The Wanderer

by Fritz Leiber

  Then from Doddsy’s car came two machetes (Paul chuckling to himself at the romanticism of it), and two army-surplus rifles with ammunition. Lastly, three five-gallon cans and a length of hose which they used to siphon gas from the tanks of the buried cars to fill the truck’s tanks and make a fifteen-gallon reserve.

  Wojtowicz shouldered one of the rifles and announced: “Hey, look, I’m back in the service! Forward…march!—I got a clownish side,” he explained to Paul.

  The loaded truck, though sluggish once or twice in the looser sand, did the return trip readily enough. Hixon even whirled it in for a landing as fancy as a speedboat’s with the tailgate abutting the raised platform.

  Doc’s comment, when he’d surveyed the treasures, was, “Doddsy, I see everything here for emergencies but hard liquor—or soft, for that matter,” he added, shaking his head incredulously at the label on a near-beer can.

  “I have an ample supply of barbiturates and Dexedrine,” the Little Man batted back at him.

  “Not the same thing,” Doc mourned. “I never was partial to goofballs. Now if it were mescaline, say, or peyote, or even a few sticks of marijuana…”

  Wanda glared. Harry McHeath laughed nervously, and Wojtowicz said solemnly, with a warning glance at Doc: “He’s jokin’, kid.”

  Doc grinned and said to the thin woman: “Break out the last of the hot coffee, Ida. The Hixons still haven’t had any, or sandwiches either, and we can all do with a bite and a cup. Now we know Doddsy’s got jars of the powdered, there’s no need to hoard. Besides, we’ll need the jug for water from the beach-house tank—I’ve checked it, and it’s drinkable. Some of you may think I’m nothing but a C2H5OH maniac, but actually I give an occasional thought to H2O.”

  Agreement on the coffee suggestion was unanimous. Everybody was tired and glad to sit or flop on the platform, up off the gritty sand. In their midst on the cot was Ray Hanks, with his leg wrapped and taped until it looked, in Wojtowicz’s words, like a section of sewer pipe. But the injured man was resting tolerably after being dosed with the rest of Doc’s whiskey—and with the Ramrod keeping a light “healing touch” on his hip.

  Ida poured first for the Hixons, who were sitting side by side now, he with his arm around her. They looked at each other, then touched cups rather solemnly. It set a tone. There was something solemn about them all as they started to sip their last scant cups of brewed coffee. As Hunter had divined earlier, each in his way felt that this place was home and dreaded the moment of departure. Here on the beach there were no hills to fall, no buildings to collapse and burn, no gas pipes to crack and flare hot yellow, or wires to fall and flash blindingly. (True, there was the beach house, looking lopsided now with one wall knocked askew by the quake, but it was dark and low and boarded up, and so could be ignored.) There were no strangers monitoring their actions, no victims to enjoin their aid. Static choked what messages of catastrophe, what do’s and don’t’s, what police and Red Cross and Civilian Defense directives must be crowding the airwaves. It was good to dream of just staying here, a compatible little beach colony—just staying here and watching the Wanderer, which was sinking and showing toward the ocean, the moon again eclipsed behind it and the planet itself showing a face like that of a bull charging purple head on, the yellow target-center half out of sight and a larger, lower yellow round creeping into view. By chance, or conceivably by intention, two small yellow ovals made eyes. Doddsy set down his coffee cup to sketch it.

  FIVE

  HOURS

  “El toro,” Margo said.

  Rama Joan said: “The head of an octopus. The Cretans drew it just so on their vases.”

  “But we’re going to have to get out of here—and in three or four hours,” Doc said suddenly, as if aware of the general, unstated dream of staying forever on the beach. “The tide.”

  Hunter frowned at him warningly and Doc hastened to say: “Now, don’t anybody get me wrong—we’re in no danger right now, in fact, just the opposite. The high-water interval here is about ten hours, which means a low tide comes about four hours after the moon’s at the top of the sky. In other words, in about an hour the tide’ll be dead low. See how far away the edge of the surf is? That leaves us ample time for a good rest—which I for one fully intend to take.”

