Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

So, to take Mulholland would take time, and Hunter felt that his little two-vehicle cavalcade had none of that to spare, for the pursuit from the Valley and inland 101, after hanging back for some while in an ominous chorus of revvings and honkings, was at last catching up.

Monica Mountainway ran straight here for three quarters of a mile through the blackly burned-over central heights of the Santa Monica mountains. The Corvette and the truck had hardly covered half of the straight when two sports cars, packed to the sides, came around the last turn abreast, and more behind them. Hunter slowed the Corvette a little and waved the truck on. Hixon remembered instructions and roared past him. Hunter got a flash of the men’s grim faces in the back: Fulby, Pop, Doddsy, and Wojtowicz — and McHeath crouching with the one rifle they had left.

The women in the car with Hunter were tensely silent. Ann beside him hugged tight to her mother.

Then he got another flash of faces, this time those of the Malibu folk standing by their expensive cars and looking surprised and rather pained, as if to say, “What bad manners to rush past us without so much as a wave — and in these catastrophic times when togetherness is mandatory!”

Hunter didn’t exactly wish them evil, but he did hope they’d divert and delay a bit the crazy pursuit from the Valley. When he heard brakes behind him and then a shot, he drew back his lips in a grimace that was half satisfaction, half guilt.

Hixon’s truck was disappearing around the first of a series of hairpin turns leading upward, which Hunter remembered from yesterday’s trip. He scowled and squinted ahead, the sinking greenish-white sun in his eyes, and he began to hunt for a certain configuration of road also remembered from yesterday.

He found it at the second of the sharp turns: a clutch of big boulders on the inside of the U-curve. He slammed to a stop just beyond it and jumped out.

“The momentum pistol!” he demanded of Margo, got it, and scrambled up the steep, acidly odorous, blackly burned slope until he was behind the boulders. He pointed the gun at them and fired. For the first two seconds he was afraid they weren’t going to move and the last charge be wasted for nothing, but then they turned over, grating together loudly, went thumping down the slope, and thudded ponderously into the asphaltoid.

He dashed forward after them and peered down through the mounting dust to see if an adjustment shot would be needed, but they blocked the road perfectly.

From above came a faint cheer and looking up be saw the truck moving along a stretch two hairpin turns further on. He ran back to the car. Before he tossed the gray pistol back to Margo, he quickly checked the scale on the grip and saw there was at least a bit of violet still showing. As he drove off he heard brakes squeal again behind them, and angry shouting.

Ann said, “Those people won’t be able to use this road now, will they?”

“Nobody will be able to use it, dear,” Rama Joan told her.

“Or so we hope,” Margo put in a bit sardonically from the back seat. “Was it a good job, Ross?”

“A real bank-to-bank choke-up,” he told her curtly. “Two of the rocks it’ll take a derrick to move.”

Ann persisted: “I meant the nice people we passed standing beside their cars.”

“They had their own road, the one they came on,” Hunter lashed out harshly. “They had their chance to turn around and use it to get away. If they didn’t, well, they were damned rich-bitch fools!”

Ann moved away from him, closer to her mother. He lashed at himself inwardly for taking out his feelings on a child. Doc hadn’t been that way.

“Professor Hunter did absolutely right, Ann,” Wanda put in with a smug positiveness from the other back seat. “A man always has to think first of the women with him and their safety.”

Rama Joan said softly to Ann: “The gods always had problems about how to use their magic weapons, dear. It’s all in the myths.”

Hunter, his smarting eyes fixed on the snakelike road, wanted to tell them both to shut up, but he managed not to.

It was a good twenty minutes before they caught up with the truck. Hixon had stopped just short of another side road.

“It says, ‘To Vandenberg’,” he called down, pointing ahead to a sign, as the Corvette drew up beside him. “I figure it leads more direct to Vandenberg through the hills. Since I guess we’re going, there, to find this Opperly and all, I think we ought to take it. Save us those miles along the coast highway.”

Hunter stood up in the seat. The side road looked all right, the first short stretch of it, asphaltoid like the one they were on. He thought for a couple of seconds.

In the pause, a profound sound, soft as a sigh, passed overhead traveling from the southeast. None of the saucer students had the dictionary that would translate it into the vanishing three and a half hours ago of the Isthmus of Rivas, Don Guillermo Walker, and Josй and Miguel Araiza.

Hunter shook his head and said loudly: “No, well keep on Monica Mountainway. We were over it yesterday and we know it’s O.K. — no falls or anything. A new road’s an unknown quantity.”

“Yeah?” Hixon commented. “I see you finally took my advice about using the gravity gun to block off those nuts.”

“Yes, I did,” was all Hunter could think of to say, and he didn’t say it pleasantly.

“Then there’s the tide, as Doddsy’s reminded me,” Hixon went on. “Along the Coast Highway we’ve got to worry about that”

“If we get there before sunset it’ll be O.K. Low tide’s at five P.M.,” Hunter told him. “That is, if the tides are sticking anywhere near their old rhythm, which they were doing yesterday.”

“Yeah — if,” Hixon said.

“Anywhere we reach the coast we’ll have the tides to contend with,” Hunter retorted. His nerves were snapping. “Come on, let’s get going,” he ordered. “I’ll take the lead from here.”

He sat down and drove off along Monica Mountainway. After a bit Margo said reassuringly: “Hixon’s following you.”

“He’d damn well better!” Hunter told her.

For forty hours the Wanderer had been raising higher and higher tides, not only in Earth’s crust and seas, but also in her atmosphere — a tide four times greater than the daily heat-tide caused by the sun warming the air. Also, the volcanoes and evaporation from the greatly widened tidal zone had been making their unprecedented contributions to tomorrow’s weather. Vortexes were forming in the disturbed air. Storms were brewing. In the Caribbean, up across the Celebes, Sulu, and South China Seas, and in a dozen other critical areas, the wind was rising as it had never risen on Earth before.

The “Prince Charles” was boldly atom-steaming southeast by the port of Cayenne. Darkly silhouetted against the wild sunset, Cape d’Orange told the great ship it was passing the mouth of the Oyapock River and nearing that of the Amazon. Captain Sithwise sent messages to the four insurgent captains imploring them to head out into the South Atlantic, away from all land. The messages were sneered at.

In one of the areas yet unruffled by the Wanderer winds, Wolf Loner scanned through the graying overcast for Race Point, or Cape Ann, or even for the one-four-three I L-O-V-E Y-O-U wink of the Minot’s Ledge Light, or the sober six-second double flash of the Graves Light in Boston’s Outer Harbor. He knew he should be nearing the end of his voyage, but he had noticed some garbage and odd wreckage floating past the “Endurance” and he hadn’t calculated he was that close to Boston. However, there was nothing to do but keep watch and sail on.

Barbara Katz took the small telescope and climbed on top of the stalled Rolls to scan around over the low tops of the mangrove forest stretching out to either side of the narrow, tide-littered road. There was only the yellow afterglow of the sunset left to see by, reflected from the clouds rapidly moving in on a chilly southeast wind. The weather had changed completely in the last twenty minutes.