The Wanderer

by Fritz Leiber

  The grin vanished. “We’re keeping order in Citrus Center,” he said harshly, moving toward the next car in line. “Tell your boy to drive on before I change my mind. Your boss ought to know better than to let his nigger girl talk for him. You college-educated niggers are the worst. They try to teach you science, but you get it all mixed up with your crazy African superstitions.”

  They drove north in silence while the Wanderer slowly climbed, and the moon-spindle crawled across it, and the monster changed to a big purple D.

  Knolls Kelsey Kettering III began to breathe gaspingly. Hester said: “We got to find him a bed. He got to stretch out.”

  Benjy slowed to read a sign. “You are leaving Glades and entering Highlands County.” Suddenly he laughed whoopingly. “That high lands sure sound good!”

  But would they be high enough? Barbara wondered.

  RICHARD HILLARY woke shivering and aching. He’d pushed aside in his sleep the straw covering him. And through the straw under him, crushed flatly, had mounted the chill of the ground—the chill of the Chiltern Hills, his mind, half sleep-locked, alliterated it. Overhead the strange planet flared, revolved back to its dismal D again. He recalled some of the other faces it had shown—equally ugly faces, looking more like signs or a psychologist’s toys than natural formations—one a bloat-centered X; another, a big yellow bull’s eye in a purple target. Still, it seemed to bulk out more like a true globe how, less like a circular flat signboard. And there was a beauty akin to that of Brancusi’s “Bird in Space” in its curving white half-ring. Could that last conceivably be the moon, as a fellow-trudger had assured him? Surely not. Yet the moon had traveled the sky all last night and where else was the moon now?

  He sat up quietly, hugging himself for warmth, rebuttoning his coat collar and turning up the inadequate flap. The straw stack from which he’d taken his bedding was all gone now, and where he’d had at most a dozen comrades when he’d laid down some two hours ago, there were now scores of low straw mounds, each covering one or more sleepers. How quietly they had come—hushing each other, perhaps, as they scooped up and hugged their straw; late arrivers at a sleeping hostel. He envied those huddled in pairs their shared warmth, and he remembered very wistfully the Young Girl of Devizes who had seemed at the time so stupid and coarse. He remembered her sausage-and-mashed, too.

  He looked toward the farmhouse where he’d bought a small bowl of soup last night and paid for his straw. Its lights were still on, but the windows were irregularly obscured. He realized with mild amazement that this was because of the people outside crowded together against its walls like bees for warmth. Surely many of the late-comers must have gone hungry; the ready food would be gone like the straw. Or perhaps the farmer’s wife would be baking? He sniffed, but got only a briny smell. Had she opened a barrel of salt beef? But now his mind was wandering foolishly, he told himself.

  Despite the crowd of new sleepers, there seemed to be no more people coming. And the road beyond the gate, which had been loud with traffic when he’d gone to sleep, was quiet and empty.

  He stood up and looked east. The valley through which he’d just trudged was now full of dark silvery mist, fingers of it stretching around the hill on which he was now, pushing up each grassy gully.

  The mist had a remarkably flat top, gleaming like gun-metal.

  He saw two lights, red and green, moving across it mysteriously, close together.

  He realized that they were the lights of a boat and that the mist was solid, still water. The stand of the high tide.

  Chapter

  Twenty-seven

  DOC AND MARGO scouted the rock slope to its crest and the road for two hundred yards beyond the boulder-block without finding any signs of human life, though they did disturb four lizards and a hawk. The valley ahead between the last two mountain ridges was all blackened. It held only wet ashes of its manzanitas and yuccas, and charred skeletons of its scrub oaks. Presumably it had been fiercely burned out a few hours before—Which helped explain why no more people had come this way.

  Clarence Dodd and Harry McHeath voluntarily joined in the reconnoiter, speeding it up. The latter made his way to the downslope precipice edge and reported that it fell away sheer for five hundred feet to a rocky knob and a steep, rock-studded, brush-grown slope.

  Neither of Black Hat’s revolvers turned up—either they’d carried over the cliff or been lost in the pitted and creviced rocks.

