The Wanderer

“I’m only too afraid it will,” Hunter said to Margo, sotto voce. Then, in the same tone, his glance dropping to her zippered-up leather bosom, “Would you care to show me the thing the cat-woman dropped from the saucer? I saw you catch it, you know, and I think you tested it this morning. Work?”

When she didn’t answer him, he said: “Keep it to yourself if it makes you feel more secure. I heard the questions you asked Doc and I heartily approve. Otherwise I’d take it away from you right now.”

She still didn’t look at him. He might have combed his beard, but she could smell his musky sweat.

The bus topped the first hill, took a slow, dipping curve, and started up a steeper one. Still no falls or crumblings came into view.

Doc said loudly: “Monica Mountainway is laid almost along the ridge tops and built of an asphaltoid that’s full of long molecular cables. Result: it’s strong in tension and almost impervious to falls. I learned that poking into engineering journals. Ha! Always trust a diversified genius, I say!”

“Diversified loudmouth,” someone behind them muttered.

Doc looked around with a hard grin, squinting suspiciously at Rama Joan. “We have already gained some three hundred feet in altitude,” he announced.

The bus turned and ran along the second hilltop, giving them a last glimpse of the Coast Highway. It was covered with water. Waves were breaking against the brush-grown slopes.

Dal Davies, as negligently casual about it all as some poetic son of Poseidon in his father’s study, watched the broad gray Bristol Channel glinting steely here and there in the mist-filtered silver light of the setting sun as the water inched and footed up the briary slope to the other side of the road fronting the pub.

The last time he’d looked, there’d been two freighters and a liner battling down-channel against the flood. Now they were gone, leaving only a scattering of wreckage and distant small craft not worth his squinting at.

He’d turned on the wireless a while back and listened to the taut-throated reports of the monster tides; and chittering insistences that they were caused by the great muster of earthquakes that had tramped Terra’s crust the last half-day; and cries for boats and buses and trains to do this, that, and the impossible; and grim, hysterical, complex commands to all England, it seemed to Dai, to go somewhere else, preferably to the top of Mount Snowdon.

He’d decided it must have been earlier installments of these frantic warnings that had put all the cowardly Somersets to flight — locking their liquor up miserly behind them! — and then he’d gone Disney for a while and jigged about and sung loudly: “Who’s afraid of the big bad tide? Certainly not Dai!”

But then the lights had gone out with a greenish-white flaring and the wireless with them, and he’d hunted up candles for cheer and affixed seven of them with their own whitehot wax artistically atilt along the bar.

Now he turned back toward them, and they were all guttering beautifully, the flames swaying like seven silver-gold maidens, their radiance glittering softly back from all the beautiful green-and-amber, neatly labeled books beyond.

Let me see, he thought as he moved slowly past the maiden flames, its many a day since I’ve looked into Old Bushmills by Thomas Hardy, but I’m mightily tempted by some of the cantos of Vat 69, by Ezra Pound. Which should it be now? Or perhaps — yes! — for a foreign fillip, Kirchwasser by Heinrich Heine!

General Spike Stevens and Colonel Mab lay side by side a foot or so under the concrete ceiling on the cot-size top of a big steel cabinet. She’d lost her flashlamp, but he still had his strapped to his chest. It shone on a still surface of black water six inches below the top of the cabinet.

They lay very still themselves. Their heads roared from the pressure of the air, which was warm due to the same compression.

There was nothing to look at along the wall-top or on the ceiling, except the grille of a ventilator beyond Colonel Mab’s head.

The general said — and his voice was weirdly gruff yet distant — “I don’t understand why with this pressure the air doesn’t puff up through there—” he pointed toward the ventilator — “and then, finis. Must be a block — maybe some anti-fallout valve got triggered.”

Colonel Mab shook her head. She was lying on her back, looking up over her eyebrows. “It isn’t easy to see at first,” she said softly, “but the ventilator shaft is full of water. It bulges down just a little in the squares in the ventilator, like tiny black pillows or big black fingertips. The water pressure from above and below balance — for the moment, at any rate, and so long as the surfaces in the grille aren’t disturbed.”