The Wanderer

by Fritz Leiber

  Margo winced at the raucous voice “singing for morale”—how well consideredly was an open question—and wished it were Paul’s. Then she clasped her hands together and studied the back of the driver’s seat. It looked recently scrubbed, but she could make out, “Ozzie is a stinker,” “Jo-Ann wears falsies,” and “Pop has 13 teeth.”

  Despite Doc’s reassurances, there was considerable excited watching of the creeping waters and scanning of the misty horizon, and a mounting feeling of tension as the bus chugged south. Margo felt the tension slacken the moment they turned up the sharply mounting, two-lane black ribbon of the mountainway—and then, almost immediately, gather again as people scanned the road ahead for slides or bucklings. There instantly sprang out of Margo’s own memory Mrs. Hixon’s vivid phrase: “Those mountains have stirred like stew.” But the first stretch, at least, straight up a low-domed hill, looked clear and smooth.

  “Truck turning inland after us, Mr. Brecht,” came a soldierly voice from the rear.

  “Thank you, McHeath,” Doc called back. Then, to Hunter and Margo with grinning enthusiasm, and loudly enough for all to hear, “I’m banking on Monica Mountainway. There hasn’t been much about it in the general press, but actually it’s a revolutionary advance in roadbuilding.”

  “Hey, Doc,” Wojtowicz called, “if this road’s clear to the Valley, there’d be traffic coming through.”

  “You’re sharp this morning, Wojtowicz,” Doc agreed, “but we only need the mountainway clear the first three miles—that’ll put us over six hundred feet up. We don’t have to worry about the other twenty-two miles. In fact, it’s probably better for us if it’s blocked somewhere beyond that”

  “I get you, Doc: we’d be fighting fifty million cars.”

  “The sky looks blacker ahead, Mommy,” Ann piped up. She and Rama Joan were in the seat behind Doc. “A big smoke plume.”

  “We’re between water and fire,” the Ramrod announced, some of the dreamy note coming back into his voice. “But be of good cheer; Ispan will return.”

  “I’m only too afraid it will,” Hunter said to Margo, sotto voce. Then, in the same tone, his glance dropping to her zippered-up leather bosom, “Would you care to show me the thing the cat-woman dropped from the saucer? I saw you catch it, you know, and I think you tested it this morning. Work?”

  When she didn’t answer him, he said: “Keep it to yourself if it makes you feel more secure. I heard the questions you asked Doc and I heartily approve. Otherwise I’d take it away from you right now.”

  She still didn’t look at him. He might have combed his beard, but she could smell his musky sweat.

  The bus topped the first hill, took a slow, dipping curve, and started up a steeper one. Still no falls or crumblings came into view.

  Doc said loudly: “Monica Mountainway is laid almost along the ridge tops and built of an asphaltoid that’s full of long molecular cables. Result: it’s strong in tension and almost impervious to falls. I learned that poking into engineering journals. Ha! Always trust a diversified genius, I say!”

  “Diversified loudmouth,” someone behind them muttered.

  Doc looked around with a hard grin, squinting suspiciously at Rama Joan. “We have already gained some three hundred feet in altitude,” he announced.

  The bus turned and ran along the second hilltop, giving them a last glimpse of the Coast Highway. It was covered with water. Waves were breaking against the brush-grown slopes.

  DAI DAVIES, as negligently casual about it all as some poetic son of Poseidon in his father’s study, watched the broad gray Bristol Channel glinting steely here and there in the mist-filtered silver light of the setting sun as the water inched and footed up the briary slope to the other side of the road fronting the pub.

  The last time he’d looked, there’d been two freighters and a liner battling down-channel against the flood. Now they were gone, leaving only a scattering of wreckage and distant small craft not worth his squinting at.

  He’d turned on the wireless a while back and listened to the taut-throated reports of the monster tides; and chittering insistences that they were caused by the great muster of earthquakes that had tramped Terra’s crust the last half-day; and cries for boats and buses and trains to do this, that, and the impossible; and grim, hysterical, complex commands to all England, it seemed to Dai, to go somewhere else, preferably to the top of Mount Snowdon.