  The two sedans beyond the boulder still had their ignition keys, which Doc pocketed. Doddsy jotted down the names on the steering-column registration papers, using his flashlight to eke out the fading green daylight, and he speculated as to whether one of them was that of the Black Dahlia sadist. Presumably Black Hat and his acolytes had come in the sedans, the lone girl, from the other direction in the red Corvette—a purely chance meeting at the roadblock—and then, probably before the rains, while flames were still roaring to the east, making an appropriately hellish backdrop…it didn’t do to think about it.

  Meanwhile, Ross Hunter and the Hixons corded up the murdered girl’s body in Doc’s borrowed raincoat and the smallest of the truck’s tarpaulins. The olive-drab bundle was lugged a hundred feet up the rock slope and eased into a coffin-size cave young McHeath had spotted. Pinned to the tarpaulin was a brief account in Doddsy’s waterproof ink of the circumstances of her death and, with a question mark, the woman’s name and address, found on the Corvette’s registration papers. The Ramrod spoke a brief, unfamiliar service, signing himself with a cross that ended in a finger-traced Isis-loop in front of his forehead.

  Then everyone began to feel a bit better, though as horror and excitement died it also became obvious that everyone was tired half to death and this must be their bivouac. Preparations were made for sleep, most of them bedding down in the school bus, the two injured men certainly, since it was already chilly, and would get a lot chillier before dawn. Hixon was bothered about more boulders on the slope above rolling down in case of a quake, but Doc pointed out that they’d stayed in place through a couple of dillies, and that anyway the Wanderer’s gravity had probably triggered off during the first few hours after its emergence most of the quakes it was going to.

  Doc decided two persons would sit guard through the night, well blanket-wrapped in a low-ramparted natural scoop in the rocks two-thirds of the way up the slope and almost directly above the boulder block. They would be armed with one of the rifles and Margo’s gray pistol. Doddsy and McHeath would take it to midnight, Ross Hunter and Margo, twelve to two-thirty, himself and Rama Joan, two-thirty to dawn. Hixon would have the other rifle and nap in the driver’s seat in the bus. The women on guard duty would sleep in the truck cab with Ann. Wanda commented on the coeducational sentry arrangements, and Doc snapped out a peppery answer.

  The primus stove was fired with charcoal. Water was heated on it for the powdered coffee. They made supper of that and the milk and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from the bus.

  Margo thought she wouldn’t be able to stomach such sweet, gooey child’s fodder, but found herself ravenous after the first bite and disposed of three, along with a pint of café au lait. She felt lightheadedly drunk, her mind from time to time happily jumping with visions of the red-hooded sadists being swept by her pistol to their deaths, and she said what she felt to everyone she met.

  Catching the Ramrod behind the bus, she asked him point-blank: “Mr. Fulby, is it true you’re married to both Ida and Wanda?”

  He, quite unoffended, nodded his narrow, grizzled head and replied: “Yes indeed, in our eyes they are both my wives, and I their breadwinner. It’s been an enriching relationship, on the whole. I originally married Wanda for the body’s glory—she was a Baby Wampas star—and Ida for the spirit’s exaltation. Of course, things are a bit different now…”

  The scowly old bus driver heard most of that speech and turned away with a snort.

  “Jealous, Pop?” Margo asked him with a friendly sort of maliciousness.

  TIG
ERISHKA FINISHED feeding Miaow for a third time and glanced at Paul. Then, with what he surmised was a deliberately human and mocking shrug of those lovely violet-barred green shoulders that had more play and stretch in them than any tennis star’s or Hindu dancer’s, she returned to the Food Panel, then swam over to him with a small kit in one paw and two narrow tubes trailing behind her. She hovered by him, eying him up and down, as if momentarily uncertain whether to force-feed him down the throat, or through a vein, or perhaps rectally.

  His throat now ached with thirst, matching his general muscle ache, and he had begun to feel very lightheaded, though more likely from experience-fatigue than hunger. What he was mostly conscious of was unhappy irritation at the change in Tigerishka. While Miaow fed, the large cat had been dancing—a wonderfully swift, rhythmic pirouetting and somersaulting and cartwheeling between ceiling and floor of the saucer, pushing off from each in turn. Simultaneously, strange music had filled the saucer, and its mysterious sunlight had pulsed in time.

