Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

Hester stuck her head out of the back and whispered up loudly: “Stop pounding around up there, Miss Barbara. You ’sturb what little power of life Mr. K got left.”

Helen was squatting to hand tools to Benjy under the back of the car, where he was trying to free the inside of the left wheel from a great length of heavy wire that it had somehow picked up and wound tightly around itself, coil on coil, and which had only been noticed when the wheel jammed.

Benjy crawfished out and squatted down beside Helen, and after he’d breathed hard and rested his head in his hands a bit, he shook it and said: “I don’t know if I can free it. I ain’t got proper clippers, and that wire on there just solid like. Must be wrap around two hundred times.”

To Barbara, scanning around from the roof and trying to shift her feet as little as possible as she braced herself against the wind, the wonder was that Benjy had been able to get the car going at all after its drowning, and that they had actually managed to drive a whole skidding, spitting, backfiring hour north before this new trouble had come.

Hester leaned out to say harshly: “You better free it, Benjy. This the lowest-lookin’ region we been yet, and these twisty little trees ain’t no good for roosting.”

“Hes, I don’t think I can. Not in less than two-three hours, anyway.”

“Hey!” Barbara called down to them, her voice excited. “Down the road — not more than a mile — I can see — sticking out of the treetops — a white triangle! I think we’re saved!”

“Now what good is a white triangle to us, child?” Hester demanded.

“Benjy,” Barbara called, “do you think you could figure out a stretcher for Mr. K — or carry him for a mile?”

“Well,” he called back, “I done just about everything else.”

Bagong hung crouched calf-deep in fish-stinking bottom-muck and shoveled into it frantically with a short-handled infantry spade. Every now and then he’d drop the spade to scrabble in the mud for something muck-coated and small which he’d thrust without inspection into a cloth bag and go on shoveling.

There were jellyfish weals on his legs, and his left hand was puffy where a shell had stung it, but he paid no attention to these hurts though he would occasionally spare a moment to drive his spade viciously through some sinister-looking worm, or knock aside a green crab that came crawling too close.

He was doing his spading almost in the center of a sharp-ended lozenge seventy feet long and twenty wide, intermittently outlined by black, rotted wood crusted with shells and coral. It mightn’t be the “Lobo de Oro,” but it certainly looked like the remains of some old ship.

Fifty feet away Cobber-Hume stood bent over on a hatch cover from the “Machan Lumpur” furiously working a bicycle pump. The pump was attached to a bright orange life raft that was hardly a quarter inflated. Two small orange cylinders tossed aside were of the gas that should have inflated the raft effortlessly, but hadn’t.

Another fifty feet beyond him the “Machan Lumpur” lay flat on her side, showing all of her pitifully rusted, weed-draped bottom.

The new-risen sun intermittently cast grotesquely tall shadows of the two men and the little steamer across the tide-drained floor of the Gulf of Tonkin and illumined the Wanderer setting in the west in her bull’s-head face, which Bagong hung called besar sapi — “big cow.”

Ragged clouds were scudding north with a wild swiftness, driven by a wind that moaned around the toppled Tiger of the Mud. A sudden gust took Cobber-Hume by surprise, and he staggered and slipped about on his none too stable pumping platform.

Bagong hung paused with elbows on knees and panted for breath. Then “ Lekas, lekas!” he cried reprovingly at himself and began to shovel again. His spade brought up a sea-eaten angle of wrought iron which might have been the corner of a chest and that set him working still faster.

Cobber-Hume shouted earnestly: “You better quit mucking for loot, sobat, and get some tucker and fresh water lekas out of the ‘Lumpy’ or give me a hand with this ruddy pumping. When the tide comes she’ll be a bloody bitch, and this wind’ll bring her faster, and then all the golden wolves in the world won’t help us — or even a platinum dingo!”

But all Bagong hung would answer was, “ Lekas, lekas!” The little Malay shoveled and scrabbled, the big Australian pumped, the clouds sped thicker between Earth and the new-risen sun, the wind whistled.

Barbara Katz shouted over the wind: “There it is!”

The same lightning flash that showed the upper mangrove branches lashing against the dark speeding clouds also revealed the white triangle of the prow of a sailboat sticking out at least fifteen feet overhead from between two of the close-crowding trees.

Barbara shifted the heavy thermos jug to her left hand and the big flashlight to her right and switched it on as she walked toward the trees under the prow. It showed the deep keel jammed between the lower branches of three of the mangroves.

Benjy laid down old KKK in his blanket on the road.

Hester and Helen set down their bags and knelt anxiously beside the old man.

Benjy came up behind Barbara. He was panting. “Shine her — on the hull,” he managed to say.

They pushed their way through the undergrowth, shining the flashlight upward on one side of the keel, then on the other. Barbara made out the boat’s name: “Albatross.”

“Don’t seem to be no holes in her,” Benjy said after a bit, speaking close to Barbara’s ear. “Reckon her mast must be broke off short, though, or you’d have seen it. I think she float with the tide. Maybe she jam too tight, but I don’t think so. I can climb up by the branches, and then I got this to help you all up.” He touched the rope slung in loops around his chest.

The wind died a little and he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted up: “Hello! Anybody aboard?”

The lull in the wind held for two seconds more, then as it rose again, Benjy said: “Seem to me I hear a wailing then. Different from the wind.”

“So did I,” Barbara replied, her teeth chattering — mostly from the cold, she told herself. She flashed her light straight overhead. “Oh, my God!”

Poking out over the side of the boat in the middle of the flashlight beam was a tiny white furious face with mouth open wide.

“It’s a little kid!” Benjy cried.

“Be ready to catch him, Benjy,” Barbara said.

“It’s a baby!” Helen yelled, coming up behind them. She waved her hand at the little wailing face. “You stay up there now, baby! Don’t you drop. We a-coming!”

Sally Harris and Jake Lesher cringed from the downdraft of the big rotors which whipped their clothes and made them squint their eyes, and which wildly blew about the charcoal-starter flame they’d fired in the barbecue bowl as an SOS beacon.

It was dark but clear, and the golden and purple beams of the Wanderer rising in its dinosaur face twinkled from black wavelets almost level with the penthouse patio floor and occasionally foaming over it, but the wind from the rotors drove the foam back.

The big helicopter masked the gray sky overhead and its rotors cut darkened circles in it.

A white rope-ladder came snaking down toward them and with it a big voice that called: “I got room for only one more!”

Jake snagged the ladder with one hand and lunged for Sally with the other, but the flames were between them, and as she started past she knocked the barbecue bowl over ahead of her, and the hot fuel hissed against the water and went up in a great blinding sheet, driving her back. An instant later all flame was gone, but now the ladder was tugging Jake away. He turned and grabbed the lowest rung with both hands and pulled himself clear. His feet skimmed the patio floor. The next moment he dropped off and tumbled in a heap against the balustrade, the wavelets foaming around him.