The Wanderer

by Fritz Leiber

  Doc groaned, fringe-audibly.

  Major Humphreys froze. “Flying saucer bugs?”

  “That’s right,” the Little Man retorted sweetly. “But please—not bugs—students.” His left arm was jerked back and he rocked onto his heels as Ragnarok, in a flurry of uneasy effacement, tugged at the leash.

  “Students,” Major Humphreys echoed doubtfully, looking them up and down, almost, Paul thought, as if he were going to demand to see their college registration cards.

  Paul said earnestly: “Their cars were buried in a landslide along with mine, Major. Miss Gelhorn and I would hardly have got here without their help. There’s nowhere for them to go now. One of them has had a heart attack and one is a child.”

  Major Humphreys’ gaze hesitated at Rama Joan, who was standing behind Hunter. She stepped forward around him and showed all of herself—her shoulder-length, red-gold hair and her white-tie evening clothes—then smiled gravely and made a little bow. Ann, with her matching red-gold braids, came forward beside her. They looked as strangely beautiful and as insultingly perverse as an Aubrey Beardsley illustration for The Yellow Book.

  “I’m the child,” Ann explained coolly.

  “I see,” Major Humphreys said, nodding rapidly as he turned away. “Look, Paul,” he said hurriedly. “I’m sorry about this, but Vandenberg Two can’t possibly take in quake refugees. That question’s already been explored and decided. We have our own vital work, and an emergency only tightens security regulations.”

  “Hey,” Wojtowicz broke in. “You’re saying the quakes were really big in L.A. County?”

  “You can see the fires, can’t you?” Major Humphreys snapped at him. “No, I can’t answer questions. Come in through the tower, Paul. And Miss Gelhorn—by herself.”

  “But these people aren’t ordinary refugees, Major,” Paul protested. “They’ll be helpful. They’ve already made some interesting deductions about the Wanderer.”

  As soon as he spoke that last word, the gold-and-purple orb, momentarily out of mind, was once again dominating their thoughts.

  Major Humphreys’ fingers gripped through the mesh as he drew his face dose to Paul’s. In a voice in which suspicion, curiosity, and fear were oddly mixed, he demanded: “Wanderer? Where did you get that name? What do you know about the…body?”

  “Body?” Doc cut in exasperatedly. “Any fool can see by now it’s a planet. Currently the moon’s orbiting behind it.”

  “We’re not responsible for it, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Rama chimed in lightly. “We didn’t conjure it up there.”

  “Yes, and we don’t know where the body was buried beforehand, either,” Doc added zestfully. “Though some of us have notions about a cemetery in hyperspace.”

  Hunter kicked him surreptitiously. “‘Wanderer’ is simply a name we gave it because it means ‘planet’,” he interposed soothingly to the major.

  “Wanderer will do well enough, though the true name be Ispan.” The Ramrod’s voice boomed out hollowly from where his angular face, eye sockets and cheeks deep-shadowed, rose over Beardy’s shoulder. He added: “Belike the imperial sages have but now touched down in Washington.”

  Major Humphreys’ shoulders contracted as if he’d been stung between them. He said curtly: “I see.” Then, to Paul: “Come on through. And Miss Gelhorn—without that cat.”

  “You mean you’re turning these people away?” Paul demanded. “After I vouch for them? And one of them deathly ill?”

  “Professor Opperly will have something to say about your behavior, Major, I’m sure,” Margo put in sharply.

  “Where is this heart case?” Major Humphreys demanded, his knee starting to jump as the guard’s had.

  Paul looked around for the cot, but just then Wanda pushed her considerable bulk forward between Hunter and Rama Joan. “I’m she,” she announced importantly.

  Doc groaned again. Wojtowicz looked at the fat woman reproachfully, rubbing the shoulder that had taken the strain on the cot corner.

  Major Humphreys snorted. “Come on—the two of you, alone,” he said to Paul, and turned back toward the jeep.

  Hunter muttered to Margo: “Better take him up on it before he changes his mind. It’s the best thing for you and Paul.”

  “Without Miaow?” Margo said.

  “We’ll take care of her for you,” Ann volunteered.

