The Wanderer

by Fritz Leiber

  “You’ve been missing it, mate,” said a short man in a bowler hat, who had taken the seat beside him.

  On Richard’s polite though tepid inquiry, he gladly summarized. During the last quarter of a day there had been a considerable number of earthquakes throughout the world—apparently a seismologist had counted squiggles on a drum and decreed: “Utterly unprecedented!”—and as a result earthquake waves were a possibility even along British shores: small craft warnings had been posted and a few low coastal areas were being evacuated. Several scientists, presumably sensation-mongering, had issued statements about “giant tides” in prospect, but such exaggerations had been sternly repudiated by responsible authorities. People with proofreader minds joyously pointed out that to confuse tsunami with tides was an ancient popular error.

  At least the earthquake hullabaloo had knocked the giant American saucer out of the news. Though, to balance that gain, Russia was making bomb-rattling protestations about a mysterious assault, successfully beaten off, on her precious lunar base.

  Not for the first time, Richard reflected that this age’s vaunted “communications industry” had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.

  He did not inform his seatmate of this insight, but instead turned to the window as the bus slowed for Brentford, surveying that town with his novelist’s eyes, and was rewarded almost at once by a human phenomenon describable as “a scurry of plumbers”: he counted three small cars with the insignia of that trade and five men with toolbags or big wrenches, hurrying places. He smiled, thinking how overbuilding invariably brings its digestive troubles.

  The bus stopped, not far from the market and the confluence of the canalized Brent with the Thames. Two women climbed in, the one saying loudly to the other: “Yes, I just rang up Mother at Kew and she’s dreadfully upset She says the lawn is afloat.”

  It happened quite suddenly then: an up-pooling of brown water from the drains in the street, and a runneling of equally dirty water from the entries of several buildings.

  The event struck Richard with peculiar horror because, at a level almost below conscious thought, he saw it as sick, overfed houses discharging, quite independently of the human beings involved with them, the product of their sickness. Architectural diarrhea. He wasn’t thinking at all of how the first sign of a flood is often the backing up of the sewers.

  And then there was a scamper of people, and at their heels a curb-to-curb rush of cleaner water, perhaps six inches deep, down the street, washing away the dirty.

  It pretty well had to be coming from the Thames. The tidy Thames, Spenser’s “Sweete Themmes.”

  THE SECOND AND LARGER installment of destruction was delivered by the Wanderer through the seas covering almost three-quarters of Earth’s surface. This watery film may be cosmically trivial, but it has always been a sort of infinity, of distance and of depth and of power, to the dwellers of Earth. And it has always had its gods: Dagon, Nun, Nodens, Ran, Rigi, Neptune, Poseidon. And the music of the seas is the tides.

  The harp of the seas, which Diana the moon goddess strums with rapt solemnity, is strung with bands of salt water miles thick, hundreds of miles wide, thousands of miles long.

  Across the great reaches of the Pacific and Indian Oceans stretch the bass strings: from the Philippines to Chile, from Alaska to Colombia, Antarctica to California, Arabia to Australia, Basutoland to Tasmania. Here the deeper notes are sounded, some vibrations lasting a full day.

  The Atlantic provides the middle voice, cantabile. Here the tempo is quicker and more regular, and the half-day the measure: the familiar, semidaily tides of Western history. Major vibrating bands link Newfoundland to Brazil, Greenland to Spain, South Africa to the Antarctic.

  Where the strings cross they may damp each other out, as at the tidal nodes near Norway and the Windward Islands and at Tahiti, where the sun alone controls the little tides—far-distant Apollo plucking feebler than Diana, forever bringing highs at noon and midnight, lows at sunset and dawn.

  The treble of the ocean harp is provided by tidal echoes and re-echoes in bays, estuaries, straits, and seas half landlocked. These shortest strings are often loudest and fiercest, as a violin will dominate a bass viol: the high-mounting tides of Fundy and the Severn Estuary, of Northern France and the Strait of Magellan, of the Arabian and Irish Seas.

  Touched by the soft fingers of the moon, the water bands vibrate gently—a foot or two up and down, five feet, ten, rarely twenty, most rarely more.

