“I understand. How do I get a communicator?”
“We’d have to go see Levy, the giant squid.”
“Big squids are dangerous! Let one get a sucker on you, and you’re in a fight for your life. You have to bite off the tentacle if you can, before others latch on and it eats you.”
“This one’s not hungry for dolphin meat.”
“It’s still a huge act of trust.”
I had little patience with his doubt. “So maybe you’d better swim away now.”
“Let’s go,” he said, and dived again, this time swimming toward the deep trench.
I followed, pleased. I had rather feared he would balk.
We entered the trench and I broadcast a mental call. The huge squid came up to meet us. “I brought someone to help,” I said. “He needs a communicator. Then we’ll try again to contact the humans.” I flashed the disaster of yesterday.
“Here,” the squid thought, holding out another packet.
Hrump swam up to take it. He knew about swallowing it, from my mind.
“Time is short,” Levy warned us.
“We’ll do our best,” Hrump replied.
Levy sank back into more comfortable depth, and we swam up to a more comfortable depth. “See, he didn’t eat you,” I said somewhat smugly.
“This is amazing!” Hrump said. “I hear mental voices all around.”
“It’s constant,” I agreed. “You have to learn to tune out most of them, so as to be able to focus on the ones you want.”
“This is a challenge.”
“It is.”
“Can you help me?”
“Like this,” I said, projecting the damping mood I had worked out. “It doesn’t do the whole job, but it helps.”
“It does,” he agreed, trying it. “But I suspect I will go hungry for a while, until I am inured to the pain of the prey.”
We shared the mental experience, so that he could gain proficiency. He picked up on it quickly, but there was a lot of detail to work out. The time seemed brief, and then I saw it was light, and knew that dawn had come while we communed.
And there were the mental traces of Tayle and Jon coming out to the boat. It was time for introductions. “Tayle!” I thought. “I have another dolphin to help.”
“Another dolfin! Great!”
The two of them stood on the dock and gazed down at the two of us in the water. “I am Hrump, a young male. I have a communicator too. I want to help save the world.”
“We can use all the help we can get,” Jon said. “Tag along as we boat out to the island.”
They got in the boat and Jon started the motor. The craft nosed out, then picked up speed. We swam on either side, pacing it, staying in mental touch. Jon talked with Hrump, updating him further; it seemed they were more comfortable male to male.
In due course we reached the island. Jon cut the motor, in effect parking the boat a polite distance away. Time to get ready for action.
“Now how do we do this?” Tayle asked. “Do we swim out with you?”
“We can’t begin to match the pace of the dolphins,” Jon said.
“You can ride mentally with us, while leaving your bodies safe on the boat,” I said. “Tayle, you can ride with me, and Jon can ride with Hrump if he wants to.”
“Sure,” Jon said. “I want to find out what it’s like, after what Tayle told me.”
I reached forth and took in Tayle’s mind. Hrump picked up my technique, and did the same with Jon’s mind. Then Hrump and I swam on toward the beach of the house whose address Jon had researched, talking with our passengers.
Then we picked up the minds of two people scuba diving. Brad Beamis and Heidi Green! Now we could make our case. Assuming they would listen to two “talking” dolphins better than the politician Norris had.
Suddenly I was very glad to have telepathic company of my own kind, as well as the presence of the two humans. Maybe they could help me avoid the pitfalls of such a dialogue.
There they were, exploring for shells on the sea floor: two humans with goggles, mouthpieces, air tanks, and fins on their feet, trailing bursts of bubbles. The two we’d come to contact, a healthy man and a slender woman. They looked up alertly as we approached, wondering why dolphins were swimming toward them. They would wonder even more when we projected our thoughts to them.
Chapter Nineteen
The next few hours were a blur of miscommunication, confusion, fear, anger, hostility and, ultimately, understanding and acceptance.
