The Wanderer (31 page)

After a bit, though, he had one formulated. He would reach the Cotswolds before the next high tide, harbor upon them during it, cross the Severn plain by way of Tewkesbury to the Malvern Hills during the next low, and finally make his way by the same stepping-stone process to the Black Mountains of Wales, which should be proof against the highest tides that might come. His ebbing exhilaration returned a bit.

Of course it might be wisest to return to the Chilterns or seek the moderate heights just east of Islip, but he told himself one ought to leave room there for the hordes that must still be pressing west, somehow, from London. Besides, he hated the thought of stopping anywhere, even on a safe-seeming height, and waiting and thinking. That was intolerable—one must keep moving, keep moving. And one feels loyalty toward a course of action one has just hammered out.

He finally told his Cotswolds-Malvern Hills-Black Mountains plan to two older men beside whom he walked for a space. The first said it was utterly impractical, a mad fool's vaporings; the second said it would save half of England and should be communicated at once to responsible authorities (this man waved his cane wildly at a cruising helicopter).

Richard became disgusted with both of them, particularly the second, and tramped swiftly ahead, leaving them arguing loudly and angrily with each other. Suddenly all his exhilaration was gone, and he felt that both his plan and his reasonings were the purest rationalizations for an urge to rush west that had no more sense to it than the crowded scamper of the lemmings across Scandinavia to the Atlantic and death. Indeed, he asked himself, mightn't shock and disorientation, in himself and all those around him, have stripped away civilized thought-layers and laid bare some primeval brain-node that responded only to the same call that the lemmings hear?

He continued to hurry, however, moving closer to the road and watching for an empty place or clinging-spot on one of the faster-moving vehicles. After all, lemming or no, his silly plan was all he had, and he had just remembered the most cogent objection to it made by the first man: that it was a good twenty-five miles to the Cotswolds.

As the morning tide flooded up the Bristol Channel, up the Severn, bringing wrecked ships and shredded hayricks, and buoys burst from their anchors, and telegraph poles trailing wires below, and torn houses, and the dead, flooding higher than last night, Dai Davies returned with it, past Glamorgan and Monmouth, twisting and turning like T. S.

Eliot's drowned Phoenician sailor, a fond Welshman poetic to the end, forty feet down.

Margo and Hunter, each wrapped in a blanket, occupied the bowl-shaped lookout post, which McHeath and Doddsy had scooped and wiped dry of rainwater. Above them stars twinkled to the west amid scattered clouds, but the top and eastern half of the sky were still solidly masked. Below them a narrow cone of light shone on the locked sedans and along the road toward the Valley. Since Doddsy had several battery-changes for his big flashlight, Doc had the notion of setting it on top of the boulder-block. "It'll help whoever's on guard to see anyone sneaking in from the Valley," he'd said. "They'll be apt to investigate the light, and if they're friendly they'll probably yoohoo. But don't shoot 'em just for being quiet. Cover 'em and order 'em to stand first. And don't wake the whole camp because we get a visitor. But wake me."

Now Hunter and Margo were smoking, which flawed the perfection of Doc's ambush—but not too seriously, they'd decided. The little orange glow as Margo inhaled lighted her hollow-cheeked face and gold hair combed down heavy and flat after last night's salt-soaking.

"You look like a Valkyrie, Margo," Hunter said softly in a deep voice.

She drew the gray pistol from under the blanket and held it high on her chest, so that it gleamed in the cigarette's brief glow. "I feel like one," she whispered happily. "I didn't like it when the others had this gun, though it was interesting the things Doddsy noticed."

During his and McHeath's sentry-go, the Little Man had examined the pistol with his small flashlight and an eight-power pocket magnifier, and had discovered a fine scale alongside the violet charge-gage. "It was made by beings with finer eyesight than ours,"

he had deduced. He had also discovered something else Margo had never noticed: a tiny, recessed lever on top of the grip—the lever pointed its narrow end at the muzzleward extreme of a similarly fine, circular scale. No one had any firm guess about the function of this lever, and it was decided not to experiment with it

"I wonder on how many planets it's killed," Margo whispered now.

"Yes," Hunter said, "you look like a vestal Valkyrie guarding the sacred flame of the weapon." He hitched a little closer to her. She smelled the musk of his sweat.

