The Wanderer

Chapter Twenty-nine

Margo and Hunter, each wrapped in a blanket, occupied the bowl-shaped lookout post, which McHeath and Doddsy had scooped and wiped dry of rainwater. Above them stars twinkled to the west amid scattered clouds, but the top and eastern half of the sky were still solidly masked. Below them a narrow cone of light shone on the locked sedans and along the road toward the Valley. Since Doddsy had several battery-changes for his big flashlight, Doc had the notion of setting it on top of the boulder-block. "It'll help whoever's on guard to see anyone sneaking in from the Valley," he'd said. "They'll be apt to investigate the light, and if they're friendly they'll probably yoohoo. But don't shoot 'em just for being quiet. Cover 'em and order 'em to stand first. And don't wake the whole camp because we get a visitor. But wake me."
Now Hunter and Margo were smoking, which flawed the perfection of Doc's ambush  -  but not too seriously, they'd decided. The little orange glow as Margo inhaled lighted her hollow-cheeked face and gold hair combed down heavy and flat after last night's salt-soaking.
"You look like a Valkyrie, Margo," Hunter said softly in a deep voice.
She drew the gray pistol from under the blanket and held it high on her chest, so that it gleamed in the cigarette's brief glow. "I feel like one," she whispered happily. "I didn't like it when the others had this gun, though it was interesting the things Doddsy noticed."
During his and McHeath's sentry-go, the Little Man had examined the pistol with his small flashlight and an eight-power pocket magnifier, and had discovered a fine scale alongside the violet charge-gage. "It was made by beings with finer eyesight than ours," he had deduced. He had also discovered something else Margo had never noticed: a tiny, recessed lever on top of the grip  -  the lever pointed its narrow end at the muzzleward extreme of a similarly fine, circular scale. No one had any firm guess about the function of this lever, and it was decided not to experiment with it.
"I wonder on how many planets it's killed," Margo whispered now.
"Yes," Hunter said, "you look like a vestal Valkyrie guarding the sacred flame of the weapon." He hitched a little closer to her. She smelled the musk of his sweat.
"Shh  -  did you hear something then?" she breathed very rapidly. They stubbed out their cigarettes and waited tensely, their eyes scanning. Hunter softly crawled to the ridge crest by a route he'd memorized earlier and checked all around from there, although the other side of the ridge fell away quite precipitously for thirty feet.
The bus-and-truck camp was quiet and there was no sign of alien movement, though the whispering wind made them think of the tomb in the cave five yards away. After a while they arranged themselves as they'd been, and lit up again.
"You know, Margo," Hunter went on where he'd left off, "I think killing those men brought you to life. It awakened you, maybe for the first time. A primal experience does that to a person."
She nodded intently with an inward-directed smile. "Everything's twice as real now," she whispered. "As if reality were built of solider stuff, and yet I could see and feel more around and into it, especially people's bodies. It's wonderful."
"It's made you beautiful," he said, laying his hand on the inside of her wrist. "More beautiful. Beautiful Valkyrie vestal."
"Why, Ross," she whispered solemnly, "anyone would think you're trying to make me."
"I am," he said, firming his hand a little on her wrist.
"You have a wife and two boys in Oregon," she whispered, pulling away, but not quite hard enough to get free.
"They don't matter," he said, "though I'm steadily worried about them. But we're living from day to day now, from second to second. Any hour may be the last. Margo, let me kiss you."
"I only met you yesterday, Ross. You're years older than I am..."
Ten, at the most," he breathed harshly. "Margo, the old rules and shibboleths don't count. Like Rudy said, it's para-reality..."
At that moment winds high above them tore the clouds, and they saw the Wanderer in its mandala face with the moon making a glittering half girdle around it. The wonder of that gold-notched violet sphere gripped them, but after a few seconds Ross Hunter put his other arm around Margo and pulled her toward him. She broke away and pointed overhead.
"I have a young man up there," she said. "He was stationed on that...that diamond jumble. But maybe he got away; maybe he's on the Wanderer now."
