The Wanderer

Then the little Malay dropped to his knees and bowed west to the Wanderer, and coincidentally to Mecca, and said, softly: “Terima kasi, bogus kuning dan ungu!” Having thanked the yellow and purple miracle-bringer, he rose briskly to his feet and with a playful, lordly wave of his hand cried out gaily: “We will tie up to our treasure ship, oh Cobber-Hume, baik sobat, and board her like kings! At last, my good friend, is the “Machan Lumpur” truly the Tiger of the Mud!”

Sally Harris leaned in the dusk on the balustrade of the penthouse patio and sighed.

To the west the last flames of sunset mingled with those of the oil that had gushed from flood-broken tanks and was now floating and burning on the salt water flooding Jersey City. To the east the Wanderer was rising in its dinosaur face.

“What’s the matter, Sal?” Jake called to her from where he was sipping brandy and chopping away at various cheeses. “Don’t tell me our fire’s started again.”

“Nope, it looks pretty much out. The water’s halfway up and still coming.”

“Is that what’s bothering you?”

“I don’t know, Jake,” she called back listlessly. “I been watching churches going under. I never knew there were so many. Saint Pat’s and Epiphany and Christ and Saint Bartholomew’s and Grace and Actors’ Temple and Saint Mary the Virgin, and Calvary, where they started AA, and All Souls and Saint Mark’s in the Bouwerie and B’nai Jeshurun and The Little Church around the Corner and—”

“Hey, you can’t see all those from there,” Jake protested. “You can’t see half of them.”

“No, but I can see them in my mind.”

“Well, get your mind out of the dumps, then!” he ordered. “Hey look, Sal, our planet’s got King Kong on him and he’s rising over the Empire State Building. How’s that for a crazy gag? Maybe I can work it into the play.”

“I bet you can!” she said, the excitement coming back into her voice. “Hey, have you finished my Noah’s Ark song?”

“Not yet. Jesus, Sal, I got to relax after the fire.”

“You’ve relaxed half a fifth. Get your mind to work.”

Chapter Twenty-six

Doc shouted: “All out, everybody, for a stretch, and to answer Nature’s calls,” forcing a rudely jolly note into his hoarseness. “Wojtowicz, it looks like we’ve finally found the roadblock you deduced.”

The saucer students eagerly yet complainingly piled out into the cool, damp, high air. From almost behind them shone a strange greenish light from the setting sun — the party’s scientific consensus was that it was due to volcanic ash already crowding the stratosphere, though the Ramrod had ideas about planetary auras.

It was very clear they’d been through a lot in the day just ending and that the effects of last night’s lost sleep were showing up with a vengeance…

The yellow paint of the school bus and the white enamel of the panel truck behind it both showed flaring black streaks where they’d barely outraced brush fires. There was a heavy bandage around Clarence Dodd’s right hand, which the Little Man had badly burned holding up a tarpaulin to shield Ray Hanks, Ida and himself from the swooping, sweeping flames.

Hunter cursed as he almost fell out of the bus, stumbling over two spades carelessly left in the aisle after a wearisome two-hour stretch of digging sand and gravel to level a buckled stretch of Monica Mountainway enough for the two cars to get through. He shoved them under the seats with another curse.

Several of the wayfarers looked quite damp, and the black flame marks on bus and truck were runneled by the mighty rain which had come marching across the Santa Monica mountains in steel-gray waves out of the west, ten minutes after they had won their race with the fire. Its great dark curtain-clouds still obscured the east, though the west was clearing spottily.

They were almost twenty miles into the mountains and topping the next to the last ridge before the descent to the Valley, Vandenberg Three, and inland Route 101 leading north from Los Angeles toward Santa Barbara and San Francisco.

There were wet patches on the borrowed raincoat Doc had thrown over his shoulders, with the barest suggestion of a military cape, as he led the others forward, Rama Joan and Margo just behind him.

At this point the Mountainway traversed a half natural, half blasted step in a great slope of solid rock, which from a boulder-crowned summit ridge fifty yards up on their right ran down at an angle of thirty degrees and then, after the step holding the road, continued down at a slightly greater angle for a dozen yards or so and then plunged away precipitously, nothing visible beyond it but the side of another small mountain a half mile off.

The awesome gray rock-slope was patched with lichen, pale green, orange, smoky blue and black, and was scored and gouged with smooth-edged trenches and potholes, some of them holding boulders ranging up to panel-truck size.