The Wanderer

Chapter Eighteen

Despite Doc’s snoring for morale purposes, no one except Rama Joan tried to follow his example, and after a half hour or so Doc himself lifted his head, propping it up on his doubled arm, so as to get into an argument Hunter and Paul were having about the paths in space Earth and the Wanderer would take with respect to each other.

“I’ve figured it all out in my head — roughly, of course,” Doc told them. “Granting they’re of equal mass, they’ll revolve around a point midway between them in a month lasting about nineteen days.”

“Shorter than that, surely,” Paul objected. “Why, we can see with our own eyes how fast the Wanderer’s moving.” He pointed to where the strange planet, maroon and light orange now, was dipping atilt toward the ocean, the blunt yellow spearhead of the moon striking across its front almost from below.

Doc chuckled. “That movement’s just the Earth turning — same thing as makes the sun rise.” Then, as Paul grimaced in exasperation at his own stupidity, Doc added: “Natural enough mistake — I keep making it in my own mind, which I inherited from my cavemen ancestors along with my tail bones! Say, look how far the sea’s gone out! Ross, I’m afraid the tidal effects are showing up faster than we hoped.”

Paul, trying to get back into the swing of the discussion, made himself visualize how tides eighty times higher would mean tides eighty times lower too — at six-hour intervals, at most places.

“Incidentally,” Doc added, “we’ll be about ten days getting into that nineteen-day orbit, since Earth’s acceleration is only about five-hundredths of an inch a second. That of the moon, also in respect to the Wanderer, must have been about four feet a second, cumulative, of course.”

A chilly land-breeze came sneaking around Paul’s neck. He pulled his coat tighter — he’d got it back from Margo when the Little Man had given her one of the leather jackets. In spite of that she had Miaow inside the jacket to make her warmer as she stared out across the long, flat beach.

“Look how the light glistens on the wet gravel,” she said to Paul. “Like amethysts and topazes shoveled out of trucks.”

“Ssh,” said the fat woman, beside her. “He’s getting messages.”

Just the other side of Wanda, the Ramrod was gazing at the Wanderer as though hypnotized by it, his chin on his fist, rather in the attitude of “The Thinker.”

“The Emperor says, ‘No harm to Terra’,” the Ramrod droned just then in a trancelike voice. “ ‘Her turbulent waters shall be stilled, her oceans withdrawn from her shores’.”

“A planetful of King Canutes,” Doc murmured softly.

“Your emperor ought to have got on the ball in time to stop the earthquakes,” Mrs. Hixon called tartly. Mr. Hixon laid his hand on her arm and whispered to her. She flirted her shoulders, but made no more cracks.

Rama Joan opened her eyes. “How are your speculations going now, Rudolf?” she challenged Doc. “Angels? Or devils?”

He replied: “I’ll wait until one flies in close enough for me to see whether his wings are feathery or leathery.” Then, realizing that he’d not necessarily made a joke, he looked quickly toward the Wanderer with a sardonic shudder. Then he stood up and stretched himself and surveyed the platform.

“Ha, I see you loaded the truck while I snoozed,” he commented blandly. “That was considerate. Didn’t even forget the water jugs — I suppose I have you to thank for that, Doddsy.” Then, softly, to Hunter: “How’s Ray Hanks?”

“Hardly woke up when we moved the cot into the truck and guyed it to the sides. Put a blanket around him.”

There was a droning in the sky. Everyone held very still. Several looked apprehensively toward the Wanderer, as if they thought something might be coming from there. Then Harry McHeath called excitedly: “It’s a ’copter from Vandenberg — I think…”

But it looked like a regulation enough little dragonfly of an observation ’copter as it slanted down toward the sea, then swung around and came along the beach, traveling at not much more than fifty feet. Suddenly it swerved toward them and hovered overhead. The drone became a roar. The down-blast from the vanes scattered the pile of unused programs in a white flutter.

“Is the damn fool trying to land on us?” Doc demanded, crouching and squinting upward like all the others.

A great voice came down through the drone. “Get out! Get out of here!”

“Why, the bastards!” Doc roared, so that what the voice said next was lost. “They’re not satisfied with slamming the door in our faces. Now they order us out of the neighborhood!” Beside him the little Man lifted and fiercely shook his fist.

“Get off the beach!” the great voice finished as the ’copter tilted over and continued in its course down the coast.