  But now the harp of the seas had been torn from Diana’s and Apollo’s hands and was being twanged by fingers eighty times stronger. During the first day after the Wanderer’s appearance the tides rose and fell five to fifteen times higher and lower than normally and, during the second day, ten to twenty-five, the water’s response swiftly building to the Wanderer’s wild harping. Tides of six feet became sixty; tides of thirty, three hundred—and more.

  The giant tides generally followed the old patterns—a different harpist, but the same harp. Tahiti was only one of the many areas on Earth—not all of them far inland—unruffled by the presence of the Wanderer, hardly aware of it except as a showy astronomic spectacle.

  The coasts contain the seas with walls which the tides themselves help bite out. In few places are the seas faced with long sweeps of flat land where the tide each day can take miles-long strides landward and back: the Netherlands and Northern Germany, a few other beaches and salt marshes, Northwest Africa.

  But there are many flat coasts only a few feet or a few dozen feet above the ocean. There the multiplied tides raised by the Wanderer moved ten, twenty, fifty, and more miles inland. With great heads of water behind them and with narrowing valleys ahead, some moved swiftly and destructively, fronted and topped by wreckage, filled with sand and soil, footed by clanking stones and crashing rocks. At other spots the invasion of the tide was silent as death.

  At points of sharp tides and sharp but not very high coastal walls—Fundy, the Bristol Channel, the estuaries of the Seine and the Thames and the Fuchun—spill-overs occurred: great mushrooms of water welling out over the land in all directions.

  Shallow continental shelves were swept by the drain of low tides, their sands cascaded into ocean abysses. Deep-sunk reefs and islands appeared; others were covered as deeply. Shallow seas, and gulfs like the Persian, were drained once or twice daily. Straits were grooved deeper. Seawater poured across low isthmi. Counties and countries of fertile fields were salt-poisoned. Herds and flocks were washed away. Homes and towns were scoured flat. Great ports were drowned.

  Despite the fog of catastrophe and the suddenness of the astronomic strike, there were prodigies of rescue performed: a thousand Dunkirks, a hundred thousand brave improvisations. Disaster-focused organizations such as coast guards and the Red Cross functioned meritoriously; and some of the preparations for atomic and other catastrophe paid off.

  Yet millions died.

  Some saw disaster coming and were able to take flight and did. Others, even in areas most affected, did not.

  DAI DAVIES strode across the mucky, littered bottom-sands of the Severn Estuary through the dissipating light fog with the furious energy and concentration of a drunkard at the peak of his alcoholic powers. His clothes and hands were smeared where he’d twice slipped and fallen, only to scramble up and pace on with hardly a check. From time to time he glanced back and corrected his course when he saw his footsteps veering. And from time to time he swigged measuredly from a flat bottle without breaking his stride.

  The Somerset shore had faded long since, except for the vaguest loom through the remaining mist of maritime industrial structures upriver toward Avonmouth. Long since there had died away the insincere cheers and uncaring admonitions—“Come back, you daft Welshman, you’ll drown!”—of the pub-mates he’d met this morning.

  He chanted sporadically: “Five miles to Wales across the sands, from noon to two
while the ebb tide stands,” occasionally varying it with such curses as “Effing loveless Somersets!—I’ll shame ’em!” and “Damned moon-grabbing Yanks!” and such snatches of his half-composed Farewell to Mona as, “Frore Mona in your meteor-skiff…Girlglowing, old as Fomalhaut…Trailing white fingers in my pools…Drawing my waters to and fro…”

  There was a faint roaring ahead. A helicopter ghosted by, going downriver, but the roaring remained. Dai crossed a particularly slimy dip in which his shoes sank out of sight and had to be jerked plopping out. He decided it must be Severn channel and that he was now mounting onto the great sandy stretch of bottom known as the Welsh Grounds.

  But the roaring grew louder; the going got easier because the sands were sloping down again; a last mist-veil faded; and suddenly his way was blocked by a rapid, turbid river more than a hundred yards wide, humping into foam-crested ridges and eating greedily at the sandy banks to either side.

