Read Online Margaret St. Clair by The Dolphins of Altair - Free Book Online Page B

y nourished. By the time we reached Noonday Rock, there were only about ten sea people still with the party —those of us who had been at the Rock more or less permanently, plus two or three from the DRAT station. My own Blitta stayed, of course.
    Sven, though stiff, managed to clamber off my back and wade ashore. But Moonlight was almost unable to move. He had to lift her off Ivry and half-carry her up on the beach.
    Her feet were no longer swollen, but shrunken and blue. He wanted to help her rub them, but she insisted he take care of himself first. It took a lot of massage before either of them could walk normally.
    “Where’s Dr. Lawrence?” Sven asked as he helped Madelaine to her feet after the rubbing. “I’m surprised he hasn’t come to meet us.”
    “Let’s go look for him.”
    They set off hand in hand to walk around the Rock, stopping now and then to call, “Dr. Lawrence! Dr. Lawrence!” We sea people watched them silently.
    They came back in about fifteen minutes. “He’s not on the Rock,” Sven said positively . “I even climbed up to see if he could be hiding at the top. He’s not here.”
    Madelaine was looking disturbed. “What could have happened to him?” she said. She fingered her lips uncertainly. “Perhaps there was another wave, a big one, and it swept him clean off the Rock. It’s the only thing I can think of. Anyhow, he seems to be gone.”
    “Certainly does,” Sven agreed.
    I said nothing. I did not think Dr. Lawrence had been swept off Noonday Rock. I remembered my earlier mistrust of him.
    -

Chapter 5
    When I think of what happened next, I always see it against a background of raging waters, a boiling sea whose froth is muddy pink. And that is odd, for it happened a little after noon on a bright, calm, windless day. The pink tinge in the water is an accurate recollection, though. I wish it were not.
    We ought to have left the Rock as soon as we realized Dr. Lawrence was gone, of course. Looking back on it, I find it strange that we took his disappearance so calmly. Even I, w ho mistrusted him, was not much alarmed. Partly this was because we could not be sure what had happened to him —the little fishing boat that had brought him to Noonday Rock in the first-place might have taken him away again, and in too much of a hurry for h im to have left a note —and partly because we sea people were in a mood of great euphoria.
    We dolphins are normally optimistic and good-tempered, and the unexpected rescue of our friends from the DRAT pens had made us feel that nothing bad could ever happ en-to us again. Our world has always been a good place, except for sharks.
    Sven and Madelaine, being human, could reasonably have been expected to be more suspicious than we, and Madelaine was certainly apprehensive of trouble to come. But neither of the m seemed to connect the danger with Dr. Lawrence at all. Perhaps the navy’s experiments in the use of psi phenomena had something to do with their myopia.
    Dr. Lawrence had told us once that the navy had been investigating psi phenomena with a view to mil itary use. Perhaps an experiment was being carried out that morning that had the unintended effect of blunting Madelaine’s normal perceptiveness. I have never been able to find out for sure.
    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