BLUE - HARRY WALD



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		Blue Harry Wald translated by Gitiddu Chitarro The object was stranger than it had appeared in the x-rays. He lifted it with the tweezers, then delicately cleaned off the blood using a shred of gauze. Its appearance was that of a bullet, but fuzzy with twisted little hooks. In all his career as a surgeon he had extracted from the bodies of his patients the most unthinkable finds, but never something similar to the fragment of metal that now shined under the lamp, nor so sinister. He turned it in the cold light of the lamp and then let it ring in the iron basin held out to him. He sensed, rather than just hearing, the gurgle of the aspirator and the rhythmic pumping of the oxygen regulating mask. Of the narrow, spartan operating room he knew every remote murmur and clang, but now sounds and odors remained in the background. He had been concentrating on the extreme physicality of the present, of the act of cutting, of the creaking hull beneath him. Then he sought the gaze of the woman who was helping him; it was friendly, attentive, but not curious. He sighed and took to closing the folds of flesh. He worked in a hurry, suturing with able hands the clean incision in the stomach, then the one on the side. With extreme delicacy they turned him over. She opened the water channels and the sea water raised in the tub until it lapped against the belly of the patient. The sun was low in the gulf dawn. From the boat, he pondered, there was only one real view; not that of the Mediterranean, which uniformly tapered away, far off in a gray strip, ill-prepared for the imagination. Instead, one saw the panorama of things known. Dense with low houses, the little riviera town fronted the sea in a challenge, by now aimless, eyeing in placid ease the submerged specters of Arab pirate ships, an age old habit, and awakening slowly from the multitude of green shutters. As he puffed his cigarette in the cool air the ash brightened, for a moment almost transparent. A mile off the coast, the large motor-yacht bobbed silently. Two hours had gone by since the operation and the surgeon was on the deck of the wide flat cruiser, by



		appearance poorly maintained. Beneath were sleeping the old and powerful 370 horsepower Sterling on-board diesels which could launch it over the waves at nearly 60 nauts. While he removed that object from the stomach of the patient he had thought, at that very moment, there must have been a man hidden in the stinking cabin of a fishing vessel at some point on the coast; a man who would await the outcome of the next night with the patience of a saint and the conscience of a sinner, while hour after hour the thought of a new car, of a designer watch was going to grow inside him until the end of that long day; until, hoped the surgeon, this man would know himself for certain to have gone mad. "There's nothing else to do for now," said Rachel, approaching him, "other people would get involved, and we don't want that. If you don't hear from me by one o'clock, send the coordinates. After.....after, I'll return along the coast just outside the port. I'll be here by dark." "You'll find it." The woman descended by the rear ladder with fluid movements. Her feet made no sound plunging into the rubber raft. The winter sun, a few degrees above the water, was by now clearing the ashen sky out of the gulf and reflections formed little splashes of light over their heads. The surgeon shut off the deck light and the signal lights. "One day," said the biologist, by now invisible below deck, "one day they'll stop us."Even from the bridge, he could smell her penetrating scent, a mix of sun block, gas, disinfectant. He felt himself breath deeply, painstakingly. "I know. You'll find it," he repeated containing his uneasiness. "OK, whenever you're ready." The motor started and the raft passed perpendicular to the waves, toward the open sea. He stood listening to the rumble until it was swallowed up by the sound of the water. Then he opened his eyes, and fixed his gaze on the sinister metal object in the palm of his hand. Some crazy......... In a corner of the cabin there was a fiberglass container, with a cover attached by hinges and a little spider inside. And far away, beyond the coastal mountains, spread the cities with millions of inhabitants, with traffic jams, streetlights, skyscrapers, supermarkets, culverts and polluted air. The surgeon turned to the tape recorder microphone. "Identity confirmed as Billo, male, strenella [species of dolphin], born in the Tyrrhenian sea."He paused, his face not showing any emotion. He touched the swollen, blackish contusions just above the front fins. The tips of his

fingers sunk in, leaving marks like teeth in the flesh.
"A damned weird thing," he said out loud. Then he rewound
the tape and stopped it at the end of the first sentence.
A shudder. The dolphin was fighting the light anesthetic.
Perhaps he would live. "I hate loosing," he thought, "it
holds no honor, especially when the defeated is an old
man."

But he had thought about it, pushing away the anger,
and had discussed it with Rachel.

