The Wanderer

by Fritz Leiber

  Helen was squatting to hand tools to Benjy under the back of the car, where he was trying to free the inside of the left wheel from a great length of heavy wire that it had somehow picked up and wound tightly around itself, coil on coil, and which had only been noticed when the wheel jammed.

  Benjy crawfished out and squatted down beside Helen, and after he’d breathed hard and rested his head in his hands a bit, he shook it and said: “I don’t know if I can free it. I ain’t got proper clippers, and that wire on there just solid like. Must be wrap around two hundred times.”

  To Barbara, scanning around from the roof and trying to shift her feet as little as possible as she braced herself against the wind, the wonder was that Benjy had been able to get the car going at all after its drowning, and that they had actually managed to drive a whole skidding, spitting, backfiring hour north before this new trouble had come.

  Hester leaned out to say harshly: “You better free it, Benjy. This the lowest-lookin’ region we been yet, and these twisty little trees ain’t no good for roosting.”

  “Hes, I don’t think I can. Not in less than two-three hours, anyway.”

  “Hey!” Barbara called down to them, her voice excited. “Down the road—not more than a mile—I can see—sticking out of the treetops—a white triangle! I think we’re saved!”

  “Now what good is a white triangle to us, child?” Hester demanded.

  “Benjy,” Barbara called, “do you think you could figure out a stretcher for Mr. K—or carry him for a mile?”

  “Well,” he called back, “I done just about everything else.”

  BAGONG BUNG crouched calf-deep in fish-stinking bottom-muck and shoveled into it frantically with a short-handled infantry spade. Every now and then he’d drop the spade to scrabble in the mud for something muck-coated and small which he’d thrust without inspection into a cloth bag and go on shoveling.

  There were jellyfish weals on his legs, and his left hand was puffy where a shell had stung it, but he paid no attention to these hurts though he would occasionally spare a moment to drive his spade viciously through some sinister-looking worm, or knock aside a green crab that came crawling too close.

  He was doing his spading almost in the center of a sharp-ended lozenge seventy feet long and twenty wide, intermittently outlined by black, rotted wood crusted with shells and coral. It mightn’t be the “Lobo de Oro,” but it certainly looked like the remains of some old ship.

  Fifty feet away Cobber-Hume stood bent over on a hatch cover from the “Machan Lumpur” furiously working a bicycle pump. The pump was attached to a bright orange life raft that was hardly a quarter inflated. Two small orange cylinders tossed aside were of the gas that should have inflated the raft effortlessly, but hadn’t.

  Another fifty feet beyond him the “Machan Lumpur” lay flat on her side, showing all of her pitifully rusted, weed-draped bottom.

  The new-risen sun intermittently cast grotesquely tall shadows of the two men and the little steamer across the tide-drained floor of the Gulf of Tonkin and illumined the Wanderer setting in the west in her bull’s-head face, which Bagong Bung called besar sapi—“big cow.”

  Ragged clouds were scudding north with a wild swiftness, driven by a wind that moaned around the toppled Tiger of the Mud. A sudden gust took Cobber-Hume by surprise, and he staggered and slipped about on his none too stable pumping platform.

  Bagong Bung paused with elbows on knees and panted for breath. Then “Lekas, lekas!” he cried reprovingly at himself and began to shovel again. His spade brought up a sea-eaten angle of wrought iron which might have been the corner of a chest and that set him working still faster.

  Cobber-Hume shouted earnestly: “You better quit mucking for loot, sobat, and get some tucker and fresh water lekas out of the ‘Lumpy’ or give me a hand with this ruddy pumping. When the tide comes she’ll be a bloody bitch, and this wind’ll bring her faster, and then all the golden wolves in the world won’t help us—or even a platinum dingo!”

  But all Bagong Bung would answer was, “Lekas, lekas!”

  The little Malay shoveled and scrabbled, the big Australian pumped, the clouds sped thicker between Earth and the new-risen sun, the wind whistled.

  BARBARA KATZ shouted over the wind: “There it is!”

  The same lightning flash that showed the upper mangrove branches lashing against the dark speeding clouds also revealed the white triangle of the prow of a sailboat sticking out at least fifteen feet overhead from between two of the close-crowding trees.

