The Wanderer

by Fritz Leiber

  “What is it?” Paul asked, not slowing down. The highway had begun its climb.

  “I’d almost swear,” Margo said, staring back down the road, “that I saw a sign with the words ‘Flying Saucer’ on it.”

  “Flying Saucer-Burgers?” Paul suggested. “Same shape, you know.”

  “No, there wasn’t a cafe or anything like that. Just one little white sign. Right before the wash. I want to go back and have a look at it”

  “But we’re almost to V-2,” Paul objected. “Don’t you want to see the moon through a ’scope while the eclipse is still on? You’ll be able to see Plato, only we’ll have to put up the top and leave Miaow locked in the car. You can’t take pets into Vandenberg.”

  “No, I don’t,” Margo said. “I’m sick of being given the slick Project treatment. What’s more, I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!”

  “All right, all right,” Paul chuckled.

  “So let’s turn back right now. We’ll be able to see the moon better facing that way.”

  Paul did his best to drive past the little white sign, but Margo brought him up short. “There! Where the green lantern is! Stop there!” As the car bumped on the uneven shoulder, Miaow sat up and stretched and then looked around with no great interest.

  There was a dirt road going down beside the beach, along the foot of the headland the highway had swung inland to climb—a lesser bump before the big plateau of Vandenberg Two.

  On one side of the dirt road there hung a flickering kerosene lantern with green glass around the flame. To the other side, standing out sharply in the convertible’s headlights, was a rather small white sign. The black lettering on it, not at all crudely drawn, read: THIS WAY TO THE FLYING SAUCER SYMPOSIUM.

  “Only in Southern California,” Paul said, shaking his head.

  Margo said, “Let’s drive in and see what’s going on.”

  “Not on your life!” Paul assured her loudly. “If you cant stand Vandenberg, I can’t stand saucer maniacs.”

  “But they don’t sound like maniacs, Paul,” Margo said. “The whole thing has tone. Take that lettering—it’s pure Baskerville.”

  Snatching up Miaow, she clambered out of the car for a closer look.

  “Besides, we don’t know if the meeting’s tonight,” he called after her. “It was probably earlier today, or even last week. Who knows?” He stood up too. “I don’t see any lights or signs of life.”

  “The green lantern proves it must be tonight,” Margo called back from where she stood by the sign. “Let’s go, Paul.”

  “The green lantern probably has nothing to do with the sign.”

  Margo turned toward him, holding up a black finger in the headlight’s glare.

  “The paint’s still wet,” she said.

  THE MOON burrowed deeper into the earth’s shadow, nearing that central point where the three bodies would be lined up. As always the moon—and much less strongly in its effects, the sun—plucked at the planet between them with invisible gravitational fingers, straining earth’s rock crust and steel-strong inner parts, lightly brushing the triggers of immense or tiny earthquakes, and setting the ponderous film of Earth’s oceans and seas, gulfs and channels, straits and sounds, lakes and bays resonating in the slow and various music of the tides, whose single vibrations are a little longer than a night or day.

  ON THE OTHER SIDE of the earth from Southern California, swart Bagong Bung, sweat dropping from under his splotched yellow turban onto his bare shoulders and chest, called to his naked Australian mate to cut the engine of the “Machan Lumpur.” If they didn’t lose any time, they’d be getting to the little inlet south of Do-Son before the ten-foot tide could lift them over the bar, and here in the Gulf of Tonkin the demon-controlled high tide came only once every twenty-four hours. A patrolling helicopter might take note if they hung about outside the inlet before slipping in to deliver the arms and drugs to the North Vietnam anticommunist underground—afterwards proceeding to Hanoi to deliver the main cargo (also arms and drugs) to the Communists.

  As the bow-ripples died, the 200-mile-wide gulf around the tiny rusty steamer glowed like a lake of molten brass. Bagong Bung, squinting about at the shimmering horizon, hand resting on the brass spyglass thrust in his belt, had no thought for the eclipse which noon and the globe hid from him. For that matter, the little Malay, his tired ship (mortgaged to Chinese bankers), and the lukewarm sea were all standing on their heads in relation to the Americas, and the sun baking his turban would have been toasting the soles of a billion Occidental feet, could it have shone through the planet between.

