The Wanderer

by Fritz Leiber

His eyes told Don he was no more than fifteen miles above the moon’s surface and hurtling toward it at about a mile a second. There was nowhere near enough time to break fall by swinging ship and main-jetting to cancel the mile-a-second downward velocity.

  As those thoughts flashed, Don’s fingers flicked the keys of the vernier jets, halting the Baba Yaga’s slow tumbling so that the spacescreen—and Don—looked straight down the chasm.

  There was one hope, based on nothing more than a matching of colors. There had been something violet and yellow glaring with tremendous brilliance behind the moon. Now there was a violet-and-yellow thread gleaming in the blackness of the moon’s core. He might be looking through the moon.

  The moon, split like a pebble? Planetary cores should flow, not fracture. But any other theory meant death.

  The walls of fresh-riven rock rushed up at him. He was too close to the righthand one. A baby solid-fuel rocket fired on that side set the Baba Yaga drifting away from it—and started a secondary tumbling which another ripple of the verniers neutralized almost before it manifested itself.

  When he was a boy, Don Merriam had read The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In that romance of science fantasy, John Carter, greatest swordsman of two planets, had escaped with his comrades from the vast, volcanic, subterranean cavern-world of the Black Pirates of Barsoom and their hideous Issus-cult by racing a Martian flyer straight up the miles-long narrow shaft leading to the outer world, instead of rising slowly and cautiously by the buoyancy of the flyer’s ray tanks. The latter had been the normal and only sane course, but John Carter had found salvation for himself and his companions in sheer blinding speed, steering vertically for a star visible at the top of the well-like shaft.

  Perhaps the Gods of Mars were the arbiters of all Don Merriam’s actions at this point. At any rate, he suddenly felt around him in the cabin of the Baba Yaga the ghostly presences, in their jeweled harness, of Xodar the Black renegade, Carthoris the mysterious Red Martian, Matai Shang the sinister Father of Holy Therns, and his brave, beautiful, love-struck, infinitely treacherous daughter Phaidor. And it is a fact that as the plummeting Baba Yaga was engulfed between blurs of raw rock touched by sunlight for the first time in billions of years, and as Don fired the G-rich main jet and was pinned by it up against his seat, where he steered by the verniers and the solid-fuel rockets to keep the glitter of the rock walls equal and the violet-and-yellow thread splitting the black ribbon into equal halves, he cried out sharply in the empty cabin: “Hold on for your lives! I am flying straight down the chasm!”

  THE SAUCER STUDENTS felt sand give way to a stretch of adobe-hard earth sloping sharply up to the high mesh fence ringing the base of the plateau of Vandenberg Two. But here—seaward of the point where the blinking red light sat atop its mast a hundred feet behind the fence—and two hundred feet, at least, above it—a broad gully cut through the ridge, gentling the slope. Tire and caterpillar tracks ran up the gully. There was a big gate in the fence where it crossed the road, and beside the gate, built like it into the fence, a two-story guard tower. The gate was closed and the tower was lightless, but the small door in the outside of the tower was open.

  The sight cheered Paul considerably. He straightened his shoulders and his necktie. The little cortege halted fifty feet in front of the gate and he, Margo, and Doc walked forward, preceded by their inky, purple-and-yellow-edged shadows.

  A brazen mechanical voice came out of the box over the door, saying, “Stop where you are. You are about to trespass on restricted property of the United States Government. You may not pass this gate. Return the way you came. Thank you.”

  “Oh, my sainted aunt!” Doc exploded. Since being relieved of cot-lugging by young Harry McHeath, he’d got his bounce back. “Do you think we’re an advance deputation of little green men?” he shouted at the box. “Can’t you see we’re human beings?”

  Paul touched Doc’s arm and shook his head, but continued to advance. He called out in a mellow voice: “I am Paul Hagbolt, 929-CW, JR, accredited PR captain-equivalent of Project Moon. I am asking admission for myself and eleven distressed persons known to me, and requesting transport for the latter.”

  A soldier stepped from the darkness of the doorway out into the light of the Wanderer. There was no mistaking he was a soldier, for he had boots on his feet and a helmet on his head; a pistol, knife, and two grenades hung from his belt; his right arm cradled a submachine gun, and tightly harnessed to his back—Paul noted incredulously—were jump rockets.

