There was another blue flash, and another. The breeze became a wind, and now the inappropriate odor came clear: it was the smell you got near the river. And there was a roaring growing louder.
“Dark train coming on both tracks!” Arab screeched.
The blue flashes came closer, closer, became brighter, brighter. The salty, sour wind was a gale; papers and dust were flying; the roaring was that of a thousand lions.
For a moment, clutching each other on the platform, they saw it clear: the foamy front dark with dirt and footed with blue flame.
Then the electricity-loaded piston of salt water struck.
Sally Harris and Jake Lesher nibbled scrambled eggs and caviar from a silver platter set over a blue flame and a crystal bowl set in ice.
“Gee, we’re high up,” Sally said, gazing out across the penthouse patio. “All I can see is the Empire State, RCA, the Chrysler, the Sixty Wall Tower…and is that bitty point the Waldorf Astoria?”
“Forty stories before we switched to Hasseltine’s private elevator,” Jake told her as he spooned caviar onto a toasted split bagel. “I counted.”
Sally took her coffee cup to the tubular chrome balustrade and peered over with a reckless swoop. “Whee, people look like gumdrops,” she called back to him. “They’re running — I don’t know why. Jake, once I asked you what those little hydrants are for that they have sticking out of buildings — I thought they were for putting out fires in cars, remember, or holding back mobs of rioting garment workers.”
“Naw, they’re for washing down the sidewalks in the morning,” Jake instructed her, pouring himself a cup of coffee from the tall slim pot with the red light at its base.
She nodded. “I thought so — they’re using them now.”
“Naw, they do it at four a.m. Now it’s eight.” His eyes grew distant. It felt to him as if the money-thought he’d had in Times Square were at last coming back.
“Well, maybe, but it looks awfully wet.” She studied a while longer. Then, “Jake?”
“What now? Sal, I’m trying to think.”
“You’re right. The water’s not coming out of those little hydrants. It’s coming out of the subways.”
Jake jumped up and came down with a heel-slam that jolted him painfully. The floor had jumped, too. The building roared and lurched — and lurched again. He flailed the air with his arms and grabbed the chrome balustrade where Sally was rocking and squealing above the roar. Blocks down, her coffee cup and large flakes of stone made pin-point flat splashes.
The lurching and roaring faded. Sally leaned over and pointed straight below at a black ribbon coming out of their building near the base.
“Look!” she yelled. “Smoke! Oh’ Jake, isn’t it exciting?” she demanded as he dragged her back. “We ought to make a play out of it!”
In the chaos of the moment, Jake still was able to realize that this was the money-idea for which he had been groping.
Behind them the telltale red light at the base of the coffee pot went out, and the orange glow of the toaster faded.
The saucer students had outrun three more sloshing earthquake waves that were more spume than water — calf-deep fakes — and had actually reached dry sand and halted there, most of them winded, the Ramrod and Ida half dragging his other woman between them, when the really big combers started chasing them all.
Up ahead, the rounded foothills of the Santa Monica mountains loomed dark and heavy against a sky that had begun to gray with the dawn. Nearer, but already quite far, the bobbing lights of the truck continued to recede. Hixon had taken the most direct course away from the sea, a course midway between the great hump of Vandenberg and the crumbled lower palisades that had buried the cars, and the others had followed the truck. This had been wise — any other course would have had them running slantwise to the waves across even lower beach; the trouble was that even the midway course was nothing but sand and flat sandy ground for a long distance — a dry river wash.
Behind them the Wanderer touched the ocean’s rim. The curving moon-lozenge was crossing its front again. The planet itself was showing once more its yin-yang face, though seemingly tilted over — Doc, gasping, thought, Why, this is where we came in. The thing’s completed one rotation — it’s got a six-hour day. Then something black and square and lace-sided reared up and blocked off the Wanderer from him.
It was the platform where they’d held their saucer symposium, upended by the second of the big combers.
Then he heard the roar.
The others had started to run again and he pounded after them, tiny needles teasing his heart.
Then…well, it was as if in one terrible, instantaneous swoop the Wanderer had leaped a quarter of a million miles out of the heavens and poised itself just above them, shutting off all of the sky except a circular gray horizon-border.
It was enough to stop them in their tracks, despite the pale, wreckage-fisted horrors roaring at them up the beach.
Hunter was the first to get distances and dimensions right, and he thought, Why, it’s simply (my God, simply!) a flying saucer forty feet across, antigravitically poised a dozen feet above us and painted with a violet-gold yin-yang. Then he started running again.
The first and least of the big combers plastered them with spume and surged around them knee-high. Although most of their minds and senses were still glued to the thing above them, their bodies responded to the material assault. They grabbed at each for support; hands clutched slippery hands or wet waists or soggy coats. Wanda went under, and Wojtowicz ducked for her.
Margo’s nails dug into Paul’s neck and she screamed in his ear: “Miaow! Get Miaow!” and she jabbed her other hand beyond him. He glimpsed a tiny cat tail and ears disappearing in the dirty spume and he crazily dove after them, clutching ahead. So Paul missed what happened next.
A pink port five feet across flashed open in the saucer’s center, and there swung out of it, hanging just above their heads by two clawed limbs and a pointed prehensile tail, a green-and-violet-furred -
“Devil!” Ida screamed. “She said there’d be devils!”
“Tiger!” yelled Harry McHeath. Doc heard and his mind threw out, as uncontrollably as a pair of honest dice, the thought: My God, the second Buck Rogers Sunday page! The Tiger Men of Mars!
“Empress!” the Ramrod cried, his cold knees buckling, and in his nostrils, framed by the sea’s mucky stink, the breath of a heavenly perfume…
Big, black-centered violet eyes scanned them all very rapidly, yet with an impression of leisurely spectator disdain.
The second huge comber wasn’t thirty yards away, the platform riding it like a surfboard, scattered chairs bobbing all around, and behind it the half-exploded beach house coming on, too.
A green paw shot out, pointed a taper-snouted gray pistol seaward, and fanned it back and forth.
There was no flash or glow or sign, but the great wave sank, shriveled, dissolved. The platform slipped back over it and to the side. The broken beach house veered toward Vandenberg. All spume shot away, vanished. Confused loomings and shrinkings. The water was hardly thigh-deep and it lacked the punch of the first comber when it struck them at last.
The gray pistol kept on fanning back and forth over their heads.
A great gust of wind whipped past them from the land. Doc, caught off balance, started to fall. Rama Joan heaved back on him.
Paul’s head and shoulders emerged from the foam. He was clutching a rat-wet Miaow to his shoulder.
The wind kept blowing.
The being hanging from the rim of the pink port seemed to lengthen out, almost impossibly, becoming a violet-barred green curve stretching toward Paul.