The Wanderer

Chapter Twenty-three

Margo and Clarence Dodd were leaning their elbows on the upper rail of the concrete bridge, looking at the hills and speculating about the ceiling of diluted smoke that was moving up from the south and turning the sun red, giving its light an ominous brassy cast. She’d come here chiefly to get away from Ross Hunter.

“It could be only brush fires in the canyons and mountains,” the Little Man said. “But I’m afraid it’s more than that, Miss Gelhorn. You live in Los Angeles?”

“I rent a cottage in Santa Monica. Same thing.”

“Any family there?”

“No, just myself.”

“That’s good, at least. I’m afraid, unless we get rain—”

“Look,” she said, glancing down. “There’s water in the wash now! Doesn’t that mean there’s rain inland?”

But just then, with a triumphant tooting of horns, Hixon’s truck came rolling back from a reconnoiter down the coast, followed by a short, blocky yellow school bus. The two vehicles stopped on the bridge. Wojtowicz climbed down from the bus. He was carrying one of the army rifles. Doc came after him, but stopped on the step-down platform, which made a convenient rostrum.

“I am pleased to announce that I’ve found us transportation,” he called out loudly and jovially. “I insisted on looking into Monica Mountainway, and there, in a little vale not one hundred yards off the highway, I discovered this charming bus waiting to begin its morning chore, which today will be carrying us! It’s all gassed up and plentifully stocked with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and irradiated, fluoridated milk. Prepare for departure in five minutes, everyone!” He stepped down and came swinging around the yellow hood. “Doddsy, that’s not rainwater in that wash there, that’s salt tide — just look over the other side of the bridge and you’ll see it stretching out in one gleaming sheet to China. Times like this, things creep up on people. You’ve got the other gun, Doddsy — you ride with the Hixons. Ida will be with you to nurse Ray Hanks. I’ll command the bus.”

“Mr. Brecht,” Margo said. “Are you planning to take us over Monica Mountainway to the Valley?”

“Part way at any rate. To the two-thousand-foot heights, if I can. After that…” He shrugged.

“Mr. Brecht,” she went on, “Vandenberg Three is just the other end of the Mountainway. On the slopes, in fact. Morton Opperly’s there, in charge of the pure science end of the Moon Project. I think we should try to contact him.”

“Say, that’s not a bad idea,” Doc told her. “He ought to be showing more sense than the V-2 brass, and he might welcome some sane recruits. It’s a sound idea that we cluster around the top scientists in this para-reality situation. However, God knows if we’ll ever get to V-3, or if Opperly will still be there if we do,” he added, shrugging again.

“Never mind that,” Margo said. “All I ask is that if there’s a chance to contact him, you help me. I’ve a special reason which is extremely important but which I can’t explain now.”

Doc looked at her shrewdly, then grinned. “Sure thing,” he promised, as Hunter and some of the others closed in on him with other questions and suggestions.

Margo boarded the bus at once and took the seat behind the driver. He was a scowly old man with a jaw so shallow she wondered if he had teeth.

“It’s very good of you to help us out this way,” she remarked.

“You’re telling me?” he retorted, looking around at her incredulously and flashing some yellowed, stumpy incisors and scattered, black, amalgam-roofed molars. “He told me,” he went on, jerking a thumb at Doc just outside the door, “about this five-hundred-and-sixty-foot tide that would drown me if I didn’t get up in the hills fast. He made it mighty vivid. And then he told me I needn’t strain myself making up my mind whether to take you folks too, because he had a guy with a gun. Good o’ me? I just had no choice. Besides,” he added, “there was a big slide blocking off my regular route south. Might as well throw in with you crazy folks.”

Margo laughed self-consciously. “You’ll get used to us,” she said. At that moment the Ramrod came shouldering into the bus, calling back to Doc: “Very well, Wanda and I will ride in this conveyance, but I categorically refuse to drink milk with fallout rays and rat poison in it!”

The driver looked at Margo. “Maybe,” he said sourly.

The rest came crowding aboard. Hunter had sat down beside Margo while the driver was talking to her. She ostentatiously made extra room, but he didn’t look at her. Doc stood in the door and counted noses. “All here,” he announced. He leaned out and shouted to the truck, “O.K., off we go! Reverse course and follow in line astern!”

The school bus turned around on the bridge, and the truck behind it. Margo noticed that the water in the wash was now a yard higher. A tiny roller came up it, foaming along the sides. The beach onto which she’d shot the boulder was under water, too. Last night the road here had been over half a mile from the ocean, but now only a hundred yards separated it from the surf.

Doc settled down in the strategic spot he’d reserved for himself, opposite Hunter and behind the door. He sprawled a leg over the extra seat beside him.

“On to Monica Mountainway,” he told the driver. “Keep her at an easy thirty and watch for rocks. We’ve hardly four miles to go along the highway — ample time to dodge Mrs. Pacific as she fattens up. Remember, everybody, the Pacific Coast tides are the mixed kind. Fortunately for us, this morning’s the low high. — McHeath,” he called over his shoulder, “you’re our liaison officer. Keep an eye on the truck. Rest of you, don’t crowd the sea-side. I want this bus balanced when we start uphill. We’re well ahead of the tide — there’s no danger.”

