The Wanderer

by Fritz Leiber

  “Well, whatever you think, there were two other twist-fields represented, two other false exits.” At this point he felt her entering his mind. Nevertheless he went on: “They were the second and fourth in the series, and they involved Jupiter and Luna.”

  Her answer rather surprised him. She said curtly: “You’re right. I’ll have to check with the Wanderer at once. It could be…what we’re afraid of.” She turned sharply to the control panel. She was standing on her hind legs now in the same gravity that gripped Paul. “You, welcome our visitor!”

  A port like a manhole opened in the center of the pink floor and, facing away from Paul, a man in the uniform of the U.S. Space Force pushed up through it. He lurched his elbows heavily against the rim as the artificial-gravity field took hold of him, but evidently this didn’t startle him particularly, for he quickly boosted the rest of his body into the saucer.

  Paul, barely into his shirt, stood up quickly too, getting a glimpse of the interior of a wide, corrugated-looking metal tube as the port closed.

  The newcomer, having stared at Tigerishka, looked around.

  “Don!”

  “Paul!”

  “I thought you were lost with the moon. How—”

  “And I thought you were—I don’t know what. But how—”

  They were both clumsily silent, waiting for the other to begin. Then Paul realized that Don was looking him up and down curiously. He hurriedly zipped his pants and buttoned his shirt.

  Don looked at Tigerishka, looked at her for quite some time. Then he looked at the flowers and the other furnishings. Then his gaze came back to Paul and he raised his eyebrows and spread his hands helplessly and grinned with the air of one who means, “I don’t care if the solar system’s falling apart and we’re in an impossible gravity field in an impossible flying saucer in the midst of space—This is as funny as a bedroom farce!”

  Paul realized he was blushing. He felt enraged at himself.

  Tigerishka looked around at them from the control panel just long enough to say rapidly: “Greetings, Donald Barnard Merriam! Please excuse the monkey, he’s ashamed of his nakedness. But I suppose you’re ashamed, too. Really, you should both try fur!”

  Chapter

  Forty

  FOR THE SAUCER STUDENTS it was a quarter past dinosaur, as Ann would have said, except she was asleep. By that token the Wanderer was about an hour and fifteen minutes higher in the sky than it had been when the Corvette and the truck had first drawn up side by side on the saddle to look at the high tide. Now late supper had been eaten, scrapes and scratches gotten rock-moving had been cleaned and bandaged, and more than half the saucer students were asleep in and around the two vehicles, wrapped, despite the relative mildness of the night, in coats, blankets, and the edges of the big tarpaulin.

  Three figures still cozied up around the primus stove where they’d boiled water for coffee: Pop, curled up on his side like a pillbug and fingering his bad teeth through his parchmenty cheeks as solemnly and sourly as if God were a dentist and Pop preparing to sue him for malpractice; the Ramrod, sitting cross-legged in the easiest variant of the lotus position—right ankle atop left knee, right knee atop left ankle—and staring up at the dinosaur rotating east on the Wanderer as if that now rather phallic-looking golden beast were the navel of the cosmos; and the Little Man, squatting on his hams and writing up the events and observations of the day in his notebook by Wanderer-light.

  Hunter, holding Margo’s hand in his, she walking beside him, stepped up to the Little Man and touched him on the shoulder and said quietly, “Doddsy, Miss Gelhorn and I are going up to the crest across the road. If there’s a serious emergency: five horn blasts.”

  The Little Man looked up and nodded.

  From beyond the primus, Pop glanced at the blanket Margo was carrying and then turned his eyes away and blew through his lips a small, ugly, contemptuous sound, half cynicism, half angry disapproval.

  The Ramrod withdrew from his contemplation to look down at Pop. “Shut up,” he said softly and calmly. Then he looked at Hunter and Margo, and above them at the Wanderer, and a smile came to his fanatical, abstracted face, and while his right forefinger traced tiny Isis-loops on his right knee he said, “Ispan shower blessings on your love.”

  The Little Man bent his head to his note-jotting. His lips were compressed, as to hide a grin and perhaps suppress a chuckle.

