The Wanderer (26 page)

Then, with sublime or simply horrid feline indifference to the world in agony below them—if, as Paul wondered, the saucer were still hovering over Southern California or even Earth—she had fed Miaow. From the second of the three panels—Paul named it the Food Panel—she had produced a fat, dark red worm which Paul uneasily felt was synthetic rather than natural. It wriggled just enough to vastly interest Miaow, who played with it for some time in free fall while Tigerishka watched, before slowly chewing it up with signs of great satisfaction.

Then Tigerishka had gone to the third panel, which after a bit Paul was calling the Control Panel, and busied herself with what he assumed to be her regular work, which seemed to be that of observer.

The first time the mirror he faced turned to transparency, Paul was distinctly glad of the sanitary arrangements.

About half a mile below him churned and spouted an angry gray sea from which a solitary, rocky island poked and in which a large long tanker wallowed, green water flowing over its bow.

The transparency of the facing wall was perfect. He felt he was about to drop through a large ring of flowers toward the maelstrom. Then the mirror was there again.

The same thing happened a half a dozen times in quite rapid succession, observation heights varying sharply. He hung cringe-stomached over sea, coast, and farmland. Once he thought he recognized the north end of the San Fernando Valley with a section of the Santa Monica mountains, but he couldn't be sure.

There was no mistaking the next view, though. They were at least five miles up, but there was nothing below them almost to the edges of the thirty-foot window but city—sunlit city, bordered by sea on one side, mountains on two, and just stretching out on the fourth.

The city was smeared across with six parallel brush strokes that began, mostly near the sea, in bright vermilion but quickly changed to the brownish black of heavy smoke spreading over the mountains inland.

It was Los Angeles burning. This time the saucer hung low enough for Paul to identify the main fire-spots: Santa Ana, Long Beach, Torrance, Inglewood, the Los Angeles Civic Center, and Santa Monica, the last blaze licking along the southern slopes of the Santa Monica mountains through Beverly Hills and Hollywood.

Margo's tiny house in Santa Monica and his own apartment were gone, it looked like.

They were too high for him to more than fancy the ant-scurry of cars, the clustering of the rectangular red beetles of fire trucks.

The seacoast to the south looked wrong. In places the Pacific came too far inland.

He started to strangle and realized he'd been trying to scream to Tigerishka, against the invisible gag, to do something about it.

She never gave him a look, but turned from the control panel to crouch on the invisible floor, staring toward the southwest and the sea.

Two miles below them a thick gray cloudbank with a dark skirt was moving in swiftly over the changed coast. The dark skirt touched the Long Beach fire, turning its smoke white—rain! Heavy rain!

Paul looked over toward the other blazes lying in the path of the cloudbank and saw the silver-and-vermilion of two military jets face on to him. Smoke puffed from their wings and he could see the four rockets on collision course with the saucer, swelling as they came.

Then it was as if Los Angeles had been jerked down twenty miles. The scene expanded thirtyfold. He saw more smoke-strokes, tiny from this altitude, down the coast and up toward Bakersfield. Then the wall winked on again—not a mirror this time, but pool-table green, presumably just for a change.

Tigerishka reached a long paw into the shrubbery and retrieved Miaow. She cuddled the little cat to her and, turning half away from Paul, said loudly: "There, we save his monkey-town for him. Call big saucer over the sea. Make rain. Small thanks.

Help monkey, monkey shoot."

Miaow squirmed as if she'd rather get back to flower-climbing, but Tigerishka licked her face with her dagger-tongue, and the little cat writhed luxuriously.

"We don't like him, do we?" Tigerishka went on with a sideways eye-flicker toward Paul, in a voice that was halfway between purr and cruel laughter. "Monkeys! Cowardly, chattering, swarming—no individuality, no flair!"

Paul wanted to strangle her, his hands locked in the sleek green fur of her neck. Yes, he wanted to lock his hands around her neck and—

Tigerishka hugged Miaow closer and whispered loudly: "We think he smells.

Makes smells with his mind, too."

Paul remembered disconsolately how he'd thought Margo bullied him. But that was before he met Tigerishka.