The two divers now sat across from us on their large vessel as the sun shone directly overhead. It was mid-day, and we had spent the better part of it trying desperately to communicate the gravity of the situation. We had ultimately succeeded in doing so, which left most of us spent and hungry.
The two divers were scientists. They also had frozen fish on hand, which they tossed to Hrump and me. My new dolphin friend and I briefly inhabited our bodies long enough to gulp down the cold morsels, relishing the fact that we did not have to listen to their cries. Once done, we sat with the others again, in the tiny cabin, inhabiting our respective hosts.
There was a lot to discuss.
Now, as the others ate what they call “sandwiches,” and drank soda, the broad-shouldered male scientist, whose name was Brad, said, “My fiance and I work together at Cal Tech.” I didn’t know what Cal Tech was, but I needed only to reach inside Brad’s mind to quickly understand that this was an institution for advanced science. Yes, we surely stumbled upon the correct people. Turned out, we didn’t stumble upon them at all. Brad explained further. “We were both due a vacation and had been trying to decide where to scuba dive.”
“And you chose here? We’re hardly known as a diving destination, what, with our mostly-dead coral reefs,” said Jon, munching his sandwich hungrily. I would have munched it, too. It looked very tasty.
I’ll make you one, silly, thought Tayle, who, of course, sensed my every thought, especially now that we were linked.
That sounded very nice to me, but I impressed on her later. I needed to hear this.
“True,” said Brad, oblivious to the minor exchange I’d been having with Tayle. “I wouldn’t have normally chosen this site, except that I’d been dreaming of it.”
Jon choked on his sandwich and Tayle quickly handed him more of the bubbly soda. Jon gulped it quickly, cleared his throat, recovered his speech, and said, “You dreamed of coming here?”
“Yes.”
“And you acted on this dream?”
Brad might have reddened a little with his expressive human face. As he did so, his “fiance” laughed lightly. Fiance, I’d come to learn, was a designation used for one who intended to mate for life with another. I couldn’t help but to think of Hrump and his suggestion to form our own pod. Had he intended to mate with me for life?
Heidi, Brad’s fiance, said, “I was against the idea. I thought it was foolishness. We are scientists after all. We work with numbers and hard evidence. We do not base decisions on dreams.”
“But you came anyway.”
Heidi shrugged, sipped her own soda. “He was adamant.”
“The dreams were persistent,” said Brad.
“And what were these dreams?” asked Tayle.
The scientist turned and looked at the girl. “A good question. I dreamed of deep trenches. I dreamed of giant squids...and of dolphins. Mostly, I dreamed that I should be here for an important reason.”
Jon looked at me, and as he spoke, I knew it was Hrump speaking through him, as Jon’s voice was monotone and slightly awkward. “Do you think the aliens reached out to him?”
“Maybe,” I said through Tayle. My own words sounded much more natural through Tayle, as the young girl and I had grown accustomed to this manner of communication. “Something had reached out to him.”
“I have a hard time believing that an alien intelligence sought me out, found me, and then invaded my dreams.”
“But you have an easier time believing
that dolphins are speaking to you through humans?” Earlier, through much demonstration, we had shown Brad and Heidi that, yes, they were indeed speaking to dolphins and that, yes, this was really happening and they weren’t dreaming.
Brad shrugged. “Honestly, at this point, anything could be possible.”
Now Jon spoke up, the real Jon. “Accepting the possibility that the aliens perhaps sought and found the correct scientists to help us, why would they not impress upon him all the information he needed?”
I had an answer to that, as I myself had recently reached the limits to my own telepathic ability. “They can only reach so far. And, I suspect, the kind of information they can give is limited. Rather then detailed information, the best they could have hoped for was a subtle approach through dreams.”
“But how did they find them?” asked Hrump through Jon.
“I suspect I know how,” said Brad. He stood and walked over to the window and looked at the glittering sea. He spoke with his back to us. “Heidi and I are part of a team of scientists who have been tracking this pulse from space.”