“Hey, Doc!” Wojtowicz yelled, grabbing the bigger man’s shoulder. “Maybe they’re trying to warn us about the tides!”

“But that won’t be for at least six hours—”

Doc broke off, as it became apparent that the roar wasn’t leaving with the ’copter, and as water spurted upward in a dozen places through the cracks between the floorboards.

All around the platform was a pale welter of foam. The wave had come in while all their eyes were on the ’copter and its roar had masked that of the wave.

“But—” Doc demanded, rather like King Canute himself.

“Not tides, but tsunami!” Hunter yelled at him. “Earthquake waves!”

Doc smote his own forehead.

With a hissing of sand and a hollow clanking of gravel the water receded, leaving behind a ghostly patchwork of spume.

“There’s another coming!” Paul cried out, watching a distant pale wall with horror. “Start the truck!”

The Hixons were already piling into the front seat The motor coughed and died. The starter whined by itself. Hunter, Doddsy, Doc, and Harry McHeath jumped down and prepared to heave at the truck’s sides. Rama Joan half-carried Ann across the platform, pushed her into the truck, and slapped her across the face when she tried to come back. “Stay there and hold on,” she snarled. Wanda tried to follow Ann, but Wojtowicz grabbed her in a bear-hug, telling her: “Not this time, Fatty!” Paul lifted and tried to secure the truck’s tailgate.

The motor caught. Wojtowicz swung Wanda behind him, and he and Paul pushed at the tailgate, sprawling on the boards when the truck lurched forward a foot or so. Its rear tires squealed as they spun in the wet sand. A heave from the men below, another forward lurch, a hesitation, another running heave, and suddenly the truck was going away fast, its tailgate swinging, its tail lights shining on the foam-frosted water nipping at its heels.

The second wave was high enough to overrun a corner of the platform and rock it a little, the cracks spouting like a sprinkler system. As it receded, Paul hustled Margo across the slippery boards. She was clutching Miaow. He paused on the back edge of the platform and looked around at the others and at the men struggling to their feet below in the shallow water.

“Come on! Quick, before the third one hits!” he yelled and plunged off with Margo, leading the rush after the truck.

Arab and Pepe and High expected blue floods of police to pour down after them into the Lenox and 125th Street subway station. So they hid in the can, Arab ready to shred their remaining reefers into the toilet and High set to flush it, while Pepe listened at the door. It wasn’t very smart but it was done almost instinctively.

But nobody else tried to come in; they didn’t hear police tramping and shouting around, in fact they didn’t hear anything. Presently they came out.

The empty station was like a haunted house, so for a while they just snuck around. Pepe tried to get some chocolate out of a machine but it stuck. He biffed it once but stopped at the noise. They got on the back end of the empty, waiting train, which was headed downtown, and walked through it all the way to the front. There Arab fingered a lever for a while and then swung it. The doors started to close and he swung it back quick. He moved another lever and the purring got louder, and the train seemed to strain, and he quickly reversed that one, too.

“Better not mess with those,” he said with a giggle.

They studied the black double tunnel through the front door, waiting for a train to come the other way, but none did.

The longer the station stayed empty, the more it felt like a private world of their own. Feeling world-owner wealthy, they lit three sticks and sipped them on the engineer’s platform.

Finally Arab said: “What we think really happen, High?”

High frowned hard. Then, “Russians land at the Battery from supersubs. Defeat the fuzz at the Battle of Union Square. Fuzz retreat north, fighting a rear-guard action. Russians advance. My orders of the day: lurk below, men, and play deaf and dumb.”

Arab nodded. “Pepe?”

“That fireball! She surface at the Battery and split up without blasting, and then come flowing uptown through the streets. People think she poison gas and go for the roofs, but she really happy smoke, poppy-weed mix. Everybody but us strangle to death. Too scare’ to inhale. Arab?”

A warm breeze began to flow past them from the tunnel ahead. It was heavy with subway smell: metal, dry dirt, human stateness, a dash of electricity.

“Come on, Arab, you started this,” Pepe prodded him.

“O.K., I got it now,” Arab said. “River high, we saw. Keep getting higher. Water surface at the Battery, drive ashore and come north. Flood like Noah’s! Tell people to take to the roofs and turn to pillars of salt. Clear out the basements and the subways. Fuzz run. Firemen all set with hoses, but water one thing they can’t fight. They run too. Water just a-coming and a-coming.”

“Hey, that’s good,” High said. “Ree-alistic.”

