear the low murmur of talk. Now and then somebody would run up on the jetty, peer in the Naomi’s window, and then run away again.

We were all getting restless. Lawrence had made a fire in the brazier, and the cabin was suitably warm. But Madelaine was keyed-up and tense, a bad mood in which to attempt telepathic contacts or Udra; and we sea people wanted to consult with our Split fr i end before making a second attempt at what Lawrence called “the Altair bit.” We waited impatiently.

“Let’s put out the light in the cabin,” the doctor suggested to Madelaine. “If they think we’ve gone to bed, they may go away.”

“All right. I wonder why they’re so suspicious of us? Our behavior hasn’t been peculiar enough to account for all this. Something unpleasant must have happened here recently. I can almost pick up what it was.”

Lawrence switched off the light and sat down on the cabin floor. Tim e passed. Madelaine coughed nervously. At last the doctor rose and softly went to the cabin window. He peered out just as one of the villagers, who had tiptoed along the jetty, peered in.

For a moment the two shadowy faces stared at each other, locked in mutual consternation. Then the villager broke away. His running feet pounded along the jetty and out on the sand.

” ‘Das ist der Teufel, sicherlich,’ ” said Lawrence, sitting down again on the floor. “Now I know what Papageno felt when he encountered th e villainous Monostatos unexpectedly. But the worst of it is, our watchers now are sure we aren’t asleep. Who will outwait whom?”

“I wish we could get started,” Sosa said. “Amtor’s getting impatient, too. But I want to talk to him before we try it. It’s going to be hard enough anyhow.”

“Yes. Maddy, had it occurred to you to wonder what the nature of the force is that you’re going to use in the reaching-out process?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Well, I suppose it will be basi cally telepathic. Amtor said it would be something like Udra at first —”

“Yes.”

“But what is Udra. Or, for that matter, telepathy? It’s always assumed that telepathy operates instantaneously. But on a terrestrial scale, that could mean it operates at the speed of light. Nobody has timed telepathic experiments to be sure there’s not that much of a time lag.