  “But whaddya mean, Doc, the tide?” Wojtowicz asked.

  Again Hunter frowned and shook his head slightly.

  Doc said to Hunter: “No, Ross, I think we better face up to it now when we’ve got a breathing space.” Then, turning toward Wojtowicz: “You know of course how the moon—the mass of the moon—is the main cause of the tides? Well, now we’ve got the Wanderer out there. It’s about the same place as the moon, so we can expect the tides to have about the same general pattern as before.”

  “That’s good,” Wojtowicz said. “For a minute you had me scared.”

  But most of the others were looking at Doc now and they weren’t smiling. He sighed and said: “However, judging from the way it’s captured the moon, the Wanderer must have a mass about as great as Earth—in other words, a mass eighty times that of the moon.”

  There was a rather long silence. The one word “eighty” hung in the air like a gray rock, getting bigger and solider every second. Only the Ramrod and his two women didn’t seem greatly concerned. Hunter was frowning worriedly, watching reactions. Rama Joan, her lap once more a pillow for her sleeping daughter, suddenly smiled at Doc warmly. Mrs. Hixon put out her hands a little as if to say, “But…” Her husband drew them down to her lap and hugged her a little tighter as he nodded solemnly at Doc. Paul did the same, at last putting an arm around Margo. The Little Man pocketed his notebook and folded his arms.

  Doc looked back at them all with a rather sorrowful, thoughtful grin.

  It was young Harry McHeath who finally put it into words.

  “You mean, Mr. Brecht, that although the tides will be coming at the same times and in the same general way as before, they’ll be…eighty times bigger?”

  “He didn’t say that!” Hunter interposed hotly. “Rudy, you’re not allowing for the age of the tides. We should have a day’s grace in any case. Besides that, tides are a resonance phenomenon—it should take quite a while for the oceanic tidal bands to get to vibrating in a larger amplitude.”

  “That may be true,” Doc said. “Also there’ll be spill-over effects to moderate the factor of eighty. However,” he went on more firmly, “that two-tone planet is out there, and thinking isn’t going to change its mass. You’ve seen what it’s done to the moon. Whether it’s going to take seven hours or a week, the big water’s coming, and when it does I’m going to feel securer if I’ve got a couple of hills under me. That’s why I inquired about Monica Mountainway,” he explained to the Hixons. “Nevertheless—” he continued very loudly, checking the excited flood of talk just beginning—“before a man makes an effort, he gathers his strength—as I’m going to do right now. Anyone wants to waste energy jabbering, go ahead. He won’t bother me.”

  And he stretched out on four chairs, put his arm across his eyes, and, presently, gave out with a large, theatrical snore.

  DON MERRIAM, orbiting for a second time behind the Wanderer, suddenly thought of the menace to Earth which the mere physical presence of the strange planet constituted. Why, there would be earthquakes—possibly—and gigantic ocean tides—certainly, though he wasn’t sure how quickly they’d build up—and there might be…well, he didn’t think the Wanderer could crack the Earth at this distance, but just the same he wished he could look at Terra right now, with his binoculars, and reassure himself.

  It was his duty to warn Earth, or at least to try, no matter how hopeless the attempt seemed. He warmed the radio of the Baba Yaga and began alternately to send and listen. Once he thought he heard the beginning of a reply, but it faded.

  He wondered if anything down on that green-spotted black hemisphere could be listening in.

  ARAB JONES and his weed-brothers on Manhattan Island were almost twic
e as far into the day as the saucer students were still in the night, since the dawn-line at this moment was sweeping west across the Rocky Mountains at its customary 700 miles an hour, also bringing rosy daybreak and the buzzards to Asa Holcomb’s mesa.

  Somewhere near Roosevelt Square Arab pointed up at the roofs and cried: “There they are!”

  High and Pepe looked. The low roofs were lined with people, explaining in part the mystery of deserted 125th Street. Some of the people were looking down at them, and a few were beckoning urgently and calling.

  But it was impossible to make out the words because of the loud chugging of an abandoned taxi, skew-parked so close by that High clutched one of its open doors to steady himself.

