The Wanderer

Chapter Thirty-seven

When the saucer students reached the crossroads, the problem of which route to take was solved for Hunter by circumstances. The entry to Mulholland was blocked by three sleekly expensive though much-muddied cars of the fashionable dragon design. Their occupants had got out and were clustered together, probably to argue about which direction to take on Monica Montainway. Though somewhat muddied like their cars, they looked to be sleekly expensive people — probably Malibu folk.

So, to take Mulholland would take time, and Hunter felt that his little two-vehicle cavalcade had none of that to spare, for the pursuit from the Valley and inland 101, after hanging back for some while in an ominous chorus of revvings and honkings, was at last catching up.

Monica Mountainway ran straight here for three quarters of a mile through the blackly burned-over central heights of the Santa Monica mountains. The Corvette and the truck had hardly covered half of the straight when two sports cars, packed to the sides, came around the last turn abreast, and more behind them. Hunter slowed the Corvette a little and waved the truck on. Hixon remembered instructions and roared past him. Hunter got a flash of the men’s grim faces in the back: Fulby, Pop, Doddsy, and Wojtowicz — and McHeath crouching with the one rifle they had left.

The women in the car with Hunter were tensely silent. Ann beside him hugged tight to her mother.

Then he got another flash of faces, this time those of the Malibu folk standing by their expensive cars and looking surprised and rather pained, as if to say, “What bad manners to rush past us without so much as a wave — and in these catastrophic times when togetherness is mandatory!”

Hunter didn’t exactly wish them evil, but he did hope they’d divert and delay a bit the crazy pursuit from the Valley. When he heard brakes behind him and then a shot, he drew back his lips in a grimace that was half satisfaction, half guilt.

Hixon’s truck was disappearing around the first of a series of hairpin turns leading upward, which Hunter remembered from yesterday’s trip. He scowled and squinted ahead, the sinking greenish-white sun in his eyes, and he began to hunt for a certain configuration of road also remembered from yesterday.

He found it at the second of the sharp turns: a clutch of big boulders on the inside of the U-curve. He slammed to a stop just beyond it and jumped out.

“The momentum pistol!” he demanded of Margo, got it, and scrambled up the steep, acidly odorous, blackly burned slope until he was behind the boulders. He pointed the gun at them and fired. For the first two seconds he was afraid they weren’t going to move and the last charge be wasted for nothing, but then they turned over, grating together loudly, went thumping down the slope, and thudded ponderously into the asphaltoid.

He dashed forward after them and peered down through the mounting dust to see if an adjustment shot would be needed, but they blocked the road perfectly.

From above came a faint cheer and looking up be saw the truck moving along a stretch two hairpin turns further on. He ran back to the car. Before he tossed the gray pistol back to Margo, he quickly checked the scale on the grip and saw there was at least a bit of violet still showing. As he drove off he heard brakes squeal again behind them, and angry shouting.

Ann said, “Those people won’t be able to use this road now, will they?”

“Nobody will be able to use it, dear,” Rama Joan told her.

“Or so we hope,” Margo put in a bit sardonically from the back seat. “Was it a good job, Ross?”

“A real bank-to-bank choke-up,” he told her curtly. “Two of the rocks it’ll take a derrick to move.”

Ann persisted: “I meant the nice people we passed standing beside their cars.”

“They had their own road, the one they came on,” Hunter lashed out harshly. “They had their chance to turn around and use it to get away. If they didn’t, well, they were damned rich-bitch fools!”

Ann moved away from him, closer to her mother. He lashed at himself inwardly for taking out his feelings on a child. Doc hadn’t been that way.

“Professor Hunter did absolutely right, Ann,” Wanda put in with a smug positiveness from the other back seat. “A man always has to think first of the women with him and their safety.”

Rama Joan said softly to Ann: “The gods always had problems about how to use their magic weapons, dear. It’s all in the myths.”

Hunter, his smarting eyes fixed on the snakelike road, wanted to tell them both to shut up, but he managed not to.

It was a good twenty minutes before they caught up with the truck. Hixon had stopped just short of another side road.

“It says, ‘To Vandenberg’,” he called down, pointing ahead to a sign, as the Corvette drew up beside him. “I figure it leads more direct to Vandenberg through the hills. Since I guess we’re going, there, to find this Opperly and all, I think we ought to take it. Save us those miles along the coast highway.”

Hunter stood up in the seat. The side road looked all right, the first short stretch of it, asphaltoid like the one they were on. He thought for a couple of seconds.

In the pause, a profound sound, soft as a sigh, passed overhead traveling from the southeast. None of the saucer students had the dictionary that would translate it into the vanishing three and a half hours ago of the Isthmus of Rivas, Don Guillermo Walker, and Josй and Miguel Araiza.

Hunter shook his head and said loudly: “No, well keep on Monica Mountainway. We were over it yesterday and we know it’s O.K. — no falls or anything. A new road’s an unknown quantity.”