  The soldier was pokerfaced and he stood stiffly, but his right knee was jouncing up and down a little, rapidly and steadily, as if he were about to go into a stamping native dance or, more reasonably, as if he were trying to control a tic and not succeeding.

  “CW and JR, eh?” he said to Paul, suspiciously but also respectfully. “Let’s see your ID cards…sir.”

  There was a faint, acid odor. Miaow, who had been remarkably calm since the landslide, lifted a little in Margo’s arms, looked straight at the soldier, and hissed like a teakettle.

  Handing the soldier the cards, which he had ready, Paul caught a sharp tremor.

  As the soldier studied the cards, tipping them forward to catch the Wanderer’s light, his face stayed expressionless, but Doc noticed that his eyes kept jumping away from the cards to the Wanderer.

  Doc asked conversationally, “Heard anything about that?”

  The soldier looked Doc straight in the eye and barked: “Yes, we know all about that and we’re not intimidated! But we’re not releasing any information, see?”

  “Yes, I do,” Doc told him softly.

  The soldier looked up from the cards. “Very well, Mr. Hagbolt, sir, I’ll phone your request to the main gate.” He backed off toward the doorway.

  “You’re sure you’ve got it right?” Paul asked, repeating and amplifying it and mentioning the names of several officers.

  “And Professor Morton Opperly,” Margo put in with strong emphasis.

  Paul finished: “And one of our people has had a heart attack. We’ll want to bring her in the tower, where it’s warmer. And we’d like some water.”

  “No, you all stay outside,” the soldier said sharply, raising the muzzle of the submachine gun an inch as he continued to back away. “Wait,” he called to Paul. “You come here.” From the darkness inside the tower he handed Paul first a loose blanket, next a half-gallon bottle of water. “But no paper cups!” he added, choking off what might have become a high-pitched laugh. “Don’t ask me for paper cups!” He drew back into the darkness, and there was the sound of dialing.

  Paul returned with his booty, handing the blanket to the thin woman. The water was passed around. They drank from the bottle.

  “I expect we’ll have to wait a bit,” Paul whispered. “I’m sure he’s O.K., but he’s pretty nervous. He looked all set to stand off the new planet singlehanded.”

  Margo said: “Miaow could smell how scared he was.”

  “Well,” Doc philosophized softly, “if I’d been all alone when I first saw the thing, but with the hardware handy, I think I’d have switched the lights off and draped myself with the hardware and shook a bit myself. We met the new planet under just about the best circumstances, I’d say—peering around for saucers and talking about hyperspace and all.”

  Ann said: “I’d think if you were scared, Mr. Brecht, you’d switch on all the lights you could.”

  Doc said, “My wicked idea, young lady, was that I’d be so terrified I wouldn’t want something big, black, and hairy able to see where I was, to grab me.”

  Ann laughed appreciatively.

  The Little Man said to them all in a small, almost unfeeling, faraway voice: “The moon is swinging behind the new planet. She’s…going away.”

  Eyes confirmed what the words had said. A chunk of the moon’s rim was hidden by the purple-and-gold intruder.

  Wojtowicz said: “My God…my God.”

  The thin woman began to sob shudderingly.

/>   Rama Joan said: “Give us courage.”

  Margo’s lips formed the word, “Don,” and she shivered and hugged Miaow to her. Paul put his arm around her shoulders, but she moved away a little, head bowed.

  Hunter said: “The moon’s in a very constricted orbit. There can’t be more than three thousand miles between their surfaces.”

  The Ramrod thought: Her birth-pangs upon her, the White Virgin shelters in Ispan’s robes.

  The Little Man made a cup of his hands and Rama Joan poured a drink for Ragnarok.

  COLONEL MABEL WALLINGFORD said stridently: “Spike, I’ve been talking with General Vandamme himself and he says that this isn’t a problem. They’ve been letting us handle a lot of it because we were faster on the jump. Your orders have gone out approved-and-relayed.”

