The Wanderer

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.

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.

“We don’t like him, do we?” Tigerishka went on with a sideways eye-flicker toward Paul, in a voice that was halfway between purr and cruel laughter. “Monkeys! Cowardly, chattering, swarming — no individuality, no flair!”

Paul wanted to strangle her, his hands locked in the sleek green fur of her neck. Yes, he wanted to lock his hands around her neck and -

Tigerishka hugged Miaow closer and whispered loudly: “We think he smells. Makes smells with his mind, too.”

Paul remembered disconsolately how he’d thought Margo bullied him. But that was before he met Tigerishka.

Don Merriam sat on the edge of a bed that was like one large, resilient cushion in a small room with restfully dim walls.

At his knees was a low table on which stood a transparent cup and a jug full of water, and also a transparent plate piled with small, white, rough-surfaced, spongy cubes. He had drunk thirstily of the former, but only nibbled experimentally at one of the latter, although they smelled and tasted quite like bread.

The only other features of the room were a lidded toilet seat and a corner area about three feet square where a soothing patter of rain was falling steadily without splashing or running over into the rest of the room. He had not yet stepped into this shower although he had stripped to his underwear.

The temperature and humidity and illumination level of the room suited themselves so to him that the room was almost like an extension of his body.

Before a wall-hued door, sliding sideways, had shut out his host or captor, the walking red-and-black tiger had said to him: “Drink. Eat. Relieve and refresh yourself. Rest.”

Those had been his only words since he had summoned Don. During the brief passage downward on the platform elevator and then the short walk along a narrow corridor, the being had been silent.

Don was relieved that the being had left him, yet irked with himself for the awe and timidity that had kept him from asking questions; now he almost wanted the being to come back.

That was only one of the many contradictory paired feelings maintaining themselves in him: weariness-uneasiness, safety-alienage, the urge to let his thoughts go and the urge to hold them in, the urge to face his situation and the urge to escape in illusion.

It was easy to think of this spot as a small hospital room. Or, as a small stateroom in a great ocean liner. Well, what was a planet but a sort of ship, moving through space? At least, this planet, with its endless decks…

Tiredness took hold; the lights dimmed; he sprawled full length on the bed, but at the same time his mind became ripplingly active, began to babble — though in a quite orderly sort of way.

The effect, which was rather like that of sodium pentothal, was almost pleasant. At least, it neutralized his restless anxiety.

It occurred to him that they were getting at his mind, examining it, but he didn’t care.

It was engrossing to watch his thoughts, his knowledge, and his remembered experiences arrange themselves in ranks and then parade, as if past some central reviewing stand.

Eventually these mental items began to move too swiftly for him to follow them, but even that was all right, because the blur they made was a warm, tender, enfolding, somnolent darkness.