The Wanderer

Paul broke off, momentarily overcome by a sudden awareness of the ridiculousness of the situation. Here he was, naked and foot-fettered, trailing the tubes of a sanitary arrangement, playing district attorney to the most fantastic “Madame X” ever to float on the witness chair.

The most fantastically lovely, too, he added uneasily in his thoughts.

Or was all this, he wondered, only the age-old racial business of the monkey teasing the leopard?

But then he remembered Brawley and Volcano.

“So you got girl friend now, hey, Paul?” Tigerishka put in wickedly. “That really true? Margo know? And you so fair — that fair to Don?”

He waved these mean diversions aside with a certain dignity. Hot feeling came into his voice as he said: “But the most crushing indictment of your boasted high culture and great sensitivity is the way human beings are dying beneath this saucer at this very moment because of the Wanderer’s distortion of our gravity field — all because you needed fuel and wouldn’t take a little extra time to find a proper source — such as the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. I’ll grant you put out some fires, but only after hundreds, more likely thousands, died in the blazes and in the quakes that began the blazes. And now whole cities are being wiped out by the floods you’ve caused. If this goes on—”

“Shut up, monkey!” Tigerishka snarled, her claws out, her hind paws touching back toward the control panel. Miaow sprang away from her. “Look, Paul,” she continued, seeming to contain herself with difficulty. “I never boast you I humani-tarian, monkey-tarian, cosmo-tarian! Cats have cruel culture some ways. Other cultures cruel, too! Death part of life. Some always suffer. Our refueling just normal course of things. It just—”

She broke off, frowning at the finger Paul was pointing at her. His face was glowing, for he had just seen what he believed to be the tremendous significance of Tigerishka’s apparently honest attempt to defend herself and her people.

“I do not believe you,” he said ringingly. “Tigerishka, I think that your blundering haste and that of your people, your lack of proper scouting and preparation, and most of all your crude, belated efforts to repair some of the damage you’ve done, all go to show that you were rushed into action by something of which you are deeply afraid.”

With a high-pitched snarl Tigerishka launched herself at him, drove him against the wall with one forepaw around his throat and the other poised like a four-tined rake a foot above his face.

“That is a damnable lie, Paul Hagbolt!” she said in flawless English. “I demand that you take it back at once!”

He got his breath. Then he shook his head.

“No,” he said, smiling at her, though there were bright tears dripping from his eyes. “You’re scared to death.”

Don Guillermo Walker slapped mosquitoes and stared at the flooded housetops of San Carlos red in the dawn as the launch beat its way back into Lake Nicaragua. During the night the current in the San Juan River had once more reversed itself, opposing the launch strongly, and now it was clear this was because the lake itself had risen a dozen feet or more — though why that happened was harder to say.

The sky presented a mystery, too. To the east it was clear, the sun already shooting his rays hotly, but to the west a thick white cloud-wall rose from the strip of land between the lake and the Pacific and extended as far north and south as one could see.

Although night before last he had witnessed the great outburst of volcanism, it did not occur to Don Guillermo that here, as along many other stretches, the Pacific Ocean was bordered now by a steam curtain, where seawater was flowing into volcanic cracks.

He asked why the launch was heading north, and the Araiza brothers informed him they were going up-lake to their home in Granada. Something sharp and clipped in their voices kept him from disputing this decision.

It did not deter him, however, from launching a little later into an account — not the first one he’d given them, either — of how, over a hundred years ago, his great-great-grandfather had landed in Nicaragua with only fifty-eight bold Yankee followers, and soon had successfully stormed Granada itself.

Bagong Buno watched the sun that was rising for Don Guillermo sink into the Gulf of Tonkin, now swollen as big as it had seen shrunken small twelve hours ago, so that it seemed to engulf North Vietnam. He thought of his strongbox in the cabin and how it now held a small bag of golden guineas and condors and morocotas and two larger bags of silver coins — the modest loot of the “Sumatra Queen.” He touched the yellow silk hankerchief bound so piratically around his head, and he looked roguishly around at Cobber-Hume and said: “Yo-ho-ho, eh, baik sobat?”

“And a bottle of rum,” the big Australian affirmed. “And a pipe of the poppy for you, since that’s not against your religion.”