The Wanderer

by Fritz Leiber

  The advertisements were a bit brighter by contrast, especially the new sixty-foot genie bafflingly juggling the three oranges big as bushel baskets.

  But the streets were no longer still. While some people just stood there and stared west, the majority were rhythmically swaying: not a few had joined hands and were snaking about with a compulsive stamp, while here and there young couples danced savagely. And most of them were humming or singing or shouting a song that had several versions, but the newest of these was being sung at the source, where Sally Harris still danced, though now she had acquired a supporting team of half a dozen sharp, aggressive young men besides Jake Lesher. And the song as she sang it now, her contralto more vibrant for its hoarseness, went:

  Strange orb!…in the western sky…

  Strange light!…streaming from on high…

  It’s a terrifying sight

  But we’re gonna live tonight,

  Live with a neo-bop beat!

  Golden!…like treasure ships…

  Crimson!…as sinful lips…

  But there’ll be no more June

  ’Cause there ain’t no more moon—

  Just a

  Planet!…on Forty-second Street!

  All of a sudden the singing and dancing stopped everywhere at once—because the dance floor had begun to tremble. There was a brief shaking. A few tiles, not many, and other trifles of masonry fell, cracking sharply against the sidewalks. There were screams—not many of those, either. But when the little earthquake was over, it could be seen that the sixty-foot genie had lost his three oranges, though he still kept going through the motions of juggling.

  ARAB JONES and his weed-brothers walked rapidly, three abreast, along 125th Street away from Lenox, in the direction all the other dark faces were peering: west, where the Wanderer was setting, a great gaudy poker chip—bloated purple X on orange field—that almost covered the pale gold-piece of the moon. Soon the heavenly pair would be hidden by the General Grant Houses, which emphasized with their tall, remote bulking the small-town look of Harlem, the two- and three-story shop-fronted buildings lining 125th.

  The three weed-brothers were so loaded that their excitement had only been heightened by the quake, which had brought out onto the street most of those who weren’t already watching the Wanderer.

  The east was rosy, where the sun, pausing in the horizon wings for his entrance, had washed out all the stars and brought the morning twilight to Manhattan. But no one looked that way, or gave any sign that it might be time to be off and doing or trying to get some sleep. The spires of lower Manhattan were an unwatched fairy-tale city of castles to the south.

  Arab and Pepe and High had long since quit trying to push through the staring, mostly silent crowd on the sidewalks and had taken to the street, where no cars moved and fewer people clustered and where the going was easier. It seemed to Pepe that a power came out of the planet ahead, freezing all motors and most people like some combined paralysis-and-motor-stalling ray out of the comic books. He crossed himself.

  High Bundy whispered: “Old moon really going into her this time. He circle in front of her, decide he like her, then whoosh!”

  Arab said, “Maybe he hiding ’cause he scared. Like we.”

  “Scared of what?” asked High.

  “The end of the world,” said Pepe Martinez, his voice rising in a soft, high wolf-wail.

  Only the rim of the Wanderer showed above the General Grant buildings, which were mounting swiftly up the sky as the weed-brothers approached them.

  “Come on!” Arab said suddenly, catching hold of the upper arms of Pepe and High and digging his fingers in. “World gonna end, I gettin’ off. Get away from all these owly-eyed deaders waitin’ for the tromp and the trump. One planet go smash, we take another. Come on, before she get away!—We catch her at the river and climb aboard!”

  The three began to run.

  PAUL AND MARGO and their new friends were sitting on the sand fifty feet in front of the dark gate when the second quake jolted the beach. It did nothing beyond rocking them, and there was nothing they could do about it, so they just gasped and rocked there. The soldier ran out of the tower with his submachine gun, stopped, and after a minute backed inside again. He did not answer when Doc called cheerily: “Hey, wasn’t that a sockdolager!”

  Five minutes later Ann was saying: “Mommy, I’m really getting hungry now.”

  “So am I,” said young Harry McHeath.

  The Little Man, diligently soothing a very upset Ragnarok, said: “Now, that’s a funny thing. We were going to serve coffee and sandwiches after the eclipse. The coffee was in four big thermos jugs—I know, because I brought it. It’s all still down at the beach.”