  Tigerishka, Paul realized now, was a toe-dancer by anatomy, her feet being all toe—digitigrade, not plantigrade—and her heel the leg-joint above them, corresponding to the lower elbow in her forearm.

  The dance had enthralled him completely, taking his mind off all his pains and anxieties.

  Now the lovely ballerina had become again the impersonally sadistic nurse—a hateful transformation.

  So in spite of his thirst he sadly shook his head and tried to press his numb, thick-feeling lips together tight. Then he pushed up his eyebrows and solemnly lifted his face toward hers in the only expression of appeal his mind could devise—though he was very conscious of how exquisitely like a gagged and pinioned monkey begging for freedom he must be making himself look.

  She grinned at him without parting her long lips—another mocking imitation of a human sign, he felt sure, and continued to contemplate him.

  It was night again, he knew, and he had been in the saucer a full twelve hours, for the last observation had been another unmistakable one—of San Francisco sinking into evening, but showing the black stains and smokings of fires put out by rains, and also a crowding of ships in the Golden Gate. Then the saucer had tilted, and he had seen the Wanderer rising in the east in its mandala-face with an asymmetric glittering ring around it that a few seconds of frantic thought convinced him was most likely the crushed moon.

  Tigerishka reached out and brushed his right wrist with the back of a green paw, then sat back again. He realized with rather incredulous wonder that his right arm was free. He worked the fingers, bent and unbent the elbow with less pain than he’d anticipated, then started to lift his fingers to his lips, but stopped them midway.

  If he simply touched his lips, she might interpret it as meaning he wished to be tube-fed that way.

  He brought his fingers to his forehead, then in one smooth movement dropped them to his lips and out toward her pointed ears. Inspiration continuing, he dropped them toward her muzzle, then swept them back to his own ear.

  “Yes, want talk,” she interpreted. “Monkey cat have great gossip, eh?” She slowly shook her green-masked face from side to side. “No! Be all chatter-questions—one, ten, five thousands! I know apes.”

  His expectations crumbled. At the same time it was occurring to him, with curious certainty, that she could have said that in grammatically perfect English, but deliberately chose not to—very much as a brilliant European quite capable of speaking any language flawlessly will hang onto his accent and his first, makeshift constructions to emphasize his exotic individuality, and also as a subtle criticism of the arbitrary English pronunciations and of its swarms of silly little auxiliary words.

  “Still—” Tigerishka temporized—“are things I will tell.” Then, at court-stenographer speed, and a little singsong, as if it were very boring to her: “I come superior galactic culture. Read minds, throw thoughts, sail hyperspace, live forever if want, blow up suns—all that sort stuff. Look like animal—resume ancestral shapes. Make brains small but really huge—(psycho​physio​submicro​miniaturization! We stay superior.) You not believe? So listen. Plants eat inorganic: they superior! Animals eat plants: they superior. Cats eat fresh meat: we most superior! Monkeys try eat everything: a mess!”

  Then without pause: “Wanderer sail hyperspace. Yes, star photos, I know. Need fuel—much matter for converters. Your moon good woodpile. Smash, pulverize, dredge. We fuel up, then go. No need you monkeys get hot and bothered.”

  After she broke off, Paul continued to seethe for all of five seconds, utterly enraged at her heartless oversimplifications. Then it occurred to him that there was nothing whatever he could do about it. He took a deep, slow breath and calmed his features, hoping they were growing less red. Then he held his hand tightly over his mouth and suddenly threw it out, as if to say: “Away with the gag.”

  It also occurred to him that there was really no point to this gesture game, since she must know his thoughts, but immediately on the heels of that came the realization that the point simply was that it was a game. Cats like games; they like to play with helpless victims; and here Tigerishka seemed no exception.

  She confirmed this by smiling as she slowly shook her head—smiling and wrinkling her upper lips so that her five-bristle mustaches made little circles.

  He took another tack. He repeated the “Away with the gag” gesture, but immediately followed it by bringing his hand to his mouth as if holding a glass, and tipping it as if drinking. Finally he laid his forefinger across the center of his lips.

  Tigerishka’s star-shaped pupils narrowed to points as she stared at his eyes. “I let you drink mouth, you no talk? No say single word?”