“Unless we get some more—” Margo began, but checked herself. She’d been going to say “earthquake waves” or “tsunami.”

Hunter flashed her a smile. “That’s right; don’t say it,” he whispered to her. Then, in a not much louder voice, across to Doc: “Where did you pick up that five-sixty figure, Rudy?”

“Eighty times the L.A. tidal range of seven feet,” Doc replied. “Much too big, I devoutly hope, but we have to make some kind of estimate. Oh, a life on the ocean wave, a home on the rolling deep, da-da-da-da-da-da-da…”

Margo winced at the raucous voice “singing for morale” — how well consideredly was an open question — and wished it were Paul’s. Then she clasped her hands together and studied the back of the driver’s seat. It looked recently scrubbed, but she could make out, “Ozzie is a stinker,” “Jo-Ann wears falsies,” and “Pop has 13 teeth.”

Despite Doc’s reassurances, there was considerable excited watching of the creeping waters and scanning of the misty horizon, and a mounting feeling of tension as the bus chugged south. Margo felt the tension slacken the moment they turned up the sharply mounting, two-lane black ribbon of the moun-tainway — and then, almost immediately, gather again as people scanned the road ahead for slides or buddings. There instantly sprang out of Margo’s own memory Mrs. Hixon’s vivid phrase: “Those mountains have stirred like stew.” But the first stretch, at least, straight up a low-domed hill, looked clear and smooth.

“Truck turning inland after us, Mr. Brecht,” came a soldierly voice from the rear.

“Thank you, McHeath,” Doc called back. Then, to Hunter and Margo with grinning enthusiasm, and loudly enough for all to hear, “I’m banking on Monica Mountainway. There hasn’t been much about it in the general press, but actually it’s a revolutionary advance in roadbuilding.”

“Hey, Doc,” Wojtowicz called, “if this road’s clear to the Valley, there’d be traffic coming through.”

“You’re sharp this morning, Wojtowicz,” Doc agreed, “but we only need the mountainway clear the first three miles — that’ll put us over six hundred feet up. We don’t have to worry about the other twenty-two miles. In fact, it’s probably better for us if it’s blocked somewhere beyond that”

“I get you, Doc: we’d be fighting fifty million cars.”

“The sky looks blacker ahead, Mommy,” Ann piped up. She and Rama Joan were in the seat behind Doc. “A big smoke plume.”

“We’re between water and fire,” the Ramrod announced, some of the dreamy note coming back into his voice. “But be of good cheer; Ispan will return.”

“I’m only too afraid it will,” Hunter said to Margo, sotto voce. Then, in the same tone, his glance dropping to her zippered-up leather bosom, “Would you care to show me the thing the cat-woman dropped from the saucer? I saw you catch it, you know, and I think you tested it this morning. Work?”

When she didn’t answer him, he said: “Keep it to yourself if it makes you feel more secure. I heard the questions you asked Doc and I heartily approve. Otherwise I’d take it away from you right now.”

She still didn’t look at him. He might have combed his beard, but she could smell his musky sweat.

The bus topped the first hill, took a slow, dipping curve, and started up a steeper one. Still no falls or crumblings came into view.

Doc said loudly: “Monica Mountainway is laid almost along the ridge tops and built of an asphaltoid that’s full of long molecular cables. Result: it’s strong in tension and almost impervious to falls. I learned that poking into engineering journals. Ha! Always trust a diversified genius, I say!”

“Diversified loudmouth,” someone behind them muttered.

Doc looked around with a hard grin, squinting suspiciously at Rama Joan. “We have already gained some three hundred feet in altitude,” he announced.

The bus turned and ran along the second hilltop, giving them a last glimpse of the Coast Highway. It was covered with water. Waves were breaking against the brush-grown slopes.

Dal Davies, as negligently casual about it all as some poetic son of Poseidon in his father’s study, watched the broad gray Bristol Channel glinting steely here and there in the mist-filtered silver light of the setting sun as the water inched and footed up the briary slope to the other side of the road fronting the pub.

The last time he’d looked, there’d been two freighters and a liner battling down-channel against the flood. Now they were gone, leaving only a scattering of wreckage and distant small craft not worth his squinting at.

He’d turned on the wireless a while back and listened to the taut-throated reports of the monster tides; and chittering insistences that they were caused by the great muster of earthquakes that had tramped Terra’s crust the last half-day; and cries for boats and buses and trains to do this, that, and the impossible; and grim, hysterical, complex commands to all England, it seemed to Dai, to go somewhere else, preferably to the top of Mount Snowdon.

He’d decided it must have been earlier installments of these frantic warnings that had put all the cowardly Somersets to flight — locking their liquor up miserly behind them! — and then he’d gone Disney for a while and jigged about and sung loudly: “Who’s afraid of the big bad tide? Certainly not Dai!”

