The Wanderer

The Wanderer Page 30

Doc took charge of the business of striking the rock-slope camp, as greenish dawn shifted through chartreuse to lemon yellow. He operated with a high-handed mysteriousness that would have been even more irritating if it hadn't been for his sardonically-tinged high spirits. In particular, he refused to discuss the question of their next objective or the problem of the boulder-block until they were organized for departure.

He scaled down by one-third the breakfast ration Ida and McHeath presented for approval, prescribed penicillin for the flushed and fretful Ray Hanks on the latter's recollection that he wasn't allergic to it, and answered with a curt headshake Hixon's suggestion that they make this a permanent camp and send out foraging parties.

The two sedans were searched. In the glove compartment of the first there was turned up a loaded .32 revolver and on its back seat a black hat. Doc appropriated both objects for himself, clapping the hat on his bald dome with a grinningly callous, "It fits."

Wojtowicz, resting his left hand on his belt to ease his bandaged shoulder, protested: "Don't wear that, Doc, it'd be bad luck," while the Ramrod said somberly: "I wouldn't want my head contaminated by particles from a sadistic murderer's aura."

"And I don't want mine worse sunburned than it is," Doc laughed back at him. "Murderer's dandruff I can stand."

The first sedan coughed and purred at once when Doc turned the ignition key and touched the gas to test it, but the second's battery seemed to be dead. Doc refused to let Wojtowicz study around under the hood, but as soon as it had been drained of gas and oil, he let off the emergency, cut its wheel sharp, and ordered the others to help him push it off the road down the rock slope.

It went over the edge with a fine scrape and bound, and five seconds later its crash drifted up, shortly followed by three buzzards.

Doc snapped his fingers and muttered: "Certainly didn't mean to disturb their breakfast, if it's what I think it was."

Mrs. Hixon heard him and made a sick face.

Next Doc tested the red Corvette, cutting it back and forth dashingly, tires on the road's edge. "Sweet job," he commented as he stepped out. "This is for me."

As breakfast was finishing he quietly gathered Hunter, Rama Joan, Margo, and Clarence Dodd and drew them off with him back of the truck.

"Well, what is it?" he demanded of them. "Do we keep on for the Valley or cut back to Mulholland and try for Cornell or Malibu Heights? Got to keep this outfit moving or it'll lose heart."

"If we decide on the Valley, how do we get around the boulder?" the Little Man asked.

"Table that one, Doddsy," Doc told him. "First things first."

Hunter said, "A few of us could take the sedan and scout the Valley."

Doc shook his head decisively. "Nope, we can't afford to split up this outfit. It's too small."

"I know some artists in Malibu," Rama Joan began tentatively.

"And I know some on Cape Cod," Doc shot at her with a grin and a wink. "They're probably swimming for Plymouth Rock."

"But I was going to say," Rama Joan went on with an answering grimace, "I vote for the Valley."

"Anyone know the Valley's elevation?" the Little Man asked. "It could be flooding from around the mountains."

"We'll find out," Doc answered with a shrug.

"It's got to be the Valley," Margo put in. "Vandenberg Three's at the foot of the Mountainway. And I think you all know that I want to give the inertia gun to Morton Opperly."

Doc looked at their faces. "The Valley it is, then," he pronounced. "I do think, though," he remarked to Margo, "that momentum pistol might be a better name for it."

"But the boulder - " the Little Man began.

Doc showed him a palm. "Come on," he said to them all and headed past the truck and bus for the boulder.

As they went by, Bill Hixon asked with a jokingness that was three-quarters antagonism: "Well, doctor, has your executive committee decided on our further tasks for today?"

"We're keeping on for the Valley," Doc said sharply, "where we will resupply ourselves and contact responsible Moon Project scientists. Any objections?"

Without waiting for any even slightly delayed answers, he took a stand on the slope just above the boulder and motioned Margo to come up.

"I saw the boulder rock," he explained, "when you slammed that gunman against it. Give it three seconds of down-trigger from here and I bet she rolls. Spread out of the way, everybody!"