The breeze got stronger and so did the subway smell, but now an inappropriate odor was mixed with the latter.

Far down the tunnel there was a blue flash.

“Train coming,” Pepe said.

There was another blue flash, and another. The breeze became a wind, and now the inappropriate odor came clear: it was the smell you got near the river. And there was a roaring growing louder.

“Dark train coming on both tracks!” Arab screeched.

The blue flashes came closer, closer, became brighter, brighter. The salty, sour wind was a gale; papers and dust were flying; the roaring was that of a thousand lions.

For a moment, clutching each other on the platform, they saw it clear: the foamy front dark with dirt and footed with blue flame.

Then the electricity-loaded piston of salt water struck.

Sally Harris and Jake Lesher nibbled scrambled eggs and caviar from a silver platter set over a blue flame and a crystal bowl set in ice.

“Gee, we’re high up,” Sally said, gazing out across the penthouse patio. “All I can see is the Empire State, RCA, the Chrysler, the Sixty Wall Tower…and is that bitty point the Waldorf Astoria?”

“Forty stories before we switched to Hasseltine’s private elevator,” Jake told her as he spooned caviar onto a toasted split bagel. “I counted.”

Sally took her coffee cup to the tubular chrome balustrade and peered over with a reckless swoop. “Whee, people look like gumdrops,” she called back to him. “They’re running — I don’t know why. Jake, once I asked you what those little hydrants are for that they have sticking out of buildings — I thought they were for putting out fires in cars, remember, or holding back mobs of rioting garment workers.”

“Naw, they’re for washing down the sidewalks in the morning,” Jake instructed her, pouring himself a cup of coffee from the tall slim pot with the red light at its base.

She nodded. “I thought so — they’re using them now.”

“Naw, they do it at four a.m. Now it’s eight.” His eyes grew distant. It felt to him as if the money-thought he’d had in Times Square were at last coming back.

“Well, maybe, but it looks awfully wet.” She studied a while longer. Then, “Jake?”

“What now? Sal, I’m trying to think.”

“You’re right. The water’s not coming out of those little hydrants. It’s coming out of the subways.”

Jake jumped up and came down with a heel-slam that jolted him painfully. The floor had jumped, too. The building roared and lurched — and lurched again. He flailed the air with his arms and grabbed the chrome balustrade where Sally was rocking and squealing above the roar. Blocks down, her coffee cup and large flakes of stone made pin-point flat splashes.

The lurching and roaring faded. Sally leaned over and pointed straight below at a black ribbon coming out of their building near the base.

“Look!” she yelled. “Smoke! Oh’ Jake, isn’t it exciting?” she demanded as he dragged her back. “We ought to make a play out of it!”

In the chaos of the moment, Jake still was able to realize that this was the money-idea for which he had been groping.

Behind them the telltale red light at the base of the coffee pot went out, and the orange glow of the toaster faded.

The saucer students had outrun three more sloshing earthquake waves that were more spume than water — calf-deep fakes — and had actually reached dry sand and halted there, most of them winded, the Ramrod and Ida half dragging his other woman between them, when the really big combers started chasing them all.

Up ahead, the rounded foothills of the Santa Monica mountains loomed dark and heavy against a sky that had begun to gray with the dawn. Nearer, but already quite far, the bobbing lights of the truck continued to recede. Hixon had taken the most direct course away from the sea, a course midway between the great hump of Vandenberg and the crumbled lower palisades that had buried the cars, and the others had followed the truck. This had been wise — any other course would have had them running slantwise to the waves across even lower beach; the trouble was that even the midway course was nothing but sand and flat sandy ground for a long distance — a dry river wash.

Behind them the Wanderer touched the ocean’s rim. The curving moon-lozenge was crossing its front again. The planet itself was showing once more its yin-yang face, though seemingly tilted over — Doc, gasping, thought, Why, this is where we came in. The thing’s completed one rotation — it’s got a six-hour day. Then something black and square and lace-sided reared up and blocked off the Wanderer from him.

It was the platform where they’d held their saucer symposium, upended by the second of the big combers.

Then he heard the roar.

The others had started to run again and he pounded after them, tiny needles teasing his heart.

Then…well, it was as if in one terrible, instantaneous swoop the Wanderer had leaped a quarter of a million miles out of the heavens and poised itself just above them, shutting off all of the sky except a circular gray horizon-border.