  Bagong Bung was dreaming of the host of wrecked ships under the shallow waters around him and south and east away, and of the treasure he would win from them when he had accumulated enough money from this accursed smuggling to pay for the equipment and the divers he’d need.

  DON GUILLERMO WALKER told himself that the cluster of feeble lights he’d just droned past must be Metapa. But—his celestial navigation being as much boast as his European Shakespearean career—what if they were Zapata or La Libertad? Better, perhaps: in widely missing his target he’d miss the torture. Sweat itched on his chin and cheeks. He should have shaved his beard, he told himself. His captors would say, jiggling the bull prod in the steaming cell, that the beard proved he was a Castro-inspired Communist and his cards of the John Birch Society forgeries or worse. Burn la barba off his face with la electricidad!

  “Damn you for getting me into this, you whore in black underwear, you nigger-Indian bitch!” Don Guillermo yelled at the sooty orange moon.

  THE “PRINCE CHARLES” and the dory “Endurance” went their diverging ways across the dark Atlantic. Most of the nylon-shod ones had gone to their rendezvous with sleep or each other, but Captain Sithwise was taking a turn on the bridge. He felt strangely uneasy. It was having those Brazilian insurgents aboard, he told himself: this new lot of empire-snatchers did such unaccountably crazy things—as if they lived on ether.

  Wolf Loner rocked in the arms of the sea, cushioned by a mile of salt water. The cloudbank under whose eastern verge the “Endurance” had entered was a vast one, trailing veils of fog and stretching to Edmonton and the Great Slave Lake, and from Boston north to Hudson Strait.

  SALLY HARRIS granted Jake Lesher another burst of hand-clutching at a dark turn in the House of Horror, but, “Hey, don’t ruck up my skirt—use the auxiliary hip placket,” she admonished.

  “Are your pants magnetically hung, too?” Jake demanded.

  “No, just Goodyear, but there’s a vanishing gadget. Easy there—and for God’s sake don’t tell me they’re like the big round loaves of good homemade bread Mama Lesher used to bake. That’s enough now, or the Rocket’ll close down before we’ve seen the eclipse.”

  “Sal, you were never astronomical like this before and we don’t need that kind of roller-ride. You got the key to Hasseltine’s place, don’t you, and he’s away, isn’t he?—and besides, you’ve never taken me there. If that skyscraper isn’t high enough for you—”

  “The roller coaster’s my skyscraper tonight,” she told him. “That’s enough, I said!”

  She twisted away from him and ran off, past an eight-foot-tall gray Saturn-man who reared out of a wall, gripping a yard-long raygun and peppering her with sizzling blue light.

  ASA HOLCOMB, puffing a bit, surmounted the top of the little mesa west of Arizona’s Superstition Mountains. Just at that moment the wall of his aorta tore a little, and blood began to seep into his chest There was no pain, but he felt a weakness and sensed a strangeness, and he quietly lay down on the flat rock, which still had a little heat in it from the day of sun.

  He was neither particularly startled nor very afraid. Either the weakness would pass, or it would not. He’d known this little climb to a good spot to watch the eclipse was a dangerous thing. After all, his mother had warned him against climbing by himself in the rocks, seventy years ago. Doubly dangerous, with an aorta paper-thin. But it was
always worth everything to get away by himself, climb a bit, and study the heavens.

  His eyes had been resting, a little wistfully, on the lights of Mesa, but now he lifted them. This was about the fiftieth time he had seen Luna shrouded, but tonight she seemed more beautiful in her bronze phase than ever before, more like the pomegranate Proserpine plucked in the Garden of the Dead. His weakness wasn’t passing.

  Chapter

  Four

  THE CONVERTIBLE carrying Paul Hagbolt and Margo Gelhorn and her cat softly jounced along the rutted trail, raw cliff again to the right, beach sand to the left, both now only a yard or so off. Away from the big highway, the night pressed in. The three wayfarers shared more fully the lonely obscurity of the eclipsed moon climbing the starry sky. Even Miaow sat up to peer ahead.