  Barbara shifted the heavy thermos jug to her left hand and the big flashlight to her right and switched it on as she walked toward the trees under the prow. It showed the deep keel jammed between the lower branches of three of the mangroves.

  Benjy laid down old KKK in his blanket on the road.

  Hester and Helen set down their bags and knelt anxiously beside the old man.

  Benjy came up behind Barbara. He was panting. “Shine her—on the hull,” he managed to say.

  They pushed their way through the undergrowth, shining the flashlight upward on one side of the keel, then on the other. Barbara made out the boat’s name: “Albatross.”

  “Don’t seem to be no holes in her,” Benjy said after a bit, speaking close to Barbara’s ear. “Reckon her mast must be broke off short, though, or you’d have seen it. I think she float with the tide. Maybe she jam too tight, but I don’t think so. I can climb up by the branches, and then I got this to help you all up.” He touched the rope slung in loops around his chest.

  The wind died a little and he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted up: “Hello! Anybody aboard?”

  The lull in the wind held for two seconds more, then as it rose again, Benjy said: “Seem to me I hear a wailing then. Different from the wind.”

  “So did I,” Barbara replied, her teeth chattering—mostly from the cold, she told herself. She flashed her light straight overhead. “Oh, my God!”

  Poking out over the side of the boat in the middle of the flashlight beam was a tiny white furious face with mouth open wide.

  “It’s a little kid!” Benjy cried.

  “Be ready to catch him, Benjy,” Barbara said.

  “It’s a baby!” Helen yelled, coming up behind them. She waved her hand at the little wailing face. “You stay up there now, baby! Don’t you drop. We a-coming!”

  SALLY HARRIS AND JAKE LESHER cringed from the downdraft of the big rotors which whipped their clothes and made them squint their eyes, and which wildly blew about the charcoal-starter flame they’d fired in the barbecue bowl as an SOS beacon.

  It was dark but clear, and the golden and purple beams of the Wanderer rising in its dinosaur face twinkled from black wavelets almost level with the penthouse patio floor and occasionally foaming over it, but the wind from the rotors drove the foam back.

  The big helicopter masked the gray sky overhead and its rotors cut darkened circles in it.

  A white rope-ladder came snaking down toward them and with it a big voice that called: “I got room for only one more!”

  Jake snagged the ladder with one hand and lunged for Sally with the other, but the flames were between them, and as she started past she knocked the barbecue bowl over ahead of her, and the hot fuel hissed against the water and went up in a great blinding sheet, driving her back. An instant later all flame was gone, but now the ladder was tugging Jake away. He turned and grabbed the lowest rung with both hands and pulled himself clear. His feet skimmed the patio floor. The next moment he dropped off and tumbled in a heap against the balustrade, the wavelets foaming around him.

  The helicopter dipped violently. The wavelets cringed from its rotors, which almost touched them. The ladder fell away from the helicopter and floated on the wavelets like the skeleton of a giant centipede. The ’copter lifted and beat off north without another word.

  Jake scrambled to his feet and watched its small lights grow tinier.

  Sally came behind him. “Why’d you let go, Ja
ke?”

  “I was afraid I’d crack my shins against the railing,” he told her self-disgustedly. “I couldn’t help it.”

  She clung to him.

  Chapter

  Thirty-eight

  AS HUNTER STEERED the Corvette slowly down the next to the last hill to the Coast Highway, the emerald sun setting on the watery horizon was still bright enough to show what looked like at least a mile of new beach stretching out beyond the old one to the edge of a calm sea. He grinned around at the others, his nerves untouched by the eeriness of their green-lit faces. He had a childish impulse to shout to Hixon in the truck just behind: “What’d I tell you? Dead low or near it!—I hit it on the nose!”

  “Look, Mommy,” Ann said, “a vine growing across the road.”

  It couldn’t be that, Hunter knew, but it was some sort of vegetable debris, perhaps a branch torn down and blown there by yesterday’s rainstorm. There was the faintest popping sound as the tires rolled across it. The car skidded a little, and he straightened it and decreased speed. He did this quite automatically since like the others his attention was preoccupied by the degree to which the sea had receded. A mile now seemed a gross underestimate. He was at first amazed, then fascinated, finally plain awestruck.