"Shh—did you hear something then?" she breathed very rapidly. They stubbed out their cigarettes and waited tensely, their eyes scanning. Hunter softly crawled to the ridge crest by a route he'd memorized earlier and checked all around from there, although the other side of the ridge fell away quite precipitously for thirty feet The bus-and-truck camp was quiet and there was no sign of alien movement, though the whispering wind made them think of the tomb in the cave five yards away. After a while they arranged themselves as they'd been, and lit up again.

"You know, Margo," Hunter went on where he'd left off, "I think killing those men brought you to life. It awakened you, maybe for the first time. A primal experience does that to a person."

She nodded intently with an inward-directed smile. "Everything's twice as real now," she whispered. "As if reality were built of solider stuff, and yet I could see and feel more around and into it, especially people's bodies. It's wonderful."

"It's made you beautiful," he said, laying his hand on the inside of her wrist. "More beautiful. Beautiful Valkyrie vestal."

"Why, Ross," she whispered solemnly, "anyone would think you're trying to make me."

"I am," he said, firming his hand a little on her wrist

"You have a wife and two boys in Oregon," she whispered, pulling away, but not quite hard enough to get free.

"They don't matter," he said, "though I'm steadily worried about them. But we're living from day to day now, from second to second. Any hour may be the last. Margo, let me kiss you."

"I only met you yesterday, Ross. You're years older than I am…"

Ten, at the most," he breathed harshly. "Margo, the old rules and shibboleths don't count. Like Rudy said, it's para-reality…"

At that moment winds high above them tore the clouds, and they saw the Wanderer in its mandala face with the moon making a glittering half girdle around it. The wonder of that gold-notched violet sphere gripped them, but after a few seconds Ross Hunter put his other arm around Margo and pulled her toward him. She broke away and pointed overhead.

"I have a young man up there," she said. "He was stationed on that…that diamond jumble. But maybe he got away; maybe he's on the Wanderer now."

"I know," Hunter said, looking only at her face, which now in the Wanderer-light needed no cigarette glow to show it. "I even read about your romance in a magazine. I thought you looked disgustingly snooty and smirking, like you needed to be grabbed by life and manhandled."

"By you, you mean? And then there's Paul," she went on rapidly, "snatched up in a saucer and now God knows where. He's crazy about me, but all tied up inside. Maybe what's happening to him now will free him."

"I don't care about either of them," Hunter said, getting up on his knees beside her and holding her by the shoulders. "I have no ethical qualms about taking advantage of the immediate difficulties of younger men crazy about you. You're beautiful, and whoever gets you first wins. Besides, I know you better than they do, I know the awakened gold-haired Valkyrie, and I'm crazier than they are. Nothing counts now but you and me. Oh, Margo—"

"No!" she said sharply, suddenly standing up from her blanket and wiping his hands down off her arms. "I'm glad you're crazy about me, but I don't need you, I don't need the you-and-me. Just living by myself in the new reality is quite enough; it's all the excitement I want; it's using all of me. Understand?"

After a couple of hard breaths he admitted: "O.K., I guess I have to." Then: "We'd better have a careful scan around with all this new light. You take the western half. Let your eyes get used to it."

After a minute or so of that, back to back, he began to talk quietly without looking around. "Granting that you're all absorbed with yourself now, I doubt if you were really ever in love. Paul you bullied and exploited—that was obvious. I imagine you managed…who was it?—oh yes, Don—by flattering his manliness."

"Interesting," Margo murmured.

"No, I don't think either of those two young men amount to much as rivals," Hunter went on. "Morton Opperly's a greater danger, because he's a father figure: a sinisterly beautiful magician who—I bet you dream about this!—is some day going to carry our young Valkyrie away to his grim castle in the Land of Higher Mathematics. Incest with Einsteinian overtones."

"Very interesting," she commented. "There seems to be a very faint general glow to the east. Maybe it's the highway."

Five minutes more and Hunter burst out, most spontaneously-seeming, with:

"Christ, it's cold. It'd help if we bundled together, the old Puritan style—"

"Nuh-uh, soldier," she interposed. "Lovemaking and guard duty don't mix."

