The Wanderer

“You’re seeing things,” the general told her. “That’s bad hydrostatics. The head of pressure on the water below us is bound to be greater. It’d still push the air out.”

“Maybe the elevator shaft hasn’t filled entirely yet,” Colonel Mab answered with a little shrug. “But I’m not seeing things.”

She reached up and poked a finger through the nearest hole in the ventilator, then snatched it quickly away as a stream of water as thick as a cigar spurted straight down and rattled loudly into the still water below, with the effect of an elephant relieving itself of fluid.

The general grabbed her by the shoulder. “You goddamn stupid bitch,” he snarled. Then he looked her in the face and he slid his fingers inside her collar, and took hold of it to tear it down. “Yes,” he said harshly, nodding once. “Whether you like it or not.”

He hesitated, then said apologetically but very stubbornly, “There’s nowhere else to escape to, is there, except into each other.”

She grinned with her teeth at him. “Let’s do this right, you big brass bastard,” she told him. Her eyes narrowed. “We’re finished,” she said thoughtfully, hitting each syllable as if she stepped on stones, “but if we could work so that we hit the climax just as we drowned…We’ll have to wait till the water’s over us — It mustn’t be too soon…”

“My Christ, you’ve got it, Mab!” the general said loudly, grinning down at her like a blocky death’s-head.

She frowned. “Not all of it,” she said, just loudly enough for him to hear her over the sizzling water-spurts — there were three of them now. “There’s something else. But it’s enough to start on, and I’ll think of the other thing after a while.”

She unbuttoned her soaking coat and shirt and unhooked her brassiere. The flashlamp strapped to his chest shone on her breasts. He entered her, and they got to work.

“Take it slow now, you old bastard,!” she told him.

When he clutched her to him, the flashlamp made a reddish square in her chest that shone out faintly through her breasts.

When the water was an inch from the top of the cabinet they paused for a while.

“Like rats in a trap,” she said to him fondly.

“You got quite a tail, Mrs. Rat,” he said to her. “I always thought you were a Lesbian.”

“I am,” she told him, “but that’s not all I am.”

He said, “About that black tiger we thought we saw—”

“We saw it,” she said. Then her face broke into a smile. “Strangling is a very quiet death,” she said. She dabbled her hand in the water, as if she were on her back in a canoe — and, for a moment, she was. “That’s from The Duchess of Malfi, General. Duke Ferdinand. Nice, don’t you think?” When he frowned speculatively, she said, still smiling tranquilly: “I’ve read in more than one place that a hanged man always has a climax — and strangling’s like hanging. I don’t know if it’s true of women, but it could be, and my sex always has to take the chances. At least it ought to help the water a little, and if we could make the three things come together…Enjoy killing a woman, General? I’m a Lesbian, General, and I’ve slept with girls you never got. Remember the little redhead in Statistics who used to twitch her left eye when you barked at her?”

Just then the water came rilling over the cabinet top, and the ventilator tore loose, and a great inorganic sobbing began as, alternately, a log of water shot down the hole and a log of air escaped up it, rhythmically. The cabinet shook.

The general and Colonel Mab got to work again.

“I won’t squeeze so hard right away, you goddamn girl-defiling bitch,” he shouted in her ear. “I’ll remember you’re the woman.”

“You think so?” she shouted back, and her long-fingered, strong-fingered strangler’s hands came up between his arms and closed around his neck.

Chapter Twenty-four

Paul Hagbolt’s joints and muscles had begun to ache from his starfished posture, despite the easement of null gravity. He thought some modest complaints about it, to no effect.

After getting over his first terror of Tigerishka, he’d spoken his complaints and started to ask many questions, too. But she had said: “Monkey chatter,” and run a dry velvet paw across his lips, and a paralysis had gripped his throat and his face below the nose — somehow an invisible gag had been applied.

At least his aches took his mind off his humiliations. He was naked now. After discovering that the primitive mind in the saucer was Paul’s and not Miaow’s, Tigerishka had riffled through his thoughts again with contemptuous speed. Then she had stripped off his wet clothes with even greater dispatch, momentarily freeing an invisible gyve from ankle or wrist to facilitate the process. Next she had subjected him to an unfeeling anatomical inspection, as coldly as if he were a cadaver. Finally — capping indignity! — she had affixed to his crotch a couple of sanitary arrangements.