The Wanderer

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.”