  “Among other things, this road probably leads to the back door of Vandenberg Two,” Paul ruminated. “The beach gate, they call it. Of course I’m supposed to use the main gate, but in a pinch…” Then after a bit: “It’s really funny how these saucer maniacs are always holding their meetings next door to missile bases or atomic installations. Hoping a little glamor will leak their way, I guess. Did you know that at one time the Space Force was really suspicious about it?”

  The headlights picked up an earth-fall blocking more than half the road. It was as high as the hood of the car, and recent, judging by the damp look of the granulated dirt. Paul let the car stop.

  “End of saucer expedition,” he announced cheerfully.

  “But the others have gone on,” Margo said, standing up again. “You can see where they’ve gone around the fall.”

  “Okay,” Paul said mock-doomfully. “But if we get stuck in the sand, you’re going to have to hunt drift boards to put under the tires.”

  The wheels spun twice, but the convertible had no real trouble getting traction. A little beyond, they came to a shallow pocket in the cliff, where the road expanded to thrice its width. A dozen cars had used the extra space to park side by side, their rear bumpers snug to the cliff. The first comers included a red sedan, a microbus and a white, open-back pickup truck.

  Beyond the last car was another green lantern and an elegantly lettered sign: PARK HERE. THEN FOLLOW THE GREEN LIGHTS.

  “Just like the Times Square subway station,” Margo exclaimed delightedly. “I’ll bet there are New Yorkers in this crowd.”

  “Newly arrived,” Paul agreed, eyeing the cliff distrustfully as he parked beside the last car. “They haven’t had time to find out about California slides.”

  Margo jumped out carrying Miaow. Paul followed, handing her her jacket.

  “I don’t need it,” she told him. He folded it over his arm without comment.

  The third green lantern was out on the beach, by a stand of tall sea-grass. The beach was very level. They could at last hear the hiss of tiny breakers—little more than wavelets, from the sound. Miaow mewed anxiously. Margo talked to her softly.

  Just beyond the cars, the cliffs swung sharply to the right and the level beach followed them inland. Paul realized they must be at the mouth of the wash they’d crossed and recrossed back on the highway. Some distance beyond the wash, the ground began to rise again. Still farther off he could see a red light blinking high up and, much lower down, the glint of a mesh fence. He found these evidences of Vandenberg Two obscurely reassuring.

  They headed oceanward past the sea-grass toward the green spark of the fourth lantern, tiny almost as a planet. The crusted sand sang faintly as they scuffed it. Margo took Paul’s arm.

  “Do you realize the eclipse is still going on?” she whispered. He nodded. She said, “Paul, what if the stars around it should squiggle now?”

  Paul said, “I think I can see a white light beyond the fourth green one. And figures. And some sort of low building.”

  They kept on. The low building looked as if it had once been someone’s large beach house, or else a small beach club. The windows were boarded up. On this side of it was a rather large floor, unsided and unroofed, about two feet above the sand, that could hardly be anything else but an old dance floor. On it had been set about a hundred folding chairs, of which only the front twenty or so were occupied. The chairs faced the sea and a long table, slightly elevated on what had once been the orchestra’s platform. Behind the table sat three persons with a little white light shining on their faces—the only illumination besides the green lantern at the back of the audience.

  One of the three persons had a beard; another was bald and wore glasses; the third was in evening dress with a white tie and wore a green turban.

  Beardy was speaking, but they weren’t yet near enough to hear him distinctly.

  Margo clutched Paul’s arm. “The one with the turban is a woman,” she whispered loudly.

  A tiny figure got up from the sand near the lantern and approached them. A small white light blinked on, and they saw it was a narrow-faced girl with pale reddish braids. She couldn’t have been more than ten. She had some sheets of paper in one hand and she held the forefinger of the other across her lips. The white light was that of a small battery lamp hanging against her chest by a cord around her neck. As she came close she lifted the sheets to them, whispering, “We’ve got to be quiet. It’s started. Take a program.”

  Her eyes lit up when she saw Miaow. “Oh, you’ve got a cat,” she whispered. “I don’t think Ragnarok will mind.”

  After Margo and Paul had each taken a sheet, she led them to a central step going up to the floor and gestured that they should sit down in front. When Margo and Paul, smiling but shaking their heads, sat down in the back row instead, she shrugged and started to go away.

