At last we found a smallish conurbation that seemed to be the right one. We couldn’t be sure it was located on a river, but we got constant impressions of movement and traffic around monuments, and a large proportion of the minds we sampled seemed to be concerned with the making of decisions and with administration. We could tick off minds almost as fast as a computer eliminates possibilities, and we began to move in from the periphery of the city, hunting the mind of the President of the United States.
We settled on three men as probables. They seemed to be in physical proximity to each other, per haps in adjoining rooms, and from their thoughts they all had power and were concerned about using it wisely.
Which one? It was hard to tell, from their thoughts, which of the three was the most powerful, and the field of their thinking appeared almost identical. But one of them was more serious and impersonal than the others. We all four thought he must be the man. We stretched out toward him and began to send Sven’s message to him.
I don’t want to give the impression that this use of Udra is merely telepathy. The “message” was only the first part of it. We were trying to take over our man’s nervous system and make him issue an order, not merely to put an idea into his mind. That meant we should have to have him in a tight grip, and keep that grip up for some time.
We had less trouble with him than we had anticipated. This was because the man we thought was the President was already deeply concerned about the Alaskan floods. The Eastern coast was beginning to get violent wind storms, and Canada, east and west, was suffering from floods almost as severe as those in Alaska. The scale of the disasters was unique, and our man was already disposed to act as we wanted him to.
We closed our four minds over him. With us urging him, he got up (we could sense his movements and be aware of what his muscles did), walked a few steps, and picked up something. I think it was a telephone. But we didn’t learn until later whether or not we had succeeded in making him give the order we wanted, because at that moment the unity of our psychic quartet was abruptly disturbed. This is always a shocking experience, and it must have been somewhat shocking to the man we thought was the President.
What had happened was that Sven, lying on the beach, had sat up suddenly, sputtering water and gasping for breath. The water had risen while he was in the Udra-state and had been almost over his face. His last breath had taken in more water than air.
As soon as he could breathe normally again, he ran to Madelaine. The girl, lying a little higher on the beach than he, was having no trouble breathing; but her legs and waist were submerged, and her hair floated loose over the sand.
He put his arm under her shoulders and pulled her into a sitting position. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “The water’s rising. The flood’s begun.”
“The flood?” she said dazedly. She was still partly in the Udra-state. “No, it’s the tide. The tide always comes in. And what about the warning we were trying to get that man in Washington to issue?”
“Never mind him. We’ve done all we can. It’s not the tide. We’ve got to get out ourselves, the dolphins and us, while we still can.
“Help me get food and water from the cottage. There’s no time to go inland to high ground. We’ll have to try to ride out the floods at sea, on the dolphins’ backs.”
Chapter 19
Our great fear was that our passengers would be swept off our backs. The water was already rough, with a stiff wind, and big pattering drops of rain were falling from the threatening sky. The weather was bound to get worse; we did not know how bad it would get. In really angry water, retrieving Sven or Madelaine would be almost impossible.
Madelaine was riding Ivry, and Sven was on Pettrus’ back. This was not as we would have preferred it—Sven by choice rode Djuna, and Moonlight and I were always happiest together. There was a particular bond between the four of us because of our common Udra experience. But Djuna and I—she because of the ways in which her wounds had healed, I because of my rudimentary hand—were weaker swimmers than the others. We were in for an ordeal, and we all knew it. It seemed best to let the stronger two carry our friends’ weight.
We had been swimming straight out to sea. Now Sven said, “I think we should head northwest.” He had to speak loudly, for the wind carried his words away. “We may be at sea for days and above all things we don’t want to be caught between the flood water from the two polar melts. That would be turbulent. But if we can get over the hump of the advancing water from the north, we should be all right. What do you think, Amtor?”
“Yes,” I said after a moment. I was thinking that the traditional knowledge we sea people had of the ocean currents would be of no use to us now. Nothing would flow as it had flowed before. The avalanches of unlocked water had put everything awry. “Yes, once we are really out to sea, we shouldn’t even notice the rise in the water. The weather is something else, but there’s nothing we can do about it. We’ll head northwest.”
The change of course was made. We dolphins were beginning to notice a slight lack of buoyancy in our swimming as the fresh water began to dilute the salt; and this, plus the fact that the waves were getting bigger, increased our anxiety for our passengers.
That this fear was not groundless was shown about half an hour later. The waves had been getting bigger, and when an extraordinarily large one came, Ivry made the mistake of taking it broadside, instead of meeting it obliquely. Moonlight, who had perhaps not had her hands as tightly under his flukes as she might have, was swept straight off his back, clutching desperately at his sleek sides.
Ivry was after her like a flash, and I followed him. We bore her up strongly, my back under her legs, and got he r to the surface quickly. All the same, she was gasping and weak when she clambered on Ivry’s back again, and vomited salt water for a while. If the sea had been rougher, we knew we could never have saved her.
“This won’t do,” Sven said, looking at the girl. “Night’s coming on, and we’re bound to doze occasionally. We’d better try to tie our legs together under the dolphins’ bellies.”
“What can we use for ropes?” Moonlight answered faintly.
“The straps from the canteens,” Sven replied. “They’re fairly strong, and if it keeps raining we’re not going to have any lack of fresh water. We’ll empty one canteen and throw it away, and I’ll take the strap off the other and stash the canteen away in my jacket with the food. That will give us two straps.”
Moonlight nodded. She drank from the canteen she was carrying, and then passed it over to Sven. He finished the water in it, took the strap off, and tossed the empty canteen into the sea. Then he took the strap from the second canteen, and put the canteen in his jacket.
Now began a complicated maneuver. For a Split to tie his feet together under the belly of a full-grown dolphin, and with a rather short strap, is no simple thing. Once Madelaine dropped her strap, and I had to dive for it. But they managed it at last, with a good deal of bending and twisting, and I went under to check the soundness of their knots and pull them as tight as I could with my rudimentary hand. Whether Sven and Madelaine would be safe through the night depended on how strong the leather of the straps was.
The sun sank. The moon was already up in the eastern sky. It gave a certain lurid glow, but it was only occasionally visible through the wind-driven clouds. We kept swimming northwest steadily.