The Wanderer

by Fritz Leiber

  Rama Joan cut down the trousers of her salt-streaked evening clothes to Bermuda shorts, ruthlessly chopped off the tails and half the arms of the coat, replaced the ruined dicky and white tie with the green scarf of her turban, and gathered her red-gold hair in a pony tail. Ann and Doc admired her.

  Everybody looked pretty battered. Margo noticed that Ross Hunter appeared trimmer than the other men, then realized it was because, while most of them were getting slightly stubbly cheeks and chins, he simply still had the beard that had made him Beardy.

  As the sky blued and brightened, their spirits rose and it became just a bit hard to think that all of last night had actually happened, and that a violet and gold planet was at this moment terrorizing Japan, Australia, and the other islands of the half-planet-spanning Pacific Ocean.

  But they could see a monster slide blocking the road not two hundred yards north, while Doc pointed out the wreckage of the beach house and the platform lodged against the gleaming fence of Vandenberg Two, little more than a mile away.

  “Still,” he said, “humanity’s skepticism about its own experiences grows like mushrooms. How about another affidavit for us all to sign, Doddsy?”

  “I’m keeping a journal of events in waterproof ink,” the Little Man retorted briskly. “It’s open to inspection at any time.” He took his notebook and slowly riffled the pages to emphasize that point “If anyone’s memory of events differs from mine, I’ll be happy to make a note of that—providing he’ll initial the divergent recollection.”

  Wojtowicz, staring down over the Little Man’s shoulder, said: “Hey, Doddsy, some of those pictures you got of the Wanderer don’t look right to me.”

  “I smoothed out the details and made them quite diagrammatic,” the Little Man admitted. “However, I did draw them…from the life. But if you want to make some memory pictures of the new planet—and initial them!—you’re welcome to put them in the book.”

  “Not me, I’m no artist,” Wojtowicz excused himself grinningly.

  “You’ll be able to check up tonight, Wojtowicz,” Doc said.

  “Jeeze, don’t remind me!” the other said, clapping his hand to his eyes and doing a little comedy stagger.

  Only the Ramrod remained miserable, sitting apart on the wide bridge-rail and staring hungrily out toward the sea’s rim where the Wanderer had set.

  “She chose him,” he muttered wonderingly. “I believed, yet I was passed over. He was drawn into the saucer.”

  “Never mind, Charlie,” said Wanda, laying her plump hand on his thin shoulder. “Maybe it wasn’t the Empress but only her handmaiden, and she got the orders mixed.”

  “You know, that was truly weird, that saucer swooping down on us,” Wojtowicz said to the others. “Just one thing about it—are you sure you saw Paul pulled up into it? I don’t like to say this, but he could have been sucked out to sea, like almost happened to several of us.”

  Doc, Rama Joan, and Hunter averred they’d seen it with their own eyes. “I think she was more interested in the cat than Paul,” Rama Joan added.

  “Why so?” the Little Man asked. “And why ‘she’?”

  Rama Joan shrugged. “Hard to say, Mr. Dodd. Except she looked like a cat herself, and I didn’t notice any external sex organs.”

  “Neither did I,” Doc confirmed, “though I won’t say I was peering for them at the time with lewd avidity.”

  “Do you think the saucer actually had an inertialess drive—like E. E. Smith’s bergenholms or something?” Harry McHeath asked Doc.

  “Have to, I’d think, the way it was jumping around. In a situation like this, science fiction is our only guide. On the other hand—”

  Margo took advantage of everyone being engrossed in the conversation to fade back between the bushes in the direction the other women had taken earlier on their bathroom trips. She climbed over a small ridge beside the wash and came out on a boulder-strewn, wide earth ledge about twenty feet above the beach.

  She looked around her. She couldn’t see anyone anywhere. She took out from under her leather jacket the gray pistol that had fallen from the saucer. It was the first chance she’d had to inspect it closely. Keeping it concealed while she’d dried her clothes had been an irksome problem.

  It was unburnished gray—aluminum or magnesium, by its light weight—and smoothly streamlined. There was no apparent hole in the tapering muzzle for anything material to come out. In front of the trigger-bump was an oval button. The grip seemed shaped for two fingers arid a thumb. In the left side of the grip, away from her palm as she held it in her right hand, was a narrow vertical strip that shone violet five-eighths of its length up, rather like a recessed thermometer.

