The Wanderer

by Fritz Leiber

  “Wait a minute, Doc!” This time it was Margo who interrupted, in a ringing voice. She moved in front of the Corvette.

  “That’s Vandenberg Three down there,” she said, pointing with the momentum pistol at the three white buildings. “Morton Opperly may still be there. We’ve got to check.”

  “Not one chance in fifty!” Doc barked at her. “Not in five hundred. He’ll have been ’copted out—maybe by the one we saw this morning. No!”

  “I’ve seen people moving inside,” Margo lied. “You agreed the idea is to get him this pistol. We’ve got to check.”

  Doc shook his head “No! Too crazy a chance to take for next to nothing.”

  Margo grinned at him. “But I’ve got the pistol,” she said, holding it against her chest, “and I’m going to take it down there if I have to walk.”

  “That’s telling him!” Hixon cheered excitedly.

  “All right, Miss Strongheart, then listen to me,” Doc said, bending forward toward her. “You go down there with that pistol, walking or in a car, and some crazy sniper picks you off, or you get jumped from three sides at once, and Opperly doesn’t get the weapon—those maniacs do. It’s got to stay here.

  “But I’ll make you a proposition, Miss Gelhorn. You go down there without the weapon—I’ll give you my revolver—and bring Opperly back, or just find he’s there, and we’ll make the deal with him. How about it?”

  Margo looked at Hunter. “You drive me?” He nodded and jumped for the sedan. She came around the side of the Corvette and held the momentum pistol toward Doc. “Trade.” He gave her his revolver and took it. Hunter started the sedan and drove it alongside the red car.

  Hixon came forward. “Hey, I’m going too.”

  “You want him?” Doc asked. Margo nodded. He asked Hixon: “You promise just to help them find Opperly?”

  Hixon nodded, muttering, “Whoever he is.”

  Doc said: “Okay then, but you’re the last one we can spare. No more volunteers!” He barked the last almost into the face of McHeath, coming up eagerly. “Gimme your rifle,” he told the boy. “You climb up those rocks back there—” he pointed to the easier gatepost—“and watch for us being outflanked…by anybody, including police!”

  Hixon piled into the back of the sedan, Margo got in beside Hunter, Doc vaulted down and leaned an elbow on her window. “Hold on a second,” he said, scanning the jammed highway again just as action broke out there.

  A dozen figures popped up from behind and between cars near the police camp. They threw things. Guns cracked and two or three of them fell. Things hit the police cars. Flames exploded.

  “Molotov cocktails,” Hixon whispered, gnawing his lip.

  Doc said: “Now’s a good time—they all got other things to think of.” He shoved his head in the window.

  “I just got one thing to say to you,” he growled at the three of them. “Bring yourselves back, you bastards!”

  BARBARA KATZ sat in the topmost spread of the big, pale, rung-like, right-angling branches of a gigantic dead magnolia tree, the westering sun hot on her back, and watched east under the blue sky for the Atlantic to come mounding back from Daytona Beach and Lake George over the neck of Florida. From time to time she tried to study the figures on the darkly-creased, sweat-stained tidal chart on the back of the calendar page Benjy had torn off for her yesterday morning, although she knew it could hardly apply closely any more, if at all. But there had been a high tide last night at three A.M. and so there should be another around the middle of this afternoon.

  In the next spread of the branches down old KKK was tied to his seat with blanket strips around the big trunk, which shielded him some from the sun. Hester sat beside him, supporting his slumping head and easing his position as best she could. Nearby Helen and Benjy had their spots. Benjy had the rope he’d used to draw up the old man and some other things.

  In their soiled and torn pale gray uniforms the three Negroes looked like bedraggled and ungainly brown-crested silver birds as they perched there high in the huge, nearly leafless tree.

  The tree rose from a slight mound half covered by the exposed section of its own thick gray roots, on which the mud-spattered Rolls now was parked.