  Wanda sat up on her cot, despite the thin woman’s protests.

  “What’s all that red glow down the coast?” she demanded crossly.

  Hunter started to tell her, not without a touch of sarcasm, that it was merely the light of the new planet, when he saw that there really was another light-source—an ugly red furnace-flaring which the other light had masked.

  “Could be brush fires,” Wojtowicz suggested somberly.

  The thin woman said: “Oh dear, that would have to happen now. As if we didn’t have enough trouble.”

  Hunter pressed his lips together. He refused to say: “Or it could be Los Angeles burning.”

  The Little Man recalled their attention to the heavens, where the purple-and-yellow intruder now hid the moon completely. He said, “We ought to have a name for the new planet. You know, it’s funny, one minute it’s the most important thing in creation to me, but the next minute it’s just a patch of sky I can cover with my outstretched hand.”

  “What’s the word ‘planet’ really mean, Mr. Brecht?” Ann asked.

  “‘Wanderer,’ dear,” Rama Joan told her.

  The Ramrod thought: Ispan is known to man by a thousand names, yet is still Ispan.

  Harry McHeath, who’d just discovered Norse mythology and the Eddas, thought: Moon-Eater would be a good name—but too menacing for most people today.

  Margo thought: They could call it Don, and she bit her lip and hugged Miaow so that the cat protested, and tears lumped hotly under her lower eyelids.

  “Wanderer is the right name for it,” the little Man said.

  The yellow marking that was the Broken Egg to the Ramrod and the Needle-Eye to Ann now touched the lefthand rim of the Wanderer as they viewed it. The yellow polar patches remained and a new central yellow spot was crawling into view on the righthand rim. In all, four yellow rim-spots: north, south, east and west.

  The Little Man got out his notebook and began to sketch it.

  THREE

  HOURS

  “The purple makes a big X,” Wojtowicz said.

  “The tilted cross,” the Ramrod said, speaking aloud at last “The notched disk. The circle split in four.”

  “It’s a mandala,” said Rama Joan.

  “Oh yeah,” Wojtowicz said. “Professor, you was telling us about those,” he addressed himself to Hunter. “Symbols of psychic something-or-other.”

  “Psychic unity,” the bearded man said.

  “Psychic unity,” Wojtowicz repeated. “That’s good,” he said matter-of-factly. “We’re going to need it.”

  “For these we are grateful,” Rama Joan murmured.

  Two big yellow eyes peered over the hump of the big gully in Vandenberg Two. There was a growling roar. Then the jeep was careening down toward the gate, its headlights swinging wildly over brush and rutted dry earth.

  “Everybody on your feet,” Paul said. “Now we’ll get some action.”

  DON MERRIAM could see a thick-waisted, asymmetric hourglass of stars in the spacescreen of the Baba Yaga. Some of the stars were slightly blurred by the dust-blasting the screen had suffered during his trip through the center of the moon.

  The black bulk shouldering into the hourglass from port was the moon, now totally eclipsed by the vast, newly appeared body.
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  The Wanderer, shouldering into the starry hourglass from starboard, was not entirely black—Don had in view seven pale green glow spots, each looking about 300 miles across, the farther ones being ellipses, the nearest, almost circular. They were featureless, though at times there was the suggestion of a phosphorescent pit or funnel. Of what they signified, Don had no more idea than if they had been pale green spots on the black underbelly of a spider.

  In company with the moon, the Baba Yaga was orbiting the Wanderer, but slowly gaining on Luna because the little ship, nearer the Wanderer, had the faster orbit.

  He warmed the radar. The return signal from the moon showed a surface more irregular than craters and mountains alone could account for, and even in five minutes the patterns had greatly changed: the tidal shattering of Luna was continuing.

  The surprisingly strong signal from the intruding planet showed a spherical, matte surface with no indication at all of the greenish glow spots—as if the Wanderer were smooth as an ivory ball.