  “They crazy they think they escape the bombs that way,” Pepe said, peering upward. “Bombs come from space, don’t burrow up through the lock from old Pellucidar.”

  “You sure of that?” High demanded. “Maybe that fireball tunneling from the river!”

  “They all awaiting the glorious fireball!” Arab cried loudly, spreading his arms to comprehend the roofs. “They all dead already. Like Manator! They a rooftop wax museum! All New York!”

  Abruptly the fear-kick in that last vision became absolutely real fear, and the thought of being spied upon and chittered at and lured and finally, irresistibly summoned by all those dark, wax-skinned living mummies fifty feet overhead became quite intolerable.

  “Let’s get out of here!” High yelled. He crouched down and squat-stepped into the front of the taxi. “I getting out!”

  Arab and Pepe piled into the back. The forward lurch of the taxi slammed the door shut and sent them back against the cold, slick leather cushions as High headed west, gathering speed as he wove around abandoned cars.

  THE STAMPEDE of sections of the New York City Police and Fire Departments, marring the metropolis’ relatively swift and sensible preparations for catastrophe, was due to a number of factors: exaggerated reports of the tidal bulge at Hell Gate and the quake damage to the Medical Center on upper Broadway, scrambled directives sent out by a water-shorted computer in the underground center of the new interdepartmental coördinating system, and false reports of riots around the Polo Grounds.

  Yet just plain nerves played their part—naked fear operating alongside the frantic urge to rush out and somehow play the hero. It was as if the Wanderer were finally bringing true the old lunatic superstitions about the moon pouring down rays of madness. All over the Western Hemisphere—in Buenos Aires and Boston, in Valparaiso and Vancouver, there were the same wild, purposeless sorties.

  HIGH BUNDY was stepping on the gas three blocks west of Lenox when he and Pepe and Arab heard the sirens coming. At first they couldn’t tell where they were coming from, only that they were coming, because they were getting louder fast.

  Then the cab crossed Eighth Avenue, and as the raucous wailing crescendoed they saw charging toward them up Eighth, not a block away, two squad cars abreast and what looked like more behind them, their red business-lights flashing.

  High stepped harder. The sound of the sirens should have cut down for a couple of seconds while there were buildings between the cab and the police cars. But it didn’t. It got louder.

  There was an old jalopy abandoned smack in the middle of the next intersection. High aimed to pass it to the right A Black Maria and a fire chief’s car hurtled out of Seventh Avenue from the south and swerved around the jalopy to either side. High stepped to the floor and held his course, just missing their tails, and got across Seventh feet ahead of a big, end-swinging firetruck following the other two cars by hardly a length. Pepe glimpsed the great red hood and the wide-eyed face of the driver and clapped his hands to his eyes, it was so close.

  The cab wasn’t halfway down the next block when the intersection ahead filled with more red and black cars, racing north on Lenox. The sound of the sirens from behind and ahead was brain-shaking.

  If the weed-brothers hadn’t been loaded on pot, they might have realized that this stampede of police cars and firetrucks from lower Manhattan had nothing to do with them personally and that the ferocious vehicles weren’t converging into 125th Street, but continuing their mad dash north.

  But the weed-brothers were loaded, and the master fear-kick of pursuit by police was upon them. Pepe believed they were to be scapegoats for an attempt to destroy Manhattan by suitcase bombs—they’d be frisked for fireballs and convicted on the evidence of a Zippo lighter.

  Arab knew it was the purpose of the police to frog-march them to the nearest roof and tie them down among the grinning wax mummies.

  High simply thought they’d been spotted smoking weed back at the river—probably by telepathy. He braked the cab to a stop just short of Lenox. They piled out.

  The subway entrance yawned with the dark invitation of a cave or den, promising the security all terrified animals crave. There was a white sawhorse half blocking it, but they darted past and clattered down the stairs.

  The token booth was empty. They scrambled over the turnstiles. There was a lighted train waiting, its doors open. But there wasn’t anybody in it.

  The station was lit, but they couldn’t see any people anywhere, on this platform or the one across.