Margo took the momentum pistol from her jacket, then suddenly turned and gave it to Hunter.

"You do it," she told him, delighted to realize that she no longer needed the big gun to give her a feeling of security and excitement  -  that, in very fact, she herself was now the big gun she could rely on and experiment with. She also noted with satisfaction the sour hungry look in Hunter's dark-circled eyes.

He crouched and firmed the gun in both hands. He'd been told it had absolutely no recoil, but his body refused to believe that. All his muscles tightened. From the corner of his eye he saw Doc wave. He pressed the button.

Whatever field or force the pistol generated, its effect was cumulative, as if the boulder had to soak it up. At first the great rounded rock didn't move at all  -  long enough for Hixon to say: "Look, it isn't - "

Then the side nearest Hunter began to lift, slowly at first, then faster. McHeath cried: "It's moving!"

It overbalanced. Hunter snatched his finger off the button. The boulder came down on the rock slope with a tremendous clank, then crashed over and over, seeming at first to move just a little faster than a rolling boulder should.

The whole rock slope shook. Some of the people clutched at those nearest them.

A final crash carried the monster over the edge, from which it took a wide shallow bite of stone.

The Little Man said loudly, pulling out his notebook: "That is the most amazing demonstration of impossible physics that I have ever - "

A great sullen thud drowned his voice. The rock slope vibrated again as the boulder hit below.

Hunter looked at the scale on the pistol and said, "Still a good third of the charge left."

Doc studied the spot where the boulder had rested. There was a smooth two-foot dip in the asphaltoid, deepest on the downslope side where the black stuff was squeezed out in a lip that smoothly joined the rock. Abruptly Doc nodded approvingly.

"I'm not so sure," Hunter said, coming down the slope. "A skid sideways - "

But Doc was already striding back toward the red Corvette.

Two of the three buzzards  -  presumably they were the same  -  came winging up from the depths, heading away from the road. But there they ran into a big, two-rotor military 'copter which had come droning from the direction of the Valley during the excitement. The birds veered off from it and headed back.

Hixon was for signaling the 'copter with his gun, but Doc said: "No, we'll take care of ourselves. Anyhow, they can see us, and if that boulder didn't fetch 'em, nothing would."

The 'copter sped off seaward.

Doc climbed in the red Corvette, yelled: "Clear the road!" and drove it across the dip with only a small sideways lurch, just as the two buzzards winged rapidly across the road, hardly fifty feet up, and disappeared over the ridge.

Doc stopped the Corvette just beyond the sedan. "Clear everyone out of the bus and bring her across!" he shouted back. Then to Hunter, Margo, and Rama Joan, who'd come after him: "I'll lead off in the Corvette. Then the order'll be: sedan, bus, truck. You come with me, Joan, but Ann had better ride in the bus. You drive the sedan, Ross. Better get her turned around now. Margo, you keep the momentum pistol and ride with him. You're our heavy artillery, if we get into trouble, but wait for orders from me. Doddsy, we ought to have a rear-guard rifle in the back of the truck, but your hand's still bad."

"Harry McHeath knows how to use the gun," the Little Man said, "and he's responsible."

Doc nodded. "Go tell him he's promoted," he said. "Hixon can keep the other rifle."

The driver, Pop, came up to demur at taking the bus across the dip. "Back tires are old," he explained. "Worn slick. She'll be apt to take a sideways slip when she drops into that hole..."

Doc was already striding back. He climbed aboard the bus and brought her across without a great deal more sideways lurch than the Corvette.

Hixon brought the truck over. Ray Hanks was carried across then in his cot and, at his feverish insistence, loaded once more into the back of the truck, rather than the bus. He was joined there by Ida and young McHeath, stern-faced with his rifle.

As the bus loaded up, Doc said to Clarence Dodd: "You command her  -  and ride herd on Pop."

Walking ahead to the Corvette, he found Ann sitting in the middle of the front seat beside her mother. He planted his fists on his hips, then grinned and shrugged and climbed behind the wheel. "Hi, sweetheart," he said, tousling her hair. She shrank away from him toward her mother, just a little.