  Intruding planet!—impossible, but there it was. At the top of his mind Don tried to recall the scraps of speculation he’d read and heard about hyperspace: the notion that a body might be able to travel from there to here without traversing the known continuum between, perhaps by blasting or slipping into some higher-dimensioned continuum of which our universe is only a surface. But where in all the immensity of stars and galaxies might the there of this intruding planet be? Why should the there even be anywhere in our universe? A higher-dimensioned continuum would have an infinity of three-dimensional surfaces, each one a cosmos.

  At the bottom of Don’s mind there was only an uneasy voice repeating: “The earth and sun are on the other side of that green-spotted black round to starboard. They set ten minutes ago; they’ll rise in twenty. I have not traveled through hyperspace, only through the moon. I am not in the intergalactic dark, staring at a galaxy shaped like a sheaf or an hourglass, while seven pale green nebulas glow to starboard…”

  Don was still in his spacesuit, but now he removed and secured the cracked helmet. There should be a sound one in the locker. “Make and mend,” he muttered, but his throat closed at the sound of his own voice. He unstrapped himself from the pilot’s seat to push as close as he could to the spacescreen. The cabin was chilly and dark, but he turned on neither heat nor light—he even dimmed the control panel. It seemed all-important to see as much as possible.

  He was gaining on the moon, all right, with his inside orbit: the sheaf of stars ahead was very slowly widening to port, as the black bulk of the eclipsed moon dropped back.

  Suddenly he thought he saw, against the star-studded glow of the Milky Way, wraithlike black threads joining the top of the Wanderer—call it its north pole—to the leading rim or nose of the moon. Looping through space, the black strands were so nearly imperceptible that, like faint stars, he could detect them best by looking a little away from them.

  It was as if, having snared and maimed the moon, the Wanderer were spinning a black shroud around it, preparatory to sucking it dry.

  He shouldn’t have started to think about spiders.

  The voice kept repeating: “The sun and Earth are beyond the green-spotted black bulge to starboard. I am Donald Barnard Merriam, lieutenant, U.S. Space Force…”

  BARBARA KATZ, her back to the other ocean bordering America 3,000 miles east of the saucer students, saw the mandala as a purple-spoked oxcart wheel. The huge wheel seemed to revolve a quarter turn as the planet touched the horizon.

  “Gee, Dad, it’s as if the Wanderer were lying down,” she said, all at once feeling agonized and desperate because she wouldn’t be able to see the next face the Wanderer showed, or to see the moon come out from behind it, either. But it would all be on TV. Or would it? Will there still be TV? she asked herself, looking around incredulously. Everywhere the sky was paling with the dawn that would not reach the Pacific Coast for another three hours.

  From beside Barbara, Knolls Kettering III said in a groggy voice she hadn’t heard before: “I’m very tired…Please…”

  She grabbed his arm as he swayed and leaned most of his weight on her—which wasn’t a great deal. Inside the white suit his body seemed like the curved, brownish husk of an insect, while his face was as hollow-cheeked and crisscrossed with wrinkles as an Indian great-grandmother’s. Barbara was almost shocked, but then she reminded herself that he was her own private millionaire, to preserve and to cherish. She made her grip more delicate on his shoulder, as if it were a shell she might crush.

  The older Negro woman, dressed like the younger, in pearl gray with white collar and cuffs, came fussing up and took hold of him on the other side. This seemed to irritate him awake.

  “Hester,” he said, leaning away from her toward Barbara. “I told you and Benjy and Helen to go to bed hours ago.”

  “Huh!” she laughed softly. “As if we would leave you playing around with that telescope in the dark! You watch how you put your weight now, Mister K. Plastic in your hip get tired working all night, it break easy.”

  “Plastic can’t get tired, Hester,” he argued wearily.

  “Huh! it not anywhere as strong as you, Mister K!” she said, putting him off. She looked across him questioningly at Barbara, who nodded firmly. Together they walked him across the thick, weedless carpet of the lawn, up three spotless concrete steps, and through a big cool kitchen with old, nickel-heavy fixtures that seemed to Barbara huge enough for a hotel.