  That last did something to Paul’s churning uncertainties. It might be the sheerest sentimentality to let the last straws of a cat and a child’s unthinking generosity weigh down the balance. But: “I’m not coming!” he heard himself shout.

  In a voice that tried not to be waspish, Major Humphreys called back: “Don’t be melodramatic, Paul. You haven’t the choice. You can’t desert the Project.”

  Margo’s free arm went around Paul and tightened encouragingly. Doc muttered in his ear: “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Paul shouted: “The hell I can’t!”

  Major Humphreys shrugged and got into the jeep. The guard shut the tower door behind him and moved out toward the twelve standing in front of the gate. “Get moving, you people,” he said edgily, wagging the muzzle of his gun. A heavy wire looped behind him from his left hand—the controls of his jump rockets.

  Except for the Little Man, everyone stepped back from the gun—even Ragnarok, for the Little Man had dropped the leash as he stared through the fence in scandalized amazement.

  “Major!” the Little Man called. “Your conduct is outrageous and inhumane, and I’ll see to it that my opinion goes on record! I’ll have you know that I’m a taxpayer, sir. My money supports installations like Vandenberg Two and pays the salaries of public servants like yourself whether they’re in uniform or not, and no matter how much brass there is on that uniform! You will please reconsider—”

  The guard moved toward him. It was clear he wanted this whole problem out of sight before he was alone again. He grated: “Shut up, you, and get moving!” And he lightly prodded the Little Man in the side with the muzzle of his gun.

  With a growl like clockwork going out of control, Ragnarok shot from behind the group, leash flirting behind him, and launched himself at the guard’s throat.

  The guard’s jump rockets blossomed—as if he had grown a second pair of legs, bright orange—and he lifted into the air, up and back. As he did so, he gave a remarkable demonstration of accurate shooting on the rise, sending four slugs crashing into his attacker. The big German police dog flattened and never moved again.

  The group started to run, then stopped.

  The guard sailed over the fence and dropped inside, his rockets blossoming briefly to cushion his landing.

  The Little Man dropped to his knees beside the body of his dog. “Ragnarok?” He paused, uncertain. Then, “Why, he’s dead,” and his voice was full of bewilderment.

  Wojtowicz picked up the aluminum cot and ran forward with it.

  “It’s too late for anything,” the Little Man murmured.

  “You can’t leave him here,” said Wojtowicz.

  They heaved the dead dog onto the cot. The Wanderer was more than bright enough to show the color of blood.

  Margo gave Miaow to Paul and took off her jacket and laid it over Ragnarok. The Little Man nodded to her dumbly.

  Then the little cortege moved off the way it had come, through the twilight that was flecked with purple and gold.

  Young Harry McHeath pointed up over the sea. “Look,” he said. “There’s a white sliver. The moon’s coming out from behind the Wanderer.”

  DONALD MERRIAM shivered as he saw the faint black threads joining the nose of the moon to the top of the Wanderer turn bone white—making them suddenly easy to see and more suggestive than ever of a spiderweb.

  Then the nose of the moon turned almost glaringly bone white, too: a tiny white crescent that swiftly lengthened and widened. The white threads came out of the white moon-nose and then looped up.

  A profoundly disturbing thing about the crescent: a
s it grew, it seemed to become too convex, as though the moon were tending toward the shape of a football. And this too-convex leading rim wasn’t smooth against black, star-specked space, but just a bit jagged. The boundary between black moon and crescent was a bit jagged, too. Also, there were sharp cracks in the surface of the crescent, as if it were a moon in a Byzantine mosaic.

  Suddenly a white glare erupted dazzlingly from starboard into the nose of the Baba Yaga. Reflection from the port rim of the spacescreen almost blinded Don.

  He shut his eyes and groped on the rack for a pair of polarizing goggles, put them on and set them to max. Then, with a double puff of the vernier rockets, he swung the ship a shade to starboard.

  There, just risen from behind the Wanderer, was the blazing round of Sol next to the dark circle of Earth—a whitehot dime beside a sooty dollar. Like the moon and the threads, the Baba Yaga had completed its first passage behind the Wanderer and emerged into sunlight again.

