Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

Three of the slim, active ones came into the no-man’s land along the shoulder, moving in a cavorting, dancing run. One of them, by his gestures, might be carrying and swigging from a bottle. They’d come sixty yards when there was a crackle of gunfire from the police-car camp. One of the three fell — hard to tell at this distance whether he lay quiet or writhed. The other two vaulted over the nearest line of stalled cars and hid.

Hunter put his arm around Margo tight. “My God, Doc, what goes on?” he demanded.

“Yeah, for crissakes, Doc, tell us what you can see through the glasses,” Wojtowicz put in. “It looks like war.”

“It is,” Doc reported crisply. “Now listen to what I say, everybody that wants to,” he went on loudly, continuing to scan through the glasses, “because I’m not going to tell it twice and there’ll be no time for anybody else to sight-see with these. It’s a war, or a big skirmish, anyhow, between a lot of young people and the older people — or I should say the police helped by a few older people, but most of the rest of those neutral or at any rate useless. Big kids versus police protecting families. It’s the Day of the Children.

“Those slim ones are teenagers, mostly. They’re drinking — I can see a liquor truck bust open and kids handing out bottles. They got a live jazz band going in a cleared space. There are fights — knife and fist. A gang with sledges is smashing car windows and beating in car bodies for no sane reason.”

Doc censored from his account the acts of stark love-making he noted inside the cars — for shade rather than privacy, it seemed — the two girls dancing naked near the jazz band, the wanton beatings-up and terrorizings, and — in the other direction — the group draining a car radiator and eagerly drinking the…well, he hoped there weren’t too many additives in the water.

“But not all their violence is against cars or each other,” be went on. “There’s a bunch of them sneaking up right now between the empty cars towards the police camp. A few of them have guns, the rest bottles.

“I think the police have set up a little ambush on their side. At any rate I can see two or three of them crouched behind cars in the middle of the jam.

“But before the battle starts, we’re going to be out of here, heading back for Mulholland,” he went on in a louder voice, handing the glasses to Rama Joan and turning to face his crowd. “Doddsy! McHeath! Have Pop and Hixon turn their cars — there’s room to do it — and…”

“You mean you’re asking us to turn tail and run?” Hixon himself demanded loudly from where he was standing, rifle in hand, just beyond the Ramrod. “When there’s decent folks down there about to be swamped? When we could turn the tables easy with that gravity gun? Look, I been a cop myself. We got to help them.”

“No!” Doc rasped back at him. “We’ve got to protect ourselves and get the momentum pistol to some responsible science group — and while it’s still got power in it. How much charge is there left in the thing, Margo?”

“About one-third,” she told him, checking the violet line.

“See?” Doc continued to Hixon, “the thing has only four or five big shots left in it, at most. There are miles of those maniacs down there on 101. If we mix in, we’ll only turn a little battle into a big one. What’s down there is dreadful, I’ll admit, but it’s something that’s going on all over the world right now and we can’t afford to lose ourselves in it — one bucket of water tossed on a burning city! No, we backtrack! Go back and turn your truck around, Hixon—”

“Wait a minute, Doc!” This time it was Margo who interrupted, in a ringing voice. She moved in front of the Corvette.

“That’s Vandenberg Three down there,” she said, pointing with the momentum pistol at the three white buildings. “Morton Opperly may still be there. We’ve got to check.”

“Not one chance in fifty!” Doc barked at her. “Not in five hundred. He’ll have been ’coptered out — maybe by the one we saw this morning. No!”

“I’ve seen people moving inside,” Margo lied. “You agreed the idea is to get him this pistol. We’ve got to check.”

Doc shook his head “No! Too crazy a chance to take for next to nothing.”

Margo grinned at him. “But I’ve got the pistol,” she said, holding it against her chest, “and I’m going to take it down there if I have to walk.”

“That’s telling him!” Hixon cheered excitedly.

“All right, Miss Strongheart, then listen to me,” Doc said, bending forward toward her. “You go down there with that pistol, walking or in a car, and some crazy sniper picks you off, or you get jumped from three sides at once, and Opperly doesn’t get the weapon — those maniacs do. It’s got to stay here.

“But I’ll make you a proposition, Miss Gelhorn. You go down there without the weapon — I’ll give you my revolver — and bring Opperly back, or just find he’s there, and we’ll make the deal with him. How about it?”

Margo looked at Hunter. “You drive me?” He nodded and jumped for the sedan. She came around the side of the Corvette and held the momentum pistol toward Doc. “Trade.” He gave her his revolver and took it. Hunter started the sedan and drove it alongside the red car.

Hixon came forward. “Hey, I’m going too.”

“You want him?” Doc asked. Margo nodded. He asked Hixon: “You promise just to help them find Opperly?”

Hixon nodded, muttering, “Whoever he is.”

Doc said: “Okay then, but you’re the last one we can spare. No more volunteers!” He barked the last almost into the face of McHeath, coming up eagerly. “Gimme your rifle,” he told the boy. “You climb up those rocks back there—” he pointed to the easier gatepost — “and watch for us being outflanked…by anybody, including police!”

Hixon piled into the back of the sedan, Margo got in beside Hunter, Doc vaulted down and leaned an elbow on her window. “Hold on a second,” he said, scanning the jammed highway again just as action broke out there.

A dozen figures popped up from behind and between cars near the police camp. They threw things. Guns cracked and two or three of them fell. Things hit the police cars. Flames exploded.

“Molotov cocktails,” Hixon whispered, gnawing his lip.

Doc said: “Now’s a good time — they all got other things to think of.” He shoved his head in the window.

“I just got one thing to say to you,” he growled at the three of them. “Bring yourselves back, you bastards!”

Barbara Katz sat in the topmost spread of the big, pale, rung-like, right-angling branches of a gigantic dead magnolia tree, the westering sun hot on her back, and watched east under the blue sky for the Atlantic to come mounding back from Daytona Beach and Lake George over the neck of Florida. From time to time she tried to study the figures on the darkly-creased, sweat-stained tidal chart on the back of the calendar page Benjy had torn off for her yesterday morning, although she knew it could hardly apply closely any more, if at all. But there had been a high tide last night at three a.m. and so there should be another around the middle of this afternoon.

In the next spread of the branches down old KKK was tied to his seat with blanket strips around the big trunk, which shielded him some from the sun. Hester sat beside him, supporting his slumping head and easing his position as best she could. Nearby Helen and Benjy had their spots. Benjy had the rope he’d used to draw up the old man and some other things.

In their soiled and torn pale gray uniforms the three Negroes looked like bedraggled and ungainly brown-crested silver birds as they perched there high in the huge, nearly leafless tree.