  He stopped in stupefaction. It had simply never occurred to him that, no matter how low the tide went, the Severn was a river and would keep flowing. And now he knew he couldn’t have come a quarter of the way across the Channel.

  Upstream he could see an angry white humping and jetting where—to be sure!—the Avon came crashing into the bigger river.

  Far downstream loomed the canted stern of a steamer aground. The ’copter hovered over it. There were faint hootings.

  He leaped back as a long stretch of bank caved in almost at his feet. Nevertheless he bravely stripped off his coat, since swimming seemed in order, stopping midway to get out the bottle. Through the near water a splintered black beam with laths nailed across it went slashing downstream like a great, hook-bladed knife. He put the bottle to his lips. It was empty.

  He shivered and shook. Suddenly he saw himself as an ant with the ambitions of a Napoleon. Fear closed in.

  He looked behind him. His footprints had smoothed to barely distinguishable hollows and bumps. And there was a glisten of water all over the sands that hadn’t been there before. The tide had turned.

  He threw away the bottle and began to run back along his footprints before they faded altogether. His feet sank in deeper than they had in coming.

  JAKE LESHER thumbed a light switch back and forth, although he’d had proof enough that the electricity was gone. He studied the elevator in the dimness of the living room. The cage had dropped six inches in the last quake and now tilted a little. Its aluminum looked rippled in the shadows. He thought he saw black threads curling out of it, and he retreated from them into the murky sunshine of the patio.

  “There’s more smoke coming out now, and I can see some flames,” Sally Harris called to him from where she was craning over the balustrade. “The flames are coming up the building, and people are watching them from the windows across, but the water’s coming up faster—I think. It’s a race. Gee, Jake, this is a flood like in the Bible, and Hugo’s penthouse is our Noah’s Ark. That’s the idea we’ll build our play around. We’ll use the fire, too.”

  He grabbed and shook her. “This is all for real, you little moron! We’re the ones that’ll be fried.”

  “But Jake,” she protested, “you always got to have a real situation to make a play. I read that somewhere.”

  ALL OVER EARTH the senses and minds of very many people were locked against the change in the tides. Those inland were inclined to doubt or minimize what they could not see with their own eyes, and many of them had never seen an ocean. Men at sea, beyond sight of land, cannot perceive the tidal bulge beneath them—they can hardly perceive the vastly shorter earthquake waves—and so they could not note if that tidal bulge in which their ship moved were a few feet or a few dozen feet higher than it should be, or the tidal hollow, correspondingly lower.

  The insurgents who had seized the “Prince Charles” had so much to do what with running the internal business of the great atomic liner, dealing with passengers, and heading off attempts on the part of the crew to turn the tables, that they found it necessary to elect four of themselves captain, with equal powers. It was hours before this revolutionary board of directors got the ship’s course shaped toward Cape St. Roque, for Rio, where their leaders were supposed to have overthrown the government last night—something which could not be confirmed because of the choking-off of radio communication. The imprisoned Captain Sithwise’s urgent plea that they atom-steam for the tidal node by the Windward Isles was laughed at as an obvious ruse to bring them nearer ships of the British Navy.

  Wolf Loner watched the great cloudbank close down around the “Endurance” until the dory was almost running through fog. In that tiny, ship-centered cosmos of water and blurry whiteness, the old fancies occurred to him that all the rest of the world might have vanished except for this one spot, or that there might be an atomic war now, with cities vanishing like coals that pop in a fire, or that a plague of virulent, artificially cultured germs might be sweeping all the continents and he be the only man alive when he stepped ashore in Boston. He smiled unanxiously. “Brace yourself against your atoms,” he said.

  But many minds were locked to facts that came pounding at the door. In the Tidal Institute at Hamburg, Fritz Scher explained away to his own satisfaction, and almost to that of Hans Opfel, every shockingly divergent tidal reading that came in. Either there was a precedent for the new reading—such a tide had occurred at the same spot forty or four hundred years ago—or the waters were being bulked by a storm the purblind weather men had missed; or someone of known carelessness had misread instruments; or someone of known instability had gone crazy; or someone of known Communist sympathies had lied.