It was enough to stop them in their tracks, despite the pale, wreckage-fisted horrors roaring at them up the beach.

Hunter was the first to get distances and dimensions right, and he thought, Why, it’s simply (my God, simply!) a flying saucer forty feet across, antigravitically poised a dozen feet above us and painted with a violet-gold yin-yang. Then he started running again.

The first and least of the big combers plastered them with spume and surged around them knee-high. Although most of their minds and senses were still glued to the thing above them, their bodies responded to the material assault. They grabbed at each for support; hands clutched slippery hands or wet waists or soggy coats. Wanda went under, and Wojtowicz ducked for her.

Margo’s nails dug into Paul’s neck and she screamed in his ear: “Miaow! Get Miaow!” and she jabbed her other hand beyond him. He glimpsed a tiny cat tail and ears disappearing in the dirty spume and he crazily dove after them, clutching ahead. So Paul missed what happened next.

A pink port five feet across flashed open in the saucer’s center, and there swung out of it, hanging just above their heads by two clawed limbs and a pointed prehensile tail, a green-and-violet-furred -

“Devil!” Ida screamed. “She said there’d be devils!”

“Tiger!” yelled Harry McHeath. Doc heard and his mind threw out, as uncontrollably as a pair of honest dice, the thought: My God, the second Buck Rogers Sunday page! The Tiger Men of Mars!

“Empress!” the Ramrod cried, his cold knees buckling, and in his nostrils, framed by the sea’s mucky stink, the breath of a heavenly perfume…

Big, black-centered violet eyes scanned them all very rapidly, yet with an impression of leisurely spectator disdain.

The second huge comber wasn’t thirty yards away, the platform riding it like a surfboard, scattered chairs bobbing all around, and behind it the half-exploded beach house coming on, too.

A green paw shot out, pointed a taper-snouted gray pistol seaward, and fanned it back and forth.

There was no flash or glow or sign, but the great wave sank, shriveled, dissolved. The platform slipped back over it and to the side. The broken beach house veered toward Vandenberg. All spume shot away, vanished. Confused loomings and shrinkings. The water was hardly thigh-deep and it lacked the punch of the first comber when it struck them at last.

The gray pistol kept on fanning back and forth over their heads.

A great gust of wind whipped past them from the land. Doc, caught off balance, started to fall. Rama Joan heaved back on him.

Paul’s head and shoulders emerged from the foam. He was clutching a rat-wet Miaow to his shoulder.

The wind kept blowing.

The being hanging from the rim of the pink port seemed to lengthen out, almost impossibly, becoming a violet-barred green curve stretching toward Paul.

The gray pistol dropped, and Margo caught it.

Violet-gray claws dug into Paul’s shoulder, and he and Miaow were swept up, by more than any mere human muscular force, into the pink port. Margo and Doc and Rama Joan, clinging together for support, saw that much very clearly.

The green and violet being whipped back into the saucer after Paul and the cat.

Then, without visible transition, the saucer was hundreds of yards overhead, no bigger than the moon, the port a big, pale dot.

Margo shoved the gray pistol inside her jacket.

The wind from the land faded.

The dot winked out, and the saucer vanished.

Then they were all struggling hand in hand up the beach, through knee-deep water sucking back seawards.

Bagong Bung, steering the “Machan Lumpur” out of the tide-swollen inlet south of Do-Son after a successful though unpleasantly delayed delivery of a cargo of assorted contraband, saw the Wanderer rising out of the cloud-edged Gulf of Tonkin in the young night just as — almost half a planet away — the saucer students, escaped from the tsunami, were watching the last sliver of it sink into the Pacific. To Bagong hung the yin-yang was a familiar Chinese symbol which he liked to think of as the Two Whales, but the deformed moon — at which he swiftly directed his brass spyglass — was now, to him, like a huge bag of faintly yellowed diamonds.

So to Bagong Bung, the Wanderer rising where the moon should have risen alone was not so much a staggering intrusion as a promise of good luck, a supernatural encouragement. Diamonds made him think of the lost treasure ships hidden under the shallow seas around him. He instantly and irrevocably decided that when tomorrow dawned, and with it the low tide came, he would spare time for at least one dive at the new location he’d guessed for the wreck of the “Sumatra Queen"!

“Come up, Cobber-Hume,” he called through the rusty speaking tube to his Australian engineer. “Great good fortune for us. No, I must not tell you. Come up, then you’ll see. Oh, you’ll see!”