  Don adjusted the goggle visors to block off the sun, then cut the polarization until he could see Earth’s night side by Wanderer-light. The eastern third of North America had slipped around the righthand rim into day. All of South America was gone. The rest of the globe was Pacific Ocean, except where New Zealand had started to show on the lower lefthand rim—it would be nightfall there.

  Don was startled at how much it warmed his heart to see Earth again—not lost on the other side of the cosmos, but a mere quarter of a million miles away!

  NEW ZEALANDERS and Polynesians ran out from their supper-tables and supper-mats to stare at the prodigy rising with the evening. Many of them assumed the Wanderer must be the moon, monstrously disfigured—most likely by American or Soviet atomic experiments gone out of control—the purple and the gold the aura of a moon-wide atomic blast—and they were hours being argued out of this conviction. But most of the inhabitants of Australia, Asia, Europe, and Africa were still going about their daytime business blissfully unaware of the Wanderer, except as a wild, newspaper-reported Yankee phenomenon, to be classified with senators, movie stars, religious fundamentalism, and Coca-Cola. The shrewder souls thought: Publicity for a new horror film, or—aha—pretext for new demands on China and Russia. No connection was seen—except by a few supersubtle psychologists—between the crazy news stories about the moon and the real enough reports of earthquake disasters.

  The Atlantic Ocean was also on Earth’s day side now, but there it was a different story, since most of the craft plying its shipping lanes and airways had observed the Wanderer during the last hours of the night. These furiously searched the static-disturbed wavebands for news and tried to get off reports and requests for advice to owners and maritime authorities. A few headed for the nearest ports. Others, with a remarkably knowledgeable prudence, turned toward the open sea.

  The “Prince Charles” suffered a drastic transition. A group of fascistic Brazilian insurgents, with the help of two officers of Portuguese extraction, seized control of the great luxury liner. Captain Sithwise became a prisoner in his own cabin. The plans of the insurgents had been brilliantly conceived, but would probably never have been successful except for the excitement attendant on the “astronomical emergency.” With a feeling almost of awe they realized that, at the expense of six men shot and three of their number wounded, they had gained control not only of a ship big as a resort hotel, but of two atomic reactors.

  Wolf Loner breakfasted comfortably and went about his small morning chores as the “Endurance” wested steadily beneath the overcast. His thoughts occupied themselves with the great regularities of nature, masked by modern life.

  Don Guillermo Walker sped in the Araizas’ launch out of Lake Nicaragua into the San Juan River, past the town of San Carlos, as dawn reddened the jungle. Now that the Wanderer was out of the sky, Don Guillermo was less inclined to think about it and about the volcanoes and earthquakes, and more inclined to dwell on his successful bombing of el presidente’s stronghold in the tiny plane that now rested in the bottom of the lake. Sic semper all leftists! At last he had really graduated from the namby-pamby John Birch Society!…or at least that was how Don Guillermo thought of it.

  He struck his chest and cried: “Yo soy un hombre!” One of the Araiza brothers, squinting against the rising sun, nodded and said: “Sí,” but rather unenthusiastically, as if being a man were not quite that grand a matter.

  Chapter

  Fifteen

  PAUL HAGBOLT had to admit to himself that walking through sand does get tiring, even when you’re with new friends and under a sky bright with a new planet. The exhilaration of defying Colonel Humphreys and the Moon Project had worn off very quickly, and this backbreaking trudge across the beach seemed peculiarly purposeless and depressing.

  “It gets lonely, doesn’t it?” Rama Joan said softly, “when you cut yourself off from the big protector and throw in your lot—and your girl friend’s—with a bunch of nuts, just to attend a dog’s funeral.”

  They were walking at the tail end of the procession, well behind the cot borne between Clarence Dodd and Wojtowicz.

  Paul had to chuckle. “You’re frank about it,” he said. “Margo’s not my girl friend, though—I mean the feeling’s all on my side. We’re really just friends.”

  Rama Joan looked at him shrewdly. “So? A man can waste his life on friendship, Paul.”