  He’d decided it must have been earlier installments of these frantic warnings that had put all the cowardly Somersets to flight—locking their liquor up miserly behind them!—and then he’d gone Disney for a while and jigged about and sung loudly: “Who’s afraid of the big bad tide? Certainly not Dai!”

  But then the lights had gone out with a greenish-white flaring and the wireless with them, and he’d hunted up candles for cheer and affixed seven of them with their own whitehot wax artistically atilt along the bar.

  Now he turned back toward them, and they were all guttering beautifully, the flames swaying like seven silver-gold maidens, their radiance glittering softly back from all the beautiful green-and-amber, neatly labeled books beyond.

  Let me see, he thought as he moved slowly past the maiden flames, its many a day since I’ve looked into Old Bushmills by Thomas Hardy, but I’m mightily tempted by some of the cantos of Vat 69, by Ezra Pound. Which should it be now? Or perhaps—yes!—for a foreign fillip, Kirchwasser by Heinrich Heine!

  GENERAL SPIKE STEVENS and Colonel Mab lay side by side a foot or so under the concrete ceiling on the cot-size top of a big steel cabinet. She’d lost her flashlamp, but he still had his strapped to his chest. It shone on a still surface of black water six inches below the top of the cabinet.

  They lay very still themselves. Their heads roared from the pressure of the air, which was warm due to the same compression.

  There was nothing to look at along the wall-top or on the ceiling, except the grille of a ventilator beyond Colonel Mab’s head.

  The general said—and his voice was weirdly gruff yet distant—“I don’t understand why with this pressure the air doesn’t puff up through there—” he pointed toward the ventilator—“and then, finis. Must be a block—maybe some anti-fallout valve got triggered.”

  Colonel Mab shook her head. She was lying on her back, looking up over her eyebrows. “It isn’t easy to see at first,” she said softly, “but the ventilator shaft is full of water. It bulges down just a little in the squares in the ventilator, like tiny black pillows or big black fingertips. The water pressure from above and below balance—for the moment, at any rate, and so long as the surfaces in the grille aren’t disturbed.”

  “You’re seeing things,” the general told her. “That’s bad hydrostatics. The head of pressure on the water below us is bound to be greater. It’d still push the air out.”

  “Maybe the elevator shaft hasn’t filled entirely yet,” Colonel Mab answered with a little shrug. “But I’m not seeing things.”

  She reached up and poked a finger through the nearest hole in the ventilator, then snatched it quickly away as a stream of water as thick as a cigar spurted straight down and rattled loudly into the still water below, with the effect of an elephant relieving itself of fluid.

  The general grabbed her by the shoulder. “You goddamn stupid bitch,” he snarled. Then he looked her in the face and he slid his fingers inside her collar, and took hold of it to tear it down. “Yes,” he said harshly, nodding once. “Whether you like it or not.”

  He hesitated, then said apologetically but very stubbornly, “There’s nowhere else to escape to, is there, except into each other.”

  She grinned with her teeth at him. “Let’s do this right, you big brass bastard,” she told him. Her eyes narrowed. “We’re finished,” she said thoughtfully, hitting each syllable as if she stepped on stones, “but if we could work so that we hit the climax just as we drowned…We’ll have to wait till the water’s over us—It mustn’t be too soon…”

  “My Christ, you’ve g
ot it, Mab!” the general said loudly, grinning down at her like a blocky death’s-head.

  She frowned. “Not all of it,” she said, just loudly enough for him to hear her over the sizzling water-spurts—there were three of them now. “There’s something else. But it’s enough to start on, and I’ll think of the other thing after a while.”

  She unbuttoned her soaking coat and shirt and unhooked her brassiere. The flashlamp strapped to his chest shone on her breasts. He entered her, and they got to work.

  “Take it slow now, you old bastard,!” she told him.

  When he clutched her to him, the flashlamp made a reddish square in her chest that shone out faintly through her breasts.

  When the water was an inch from the top of the cabinet they paused for a while.

  “Like rats in a trap,” she said to him fondly.

  “You got quite a tail, Mrs. Rat,” he said to her. “I always thought you were a Lesbian.”