“So you know about it!” This was Tayle, not me.
Brad and Heidi, I suspected, probably didn’t know when I was speaking or when Tayle was speaking. Ultimately, it didn’t matter.
“Yes,” said Heidi. “But we couldn’t calculate when it would arrive or what danger it would pose. Now we understand the magnitude of the situation.”
“Perhaps they tried to reach other scientists, but could only get through to Brad,” I suggested.
“I think so,” said Brad, turning to us. “Well, we’re here, and we’ve seen, thanks to your telepathy, the impact this pulse will have. I’ve also seen, through your telepathy, what we need to build to save our planet. Except there’s one problem.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
He looked directly at me. “The information you’ve given us is incomplete.”
“How can that be?” asked Jon.
“Perhaps something was lost,” suggested Heidi. “From the alien mind, to the giant squid, to Azael, and then finally us...something got lost in translation.”
Brad nodded. “I understand what they want us to build, and we even have the technology at Cal Tech, but there’s something missing.”
“What?” I asked.
But Heidi answered for me. “The power source.”
“Yes,” said Brad. “We don’t have anything near strong enough to power want they want us to build.”
“What do we do?” asked Jon. His own sandwich was now forgotten in front of him.
“Well, I think the answer is obvious,” said Brad, giving us a half smile. “We need to speak to the aliens directly.”
“But we can’t swim that far down,” said Hrump through Jon. “I tried. My head nearly imploded.”
“Well, we don’t want your head to implode,” said Heidi. “I think what Brad is alluding to is that we need to go down, too.”
“Humans?” I said. “Into the trench? But how?”
“We have a friend,” said Brad. “A famous movie director who has his own deep sea manned sub. We can fit three in there comfortably. And, as luck would have it, he’s filming an undersea documentary nearby.”
“Perhaps it’s not luck at all,” suggested Jon. “Perhaps the aliens had something to do with that, too.”
“Perhaps,” said Brad. “We’ll find out soon enough.”
Chapter Twenty
I wasn’t satisfied. Something was bothering me, and finally it came to the surface. “I don’t think we can do it.”
The three other human bodies looked at ours, and Tayle herself was confused. “Why, Azael?” Heidi asked, showing that she knew which of us was speaking.
“Because in the mass of information they gave me there was something I only picked up on now, when we realized we would have to meet the aliens more directly. They’re not here, exactly. They’re in a deep trench.”
“Off the Patton Escarpment, west of the California coast,” Brad said. He knew about the undersea landscape.
“No. That’s just a—a life-ship, sent to get closer to you at Tech Cal,” I said. “Specially engineered to withstand the lesser pressure of the surface water. All it contains is a—a metal device.”
“A robot mechanism,” Brad said.
“Yes. A Row Bot.” But that wasn’t it. The concept was of an intelligent machine, like a boat or car, but more sophisticated. Robot. “With the telepathy to reach out and project to the nearest sapient or near-sapient creatures. That’s how the squid was contacted; it swam close to investigate, and got the message and the telepathy packs. The aliens see through the—the robot’s eyes, and receive its thoughts, but they aren’t here.”
Brad nodded. “They’re in one of the really deep trenches. The Mariana or Puerto Rico. Neither of which is close by here.”
“Yes, the Mariana Trench,” I agreed, relieved that he understood what I barely grasped. “This little local trench is just for the robot.”
“But they are in touch with the robot,” Brad said. “So if we descend to it, bypassing the squid, we’ll have contact that much more direct. That may suffice.”
“Maybe,” I agreed uncertainly.
“The alternative is to commission a mission to fly the six of us—four humans and two dolphins—plus my friend’s deep sea sub—to the alien mother ship. More than six thousand miles west, near the Philippines. That would be cumbersome and expensive at best.”
“But if it’s really the end of the world we face,” Heidi said, “expense is no object, is it?”