  Hunter and Margo crossed the road. Ann and her mother were lying blanket-wrapped just beyond the shadow of the truck and it seemed to Hunter that Rama Joan was smiling at them open-eyed, but as he came closer he saw that her eyes were closed. Just then he became aware, from the corner of his eye, of a tall dark figure standing back in the shadow of the truck. Even its face was dark, shadowed by a black hat with brim turned down.

  A shiver mounted Hunter’s spine, because he was certain it was Doc. He wanted Doc to speak and show his face, but the figure only raised its hands to its hat and pulled it further down and drew back into the shadow.

  At that instant Hunter felt Margo’s fingers tighten hard on his, and he looked directly into the shadow of the truck. There was no longer a figure there.

  They walked on, saying nothing to each other about it. Wild grass crunched faintly under their feet as they mounted the slope in the gray midnight noon of the Wanderer. They were strongly aware of the sea invading the hills—the high tide at its stand fifty yards away, its waves creaming the hillside—and of the Wanderer invading the sky, or rather invading Earth’s space and bringing its own dark, pearly sky with it, and of strangeness invading the life of all mankind, of all Terra.

  They stepped onto a low stone ledge and from that to another, and there before them was a flat-topped rectangular gray rock big as a giant’s coffin. Margo spread the blanket on it and they kneeled on it facing each other. They stared at each other intently, unsmilingly, or if their lips smiled at all they smiled cruelly, devouringly. The hushes between the surges of the surf were filled with the rhythmic poundings of their blood, louder than the steady sigh-crash of the sea itself. The hills seemed to echo those poundings and almost to move yielding with them, and the sky to resound. Margo zipped down her jacket, laying the momentum pistol beside it, and lifted her hands to her throat and began to unbutton her blouse, but Hunter took that work away from her, and she ran the fingers of her right hand up into his beard and made a fist of it, trapping the wiry hairs, and dug her knuckles into his chin. Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried. The sea and the rocks and the hills and the sky and the cool enfolding air and the wide rich planet overhead all came alive in their ways, becoming fixtures of the room that is the mind, or—truer—the mind reaching out to embrace them. The more Hunter and Margo became aware of each other’s bodies and each other, the more, not the less, intensely they became aware of everything around them, the largest and the least, even the tiny violet dash, scarcely an eighth of an inch long, in the scale on the grip of the momentum pistol—and aware of things unseen as well as things seen, the dead as well as the living. Their bodies and the heavens were one, the engorged sun wooed the dark moon-crescent and was at last received by it. The driving, punishing surf was in them, and the sea with all its swell and storm and certainty of calm. Time stretched out, passing with silent tread, for once not humming a death-spell but seamlessly joining death with life. Overhead the golden lingam beast swinging east through the dark purple became the back of the golden serpent coiled round the broken egg in the next hour-face of the Wanderer—the female serpent contending with and constricting about and finally crushing the male seed-bringer—while around about the great intruding planet the moon-fragments glittered and danced like the million sperm dance supplicatingly, vyingly, fiercely, about the ovum.

  DON MERRIAM had given Paul Hagbolt a brief account of his experiences in space and aboard the Wanderer. It seemed to confirm th
e background of much that Tigerishka had told Paul and it revived in him something of the mood that she had induced in him by her story, though he was still shaken and hurt by the subsequent change in her feelings. Now he was telling Don what had happened to him and Margo on the night of the Wanderer’s appearance—at the flying saucer symposium and by the gate of Vandenberg and in the earthquake waves—when Tigerishka interrupted sharply.

  “Stop chattering, please! I have some questions for you.”

  She was standing at the pinkly embowered control panel—had presumably been in silent contact with her superiors. Paul and Don were sitting on the pink floor, across which Miaow made periodic scampering sorties from the flower banks—evidently much intrigued or at least stimulated by the simulated terrestrial gravity.

  “Have you two beings been well treated here and during your contacts with my people? Donald Merriam?”

  He stared at her, thinking how much she resembled, except for the coloring of her fur, the felinoid he had seen catch a great topaz bird and drink its blood with the air of a ballerina nibbling at an after-theater snack.