  Paul nodded solemnly.

  She took from her kit a limp white flask of what looked like half-pint capacity and held it against his lips. “I squeeze gently, you suck,” she said, and brushed the back of her other forepaw across his cheek and chin. Sensation flashed back into them and at the same time a cool seeping was solacing his dry and aching throat. After a bit the taste came: milk. Milk with a faint musky tone. He wondered if it were feline or synthetic, humanly assimilable or not, but decided he must trust Tigerishka’s judgment.

  When the first edge of his thirst was quenched, he reached up his hand to take over the job of squeezing. She neither rebuffed this gesture nor immediately relinquished her hold on the flask, so for a few moments he felt, through the edges of his fingers and hand, the velvet of her pads and the resilient silk of her fur and, through the latter, the hard curve of a sheathed claw. Then she withdrew her paw, saying only: “Gently, remember.”

  When the flask was crushed flat, he handed it back to her, unintentionally adding: “Thank you”—but before the words could come out, her pads had lightly slapped his lips and the gag was back again.

  He wondered dully if the gag was a matter of pure suggestion or some impalpable film, or some instantaneous electrophoretic tissue-impregnation—cataphoresis, doctors actually called it!—or whatnot else—but a thought-jumbling lethargy was swiftly stealing over his body and mind. Fatigue or drugs? That too was too hard to think about.

  Drowsily he realized that the saucer’s invisible indoor sun had faded to twilight. Through sleep-mist he felt the freeing brush of Tigerishka’s fur against his left wrist and ankle, so that only his right ankle still fettered him.

  He folded himself into a uterine position and drifted toward deeper sleep.

  The last thing he was aware of was Tigerishka’s neutral, “’Night, monkey.”

  Chapter

  Twenty-eight

  THE WANDERER showed Earth its yin-yang face for a fifth time. For a full day now it had hung in Terra’s night sky. For the meteorologists at the South Pole International Observation Station, deep in the unbroken night of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, the Wanderer had made a full circuit of the sunless sky, keeping always the same distance above the icy horizon, and now hung once more where it had first appeared above the Queen Maud Range and Mari
e Byrd Land. Great green auroras sprang from the snows and glowed around it.

  The strange planet mightily restimulated some supernatural beliefs and many sorts of mania.

  In India, which had thus far escaped the severer earthquakes and suffered minimal tidal damage, it was worshipped by large congregations in nightlong rites. Some identified it as the invisible planet Ketu, at last disgorged by the serpent. Brahmins quietly contemplated it and hinted it might mark the dawn of a new kalpa.

  In South Africa it became the standard of revolt for a bloody and successful uprising against the Boers.

  In Protestant countries the Book of Revelation was searched through in thousands of Bibles never before read or even opened.

  In Rome the new Pope, who was a Jesuit-trained astronomer, combatted superstitious interpretations of events, while the paparazzi found films and lenses for their cameras which would enable them to snap movie stars and other notorious notables gesturing at the Wanderer or background by it—as Ostia fought flood, and the new Mediterranean tides pushed up the Tiber.

  In Egypt a felinoid being landing from a saucer was identified as the benign goddess Bast by an expatriate British theosophist, and the cult of cat-worship got off to a new beginning. According to the theosophist, the Wanderer itself was Bast’s destructive twin: Sekhet, the Eye of Ra.

  There was an odd echo of this development in Paris, where two felinoids, repeating Tigerishka’s mistake, loosed from the zoological gardens all the tigers, lions, leopards, and other large felines. Some of the beasts appeared in Left Bank cafes. A similar liberation occurred at the Tiergarten in Berlin, where the animals were threatened by flood waters.

  Strange, strange to think that Don Merriam was sleeping snugly now in his little cabin aboard the Wanderer, just as Paul was sleeping as soundly aboard Tigerishka’s saucer.

  While the Wanderer caused numerous panics and outbursts of mania, its sudden appearance and the catastrophes attendant on it acted in other instances as a sort of shock therapy. There were literal outbursts of sanity in the violent wards of mental hospitals. Seeing the impossible made real, and even nurses and doctors terrified by it, satisfied some deep need in psychotics. And private neuroses and psychoses became trivial to their possessors in the face of a cosmic derangement.