  Going downhill made the sun set faster. The green light grew gloomy. Although the ocean was so far away, its reek was strong and fishy. There was no wind, and save for the chug of the two motors there was a general hush. No cars were passing along the Coast Highway, he remarked to himself—and only then realized that the stupid part of his mind had still been expecting them.

  They started down the last hill. Again the car skidded a fraction, and this time Hunter shifted into low as he straightened.

  “I don’t remember that ruined house,” Rama Joan said thoughtfully.

  “And I don’t remember the old boat out in the field,” Margo chimed in from behind her.

  There was a sudden squawking. “Look at those white birds pecking on the hillside,” Wanda observed shrilly. “Why, I do believe they’re gulls.”

  “Here comes another vine,” Ann informed them. “No, two. Oh, and a fish.”

  At that word a horror gripped Hunter and the scene around him turned nightmarish, though for the moment he didn’t quite know why—there was something dreadfully obvious his mind refused to see. Hixon was honking behind him. Did the fool want to pass? One—two—three—four. Four honks meant something, but he couldn’t remember what, because now he realized that the horror was the illusion that they were traveling under the sea—the silence, the gloomy green light, the black road changing by imperceptible degrees to a feather-smooth slope of silty slime, the fishy reek (“…and a fish!”), the seaweed bladders popping as they drifted across the two “vines”…

  Four means stop, Doc had said. Instantly, but very gingerly, Hunter put on the brakes. At first the car hardly slowed at all. Then gradually it came to a halt, slewing around in spite of all his steering—came to a stop because its tires were pushing up ridges of silt from a smooth coating an inch or more thick on the road.

  He looked back along the road, simply because the car was now facing almost backwards, and he saw the truck, green in the last of the sunlight, stopped, unslewed, fifty feet or so behind. His hands were shaking on the wheel, and his heart was pounding.

  It was Rama Joan who put the dreadfully obvious into words. She said, rather casually: “We must have passed the highwater mark a quarter of a mile back.”

  That was what was jolting his muscles and drumming his heart, Hunter realized—and as he realized it, his body began to quiet—simply the thought of the salt water that had been everywhere here and dozens of feet overhead, only six hours ago, leaving behind its sea-life and its sea-earth and its wreckage, the salt water that would be here again six hours from now—the thought of the tides of a few feet now sinking at low beneath the continental shelves and rushing back at high over the foothills of mountains.

  The women were taking it with an incomprehensible calm, he thought. It would have seemed more natural if they’d been screaming.

  Hixon and Doddsy and Wojtowicz and McHeath were coming down to them from the truck. They were walking oddly—stiff-legged and with elbows out. But, of course—the mud-coated road would be very slippery.

  Hixon and Doddsy stepped beside him, while the others walked on. The Little Man said, looking out to sea: “It’s…” and then words evidently failed him.

  The last sliver of green sun went under, but the whole sky stayed green—pale as a transparent wave to the west, dark as a forest to the east.

  There was a rhythmic throbbing. Hunter realized that the engine of the Corvette was still turning over. He twisted the ignition key.

  Only then did he realize that everyone else must be as stunned as he was.

  A couple of minutes later they were all pulling out of their shock. Most of them had got out of the cars and were standing gingerly in the muck.

  Wojtowicz and McHeath came trudging back uphill. The latter’s pants were covered with mud and his shoes were big blobs of it. “You can’t take a car that way, Mr. Hunter,” he said cheerfully. “It gets feet deep on the highway.”

  Wojtowicz nodded emphatically. “The kid went further than I did,” he averred. “Just look at him.”

  “And all deposited in only three high tides,” the Little Man said, shaking his head. “Amazing.”

  Hunter said bitterly: “There’s nothing else for it—we’re going to have to go back and take that other road with the sign saying it led to Vandenberg.” He looked at Hixon. “You were right.”

  Hixon nodded. He surveyed the Corvette’s mired wheels. “I guess I can pull you out of this,” he said. “I got a towline, and where I’m stopped the mud’s a lot thinner and almost dry. I should have good enough traction. And I got chains if I need ’em.”