  “I am,” she told him, “but that’s not all I am.”

  He said, “About that black tiger we thought we saw—”

  “We saw it,” she said. Then her face broke into a smile. “Strangling is a very quiet death,” she said. She dabbled her hand in the water, as if she were on her back in a canoe—and, for a moment, she was. “That’s from The Duchess of Malfi, General. Duke Ferdinand. Nice, don’t you think?” When he frowned speculatively, she said, still smiling tranquilly: “I’ve read in more than one place that a hanged man always has a climax—and strangling’s like hanging. I don’t know if it’s true of women, but it could be, and my sex always has to take the chances. At least it ought to help the water a little, and if we could make the three things come together…Enjoy killing a woman, General? I’m a Lesbian, General, and I’ve slept with girls you never got. Remember the little redhead in Statistics who used to twitch her left eye when you barked at her?”

  Just then the water came rilling over the cabinet top, and the ventilator tore loose, and a great inorganic sobbing began as, alternately, a log of water shot down the hole and a log of air escaped up it, rhythmically. The cabinet shook.

  The general and Colonel Mab got to work again.

  “I won’t squeeze so hard right away, you goddamn girl-defiling bitch,” he shouted in her ear. “I’ll remember you’re the woman.”

  “You think so?” she shouted back, and her long-fingered, strong-fingered strangler’s hands came up between his arms and closed around his neck.

  Chapter

  Twenty-four

  PAUL HAGBOLT’S joints and muscles had begun to ache from his starfished posture, despite the easement of null gravity. He thought some modest complaints about it, to no effect. After getting over his first terror of Tigerishka, he’d spoken his complaints and started to ask many questions, too. But she had said: “Monkey chatter,” and run a dry velvet paw across his lips, and a paralysis had gripped his throat and his face below the nose—somehow an invisible gag had been applied.

  At least his aches took his mind off his humiliations. He was naked now. After discovering that the primitive mind in the saucer was Paul’s and not Miaow’s, Tigerishka had riffled through his thoughts again with contemptuous speed. Then she had stripped off his wet clothes with even greater dispatch, momentarily freeing an invisible gyve from ankle or wrist to facilitate the process. Next she had subjected him to an unfeeling anatomical inspection, as coldly as if he were a cadaver. Finally—capping indignity!—she had affixed to his crotch a couple of sanitary arrangements.

  Tubes snaked from them to the same silver-gray panel into which, through a briefly dilating door, she’d thrown his wet clothes. Paul named it the Waste Panel.

  In the warmth of the cabin it was more comfortable being naked, though comfort did not cancel humiliation.

  After attending to the obviously distasteful Paul-chore, Tigerishka had gone about her own activities. First she had groomed herself and Miaow, using not only a long, pointed, pale violet tongue more like a frog’s than a cat’s, but also two silver combs which she wielded equally well with all of her four paws and also her prehensile tail. As she rhythmically combed, she softly wailed discordant, eerie music, somehow producing three voices simultaneously. The captured hair from her combing went into the Waste Panel.

  Then, with sublime or simply horrid feline indifference to the world in agony below them—if, as Paul wondered, the saucer were still hovering over Southern California or even Earth—she had fed Miaow. From the second of the three panels—Paul named it the Food Panel—she had produced a fat, dark red worm which Paul uneasily felt was synthetic rather than natural. It wriggled just enough to vastly interest Miaow, who played with it for some time in free fall while Tigerishka watched, before slowly chewing it up with signs of great satisfaction.

  Then Tigerishka had gone to the third panel, which after a bit Paul was calling the Control Panel, and busied herself with what he assumed to be her regular work, which seemed to be that of observer.

  The first time the mirror he faced turned to transparency, Paul was distinctly glad of the sanitary arrangements.

  About half a mile below him churned and spouted an angry gray sea from which a solitary, rocky island poked and in which a large long tanker wallowed, green water flowing over its bow.

  The transparency of the facing wall was perfect. He felt he was about to drop through a large ring of flowers toward the maelstrom. Then the mirror was there again.

