“Radio station.” She was fumbling with a San Diego telephone directory. “I’m going to try to—yes, here it is.” She went into the telephone booth.
She was in the booth a long time. Buses came and went. Sven, looking down on her head, saw that her hair had grown out beyond the dark dye, and was blonde again at the roots. At last she came out, even paler than when she had gone in.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. He put his hand under her arm. “Are you OK, kid?”
“Yes. I called the station. I kept getting a busy signal, but I stayed on the line. Finally somebody answered. I told him I wanted to speak to the station manager, that it was important. He said, ‘Lady, call back some other time. All our lines are jammed with people asking about the Alaska hurricane and flood.’
“I said, ‘Flood?’ He said, ‘Yeah, half Anchorage is under water, and it’s still rising. Nobody knows why.’ Then he hung up.”
Sven blinked. “It-must have got there,” he said.
“Oh, yes. I suppose it’s causing the hurricane, too. I’ve got to try something else. I—I know, I’ll call the President.” She started toward the booth once more.
Sven held her back. “It’s a waste of time,” he said. “You’d never get through to the President. They’d just think you were some kind of crank.”
“But—we can’t just let it go at this! Millions of people will be killed if they aren’t warned to get to high ground. Everybody in this room will be killed. Descanso is flat as a board. We have to—to keep trying.”
“Take it easy,” he said. “The flood won’t get here for a good many hours.”
“What’s that got to do with it? Every city on the California coast will be flooded. And after the South Polar ice starts to melt, every coastal city in the world. We—I know, Sven. You and I will fly to Washington and insist on seeing the President. We’ll tell him what’s happening.” She started toward the ticket window.
Once more he held her back. “They’d think we were cranks, Maddy. By the time we managed to see anybody important, the flood would already have arrived.”
She shook her head desperately. “We’ve got to do something! Millions of people will die!”
It seemed to Sven that everybody in the bus station was looking at them. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “We’ll try to do something. But there’s nothing we can do by telephoning that will help.”
He started toward the station door and, after a moment, she followed him. When they were walking along the rutted road once more, she said, “We must try the new way of using Udra. We can try to make the President issue a general warning. Or even send the navy out to destroy the three ahln devices.”
He said, “I thought of that. The trouble is, we haven’t a spatial fix on the President. I was able to make the commander of the sub do what I wanted because I knew where he was, visually speaking, and could so rt out his mind from those of the crew members. The same thing was true when we had the gunner direct his cannon at the underwater shelf. But I doubt we can pick up the President, out of all the millions of minds on the Eastern seaboard. You remember, when we tried to pick up Lawrence with Udra, we couldn’t get anything at all.”
“That was because he had the kind of mind that doesn’t leave any traces.”
“Maybe. I think we could have picked him up, though, if we’d known where he was.”
They had got back to the beach cottage. Moonlight went running down over the sand to the water, calling us. When we swam up, she told us what had happened.
The news silenced us for a moment. Then I said, “Yes, he’s done it. The floods are going to be terrible, especially after the Antarctic ice starts to melt. We’re willing to work with you, Sosa, if you want to try to contact the President’s mind and have him issue a warning. Or even have the navy try to find and destroy the three ahln machines. Which do you want to try to do?”
Sven said, “The simpler the action we are trying to make him perform, the greater our chances of success. Issuing a general warning is a good deal simpler than sending the navy out to hunt for the machines. We’d have to make him understand what the machines were, where they would be apt to be found, and what they looked like. Also, I doubt whether the navy could possibly find anything as small as the ahln devices in the midst of the Pacific waters. They’re too small a target. I move we try to make the President issue a general warning and give orders to evacuate all coastal areas.”
Madelaine said, “What about the rest of the world? The flood won’t be confined to the United States.”
“No, but I think this is the best we can do. If the President of the United States says a worldwide flood is coming, the rest of the world will listen. There’s no use trying to get the U.N. Secretary-General to warn people. They wouldn’t listen. And he can’t order an evacuation. He has no real power.”
“Good,” I said after a moment. I do not mind saying that we sea people were relieved. We had no ill-will toward Splits generally. I think we have proved this many times. We regarded them as brothers, albeit brothers with an unfortunate tendency to fratricide.
But the ahln devices were our one real weapon, and if they were destroyed, we should be returned to our former status of experimental animals. Worse, if our part in having caused the Alaskan flood became known, all Splits everywhere would regard us as legitimate prey, and killing us as a virtuous act. It was the same situation, in short, that we had been in when we thought Dr. Lawrence had defected to the navy with the stolen ahln devices in his medical bag; and to be returned to it after an interval of hope was almost more than we could bear.
“The first thing to do,” Sven said, “is to try to get a spatial fix on Washington, where the President probably is. It’s a medium-sized city straight across the continent, and north of here, oh, about three hundred and fifty miles. It’s in somewhat from the coast, and it’s situated on a river. There are a lot of monuments.”
“Good,” I repeated. We all knew that we couldn’t really “see” Washington; but we hoped we would be able to “see” the city, monuments, rivers and all, in the minds of the people who lived in it. The river would be visible as thoughts about a river, and so on.
“After we get a fix on the city, we’ll try to pick out the mind of the President,” Sven said. “We may be able to identify him from his thoughts. And then we’ll try to give him a simple message, and a simple command: ‘A worldwide flood is coming. Order all coastal areas evacuated.’
“We can’t make him think what we want him to think—the new way of using Udra is basically motor control. But we may be able to make him do what we want him to do, if only for a short while.”
The two Splits sat down on the sand, rather high up on the beach. The afternoon sun was warm, but Madelaine was shivering with nervousness. Sven piled the sand up around her legs to make her more comfortable. Then he stretched out on his back, with his arm over his eyes.
It was difficult for us to get into the Udra-state. We were all anxious and upset, apprehensive for the future, and we had been through sharp emotional reversals in the last few days. On the other hand, we were learning how to help each other. So, after the first resistance, we made good progress. We were deeply into the state in three-quarters of an hour.
It was when we began looking for the city in the District of Columbia that we understood what Sven had meant about the importance of getting a spatial fix. We had no difficulty discerning the clustering of minds that marks a city. But there were so many clusterings! How were we to know which was the one we were hunting? People almost never think of the name of the place where they are; and it seemed that the inhabitants of every urban nucleus on the Eastern seaboard were thinking of rivers—or at any rate of water—and monuments. I suppose the Alaskan floods were responsible for all the watery thoughts we got.