The Wanderer (32 page)

Paul swallowed and then lifted his fingers wonderingly to his lips. The gag was gone.

Tigerishka smiled at him. "You sleep seven hours," she volunteered. "Feel better?"

Paul cleared his throat, but then only shut his lips and looked at her. He did not smile back.

"Oho, we learn a little wisdom, eh?" Tigerishka purred. "Monkey not jabber, we get along better. O.K. talk now, though."

Paul kept his lips shut

"Don't be sulky, Paul," Tigerishka directed. "I know you civilized by your lights, but I tie you, gag you, call you monkey to teach you little lesson: how you not so important in scheme of things, how others can treat you like you treat potentially superior animal Miaow here. Also I do it to give you birth-experience any psychologist know you badly need."

Paul looked at her a bit longer, then slowly shook his head.

"What you mean?" Tigerishka demanded sharply. "What you think my reason?"

Enunciating each syllable as sharply and carefully as if he were teaching a speech class, Paul said: "You tell me you have a mind vastly superior to my own, and in many ways I must agree with you, yet for at least twenty minutes yesterday you confused my thoughts with those of that charming but speechless and cultureless little animal on your lap. So you took out on me your irritation at having made such a very stupid mistake."

"That's a lie, I never did!" Tigerishka retorted instantly in unslurred English quite as good as his own. She stiffened, her claws came out, and Miaow stopped grooming her.

Then she caught herself and leaned back luxuriously, relaxed and chuckling. A delicious shrug rippled her violet-barred shoulders. "You right there," she admitted.

"That a little part my reason. Few cosmic cat strains, me let hopes run away. You notice.

Monkey sly."

"Just the same, you made the error, and it was a gross one," he told her quietly.

"How could you expect an animal tiny as Miaow to have a reasoning brain?"

"Me think it miniaturized," she answered quickly. "Could have told it wasn't if I'd checked by clairvoyance, but I depending on telepathy." She petted Miaow. "Any more monkey-quibbles?"

Paul waited a bit again, then said: "You claim to belong to a super-civilized galactic culture, yet you exhibit a fantastic xenophobia. I should think a true galactic citizen would have to be able to get along with intelligent beings of all strains: sea dwellers, grazers, arachnoids and coleopteroids possibly, winged beings, wolves and other carnivores like yourself, yes, and simians, too."

Tigerishka seemed to start just a little as he said, "wolves and other carnivores," but she recovered nicely with a sweet, "Monkey much the worst strain of those, Paul." She added huskily: "Also cosmos not so pretty-pretty love-lovey you think." She had begun to stroke Miaow rhythmically, kneading the small cat's shoulderblades.

"I am inclined to agree," Paul commented. "You pretend to near omniscience and to a great consideration for life—at least you boasted of saving two anthropoid cities from fire—yet when you crushed our moon for fuel, you ignored the presence on it of a number of human beings, including my best friend."

"Too bad, Paul," Tigerishka sympathized coolly. "But they on airless planet, they have ships. Get away."

"Yes, at least we can hope that Don and the others escaped," Paul agreed with equal coolness, "but I don't believe that you even knew they were there! I don't believe that when you emerged from hyperspace you had any idea that this planet was inhabited by intelligent beings. Or if you did, you didn't care."

Tigerishka still seemed quite relaxed, but she was stroking Miaow in a faster rhythm, as a nervous woman might puff harder on her cigarette. "You a little right there too, Paul," she conceded. "Things bad in hyperspace: storms, et cetera. Our need fuel acute. We feel beat when we come out, truly. Also last galactic survey show no intelligent life here, only promising feline strain." And she twitched her nose at him as she interrupted the stroking to pat Miaow twice.

Ignoring this humorous sally, Paul continued: "Here is another sidelight on your unfeeling and blundering haste: when you rescued Miaow from the earthquake waves—and myself too, mistakenly assuming I was a cat's beast of burden—you left a score of precious human beings, including my girl friend, to sink or swim."

"That damn lie, Paul!" Tigerishka retorted. "I quiet waves for them, they get out safe.

I even lose momentum pistol."

