The Wanderer

“Yes, I did,” was all Hunter could think of to say, and he didn’t say it pleasantly.

“Then there’s the tide, as Doddsy’s reminded me,” Hixon went on. “Along the Coast Highway we’ve got to worry about that”

“If we get there before sunset it’ll be O.K. Low tide’s at five P.M.,” Hunter told him. “That is, if the tides are sticking anywhere near their old rhythm, which they were doing yesterday.”

“Yeah — if,” Hixon said.

“Anywhere we reach the coast we’ll have the tides to contend with,” Hunter retorted. His nerves were snapping. “Come on, let’s get going,” he ordered. “I’ll take the lead from here.”

He sat down and drove off along Monica Mountainway. After a bit Margo said reassuringly: “Hixon’s following you.”

“He’d damn well better!” Hunter told her.

For forty hours the Wanderer had been raising higher and higher tides, not only in Earth’s crust and seas, but also in her atmosphere — a tide four times greater than the daily heat-tide caused by the sun warming the air. Also, the volcanoes and evaporation from the greatly widened tidal zone had been making their unprecedented contributions to tomorrow’s weather. Vortexes were forming in the disturbed air. Storms were brewing. In the Caribbean, up across the Celebes, Sulu, and South China Seas, and in a dozen other critical areas, the wind was rising as it had never risen on Earth before.

The “Prince Charles” was boldly atom-steaming southeast by the port of Cayenne. Darkly silhouetted against the wild sunset, Cape d’Orange told the great ship it was passing the mouth of the Oyapock River and nearing that of the Amazon. Captain Sithwise sent messages to the four insurgent captains imploring them to head out into the South Atlantic, away from all land. The messages were sneered at.

In one of the areas yet unruffled by the Wanderer winds, Wolf Loner scanned through the graying overcast for Race Point, or Cape Ann, or even for the one-four-three I L-O-V-E Y-O-U wink of the Minot’s Ledge Light, or the sober six-second double flash of the Graves Light in Boston’s Outer Harbor. He knew he should be nearing the end of his voyage, but he had noticed some garbage and odd wreckage floating past the “Endurance” and he hadn’t calculated he was that close to Boston. However, there was nothing to do but keep watch and sail on.

Barbara Katz took the small telescope and climbed on top of the stalled Rolls to scan around over the low tops of the mangrove forest stretching out to either side of the narrow, tide-littered road. There was only the yellow afterglow of the sunset left to see by, reflected from the clouds rapidly moving in on a chilly southeast wind. The weather had changed completely in the last twenty minutes.

Hester stuck her head out of the back and whispered up loudly: “Stop pounding around up there, Miss Barbara. You ’sturb what little power of life Mr. K got left.”

Helen was squatting to hand tools to Benjy under the back of the car, where he was trying to free the inside of the left wheel from a great length of heavy wire that it had somehow picked up and wound tightly around itself, coil on coil, and which had only been noticed when the wheel jammed.

Benjy crawfished out and squatted down beside Helen, and after he’d breathed hard and rested his head in his hands a bit, he shook it and said: “I don’t know if I can free it. I ain’t got proper clippers, and that wire on there just solid like. Must be wrap around two hundred times.”

To Barbara, scanning around from the roof and trying to shift her feet as little as possible as she braced herself against the wind, the wonder was that Benjy had been able to get the car going at all after its drowning, and that they had actually managed to drive a whole skidding, spitting, backfiring hour north before this new trouble had come.

Hester leaned out to say harshly: “You better free it, Benjy. This the lowest-lookin’ region we been yet, and these twisty little trees ain’t no good for roosting.”

“Hes, I don’t think I can. Not in less than two-three hours, anyway.”

“Hey!” Barbara called down to them, her voice excited. “Down the road — not more than a mile — I can see — sticking out of the treetops — a white triangle! I think we’re saved!”

“Now what good is a white triangle to us, child?” Hester demanded.

“Benjy,” Barbara called, “do you think you could figure out a stretcher for Mr. K — or carry him for a mile?”

“Well,” he called back, “I done just about everything else.”

Bagong hung crouched calf-deep in fish-stinking bottom-muck and shoveled into it frantically with a short-handled infantry spade. Every now and then he’d drop the spade to scrabble in the mud for something muck-coated and small which he’d thrust without inspection into a cloth bag and go on shoveling.