The Wanderer (34 page)

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."

The saucer students heard four rapid horn-beeps which came winging back through air heavy with the sour, acrid fumes of burnt-over land—and reeking more than ever since a hot, damp wind had set in from the southeast. Overhead the sun was hot but there was a big black cloudbank to the south.

Hunter brought the sedan to a stop behind the Corvette, which had just topped a rise, the road passing between two natural rock gateposts some fifteen feet high.

Doc was standing in the seat, studying the terrain ahead. He looked just a little like a pirate, with the brim of his black hat pulled down in back but turned up sharply in front. He reached out his right hand, and Rama Joan put the field glasses into it. He resumed his scanning, using the seven-power instrument. Rama Joan and Ann stood up, too.

Hunter stopped the sedan's motor, set the brake, and as the school bus drew up behind them third in line, he and Margo got out and hurried forward until they could see, too.

In front of them a slope stretched downward for a quarter of a mile in gentle undulations to a broad-ditched flat, then rose again, though not so high.

The slope was black to the left, dusty greenish-brown to the right. Monica Mountainway went down it in swinging curves, crossing and recrossing the demarcation line between the burned and the unburned.

Toward the bottom, almost on the demarcation line, it passed three white buildings surrounded by a wide graveled space and a high, wire-mesh fence. Then the road joined the broad-ditched fiat which led off in either direction, almost level but gently curving, until the hills hid it each way.

Down the center of the flat, following its contours, stretched what looked for a long moment exactly like a miles-long, flattish, scaly serpent thirty yards wide. The individual scales, which ran in glitter-bordered rows eight or nine across, were mostly blue, brown, cream and black, though here and there was a green
or
red one. Judging by its glittering sides, the serpent had a silver belly.

Wojtowicz, coming up behind them, said, "Cripes, we're there. That's it. Wow!"

The scaly serpent was inland Route 101, jammed with cars bumper to bumper. The glitter-border was the freeway's wire-mesh fence.

Doc said hoarsely, "I want to talk to Doddsy and McHeath."

Rama Joan said, "Ann, you can get them." The little girl climbed past her mother and hopped out.

As soon as Hunter's and Margo's eyes stopped swinging and started to linger, details began to destroy the serpent illusion. At many spots cars had been driven wide on the shoulder, up against the fence. Some of these had their hoods up and dabs of white at their sides—Hunter realized these last must be towels, shirts, scarves, and large handkerchiefs: pitifully obedient "askings for assistance" set up before the jam got impossible.

At several points the serpent scales were twisted and whorled: accidents never cleaned up and attempts of whole groups of cars to turn and go back the way they'd come, either by crossing the median strip or by using the shoulder.

At three places the wire-mesh fence bulged acutely outward, each bulge filled with cars nose-on: these must have been trying to ram their way out. One of these attempts had been limitedly successful: the fence was down, but the way out beyond it blocked by a mess of cars ditch-overturned and crushed together, two half-climbed onto the others' backs.

Here and there a few cars still moved in senseless-seeming, backward and forward jerks of a few feet each way. Stale exhaust-stench mixed with the burnt reek coming on the moist southeast wind.

Hunter thought of what it must have looked like at night in the last stages of general movement: five thousand cars in sight from here, ten thousand headlights swinging and blinking, ten thousand bumpers to clash and snag and rip, a few police speeding up and down trying to keep open lanes that relentlessly shortened and narrowed, five thousand motors, belching exhaust pipes, horns…And about a hundred thousand more cars between here and L.A.

He heard the Ramrod saying, "It is the valley of dry bones. Lord of the Saucers, succor them." From the car beside him Rama Joan said softly: "Even an evildoer sees happiness so long as his evil deed does not ripen; but when his evil deed ripens…"

The biggest and worst car-crush of all was where Monica Mountainway entered 101

just beyond the three white buildings: a hundred or so cars slewed every which way, several overset, others ditch-jammed sideways, and the nearest three dozen burnt black—it occurred to Hunter that he was very possibly looking at the source of the brush fire.