“We ended this last trip battered and strained, starving for mass and sunlight. Our insulation from raw hyperspace had shrunk to zero; we almost lost our sky and atmosphere; no one could venture on our upper deck except the inorganic giants which dwell there — the crystal minds which are like colored hills.
“At that we made two false exits in your system, each gobbling up some cubic leagues of fuel we could not spare, but each time had to cancel because the signs weren’t right or else the vectors wrong, the exit spots not near enough your sun or to a moon that wholly suited us.”
Paul interposed automatically: “Only two false exits? There were four photos of twisting starfields.”
“Four photos, but only two false exits — one near Pluto, one near Venus,” she asserted sharply. “Don’t interrupt me, Paul. We finally managed our exit near your moon, the eclipse line-up making a perfect shadow. We surfaced from the sea of hyperspace. But we were almost powerless by then. Why, if we’d had to do battle we could barely have thrown the Wanderer into null gravity for maneuvering.”
“Tigerishka!” Paul protested. “You mean you could have nullified the Wanderer’s gravity field, so that it wouldn’t have caused quakes and huge tides on Earth — and you didn’t?”
“I’m not the Wanderer’s captain!” she snarled at him. “Besides, we had to have full gravity to catch and crush your moon, don’t you see? Full gravity augmented by local churn-fields and torque-volumes. And even in the worst emergencies we must maintain a general fuel reserve for battle — that’s obvious, surely!”
Paul said, “But Tigerishka, compared to the Wanderer’s, the world’s space forces and atomic weapons are a joke. What conceivable battle—”
“Paul, I told you once we were afraid.” There was a dark violet flash from her petaled irises as she turned her head away from him. “The Wanderer’s not the only far-ranging planet in the universe.”
Chapter Thirty-five
Hunter stopped for one last look down the slope before walking ahead past the truck to the Corvette and taking his place behind the wheel. Rama Joan and Margo stood beside him. All the rest were already aboard: Ann and Wanda in the Corvette, the Hixons and Ida in the cab of the truck, the remaining five men crowded in the back of the truck with Ray Hanks. Hunter didn’t like the arrangement, but nothing felt right since Doc’s death: everything was cold and hard and clumsy and uncomfortable, like his own insides.
He hadn’t wanted to take command, he’d tried to wish it on Doddsy, but Hixon had just looked at him steadily and said: “I think Doc would have picked you,” and that had settled it.
He hated making final decisions, like turning down Hixon’s suggestion they use the momentum pistol to move some boulders to block the road; he’d answered that one by pointing out there was a bare one-eighth charge left in the gun, if the violet scale meant what they thought it did. Or ruling whether they should take Mulholland or backtrack all the way to Vandenberg Two; he’d tabled that one until they came to that particular crossroad — and then had to suffer the private criticism of Margo, who’d taken it for granted they’d continue their pursuit of Morton Opperly, especially now that they had his note saying he was going to Vandenberg Two. Margo told Hunter he should have smothered dissension, by making this clear to everyone from the start.
Hardly a word had been spoken about Doc, though that only underlined the gloom. Hunter had quietly asked Wojtowicz what last thing Doc had said that they’d laughed at, and Wojtowicz had replied: “I was just asking him again to take the hat off, that it was bad luck, and he said to me, “Wojtowicz, when you’re as bald as I am and aren’t allowed to hide it any more, you’ll know that’s worse luck!’”
The Ramrod had overheard and said, shaking his head sadly: “I warned him about that hat, too,” and then added something that sounded like, “The sin of pride.”
Wojtowicz had called the Ramrod on that, and Doddsy had tried to smooth things out by saying: I’m sure Charles Fulby was referring to hubris — the sort of high optimism some of the great Greek heroes had that made the gods jealous, so that they destroyed them.”
Wojtowicz had flared back: “Greeks or not, I don’t care, nobody’s going to say anything against Doc!”
Now Hunter looked down at that same black hat, which he’d been carrying crumpled up all this time, and he thought of Doc down there with the three murderers, all the same meat to the buzzards.
“God,” he muttered bitterly, “we’re not leaving him as much of a monument as he did Doddsy’s big stupid mutt.”
He thought of sticking the hat up somewhere, but that was all wrong. He smoothed out the brim and, when a lull came in the breeze, skimmed it down the slope. For a moment he thought it was going to land on the rim, and how horribly inept that would make him out, but it sailed over and out of sight.
Rama Joan gripped his upper arm tight and Margo’s on the other side. Her face and reddish hair were still blackly streaked, her limp, dirty, chopped-off evening clothes a tramp clown’s costume.
“God knows it’s not any monument,” she said in a low voice, huskily, “but Doc laid me here last night.”
Hunter’s eyes filled up. He said chokily: “The fornicating old buzzard!”
Off in the distance, very faintly, he heard the whine of a motor. It seemed to come from the direction of the freeway.
“Do you hear that, Mr. Hunter?” young McHeath called, crouching in the back end of the truck, his rifle ready. Hunter remembered Doc saying how “those murdering drunken kids” would be coming.
The three of them ran for the Corvette. As Hunter piled behind the wheel, Margo in back, Rama Joan in front, on the other side of Ann, he thought, Doc would have walked. Or would he? At least he’d have said something.
He started the motor, then faced around, holding up his right arm.
“If cars come up behind us, you pass me,” he shouted to Hixon. “That way we’ll be able to use the momentum pistol. If they start pointing guns, fire on ’em! O.K., everybody, here we go!”
It wasn’t good, he thought as he shifted into gear, but it would have to do.
Richard Hillary made the acquaintance of Vera Carlisle at a moment when the girl was sitting in the mud in Tewkesbury and crying quietly.
Sitting in the mud was getting to be quite the way to meet people, Richard reflected, and truth to tell it was at least a great deal better than finding them lying face down in it.
She was crouched so mouselike in the little side street and crying so quietly that he might well have missed her had not the night been still so light two hours after sunset. She was carrying nothing but a small transistor wireless, which she hugged like a baby.
During the past thirty-six hours Richard had witnessed several rescues and reunions and numerous befriendments, and now he realized that he wanted very much to befriend someone himself. He was acutely anxious that no one but he should hear this girl’s soft sobs, or come upon them before her sobs had been stilled and at least the first gestures of comradeship made.
As he approached her he had the thought of how chilly it was getting and the memory of how warmly the couples had seemed to be sleeping last night under the straw, and also the thought of how this was the end of the world, or at least a very good imitation; yet at the same time it seemed to him that those thoughts did not fully describe his present motives.
He offered her fresh bread he had saved from a thrifty scatter of little loaves dropped near Cleeve from a helicopter, but it turned out that Vera’s chief discomfort was that she was thirsty. Getting water in the new tidal areas was no simple matter, with all the reservoirs and wells and springs salt-drowned. Some pipes held fresh water, but that was chancy.