  The same thing happened a half a dozen times in quite rapid succession, observation heights varying sharply. He hung cringe-stomached over sea, coast, and farmland. Once he thought he recognized the north end of the San Fernando Valley with a section of the Santa Monica mountains, but he couldn’t be sure.

  There was no mistaking the next view, though. They were at least five miles up, but there was nothing below them almost to the edges of the thirty-foot window but city—sunlit city, bordered by sea on one side, mountains on two, and just stretching out on the fourth.

  The city was smeared across with six parallel brush strokes that began, mostly near the sea, in bright vermilion but quickly changed to the brownish black of heavy smoke spreading over the mountains inland.

  It was Los Angeles burning. This time the saucer hung low enough for Paul to identify the main fire-spots: Santa Ana, Long Beach, Torrance, Inglewood, the Los Angeles Civic Center, and Santa Monica, the last blaze licking along the southern slopes of the Santa Monica mountains through Beverly Hills and Hollywood.

  Margo’s tiny house in Santa Monica and his own apartment were gone, it looked like.

  They were too high for him to more than fancy the ant-scurry of cars, the clustering of the rectangular red beetles of fire trucks.

  The seacoast to the south looked wrong. In places the Pacific came too far inland.

  He started to strangle and realized he’d been trying to scream to Tigerishka, against the invisible gag, to do something about it.

  She never gave him a look, but turned from the control panel to crouch on the invisible floor, staring toward the southwest and the sea.

  Two miles below them a thick gray cloudbank with a dark skirt was moving in swiftly over the changed coast. The dark skirt touched the Long Beach fire, turning its smoke white—rain! Heavy rain!

  Paul looked over toward the other blazes lying in the path of the cloudbank and saw the silver-and-vermilion of two military jets face on to him. Smoke puffed from their wings and he could see the four rockets on collision course with the saucer, swelling as they came.

  Then it was as if Los Angeles had been jerked down twenty miles. The scene expanded thirtyfold. He saw more smoke-strokes, tiny from this altitude, down the coast and up toward Bakersfield. Then the wall winked on again—not a mirror this time, but pool-table green, presumably just for a change.

  Tigerishka reached a long paw into the shrubbery and retrieved Miaow. She cuddled the little cat to her and, turning half away from Paul, said loudly: “There, we save his monkey-town for him. Call big sauc
er over the sea. Make rain. Small thanks. Help monkey, monkey shoot.”

  Miaow squirmed as if she’d rather get back to flower-climbing, but Tigerishka licked her face with her dagger-tongue, and the little cat writhed luxuriously.

  “We don’t like him, do we?” Tigerishka went on with a sideways eye-flicker toward Paul, in a voice that was halfway between purr and cruel laughter. “Monkeys! Cowardly, chattering, swarming—no individuality, no flair!”

  Paul wanted to strangle her, his hands locked in the sleek green fur of her neck. Yes, he wanted to lock his hands around her neck and—

  Tigerishka hugged Miaow closer and whispered loudly: “We think he smells. Makes smells with his mind, too.”

  Paul remembered disconsolately how he’d thought Margo bullied him. But that was before he met Tigerishka.

  DON MERRIAM sat on the edge of a bed that was like one large, resilient cushion in a small room with restfully dim walls.

  At his knees was a low table on which stood a transparent cup and a jug full of water, and also a transparent plate piled with small, white, rough-surfaced, spongy cubes. He had drunk thirstily of the former, but only nibbled experimentally at one of the latter, although they smelled and tasted quite like bread.

  The only other features of the room were a lidded toilet seat and a corner area about three feet square where a soothing patter of rain was falling steadily without splashing or running over into the rest of the room. He had not yet stepped into this shower although he had stripped to his underwear.

  The temperature and humidity and illumination level of the room suited themselves so to him that the room was almost like an extension of his body.

  Before a wall-hued door, sliding sideways, had shut out his host or captor, the walking red-and-black tiger had said to him: “Drink. Eat. Relieve and refresh yourself. Rest.”

  Those had been his only words since he had summoned Don. During the brief passage downward on the platform elevator and then the short walk along a narrow corridor, the being had been silent.