The general grabbed her by the shoulder. “You goddamn stupid bitch,” he snarled. Then he looked her in the face and he slid his fingers inside her collar, and took hold of it to tear it down. “Yes,” he said harshly, nodding once. “Whether you like it or not.”

He hesitated, then said apologetically but very stubbornly, “There’s nowhere else to escape to, is there, except into each other.”

She grinned with her teeth at him. “Let’s do this right, you big brass bastard,” she told him. Her eyes narrowed. “We’re finished,” she said thoughtfully, hitting each syllable as if she stepped on stones, “but if we could work so that we hit the climax just as we drowned…We’ll have to wait till the water’s over us — It mustn’t be too soon…”

“My Christ, you’ve got it, Mab!” the general said loudly, grinning down at her like a blocky death’s-head.

She frowned. “Not all of it,” she said, just loudly enough for him to hear her over the sizzling water-spurts — there were three of them now. “There’s something else. But it’s enough to start on, and I’ll think of the other thing after a while.”

She unbuttoned her soaking coat and shirt and unhooked her brassiere. The flashlamp strapped to his chest shone on her breasts. He entered her, and they got to work.

“Take it slow now, you old bastard,!” she told him.

When he clutched her to him, the flashlamp made a reddish square in her chest that shone out faintly through her breasts.

When the water was an inch from the top of the cabinet they paused for a while.

“Like rats in a trap,” she said to him fondly.

“You got quite a tail, Mrs. Rat,” he said to her. “I always thought you were a Lesbian.”

“I am,” she told him, “but that’s not all I am.”

He said, “About that black tiger we thought we saw—”

“We saw it,” she said. Then her face broke into a smile. “Strangling is a very quiet death,” she said. She dabbled her hand in the water, as if she were on her back in a canoe — and, for a moment, she was. “That’s from The Duchess of Malfi, General. Duke Ferdinand. Nice, don’t you think?” When he frowned speculatively, she said, still smiling tranquilly: “I’ve read in more than one place that a hanged man always has a climax — and strangling’s like hanging. I don’t know if it’s true of women, but it could be, and my sex always has to take the chances. At least it ought to help the water a little, and if we could make the three things come together…Enjoy killing a woman, General? I’m a Lesbian, General, and I’ve slept with girls you never got. Remember the little redhead in Statistics who used to twitch her left eye when you barked at her?”

Just then the water came rilling over the cabinet top, and the ventilator tore loose, and a great inorganic sobbing began as, alternately, a log of water shot down the hole and a log of air escaped up it, rhythmically. The cabinet shook.

The general and Colonel Mab got to work again.

“I won’t squeeze so hard right away, you goddamn girl-defiling bitch,” he shouted in her ear. “I’ll remember you’re the woman.”

“You think so?” she shouted back, and her long-fingered, strong-fingered strangler’s hands came up between his arms and closed around his neck.

Chapter Twenty-four

Paul Hagbolt’s joints and muscles had begun to ache from his starfished posture, despite the easement of null gravity. He thought some modest complaints about it, to no effect.

After getting over his first terror of Tigerishka, he’d spoken his complaints and started to ask many questions, too. But she had said: “Monkey chatter,” and run a dry velvet paw across his lips, and a paralysis had gripped his throat and his face below the nose — somehow an invisible gag had been applied.

At least his aches took his mind off his humiliations. He was naked now. After discovering that the primitive mind in the saucer was Paul’s and not Miaow’s, Tigerishka had riffled through his thoughts again with contemptuous speed. Then she had stripped off his wet clothes with even greater dispatch, momentarily freeing an invisible gyve from ankle or wrist to facilitate the process. Next she had subjected him to an unfeeling anatomical inspection, as coldly as if he were a cadaver. Finally — capping indignity! — she had affixed to his crotch a couple of sanitary arrangements.

Tubes snaked from them to the same silver-gray panel into which, through a briefly dilating door, she’d thrown his wet clothes. Paul named it the Waste Panel.

In the warmth of the cabin it was more comfortable being naked, though comfort did not cancel humiliation.

After attending to the obviously distasteful Paul-chore, Tigerishka had gone about her own activities. First she had groomed herself and Miaow, using not only a long, pointed, pale violet tongue more like a frog’s than a cat’s, but also two silver combs which she wielded equally well with all of her four paws and also her prehensile tail. As she rhythmically combed, she softly wailed discordant, eerie music, somehow producing three voices simultaneously. The captured hair from her combing went into the Waste Panel.

Then, with sublime or simply horrid feline indifference to the world in agony below them — if, as Paul wondered, the saucer were still hovering over Southern California or even Earth — she had fed Miaow. From the second of the three panels — Paul named it the Food Panel — she had produced a fat, dark red worm which Paul uneasily felt was synthetic rather than natural. It wriggled just enough to vastly interest Miaow, who played with it for some time in free fall while Tigerishka watched, before slowly chewing it up with signs of great satisfaction.

Then Tigerishka had gone to the third panel, which after a bit Paul was calling the Control Panel, and busied herself with what he assumed to be her regular work, which seemed to be that of observer.

The first time the mirror he faced turned to transparency, Paul was distinctly glad of the sanitary arrangements.

About half a mile below him churned and spouted an angry gray sea from which a solitary, rocky island poked and in which a large long tanker wallowed, green water flowing over its bow.

The transparency of the facing wall was perfect. He felt he was about to drop through a large ring of flowers toward the maelstrom. Then the mirror was there again.

The same thing happened a half a dozen times in quite rapid succession, observation heights varying sharply. He hung cringe-stomached over sea, coast, and farmland. Once he thought he recognized the north end of the San Fernando Valley with a section of the Santa Monica mountains, but he couldn’t be sure.

There was no mistaking the next view, though. They were at least five miles up, but there was nothing below them almost to the edges of the thirty-foot window but city — sunlit city, bordered by sea on one side, mountains on two, and just stretching out on the fourth.

The city was smeared across with six parallel brush strokes that began, mostly near the sea, in bright vermilion but quickly changed to the brownish black of heavy smoke spreading over the mountains inland.

It was Los Angeles burning. This time the saucer hung low enough for Paul to identify the main fire-spots: Santa Ana, Long Beach, Torrance, Inglewood, the Los Angeles Civic Center, and Santa Monica, the last blaze licking along the southern slopes of the Santa Monica mountains through Beverly Hills and Hollywood.

Margo’s tiny house in Santa Monica and his own apartment were gone, it looked like.

They were too high for him to more than fancy the ant-scurry of cars, the clustering of the rectangular red beetles of fire trucks.

The seacoast to the south looked wrong. In places the Pacific came too far inland.

He started to strangle and realized he’d been trying to scream to Tigerishka, against the invisible gag, to do something about it.