"I know," Hunter said, looking only at her face, which now in the Wanderer-light needed no cigarette glow to show it. "I even read about your romance in a magazine. I thought you looked disgustingly snooty and smirking, like you needed to be grabbed by life and manhandled."
"By you, you mean? And then there's Paul," she went on rapidly, "snatched up in a saucer and now God knows where. He's crazy about me, but all tied up inside. Maybe what's happening to him now will free him."
"I don't care about either of them," Hunter said, getting up on his knees beside her and holding her by the shoulders. "I have no ethical qualms about taking advantage of the immediate difficulties of younger men crazy about you. You're beautiful, and whoever gets you first wins. Besides, I know you better than they do, I know the awakened gold-haired Valkyrie, and I'm crazier than they are. Nothing counts now but you and me. Oh, Margo - "
"No!" she said sharply, suddenly standing up from her blanket and wiping his hands down off her arms. "I'm glad you're crazy about me, but I don't need you, I don't need the you-and-me. Just living by myself in the new reality is quite enough; it's all the excitement I want; it's using all of me. Understand?"
After a couple of hard breaths he admitted: "O.K., I guess I have to." Then: "We'd better have a careful scan around with all this new light. You take the western half. Let your eyes get used to it."
After a minute or so of that, back to back, he began to talk quietly without looking around. "Granting that you're all absorbed with yourself now, I doubt if you were really ever in love. Paul you bullied and exploited  -  that was obvious. I imagine you managed...who was it?  -  oh yes, Don  -  by flattering his manliness."
"Interesting," Margo murmured.
"No, I don't think either of those two young men amount to much as rivals," Hunter went on. "Morton Opperly's a greater danger, because he's a father figure: a sinisterly beautiful magician who  -  I bet you dream about this!  -  is some day going to carry our young Valkyrie away to his grim castle in the Land of Higher Mathematics. Incest with Einsteinian overtones."
"Very interesting," she commented. "There seems to be a very faint general glow to the east. Maybe it's the highway."
Five minutes more and Hunter burst out, most spontaneously-seeming, with: "Christ, it's cold. It'd help if we bundled together, the old Puritan style - "
"Nuh-uh, soldier," she interposed. "Lovemaking and guard duty don't mix."
"Au contraire, they combine beautifully. You become vibrantly alive, aware of everything."
"Nuh-uh, Ross, I said."
"I wasn't trying a new approach," he protested, "just being practical. I'm freezing."
"Then wrap your blanket around you, tight," she suggested. "I don't need any heater." She smiled straight at him. "Right this minute I'm hot as fire from my neck down to my toes. And vibrantly alive. All by myself."
"You are a bitch," he said thoughtfully.
"Yes, I am," she agreed with a happy smirk. "And right now I'm going on a little scout, first down the road fifty yards beyond the sedans. I'll carry the rifle. You stay here with the big gun and...cover me."
"Bitch," he repeated bitterly as she stole crosswise down the slope.
A cloud was shrouding the Wanderer when they waked Doc for sentry change. He groaned guardedly a couple of times as he unkinked stiff joints, then grew more chipper.
"Have to renew the flash batteries," he noted. "Got 'em here in my pocket. Should have turned one of the sedans around and used its headlights. Can't do it now, though  -  it'd wake people."
By the time Margo had taken over Rama Joan's bed in the truck, the Wanderer was out again, showing the Jaws. Ann was awake. Ever since the afternoon's horror, the little girl who "loved everything" had been very thoughtful. Now Margo wondered uneasily what she was thinking when those wide eyes looked at her, a screaming killer.
But, "Why does Mommy have to go away?" was all Ann asked, rather fretfully.
Margo explained about guard duty.
"I think Mommy likes being with Mr. Brecht," Ann commented dolefully.
"Look at the Wanderer, dear," Margo suggested. "See, the moon's growing into a ring. She's broken her cocoon and is spreading her wings."