  Spike Stevens, his eyes fixed on the twin screens showing the moon moving behind the Wanderer, bit off the end of a cigar and snarled: “O. K., tell him to prove it.”

  “Jimmy, warm up the inter-HQ screen,” Colonel Mabel ordered.

  The General lit his cigar.

  A third screen glowed on, showing a smiling, distinguished-looking gentleman with a bald head. The General whipped his cigar out of his mouth and stood up. Colonel Mabel felt a surge of hot joy, watching him play the guilty, dutiful schoolboy.

  “Mr. President,” Spike said.

  “I’m not part of a simulated crisis, Spike,” the other responded, “though it’s hard to believe that’s been bothering you, considering the masterly way your gang’s been operating.”

  “Not masterly at all, sir,” the General said. “I’m afraid we’ve lost Moonbase. Not a word for over an hour.”

  The face on the screen grew grave. “We must be prepared for losses. I am now leaving Space HQ to meet the Coast Guard. My word to you is: Carry on!…for the duration of this…” You could sense him reaching for one of his famous polished phrases…“astronomical emergency.”

  The screen faded.

  Colonel Willard Griswold, his eyes on the astronomic screens, said: “Moonbase? Hell, Spike, we’ve lost the moon.”

  Chapter

  Twelve

  DON MERRIAM had been fifteen minutes in the body of the moon, doing much of it at two miles a second, and now the violet-and-yellow thread, after widening to a ribbon, was staying the same width, which couldn’t be good, but there was nothing to do but bullet toward it through the incredible flaw that split the moon along an almost perfect plane like a diamond tapped just right, and nothing to be but one great piloting eye, and suffer what thoughts to come that would, since he couldn’t spare mind to control them.

  After the first big shove, he fired the main jet in brief bursts, aiming the Baba Yaga with the verniers.

  Don Merriam was making a trip through a planet’s core. He had passed through its very center, and so far the trip had been glitter and blur and blackness and a violet thread halving a spacescreen turned milky in patches. That and an aching throat and smarting eyes and the picture of himself as a glass bee with a Prince Rupert’s Drop tail buzzing through a ripple in a stack of metal sheets miles long, or an enchanted prince sprinting down a poisoned corridor wide as his elbows—to brush a wall, what a faux pas!

  Toward midpassage there had been soot-black streaks and a flash of green fire, but no guessing what made them.

  The milkiness in the spacescreen, at any rate, should be erosion from the fantastic thin-armed dust swirls that at one point had almost lost him the thread.

  He had lost the aftward sunlight, too, sooner than he’d hoped, and had to aim the Baba Yaga solely by the fainter purple and golden wall-glimmers, and that was deceptive because the yellow was intrinsically brighter than the purple and tempted him to stay too far away from it.

  But now the violet ribbon began to narrow and he knew it was the doom of him, worse than collision course, for there came unbidden to his mind a vision of the riven halves of the moon crashing together behind him, cutting oft all sunlight, and then—in ponderous reaction and by the fierce mutual attraction of their masses moving—to crash together ahead of him, swinging through yards while he rocketed through miles, but swiftly enough to beat him to the impact point.

  Then, just as he seemed almost to reach it, just as by his rough gauging he’d moon-traversed close to two thousand miles, the violet ribbon blacked out altogether.

  And then, as incredible as if he’d found a life after death, he burst out of the blackness into light, with stars showing off to all sides and even old shock-headed Sol shooting his blinding white arrows.

  Only then did he take in what lay straight ahead of him.

  It was a great round, as big as Earth seen from a two-hour orbit. This vast, mounded disk was all radiantly violet and golden to the right, where Sol lay beyond, but to the left inky black save for three pale greenish oval glow-spots curving off the disk in the distance.

  The unblurred night line between the radiant and the inky hemispheres was slowly drifting to the right as he watched, just as Sol was slowly drifting toward the violet horizon. He realized that back there in the moon he had lost sight of the violet ribbon, not because the jaws of the moon had clamped together, but simply because the night side of the planet ahead had moved over and looked down the chasm at him.

  He at once accepted the fact that it was a massive planet and that the moon had gone into a tight orbit around it, because that alone, as far as he could reason, could explain the sights and happenings of the past three hours: the light deluging Earth’s night side, the highlight in the Atlantic, and above all the shattering of Luna.