  Halfway up a wide stairway, he made them stop. Perhaps the vast, cool, dark living room next to the stairs took him back into the night, for he said: “Miss Katz, every heavenly body that seems to stand erect when it’s high in the sky, appears to lie down when it rises and sets. It’s true of constellations, too. I’ve often thought—”

  “Come on now, Mister K, you need your rest,” Hester said, but he fretfully shook the arm she was holding and said insistently: “I have often thought that the answer to the Sphinx’s question of what goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at midday, and three legs at evening was not Man but the constellation Orion walking just ahead of the Dog Star, whose rising signaled the flooding of the Nile.”

  His voice wavered on the last words, and his head drooped, and he permitted himself to be led upward again. Barbara, feeling his weight on her arm—more than he was putting on Hester, she was pleased to note—thought: I guess I can see why you’re thinking of three legs at evening, Dad—or four.

  They laid him down on a big bed in a dark bedroom bigger than the kitchen. Hester whisked something from the pillow into a drawer, then changed her mind and let Barbara see it.

  It was a slim, black-haired fashion doll about ten inches high, dressed in black lace underwear and black stockings and long black gloves.

  Knolls Kettering III muttered thickly: “For midday, read midnight”

  Hester looked up from the doll to Barbara’s long black foot-gloves and playsuit and black hair, and she grinned.

  Barbara couldn’t have stopped herself from grinning back, even if she’d wanted to.

  Chapter

  Fourteen

  PAUL HAGBOLT faced Major Buford Humphreys through the beach gate of Vandenberg Two. Margo stood beside him holding Miaow. The ten saucer students were crowded around them. The edges of all their shadows made purple and golden flecks on the silvery mesh of the gate.

  There were gold and purple flecks in the Pacific behind them as well, where the Wanderer, still rather high in the sky, had begun a coasting descent toward the placid ocean. It still showed the face Rama Joan had called the mandala, though now the western yellow spot was growing and the eastern one shrinking as the orb rotated. It cast a strong twilight across the scrubby coastal landscape and turned the sky a slate gray through which only five or six stars showed.

  The jeep that had brought Major Humphreys down the gully from the heights still growled behind him and stared with its unnecessary headlights. One of the two soldiers with him sat at the wheel, the other stoo
d at his side. The heavily-armed soldier on guard at the gate stood outside the fence in the dark doorway of the guard tower. His eyes were on the major. His submachine gun was in shadow except for a purple ring showing on the muzzle.

  Major Humphreys had the thoughtful eyes and downturned mouth of a schoolteacher, but right now his dominant expression was the same as that of the soldier on guard—tension masking dread.

  Paul, his soft, handsome face firmed a bit by the responsibility he felt, said: “I was hoping it would be you, Major. This saves a lot of trouble.”

  “You’re lucky, because I didn’t come on your account,” Major Humphreys retorted sharply, then added in a rush: “A few others of the L.A. section made it before the Coast Highway went. We’re hoping the rest will arrive by the Valley—over Monica Mountainway or through Oxnard. Or we’ll lift them out by ’copter—especially Cal Tech. Pasadena really got it in the second quake.” He checked himself with a frown and a headshake, as if irritated at having impulsively said that much. Then he continued loudly, speaking over the flurry of exclamations from the saucerites. “Well, Paul, I haven’t got all night—in fact, I haven’t got a minute. Why’d you come by the beach gate? I recognize Miss Gelhorn, of course—” He nodded curtly toward Margo—“But who are the others?” His gaze flickered across the saucer students, pausing doubtfully at Ross Hunter’s full brown beard.

  Paul hesitated.

  Doc, looking like a long-faced, modern day Socrates with his hairless dome and thick glasses, cleared his throat and prepared to risk all by rumbling: “We are clerical members of Mr. Hagbolt’s section.” He suspected that this was one of those moments when a large white bluff is essential.

  But Doc had hesitated a fractional second too long. The Little Man, pushing to the front between him and Wojtowicz, fixed the major with a benign stare. A confident smile nestled under his brush mustache as he said with lawyer-like glibness: “I am secretary and we are all members in good standing of the Southern California Meteor and UFO Students. We were holding an eclipse symposium at the Rodgers beach house, having signed permission from the Rodgers estate and—although it was not strictly needed—approval from your own headquarters.”