"Yes, it's lovely, isn't it?" Ann said, a dreamy note at last coming into her voice. "Purple forests and golden seas...Hello, Ragnarok..."
In the bus Mrs. Hixon leaned forward from the seat behind the driver's and whispered in Mr. Hixon's ear: "Bill, what if these people find out we're not really married?"
He whispered back: "Babe, I don't think it'd matter to them a bit."
Mrs. Hixon sighed. "Still, it's a kind of distinction being the only normal married couple in the bunch."
Paul woke up as alone in black space as a hobo angel, it seemed to him  -  so high above Earth that the stars glittered more thickly above the scythe-curve of the black horizon than he'd ever seen them, even in the desert. Yet he felt so snug and refreshed, and the transition from sleep to waking had been so gradual, that he experienced no fear at alL Besides that, there was an invisible warm glassy surface he could touch. It shut off all the harshness of space from him, and his right foot was guyed to it reassuringly. He gave himself up to the great sight.
He was poised in the night at least one hundred miles above Arizona, he decided, and looking west, for he could see all of Southern California and the northwest corner of Mexico, including the neck of the peninsula of Baja California, and beyond them the Pacific. No mistaking that pattern.
He could see the lights of San Diego  -  at least some city-like glow, about where San Diego should be  -  and he realized he was voicelessly thanking God for that, very tritely, but sincerely.
There were no clouds. The Wanderer was hanging in the west in its bull's-head face, girdled by the shattered moon. Its violet and golden light sparkled in a wide wake across the Pacific straight toward him, and also spangled the northern end of the Gulf of California, so that all coasts were sharply defined.
The land areas reflected only a diffuse yellowish glow, like multiplied moonlight but far duller than the glittering sea.
But then he saw, with a feeling of dim but growing horror, that the Gulf of California extended at least a hundred miles too far northwest in a glittering tongue that narrowed at first but then widened. No mistaking that one departure from pattern, either.
Either because of the earthquakes or the high tides or both, the salt waters of the Gulf had burst through and filled the land below sea level in and around the Imperial Valley and the drying Salton Sea, and stretched on toward Palm Springs. He remembered that one of the towns there, a pretty big one, had been called Brawley, and another, Volcano -
Space turned to a pink wall in front of his nose, and a neutral voice called: " 'Morning, monkey."
Blinking, Paul slowly hunched around, easing his right foot in its invisible fetter. Tigerishka was floating bent by the control panel, as if she were sitting in an invisible swing. Miaow clung to her lap and was industriously grooming the larger cat's green knees with her tiny pink tongue.
Paul swallowed and then lifted his fingers wonderingly to his lips. The gag was gone.
Tigerishka smiled at him. "You sleep seven hours," she volunteered. "Feel better?"
Paul cleared his throat, but then only shut his lips and looked at her. He did not smile back.
"Oho, we learn a little wisdom, eh?" Tigerishka purred. "Monkey not jabber, we get along better. O.K. talk now, though."
Paul kept his lips shut.
"Don't be sulky, Paul," Tigerishka directed. "I know you civilized by your lights, but I tie you, gag you, call you monkey to teach you little lesson: how you not so important in scheme of things, how others can treat you like you treat potentially superior animal Miaow here. Also I do it to give you birth-experience any psychologist know you badly need."
Paul looked at her a bit longer, then slowly shook his head.
"What you mean?" Tigerishka demanded sharply. "What you think my reason?"
Enunciating each syllable as sharply and carefully as if he were teaching a speech class, Paul said: "You tell me you have a mind vastly superior to my own, and in many ways I must agree with you, yet for at least twenty minutes yesterday you confused my thoughts with those of that charming but speechless and cultureless little animal on your lap. So you took out on me your irritation at having made such a very stupid mistake."
"That's a lie, I never did!" Tigerishka retorted instantly in unslurred English quite as good as his own. She stiffened, her claws came out, and Miaow stopped grooming her. Then she caught herself and leaned back luxuriously, relaxed and chuckling. A delicious shrug rippled her violet-barred shoulders. "You right there," she admitted. "That a little part my reason. Few cosmic cat strains, me let hopes run away. You notice. Monkey sly."