  She gripped the gun experimentally. Just beyond the end of the muzzle she noted a boulder two feet wide sitting on the rim of the ledge. Her heart began to pound. She pointed the gun at the boulder and tapped the trigger. Nothing happened. She pressed it a little harder, then a little harder than that, and suddenly—there was no recoil, but suddenly the boulder was shooting away, and a three-foot bite of ledge with it, to fall almost soundlessly into the sand a hundred feet off, though some of the sand there whooshed up and flew on farther. A breeze blew briefly from behind her. A little gravel rattled down the slope.

  She took a gasping breath and a big swallow. Then she grinned. The violet column didn’t look much shorter, if any. She put the gun back inside her jacket, belting the latter a notch tighter. A thoughtful frown replaced her grin.

  She climbed back over the top of the ridge, and there on the other side was Hunter, his whiskers showing copper hairs among the brown in the sun’s rays just topping the hills.

  “Professor Hunter!” she said. “I didn’t think you were that sort of man.”

  “What sort?” he asked her, perhaps smiling, but the beard made that hard to tell.

  “Why, to follow a girl when she’s on private business.”

  He simply looked at her, and she smoothed her blonde hair. “Aren’t you used to the frank interest of men? Sexual or otherwise,” he asked blandly. Then, “Fact is, I thought I heard a little landslide.”

  “A rock did roll down to the beach,” she said, stepping past him, “but the noise couldn’t have carried far.”

  “It carried to me,” he said, starting down the ridge beside her. “Why don’t you take that jacket off? It’s getting hot”

  “I could think of subtler approaches,” she told him a bit acidly.

  “So could I,” he assured her.

  “I guess you could,” she agreed after a moment. Then stopping at the foot of the ridge: “Ross, name a leading scientist, physicist especially, Nobel Prize caliber, who’s got real wisdom for humanity?…Moral integrity, but vision and compassion, too.”

  “That’s quite a question,” he said. “Well, there’s Drummond, there’s Stendhal—though he’s hardly a physicist—and Rosenzweig…and of course there’s Morton Opperly.”

  “That’s the name I wanted you to say,” she told him.

  DAI DAVIES pounded on the frame of the diamond-paned door of the tiny pub near Portishead. His knees knocked together; his face was greenish pale; his hair, straight, plastered-down black locks; his clothes, soaking—and he would have been covered with mud from his falls except that it had been scoured off by the swim he’d had to make of the last hundred yards of his retreat back across Bristol Channel.

  And he was at the very end of his ebbing, drunken strength—if it had taken another dozen flailing overarm strokes and convulsive kicks, he’d never have made it to shore, he knew, out of the wild, foamy flood tide surging up-Severn. He needed alcohol, ethanol, spirits of wine!—as a bleeding man in shock needs a transfusion.

  Yet for some reason the filthy Somersets had locked the door and hidden themselves—doubtless simply to thwart him, out of pure, mean, Welsh-hating, poet-despising cruelty, for these were open hours. By suffering Christ, he’d have the law on them for locking the place! He pressed his face to the lead-netted small pane
s to spy them out in their cowardly holes, but the shadowy taproom was empty, the lights were all out.

  He reeled back, beating his arms across his chest for warmth, and hoarsely screeched up and down the road: “Where are you all? Come out! Come out, somebody!” But not a soul showed himself, not a single house door opened, not even one loveless white she-face peered out a window. He was all alone.

  He went trembling back to the pub door, grabbed the frame with both hands to steady himself, managed to lift a cramped leg, and kicked a short, convulsive kick with his heel. Three panes cracked and fell inside. He got his leg down, then he crouched against the door and thrust his arm through to the shoulder and reached around, found the lock, and worked it. The door opened, and he stumbled inside, retrieving his arm from the glass-jagged leaden web, then took four steps toward the bar, and stood wavering in the middle of the room, almost fainting.