  South of the mound stretched a tiny graveyard, its wooden headboards sand-drifted and some pushed down and all sedge-draped by the scour of the last high tide. At the foot of the graveyard was a small wooden church that had once been painted white. It was shifted a dozen feet off its foundation bricks and strained and twisted at the corners, though not broken apart. The brown mark of the tide went up about eight feet on it, almost to the flaking but newer-painted black letters over the door, which read CHURCH OF JESUS SAVER.

  Barbara squeezed her eyes shut several times rapidly. It looked to her as if several patches of the blue sky had come down onto the flat, brown-green land to the east, a little like the watery reflections one sees far ahead on a level concrete road on a burning hot day. The blue patches grew and merged. No longer conscious of blinking, Barbara watched with an intensity approaching that of trance. Second linked to second and minute to minute seamlessly, as if the hooves of time had halted, or as if something in her stood still so that she could no longer hear their pounding.

  Nor—so attentive was she to the strange phenomenon of the sky overflooding the land—did she much hear the physical roar coming louder and louder from the east, or the awed, excited calling back and forth of the three great gray featherless fowl beneath her, or even much feel the tree shake and strain as the waters came surging around it, or hear Helen’s scream.

  But it did seem to her that the whole earth was tipping and sliding up into the sky as that blue came reaching dizzyingly underneath, and she leaned farther and farther backwards and would have fallen, except that now a body came pressing up against her side and a strong arm came around her back, bracing her.

  “You hold on, Miss Barbara,” Benjy was shouting in her ear. “You watch so hard you fall.”

  She looked around the watery plain. Florida was gone. The Church of Jesus Saver was floating off upside down with its eight short legs crookedly in the air.

  She looked down again. The magnolia, its height halved, was a lonely midsea refuge. She thought of the Rolls Royce and giggled.

  “I don’t know about that, Miss Barbara,” Benjy said, diviningly. “I hoist out the battery and ’stributor and some more parts. Grease others heavy—might help. Plug up gas tank tight at both ends, same for oil. Tide go down, she might run again, though I be surprise.”

  The tree swayed with the surge and then swayed back. Helen squawked. Hester clutched at her. Benjy laughed crowingly. He said to Barbara: “But I still got hopes—some.”

  Chapter

  Thirty-two

  ROSS HUNTER, driving conservatively fast, swung the sedan around the last curve. Now the road lay straight along the high mesh fence of Vandenberg Three.

  Margo hit his shoulder and pointed at a small open door in the first corner of the fence.

  Hunter didn’t slow down. “No good,” he grunted. “I’d try for a gate that can take the car.”

  “Hurry it up,” Hixon urged from the back seat.

  The landscape turned suddenly spectral. The big cloud-bank had cut off the sun. There was thunder. Through the thunder, guns cracked ahead. A police car came out of the flaming laager through the opening clipped in the freeway fence, plunged down a little slope, and headed in their direction, bumping and jouncing around the edge of the burned car-crush at the mouth of Monica Mountainway. A second police car came out, hind end foremost but backing fast, and followed the first.

  Hunter slowed. There was a big gate with an empty guard booth. The gate was open. He swung through it as a third police car, this one front end first, escaped from the laager.

  Hunter gunned the sedan across the dusty gray gravel toward a wide black door in the biggest of the three white buildings.

  Beyond them Margo saw teenagers climbing the far fence and crowding in throu
gh a little door in it.

  Hunter pulled up. Hixon and Margo piled out. There were three concrete steps, a narrow porch, then the black double door with a tag of white on it.

  Hixon and Margo ran up the steps. She tried the door. It was locked. Hixon pounded on it with the butt of his rifle and yelled: “Open up!”

  Hunter started to turn the sedan around.

  The first police car came screeching through the gate and headed toward them. Through the clouds of dust the first raised, the second police car followed, still backing.

  Hixon ran to the nearest window and smashed with his rifle butt through it, then chopped away at the big fangs of glass left.

  With a squeal of brakes, a surge of springs, and a ten-foot skid, the first police car drew up beside the sedan. Two officers jumped out, their faces soot-smeared, their eyes wild. One wave of a Tommy gun.