  He said: “After I escaped from the moon—wholly by my own efforts as far as I know—I was picked up by two of your ships, escorted to the Wanderer, kept in a comfortable room there for two days, apparently, then brought here. Nobody talked to me much. I think my mind was turned inside out and inspected. In a dreamlike vision I was shown many things. That’s about it.”

  “Thank you. Now you, Paul Hagbolt, have you been well treated?”

  “Well…” he began, smiling at her questioningly.

  “A simple yes or no will do!” she snapped.

  “Then—yes.”

  “Thank you. Question two: Have you seen evidence of your Earth people being given aid in their tidal troubles?”

  Paul said: “There were those things you showed me over Los Angeles and San Francisco and Leningrad: fires put out by rain, tides being driven back by some sort of repulsion field.”

  Don said: “I think I saw television pictures of the same sort of thing in one huge room of the Wanderer during my vision or dream.”

  “It was a true vision,” she assured him. “Question—”

  “Tigerishka,” Paul interrupted, “does all this have something to do with the two star photographs that don’t match the Wanderer’s false exits from hyperspace? Are you people afraid the pursuit will catch up with you, and are you preparing a defense of your actions here?”

  Don looked at him in surprise—Paul had as yet told him nothing of Tigerishka’s story—but she said simply, “Stop chattering, monkey—I mean, being. Yes, that is possible. But question three: So far as you know, have your companions suffered by reason of the Wanderer?”

  Don said harshly: “My three companions at Moonbase were killed when Luna broke up.”

  She nodded curtly and said: “One of them may have survived—it’s being checked. Paul Hagbolt?”

  He said, “I was just telling Don about that, Tigerishka. Margo and the saucer people were O.K. when I last saw them—I mean at least they were alive, though in the wash of some earthquake waves which you’d done something to make smaller. But that was two days ago.”

  “They’re still alive,” Tigerishka asserted. Her violet eyes twinkled and she shaped her lips in a thin, humanoid smile as she added: “I’ve been keeping an eye on them—you mortals never realize how much the gods worry about you: all you see are the floods and the earthquakes. However I won’t ask either of you to accept my word for that, I’ll show you! Stand up, please, both of you. I am going to send you down to Earth to see for yourselves.”

  “You mean in the Baba Yaga?” Don asked as they complied. “As I’m sure you know, it’s linked to this saucer now by a space tube and I was given the idea that I—I mean that we now, Paul and myself—would be able to use it to return to Earth. Which the Baba Yaga can manage, I think, if we are released above the atmosphere with no orbital speed to—”

  “No, no, no,” she interrupted. “Later you’ll do that—in an hour or two, say, and at your Vandenberg Two space field—which is just five hundred miles below us now, by the way—but now I send you there a much quicker way. Face the control panel! Stand close together!”

  Don commented with a somewhat grim chuckle, “It’s as if you were going to take a snapshot of us.”

  Tigerishka said, “That’s just about what I am going to do.”

  The sunlight in the saucer began to dim. Miaow, as if scenting excitement, came scampering out of the flowers and rubbed around their ankles. On a sudden impulse Paul scooped up the little cat.

  MARGO AND HUNTER had dressed and folded the blankets and started down the hillside arm in arm, at one with each other and the cosmos in the afterglow of their lovemaking, when they heard a voice calling faintly: “Margo! Margo!”

  Below them at the foot of the slope lay the camp around the two cars. No one was stirring. The Wanderer-light streaming down from the serpent-egg face showed only wrapped, recumbent figures. The pool of shadow by the truck had grown smaller as the Wanderer mounted the sky, yet it was still there.

  But the voice did not seem to come from the camp, but from the air.

  They looked toward the sea and it had sunk ten yards or more, leaving a wide band of hillside darkly stained where the high tide had been. What water now lay between them and Vandenberg Two was more like a wide river, with islets showing in it here and there. Their gaze mounted from the point, and against the dark gray sky they saw two faintly luminous figures of men descending the air, erect yet with unmoving feet. The figures descended at a slant, floating swiftly and weightlessly, and vanished into the hillside midway between them and the camp.