  “Just you wait,” Fritz smilingly told Hans Opfel when the latter indicated the growing pile of reports of the Wanderer and of the moon’s destruction. “Just you wait. When night comes, the jolly old moon will be up there all by himself—and laughing down at you!” He leaned lightly against the smooth case of the tide-predicting machine and patted it affectionately, almost hugged it. “You know what fools they are, don’t you?” he murmured infatuatedly.

  Other minds accepted the situation.

  BARBARA KATZ swabbed up some last fragments of egg and sausage with a section of buttermilk pancake soaking in one hundred percent maple syrup, pushed her coffee cup across the big kitchen table to Hester, and sighed her appreciation and gratitude. Outside the birds were warbling in the sunlight. The big old pendulum wall-clock said eight-thirty in Roman numerals. A big calendar showing a view of the Everglades hung below the clock.

  Hester smiled broadly at Barbara as she poured out more of the wonderfully strong coffee, and said: “Seems more natural and wholesome-like, now old KKK got himself a real fancy girl instead of that doll.”

  Helen, the younger colored woman, giggled and then looked away in mischief and embarrassment, but Barbara took it in her stride.

  “I believe those are called Barbie dolls,” she remarked. “Well, my name happens to be Barbara, too—Barbara Katz.”

  Hester laughed heartily at that, and Helen smothered more giggles.

  “Why do you call him old KKK?” Barbara asked.

  “Middle name Kelsey,” Hester explained. “Knolls Kelsey Kettering III. You Katz the fourth K.” And she started laughing again.

  There was a long, soft creaking. “Shut the screen door, Benjy,” Hester said sharply out of her laughter, but the tall Negro didn’t move. He stood halfway through the door in his white shirt and his silver-gray trousers which had stripes of dark gray tape running down the seams. There was a big tuft of cotton in the top of the screen—a modern white fetish against flies.

  “There’s the most monstrous low tide ever,” he informed them earnestly. “People walking straight out like they could get to Grand Bahama without wetting the ankle. Picking up fresh fish by the basket, some of them!”

  Barbara sat straight up, set down her coffee cup and snapped her fingers.

  “Other folk say TV ain’t working either—or radio,” Benjy added, looking at her, as
did Hester and Helen.

  “Do you know when low tide is, exactly?” Barbara asked intently.

  “Seven-thirty, about,” Benjy answered without hesitation. “Hour ago. It have it all on the backs of those calendar sheets.”

  “Tear off the top one,” she told him. “What kind of a car does Mr. K have?”

  “Only the two Rolls,” he told her. “Limousine and sedan.”

  “Get the sedan ready for a long trip,” she told him sharply. “All the extra gas she can carry—take it from the limousine! We’ll need blankets, too, and all Mister K’s medicines and lots of food and more of this coffee in thermos jugs…and a couple of those table-water bottles in the corner!”

  They stared at her fascinatedly. Her excitement was contagious, but they were puzzled. “Why for, child?” Hester demanded. Helen started to giggle again.

  Barbara looked at them impressively, then said: “Because there’s a high tide coming! As high as this one’s low—and higher!”

  “That because of the—Wanderer?” Benjy asked, handing her the sheet she’d asked for.

  She nodded decisively as she studied its back. She said: “Mr. K has a smaller telescope. Where would that be?”

  “Telescope?” Hester asked with grinning incredulity. She said: “Now, why for—oh, sho, astronomy what you and Mr. K have in common. Now, I expect he put that one—the one he spy on the gals with—back in the gun room.”

  “Gun room?” Barbara asked, her eyes brightening. “What about ready cash?”

  “It’d be in one of the wall safes,” Hester said, frowning at Barbara just a little.

  Chapter

  Twenty-two

  THE SAUCER STUDENTS were at last beginning to feel alive again after their ducking and their exhausting race with the waves. The men had built a driftwood fire beside the empty highway near the low concrete bridge at the head of the wash, and everyone was drying out around it, which necessitated considerable comradely trading around of clothes and of the unwetted blankets and stray articles of dress from the truck.