The gray pistol dropped, and Margo caught it.

Violet-gray claws dug into Paul’s shoulder, and he and Miaow were swept up, by more than any mere human muscular force, into the pink port. Margo and Doc and Rama Joan, clinging together for support, saw that much very clearly.

The green and violet being whipped back into the saucer after Paul and the cat.

Then, without visible transition, the saucer was hundreds of yards overhead, no bigger than the moon, the port a big, pale dot.

Margo shoved the gray pistol inside her jacket.

The wind from the land faded.

The dot winked out, and the saucer vanished.

Then they were all struggling hand in hand up the beach, through knee-deep water sucking back seawards.

Bagong Bung, steering the “Machan Lumpur” out of the tide-swollen inlet south of Do-Son after a successful though unpleasantly delayed delivery of a cargo of assorted contraband, saw the Wanderer rising out of the cloud-edged Gulf of Tonkin in the young night just as — almost half a planet away — the saucer students, escaped from the tsunami, were watching the last sliver of it sink into the Pacific. To Bagong hung the yin-yang was a familiar Chinese symbol which he liked to think of as the Two Whales, but the deformed moon — at which he swiftly directed his brass spyglass — was now, to him, like a huge bag of faintly yellowed diamonds.

So to Bagong Bung, the Wanderer rising where the moon should have risen alone was not so much a staggering intrusion as a promise of good luck, a supernatural encouragement. Diamonds made him think of the lost treasure ships hidden under the shallow seas around him. He instantly and irrevocably decided that when tomorrow dawned, and with it the low tide came, he would spare time for at least one dive at the new location he’d guessed for the wreck of the “Sumatra Queen"!

“Come up, Cobber-Hume,” he called through the rusty speaking tube to his Australian engineer. “Great good fortune for us. No, I must not tell you. Come up, then you’ll see. Oh, you’ll see!”

Chapter Nineteen

Paul Hagbolt was plunged into a breathable sea of warmth, sweet spicy odors, and gay pastel colors dominated by pink — though here and there were bright green swatches.

For a few moments he hadn’t been at all certain that he’d been snatched inside a vehicle. It seemed more like nearly instantaneous translation to another plane of existence, another spot in the universe — a jungly, bedroomy spot.

He’d hardly seen the saucer. Most of the time it was hovering, he’d been floundering and choking in the gritty salt water clutching Miaow. When he’d been whisked up, his first thought had been that he and Miaow had been spun aloft by the next comber and were riding its top.

Then had come three fleeting yet shockingly vivid flashes: first, a huge, tapering, greenish-purplish cat face; second, two staring eyes with incredible five-petaled irises around the black five-spiked stars of the pupils; third, a long, slim, hand-sized paw with narrow indigo pads and four cruel curving claws of translucent, violet-gray horn — he had the impression that they’d just been buried in the scruff of his coat, and maybe his neck, too, hastening him.

The next instant he was floating with a slow twist in the warm, sugary-flowery, green-flecked, pink sea.

A dark hole in that sea swung into view, and through it he saw Margo thigh-deep in dirty, foamed water holding something gray-gleaming and staring up at him, and beside her Doc, spume-patched, and Rama Joan, sand-streaked, with red-gold hair clinging wet and twisty. Then they were shrinking with incredible swiftness, as if a wrong-ended telescope had been interposed. Nevertheless, it was then that Paul began to believe that he was in the saucer he’d disjointedly seen — the saucer that now must be soaring faster than any mortar shell, though with no sensation of acceleration. Then the hole closed upon jumbly pinkness — in fact, yes, to strange pink flowers.

A word jumped up in his mind: antigravity. If this vehicle carried its own null-gravity field — possibly null-inertia too — that could explain the absence of any felt G-forces, and also his floating, dripping wet, surrounded by floating round drops of this wetness, in breathable perfumy air in a round, flattened room lined with live flowers.

Claws stung his left hand like a dozen wasps: Miaow was terrified by the strange jolts, and insulted by sea water, and she held on to him overtightly. In his sudden agony Paul flung off the soaking cat, and she shot twisting through the air and vanished with a puff of yellow-pink petals into a flowerbank.

The next instant he was grabbed from behind and slammed flat on his back against a hard, satin-smooth surface that had somehow been somewhere in the omni-surrounding flowers. The thing that terrified him most was that the limb that snaked around his neck — a sleek, spring-strong, green-furred limb, barred with violet — had two elbows.

With a whirling speed that did not allow his seeing it clearly, the green and violet tiger-thing worked at his out-flung wrists and ankles. Paws with claws of violet-gray pinched without stabbing; once he felt the grip of something more like a snake. Then the thing kicked off from his side and dived into the flowerbank after Miaow. A long green violet-ringed tail, smoothly furred and tapering, vanished in a larger explosion of petals.

He tried to push himself up from the surface under him and discovered he could budge only his head. Though still in null gravity, he was somehow gyved tautly to that same surface — as was next brought home to him most graphically when he looked straight up and saw not ten feet above him (or below, or out to the side — he didn’t know how to feel about it in null gravity) a spread-eagled, wet-sand-specked, pale, wildly staring reflection of himself, backed by a dozen dimming reflections of reflections of the same ridiculous, poignant picture.

The inner shape and decor of the saucer began to come clear to him. More than half the flowers he’d seen had been reflections. Ceiling and floor were round, flat mirrors facing each other, about nine feet apart and twenty feet in diameter. He was spread-eagled near the center of one of them. The rim between the mirrors was luxuriant with exotic, thick-petaled flowers, large and small — pale yellow, pale blue, violet, magenta, but mostly pink and pinkish red. Seemingly live flowers, for there were leaves shaped like sickles and swords and spears, and there were glimpses of twisting branches — probably their hydroponic or whatever underpinnings filled much of the saucer’s tapered outside rim.

But the triangularly cross-sectioned doughnut of the rim couldn’t be entirely filled with vegetation, for bowered in it beyond his fettered feet he now made out a silvery gray control panel — at any rate some sort of flat surface with smooth silvery excrescences and geometrical shapes limned on it. Straining his head around, he could see similar panels beyond each of his spread and outstretched arms, the three panels being situated relative to each other at the apices of an equilateral triangle incribed in the saucer, but each of them half hidden by the embowering flowers — very much as crassly functional objects such as heater and sink and phone and hi-fi might be masked in the small apartment of a modish and esthetically-minded woman.

The whole was bathed in bright, warm, beachy light coming from…he couldn’t see where. An invisible indoor sun — most eerie.

Eerier still and infinitely closer to home was the feeling that next came to him: that his mind was being invaded and his memories and knowledge riffled through like so many decks of cards. He tritely recalled how a drowning man is supposed to relive his life in a few seconds, and he wondered if it applied when you drowned in flowers — or were crucified by a tiger preparatory to being torn apart and devoured.