The Wanderer

by Fritz Leiber

  “Of course,” Hunter said impatiently. “What’s the other reason for the call?”

  Don said: “To let you know that if everything works out right, we’ll be landing at Vandenberg Two in a few hours, probably in my moon ship.”

  “At least Don will,” Paul added. “We have to stay up here in space now. The Wanderer may be in danger, there’s an emergency developing.”

  “The Wanderer, in danger?” Margo repeated incredulously, almost sardonically. “Emergency developing? What do you call what’s been happening the last two days?”

  Hunter said to Don: “We’re in sight of Vandenberg Two, as you know, and we’re planning to go there as soon as we can.”

  “We’re trying to find Morton Opperly,” Margo put in automatically.

  Don said to Hunter: “That’s good. If you bring them the news about me, it’ll be easier for you to get in. Tell Oppie the Wanderer has linear accelerators eight thousand miles long and a cyclotron of that diameter. That should convince him of something! It’ll help me if they’re informed ahead of time about my intended landing.” He looked toward Margo. “Then I’ll be able to kiss you properly, dear.”

  Margo looked back at him and said: “And I’ll kiss you, Don. But I want you to know that things have changed. I’ve changed,” and she pressed more closely to Hunter to show what she meant.

  Hunter frowned and pressed his lips against his teeth, but then he tightened his arm around her and nodded and said curtly: “That’s right.”

  Before Don could say anything, if he’d been going to, the ground suddenly turned bright red, faded, turned red again. The same thing was happening to the whole landscape: it was lightening redly, then darkening, then reddening again, as if from soundless red lightning flashes coming in a steady rhythm. Hunter and Margo looked up and instantly flinched their eyes away from the blinding red pinpoint flares winking on and off at the north and south poles of the Wanderer, rhythmically reddening its own polar caps as well as the Earth’s whole sky. Never in their whole lives had they seen anything like such bright sources of monochromatic light.

  “The emergency’s arrived,” said the Paul-image, the red light striking weirdly through it, making it doubly unreal. “We’re going to have to cut this short.”

  The Don-image said: “The Wanderer is recalling its ships.”

  Hunter said strongly: “We’ll tell them at Vandenberg. We’ll see you there. Oppie: eight-thousand-mile linear accelerators and a cyclotron of that diameter. Good luck!”

  But in that instant the two images were gone. They didn’t fade or drift, just winked out.

  Hunter and Margo looked down the red-lit hillside. Even the surf was red, the foaming of a lava sea. The camp was astir; there were small figures moving about, clustering, pointing.

  But one was nearer. From behind a boulder not twenty feet away the Ramrod stared at them wonderingly, enviously, in his eyes an unappeasable hunger as the red light rhythmically bathed his face.

  Chapter

  Forty-one

  FIFTY MILLION MILES starward of Earth, spacemen Tigran Biryuzov could see the Red Recall plainly as he and his five comrades orbited Mars in the three ships of the First Soviet People’s Expedition. For Tigran, Earth and the Wanderer were two bright planets about as far apart as adjoining stars in the Pleiades. Even in airless space, their crescent shapes were not quite apparent to the Communist spaceman’s unaided eye.

  Radio communications from home had stopped with the Wanderer’s appearance, and for two days the six men had been in a frenzy of wonder about what was going on in the next orbit sunward. The projected surface landing on Mars, scheduled for ten hours ago, had been postponed.

  Their telescopes showed them the astronomic situation clearly enough—the capture and destruction of the moon, the weird surface patterns of the Wanderer—but that was all.

  Not only was the Red Recall plainly visible to Tigran, but also its dark red visual echoes from the night side of Earth. He started to note down, “Krasniya molniya—” and then broke off to beat his cheeks with his knuckles in a fury of frustrated curiosity and to think, Red lightning! Mother of Lenin! Blood of Marx! What next? What next?

  THE SAUCER STUDENTS had many questions to ask about the tantalizingly limited conversation with Paul and Don. When Hunter and Margo had finished answering them, the Red Recall had stopped flashing, and the swiftly-sinking tide had uncovered more of the road to Vandenberg, even a stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway.

  Hixon summed it up, jerking a thumb at the Wanderer. “So they got saucers, which we knew. And they got energy guns’ll shoot rays that can chop up mountains and puncture planets probably. And they got three-D TV a lot better than ours, which makes sense. But they’re supposed to be in danger, which doesn’t! Why should they be in danger?”

  Ann said brightly: “Maybe there’s another planet after them.”

  “Anything but that, Annie, please,” Wojtowicz protested comically. “One weird planet is all I can stand.”

  At that moment the landscape brightened, and Clarence Dodd, who alone of them was looking east, made a single strangling, clucking noise, as if he’d tried to cry out and choked on the cry, and he hunched away from the east and at the same time pointed his hand in that direction above the mountains.

  Hanging there, between the Wanderer and the serrated eastern horizon, was a gibbous shape half again as wide as the Wanderer, all an unvarying, bright steely gray except for one glittering highlight midway between its round rim and its natter rim.

  Margo felt, Now the sky’s too heavy—it must fall.

