The Wanderer

by Fritz Leiber

  It wasn’t chilly. There was an almost warmish breeze from the southwest—eerie, unnatural, agitating.

  One might well think that watching the bore of the Severn rush up its valley, like some white thunder-wall released by the tearing of an eighth seal in the Book of Revelation, would utterly outweary the senses. But, as Richard was now discovering, the senses do not work that way. Experiencing the almost unimaginable only makes them more acid-bittenly alive.

  Or perhaps it was simply that they were both too tired, too aching with fatigue poisons, to sleep.

  Vera had earlier told him her story. A London business-machine typist, she had been rescued from the roof of an office building during the second high, and had come all the way to the valley of the Severn in a small motorboat, which had navigated the standing highs as Richard had tramped and cadged rides across the muddy lows, only to be wrecked in the edge of the bore near Deerhurst, she alone of the boat’s company surviving, as far as she knew.

  A little while ago Richard had asked her to tell her story in more detail, but she had protested that she was much too tired. She had listened to the static on her transistor wireless for a while, and Richard had said: “Throw that away.” She hadn’t, but she’d turned it off. Now she was saying softly: “Oh, I shall never sleep, never. My mind’s revving and revving…”

  Richard rolled over and put his arm lightly around her waist, his face above hers, then hesitated.

  “Go on,” she said, looking up at him with an oddly bitter smile. “Or do you have sleeping pills?”

  Richard thought for a moment, then said rather formally: “Even if I did have them, I should much prefer you.”

  She giggled. “You’re so stiff,” she said.

  He pulled her to him and kissed her. Her body was tense and unyielding.

  “Vera,” he said. Then hugging her determinedly, “For a pet name I shall call you Veronal.”

  She giggled again, more at him than appreciatively, he thought, but her body relaxed. Suddenly her fingers clutched at his back. “Go on, try me,” she whispered throatily in his ear. “I’m strong, strong sleeping medicine.”

  BARBARA KATZ had first been depressed by the lowness and narrowness of the one little cabin of the “Albatross,” but now she was glad of those dimensions because it meant there was always a surface close at hand to brace herself against when the boat rocked or pitched farther than she’d been expecting it to. And the slightly-arched roof being so low somehow made it seem more secure whenever a solid wave-top banged down on it deafeningly.

  The cabin was pitch dark except when lightning blazed in whitely through the four tiny portholes, or when Barbara used her flashlight.

  Old KKK lay blanket-tied to one of the little bunks with Hester sitting braced at his head and holding the unknown baby. Helen stretched out in the other bunk, moaning and retching with seasickness, while Barbara was scrunched in at the foot of that bunk like Hester across from her. Every once in a while Barbara felt through a trap in the planking of the floor for water. So far she hadn’t felt any to amount to much.

  The “Albatross” had almost foundered before the west-rushing tide lifted it out of the grip of the mangroves. Then it had almost been keeled over by a taller tree. After that it had been rather fun, until the storm waves had got so high and wild that everyone except Benjy had been forced below.

  After a long silence—that is, a long space of listening to nothing but the baby crying and the timbers straining and the waves and the wind hitting the boat—Barbara asked: “How’s Mister K, Hester?”

  “He die a little while back, Miss Barbara,” the other replied. “Hush now, baby, you had your canned milk.”

  Barbara digested the information. After a while she said: “Hester, maybe we should wrap him in something and put him up front—there’s just enough room—and you should lie down in that bunk.”

  “No, Miss Barbara,” Hester replied positively. “We don’t want to chance his hip get bust again or anything. He in good shape now, except he dead, and if he lie soft he stay that way. Then we got evidence we took the best care of him we could.”

  Helen started up, crying: “Oh Lord, there’s a deader in the cabin! I got to get out!”

  “Lie down, you crazy nigger!” Hester commanded. “Miss Barbara, you hold her!”

  There was no need. A fresh attack of seasickness stretched Helen out again.

  A little later the motions of the “Albatross” became less violent. Solid water no longer thumped the roof of the cabin.

