The Wanderer

Tubes snaked from them to the same silver-gray panel into which, through a briefly dilating door, she’d thrown his wet clothes. Paul named it the Waste Panel.

In the warmth of the cabin it was more comfortable being naked, though comfort did not cancel humiliation.

After attending to the obviously distasteful Paul-chore, Tigerishka had gone about her own activities. First she had groomed herself and Miaow, using not only a long, pointed, pale violet tongue more like a frog’s than a cat’s, but also two silver combs which she wielded equally well with all of her four paws and also her prehensile tail. As she rhythmically combed, she softly wailed discordant, eerie music, somehow producing three voices simultaneously. The captured hair from her combing went into the Waste Panel.

Then, with sublime or simply horrid feline indifference to the world in agony below them — if, as Paul wondered, the saucer were still hovering over Southern California or even Earth — she had fed Miaow. From the second of the three panels — Paul named it the Food Panel — she had produced a fat, dark red worm which Paul uneasily felt was synthetic rather than natural. It wriggled just enough to vastly interest Miaow, who played with it for some time in free fall while Tigerishka watched, before slowly chewing it up with signs of great satisfaction.

Then Tigerishka had gone to the third panel, which after a bit Paul was calling the Control Panel, and busied herself with what he assumed to be her regular work, which seemed to be that of observer.

The first time the mirror he faced turned to transparency, Paul was distinctly glad of the sanitary arrangements.

About half a mile below him churned and spouted an angry gray sea from which a solitary, rocky island poked and in which a large long tanker wallowed, green water flowing over its bow.

The transparency of the facing wall was perfect. He felt he was about to drop through a large ring of flowers toward the maelstrom. Then the mirror was there again.

The same thing happened a half a dozen times in quite rapid succession, observation heights varying sharply. He hung cringe-stomached over sea, coast, and farmland. Once he thought he recognized the north end of the San Fernando Valley with a section of the Santa Monica mountains, but he couldn’t be sure.

There was no mistaking the next view, though. They were at least five miles up, but there was nothing below them almost to the edges of the thirty-foot window but city — sunlit city, bordered by sea on one side, mountains on two, and just stretching out on the fourth.

The city was smeared across with six parallel brush strokes that began, mostly near the sea, in bright vermilion but quickly changed to the brownish black of heavy smoke spreading over the mountains inland.

It was Los Angeles burning. This time the saucer hung low enough for Paul to identify the main fire-spots: Santa Ana, Long Beach, Torrance, Inglewood, the Los Angeles Civic Center, and Santa Monica, the last blaze licking along the southern slopes of the Santa Monica mountains through Beverly Hills and Hollywood.

Margo’s tiny house in Santa Monica and his own apartment were gone, it looked like.

They were too high for him to more than fancy the ant-scurry of cars, the clustering of the rectangular red beetles of fire trucks.

The seacoast to the south looked wrong. In places the Pacific came too far inland.

He started to strangle and realized he’d been trying to scream to Tigerishka, against the invisible gag, to do something about it.

She never gave him a look, but turned from the control panel to crouch on the invisible floor, staring toward the southwest and the sea.

Two miles below them a thick gray cloudbank with a dark skirt was moving in swiftly over the changed coast. The dark skirt touched the Long Beach fire, turning its smoke white — rain! Heavy rain!

Paul looked over toward the other blazes lying in the path of the cloudbank and saw the silver-and-vermilion of two military jets face on to him. Smoke puffed from their wings and he could see the four rockets on collision course with the saucer, swelling as they came.

Then it was as if Los Angeles had been jerked down twenty miles. The scene expanded thirtyfold. He saw more smoke-strokes, tiny from this altitude, down the coast and up toward Bakersfield. Then the wall winked on again — not a mirror this time, but pool-table green, presumably just for a change.

Tigerishka reached a long paw into the shrubbery and retrieved Miaow. She cuddled the little cat to her and, turning half away from Paul, said loudly: “There, we save his monkey-town for him. Call big saucer over the sea. Make rain. Small thanks. Help monkey, monkey shoot.”

Miaow squirmed as if she’d rather get back to flower-climbing, but Tigerishka licked her face with her dagger-tongue, and the little cat writhed luxuriously.