"Another super-feline blunder?" Paul shot back at her. "Well, at least it was on the side of generosity, so we'll pass over it. But—"

Paul broke off, momentarily overcome by a sudden awareness of the ridiculousness of the situation. Here he was, naked and foot-fettered, trailing the tubes of a sanitary arrangement, playing district attorney to the most fantastic "Madame X" ever to float on the witness chair.

The most fantastically lovely, too, he added uneasily in his thoughts.

Or was all this, he wondered, only the age-old racial business of the monkey teasing the leopard?

But then he remembered Brawley and Volcano.

"So you got girl friend now, hey, Paul?" Tigerishka put in wickedly. "That really true? Margo know? And you so fair—that fair to Don?"

He waved these mean diversions aside with a certain dignity. Hot feeling came into his voice as he said: "But the most crushing indictment of your boasted high culture and great sensitivity is the way human beings are dying beneath this saucer at this very moment because of the Wanderer's distortion of our gravity field—all because you needed fuel and wouldn't take a little extra time to find a proper source—such as the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. I'll grant you put out some fires, but only after hundreds, more likely thousands, died in the blazes and in the quakes that began the blazes. And now whole cities are being wiped out by the floods you've caused. If this goes on—"

"Shut up, monkey!" Tigerishka snarled, her claws out, her hind paws touching back toward the control panel. Miaow sprang away from her. "Look, Paul," she continued, seeming to contain herself with difficulty. "I never boast you I humani-tarian, monkey-tarian, cosmo-tarian! Cats have cruel culture some ways. Other cultures cruel, too! Death part of life. Some always suffer. Our refueling just normal course of things. It just—"

She broke off, frowning at the finger Paul was pointing at her. His face was glowing, for he had just seen what he believed to be the tremendous significance of Tigerishka's apparently honest attempt to defend herself and her people.

"I do not believe you," he said ringingly. "Tigerishka, I think that your blundering haste and that of your people, your lack of proper scouting and preparation, and most of all your crude, belated efforts to repair some of the damage you've done, all go to show that
you were rushed into action by something of which you are deeply afraid."

With a high-pitched snarl Tigerishka launched herself at him, drove him against the wall with one forepaw around his throat and the other poised like a four-tined rake a foot above his face.

"That is a damnable lie, Paul Hagbolt!" she said in flawless English. "I demand that you take it back at once!"

He got his breath. Then he shook his head.

"No," he said, smiling at her, though there were bright tears dripping from his eyes.

"You're scared to death."

Don Guillermo Walker slapped mosquitoes and stared at the flooded housetops of San Carlos red in the dawn as the launch beat its way back into Lake Nicaragua. During the night the current in the San Juan River had once more reversed itself, opposing the launch strongly, and now it was clear this was because the lake itself had risen a dozen feet or more—though why that happened was harder to say.

The sky presented a mystery, too. To the east it was clear, the sun already shooting his rays hotly, but to the west a thick white cloud-wall rose from the strip of land between the lake and the Pacific and extended as far north and south as one could see.

Although night before last he had witnessed the great outburst of volcanism, it did not occur to Don Guillermo that here, as along many other stretches, the Pacific Ocean was bordered now by a steam curtain, where seawater was flowing into volcanic cracks.

He asked why the launch was heading north, and the Araiza brothers informed him they were going up-lake to their home in Granada. Something sharp and clipped in their voices kept him from disputing this decision.

It did not deter him, however, from launching a little later into an account—not the first one he'd given them, either—of how, over a hundred years ago, his great-great-grandfather had landed in Nicaragua with only fifty-eight bold Yankee followers, and soon had successfully stormed Granada itself.

Bagong Buno watched the sun that was rising for Don Guillermo sink into the Gulf of Tonkin, now swollen as big as it had seen shrunken small twelve hours ago, so that it seemed to engulf North Vietnam. He thought of his strongbox in the cabin and how it now held a small bag of golden guineas and condors and morocotas and two larger bags of silver coins—the modest loot of the "Sumatra Queen." He touched the yellow silk hankerchief bound so piratically around his head, and he looked roguishly around at Cobber-Hume and said: "Yo-ho-ho, eh,
baik sobat?"

"And a bottle of rum," the big Australian affirmed. "And a pipe of the poppy for you, since that's not against your religion."