  “I’m going to take some coffee up to Benjy,” Barbara said.

  “No you not, Miss Barbara.”

  “Yes, I am,” Barbara told Hester.

  When she’d cautiously slid aside the little hatch at the back of the cabin and stuck her head out, the first thing she saw was Benjy kneeling spread-legged behind the little wheel. The clouds had broken overhead, and through the narrow rift the Wanderer shone down in its bull’s-head face.

  She crawled out. Wind tore at her from the bow, but it wasn’t too bad, so she slid the hatch shut and crawled back to Benjy.

  He swigged coffee from the small thermos she’d brought and thanked her with a nod.

  She peered around over the low coaming of the cockpit. The Wanderer, vanishing behind the clouds again, showed nothing by its last light but waves that looked very high indeed.

  “I thought it was getting calmer,” she shouted to Benjy over the wind.

  He pointed toward the bow. “I find a mattress,” he shouted back, “and tie one end of a rope to it and the other to the front end of this boat and throw her over. It hold the boat so she head into the wind and the waves steady-like.”

  Barbara remembered the name for that: a sea anchor.

  “Where do you think we are, Benjy?” she shouted.

  His laughter whooped over the wind. “I don’t know if we in the Atlantic or the Gulf or what, Miss Barbara, but we still on top!”

  SALLY HARRIS AND JAKE LESHER climbed down from the penthouse roof. Despite the activity, they were shaking with cold. Beyond the balustrade the wavelets were sinking at a rate almost visible.

  Sally looked into the living room by the light of the Wanderer in its jaws face, which she called Rin-Tin-Tin.

  “It’s a mess,” she told Jake. “The furniture’s tumbled every which way. The piano’s got its legs in the air. The black rug’s got waves in it, and all those soaked black drapes make the place look like a storm-tossed mortuary. Come on, let’s hunt for driftwood or candles or something to make a fire. I’m freezing.”

  Chapter

  Thirty-nine

  THE WANDERER put on its yin-yang mask for a ninth time. For two full days it had tormented Earth with fire and floods and shakings and now with storms. Bagong Bung dropped his spade, snatched up his muddy sack, and dove for the orange life raft as it rushed by on a foam-crested step of water. Cobber-Hume grabbed at him. The four insurgent captains of the “Prince Charles,” terrified by the hurricane winds that struck through the inky night from the east like ten thousand invisible planes buzzing them and by the tall regiments of waves marching under the winds like black grenadiers, steered the great atom-liner for safety into one of the mouths of the Amazon. Waves began to break over the “Albatross” again despite its sea anchor, but Barbara Katz wouldn’t go below. A chill wind began to blow in gusts across Mr. Hasseltine’s penthouse patio, rippling thin pools of water there, and Sally Harris and Jake Lesher retreated once again to the soaked living room. By the masthead light of the “Endurance” Wolf Loner saw two corpses float by amongst the ever-thickening flotsam.

  THE SAUCER STUDENTS’ Corvette and truck, headlights peering, cautiously nosed their way along the mountain road that had signs pointing, at intervals, to Vandenberg Two. Twice already most of the huddling passengers had had to unkink and climb out to shovel and heave away rock-and-gravel slides not big enough to warrant expending the last charge in the momentum pistol. At any moment another earth-fall might show up in
the watchful headlight beams of the Corvette. Chains clinked rhythmically on the truck’s rear wheels.

  The east-breeze coming over the mountains at their back was mostly tepid—fortunately for people all bone-weary and all exposed, except for the Hixons and Pop in the cab of the truck.

  Save for that of the motors and wheels, the only sound was a faint, rhythmic, hissing roar from ahead.

  The Wanderer had risen two hours after sunset and now rode above the same eastward mountains in the cloudless slate-gray sky, its warm winy and golden light creating the illusion that it was the source of the friendly breeze. It was no longer quite spherical, however, but slightly gibbous, like the moon two days after full. A narrow black crescent cut off the rim of the purple half of its yin-yang face as, mimicking the movements of the moon it had destroyed, it moved east around the earth, or rather, around a point between the two planets. Loosely girdling its equator like a filmy diamond-studded scarf, the trophy-ring of moon fragments glittered and gleamed.