  The empty train was purring softly and insistently, but after the sirens faded there wasn’t another sound.

  Chapter

  Eighteen

  DESPITE DOC’S SNORING for morale purposes, no one except Rama Joan tried to follow his example, and after a half hour or so Doc himself lifted his head, propping it up on his doubled arm, so as to get into an argument Hunter and Paul were having about the paths in space Earth and the Wanderer would take with respect to each other.

  “I’ve figured it all out in my head—roughly, of course,” Doc told them. “Granting they’re of equal mass, they’ll revolve around a point midway between them in a month lasting about nineteen days.”

  “Shorter than that, surely,” Paul objected. “Why, we can see with our own eyes how fast the Wanderer’s moving.” He pointed to where the strange planet, maroon and light orange now, was dipping atilt toward the ocean, the blunt yellow spearhead of the moon striking across its front almost from below.

  Doc chuckled. “That movement’s just the Earth turning—same thing as makes the sun rise.” Then, as Paul grimaced in exasperation at his own stupidity, Doc added: “Natural enough mistake—I keep making it in my own mind, which I inherited from my cavemen ancestors along with my tail bones! Say, look how far the sea’s gone out! Ross, I’m afraid the tidal effects are showing up faster than we hoped.”

  Paul, trying to get back into the swing of the discussion, made himself visualize how tides eighty times higher would mean tides eighty times lower too—at six-hour intervals, at most places.

  “Incidentally,” Doc added, “we’ll be about ten days getting into that nineteen-day orbit, since Earth’s acceleration is only about five-hundredths of an inch a second. That of the moon, also in respect to the Wanderer, must have been about four feet a second, cumulative, of course.”

  A chilly land-breeze came sneaking around Paul’s neck. He pulled his coat tighter—he’d got it back from Margo when the Little Man had given her one of the leather jackets. In spite of that she had Miaow inside the jacket to make her warmer as she stared out across the long, flat beach.

  “Look how the light glistens on the wet gravel,” she said to Paul. “Like amethysts and topazes shoveled out of trucks.”

  “Ssh,” said the fat woman, beside her. “He’s getting messages.”

  Just the other side of Wanda, the Ramrod was gazing at the Wanderer as though hypnotized by it, his chin on his fist, rather in the attitude of “The Thinker.”

  “The Emperor says, ‘No harm to Terra’,” the Ramrod droned just then in a trancelike voice. “‘Her turbulent waters shall be stilled, her oceans withdrawn from her shores’.”

  “A planetful of King Canutes,” Doc murmured softly.

  “Your emperor ought to hav
e got on the ball in time to stop the earthquakes,” Mrs. Hixon called tartly. Mr. Hixon laid his hand on her arm and whispered to her. She flirted her shoulders, but made no more cracks.

  Rama Joan opened her eyes. “How are your speculations going now, Rudolf?” she challenged Doc. “Angels? Or devils?”

  He replied: “I’ll wait until one flies in close enough for me to see whether his wings are feathery or leathery.” Then, realizing that he’d not necessarily made a joke, he looked quickly toward the Wanderer with a sardonic shudder. Then he stood up and stretched himself and surveyed the platform.

  “Ha, I see you loaded the truck while I snoozed,” he commented blandly. “That was considerate. Didn’t even forget the water jugs—I suppose I have you to thank for that, Doddsy.” Then, softly, to Hunter: “How’s Ray Hanks?”

  “Hardly woke up when we moved the cot into the truck and guyed it to the sides. Put a blanket around him.”

  There was a droning in the sky. Everyone held very still. Several looked apprehensively toward the Wanderer, as if they thought something might be coming from there. Then Harry McHeath called excitedly: “It’s a ’copter from Vandenberg—I think…”

  But it looked like a regulation enough little dragonfly of an observation ’copter as it slanted down toward the sea, then swung around and came along the beach, traveling at not much more than fifty feet. Suddenly it swerved toward them and hovered overhead. The drone became a roar. The down-blast from the vanes scattered the pile of unused programs in a white flutter.