What had the scene been like? The site of the
execution. Everything always starts at night. The dolphin
was perhaps swimming near the tuna when it began to hear
the sound of the diesel engines. A fishing vessel, fast,
a mile away, maybe less. For him it was not difficult to
establish it the distance. He had approached just under
the surface, staring at the green and red navigation
lights. It was coming more or less in his direction,
angling, but would not have passed closer than half a mile
from him had he not decided to come closer. The water
lapped against the hull. The night was calm, quiet. The
man at the helm was perhaps drinking coffee, observing
radar and sonar. Meanwhile, kilometers of netting
descended under the surface of the water opening up like a
gigantic hand, ready to destroy, to suffocate. Billo had
gone under, perhaps made curious by the movement. A new
type of net, with many little sinkers fuzzy with hooks
that bit the water in every direction, made to thrash the
flesh, slow down the pray, make one lose even less time in
hauling it aboard....
With a sigh he sat at the vast table beside the still
sleeping dolphin and he flipped up the computer screen.
The Internet connection brought him to the offices of
naval registration. There she was, BLUE, and she had a
clean record, officially titled to a Liberian company.
Anonymous. The money earned in thirty years of work
allowed him this and more.
He cast a glance at the control panel of the radio
impulse display. He pushed a button and the screen lit up
with flashing white dots on a blue background. Dozens of
dolphins, in every part of the Mediterranean, were
carrying the minuscule transmitter. If a point stopped,
Blue went to see why. The surgeon pulled the bullet-like
object out of his pocket and spun it in his fingers. It
was light, very light. One of the hooks stuck in under the
skin of a fingertip. A drop of blood rose, dark and
thick. A strange, cursed nightmare, he thought. He
placed the object inside the anti radiation cylinder of
the metal analyzer. It was not lead, but aluminum; the
hooks were an alloy of titanium and stainless steel.



		He transferred the data to the computer, from which they passed to the sophisticated sonar under the hull. He set the search radius at fifty nautical miles. Nothing left but to wait. Then he returned to his patient. He had been thrown back in the water as useless. Blue had approached the old dolphin who was floating on his side. They had pulled him aboard. To the surgeon it was not important that the law had re-established dragnet fishing rights. Justice was more important than the law. At noon the wind came up. Clouds arrived from the west to obscure the sky, and the air became cold as the sea foamed with thousands of whitecaps. The winds blew in the funnel of the waves; the sound propagated on the surface, greeted the seagulls and reached the little fish within the upper meter of water, all the while shouting in the ears of mariners. And as the wind billowed the sails, making them sing, it distanced itself toward the inland mountains where it would arrive fragrant and refreshing. The surgeon put on the yellow rain-gear and went out on deck. The blood of the sea circulated in the currents, transporting globules of multiform and varied life. Among the intelligent organisms, the cetaceans distinguished themselves: whales, orca, dolphins. They were the brains of the immense marine body, at the top of the evolutionary scale, and destined to rule it. At around 3 o'clock the detector revealed gamma rays emitted by the proper concentration of the three elements: a mass of metal forty miles to the west, twenty from the coast. The net had to contain hundreds of those instruments of death. The surgeon grabbed the radio microphone and set the proper channel. "Rachel." "Yes," the voice came clear. "We're there" The surgical practice was precise and systematic, a necessary violence. Extract a tumor, scrape out roots and remnants. To remove the cancer from an otherwise healthy body was not much different from striking a pirate ship, because at the helm was a clump of insane cells which gave death to the organism which permitted its existence. She returned four hours after dark. The raft came alongside, she climbed aboard. Tall and athletic, she still wore the scuba suit. He helped her get the gear off in the heated cabin where she changed in silence, catching the aroma of the vegetable soup which simmered in the galley. "Sip of wine?" "Maybe a little tonic water." The glasses clinked musically "Had a good trip?" "A little bumpy on the way back."



		"I'm not surprised," commented the surgeon, "there's a storm arriving from Spain." "I sank the ship." Fleece coat and pants, bare feet, fine silver hair on a rugged face. "Good." "How's the dolphin?" "He'll make it" She had submerged with the explosive charges, magnetic disks which she had attached under the boat. She had given them a warning by radio: Five minutes to abandon ship. Through the transparency of his wine, the surgeon looked at the object full of twisted hooks sitting on the wooden table. "One day they will stop us," he said slowly. "I know," she smiled.
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