  Hunter and Margo held each other tight, their skin chilling and prickling, for both remembered the figure they had seen in the shadow of the truck, and both had the thought that one of the weightless figures was Doc—and the whole sight another, though bolder, ghostly manifestation, or a continuation of the first.

  When nothing more happened they went a few steps farther down the hill, and then Margo looked down and gasped with horror and retreated a sudden two steps as if from a snake, dragging him back with her.

  From the ground in front of them rose two heads of men, their figures earth-encumbered to the shoulders. The features of the heads were blurred, though one misty face seemed namelessly familiar to Hunter. Necks and shoulders identified one as a uniformed spaceman, one—the familiar one—as a civilian. The thought flashed through Hunter’s mind of how much this was like Ulysses’ encounter with the spirits of the dead in the Underworld, these two spirits summoned not by the hot shed blood of the bull, but by the pounding blood of his and Margo’s lovemaking.

  Then the two figures rose out of the ground, not by their own efforts, for they moved neither hand nor foot, but drawn up by a power outside them until their feet touched the surface of the ground, yet not quite as if they stood but rather floated there, facing Hunter and Margo six feet away. Then what was blurred came into focus and Margo gasped: “Don! Paul!” although she clutched more tightly at Hunter as she did so, and as he, too, recognized the second figure.

  The Paul-figure smiled and opened its lips, and a voice which synchronized perfectly with the lip movements yet did not come from the throat said: “Hello, Margo and Professor…Excuse my poor memory. We’re not ghosts. This is merely an advanced form of communication.”

  In similar fashion the Don-figure said: “Paul and I are talking to you from a small saucer out in space, between you and the Wanderer, but nearer the earth. It’s wonderful to see you, Margo, dear.”

  “That’s right,” Paul chimed in. “I mean about being in the saucer. It’s the same one that picked me up. See—” he lifted something in his hands. “Here’s Miaow!”

  The little cat rested quietly for a moment, then its lips writhed back, there was a synchronized spitting hiss and it vanished into the darkness in a whirl of its own little limbs.

  The Paul-figure scow
led and momentarily raised a hand to his lips and sucked at it, then explained: “She got excited. It’s all a little too weird for her.”

  Margo let go of Hunter and put his arms away from her and stepped forward, reaching a hand toward Paul but raising the other to Don’s cheek and lifting her face to kiss him.

  The hand went through the cheek, however, and with a little nervous gasp—not so much of fear as of exasperation at her own nervousness—Margo retreated back to Hunter.

  “We’re only three-dimensional images,” Paul explained with a quirking smile. “Touch doesn’t transmit on this system. We’re seeing your two images up here in the saucer, except they aren’t always together in the saucer, especially when they were moving into focus. It’s really pretty weird, if you’ll excuse my saying so, Professor…”

  “My name’s Ross Hunter,” he said, at last managing to speak.

  Don said to Margo: “I’m sorry I’m too insubstantial to kiss, dear. I’ll make up for that when I really see you. Incidentally, I’ve actually been on the Wanderer.”

  “And I’ve been talking to one of their beings,” Paul put in. “She’s quite a person—you’d have to see her. She wants us to—”

  Hunter interrupted, “You’ve been on the Wanderer, you’ve talked with them—Who are they? What are they doing? What do they want?”

  Paul said: “We haven’t time to try to answer any questions like that. As I was about to say, our…well, captress…wants us to assure ourselves that you survived the tidal waves and that you’re all safe. That’s half the reason for this…call.”

  “We’re safe,” Margo said faintly, “as far as anyone on Earth is.”

  “Our whole party’s survived so far,” Beardy amplified, “except for Rudolph Brecht, who was killed in a mountain accident.”

  “Brecht?” Paul questioned him doubtfully, frowning.

  “You remember; we called him Doc,” Margo explained.

  “Of course,” Paul said, “and we called that funny old crackpot the Ramrod and Professor Hunter Beardy. Excuse me. Professor.”