  “Drop your guns, all of you!” he yelled.

  The other covered Hunter. “Get out of that car!”

  Hixon, holding his rifle muzzle away from the police, yelled: “Hey, we’re on your side!”

  The officer let off a couple of shots that holed the stucco over Hixon’s head. He dropped the rifle.

  Margo was holding the revolver behind her.

  Hunter climbed out of the car and came up the steps, hands held shoulder high.

  The backing police car drew up behind the first. More officers piled out of it. The third police car drew up outside the gate.

  Something dropped through the sedan window and bounced on the seat. Something else smashed against the windshield of the first police car, and hissing flames jetted out in a blue-yellow burst.

  The police fired around the side of the building from which the Molotov cocktails had come. Two or three unseen guns returned their fire.

  Margo was looking at the white tag on the black door. She ripped it down and crumpled it up.

  The driver of the first police car lunged out of it, face arm-shielded from the flames. There were flames inside the sedan, too.

  Hunter, keeping his hands raised, came up to Margo and Hixon.

  The Molotov cocktail that had fallen unbroken into the sedan exploded. Big, blue-yellow flame-jets flared from the four windows.

  Hunter said: “Let’s run for it. The little gate we saw first.”

  They did. The police didn’t shoot at them. The officers were already piling back into their second car. Thunder rumbled again, much louder.

  Margo and Hunter and Hixon ran past the last white building just as a bunch of teenagers came around it on the other side. Margo felt the gust of their crazy high spirits like an electric wind, and for a moment she was on their side. Then gravel jumped ahead of Hunter, there was a crack, and she realized one of the kids was shooting. They were waving bottles and knives and one of them had a handgun. It was still more than fifty yards to the little gate.

  The teenagers came at them whooping and screaming. A girl threw a bottle.

  As she ran, Margo shot at them three times with the revolver and didn’t hit anyone. Making the third shot, she tripped and sprawled on the gravel. The thrown bottle hit beside her and broke. She threw up her hands to shield her face from the flames, but there was only the smell of whiskey.

  Hunter yanked her up and they ran on. Ahead, Hixon was pointing at something and yelling.

  The teenagers no longer came straight at them, but a dozen or so raced ahead toward the little door, cutting them off.

  Margo and Hunter saw what Hixon was pointing at: a bright red car with a black hat at the wheel coming fast down Monica Mountainway, tires screeching at the turns.

  The teenagers had them blocked off from the door but they still ran toward it.

  The Corvette lurched to a stop in front of the door. Rama Joan stood up beside the driver and pointed a gray-tipped hand at the teenagers. Dust and gravel blew up in their wild faces, they went staggering, lurching, sprawling backwards as if struck by a gale; the fence sagged inward.

  Doc stood up beside her and yelled toward Margo and the two men: “Come on! Make it fast!”

  They ran through the gate and piled into the tiny back of the Corvette. Doc cut the wheels sharp and turned it.

  They saw the second police car, escaped from Vandenberg Three, bouncing back around the burned car-crush.

  But the third police car was coming straight at them up Monica Mountainway along the fence.

  Rama Joan pointed the momentum pistol at it.

  Hixon cried: “Don’t do it They’re police.”

  The police car seemed to brake to a stop, except that its occupants were not thrown forward but back. The whole car started to skid back. Rama Joan quit pointing the pistol.

  The Corvette roared uphill. Hunter protested: “Not so fast, Doc.”

  Doc retorted: “This is nothing. Didn’t you see me coming down?” But he did slow a bit.

  Hixon chortled: “I’ll say we did! You sure swung it, Captain!”

  Behind them the car Rama Joan had stopped had turned back, and both police vehicles were headed north along the flat outside the freeway fence. The flames of the abandoned laager waved and twisted higher. The fire had spread to other cars.

  Hunter snorted and said: “That was the last useless, heroic nonsense I’ll ever go in for.” He scowled at Margo.

