The Wanderer

The sunlight came through a wide break in the curtain of steam to the west. The break should have showed the towns of La Virgin and Rivas on the Isthmus of Rivas between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific, but instead there was only water stretching endlessly.

The Araizas had supplied the information that the normal tides along the Pacific coast by Brito and San Juan del Sur across the isthmus were about fifteen feet.

The inference was incredible, yet inescapable. The Wanderer-multiplied tides were flowing over the isthmus, joining the Pacific to Lake Nicaragua. That was why the lake had gone up and why its waters now tasted of salt. Where once the white and sky-blue coaches of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Accessory Transit Company had carried the gold-dreaming Forty-niners and their baggage from ocean to ocean, from Virgin Bay to San Juan del Sur, there now stretched the blue waters of the Peaceful Sea. The Nicaraguan Canal, of which so many men had dreamed, had become a twice-daily reality.

A red glare appeared halfway up the thickly vegetated cone of Madera. Almost immediately pale smoke puffed from around it. Then the red glare began to lengthen downward, the smoke following. Red-hot lava must have broken through a crack and be flowing toward the lake.

The launch kept on. Don Guillermo wondered that the waters around them were so calm. He did not think particularly of the stupendous pressure they must be exerting on this whole stretch of coast, nor did he see anything ominous in the absence of the steam curtain, though if he had thought about it he would have guessed that steam was still generating far below.

There was no definable stimulus, but suddenly the three men looked at each other.

Don Guillermo slapped a mosquito on his neck.

A thick button of water swelled up like a gray pimple from the placid surface in the direction of the inundated Isthmus of Rivas and without a sound grew in three seconds to a mushroom of water a half mile high and a mile wide.

Something that turned the surface of the water from bright to dull was traveling from the mushroom to the launch.

The three men stared unbelievingly.

The blast wave from the explosion broke their eardrums and knocked them down in the launch.

Don Guillermo glimpsed the great vertical hillside of steam-driven water an instant before it engulfed him and his comrades in the launch. It seemed to be everywhere thickly covered with a water-vegetation of lacy, dull gray fronds. He thought, The blasted heath. There to meet with Macbeth. I come, Graymalkin.

The Isthmus of Rivas vanished, too. The Nicaraguan Canal became a permanent reality.

Chapter Thirty-three

Don Merriam had eaten and slept once more in his tiny cabin aboard the Wanderer, when he woke with a feeling of great inner clarity. He gazed tranquilly at the neutral-colored ceiling as it lightened.

He did not feel the bed under him and was barely aware of his body — the little nerve messages of touch and tension were at a minimum. Insofar as he could tell at all, he was stretched on his back with his arms straight and relaxed at his sides.

Suddenly he was filled with a boundless curiosity about the great ship on which he was an involuntary passenger. His whole being was suffused with the yearning to know, or if that were impossible, at least to see. This feeling was most intense, yet he felt no impulse to work it out in grimacings and gestures and muscular strainings.

Without warning, the ceiling swiftly descended toward him.

He tried to throw himself off the bed, but the only result was that he turned over, very smoothly, and saw by the bottom of the wall and the pattering shower area that he was about six feet above them.

The ceiling had not moved. He was floating in the air, first on his back, now on his face, two feet below the ceiling.

His chin was tipped forward and his head bent back, though without any sensation of strain, so that his vision was directed straight ahead, like the point of a spear. He couldn’t look down at any part of the bed beneath him, although he tried to, because he wanted to know whether he would see his body lying there — whether a real body or a body in a dream.

Nor could he bring his hands in front of his face to look at them. Either he was unable to feel and move his arms, or else he had none.

He couldn’t tell whether he had a real body up here, or even a dream body, or whether he was only a levitating viewpoint with an imagined body behind it.

One bit of evidence for the last: he couldn’t seem to see in the periphery of his vision the dim edges of nose and brow and cheek that one normally sees and ignores. But perhaps that was only because his vision was directed so fiercely forward.