Bagong hung grinned, but then his face grew grave and he said softly and intently:

"Pagi dan ayer surut!"

Morning and the low tide! Truly, he could hardly bear to contemplate the waiting for them. He had long ago decided what wreck he would try for then: the near-legendary Spanish treasure ship Lobo de Oro. The Tiger of the Mud would try conclusions with the Wolf of Gold!

Barbara Katz's first reaction to the double-barreled shotgun muzzle poked through the driver's window near Benjy's hunched shoulders was that here was just one more weary bit of the weird flotsam and scour they'd been driving and skidding over, past, through, and around for the first three hours of daylight. Sandy soil—lots of that; leaves and fronds and matted sedge; uprooted bushes and small trees; ruined cars and farm machinery; dead animals and—Don't stop!—people; wire—that could be devilish, especially the barbed stuff; they'd had to lay boards across one dragged and leveled fence to get the Rolls over without puncturing the tires; sodden flowers plastered here and there, including a remarkable number of scarlet poinsettias; houses and barns, both fragmentary and almost intact—they'd had to find a looping sideroad to get around one monstrous cluster of those. Everything steaming in the heat, as if a swiftly dissipating fog were coming out of the ground. Of course there had been live people, too, though not so very many of those, and they either acting stunned and helpless or else going very much about their business, such as shoring up houses on high ground, hoisting planks into big trees, or going places in cars or on horses. Once a small airplane had passed overhead, its motor sounding loud and self-important.

Barbara's second reaction to the shotgun muzzle was that here was the nasty emergency she'd been expecting all along, and thank God she had the short-barreled .38

revolver in her right hand under her thigh next to old KKK, and if she had to, she hoped she could whip it up and start shooting through the window—though if that just got Benjy and Hester blown to bits in the front seat it wasn't going to do any good, even though the motor of the Rolls was idling softly. If they just had a few seconds' start—

Her third reaction to the shotgun muzzle was to see the fresh rust on it and wonder if its cartridges were wet, in which case she might hold the balance of power and needn't actually fire, only threaten—but that was guessing.

The voice from behind the shotgun had a buzz in it that was lazy yet menacing, rather like the horsefly going back and forth against the inside of the sedan's rear window.

"This is an inspection point We're collecting toll. What were you doing—"

"We were only changing a tire," Barbara answered sharply.

"—back in Trilby?" the buzzing voice finished.

So
that,
she thought, was the name of the miserable smashed village through whose crookedly choked main street they'd zigzagged twenty minutes ago. They should have called it Svengali!

Aloud she said hurriedly, "We were just coming through from Palm Beach. We can pay the toll," but as she fumbled with her left hand at the black bag on her lap, two thick-corded sun-reddened arms came through the window and took the bag and one horny hand shifted to her chin and tilted her face up, and for a second she glared into a thin, unshaven, fish-eyed face and fought down the impulse to put a bullet in it or bite the hand, and then the arms went away with the bag, and the voice behind them said:

"Hey, the old geezer must be one of them Palm Beach millionaires. Lots of paper money here."

Barbara said, "He's very sick. He's in a coma. We're trying to get him to—"

"One of them Yankee millionaires," the buzzing voice cut her off, "who come down here and lord it and pay nigras white man's wages and then run like chickens when the Lord tests us. We'll take the money for the Jubilee Fund and we'll take the two nigra gals—they'll make the hill a little more comfortable. Get out, you two, quick!—or I'll blow a hole in your high-yellow chauffeur."

And he rested the muzzle of his gun against Benjy's side.

This is it,
Barbara thought, but as she started to bring up the revolver she felt old KKK's clawlike fingers grip her hand on the gun with startling strength, holding it down. He cleared his throat hawkingly and next he was speaking in a voice louder than she'd ever heard from him, a voice that rasped imperiously.

"Did I hear some goddam turkey-necked cracker questioning the color of my son Benjy? I thought by your words you were Southrons out there, not mud-eating gophers!"

There was a murmuring outside, angry but uncertain. The gun pulled away from Benjy. Then old KKK, his features creasing like an old vulture's as he stared at the men in overalls, intoned portentously, "When will the Black Night end?"