"Just the same, you made the error, and it was a gross one," he told her quietly. "How could you expect an animal tiny as Miaow to have a reasoning brain?"
"Me think it miniaturized," she answered quickly. "Could have told it wasn't if I'd checked by clairvoyance, but I depending on telepathy." She petted Miaow. "Any more monkey-quibbles?"
Paul waited a bit again, then said: "You claim to belong to a super-civilized galactic culture, yet you exhibit a fantastic xenophobia. I should think a true galactic citizen would have to be able to get along with intelligent beings of all strains: sea dwellers, grazers, arachnoids and coleopteroids possibly, winged beings, wolves and other carnivores like yourself, yes, and simians, too."
Tigerishka seemed to start just a little as he said, "wolves and other carnivores," but she recovered nicely with a sweet, "Monkey much the worst strain of those, Paul." She added huskily: "Also cosmos not so pretty-pretty love-lovey you think." She had begun to stroke Miaow rhythmically, kneading the small cat's shoulderblades.
"I am inclined to agree," Paul commented. "You pretend to near omniscience and to a great consideration for life  -  at least you boasted of saving two anthropoid cities from fire  -  yet when you crushed our moon for fuel, you ignored the presence on it of a number of human beings, including my best friend."
"Too bad, Paul," Tigerishka sympathized coolly. "But they on airless planet, they have ships. Get away."
"Yes, at least we can hope that Don and the others escaped," Paul agreed with equal coolness, "but I don't believe that you even knew they were there! I don't believe that when you emerged from hyperspace you had any idea that this planet was inhabited by intelligent beings. Or if you did, you didn't care."
Tigerishka still seemed quite relaxed, but she was stroking Miaow in a faster rhythm, as a nervous woman might puff harder on her cigarette. "You a little right there too, Paul," she conceded. "Things bad in hyperspace: storms, et cetera. Our need fuel acute. We feel beat when we come out, truly. Also last galactic survey show no intelligent life here, only promising feline strain." And she twitched her nose at him as she interrupted the stroking to pat Miaow twice.
Ignoring this humorous sally, Paul continued: "Here is another sidelight on your unfeeling and blundering haste: when you rescued Miaow from the earthquake waves  -  and myself too, mistakenly assuming I was a cat's beast of burden  -  you left a score of precious human beings, including my girl friend, to sink or swim."
"That damn lie, Paul!" Tigerishka retorted. "I quiet waves for them, they get out safe. I even lose momentum pistol."
"Another super-feline blunder?" Paul shot back at her. "Well, at least it was on the side of generosity, so we'll pass over it. But - "
Paul broke off, momentarily overcome by a sudden awareness of the ridiculousness of the situation. Here he was, naked and foot-fettered, trailing the tubes of a sanitary arrangement, playing district attorney to the most fantastic "Madame X" ever to float on the witness chair.
The most fantastically lovely, too, he added uneasily in his thoughts.
Or was all this, he wondered, only the age-old racial business of the monkey teasing the leopard?
But then he remembered Brawley and Volcano.
"So you got girl friend now, hey, Paul?" Tigerishka put in wickedly. "That really true? Margo know? And you so fair  -  that fair to Don?"
He waved these mean diversions aside with a certain dignity. Hot feeling came into his voice as he said: "But the most crushing indictment of your boasted high culture and great sensitivity is the way human beings are dying beneath this saucer at this very moment because of the Wanderer's distortion of our gravity field  -  all because you needed fuel and wouldn't take a little extra time to find a proper source  -  such as the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. I'll grant you put out some fires, but only after hundreds, more likely thousands, died in the blazes and in the quakes that began the blazes. And now whole cities are being wiped out by the floods you've caused. If this goes on - "
"Shut up, monkey!" Tigerishka snarled, her claws out, her hind paws touching back toward the control panel. Miaow sprang away from her. "Look, Paul," she continued, seeming to contain herself with difficulty. "I never boast you I humani-tarian, monkey-tarian, cosmo-tarian! Cats have cruel culture some ways. Other cultures cruel, too! Death part of life. Some always suffer. Our refueling just normal course of things. It just - "
She broke off, frowning at the finger Paul was pointing at her. His face was glowing, for he had just seen what he believed to be the tremendous significance of Tigerishka's apparently honest attempt to defend herself and her people.
