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 identicaclass="underline" we sea people have a pressure sense and a navigational 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 difference 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 could 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 above 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 happen. 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 consciousness 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 reaching-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 conscious 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 village 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-name 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 on 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 fishing, 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 friend 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.”