The Wanderer

“Look!” she yelled. “Smoke! Oh’ Jake, isn’t it exciting?” she demanded as he dragged her back. “We ought to make a play out of it!”

In the chaos of the moment, Jake still was able to realize that this was the money-idea for which he had been groping.

Behind them the telltale red light at the base of the coffee pot went out, and the orange glow of the toaster faded.

The saucer students had outrun three more sloshing earthquake waves that were more spume than water — calf-deep fakes — and had actually reached dry sand and halted there, most of them winded, the Ramrod and Ida half dragging his other woman between them, when the really big combers started chasing them all.

Up ahead, the rounded foothills of the Santa Monica mountains loomed dark and heavy against a sky that had begun to gray with the dawn. Nearer, but already quite far, the bobbing lights of the truck continued to recede. Hixon had taken the most direct course away from the sea, a course midway between the great hump of Vandenberg and the crumbled lower palisades that had buried the cars, and the others had followed the truck. This had been wise — any other course would have had them running slantwise to the waves across even lower beach; the trouble was that even the midway course was nothing but sand and flat sandy ground for a long distance — a dry river wash.

Behind them the Wanderer touched the ocean’s rim. The curving moon-lozenge was crossing its front again. The planet itself was showing once more its yin-yang face, though seemingly tilted over — Doc, gasping, thought, Why, this is where we came in. The thing’s completed one rotation — it’s got a six-hour day. Then something black and square and lace-sided reared up and blocked off the Wanderer from him.

It was the platform where they’d held their saucer symposium, upended by the second of the big combers.

Then he heard the roar.

SIX HOURS

The others had started to run again and he pounded after them, tiny needles teasing his heart.

Then…well, it was as if in one terrible, instantaneous swoop the Wanderer had leaped a quarter of a million miles out of the heavens and poised itself just above them, shutting off all of the sky except a circular gray horizon-border.

It was enough to stop them in their tracks, despite the pale, wreckage-fisted horrors roaring at them up the beach.

Hunter was the first to get distances and dimensions right, and he thought, Why, it’s simply (my God, simply!) a flying saucer forty feet across, antigravitically poised a dozen feet above us and painted with a violet-gold yin-yang. Then he started running again.

The first and least of the big combers plastered them with spume and surged around them knee-high. Although most of their minds and senses were still glued to the thing above them, their bodies responded to the material assault. They grabbed at each for support; hands clutched slippery hands or wet waists or soggy coats. Wanda went under, and Wojtowicz ducked for her.

Margo’s nails dug into Paul’s neck and she screamed in his ear: “Miaow! Get Miaow!” and she jabbed her other hand beyond him. He glimpsed a tiny cat tail and ears disappearing in the dirty spume and he crazily dove after them, clutching ahead. So Paul missed what happened next.

A pink port five feet across flashed open in the saucer’s center, and there swung out of it, hanging just above their heads by two clawed limbs and a pointed prehensile tail, a green-and-violet-furred -

“Devil!” Ida screamed. “She said there’d be devils!”

“Tiger!” yelled Harry McHeath. Doc heard and his mind threw out, as uncontrollably as a pair of honest dice, the thought: My God, the second Buck Rogers Sunday page! The Tiger Men of Mars!

“Empress!” the Ramrod cried, his cold knees buckling, and in his nostrils, framed by the sea’s mucky stink, the breath of a heavenly perfume…

Big, black-centered violet eyes scanned them all very rapidly, yet with an impression of leisurely spectator disdain.

The second huge comber wasn’t thirty yards away, the platform riding it like a surfboard, scattered chairs bobbing all around, and behind it the half-exploded beach house coming on, too.

A green paw shot out, pointed a taper-snouted gray pistol seaward, and fanned it back and forth.

There was no flash or glow or sign, but the great wave sank, shriveled, dissolved. The platform slipped back over it and to the side. The broken beach house veered toward Vandenberg. All spume shot away, vanished. Confused loomings and shrinkings. The water was hardly thigh-deep and it lacked the punch of the first comber when it struck them at last.

The gray pistol kept on fanning back and forth over their heads.