"I do not believe you," he said ringingly. "Tigerishka, I think that your blundering haste and that of your people, your lack of proper scouting and preparation, and most of all your crude, belated efforts to repair some of the damage you've done, all go to show that you were rushed into action by something of which you are deeply afraid."
With a high-pitched snarl Tigerishka launched herself at him, drove him against the wall with one forepaw around his throat and the other poised like a four-tined rake a foot above his face.
"That is a damnable lie, Paul Hagbolt!" she said in flawless English. "I demand that you take it back at once!"
He got his breath. Then he shook his head.
"No," he said, smiling at her, though there were bright tears dripping from his eyes. "You're scared to death."
Don Guillermo Walker slapped mosquitoes and stared at the flooded housetops of San Carlos red in the dawn as the launch beat its way back into Lake Nicaragua. During the night the current in the San Juan River had once more reversed itself, opposing the launch strongly, and now it was clear this was because the lake itself had risen a dozen feet or more  -  though why that happened was harder to say.
The sky presented a mystery, too. To the east it was clear, the sun already shooting his rays hotly, but to the west a thick white cloud-wall rose from the strip of land between the lake and the Pacific and extended as far north and south as one could see.
Although night before last he had witnessed the great outburst of volcanism, it did not occur to Don Guillermo that here, as along many other stretches, the Pacific Ocean was bordered now by a steam curtain, where seawater was flowing into volcanic cracks.
He asked why the launch was heading north, and the Araiza brothers informed him they were going up-lake to their home in Granada. Something sharp and clipped in their voices kept him from disputing this decision.
It did not deter him, however, from launching a little later into an account  -  not the first one he'd given them, either  -  of how, over a hundred years ago, his great-great-grandfather had landed in Nicaragua with only fifty-eight bold Yankee followers, and soon had successfully stormed Granada itself.
Bagong Buno watched the sun that was rising for Don Guillermo sink into the Gulf of Tonkin, now swollen as big as it had seen shrunken small twelve hours ago, so that it seemed to engulf North Vietnam. He thought of his strongbox in the cabin and how it now held a small bag of golden guineas and condors and morocotas and two larger bags of silver coins  -  the modest loot of the "Sumatra Queen." He touched the yellow silk hankerchief bound so piratically around his head, and he looked roguishly around at Cobber-Hume and said: "Yo-ho-ho, eh, baik sobat?"
"And a bottle of rum," the big Australian affirmed. "And a pipe of the poppy for you, since that's not against your religion."
Bagong hung grinned, but then his face grew grave and he said softly and intently: "Pagi dan ayer surut!"
Morning and the low tide! Truly, he could hardly bear to contemplate the waiting for them. He had long ago decided what wreck he would try for then: the near-legendary Spanish treasure ship Lobo de Oro. The Tiger of the Mud would try conclusions with the Wolf of Gold!
Barbara Katz's first reaction to the double-barreled shotgun muzzle poked through the driver's window near Benjy's hunched shoulders was that here was just one more weary bit of the weird flotsam and scour they'd been driving and skidding over, past, through, and around for the first three hours of daylight. Sandy soil  -  lots of that; leaves and fronds and matted sedge; uprooted bushes and small trees; ruined cars and farm machinery; dead animals and  -  Don't stop!  -  people; wire  -  that could be devilish, especially the barbed stuff; they'd had to lay boards across one dragged and leveled fence to get the Rolls over without puncturing the tires; sodden flowers plastered here and there, including a remarkable number of scarlet poinsettias; houses and barns, both fragmentary and almost intact  -  they'd had to find a looping sideroad to get around one monstrous cluster of those. Everything steaming in the heat, as if a swiftly dissipating fog were coming out of the ground. Of course there had been live people, too, though not so very many of those, and they either acting stunned and helpless or else going very much about their business, such as shoring up houses on high ground, hoisting planks into big trees, or going places in cars or on horses. Once a small airplane had passed overhead, its motor sounding loud and self-important.