“We’d have to wrestle with the government bureaucracy. I’m a consultant rather than an official; it would be a months-long hassle.”
“Unless we cut out the middleman and go directly to the president. With the telepathy.”
“Can’t do it,” Brad said. “Azael and Jon had the right idea, trying to use the political chain of command, and look where it got them.”
“Well, Norris is a turd,” she said.
“The political scene is lined with turds.”
“So it is,” she agreed with resignation.
“Anyway, the nature of the threat is too complicated for any politician to comprehend. Even with direct telepathic access to the president, it would be a tough sell.”
“The end of the world can’t be that complicated,” she protested. “if we can understand it, the president can.”
“We don’t understand it. That’s part of the problem. We need to get closer contact with the aliens for that, and we’re still wrestling with that aspect.”
“What do you mean, we don’t understand it? It’s a magnetic storm.”
“Which few if any Earth scientists really understand. We need a far clearer picture before we take it further.”
“What is so damned difficult about it?” Jon asked.
Brad sighed. “Very well, I’ll try. If we here can’t get it, we aren’t going to be able to sell anyone else on it, regardless of urgency or alien contact. But I’ll have to provide some background.”
“Sure,” Jon said, and Heidi nodded.
“Historically, there are precedents,” Brad said, sounding like a college professor, according to Tayle’s thought. “Back in AD 775, the European dark age, the skies lit up with seeming glowing serpents. Nothing else seemed to happen, and there’s no direct trace of it today except in things like the tree rings record. That showed that a supremely powerful blast of radiation struck our atmosphere from space; there was a remarkable spike in carbon-14 levels. So it did no real harm to the world then, but it’s a warning, because if something similar happened today, with our highly developed technology, satellites would fry, power stations would melt, the internet would shut down, and we’d lose power and communications for years. In fact we might never bounce back from the resulting chaos. And we do face this today, perhaps not from the same source.”
“But what was it?” Heidi asked.
“That’s what we don’t
know. There’s no earthly source strong enough, by a hundredfold; it had to come from space. Only something like a nova next door could generate such intense radiation, and there was none. Our best guess is that it resulted from a coronal mass ejection—we abbreviate it CME—wherein a billion tons of the sun’s atmosphere got hurled into space, and Earth happened to be in its path. What caused the CME? Maybe a meteor grazing the surface of the sun; we don’t know, and we can’t reliably predict such an event. It’s hard enough to track meteors that might impact the Earth, and the sun is a far more likely target. In addition, no two CMEs are the same; they vary widely in nature. Now this threat the aliens warn of isn’t even exactly that, but the effect would be similar.”
Heidi nodded. “I think I could comprehend that if I worked on it. You?” She looked at Jon and Tayle.
Both shook their heads, and Hrump and I agreed. Nova? A billion tons of solar atmosphere? A hundredfold intense radiation? I did not know what those were, but I felt their menace. This was mind-stretching stuff that surely made sense to a scientist, but was beyond us.
So I focused on the problem I could understand. “So let’s go talk to the squid, and maybe the robot will know how to get enough power to build the machine that will keep that deadly radiation bubble away. Then at least we’ll have the answer, even if we don’t properly understand the question.”
Brad nodded. “Let’s hope so.”
Chapter Twenty-one
The film director just might have been insane. His name was Kevin Dupree.
After our arrival to his vast research ship, a ship that Kevin’s film company had chartered (yes, so many new terms and ideas for a simple dolphin...yet concepts I could understand well enough thanks to the aid of those humans around me), I reached out to the director’s brain—and was surprised by what I discovered there.
It was incredibly fast, bouncing around from idea to idea. The director, I saw quickly enough, was a different kind of genius, far removed from the analytical brains of the scientists, whose brains I had more closely identified with. The director was a different story; thoughts coursed through his mind rapidly, wildly, imaginatively. He was an artist, I soon learned, an artist who used movie pictures to tell his story.