"Au contraire,
they combine beautifully. You become vibrantly alive, aware of everything."

"Nuh-uh, Ross, I said."

"I wasn't trying a new approach," he protested, "just being practical. I'm freezing."

"Then wrap your blanket around you, tight," she suggested. "I don't need any heater." She smiled straight at him. "Right this minute I'm hot as fire from my neck down to my toes.
And
vibrantly alive. All by myself."

"You
are
a bitch," he said thoughtfully.

"Yes, I am," she agreed with a happy smirk. "And right now I'm going on a little scout, first down the road fifty yards beyond the sedans. I'll carry the rifle. You stay here with the big gun and…cover me."

"Bitch," he repeated bitterly as she stole crosswise down the slope.

A cloud was shrouding the Wanderer when they waked Doc for sentry change. He groaned guardedly a couple of times as he unkinked stiff joints, then grew more chipper.

"Have to renew the flash batteries," he noted. "Got 'em here in my pocket. Should have turned one of the sedans around and used its headlights. Can't do it now, though—it'd wake people."

By the time Margo had taken over Rama Joan's bed in the truck, the Wanderer was out again, showing the Jaws. Ann was awake. Ever since the afternoon's horror, the little girl who "loved everything" had been very thoughtful. Now Margo wondered uneasily what she was thinking when those wide eyes looked at her, a screaming killer.

But, "Why does Mommy have to go away?" was all Ann asked, rather fretfully.

Margo explained about guard duty.

"I think Mommy likes being with Mr. Brecht," Ann commented dolefully.

"Look at the Wanderer, dear," Margo suggested. "See, the moon's growing into a ring. She's broken her cocoon and is spreading her wings."

"Yes, it's lovely, isn't it?" Ann said, a dreamy note at last coming into her voice.

"Purple forests and golden seas…Hello, Ragnarok…"

In the bus Mrs. Hixon leaned forward from the seat behind the driver's and whispered in Mr. Hixon's ear: "Bill, what if these people find out we're not really married?"

He whispered back: "Babe, I don't think it'd matter to them a bit."

Mrs. Hixon sighed. "Still, it's a kind of distinction being the only normal married couple in the bunch."

Paul woke up as alone in black space as a hobo angel, it seemed to him—so high above Earth that the stars glittered more thickly above the scythe-curve of the black horizon than he'd ever seen them, even in the desert. Yet he felt so snug and refreshed, and the transition from sleep to waking had been so gradual, that he experienced no fear at alL

Besides that, there was an invisible warm glassy surface he could touch. It shut off all the harshness of space from him, and his right foot was guyed to it reassuringly. He gave himself up to the great sight.

He was poised in the night at least one hundred miles above Arizona, he decided, and looking west, for he could see all of Southern California and the northwest corner of Mexico, including the neck of the peninsula of Baja California, and beyond them the Pacific. No mistaking that pattern.

He could see the lights of San Diego—at least some city-like glow, about where San Diego should be—and he realized he was voicelessly thanking God for that, very tritely, but sincerely.

There were no clouds. The Wanderer was hanging in the west in its bull's-head face, girdled by the shattered moon. Its violet and golden light sparkled in a wide wake across the Pacific straight toward him, and also spangled the northern end of the Gulf of California, so that all coasts were sharply defined.

The land areas reflected only a diffuse yellowish glow, like multiplied moonlight but far duller than the glittering sea.

But then he saw, with a feeling of dim but growing horror, that the Gulf of California extended at least a hundred miles too far northwest in a glittering tongue that narrowed at first but then widened. No mistaking that one departure from pattern, either.

Either because of the earthquakes or the high tides or both, the salt waters of the Gulf had burst through and filled the land below sea level in and around the Imperial Valley and the drying Salton Sea, and stretched on toward Palm Springs. He remembered that one of the towns there, a pretty big one, had been called Brawley, and another, Volcano—

Space turned to a pink wall in front of his nose, and a neutral voice called: "

'Morning, monkey."

Blinking, Paul slowly hunched around, easing his right foot in its invisible fetter.

Tigerishka was floating bent by the control panel, as if she were sitting in an invisible swing. Miaow clung to her lap and was industriously grooming the larger cat's green knees with her tiny pink tongue.