The Wanderer

Chapter Twenty-two

The saucer students were at last beginning to feel alive again after their ducking and their exhausting race with the waves. The men had built a driftwood fire beside the empty highway near the low concrete bridge at the head of the wash, and everyone was drying out around it, which necessitated considerable comradely trading around of clothes and of the unwetted blankets and stray articles of dress from the truck.

Rama Joan cut down the trousers of her salt-streaked evening clothes to Bermuda shorts, ruthlessly chopped off the tails and half the arms of the coat, replaced the ruined dicky and white tie with the green scarf of her turban, and gathered her red-gold hair in a pony tail. Ann and Doc admired her.

Everybody looked pretty battered. Margo noticed that Ross Hunter appeared trimmer than the other men, then realized it was because, while most of them were getting slightly stubbly cheeks and chins, he simply still had the beard that had made him Beardy.

As the sky blued and brightened, their spirits rose and it became just a bit hard to think that all of last night had actually happened, and that a violet and gold planet was at this moment terrorizing Japan, Australia, and the other islands of the half-planet-spanning Pacific Ocean.

But they could see a monster slide blocking the road not two hundred yards north, while Doc pointed out the wreckage of the beach house and the platform lodged against the gleaming fence of Vandenberg Two, little more than a mile away.

“Still,” he said, “humanity’s skepticism about its own experiences grows like mushrooms. How about another affidavit for us all to sign, Doddsy?”

“I’m keeping a journal of events in waterproof ink,” the Little Man retorted briskly. “It’s open to inspection at any time.” He took his notebook and slowly riffled the pages to emphasize that point “If anyone’s memory of events differs from mine, I’ll be happy to make a note of that — providing he’ll initial the divergent recollection.”

Wojtowicz, staring down over the Little Man’s shoulder, said: “Hey, Doddsy, some of those pictures you got of the Wanderer don’t look right to me.”

“I smoothed out the details and made them quite diagrammatic,” the Little Man admitted. “However, I did draw them…from the life. But if you want to make some memory pictures of the new planet — and initial them! — you’re welcome to put them in the book.”

“Not me, I’m no artist,” Wojtowicz excused himself grinningly.

“You’ll be able to check up tonight, Wojtowicz,” Doc said.

“Jeeze, don’t remind me!” the other said, clapping his hand to his eyes and doing a little comedy stagger.

Only the Ramrod remained miserable, sitting apart on the wide bridge-rail and staring hungrily out toward the sea’s rim where the Wanderer had set.

“She chose him” he muttered wonderingly. “I believed, yet I was passed over. He was drawn into the saucer.”

“Never mind, Charlie,” said Wanda, laying her plump hand on his thin shoulder. “Maybe it wasn’t the Empress but only her handmaiden, and she got the orders mixed.”

“You know, that was truly weird, that saucer swooping down on us,” Wojtowicz said to the others. “Just one thing about it — are you sure you saw Paul pulled up into it? I don’t like to say this, but he could have been sucked out to sea, like almost happened to several of us.”

Doc, Rama Joan, and Hunter averred they’d seen it with their own eyes. “I think she was more interested in the cat than Paul,” Rama Joan added.

“Why so?” the Little Man asked. “And why ‘she’?”

Rama Joan shrugged. “Hard to say, Mr. Dodd. Except she looked like a cat herself, and I didn’t notice any external sex organs.”

“Neither did I,” Doc confirmed, “though I won’t say I was peering for them at the time with lewd avidity.”

“Do you think the saucer actually had an inertialess drive — like E. E. Smith’s bergenholms or something?” Harry McHeath asked Doc.

“Have to, I’d think, the way it was jumping around. In a situation like this, science fiction is our only guide. On the other hand—”

Margo took advantage of everyone being engrossed in the conversation to fade back between the bushes in the direction the other women had taken earlier on their bathroom trips. She climbed over a small ridge beside the wash and came out on a boulder-strewn, wide earth ledge about twenty feet above the beach.

She looked around her. She couldn’t see anyone anywhere. She took out from under her leather jacket the gray pistol that had fallen from the saucer. It was the first chance she’d had to inspect it closely. Keeping it concealed while she’d dried her clothes had been an irksome problem.

It was unburnished gray — aluminum or magnesium, by its light weight — and smoothly streamlined. There was no apparent hole in the tapering muzzle for anything material to come out. In front of the trigger-bump was an oval button. The grip seemed shaped for two fingers arid a thumb. In the left side of the grip, away from her palm as she held it in her right hand, was a narrow vertical strip that shone violet five-eighths of its length up, rather like a recessed thermometer.

She gripped the gun experimentally. Just beyond the end of the muzzle she noted a boulder two feet wide sitting on the rim of the ledge. Her heart began to pound. She pointed the gun at the boulder and tapped the trigger. Nothing happened. She pressed it a little harder, then a little harder than that, and suddenly — there was no recoil, but suddenly the boulder was shooting away, and a three-foot bite of ledge with it, to fall almost soundlessly into the sand a hundred feet off, though some of the sand there whooshed up and flew on farther. A breeze blew briefly from behind her. A little gravel rattled down the slope.

She took a gasping breath and a big swallow. Then she grinned. The violet column didn’t look much shorter, if any. She put the gun back inside her jacket, belting the latter a notch tighter. A thoughtful frown replaced her grin.

She climbed back over the top of the ridge, and there on the other side was Hunter, his whiskers showing copper hairs among the brown in the sun’s rays just topping the hills.