  Thunder roared. A big drop or two of rain spattered.

  Margo fished a small ball of paper from her bosom and uncrumpled it. “Useless?” she grinned at Hunter, holding the paper forward between Doc and Rama Joan, but so Hunter could see it, too.

  The big-scrawled message was: “Van Bruster, Comstock, rest of you! We’re being lifted out to Vandenberg Two. Join us by Monica Mountainway. Luck!”

  It was signed: “Opperly.”

  A big raindrop hit the paper. The rain was black.

  DON GUILLERMO WALKER and the Araiza brothers were halfway up Lake Nicaragua. The launch would soon head around the island of Ometepe. From the island’s two volcanoes rose thick black smoke plumes that glared red toward the base even in the bright sunlight.

  The sunlight came through a wide break in the curtain of steam to the west. The break should have showed the towns of La Virgin and Rivas on the Isthmus of Rivas between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific, but instead there was only water stretching endlessly.

  The Araizas had supplied the information that the normal tides along the Pacific coast by Brito and San Juan del Sur across the isthmus were about fifteen feet.

  The inference was incredible, yet inescapable. The Wanderer-multiplied tides were flowing over the isthmus, joining the Pacific to Lake Nicaragua. That was why the lake had gone up and why its waters now tasted of salt. Where once the white and sky-blue coaches of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Accessory Transit Company had carried the gold-dreaming Forty-niners and their baggage from ocean to ocean, from Virgin Bay to San Juan del Sur, there now stretched the blue waters of the Peaceful Sea. The Nicaraguan Canal, of which so many men had dreamed, had become a twice-daily reality.

  A red glare appeared halfway up the thickly vegetated cone of Madera. Almost immediately pale smoke puffed from around it. Then the red glare began to lengthen downward, the smoke following. Red-hot lava must have broken through a crack and be flowing toward the lake.

  The launch kept on. Don Guillermo wondered that the waters around them were so calm. He did not think particularly of the stupendous pressure they must be exerting on this whole stretch of coast, nor did he see anything ominous in the absence of the steam curtain, though if he had thought about it he would have guessed that steam was still generating far below.

  There was no definable stimulus, but suddenly the three men looked at each other.

  Don Guillermo slapped a mosquito on his neck.

  A thick button of water swelled up like a gray pimple from the placid surface in the direction of the inundated Isthmus of Rivas and without a sound grew in three seconds to a mushroom of water a half mile high and a mile wide.

  Something that turned the
surface of the water from bright to dull was traveling from the mushroom to the launch.

  The three men stared unbelievingly.

  The blast wave from the explosion broke their eardrums and knocked them down in the launch.

  Don Guillermo glimpsed the great vertical hillside of steam-driven water an instant before it engulfed him and his comrades in the launch. It seemed to be everywhere thickly covered with a water-vegetation of lacy, dull gray fronds. He thought, The blasted heath. There to meet with Macbeth. I come, Graymalkin.

  The Isthmus of Rivas vanished, too. The Nicaraguan Canal became a permanent reality.

  Chapter

  Thirty-three

  DON MERRIAM had eaten and slept once more in his tiny cabin aboard the Wanderer, when he woke with a feeling of great inner clarity. He gazed tranquilly at the neutral-colored ceiling as it lightened.

  He did not feel the bed under him and was barely aware of his body—the little nerve messages of touch and tension were at a minimum. Insofar as he could tell at all, he was stretched on his back with his arms straight and relaxed at his sides.

  Suddenly he was filled with a boundless curiosity about the great ship on which he was an involuntary passenger. His whole being was suffused with the yearning to know, or if that were impossible, at least to see. This feeling was most intense, yet he felt no impulse to work it out in grimacings and gestures and muscular strainings.

  Without warning, the ceiling swiftly descended toward him.

  He tried to throw himself off the bed, but the only result was that he turned over, very smoothly, and saw by the bottom of the wall and the pattering shower area that he was about six feet above them.