  And then as he swayed there gasping, and his eyes got used to the dimness, a wonderful change came over him and filled him brimful. Suddenly it was the finest thing in the world that he should be all alone at this moment; it was the fulfillment of an old, old dream.

  He did not mind the faint roar behind him or glance once over his shoulder through the broken door at the Bristol Channel filling in dirty, low, foam-edged, flotsam-studded steps. He had eyes only for the amber and greenish, charmingly labeled bottles ranged on the shelves behind the bar. They were like treasured books to him, founts of all wisdom, friends of the lonely, a lovely library to be forever sampled and savored and of which he could never tire.

  And as he approached them with loving deliberation, smiling a wide smile, he began softly and liltingly to read their titles from their spines:

  “Old Smuggler…by Richard Blackmore. Teachers, by C. P. Snow. The Black and the White, by Stendhal. White Horse, by G. K. Chesterton…”

  GENERAL SPIKE STEVENS sloshed through cold salt water past the elevator shaft from which the water was welling more strongly every moment, making the metal door groan. A flashlamp strapped to his chest shone on the thigh-deep water and on a wall papered with historic battle scenes. Three more flashlamps came up behind him “…like we were a bunch of damn musical comedy burglars,” Colonel Griswold had put it.

  The general felt around the wall, dug his fingers through the paper, and jerked open—the paper tearing—a light, two-foot-square door, revealing a shallow recess with nothing but a big black lever-handle in it.

  He faced the others. “Understand,” he said rapidly, “I only know the entrance to the escape shaft. I don’t know where it comes out any more than you do, because I’m not supposed to know where we are—and I don’t. We’ll hope it leads up into some sort of tower, because we know we’re about two hundred feet below ground and that somehow there’s some salt water up there. Understand? Okay, I’m going to open it.”

  He turned and dragged down on the lever. Colonel Mabel Wallingford was standing just behind him, Colonel Griswold and Captain Kidley a few feet back.

  The lever budged a quarter inch and stuck. He dragged down on it with both hands until he was only knee-deep in the water. Colonel Mab reached up and put her hands beside his and chinned herself.

  Griswold called: “Wait! If it’s jammed, it means—”

  The lever dropped eight inches. Three feet away, wallpaper tore along a right angle as a door two feet wide and five feet high opened, and a black bolster of water came out and bowled over Captain Kidley and Colonel Griswold—Colonel Mab saw the tatter’s lamp pushed deeper and deeper.

  The solid water kept coming, a great thick ridge of it. It grabbed at the feet of Colonel Mab and the general. They clung to the lever.

  Chapter

  Twenty-three

  MARGO AND CLARENCE DODD were leaning their elbows on the upper rail of the concrete bridge, looking at the hills and speculating about the ceiling of diluted smoke that was moving up from the south and turning the sun red, giving its light an ominous brassy cast. She’d come here chiefly to get away from Ross Hunter.

  “It could be only brush fires in the canyons and mountains,” the Little Man said. “But I’m afraid it’s more than that, Miss Gelhorn. You live in Los Angeles?”

  “I rent a cottage in Santa Monica. Same thing.”

  “Any family there?”

  “No, just myself.”

  “That’s good, at least. I’m afraid, unless we get rain—”

  “Look,” she said, glancing down. “There’s water in the wash now! Doesn’t that mean there’s rain inland?”

  But just then, with a triumphant tooting of horns, Hixon’s truck came rolling back from a reconnoiter down the coast, followed by a short, blocky yellow school bus. The two vehicles stopped on the bridge. Wojtowicz climbed down from the bus. He was carrying one of the army rifles. Doc came after him, but stopped on the step-down platform, which made a convenient rostrum.

  “I am pleased to announce that I’ve found us transportation,” he called out loudly and jovially. “I insisted on looking into Monica Mountainway, and there, in a little vale not one hundred yards off the highway, I discovered this charming bus waiting to begin its morning chore, which today will be carrying us! It’s all gassed up and plentifully stocked with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and irradiated, fluoridated milk. Prepare for departure in five minutes, everyone!” He stepped down and came swinging around the yellow hood. “Doddsy, that’s not rainwater in that wash there, that’s salt tide—just look over the other side of the bridge and you’ll see it stretching out in one gleaming sheet to China. Times like this, things creep up on people. You’ve got the other gun, Doddsy—you ride with the Hixons. Ida will be with you to nurse Ray Hanks. I’ll command the bus.”