“Professor Hunter!” she said. “I didn’t think you were that sort of man.”

“What sort?” he asked her, perhaps smiling, but the beard made that hard to tell.

“Why, to follow a girl when she’s on private business.”

He simply looked at her, and she smoothed her blonde hair. “Aren’t you used to the frank interest of men? Sexual or otherwise,” he asked blandly. Then, “Fact is, I thought I heard a little landslide.”

“A rock did roll down to the beach,” she said, stepping past him, “but the noise couldn’t have carried far.”

“It carried to me,” he said, starting down the ridge beside her. “Why don’t you take that jacket off? It’s getting hot”

“I could think of subtler approaches,” she told him a bit acidly.

“So could I,” he assured her.

“I guess you could,” she agreed after a moment. Then stopping at the foot of the ridge: “Ross, name a leading scientist, physicist especially, Nobel Prize caliber, who’s got real wisdom for humanity?…Moral integrity, but vision and compassion, too.”

“That’s quite a question,” he said. “Well, there’s Drummond, there’s Stendhal — though he’s hardly a physicist — and Rosenzweig…and of course there’s Morton Opperly.”

“That’s the name I wanted you to say,” she told him.

Dai Davies pounded on the frame of the diamond-paned door of the tiny pub near Portishead. His knees knocked together; his face was greenish pale; his hair, straight, plastered-down black locks; his clothes, soaking — and he would have been covered with mud from his falls except that it had been scoured off by the swim he’d had to make of the last hundred yards of his retreat back across Bristol Channel.

And he was at the very end of his ebbing, drunken strength. — if it had taken another dozen flailing overarm strokes and convulsive kicks, he’d never have made it to shore, he knew, out of the wild, foamy flood tide surging up-Severn. He needed alcohol, ethanol, spirits of wine! — as a bleeding man in shock needs a transfusion.

Yet for some reason the filthy Somersets had locked the door and hidden themselves — doubtless simply to thwart him, out of pure, mean, Welsh-hating, poet-despising cruelty, for these were open hours. By suffering Christ, he’d have the law on them for locking the place! He pressed his face to the lead-netted small panes to spy them out in their cowardly holes, but the shadowy taproom was empty, the lights were all out.

He reeled back, beating his arms across his chest for warmth, and hoarsely screeched up and down the road: “Where are you all? Come out! Come out, somebody!” But not a soul showed himself, not a single house door opened, not even one loveless white she-face peered out a window. He was all alone.

He went trembling back to the pub door, grabbed the frame with both hands to steady himself, managed to lift a cramped leg, and kicked a short, convulsive kick with his heel. Three panes cracked and fell inside. He got his leg down, then he crouched against the door and thrust his arm through to the shoulder and reached around, found the lock, and worked it. The door opened, and he stumbled inside, retrieving his arm from the glass-jagged leaden web, then took four steps toward the bar, and stood wavering in the middle of the room, almost fainting.

And then as he swayed there gasping, and his eyes got used to the dimness, a wonderful change came over him and filled him brimful. Suddenly it was the finest thing in the world that he should be all alone at this moment; it was the fulfillment of an old, old dream.

He did not mind the faint roar behind him or glance once over his shoulder through the broken door at the Bristol Channel filling in dirty, low, foam-edged, flotsam-studded steps. He had eyes only for the amber and greenish, charmingly labeled bottles ranged on the shelves behind the bar. They were like treasured books to him, founts of all wisdom, friends of the lonely, a lovely library to be forever sampled and savored and of which he could never tire.

And as he approached them with loving deliberation, smiling a wide smile, he began softly and liltingly to read their titles from their spines:

“Old Smuggler…by Richard Blackmore. Teachers, by C. P. Snow. The Black and the White, by Stendhal. White Horse, by G. K. Chesterton…”

General Spike Stevens sloshed through cold salt water past the elevator shaft from which the water was welling more strongly every moment, making the metal door groan. A flashlamp strapped to his chest shone on the thigh-deep water and on a wall papered with historic battle scenes. Three more flashlamps came up behind him “…like we were a bunch of damn musical comedy burglars,” Colonel Griswold had put it.

The general felt around the wall, dug his fingers through the paper, and jerked open — the paper tearing — a light, two-foot-square door, revealing a shallow recess with nothing but a big black lever-handle in it.

He faced the others. “Understand,” he said rapidly, “I only know the entrance to the escape shaft. I don’t know where it comes out any more than you do, because I’m not supposed to know where we are — and I don’t. We’ll hope it leads up into some sort of tower, because we know we’re about two hundred feet below ground and that somehow there’s some salt water up there. Understand? Okay, I’m going to open it.”

He turned and dragged down on the lever. Colonel Mabel Wallingford was standing just behind him, Colonel Griswold and Captain Kidley a few feet back.

The lever budged a quarter inch and stuck. He dragged down on it with both hands until he was only knee-deep in the water. Colonel Mab reached up and put her hands beside his and chinned herself.

Griswold called: “Wait! If it’s jammed, it means—”

The lever dropped eight inches. Three feet away, wallpaper tore along a right angle as a door two feet wide and five feet high opened, and a black bolster of water came out and bowled over Captain Kidley and Colonel Griswold — Colonel Mab saw the tatter’s lamp pushed deeper and deeper.

The solid water kept coming, a great thick ridge of it. It grabbed at the feet of Colonel Mab and the general. They clung to the lever.