  The road now mounted gently to a wide saddle, the sides of which rose in smooth earthen slopes to flat, low rock crests. The Corvette reached the top of the saddle, pulled to the right, and stopped with four rapid horn-beeps, dousing its lights. The truck pulled up beside it to the left, and did the same.

  Most of the party had at one time or another in their lives had the experience of looking down on a fog or a low cloud layer from a mountainside or an airplane, and seeing the hilltops lifting up through it, and marveling at how flat and far it stretched—a veritable ocean of clouds. Now the same persons had for a second or two or three the illusion that they were witnessing the same sight again, by Wanderer-light.

  This illusory, nocturnal cloud-ocean began scarcely fifty yards beyond and no more than a dozen yards below them and it stretched to the western horizon, closely following to either side the contours of the hills. There was only one island, low and flat, but so big it stretched out of sight past the dark hillsides to the north. Red and white lights shone sparsely from this island and the Wanderer-light revealed two clusters of low, pale-walled, pale-roofed buildings. And already in the first moments of watching, there was a faint drone and a tiny red and green pair of lights slanting down from the south, as a small airplane landed on the island. A strait a quarter of a mile wide separated the island from the mainland.

  Then the illusion faded and one by one the saucer students realized that it was not cloud-ocean that stretched to the horizon but salt ocean, not mist-water but solid-water sea, its waves breaking rhythmically against the hillside and the descending road fifty yards ahead; that the island was Vandenberg Two; and that the strait between covered among other things the Pacific Coast Highway where it swung inland of the Space Force base, home of the Moon Project—of Morton Opperly and Major Buford Humphreys, of Paul Hagbolt and Donald Merriam, though those last two were elsewhere now.

  At the wheel of the Corvette, Hunter felt on his left shoulder fingers that lay lightly at first, but then gripped strongly. He put his right hand on top of the hand there and turned his head and looked at Margo’s face—the yellow hair drawn flat, the long lips, the hungry cheeks, the dark eyes—and she looked back, expressionless, at him.

  Without lifting his hand from hers he called up to the truck: “We’ll camp here by the sea. When the tide goes down we’ll enter Vandenberg.”

  DON MERRIAM gazed up the elevator shaft at the circle of sky swirling symphonically with a red-black storm, as if the colors had been chosen to match the fur of his conductor standing silently beside him.

  The circle grew slowly, then rapidly, then the elevator stopped, and its floor was once more seamlessly part of the etched silver pavement.

  Nothing seemed to have changed. The pillar of hurtling moonrock still towered like a gray pinnacle four times the height of Everest. Beyond the empty pavement the great plastic structures crouched off into the distance like an army of abstract sculptures. The pit yawned with its unsupported silver railings.

  Then Don saw that only one saucer—colored with a violet-yellow yin-yang—hovered beside the Baba Yaga. That stained moon ship gleamed as if newly burnished, and instead of the ladder there hung below the hatch a stubby man-wide metal tube that looked telescoped.

  Beyond the Baba Yaga, the Russian moon ship gleamed freshly, too, and a similar extensible-looking metal tube projected outside its hatch, which was located near the nose.

  The felinoid lightly touched Don’s shoulder and said in his caressingly slurred English: “We are taking you to an Earth friend. Your ship is fueled and serviced, and it goes with us, but you will ride in mine at first There will be a transfer in space. Have no fear.”

  PAUL HAGBOLT woke with a start Tigerishka was snarling at him: “Wake up! Get dressed. We’ve got a visitor!”

  The start carried him a yard away from the window against which he’d been resting, so for the moment all he could do was grope around impotently in null gravity while he tried to get the sleep out of his eyes and mind.

  The inner sun had been switched on again, and the windows were solid pink once more, creating with the flowers the effect of a combination conservatory and boudoir.

  Tigerishka was jerking some flappy objects out of a door in the Waste Panel. She proceeded to throw them at him.

  “Get dressed, monkey!”

