The Wanderer

by Fritz Leiber

  On others the Wanderer bestowed a last-minute ability to look on the truth, if not to struggle against it. As Fritz Scher, now waist-deep in salt water, looked out of the window in the Tidal Institute at Hamburg toward dawn, the clouds lifted a little in the west like a curtain half drawn up, and from beneath them the Wanderer glared at him full in the face. Things at last came clear in his mind as a powerful new surge of water toppled him and carried him back from the window. As he clutched futilely at the sleek sides of the tide-predicting machine while the tide carried him along it, he used his last breaths to cry out over and over: “Multiply everything by eighty!”

  BARBARA KATZ felt the bed under her move a little on its casters, as the dark, third-floor hotel room rocked with the building holding it She mastered the impulse to jump up and she pressed closer to old KKK, then reached her hand across him to Helen on his other side. An hour ago the old man had shaken with a chill. This afternoon it had been the heat that had troubled him, but now with the icy waters of the Atlantic washing across Florida, it was the cold.

  Benjy, standing at the window, his face ghostly in the Wanderer-light, reported: “Water over first-floor windows and pressing us hard. Here come a summer house. Hear it bang us? Sort of crunchy.”

  “Get in you cot, Benjy, and get some rest.” Hester called from the corner. “If this place go, it go. Water knock to come in, you cain’t tell it, ‘Stay out!’”

  “I ain’t got your calm, Hes,” he told her. “I should’ve stayed with the car, make sure they leave it on top the mound. Water be pretty close to it by now, though.”

  “They’d better not have moved it!” Barbara called softly but feelingfully over her shoulder. “That parking place was part of the five thousand we’re paying for this room.”

  From the other side of old KKK Helen called with just a ghost of her giggle: “I wonder those skinflints remember to bring the cash box upstairs. Else she be washed away sho!”

  “Quiet,” Hester called. “Benjy, get in you cot.”

  “Where’s the attraction?” he asked pensively from the window. “Helen got to sleep with the Old Man, help keep him warm. And that pancake makeup and powder Miss Barbara put on my face itch it.”

  “Quit bellyachin’, darkie,” Hester told him. “Helen and I get by as nurses, but you need a little lightening. Don’t make you pass, but it justify you. Show you trying to please. With that and a thousand-dollar bill, you get anywhere.”

  Benjy said, the pale light in his eyes now as he lifted them: “Old Wanderer got the monster on him once again. He spin fast.”

  The room rocked. Timbers creaked. Benjy announced: “Water up another band’s width. Seem to me the angles is shifting.”

  Helen raised up. “You think we should—” she began in a tight, breathy voice.

  “Quiet!” Hester commanded heavily. “Everybody got to be quiet now, and lie down. We enjoyin’ five thousand dollars. Benjy, you tell me when that water up to you neck—and not before! Good night.”

  In the dark Barbara thought of the Sebring race course a mile off, and all those fine-tuned motors in their pits under the salt sea, the oil washed away. Or had they been smart and roared north to safety in a red-blue-green-yellow-silver pack? She pictured outboards racing the Sebring course. She pictured the drowned rockets a hundred miles beyond at Cape Kennedy.

  Old KKK groaned faintly and mumbled something. Barbara stroked his papery, furrowed cheek, but he kept on muttering. His fingers, which he kept close to his chest as one praying, were working a little. She reached down the bed and found the fashion doll in its black lace underwear and laid it in them. He quieted. She smiled.

  The room rocked.

  SALLY HARRIS had put on a pearl-encrusted evening sheath from the very interesting wardrobe in the bedroom adjoining Mr. Hasseltine’s. Jake Lesher had draped his frame in a dark blue serge suit that was a little long for him everywhere, making it zooty looking. They sat at the grand piano, which was topped by flat wine glasses and two champagne bottles.

  The room was lit by twenty-three candles—all Sally had been able to find—and two flashlights. Dark drapes hid the windows and even the stalled elevator, and especially the French doors to the patio.