“Yeah?” Hixon commented. “I see you finally took my advice about using the gravity gun to block off those nuts.”

“Yes, I did,” was all Hunter could think of to say, and he didn’t say it pleasantly.

“Then there’s the tide, as Doddsy’s reminded me,” Hixon went on. “Along the Coast Highway we’ve got to worry about that”

“If we get there before sunset it’ll be O.K. Low tide’s at five P.M.,” Hunter told him. “That is, if the tides are sticking anywhere near their old rhythm, which they were doing yesterday.”

“Yeah — if,” Hixon said.

“Anywhere we reach the coast we’ll have the tides to contend with,” Hunter retorted. His nerves were snapping. “Come on, let’s get going,” he ordered. “I’ll take the lead from here.”

He sat down and drove off along Monica Mountainway. After a bit Margo said reassuringly: “Hixon’s following you.”

“He’d damn well better!” Hunter told her.

For forty hours the Wanderer had been raising higher and higher tides, not only in Earth’s crust and seas, but also in her atmosphere — a tide four times greater than the daily heat-tide caused by the sun warming the air. Also, the volcanoes and evaporation from the greatly widened tidal zone had been making their unprecedented contributions to tomorrow’s weather. Vortexes were forming in the disturbed air. Storms were brewing. In the Caribbean, up across the Celebes, Sulu, and South China Seas, and in a dozen other critical areas, the wind was rising as it had never risen on Earth before.

The “Prince Charles” was boldly atom-steaming southeast by the port of Cayenne. Darkly silhouetted against the wild sunset, Cape d’Orange told the great ship it was passing the mouth of the Oyapock River and nearing that of the Amazon. Captain Sithwise sent messages to the four insurgent captains imploring them to head out into the South Atlantic, away from all land. The messages were sneered at.

In one of the areas yet unruffled by the Wanderer winds, Wolf Loner scanned through the graying overcast for Race Point, or Cape Ann, or even for the one-four-three I L-O-V-E Y-O-U wink of the Minot’s Ledge Light, or the sober six-second double flash of the Graves Light in Boston’s Outer Harbor. He knew he should be nearing the end of his voyage, but he had noticed some garbage and odd wreckage floating past the “Endurance” and he hadn’t calculated he was that close to Boston. However, there was nothing to do but keep watch and sail on.

Barbara Katz took the small telescope and climbed on top of the stalled Rolls to scan around over the low tops of the mangrove forest stretching out to either side of the narrow, tide-littered road. There was only the yellow afterglow of the sunset left to see by, reflected from the clouds rapidly moving in on a chilly southeast wind. The weather had changed completely in the last twenty minutes.

Hester stuck her head out of the back and whispered up loudly: “Stop pounding around up there, Miss Barbara. You ’sturb what little power of life Mr. K got left.”

Helen was squatting to hand tools to Benjy under the back of the car, where he was trying to free the inside of the left wheel from a great length of heavy wire that it had somehow picked up and wound tightly around itself, coil on coil, and which had only been noticed when the wheel jammed.

Benjy crawfished out and squatted down beside Helen, and after he’d breathed hard and rested his head in his hands a bit, he shook it and said: “I don’t know if I can free it. I ain’t got proper clippers, and that wire on there just solid like. Must be wrap around two hundred times.”

To Barbara, scanning around from the roof and trying to shift her feet as little as possible as she braced herself against the wind, the wonder was that Benjy had been able to get the car going at all after its drowning, and that they had actually managed to drive a whole skidding, spitting, backfiring hour north before this new trouble had come.

Hester leaned out to say harshly: “You better free it, Benjy. This the lowest-lookin’ region we been yet, and these twisty little trees ain’t no good for roosting.”

“Hes, I don’t think I can. Not in less than two-three hours, anyway.”

“Hey!” Barbara called down to them, her voice excited. “Down the road — not more than a mile — I can see — sticking out of the treetops — a white triangle! I think we’re saved!”

“Now what good is a white triangle to us, child?” Hester demanded.

“Benjy,” Barbara called, “do you think you could figure out a stretcher for Mr. K — or carry him for a mile?”

“Well,” he called back, “I done just about everything else.”

Bagong hung crouched calf-deep in fish-stinking bottom-muck and shoveled into it frantically with a short-handled infantry spade. Every now and then he’d drop the spade to scrabble in the mud for something muck-coated and small which he’d thrust without inspection into a cloth bag and go on shoveling.

There were jellyfish weals on his legs, and his left hand was puffy where a shell had stung it, but he paid no attention to these hurts though he would occasionally spare a moment to drive his spade viciously through some sinister-looking worm, or knock aside a green crab that came crawling too close.

He was doing his spading almost in the center of a sharp-ended lozenge seventy feet long and twenty wide, intermittently outlined by black, rotted wood crusted with shells and coral. It mightn’t be the “Lobo de Oro,” but it certainly looked like the remains of some old ship.

