We heard Madelaine say to Lawrence, who was at the helm of the Akbar, “How much gas have we got?”
“Not—very much,” he answered. “Enough for about half an hour more cruising.”
Half an hour—it wasn’t nearly enough. The Akbar was a slow craft. She couldn’t get through to clear water in three times the time.
“I know what this stuff on the water is,” Lawrence said after a brief silence. “It’s called pyrtrol and was invented for dealing with fires at sea. It’s a chemical that reacts with moisture—the moisture from a fire hose, or in sea water, or even the moisture in the air—to form a thick blanket of foam. Somebody was smart to think of using it against the dolphins. I wonder what the dockside workers in the bay ports think of it.”
Moonlight made no answer. “It evaporates in four or five hours,” he went on. “That’s too long, of course. There’s a simple way of dealing with it—one of the crewmen told me about it once—if I could only think what it is.”
Madelaine was still silent. I think she was looking at him steadily. After a moment he put his right hand up to his head. “Don’t,” he said sharply. “That hurts.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Lawrence. You’ll have to stand it. I do not like it either. But it is important that you remember how to get rid of the foam.”
He made an inarticulate sound. He had left the helm and was standing with both hands pressed to his head. Madelaine had taken the wheel. “Well?” she said after a moment or two.
We were listening avidly; after all, our lives depended on whether Lawrence could remember what the crewman had told him. “Not yet,” Lawrence answered. “Christ, how it hurts!”
“I’m sorry. Try to relax. That’s causing part of your distress.”
It occurred to me that Sosa’s new abilities were, as she had said, something like our Udra, and that the trouble was coming from her trying to use them with an unsuitable subject. If she had been trying with Sven, for example, it would have caused him no distress.
The broad sheet of foam, whitish, like dirty snow, reflected the light from the sky and greatly increased the visibility of the objects around us; but it muffled and deadened sound. For us dolphins, swimming slowly in the Akbar’s narrow wake, it was as if we swam inside a small box, barely large enough for the three of us. It made us feel claustrophobic.
We heard Lawrence grunt again. “I am trying to relax, but it hurts so much that—wait now. I think I’m getting it Can’t you ease up a bit, Maddy?”
“All right.”
“That’s better,” he said. “Thanks for stopping. I couldn’t have stood it much longer. But I’ve remembered how to deal with the foam.”
We heard him go into the deckhouse. He came out after a minute with a plastic squeeze bottle of detergent in his hand. “This is going to look funny,” he told her. “But unless the crewman was mistaken, it will work.”
He went to the Akbar’s rail, leaned over, and began to squirt the detergent out of the bottle in long spurts, so that it landed on the sheet of foam. He walked slowly around the Akbar’s deck, squeezing the bottle, and when it was empty he tossed it into the froth ahead of the little houseboat.
Nothing happened. The Akbar continued to move slowly through the. water, and we followed behind her. “It will take a little while,” the doctor said, “ten or fifteen minutes, and when the foam goes, it will go all at once, all over the bay. It’s a one-piece sheet of foam, you see, even though it’s so large, and will respond all in one piece. At least, that’s what the crewman said.—I hope we don’t run out of gas.”
He took the helm from Madelaine. She went aft, where the foam was piled up almost as high as her shoulders, and stood looking down at us. “Don’t be frightened,” she told us softly. “I think it’s going to be all right. I don’t mean that our troubles are over, of course. But perhaps this one is.”
It would be dramatic to report that the foam lifted just as the Akbar’s motor gave its last cough and stopped from lack of gas. That is not what happened. Quite suddenly, as she was still moving forward and had still a few minutes’ fuel left, the whole sheet of froth lifted up from the water and hung suspended two or three feet above it. Then it disappeared. There was nothing gradual about the disappearance—one moment the thick froth was there, inexplicably floating, and the next it had gone. It left an oily, unpleasant smell in the air.
Madelaine drew a deep breath. “If navy planes have been monitoring this—and I think they have, very high up—they will have seen the foam lift and disappear. They won’t be sure what caused it, of course. Anybody who happened to spill enough detergent on the foam could have done it. The navy can’t have been watching everything that took place on San Francisco Bay.
“But tomorrow the planes will fly over, looking for the dead bodies of dolphins. When they don’t find any, and nobody reports finding any, they’ll be pretty certain we got away. We can expect more attacks to be made.”
The Akbar tied up almost at her old anchorage, the dock where Sosa had taken refuge when she was wounded and delirious. There was no other craft tied up there now.
The rest of the night I spent in the Udra-state, trying, with Madelaine’s help, to contact Sven. Ivry and Pettrus had gone fishing; Lawrence sat on the deck smoking and seeming to think.
Madelaine was not really in Udra, of course; her mind, though it had changed since her long semiconsciousness, was still essentially the mind of a Split. But she did what she could do to help. We both thought a Split working with a dolphin would be more apt to contact the mind of a Split.
I never made a contact with a mind that was clearly Sven’s, though over and over I had impressions of stress and helplessness. It was about four o’clock in the morning according to Madelaine, when I gave a loud, gurgling cry.
What had happened was that, deep in the Udra-state as I was, I had received an exceedingly unpleasant shock. It was dangerous, too—I have known of sea people to be knocked unconscious, or even to have a heart attack, from such a shock. Ivry and Pettrus, off fishing, felt it too, but not nearly so severely. The Udra-state makes one vulnerable.
“What’s the matter?” Sosa cried. “Something has happened. What was it?”
“A lot of the sea people have been killed.”
“How many? Oh, Amtor! Where was it! How?”
“I don’t know how many,” I said miserably. I was still badly shaken. “Quite a few. It was out at sea, near Hawaii. They were leaping up in the air because they were happy. A navy bomber saw them and dropped bombs on them.”
“I knew trouble was coming,” Madelaine said desolately. She looked briefly at Lawrence, and I knew she was thinking that it was he who was responsible for so much pain. And yet, if it had not been for him, the sea people would still have been confined in the navy’s training stations. Dr. Lawrence was always ambiguous.
Lawrence got to his feet and came toward Madelaine. He flipped his cigarette over the side of the Akbar. “A direct attack,” he said, “and there’re going to be more of them. The only reason we’ve survived so far is that the navy isn’t sure where to look for us. There’d have been no nonsense about a sheet of pyrtrol foam if they had.
“It’ll get worse. They can’t afford to let us go on living. Maddy’s ‘war against the human race’ is enough to make Homo sapiens, with his guilty conscience, acutely nervous. Before things get really desperate, we’d better find a way of getting the heat off ourselves.”
Ivry and Pettrus swam up and listened.