  Silence was seeping in through the dark drapes, freezing the candle flames, pressing on their throats and hearts. But then Jake’s fingers came down on the keyboard and drove the silence back with the rippling burst of an introduction. Sally stood up, weaving a little, and sang loudly and quite clearly:

  Oh, I am the Girl in Noah’s Ark

  And you are my old Flood King.

  Our love’s not just big as the ocean free,

  As Mount Ararat or a beanstalk tree—

  You found me a penthouse in the sea!

  Our love is a very big thing.

  As Jake played the vamp with his left hand, he reached over and handed Sally a sheet of paper.

  “Try the second stanza,” he said.

  She scanned it owlishly. “Gee, it’s got some crazy words. And how do I sing inkblots?”

  “I found what you call crazy words in a fancy ‘list of outstanding celestial objects,’ in one of your intellectual boy friend’s big books. We got to keep up the astronomical motif to go with the new planet.”

  “Planet-shplanet. If it weren’t for Hugo, you’d be in the drink. I wonder where Hugo is now? Okay, Jake, play it” And she sang, with the sheet to her nose:

  Oh, I am the Girl in Noah’s Ark

  And you are my old Storm King.

  Our love is not merely as big as the sun,

  Orion or Messier-31—

  You launched me a private skyscraper, Hon!

  Our love is a very big thing.

  Jake beamed at her. “We got us a hit, baby! A real blazer!”

  “That’s very good,” Sally told him, thrusting a hand out for her glass, “Because the chances are we’ll be putting it on in a very damp theater.”

  RICHARD HILLARY felt a weird exhilaration as he tramped along springily beside a salt-reeking road leading west a distance south of Islip. Stranded on the mud-filmed, tide-combed grass within his view of the moment were two silvery fish and a small green lobster feebly crawling across a long sodden twist of black cloth that might well be a college gown. Looking south, he could see some of the gray towers of Oxford and clearly distinguish the brown tide-mark halfway up them. He held his breath, his hands moved upward, and his next step was almost turned to a leap as in imagination he frantically swam up through the waters of the North or Irish Sea that had been here some five or six hours ago.

  He turned his leap back to a step with a snickering laugh, maintaining his exhilaration. Sometimes, of course, the weirdness of the contrasts constantly presented by the stranded flotsam got a bit too much, especially when they involved sodden human bodies, or even the bodies of horses and dogs. Here his rule, and apparently that of the people tramping with him, was, “If they don’t stir, look away from them quickly.” He’d had to invoke that rule several times in the past mile. Thus far, none of the sprawled wet forms had stirred.

  Richard had been lucky in that he had got a lift almost all the way from the field where he’d slept on the far edge of the Chiltern Hills. He had set out at night, immediately after seeing the flooded east behind him, and had been picked up by a couple in a Bentley, come from Letchworth in the East Anglian Heights. They’d been nervously intent on picking up their son at Oxford. They hadn’t seen much of the flood and were inclined to minimize it. They’d given him a sandwich. After a bit, a good many other cars had turned up, and the going had got slow, and when they had finally driven slippingly down after dawn onto the sodden Oxford plain into the midst of a muddy traffic tie-up, Richard had thanked them and left. The tie-up looked like a lasting one, and he couldn’t bear the stunned, hurt, planless expressions on their faces.

  One must have a plan, he told himself now, as he marched along quickly among a pack of fellow marchers, beside another double file of spattered cars slowl
y moving west. They crossed the Cherwell by a crowded bridge hardly two feet above a foaming flood. He wondered how salt the water was, but didn’t stop to taste.

  He wondered, too, whether last night’s flooding here had come up from the Thames Estuary, or a hundred miles down from the Wash across the fenlands, roaring over the height of land between Daventry and Bicester, or even striking through gaps in the Cotswolds from the west coast, where the normal tides have a range of thirty feet. But such speculation wasn’t bringing him any closer to a plan. The sun was getting hot on his back.