Fifty feet away Cobber-Hume stood bent over on a hatch cover from the “Machan Lumpur” furiously working a bicycle pump. The pump was attached to a bright orange life raft that was hardly a quarter inflated. Two small orange cylinders tossed aside were of the gas that should have inflated the raft effortlessly, but hadn’t.

Another fifty feet beyond him the “Machan Lumpur” lay flat on her side, showing all of her pitifully rusted, weed-draped bottom.

The new-risen sun intermittently cast grotesquely tall shadows of the two men and the little steamer across the tide-drained floor of the Gulf of Tonkin and illumined the Wanderer setting in the west in her bull’s-head face, which Bagong hung called besar sapi — “big cow.”

Ragged clouds were scudding north with a wild swiftness, driven by a wind that moaned around the toppled Tiger of the Mud. A sudden gust took Cobber-Hume by surprise, and he staggered and slipped about on his none too stable pumping platform.

Bagong hung paused with elbows on knees and panted for breath. Then “Lekas, lekas!” he cried reprovingly at himself and began to shovel again. His spade brought up a sea-eaten angle of wrought iron which might have been the corner of a chest and that set him working still faster.

Cobber-Hume shouted earnestly: “You better quit mucking for loot, sobat, and get some tucker and fresh water lekas out of the ‘Lumpy’ or give me a hand with this ruddy pumping. When the tide comes she’ll be a bloody bitch, and this wind’ll bring her faster, and then all the golden wolves in the world won’t help us — or even a platinum dingo!”

But all Bagong hung would answer was, “Lekas, lekas!” The little Malay shoveled and scrabbled, the big Australian pumped, the clouds sped thicker between Earth and the new-risen sun, the wind whistled.

Barbara Katz shouted over the wind: “There it is!”

The same lightning flash that showed the upper mangrove branches lashing against the dark speeding clouds also revealed the white triangle of the prow of a sailboat sticking out at least fifteen feet overhead from between two of the close-crowding trees.

Barbara shifted the heavy thermos jug to her left hand and the big flashlight to her right and switched it on as she walked toward the trees under the prow. It showed the deep keel jammed between the lower branches of three of the mangroves.

Benjy laid down old KKK in his blanket on the road.

Hester and Helen set down their bags and knelt anxiously beside the old man.

Benjy came up behind Barbara. He was panting. “Shine her — on the hull,” he managed to say.

They pushed their way through the undergrowth, shining the flashlight upward on one side of the keel, then on the other. Barbara made out the boat’s name: “Albatross.”

“Don’t seem to be no holes in her,” Benjy said after a bit, speaking close to Barbara’s ear. “Reckon her mast must be broke off short, though, or you’d have seen it. I think she float with the tide. Maybe she jam too tight, but I don’t think so. I can climb up by the branches, and then I got this to help you all up.” He touched the rope slung in loops around his chest.

The wind died a little and he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted up: “Hello! Anybody aboard?”

The lull in the wind held for two seconds more, then as it rose again, Benjy said: “Seem to me I hear a wailing then. Different from the wind.”

“So did I,” Barbara replied, her teeth chattering — mostly from the cold, she told herself. She flashed her light straight overhead. “Oh, my God!”

Poking out over the side of the boat in the middle of the flashlight beam was a tiny white furious face with mouth open wide.

“It’s a little kid!” Benjy cried.

“Be ready to catch him, Benjy,” Barbara said.

“It’s a baby!” Helen yelled, coming up behind them. She waved her hand at the little wailing face. “You stay up there now, baby! Don’t you drop. We a-coming!”

Sally Harris and Jake Lesher cringed from the downdraft of the big rotors which whipped their clothes and made them squint their eyes, and which wildly blew about the charcoal-starter flame they’d fired in the barbecue bowl as an SOS beacon.

It was dark but clear, and the golden and purple beams of the Wanderer rising in its dinosaur face twinkled from black wavelets almost level with the penthouse patio floor and occasionally foaming over it, but the wind from the rotors drove the foam back.

The big helicopter masked the gray sky overhead and its rotors cut darkened circles in it.

A white rope-ladder came snaking down toward them and with it a big voice that called: “I got room for only one more!”

Jake snagged the ladder with one hand and lunged for Sally with the other, but the flames were between them, and as she started past she knocked the barbecue bowl over ahead of her, and the hot fuel hissed against the water and went up in a great blinding sheet, driving her back. An instant later all flame was gone, but now the ladder was tugging Jake away. He turned and grabbed the lowest rung with both hands and pulled himself clear. His feet skimmed the patio floor. The next moment he dropped off and tumbled in a heap against the balustrade, the wavelets foaming around him.

The helicopter dipped violently. The wavelets cringed from its rotors, which almost touched them. The ladder fell away from the helicopter and floated on the wavelets like the skeleton of a giant centipede. The ’copter lifted and beat off north without another word.

Jake scrambled to his feet and watched its small lights grow tinier.

Sally came behind him. “Why’d you let go, Jake?” “I was afraid I’d crack my shins against the railing,” he told her self-disgustedly. “I couldn’t help it.” She clung to him.