  Margo felt Miaow stiffen. The cat was staring at something lying across two end chairs in the front row.

  Ragnarok was a large German police dog.

  The moment of first crisis passed. Miaow relaxed a little, though continuing to stare unblinkingly with ears laid back.

  The little girl came behind them. “I’m Ann,” she whispered. “The one with the turban is my mother. We’re from New York.”

  Then she went back to her vigil beside the green lantern.

  GENERAL SPIKE STEVENS and three of his staff sat close-crowded in a dimmed room of the Reserve Headquarters of the U.S. Space Force. They were watching two large television screens set side by side. Each screen showed the same area of darkened moon, an area which took in Plato. The image on the righthand screen was relayed from an unmanned communication-and-observation satellite hanging 23,000 miles above Christmas Island, 20 degrees south of Hawaii, while the one on the lefthand screen came from a similar equatorial satellite over a point in the Atlantic off the coast of Brazil where the “Prince Charles” was atom-steaming south.

  The four viewers crossed their eyes with practiced skill, fusing the images which had originated 30,000 miles apart out in space. The effect was exaggeratedly three-dimensional, with the moon section bumping out solidly. “We can give the new electroamplif a limited O.K.,” the general said. “I’d say that’s adequate crater definition now Christmas has got rid of its herringbone. Jimmy, let’s have an unmagnified view of the whole moonward space sector.”

  Colonel Mabel Wallingford studied the General covertly, knitting together her long, strong fingers. Someone had once told her that she had a strangler’s hands, and she never looked at the General without remembering that. It gave her a bitter satisfaction that Spike should sound as casually confident as might Odin surveying the Nine Worlds from Hlithskjalf tower in Asgard, yet that he knew no more of where they now were than did she: that they were within fifty miles of the White House and at least 200 feet underground. They had all been driven here, and had entered the elevator hooded, and they had not met the staff they had relieved.

  ARAB JONES and High Bundy and Pepe Martinez sipped at their fourth stick of tea, passing the potent thin reefer from fingers to fingers and holding the piney smoke long in their lungs. They sat on cushions and a carpet in front of a little tent with strings
of wooden beads for a door, pitched on a rooftop in Harlem, not far from Lenox and 125th Street. Their eyes sought each other’s with the friendly watchfulness of weed-brothers, then moved together toward the eclipsed moon.

  “Man, I bet she on pot too,” High said. “See that bronzy smoke? Those lunar spacemen gonna get high.”

  Pepe said, “We’re gonna be way out there ourselves. You planning to eclipse, Arab?”

  Arab said, “The astronomical kick is the most”

  Chapter

  Five

  PAUL HAGBOLT and Margo Gelhorn began to listen to what the man with the beard was saying: “A human being’s hopes and fears, his deepest agitations, will always color what he sees in the skies—whether it’s a plane or a planet or a ship from another world, or only a corpuscle of his own blood. Put it this way: every saucer is also a sign.”

  Beardy’s voice was mellow yet youthfully intense. Doc—the big bald man with thick glasses—and the She-Turban listened inscrutably. (It hadn’t taken Margo two minutes to nickname all three panelists and several members of the audience.)

  Beardy continued: “The late Dr. Jung has explored this aspect of saucer sightings thoroughly in his book, Ein Moderner Mythus von Dingen die am Himmel gesehen werden.” His German was authentically gargled. He immediately translated: “A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.”

  “Who is Beardy?” Margo demanded of Paul. He started to study his program, but that was useless in the back-row darkness.

  Beardy went on, “Dr. Jung was particularly interested in saucers with the appearance of a circle divided into four parts. He relates such shapes to what Mahayana Buddhism calls mandalas. A mandala is a symbol of psychic unity—the individual mind embattled against insanity. It is apt to appear at times of great stress and danger, as today, when the individual is torn and shaken by his horror of atomic destruction, his dread of being depersonalized, made into one more soldier-slave or consumer-robot in a totalitarian horde, and his fear of completely losing touch with his own culture as it goes chasing off into ten thousand difficult yet crucial specializations.”