Don Merriam sat on the edge of a bed that was like one large, resilient cushion in a small room with restfully dim walls.

At his knees was a low table on which stood a transparent cup and a jug full of water, and also a transparent plate piled with small, white, rough-surfaced, spongy cubes. He had drunk thirstily of the former, but only nibbled experimentally at one of the latter, although they smelled and tasted quite like bread.

The only other features of the room were a lidded toilet seat and a corner area about three feet square where a soothing patter of rain was falling steadily without splashing or running over into the rest of the room. He had not yet stepped into this shower although he had stripped to his underwear.

The temperature and humidity and illumination level of the room suited themselves so to him that the room was almost like an extension of his body.

Before a wall-hued door, sliding sideways, had shut out his host or captor, the walking red-and-black tiger had said to him: "Drink. Eat. Relieve and refresh yourself.

Rest."

Those had been his only words since he had summoned Don. During the brief passage downward on the platform elevator and then the short walk along a narrow corridor, the being had been silent.

Don was relieved that the being had left him, yet irked with himself for the awe and timidity that had kept him from asking questions; now he almost wanted the being to come back.

That was only one of the many contradictory paired feelings maintaining themselves in him: weariness-uneasiness, safety-alienage, the urge to let his thoughts go and the urge to hold them in, the urge to face his situation and the urge to escape in illusion.

It was easy to think of this spot as a small hospital room. Or, as a small stateroom in a great ocean liner. Well, what was a planet but a sort of ship, moving through space? At least, this planet, with its endless decks…

Tiredness took hold; the lights dimmed; he sprawled full length on the bed, but at the same time his mind became ripplingly active, began to
babble
—though in a quite orderly sort of way.

The effect, which was rather like that of sodium pentothal, was almost pleasant. At least, it neutralized his restless anxiety.

It occurred to him that
they
were getting at his mind, examining it, but he didn't care.

It was engrossing to watch his thoughts, his knowledge, and his remembered experiences arrange themselves in ranks and then parade, as if past some central reviewing stand.

Eventually these mental items began to move too swiftly for him to follow them, but even that was all right, because the blur they made was a warm, tender, enfolding, somnolent darkness.

The freaks of the monster tides were innumerable, as the Wanderer-humped waters washed around the world.

Currents in straits like Dover, Florida, Malacca and Juan de Fuca became too strong for steamers to breast. Small boats were gulped down like chips in a millrace.

High bridges built to hang firm against winds had their resistance tested to rushing water. They became barriers to ships, which piled up against and broke them.

Moored steamers lifted their docks, or broke free and lodged in the downtown streets of ports, shouldering in the walls of skyscrapers.

Lightships were torn from their great chains, or dragged down by them. Lighthouses were inundated. The Eddystone Light gleamed on for hours in the deeps after it went under.

The permafrost of the Siberian and Alaskan coasts was ripped from below and melted by salt water. In America and Russia atomic-armed rockets drowned in their silos. (One inland newspaper suggested atomic bombs be used to blow the water back.) High-tension lines were shorted out and reappeared six hours later draped with wreckage.

The tiny tides of the Mediterranean became big enough to create disasters of the same magnitude that lowlying oceanic ports regularly suffer from hurricane combined with a high lunar tide.

The Mississippi's fresh water was spread thin over the salt tide pushing up from the Gulf across its delta to cover the streets of New Orleans.

The Araiza brothers and Don Guillermo Walker encountered a similar phenomenon on the San Juan. Late in the afternoon the river reversed its current, spread into the jungle to either side, and began to taste brackish. Wreckage appeared, floating upstream. They cursed in wonder—the Latins with a certain reverence, the Yankee theatrically, drawing a bit on
King Lear
—and headed the launch back for Lake Nicaragua.

The population of great ports found refuge on inland hills or—less securely—in the upper floors of tall buildings, where dreadful little wars were fought for living space.