  “Mr. Brecht,” Margo said. “Are you planning to take us over Monica Mountainway to the Valley?”

  “Part way at any rate. To the two-thousand-foot heights, if I can. After that…” He shrugged.

  “Mr. Brecht,” she went on, “Vandenberg Three is just the other end of the Mountainway. On the slopes, in fact. Morton Opperly’s there, in charge of the pure science end of the Moon Project. I think we should try to contact him.”

  “Say, that’s not a bad idea,” Doc told her. “He ought to be showing more sense than the V-2 brass, and he might welcome some sane recruits. It’s a sound idea that we cluster around the top scientists in this para-reality situation. However, God knows if we’ll ever get to V-3, or if Opperly will still be there if we do,” he added, shrugging again.

  “Never mind that,” Margo said. “All I ask is that if there’s a chance to contact him, you help me. I’ve a special reason which is extremely important but which I can’t explain now.”

  Doc looked at her shrewdly, then grinned. “Sure thing,” he promised, as Hunter and some of the others closed in on him with other questions and suggestions.

  Margo boarded the bus at once and took the seat behind the driver. He was a scowly old man with a jaw so shallow she wondered if he had teeth.

  “It’s very good of you to help us out this way,” she remarked.

  “You’re telling me?” he retorted, looking around at her incredulously and flashing some yellowed, stumpy incisors and scattered, black, amalgam-roofed molars. “He told me,” he went on, jerking a thumb at Doc just outside the door, “about this five-hundred-and-sixty-foot tide that would drown me if I didn’t get up in the hills fast. He made it mighty vivid. And then he told me I needn’t strain myself making up my mind whether to take you folks too, because he had a guy with a gun. Good o’ me? I just had no choice. Besides,” he added, “there was a big slide blocking off my regular route south. Might as well throw in with you crazy folks.”

  Margo laughed self-consciously. “You’ll get used to us,” she said. At that moment the Ramrod came shouldering into the bus, calling back to Doc: “Very well, Wanda and I will ride in this conveyance, but I categorically refuse to drink milk with fallout rays and rat poison in it!”

  The driver looked at Margo. “Mayb
e,” he said sourly.

  The rest came crowding aboard. Hunter had sat down beside Margo while the driver was talking to her. She ostentatiously made extra room, but he didn’t look at her. Doc stood in the door and counted noses. “All here,” he announced. He leaned out and shouted to the truck, “O.K., off we go! Reverse course and follow in line astern!”

  The school bus turned around on the bridge, and the truck behind it. Margo noticed that the water in the wash was now a yard higher. A tiny roller came up it, foaming along the sides. The beach onto which she’d shot the boulder was under water, too. Last night the road here had been over half a mile from the ocean, but now only a hundred yards separated it from the surf.

  Doc settled down in the strategic spot he’d reserved for himself, opposite Hunter and behind the door. He sprawled a leg over the extra seat beside him.

  “On to Monica Mountainway,” he told the driver. “Keep her at an easy thirty and watch for rocks. We’ve hardly four miles to go along the highway—ample time to dodge Mrs. Pacific as she fattens up. Remember, everybody, the Pacific Coast tides are the mixed kind. Fortunately for us, this morning’s the low high. —McHeath,” he called over his shoulder, “you’re our liaison officer. Keep an eye on the truck. Rest of you, don’t crowd the sea-side. I want this bus balanced when we start uphill. We’re well ahead of the tide—there’s no danger.”

  “Unless we get some more—” Margo began, but checked herself. She’d been going to say “earthquake waves” or “tsunami.”

  Hunter flashed her a smile. “That’s right; don’t say it,” he whispered to her. Then, in a not much louder voice, across to Doc: “Where did you pick up that five-sixty figure, Rudy?”

  “Eighty times the L.A. tidal range of seven feet,” Doc replied. “Much too big, I devoutly hope, but we have to make some kind of estimate. Oh, a life on the ocean wave, a home on the rolling deep, da-da-da-da-da-da-da…”