  There was a low, heavy drumming, and the crowd around him pressed closer to the road as a small helicopter settled to a landing fifty yards away. The pilot, a young woman in muddied nurse’s whites, sprang out and ran to the one live figure that hadn’t run away from the noise and down-draft: another young woman sitting in the mud with a baby in her arms. She took the baby from her, dragged her to her feet, and hurriedly led her to the ’copter and put her aboard. Then, making no answer to the diverse shouted questions that now began to come from the crowd, she quickly climbed aboard herself and took off.

  Richard shook his head self-angrily and strode on. Watching such things made him feel horribly lonely, and got him no nearer to a plan, either.

  After a bit, though, he had one formulated. He would reach the Cotswolds before the next high tide, harbor upon them during it, cross the Severn plain by way of Tewkesbury to the Malvern Hills during the next low, and finally make his way by the same stepping-stone process to the Black Mountains of Wales, which should be proof against the highest tides that might come. His ebbing exhilaration returned a bit.

  Of course it might be wisest to return to the Chilterns or seek the moderate heights just east of Islip, but he told himself one ought to leave room there for the hordes that must still be pressing west, somehow, from London. Besides, he hated the thought of stopping anywhere, even on a safe-seeming height, and waiting and thinking. That was intolerable—one must keep moving, keep moving. And one feels loyalty toward a course of action one has just hammered out.

  He finally told his Cotswolds-Malvern Hills-Black Mountains plan to two older men beside whom he walked for a space. The first said it was utterly impractical, a mad fool’s vaporings; the second said it would save half of England and should be communicated at once to responsible authorities (this man waved his cane wildly at a cruising helicopter).

  Richard became disgusted with both of them, particularly the second, and tramped swiftly ahead, leaving them arguing loudly and angrily with each other. Suddenly all his exhilaration was gone, and he felt that both his plan and his reasonings were the purest rationalizations for an urge to rush west that had no more sense to it than the crowded scamper of the lemmings across Scandinavia to the Atlantic and death. Indeed, he asked himself, mightn’t shock and disorientation, in himself and all those around him, have stripped away civilized thought-layers and laid bare some primeval brain-node that responded only to the same call that the lemmings hear?

  He continued to hurry, however, moving closer to the road and watching for an empty place or clinging-spot on one of the faster-moving vehicles. After all, lemming or no, his silly plan was all he had, and he had just remembered the most cogent objection to it made by the first man: that it was a good twenty-five miles to the Cotswolds.

  As the morning tide flooded up the Bristol Channel, up the Severn, bringing wrecked ships and shredded hayricks, and buoys burst from their anchors, and telegraph poles trailing wires below, and torn houses, and the dead, flooding higher than last night, Dai Davies returned with it, past Glamorgan and Monmouth, twisting and turning like T. S. Eliot’s drowned Phoenician sailor, a fond Welshman poetic to the end, forty feet down.

  Chapter

  Twenty-nine

  MARGO AND HUNTER, each wrapped in a blanket, occupied the bowl-shaped lookout post, which McHeath and Doddsy had scooped and wiped dry of rainwater. Above them stars twinkled to the west amid scattered clouds, but the top and eastern half of the sky were still solidly masked. Below them a narrow cone of light shone on the locked sedans and along the road toward the Valley. Since Doddsy had several battery-changes for his big flashlight, Doc had the notion of setting it on top of the boulder-block. “It’ll help whoever’s on guard to see anyone sneaking in from the Valley,” he’d said. “They’ll be apt to investigate the light, and if they’re friendly they’ll probably yoohoo. But don’t shoot ’em just for being quiet. Cover ’em and order ’em to stand first. And don’t wake the whole camp because we get a visitor. But wake me.”

  Now Hunter and Margo were smoking, which flawed the perfection of Doc’s ambush—but not too seriously, they’d decided. The little orange glow as Margo inhaled lighted her hollow-cheeked face and gold hair combed down heavy and flat after last night’s salt-soaking.

  “You look like a Valkyrie, Margo,” Hunter said softly in a deep voice.

  She drew the gray pistol from under the blanket and held it high on her chest, so that it gleamed in the cigarette’s brief glow. “I feel like one,” she whispered happily. “I didn’t like it when the others had this gun, though it was interesting the things Doddsy noticed.”