  And, beyond reason, there was that inside him—since he was out here and facing it—that cried out to believe it was a planet.

  He swung ship, and there, only fifty miles below him, was the moon’s vast disk, half inky black, half glaring white with sunlight. He could see where the chasm walls had truly crashed shut behind him by the line of dust-geysers rising gleaming into sunlit vacuum almost along the moon’s night line, and by the surrealist, jagged-squared chessboard of lesser cracks marked by lesser geysers radiating outward from the crash line. Monstrous cross-hatching!

  He was poised fifty miles—and receding—over what every moment looked more like a rock sea churning.

  Then, because he didn’t want to plunge—not yet, at least—at a mile a second into the glow-spotted black hemisphere now beneath his jets, he fired the main jet to kill that part of his velocity—at last checking the tank gages and discovering that there was barely enough fuel and oxidizer for this maneuver. It should put him into an orbit around the strange planet—inside even the tight orbit of the moon.

  He knew that the sun would soon sink from view and the metamorphosing moon be blackly eclipsed, as the Baba Yaga and Luna swung together into the shadow-cone—into the night—of a mystery.

  FRITZ SCHER sat stiffly at his desk in the long room at the Tidal Institute at Hamburg, West Germany. He was listening with amusement tending toward exasperation to the demented morning news flash from across the Atlantic. He switched it off with a twist that almost fractured the knob and said to Hans Opfel: “Those Americans! Their presence is needful to hold the Communist swines in check, but what an intellectual degradation to the Fatherland!”

  He stood up from his desk and walked over to the sleekly streamlined, room-long tide-predicting machine. Inside the machine a wire ran through many movable precision pulleys, each pulley representing a factor influencing the tide at the point on Earth’s hydrosphere for which the machine was set; at the end of the wire a pen drew on a graph-papered drum a curve giving the exact tides at that point, hour by hour.

  At Delft they had a machine that did it all electronically, but those were the feckless Hollanders!

  Fritz Scher said dramatically: “The moon in orbit around a planet from nowhere? Hah!” He tapped the shell of the machine beside him significantly. “Here we have the moon nailed down!”

  THE “MACHAN LUMPUR,” her rusty prow aimed a little south of
the sun sinking over North Vietnam, crossed the bar guarding the tiny inlet south of Do-Son. Bagong Bung noted, by a familiar configuration of mangrove roots and by an old gray piling that was practically a member of his family, that the high tide was perhaps a hand’s breadth higher than he’d ever encountered it here. A good omen! Tiny ripples shivered across the inlet mysteriously. A sea hawk screamed.

  RICHARD HILLARY watched the sunbeams slowly straighten up as the big air-suspended bus whipped smoothly on toward London. Bath was far behind and they were passing Silbury Hill.

  He listened idly to the solemn speculations around him about the nonsensical news items that had been coming over the wireless concerning a flying saucer big as a planet sighted by thousands over the United States. Really, science fiction was corrupting people everywhere.

  A coarsely attractive girl from Devizes in slacks, snood, and a sweater, who had transferred aboard at Beckhampton, now dropped into the seat ahead of him and instantly fell into small talk with the woman beside her. She was expatiating, with exactly equal enthusiasm, on the saucer reports—and the little earthquake that had nervously twitched parts of Scotland—and on the egg she’d had for breakfast and the sausage-and-mashed she was going to have for lunch. In honor of Edward Lear, Richard offhandedly shaped a limerick about her:

  There was a Young Girl of Devizes

  Whose thoughts came in two standard sizes:

  While most fitted a spoon,

  Some were big as the moon;

  That spacestruck Young Girl of Devizes.

  Thinking of it kept him amused all the way to Savernake Forest, where he fell into a doze.

  Chapter

  Thirteen

  TIMES SQUARE at five A.M. was still as packed as it had been on the nights of the moon landing and of the False War With Russia. Traffic had long stopped. The streets were full of people. The Wanderer, now masking half the moon, was still visible down the crosstown streets, including 42nd, but low in the sky, its yellow mellower and its purple turning red.