But then the lights had gone out with a greenish-white flaring and the wireless with them, and he’d hunted up candles for cheer and affixed seven of them with their own whitehot wax artistically atilt along the bar.

Now he turned back toward them, and they were all guttering beautifully, the flames swaying like seven silver-gold maidens, their radiance glittering softly back from all the beautiful green-and-amber, neatly labeled books beyond.

Let me see, he thought as he moved slowly past the maiden flames, its many a day since I’ve looked into Old Bushmills by Thomas Hardy, but I’m mightily tempted by some of the cantos of Vat 69, by Ezra Pound. Which should it be now? Or perhaps — yes! — for a foreign fillip, Kirchwasser by Heinrich Heine!

General Spike Stevens and Colonel Mab lay side by side a foot or so under the concrete ceiling on the cot-size top of a big steel cabinet. She’d lost her flashlamp, but he still had his strapped to his chest. It shone on a still surface of black water six inches below the top of the cabinet.

They lay very still themselves. Their heads roared from the pressure of the air, which was warm due to the same compression.

There was nothing to look at along the wall-top or on the ceiling, except the grille of a ventilator beyond Colonel Mab’s head.

The general said — and his voice was weirdly gruff yet distant — “I don’t understand why with this pressure the air doesn’t puff up through there—” he pointed toward the ventilator — “and then, finis. Must be a block — maybe some anti-fallout valve got triggered.”

Colonel Mab shook her head. She was lying on her back, looking up over her eyebrows. “It isn’t easy to see at first,” she said softly, “but the ventilator shaft is full of water. It bulges down just a little in the squares in the ventilator, like tiny black pillows or big black fingertips. The water pressure from above and below balance — for the moment, at any rate, and so long as the surfaces in the grille aren’t disturbed.”

“You’re seeing things,” the general told her. “That’s bad hydrostatics. The head of pressure on the water below us is bound to be greater. It’d still push the air out.”

“Maybe the elevator shaft hasn’t filled entirely yet,” Colonel Mab answered with a little shrug. “But I’m not seeing things.”

She reached up and poked a finger through the nearest hole in the ventilator, then snatched it quickly away as a stream of water as thick as a cigar spurted straight down and rattled loudly into the still water below, with the effect of an elephant relieving itself of fluid.

The general grabbed her by the shoulder. “You goddamn stupid bitch,” he snarled. Then he looked her in the face and he slid his fingers inside her collar, and took hold of it to tear it down. “Yes,” he said harshly, nodding once. “Whether you like it or not.”

He hesitated, then said apologetically but very stubbornly, “There’s nowhere else to escape to, is there, except into each other.”

She grinned with her teeth at him. “Let’s do this right, you big brass bastard,” she told him. Her eyes narrowed. “We’re finished,” she said thoughtfully, hitting each syllable as if she stepped on stones, “but if we could work so that we hit the climax just as we drowned…We’ll have to wait till the water’s over us — It mustn’t be too soon…”

“My Christ, you’ve got it, Mab!” the general said loudly, grinning down at her like a blocky death’s-head.

She frowned. “Not all of it,” she said, just loudly enough for him to hear her over the sizzling water-spurts — there were three of them now. “There’s something else. But it’s enough to start on, and I’ll think of the other thing after a while.”

She unbuttoned her soaking coat and shirt and unhooked her brassiere. The flashlamp strapped to his chest shone on her breasts. He entered her, and they got to work.

“Take it slow now, you old bastard,!” she told him.

When he clutched her to him, the flashlamp made a reddish square in her chest that shone out faintly through her breasts.

When the water was an inch from the top of the cabinet they paused for a while.

“Like rats in a trap,” she said to him fondly.

“You got quite a tail, Mrs. Rat,” he said to her. “I always thought you were a Lesbian.”

“I am,” she told him, “but that’s not all I am.”

He said, “About that black tiger we thought we saw—”

“We saw it,” she said. Then her face broke into a smile. “Strangling is a very quiet death,” she said. She dabbled her hand in the water, as if she were on her back in a canoe — and, for a moment, she was. “That’s from The Duchess of Malfi, General. Duke Ferdinand. Nice, don’t you think?” When he frowned speculatively, she said, still smiling tranquilly: “I’ve read in more than one place that a hanged man always has a climax — and strangling’s like hanging. I don’t know if it’s true of women, but it could be, and my sex always has to take the chances. At least it ought to help the water a little, and if we could make the three things come together…Enjoy killing a woman, General? I’m a Lesbian, General, and I’ve slept with girls you never got. Remember the little redhead in Statistics who used to twitch her left eye when you barked at her?”

Just then the water came rilling over the cabinet top, and the ventilator tore loose, and a great inorganic sobbing began as, alternately, a log of water shot down the hole and a log of air escaped up it, rhythmically. The cabinet shook.

The general and Colonel Mab got to work again.

“I won’t squeeze so hard right away, you goddamn girl-defiling bitch,” he shouted in her ear. “I’ll remember you’re the woman.”

“You think so?” she shouted back, and her long-fingered, strong-fingered strangler’s hands came up between his arms and closed around his neck.