  Paul nodded unhappily. “Margo’s told me that herself,” he said. “She claims I get my satisfaction out of mother-henning her around and trying to keep other men away from her. Except for Don, of course—and she thinks my interest in him is more than brotherly, even if I don’t know it.”

  Rama Joan shrugged. “Could be, I suppose. The set-up of you and Margo and Don does seem unnatural.”

  “No, it’s perfectly natural in its way,” he assured her with a kind of gloomy satisfaction. “The three of us went to high school and college together. We were interested in science and things. We meshed. Then Don went on to become an engineer and a spaceman, while I took the turn into journalism and PR work, and Margo into art. But we were determined to stick together, so when Don got into the Moon Project, we managed to, too, or at least I did. By that time Margo had decided she liked him a little better than she did me—or loved him, whatever that means—and they got engaged. So that was settled—maybe simply because our society frowns on triangular living arrangements. Then Don went to the moon. We stayed on Earth. That’s all there is to it, until this evening, when I seem to have thrown in with you people.”

  “Maybe because you had an explosion overdue. Well, I can tell you why I’m here,” the red-blonde woman continued. “I could be safe in Manhattan, an advertising executive’s wife: Ann going to a fancy school, myself fitting in an occasional lecture on mysticism to a women’s club. Instead, I’m divorced, eking out a tiny inherited income with lecture fees, and dressing up the mysticism with all sorts of carnival hokum.” She indicated her white tie and tails with a disparaging laugh. “‘Masculine protest’, my friends said. ‘No, just human protest’, I told them. I wanted to be able to say things I really meant and say them to the hilt—things that were mine alone. I wanted Ann to have a real mother, not just a well-dressed statistic.”

  “But do you really mean the things you say?” Paul asked. “Buddhism, I gather—that sort of thing?”

  “I don’t believe them as much as I’d like to, but I do believe them as much as I can,” she told him. “Certainty’s a luxury. If you say things with gusto and color, at least you’re an individual. And even if you fake it a bit, it’s still you, and if you keep trying you may some day come out with a bit of the truth—like Charlie Fulby did, when he told us he knew about his wild planets not by flying-saucer trips, as he’d always claimed, but by pure intuition.”

  “He’s paranoid,” Paul muttered, gazing ahead at the Ramrod where he marched behind the cot, with Wanda to his right and the thin woman to his left. “Are those two women his disciples, or patrons, or what?”

  “I’m sure h
e is somewhat paranoid,” Rama Joan said, “but you surely don’t believe, do you, Paul, that sane people have a monopoly of the truth? No, I think they’re his wives—he grew up in a complex-marriage sect. Oh, Paul, you do find us alarming, don’t you?”

  “Not really,” he protested. “Though there’s something reassuring about moving with the majority.”

  “And with the money and the power,” Rama Joan agreed. “Well, cheer up—the majority and the nuts spend most of their time the same way: satisfying basic needs. We’re all going back to the pavilion on the beach simply because we think there’ll be coffee and sandwiches.”

  At the head of the procession, Hunter was telling Margo Gelhorn very much the same sort of thing. “I started going to flying-saucer meetings as a sociological project,” he confessed to her. “I went to all kinds: the way-out contactees like Charlie Fulby, the sober-minded ones, and the in-between-ers and freewheelers, like this group. I wanted to analyze a social syndrome and write a few papers on it. But after a while I had to admit I was keeping on going because I was hooked.”

  “Why, Professor Hunter?” Margo asked, hugging Miaow to her. She was cold without her jacket, and the cat was like a hot water bottle. “Does saucering make you feel bohemian and different, like wearing a beard?”

  “Call me Ross. No, I don’t think so, though I suppose vanity plays a part.” He touched his beard. “No, it was simply because I’d found people who had something to follow and be excited about, something to be disinterestedly interested in—and that’s not so common any more in our money-and-sales-and-status culture, our don’t-give-yourself-away yet sell-yourself-to-everybody society. It got so I wanted to make a contribution of my own—the lecturing and panel bits. Now I do almost as much saucering as Doc, who knocks himself out selling pianos—he’s a whiz at that—so he can divide the rest of his time between saucering, chess, and living it up.”