When the flask was crushed flat, he handed it back to her, unintentionally adding: “Thank you” — but before the words could come out, her pads had lightly slapped his lips and the gag was back again.
He wondered dully if the gag was a matter of pure suggestion or some impalpable film, or some instantaneous electrophoretic tissue-impregnation — cafaphoresis, doctors actually called it! — or whatnot else — but a thought-jumbling lethargy was swiftly stealing over his body and mind. Fatigue or drugs? That too was too hard to think about.
Drowsily he realized that the saucer’s invisible indoor sun had faded to twilight. Through sleep-mist he felt the freeing brush of Tigerishka’s fur against his left wrist and ankle, so that only his right ankle still fettered him.
He folded himself into a uterine position and drifted toward deeper sleep.
The last thing he was aware of was Tigerishka’s neutral, “ ’Night, monkey.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
The Wanderer showed Earth its yin-yang face for a fifth time. For a full day now it had hung in Terra’s night sky. For the meteorologists at the South Pole International Observation Station, deep in the unbroken night of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, the Wanderer had made a full circuit of the sunless sky, keeping always the same distance above the icy horizon, and now hung once more where it had first appeared above the Queen Maud Range and Marie Byrd Land. Great green auroras sprang from the snows and glowed around it.
The strange planet mightily restimulated some supernatural beliefs and many sorts of mania.
In India, which had thus far escaped the severer earthquakes and suffered minimal tidal damage, it was worshipped by large congregations in nightlong rites. Some identified it as the invisible planet Ketu, at last disgorged by the serpent. Brahmins quietly contemplated it and hinted it might mark the dawn of a new kalpa.
In South Africa it became the standard of revolt for a bloody and successful uprising against the Boers.
In Protestant countries the Book of Revelation was searched through in thousands of Bibles never before read or even opened.
In Rome the new Pope, who was a Jesuit-trained astronomer, combatted superstitious interpretations of events, while the paparazzi found films and lenses for their cameras which would enable them to snap movie stars and other notorious notables gesturing at the Wanderer or background by it — as Ostia fought flood, and the new Mediterranean tides pushed up the Tiber.
In Egypt a felinoid being landing from a saucer was identified as the benign goddess Bast by an expatriate British theosophist, and the cult of cat-worship got off to a new beginning. According to the theosophist, the Wanderer itself was Bast’s destructive twin: Sekhet, the Eye of Ra.
There was an odd echo of this development in Paris, where two felinoids, repeating Tigerishka’s mistake, loosed from the zoological gardens all the tigers, lions, leopards, and other large felines. Some of the beasts appeared in Left Bank cafes. A similar liberation occurred at the Tiergarten in Berlin, where the animals were threatened by flood waters.
Strange, strange to think that Don Merriam was sleeping snugly now in his little cabin aboard the Wanderer, just as Paul was sleeping as soundly aboard Tigerishka’s saucer.
While the Wanderer caused numerous panics and outbursts of mania, its sudden appearance and the catastrophes attendant on it acted in other instances as a sort of shock therapy. There were literal outbursts of sanity in the violent wards of mental hospitals. Seeing the impossible made real, and even nurses and doctors terrified by it, satisfied some deep need in psychotics. And private neuroses and psychoses became trivial to their possessors in the face of a cosmic derangement.
On others the Wanderer bestowed a last-minute ability to look on the truth, if not to struggle against it. As Fritz Scher, now waist-deep in salt water, looked out of the window in the Tidal Institute at Hamburg toward dawn, the clouds lifted a little in the west like a curtain half drawn up, and from beneath them the Wanderer glared at him full in the face. Things at last came clear in his mind as a powerful new surge of water toppled him and carried him back from the window. As he clutched futilely at the sleek sides of the tide-predicting machine while the tide carried him along it, he used his last breaths to cry out over and over: “Multiply everything by eighty!”
Barbara Katz felt the bed under her move a little on its casters, as the dark, third-floor hotel room rocked with the building holding it She mastered the impulse to jump up and she pressed closer to old KKK, then reached her hand across him to Helen on his other side. An hour ago the old man had shaken with a chill. This afternoon it had been the heat that had troubled him, but now with the icy waters of the Atlantic washing across Florida, it was the cold.
Benjy, standing at the window, his face ghostly in the Wanderer-light, reported: “Water over first-floor windows and pressing us hard. Here come a summer bouse. Hear it bang us? Sort of crunchy.”
“Get in you cot, Benjy, and get some rest.” Hester called from the corner. “If this place go, it go. Water knock to come in, you cain’t tell it, ‘Stay out!’ ”
“I ain’t got your calm, Hes,” he told her. “I should’ve stayed with the car, make sure they leave it on top the mound. Water be pretty close to it by now, though.”
“They’d better not have moved it!” Barbara called softly but feelingfully over her shoulder. “That parking place was part of the five thousand we’re paying for this room.”
From the other side of old KKK Helen called with just a ghost of her giggle: “I wonder those skinflints remember to bring the cash box upstairs. Else she be washed away sho!”
“Quiet,” Hester called. “Benjy, get in you cot.”
“Where’s the attraction?” he asked pensively from the window. “Helen got to sleep with the Old Man, help keep him warm. And that pancake makeup and powder Miss Barbara put on my face itch it.”
“Quit bellyachin’, darkie,” Hester told him. “Helen and I get by as nurses, but you need a little lightening. Don’t make you pass, but it justify you. Show you trying to please. With that and a thousand-dollar bill, you get anywhere.”
Benjy said, the pale light in his eyes now as he lifted them: “Old Wanderer got the monster on him once again. He spin fast.”
The room rocked. Timbers creaked. Benjy announced: “Water up another band’s width. Seem to me the angles is shifting.”
Helen raised up. “You think we should—” she began in a tight, breathy voice.
“Quiet!” Hester commanded heavily. “Everybody got to be quiet now, and lie down. We enjoyin’ five thousand dollars. Benjy, you tell me when that water up to you neck — and not before! Good night.”
In the dark Barbara thought of the Sebring race course a mile off, and all those fine-tuned motors in their pits under the salt sea, the oil washed away. Or had they been smart and roared north to safety in a red-blue-green-yellow-silver pack? She pictured outboards racing the Sebring course. She pictured the drowned rockets a hundred miles beyond at Cape Kennedy.
Old KKK groaned faintly and mumbled something. Barbara stroked his papery, furrowed cheek, but he kept on muttering. His fingers, which he kept close to his chest as one praying, were working a little. She reached down the bed and found the fashion doll in its black lace underwear and laid it in them. He quieted. She smiled.
The room rocked.
Sally Harris had put on a pearl-encrusted evening sheath from the very interesting wardrobe in the bedroom adjoining Mr. Hasseltine’s. Jake Lesher had draped his frame in a dark blue serge suit that was a little long for him everywhere, making it zooty looking. They sat at the grand piano, which was topped by flat wine glasses and two champagne bottles.