The Wanderer

A great gust of wind whipped past them from the land. Doc, caught off balance, started to fall. Rama Joan heaved back on him.

Paul’s head and shoulders emerged from the foam. He was clutching a rat-wet Miaow to his shoulder.

The wind kept blowing.

The being hanging from the rim of the pink port seemed to lengthen out, almost impossibly, becoming a violet-barred green curve stretching toward Paul.

The gray pistol dropped, and Margo caught it.

Violet-gray claws dug into Paul’s shoulder, and he and Miaow were swept up, by more than any mere human muscular force, into the pink port. Margo and Doc and Rama Joan, clinging together for support, saw that much very clearly.

The green and violet being whipped back into the saucer after Paul and the cat.

Then, without visible transition, the saucer was hundreds of yards overhead, no bigger than the moon, the port a big, pale dot.

Margo shoved the gray pistol inside her jacket.

The wind from the land faded.

The dot winked out, and the saucer vanished.

Then they were all struggling hand in hand up the beach, through knee-deep water sucking back seawards.

Bagong Bung, steering the “Machan Lumpur” out of the tide-swollen inlet south of Do-Son after a successful though unpleasantly delayed delivery of a cargo of assorted contraband, saw the Wanderer rising out of the cloud-edged Gulf of Tonkin in the young night just as — almost half a planet away — the saucer students, escaped from the tsunami, were watching the last sliver of it sink into the Pacific. To Bagong hung the yin-yang was a familiar Chinese symbol which he liked to think of as the Two Whales, but the deformed moon — at which he swiftly directed his brass spyglass — was now, to him, like a huge bag of faintly yellowed diamonds.

So to Bagong Bung, the Wanderer rising where the moon should have risen alone was not so much a staggering intrusion as a promise of good luck, a supernatural encouragement. Diamonds made him think of the lost treasure ships hidden under the shallow seas around him. He instantly and irrevocably decided that when tomorrow dawned, and with it the low tide came, he would spare time for at least one dive at the new location he’d guessed for the wreck of the “Sumatra Queen"!

“Come up, Cobber-Hume,” he called through the rusty speaking tube to his Australian engineer. “Great good fortune for us. No, I must not tell you. Come up, then you’ll see. Oh, you’ll see!”

Chapter Nineteen

Paul Hagbolt was plunged into a breathable sea of warmth, sweet spicy odors, and gay pastel colors dominated by pink — though here and there were bright green swatches.

For a few moments he hadn’t been at all certain that he’d been snatched inside a vehicle. It seemed more like nearly instantaneous translation to another plane of existence, another spot in the universe — a jungly, bedroomy spot.

He’d hardly seen the saucer. Most of the time it was hovering, he’d been floundering and choking in the gritty salt water clutching Miaow. When he’d been whisked up, his first thought had been that he and Miaow had been spun aloft by the next comber and were riding its top.

Then had come three fleeting yet shockingly vivid flashes: first, a huge, tapering, greenish-purplish cat face; second, two staring eyes with incredible five-petaled irises around the black five-spiked stars of the pupils; third, a long, slim, hand-sized paw with narrow indigo pads and four cruel curving claws of translucent, violet-gray horn — he had the impression that they’d just been buried in the scruff of his coat, and maybe his neck, too, hastening him.

The next instant he was floating with a slow twist in the warm, sugary-flowery, green-flecked, pink sea.

A dark hole in that sea swung into view, and through it he saw Margo thigh-deep in dirty, foamed water holding something gray-gleaming and staring up at him, and beside her Doc, spume-patched, and Rama Joan, sand-streaked, with red-gold hair clinging wet and twisty. Then they were shrinking with incredible swiftness, as if a wrong-ended telescope had been interposed. Nevertheless, it was then that Paul began to believe that he was in the saucer he’d disjointedly seen — the saucer that now must be soaring faster than any mortar shell, though with no sensation of acceleration. Then the hole closed upon jumbly pinkness — in fact, yes, to strange pink flowers.

A word jumped up in his mind: antigravity. If this vehicle carried its own null-gravity field — possibly null-inertia too — that could explain the absence of any felt G-forces, and also his floating, dripping wet, surrounded by floating round drops of this wetness, in breathable perfumy air in a round, flattened room lined with live flowers.

Claws stung his left hand like a dozen wasps: Miaow was terrified by the strange jolts, and insulted by sea water, and she held on to him overtightly. In his sudden agony Paul flung off the soaking cat, and she shot twisting through the air and vanished with a puff of yellow-pink petals into a flowerbank.