Airlifts rescued a random scattering. Heroic and merely stubborn or incredulous people stuck to posts of duty. One of these was Fritz Scher, who stayed on all night at the Tidal Institute. Hans Opfel, braving the shallowly flooded Hamburg streets, went out for supper, promising to return with a Bratwurst on rye and two bottles of beer, but he never came back—overpowered by floodwaters or his own sense of self-preservation.

So Fritz had no one at whom to direct his mocking laughter when the tide went down during the evening hours. And later, around midnight, he had only the tide-predicting machine with whom to share his rationalizations as to why the tide had gone down so far, according to the very few reports that were still trickling in. But that rather pleased him, as his devout affection for the long, sleek machine was becoming physical. He moved his desk beside her, so he could touch her constantly. From time to time he went to a window and looked out briefly, but there was heavy cloud cover, so his disbelief in the Wanderer was not put to the crucial test.

Many of those fleeing the tides ran into other troubles that made them forget the menace of the waters. At noon, Pacific Standard Time, the school bus and the truck carrying the saucer students were racing against fire. Ahead, walls of flame were swiftly climbing the saddle-backed ridge along which Monica Mountainway crossed the central spine of the Santa Monica mountains.

Barbara Katz watched the tiny bow wave from the left front wheel of the Rolls Royce sedan angle across the road and lose itself in the tall green swords of the saw grass, as Benjy stubbornly kept their speed down to a maddeningly monotonous thirty. As captain of the car, at least in her own estimation, she ought to be sitting up in front, but Barbara felt it was more vital that she keep in direct contact with her millionaire, so she sat behind Benjy with old KKK beside her and Hester beyond him, which put Helen up in front with Benjy and a pile of suitcases.

The sun had just begun to look into the front of the car from high in the sky as they traveled due west through the Everglades. The windows were all closed tight on Barbara's side and it was hot. She knew that Lake Okeechobee ought to be somewhere off to the right and north, but all she could see was the endless green expanse of saw grass, broken here and there by clumps of dark, mortuary-looking cypress, and the narrow, mirrorlike corridor of water ahead covering the string-straight, level road to a depth of never less than one inch or more than four—so far.

"You sure right about that high tide, Miss Barbara," Benjy called back softly and cheerily. "She come way in. Never hear tell she come so far."

"Hush, Benjy," Hester warned. "Mister K still sleeping."

Barbara wished she were as confident about her own wisdom as Benjy sounded about it. She checked the two of old KKK's wrist watches strapped to her left wrist—two-ten, they averaged—and the time for today's second high tide at Palm Beach on the back of the calendar sheet—1:45 p.m. But wouldn't a high tide moving inland be later than on the coast? That was the way it was with rivers, she seemed to recall. She didn't know nearly enough, she told herself.

An open car moving at almost twice their speed roared past them, deluging the Rolls with water. It forged swiftly ahead, beating up a storm in the water-mirror. There were four men in it.

"Another of them speeders," Hester growled.

"Wowee! Sure lucky we Sanforized," Benjy crowed. "I Sanforize this bus with lots of high-yellow grease," he explained. Helen giggled.

The encounter roused old KKK, who looked at Barbara with red-rimmed, wrinkle-edged little eyes that seemed to her to be almost awake for the first time today.

He'd gone through the preparations and actual departure in a kind of stupor that had alarmed Barbara but not Hester. "He just not had his sleep out, he be all right," Hester had told her.

Now he said briskly: "Phone the airfield, Miss Katz. We want two tickets to Denver by the next plane out. Triple premiums to the reservation clerks, the pilot, and the air line. Denver's a mile high, out of reach of any tides, and I have friends there."

She looked at him frightenedly, then simply indicated their surroundings.

"Oh yes, I begin to remember now," he said heavily, after a moment. "But why didn't you think of the air, Miss Katz?" he complained, looking at the black shoulder bag of the Black Ball Jetline on her lap.

"I borrowed this from a friend. I hitchhiked down from the Bronx. I don't fly much,"

she confessed miserably, feeling still more miserable inside. Here she'd been going to rescue her millionaire so brilliantly and—dazzled by a Rolls Royce sedan—had missed the obvious way to do it, maybe doomed them all. Dear God, why hadn't she thought like a millionaire!