  “I don’t want to be a bird of ill omen,” the Little Man said, “but when we go back there’s the danger of running into those young goons from the Valley.”

  Hixon shrugged. “That’s one of the chances we got to take. There’s no other road. We’ll hope Ross’s roadblock held ’em and they headed for Malibu. I’ll get the towline.”

  Margo said to Hunter, “It’s only four miles to Vandenberg. Couldn’t we walk it? Even with the mud it shouldn’t take more than a few hours.”

  Hunter said to her in a harsh whisper: “Use your head. In less than a few hours the coast road will be under water. Even this spot’ll be fifty or more feet deep.”

  “Oh, I’m getting stupid,” Margo sighed wearily. “I wish…” She didn’t say what.

  He inquired, rather bitterly: “Isn’t living by yourself in the new reality so much fun any more?”

  She looked up at him. “No, Ross,” she said, “it’s not.”

  The Little Man interrupted: “And when it comes to walking, we’ve got to remember we’ve got Ray Hanks to carry. I don’t like his condition, Ross. I’ve given him all the barbiturates I think I should. He fell asleep as soon as the truck stopped, but he’ll probably wake when it starts again. He’s in a lot of pain.”

  Just then Pop came limping up. “Mr. Hunter,” he said, “I can’t stand riding the back of that truck any more. I’m all bent up.”

  Hunter was about to give him a hot answer when Ida said: “You can have my place in the cab. You men don’t know how to care for Mr. Hanks, and it’s my job anyway.”

  Hixon tossed down the end of the towline. “Hitch it on your front end,” he directed Hunter. “Think you can?”

  “I’ll do it,” said Wojtowicz, grabbing hold of it first.

  “I imagine the Corvette’s getting low on gas,” the Little Man said to Hunter.

  “It is, Mr. Dodd,” Ann called from beside her mother. “I was watching the needle and it said empty.”

  “I’ll get one of the reserve cans,” the Little Man said.

  Hunter nodded. He felt simultaneously furious and impotent. Everyone was taking charge for him. Doc
would have found something humorous to say at this point, but he wasn’t Doc. He looked at Margo, who was looking at the distant sea, and he felt a sullen hunger.

  SALLY HARRIS AND JAKE LESHER, blanket-wrapped, hooked their elbows for extra safety over the low ridge of the penthouse roof. Two feet below the eaves, the wavelets glittered richly with the beams from the Wanderer’s needle-eye face, which Jake alternately called the Clutching Hand—for the coiled Serpent—and Pie in the Sky—for the Broken Egg.

  “And we thought we could make a play of this,” Sally said softly.

  “Yeah,” Jake echoed. “We thought we could—a supercolossal spectacle. But we were still thinking indoors.”

  Sally looked around at the black waters over Manhattan and at the few low, lonesome towers poking up from it here and there.

  “Imagine, some of them still got lights,” she commented.

  “Gas engines in their attics,” Jake explained. “Or maybe batteries.”

  “What’s that one way down there?” Sally wondered. “The Singer Building or Irving Trust?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “But I want to be able to remember exactly…or anyway, know exactly, if I’m not going to be able to remember.”

  “Forget it, Sal. Look, I brought a flask of Napoleon. How about a snort?”

  “You’re sweet,” she said, touching his cold hand lightly with her own, no warmer. And then she sang very softly, as if not to disturb the mounting wavelets:

  Oh, I am the Girl on Noah’s Raft

  And you are my Castaway King.

  Our love is not as big as a wink

  Or one single hair from a silver mink—

  But you stayed with me and you found me a drink;

  Our love is a very big thing.

  RICHARD HILLARY and Vera Carlisle lay a distance apart on green hay taken from a small stack they’d found high in the Malvern Hills. Richard thought restlessly, Last night straw, tonight hay. Straw, seedless and dry, for death. Hay, sour and sweet, for life.

  The Wanderer glared down on them from the west, again in its bloated-X face. The planet was becoming as dreadfully familiar as the face of a clock. Some three quarters of an hour ago, Vera had said: “Look, it’s half past D.”