Doc started the motor, then stood up and faced back.

"Listen to this!" he shouted toward sedan, bus, and truck. "Follow at twenty-yard intervals!  -  I'll be taking it easy. Three horn blasts from me means slow! Four means stop! Five  -  from one of you  -  means you're in trouble. Got that?

"O.K.! We roll!"

The people of Earth responded to the Wanderer catastrophes as necessity constrained them, or did not constrain them.

A skeletal new New York of refugees and tents and emergency hospitals and airlift terminals grew in Putnam and Dutchess Counties and across the river in the southern reaches of the Catskills.

In Chicago a few people walked down to Lake Michigan to marvel mildly at the four-foot tide, and to tell each other they'd never known there'd always been a three-inch one. They briefly lifted their eyes to watch a string of light planes flying east from Meigs Field to join in some airlift. Behind them traffic roared along the Outer Drive unheedingly, about as heavy as any other day.

In Siberia tidal waters invading an atomic bomb plant contributed to a great fizzle-explosion which scattered deadly fallout on trudging refugees.

From foundering Pacific atolls long canoes took off on enforced voyages of discovery, echoing those of their adventurous forefathers.

Wolf Loner sailed confidently on toward Boston by dead reckoning. He wondered placidly why twice last night the moonlight had glowed very brightly through the clouds with a faint violet tinge.

The "Prince Charles" hugged the Brazilian coast as it atom-steamed south. The four insurgent captains commanding it ignored the warnings of Captain Sithwise to swing wide around the mouth of the Amazon.

Paul Hagbolt surveyed northern Europe from five hundred miles up. It was sunlit and clear, except that a wide white cloudbank was creeping across the Atlantic toward Ireland.

Immediately below him was the North Sea, about as big as the page of an atlas when you study it, and dull gray except where the sun made an irritating highlight in the Dover Strait corner.

The British Isles, the southern half of Scandinavia, and North Germany and the Lowlands made three more atlas pages placed to the left, the right, and below.

Scotland and Norway looked about as they should, but the pendant of southern Sweden was laced by the encroaching gray of the Baltic.

Below a skeletal Denmark, a wide scimitar of water, the cutting edge of the blade faced south, lay across the Netherlands and northern Germany. Paul thought, Oh well, this isn't the first time Holland's been flooded.

England now: it was gray-laced, too, and something had taken a big bite out of the east coast. The Thames? The...Humber? Paul felt guiltily that his mind ought to be able to pop out the correct answer at once, but geography had never been his strong point Why didn't Tigerishka look into his unconscious mind and tell him? he asked himself pettishly, glancing to where she was serenely grooming herself with a silver comb and her dagger tongue.

Paul's accusations and her fierce reactions to them had ended in pure anticlimax. She had lowered her threatening claws, turned her back on him, and spent the next hour at the control panel, sometimes manipulating the silver excrescences but mostly sitting still. Then she had begun a new series of maneuvers and observations.

Midway she had broken off to release him, without comment, from his last ankle fetter and the sanitary connections. Then she had explained to him tersely and impersonally, but in monkey-English again, the basic rules for manipulating one's body in null gravity and for using the Waste and Food Panels. Finally she had gone back to her business, leaving Paul with the feeling of being an interloper in a very fancy office. He had hurriedly eaten a meal of tiny protein cookies, swallowing them down in plain water, almost like so many pills. They still sat heavy in his stomach.

The observations had been frantically exciting at first, then had swiftly grown wearisome.

He tried to think of Margo around the world in Southern California and of Don the other side of the earth on the crushed moon  -  or escaped from it in a moon ship  -  but his imagination was tired out.

He pulled his attention back to the observations with an effort  -  away from the troublingly delightful sight of Tigerishka titivating herself and back to the live atlas outspread below the saucer's transparent floor with its scattered invisible handholds through two of which he now had a toe and finger hooked.

Lets see, that bite in England might be something they called the Wash, which was connected with something they called the Fenlands...He sighed.