  During his and McHeath’s sentry-go, the Little Man had examined the pistol with his small flashlight and an eight-power pocket magnifier, and had discovered a fine scale alongside the violet charge-gage. “It was made by beings with finer eyesight than ours,” he had deduced. He had also discovered something else Margo had never noticed: a tiny, recessed lever on top of the grip—the lever pointed its narrow end at the muzzleward extreme of a similarly fine, circular scale. No one had any firm guess about the function of this lever, and it was decided not to experiment with it.

  “I wonder on how many planets it’s killed,” Margo whispered now.

  “Yes,” Hunter said, “you look like a vestal Valkyrie guarding the sacred flame of the weapon.” He hitched a little closer to her. She smelled the musk of his sweat.

  “Shh—did you hear something then?” she breathed very rapidly. They stubbed out their cigarettes and waited tensely, their eyes scanning. Hunter softly crawled to the ridge crest by a route he’d memorized earlier and checked all around from there, although the other side of the ridge fell away quite precipitously for thirty feet.

  The bus-and-truck camp was quiet and there was no sign of alien movement, though the whispering wind made them think of the tomb in the cave five yards away. After a while they arranged themselves as they’d been, and lit up again.

  “You know, Margo,” Hunter went on where he’d left off, “I think killing those men brought you to life. It awakened you, maybe for the first time. A primal experience does that to a person.”

  She nodded intently with an inward-directed smile. “Everything’s twice as real now,” she whispered. “As if reality were built of solider stuff, and yet I could see and feel more around and into it, especially people’s bodies. It’s wonderful.”

  “It’s made you beautiful,” he said, laying his hand on the inside of her wrist. “More beautiful. Beautiful Valkyrie vestal.”

  “Why, Ross,” she whispered solemnly, “anyone would think you’re trying to make me.”

  “I am,” he said, firming his hand a little on her wrist.

  “You have a wife and two boys in Oregon,” she whispered, pulling away, but not quite hard enough to get free.

  “They don’t matter,” he said, “though I’m steadily worried about them. But we’re living from day to day now, from second to second. Any hour may be the last. Margo, let me kiss you.”

  “I only met you yesterday, Ross. You’re years older than I am…”

  “Ten, at the most,” he breathed harshly. “Margo, the old rules and shibboleths don’t count. Like Rudy said, it’s para-reality…”

  At that moment winds high above them tore the clouds, and they saw the Wanderer in its mandala face with the moon making a glittering half girdle around it. The wonder of that gold-notched violet sphere gripped
them, but after a few seconds Ross Hunter put his other arm around Margo and pulled her toward him. She broke away and pointed overhead.

  “I have a young man up there,” she said. “He was stationed on that…that diamond jumble. But maybe he got away; maybe he’s on the Wanderer now.”

  “I know,” Hunter said, looking only at her face, which now in the Wanderer-light needed no cigarette glow to show it. “I even read about your romance in a magazine. I thought you looked disgustingly snooty and smirking, like you needed to be grabbed by life and manhandled.”

  “By you, you mean? And then there’s Paul,” she went on rapidly, “snatched up in a saucer and now God knows where. He’s crazy about me, but all tied up inside. Maybe what’s happening to him now will free him.”

  “I don’t care about either of them,” Hunter said, getting up on his knees beside her and holding her by the shoulders. “I have no ethical qualms about taking advantage of the immediate difficulties of younger men crazy about you. You’re beautiful, and whoever gets you first wins. Besides, I know you better than they do, I know the awakened gold-haired Valkyrie, and I’m crazier than they are. Nothing counts now but you and me. Oh, Margo—”

  “No!” she said sharply, suddenly standing up from her blanket and wiping his hands down off her arms. “I’m glad you’re crazy about me, but I don’t need you, I don’t need the you-and-me. Just living by myself in the new reality is quite enough; it’s all the excitement I want; it’s using all of me. Understand?”

  After a couple of hard breaths he admitted: “O.K., I guess I have to.” Then: “We’d better have a careful scan around with all this new light. You take the western half. Let your eyes get used to it.”