Barbara's second reaction to the shotgun muzzle was that here was the nasty emergency she'd been expecting all along, and thank God she had the short-barreled .38 revolver in her right hand under her thigh next to old KKK, and if she had to, she hoped she could whip it up and start shooting through the window  -  though if that just got Benjy and Hester blown to bits in the front seat it wasn't going to do any good, even though the motor of the Rolls was idling softly. If they just had a few seconds' start -
Her third reaction to the shotgun muzzle was to see the fresh rust on it and wonder if its cartridges were wet, in which case she might hold the balance of power and needn't actually fire, only threaten  -  but that was guessing.
The voice from behind the shotgun had a buzz in it that was lazy yet menacing, rather like the horsefly going back and forth against the inside of the sedan's rear window.
"This is an inspection point We're collecting toll. What were you doing - "
"We were only changing a tire," Barbara answered sharply.
" - back in Trilby?" the buzzing voice finished.
So that, she thought, was the name of the miserable smashed village through whose crookedly choked main street they'd zigzagged twenty minutes ago. They should have called it Svengali!
Aloud she said hurriedly, "We were just coming through from Palm Beach. We can pay the toll," but as she fumbled with her left hand at the black bag on her lap, two thick-corded sun-reddened arms came through the window and took the bag and one horny hand shifted to her chin and tilted her face up, and for a second she glared into a thin, unshaven, fish-eyed face and fought down the impulse to put a bullet in it or bite the hand, and then the arms went away with the bag, and the voice behind them said: "Hey, the old geezer must be one of them Palm Beach millionaires. Lots of paper money here."
Barbara said, "He's very sick. He's in a coma. We're trying to get him to - "
"One of them Yankee millionaires," the buzzing voice cut her off, "who come down here and lord it and pay nigras white man's wages and then run like chickens when the Lord tests us. We'll take the money for the Jubilee Fund and we'll take the two nigra gals  -  they'll make the hill a little more comfortable. Get out, you two, quick!  -  or I'll blow a hole in your high-yellow chauffeur."
And he rested the muzzle of his gun against Benjy's side.
This is it, Barbara thought, but as she started to bring up the revolver she felt old KKK's clawlike fingers grip her hand on the gun with startling strength, holding it down. He cleared his throat hawkingly and next he was speaking in a voice louder than she'd ever heard from him, a voice that rasped imperiously.
"Did I hear some goddam turkey-necked cracker questioning the color of my son Benjy? I thought by your words you were Southrons out there, not mud-eating gophers!"
There was a murmuring outside, angry but uncertain. The gun pulled away from Benjy. Then old KKK, his features creasing like an old vulture's as he stared at the men in overalls, intoned portentously, "When will the Black Night end?"
Slowly, almost as though it were drawn out of him against his will, the one with the buzzing voice replied, "With the dawn of the White Jubilee."
"Hallelujah!" old KKK responded. "Convey to the Grand Chanticleer of Dade City the greetings of the Grand Chanticleer of Dade County. Benjamin, it would pleasure me if you drove on!"
They were moving forward  -  a foot  -  five  -  fifteen  -  then they were going faster, and Hester was saying, "Don't hit that stump, Benjy!" and the Rolls veered abruptly and veered again, and then they were going faster still, and Benjy was laughing his whooping laugh, only this time it was pretty hysterical, and finally he was wheezing, "Old KKK sho live up to his name!" He glanced back. " 'Scuse me...Dad!"
Hester said, "He cain't hear you, Benjy. He pass out again. It take all his stren'th."
Helen stared back wide-eyed. "I never suspect he Kluxer."
Hester said: "You just be grateful, gal."