"You feeling bad 'bout your planet, Paul?" Tigerishka called over to him. "Peoples suffering and all?"

He shrugged and shook his head. "It's too big," he said. "I've lost my feelings."

"Like see things closer?" she asked, pushing off and drifting slowly toward him.

"What would be the use?" he asked.

"Then you feeling bad 'bout something smaller, Paul, something nearer you," she told him. "Girl? You worry 'bout her?"

He grimaced. "I don't know. Margo's not my girl, really."

"Then you feeling bad 'bout nearest thing of all: you-self," Tigerishka informed him, checking her drift beside him. She laid a velvet paw on his bare shoulder. "Poor Paul," she purred. "All mixed up. Poor, poor Paul."

He angrily twisted his shoulder away from the thrilling touch, flipping air toward her with a short sweep of his hands to keep a few inches back. "Don't treat me like a pet that's out of sorts," he demanded angrily. "Don't treat me like a sick monkey. Treat me like a man!"

She grinned at him, her whiskers laying back across her violet cheeks, the black pupils of her eyes shrinking to pinpoints, and she pointed a violet-gray foreclaw at his heart and said: "Bang!"

After a moment he chuckled miserably and admitted, "All right, Tigerishka, I guess I have to be some sort of lower animal to you, but in that case look into my mind and tell me what's wrong with me. Why am I so mixed up?"

The pupils of her eyes expanded to stars  -  black spidery stars in a violet sky.

"Why, Paul," she said gravely, "ever since you forced me to treat you as an intelligent being  -  primitive but intelligent, bearing a little living universe inside  -  it has no longer been a simple thing for me to go deep into your mind. It's more than a matter of having to ask your permission now. But I have gathered some notions about you, and if you want I will tell them to you."

He nodded. "Go on."

"Paul," she said, "you resent being treated like a pet, yet that is how you treat the people around you. You stand back and watch their antics with tolerant understanding and you nurse and guard and cajole the ones you love: Margo, Don, your mother, several others. You call this friendship, but it's nursemaiding and devouring. A decent cat wouldn't do it to her own kittens.

"You stand back and watch yourself more than is healthy. You live too much in the self watching you and in the third self watching the second, and so on. Look!" She switched the windows to mirror. Her foreclaw placed itself between his right eye and his own stacked reflections and somehow ticked off the edges of the first six of them exactly.

"See?" she said. "Each watching the one in front I know  -  all intelligent animals are self-observing. But you live too much in the reflections, Paul. Best to live mostly in front of the mirror and just a little in the watchers. That way courage comes. Don't live in Watcher Number Six!

"Also, you think other people same as your watchers. You cringe from them, then criticize. But they not. They got watchers too, watching just them.

"Also, love yourself more, or you can't like anybody.

" 'Nother thing 'bout you," she finished, dropping wholly back into monkey-talk, "fight-reflexes pretty poor. Likewise dance. Likewise sex. Not 'nough practice. That's all."

"I know you're right," Paul said haltingly in a small, tight voice. "I try to change, but - "

" 'Nough thinking 'bout self! Look! See one our big saucers save one your towns."

Ceiling and floor were transparent again. They were descending at a rapid slant toward a dark branchwork merged with a pale checkerboard mesh, from the center of which brown rings were expanding outward toward a circular brown rim that merged into bluish gray. High above the center of the circles hung a golden and violet saucer which he judged had to be huge from the cloud-arm between them.

The mesh grew larger  -  it was streets. And the squares were blocks of buildings.

The brown rings were humpings of silt-laden water being driven out of the city.

He recognized, from remembered pictures, the great buildings of Elektrosila and the Institute of Energetics, the blue-green of the Kirov Theater, the Square of the Decembrists. The branchwork must be the streams of the Neva delta, and the city itself, Leningrad.

"See? We save your beloved cities," Tigerishka said complacently. "Momentum engine of big saucer move only water. Very smart machine."