  One of them got hooked on her claws and she ripped it loose in a fury and hurled it after the others.

  Paul, or rather his body, intercepted the objects without difficulty, since they were well aimed. They were his clothes, nicely laundered and smelling freshly of cotton and other fabrics, though there were no creases in the pants. He fumbled at them, saying in a voice still squeaky with sleep: “But, Tigerishka—”

  “I’ll help you, you stupid ape!”

  She coasted to him quickly and, grabbing the shirt, started to ram his foot into the arm of it.

  “What’s happened, Tigerishka?” he demanded, not helping her. “After last night—”

  “Don’t ever mention last night to me, monkey!” she snarled. The shirt ripped, and she tried to shove his foot into the next garment she grabbed, which happened to be his coat.

  “But you’re acting as if you were angry and ashamed about what happened,” he protested, still ignoring her attempts to dress him.

  She stopped what she was doing and grabbed him by the shoulders as they floated there and glared her violet-irised eyes into his.

  “Ashamed!” she repeated vibrantly. Then, very coldly: “Paul, have you ever masturbated a lower animal?”

  He just stared back at her stupidly, feeling his muscles tighten, especially around the neck.

  “Don’t act so shocked!” she commanded irritably. “It happens all the time on your planet. One way or another, you do it to get seed from bulls and stallions for artificial insemination…and so on!”

  He said quietly: “You mean that what happened last night wasn’t a real embrace?”

  She hissed at that, just like a cat, then said harshly: “A real embrace would have shredded your flimsy anthropoid genitals! I was silly, I was bored, I felt sorry for you. That was all.”

  For a moment Paul saw clearly how a superbeast would at its level have neuroses just like those of a talking anthropoid, how it would suffer from attacks of irrealism, do the wrong thing, get bored, fritter away time and feelings. For a moment he realized how lonely and confused he himself would have to be to pretend to love a cat as if it were a girl, to fantasize an erotic passion for Miaow…

  But just then Tigerishka slapped him with her pads and snarled: “Don’t dream, monkey. Get dressed!”

  The fragile bridge of understanding which his intuition had been building crashed, though this was not instantly apparent on the surface, for he continued as quietly as before: “You mean that was the whole experience, that was all that last night meant to you? Just being ‘nice’ to a pet?”

  She said firmly: “Last night my feelings were fully ninety per cent pity for you and boredom w
ith myself.”

  “And the other ten per cent?” he persisted.

  She dropped her great eyes from his. “I don’t know, Paul. I just don’t know,” she said very tautly, grabbing his coat again. Then, “Oh, get dressed yourself,” she hissed exasperatedly and pushed off for the control panel. “But be quick about it. Our visitor’s almost at the door.”

  Paul ignored that. A hot maliciousness was flooding up into his cold misery. He slowly pulled his coat sleeve off his foot. He said evenly: “It seems to me that last night began with me treating you like a pet, scratching you under the neck and stroking your fur, and you were lapping it up, you were responding just like—”

  The pink floor jumped up and bumped him, jarred his spine. She called: “I’ve switched on earth-normal gravity so you’ll be able to get dressed! Oh, if you had any idea of what it means to be cooped up this way with a repulsive bald body and with an utterly inferior mind and to have to wear out one’s throat with the nonsense of sound-making…”

  Now at last he did begin to attend to his clothes, though without haste, locating his shorts and his pants and laying them out for pulling on. But at the same time his maliciousness was searching for something—anything, it didn’t matter what—to hurl back at her. Rather quickly he found it.

  “Tigerishka,” he said slowly, feeling unaccustomedly heavy but quite comfortable as be sat on the pink velvet floor and pulled on his shorts and reached for his trousers, “you boast that you never miss a mental trick. Certainly your mind works much faster than mine. Presumably you have eidetic memory for everything that happens around you—including what you spy on in my mind. Yet last night when I mentioned the four crucial stellar photographs I’d seen—photographs of a planet making a false exit from hyperspace, I realize now—you assured me there could have been only two twist-fields involved, the first near Pluto, the second near Venus.