The Wanderer

“No, I don’t think either of those two young men amount to much as rivals,” Hunter went on. “Morton Opperly’s a greater danger, because he’s a father figure: a sinisterly beautiful magician who — I bet you dream about this! — is some day going to carry our young Valkyrie away to his grim castle in the Land of Higher Mathematics. Incest with Einsteinian overtones.”

“Very interesting,” she commented. “There seems to be a very faint general glow to the east. Maybe it’s the highway.”

Five minutes more and Hunter burst out, most spontaneously-seeming, with: “Christ, it’s cold. It’d help if we bundled together, the old Puritan style—”

“Nuh-uh, soldier,” she interposed. “Lovemaking and guard duty don’t mix.”

“Au contraire, they combine beautifully. You become vibrantly alive, aware of everything.”

“Nuh-uh, Ross, I said.”

“I wasn’t trying a new approach,” he protested, “just being practical. I’m freezing.”

“Then wrap your blanket around you, tight,” she suggested. “I don’t need any heater.” She smiled straight at him. “Right this minute I’m hot as fire from my neck down to my toes. And vibrantly alive. All by myself.”

“You are a bitch,” he said thoughtfully.

“Yes, I am,” she agreed with a happy smirk. “And right now I’m going on a little scout, first down the road fifty yards beyond the sedans. I’ll carry the rifle. You stay here with the big gun and…cover me.”

“Bitch,” he repeated bitterly as she stole crosswise down the slope.

A cloud was shrouding the Wanderer when they waked Doc for sentry change. He groaned guardedly a couple of times as he unkinked stiff joints, then grew more chipper.

“Have to renew the flash batteries,” he noted. “Got ’em here in my pocket. Should have turned one of the sedans around and used its headlights. Can’t do it now, though — it’d wake people.”

By the time Margo had taken over Rama Joan’s bed in the truck, the Wanderer was out again, showing the Jaws. Ann was awake. Ever since the afternoon’s horror, the little girl who “loved everything” had been very thoughtful. Now Margo wondered uneasily what she was thinking when those wide eyes looked at her, a screaming killer.

But, “Why does Mommy have to go away?” was all Ann asked, rather fretfully.

Margo explained about guard duty.

“I think Mommy likes being with Mr. Brecht,” Ann commented dolefully.

“Look at the Wanderer, dear,” Margo suggested. “See, the moon’s growing into a ring. She’s broken her cocoon and is spreading her wings.”

“Yes, it’s lovely, isn’t it?” Ann said, a dreamy note at last coming into her voice. “Purple forests and golden seas…Hello, Ragnarok…”

In the bus Mrs. Hixon leaned forward from the seat behind the driver’s and whispered in Mr. Hixon’s ear: “Bill, what if these people find out we’re not really married?”

He whispered back: “Babe, I don’t think it’d matter to them a bit.”

Mrs. Hixon sighed. “Still, it’s a kind of distinction being the only normal married couple in the bunch.”

Paul woke up as alone in black space as a hobo angel, it seemed to him — so high above Earth that the stars glittered more thickly above the scythe-curve of the black horizon than he’d ever seen them, even in the desert. Yet he felt so snug and refreshed, and the transition from sleep to waking had been so gradual, that he experienced no fear at alL Besides that, there was an invisible warm glassy surface he could touch. It shut off all the harshness of space from him, and his right foot was guyed to it reassuringly. He gave himself up to the great sight.

He was poised in the night at least one hundred miles above Arizona, he decided, and looking west, for he could see all of Southern California and the northwest corner of Mexico, including the neck of the peninsula of Baja California, and beyond them the Pacific. No mistaking that pattern.

He could see the lights of San Diego — at least some city-like glow, about where San Diego should be — and he realized he was voicelessly thanking God for that, very tritely, but sincerely.

There were no clouds. The Wanderer was hanging in the west in its bull’s-head face, girdled by the shattered moon. Its violet and golden light sparkled in a wide wake across the Pacific straight toward him, and also spangled the northern end of the Gulf of California, so that all coasts were sharply defined.

The land areas reflected only a diffuse yellowish glow, like multiplied moonlight but far duller than the glittering sea.

But then he saw, with a feeling of dim but growing horror, that the Gulf of California extended at least a hundred miles too far northwest in a glittering tongue that narrowed at first but then widened. No mistaking that one departure from pattern, either.

Either because of the earthquakes or the high tides or both, the salt waters of the Gulf had burst through and filled the land below sea level in and around the Imperial Valley and the drying Salton Sea, and stretched on toward Palm Springs. He remembered that one of the towns there, a pretty big one, had been called Brawley, and another, Volcano -