Suddenly the saucer dipped so close he saw the cobblestones, a mud-buried gutter, and the sprawled, silt-drifted, water-grayed bodies of a woman and a little girl. Then a low brown wave surged over them, a gray arm and a gray, bearded face lifelessly flinging out of the dirty foam.

"Save?" Paul demanded incredulously. "Yes, after killing your millions  -  and if the rescue isn't worse than the disaster! Tigerishka, how could you bring yourself to wreck our world just to get fuel a little faster? What frightened you into it?"

She hissed: "Stay off that subject, Paul!"

Richard Hillary limped along swiftly  -  a dimentionless point in the atlas-page England Paul had been viewing, but a living, breathing, frightened man for all that. He was sweating profusely; the sun beat in his face. He was panting and at every other step he winced.

The pedestrian equivalent of a fast car on a big highway, Richard had outdistanced the pack behind but yet had not caught up with the pack ahead, if there was one. The last signpost he had seen had pointed, quite appropriately, he was certain, to "Lower Slaughter."

Squinting ahead, he could see that after some hundred yards the road began leisurely to wind up a high, forest-capped hill.

But, looking behind, his sun-dazzled eyes could see only a crazy scattering of sheets and serpents of water.

The fattest serpent was the road he was traveling, and now it suddenly began to fill where he was, brimming over from the ditch to the left. Hardly an inch, yet it unnerved him.

To the right was a forbiddingly fenced field of young barley, a bit higher than the road and mounting directly toward the hilltop. He climbed the fence, unmindful of the tearing of the barbed wire, and set on again through the swishing green. With a startling sudden beat of wings, a crow emerged just ahead and took off, cawing with hoarse disapproval. Although Richard's legs were cramping now, he increased his pace.

He heard a rumble of low, distant thunder. Only this was the sort of thunder that doesn't die away muttering, but gets louder, louder, louder. Richard didn't think he could do it, but he began to run, run at his top speed uphill. There was a rush of rabbits from behind him. At one point he could see a dozen white bounding forms.

From the sides of his eyes he began to glimpse brown-frothy, whirling, pursuing walls. The thunder became that of a dozen express trains. At one moment there was yellow foam around his feet, at another it looked as though a swinging, dust-raising surge would cut him off.

Yet he did make it to the hilltop, and the waters didn't get quite that far, and the thundering began slowly to fade.

As he swayed there panting, his lower chest feeling as if it had been kicked, there stepped out of the trees just ahead a straight-backed, small, elderly man with a shotgun.

"Stand, sir!" this apparition cried, directing the weapon at Richard. "Or I'll fire."

The apparition was dressed in brown gaiters, gray knickerbockers, and a lilac pullover. His narrow, wrinkled, watery-eyed face was set in lines of grimmest disapproval.

Richard stood, if only because he was so utterly and painfully winded. The thundering died away completely as the turbid water leveled a little way down the hill.

"Speak up!" the apparition cried. "What lets you think you have the right to trample my barley? And how did you let in all that water?"

Finally getting some of his breath, Richard shaped his lips in a grave smile and said: "It wasn't deliberate on my part, believe me."

Sally Harris, the midmorning sun glowing from the solid gold threads in her bikini, peered down over the balustrade and called back a running commentary.

Jake Lesher sat by a cup of black coffee flaming almost invisibly with Irish whiskey and puffed a long greenish cigar. Occasionally he frowned. A notebook stood open at two blank pages beside the coffee cup.

Sally called, "The water's ten stories higher than last time. The roofs are packed with people and there's two or three at every window I can see. Some are standing on the ledges. We're lucky our skyscraper had a fire and the elevator's stuck. Somebody's shaking his fist  -  why me, what have I done to you? Somebody else just took a high dive  -  ouch, bellywhopper! The current's fierce  -  it's pushing a police launch backwards. You there, quit pointin' your cane at me! There's mothers and kids and - "

There was a zing and a crack and the tubular chrome rang along its length. Sally flipped her hands off it as if she'd been stung and turned around.

"Somebody just shot at me!" she announced indignantly.

"Move back, baby," Jake instructed her. "People are always jealous of the guy at the top. Or the gal."