I moved up to the bar, becoming its only occupant. The bartender, a fat man who had needed a shave yesterday as well as the day before, put down his newspaper and came over.
What'll it be?
Give me a beer, I said. And can I get something to eat?
Wait a minute.
He moved farther down, checked a small refrigerator.
Fish-salad sandwich? he said.
Okay.
Good. Because that's all we've got.
He put it together, brought it over, drew me my beer.
That was your boat I heard, wasn't it? he asked.
That's right.
Vacationing?
No. I just started work over at Station One.
Oh. Diver?
Yes.
He sighed.
You're Mike Thomley's replacement, then. Poor guy.
I prefer the word successor to replacement in these situations, because it makes people seem less like spark plugs. But I nodded.
Yeah, I heard all about it, I said. Too bad.
He used to come here a lot.
I heard that, too, and that the guy he was with worked here.
He nodded.
Rudy. Rudy Myers, he said. Worked here a couple years.
They were pretty good friends, huh?
He shook his head.
Not especially, he said. They just knew each other ... Rudy worked in back. He glanced at the curtain.
You know.
I nodded.
Chief guide, high medical officer, and head bottle washer, he said, with rehearsed levity. You interested ... ?
What's the specialty of the house?
Pink Paradise, he said. It's nice.
What's it got?
Bit of a drift, bit of an up, the pretty lights.
Maybe next time, I said. Did he and Rudy go swimming together often?
No, that was the only time ... You worried?
I am not exactly happy about it. When I took this job nobody told me I might get eaten. Did Mike ever say anything about unusual marine activity or anything like that?
No, not that I can recall.
What about Rudy? Did he like the water?
He peered at me, working at the beginnings of a frown.
Why do you ask?
Because it occurs to me that it might make a difference. If he was interested in things like that and Mike came across something unusual, he might take him out to see it.
Like what?
Beats the hell out of me ... But if he found something and it was dangerous, I'd like to know about it.
The frown went away.
No, he said. Rudy wouldn't have been interested. He wouldn't have walked outside to look if the Loch Ness monster was swimming by.
Wonder why he went, then?
He shrugged.
I have no idea.
I had a hunch that if I asked him anything else I just might ruin our beautiful rapport. So I ate up, drank up, paid up, and left.
I followed the stream out to the open water again and ran south along the coast. Deems had said it was about four miles that way, figuring from the restaurant, and that it was a long, low building right on the water. All right. I hoped she had returned for that trip Don had mentioned. The worst she could do was tell me to go away. But she knew an awful lot that might be worth hearing. She knew the area and she knew dolphins. I wanted her opinion, if she had one.
There was still a lot of daylight left in the sky, though the air seemed to have cooled a bit, when I spotted a small cove at about the proper distance, throttled down, and swung toward it. Yes, there was the place, partway back and to the left, built against a steep rise and sporting a front deck that projected out over the water. Several boats, one of them a sailboat, rode at rest at its side, sheltered by the long, white curve of a breakwater.
I headed in, continuing to slow, and made my way around the inward point of the breakwall. I saw her sitting on the pier, and she saw me and reached for something. Then she was lost to sight above me as I pulled into the lee of the structure. I killed my engine and tied up to the handiest piling, wondering each moment whether she would appear the next, boathook in hand, ready to repel invaders.
This did not happen, though, so I climbed out and onto a ramplike staging that led me topside. She was just finishing adjusting a long, flaring skirt, which must have been what she had been reaching after. She wore a bikini top, and she was seated on the deck itself, near to the edge, legs tucked out of sight beneath the green, white and blue print material. Her hair was long and very black, her eyes dark and large. Her features were regular, with a definite Oriental cast to them, of the sort I find exceedingly attractive. I paused at the top of the ramp, feeling immediately uncomfortable as I met her gaze.
My name is Madison, James Madison, I said. I work out at Station One. I'm new there. May I come up for a minute?
You already have, she said. Then she smiled, a tentative thing. But you can come the rest of the way over and have your minute.
So I did, and as I advanced she kept staring at me. It made me acutely self-conscious, a condition I thought I had mastered shortly after puberty, and as I was about to look away, she said, Martha Millay, just to make it a full introduction, and she smiled again.
I've admired your work for a long while, I said, although that is only part of the reason I came by. I hoped you could help me to feel safer in my own work.
The killings, she said.
Yes, Exactly ... Your opinion. I'd like it.
All right. You can have it, she said. But I was on Martinique at the time the killings occurred, and my intelligence comes only from the news reports and one phone conversation with a friend at the IDS. On the basis of years of acquaintanceship, years spent photographing them, playing with them, knowing them, loving them, I do not believe it possible that a dolphin would kill a human being. The notion runs contrary to all my experience. For some peculiar reason, perhaps some delphinic concept as to the brotherhood of self-conscious intelligence, we seem to be quite important to them, so important that I even believe one of them might rather die himself than see one of us killed.
So you would rule out even a self-defense killing by a dolphin?
I think so, she said, although I have no facts to point at here. However, what is more important, in terms of your real question, is that they struck me as very undolphinlike killings.
How so?
I don't see a dolphin as using his teeth in the way that was described. The way a dolphin is designed, his rostrum, or beak, contains a hundred teeth, and there are eighty-eight in his lower jaw. But if he gets into a fight with, say, a shark or a whale, he does not use them for purposes of biting or slashing. He locks them together, which provides a very rigid structure, and uses his lower jaw, which is considerably undershot, for purposes of ramming his opponent. The anterior of the skull is quite thick and the skull itself sufficiently large to absorb enormous shocks from blows administered in this fashion, and they are tremendous blows, for dolphins have very powerful neck muscles. They are quite capable of killing sharks by battering them to death. So even granting for the sake of argument that a dolphin might have done such a thing, he would not have bitten his victims. He would have bludgeoned them.
So why didn't someone from the dolphin institute come out and say that?
She sighed.
They did. The news media didn't even use the statement they gave them. Apparently nobody thought it an important enough story to warrant any sort of followup.
She finally took her eyes off me and stared out over the water.
Then, I believe their indifference to the damage caused by running only the one story is more contemptible even than actual malice, she finally said.
Acquitted for a moment by her gaze, I lowered myself to sit on the edge of the pier, my feet hanging down over the side. It had been an added discomfort to stand, staring down at her. I joined her in looking out across her harbor.