  The Ramrod thought, And a voice like a trumpet spoke and the Lamb opened another seal…and another…and another…and another…

  Wojtowicz yelled softly: “My God, Ann was right. It is another planet”

  “And it’s bigger.” That was Mrs. Hixon.

  “But it’s not round,” Hixon protested, almost angrily.

  “Yes, it is,” Hunter contradicted, “only it’s partly in shadow, more than the Wanderer is. It’s as much in shadow as the moon would be if it were there.”

  “It’s at least seven Wanderer-diameters down the sky from the Wanderer,” the little Man pronounced, so quickly recovered from his original shock that he was already pulling out his notebook. “That’s fifteen degrees. An hour.” He uncapped his pen and studied his wrist watch.

  Rama Joan said: “The highlight’s the reflection of the sun. Its surface must be like a dull mirror.”

  Ann said, “I don’t like the new planet, Mommy. The Wanderer’s our friend, all golden and lovely, but this one’s in armor.”

  Rama Joan pressed her daughter’s head against her waist, but kept her eyes on the new planet as she said ringingly: “I think the gods are at war. The stranger devil has come to fight the devil we know.”

  The Little Man, already jotting notes, said eagerly: “Let’s call it the Stranger—that’s a good enough name.”

  Young Harry McHeath thought, Or you could call it Wolf—no, that might confuse it with the Jaws.

  Mrs. Hixon snarled at them: “Oh, for Christ’s sake, spare us the poetry! A new planet means more tides, more quakes, more God knows what.”

  Through it all Ray Hanks was calling querulously from the truck: “What is it you’re talking about? I can’t see it from here. Somebody tell me. What is it?” Young Harry McHeath was thinking how glad he was to be here and alive, how wonderful it was to have been born to these sights, how miserable for those who missed them. So it was natural that Ray Hanks’ cry came through to him. He vaulted up on the back of the truck, laid his hand on a mirror, and held it so that Hanks could see the reflection of the Stranger in it.

  Wanda and Ida and the Ramrod had been standing together. Now Wanda simply sat down on the ground where she was and put her face in her hands and moaned loudly: “This is too much. I think I’m going to have another heart attack.”

  But Ida pounded on the Ramrod’s shoulder, demanding, “What is it, Charlie? What�
�s its real name? Explain it!”

  The Ramrod stared at the Stranger with a tortured expression and finally said, in a voice that, though defeated-sounding, had a strange undertone of relief and of opening doors: “I don’t know, Ida. I just don’t know. The universe is bigger than my mind.”

  At that instant two bright lines sprang out from the sides of the Stranger and traveled to the Wanderer, in the tick of a wrist watch, and passed it one in front and one behind, and then went on seemingly more slowly across the gray heavens as straight as if drawn with a ruler and a penful of luminous blue ink. But where the blue line passed in front of the Wanderer there was an eruption of white coruscations almost blindingly bright.

  One of the lines came from the dark side of the Stranger, touching faintly the black crescent with blue, revealing its shape and the sphericity of the entire body.

  “Jesus, it is war.” Again Wojtowicz was the quickest to respond vocally.

  “Lasers,” said the Little Man. “Beams of solid light. But so big—it’s almost incredible.”

  “And we’re just seeing the sides,” Hunter put in awestruck, “the leakage. Suppose you had to look one of those in the face. A million suns!”

  “A hundred, anyway,” said the Little Man. “If one of those beams should point even for a moment at Earth…”

  Blue and steel touched off an intuition in Hixon’s mind. “I tell you what,” he said excitedly, “the new planet’s police! It’s come to arrest the Wanderer for disturbing us.”

  “Bill, you’re nuts,” Mrs. Hixon yelled across at him. “Next you’ll be saying angels.”

  “I hope they fight! I hope they kill each other!” Pop yelled shrilly, his whole body trembling as he shook his clenched fists at them. “I hope they burn each other’s guts out!”

  “I sure don’t,” Wojtowicz told him, walking around in an odd little circle as he stared at the sky. “What’s to keep us from getting hit, then? You like having a battle fought across your back yard? You like being a sitting duck for stray shots?”

  Hunter said rapidly: “I don’t think the near beam’s hitting the Wanderer. I think it’s hitting the moon-ring and disintegrating the fragments it touches.”

  “That’s right,” the Little Man said coolly. “Those beams bracketing the Wanderer look more to me like a shot over the bows.”

  Hixon heard that. “Like I said, arrest,” he pointed out eagerly. “You know—‘Don’t move or we’ll shoot to kill!’”

  The bright blue beams were extinguished at their source and died along their length as swiftly as they had first shot out. They left behind two yellow afterimages drawn on the gray sky, but moving with the eyes that saw. Yet the two original blue beams, though rapidly growing shorter and fainter, could still be seen crawling away beyond the Wanderer like straight blue worms into the gray infinity.

  Hixon said: “My God, I thought they’d never quit. They must have fired for two minutes.”

  “Seventeen seconds,” the Little Man informed him, looking up from his wrist watch. “It’s a proven fact that in a crisis time estimates vary wildly, and witnesses are apt to disagree on almost everything. That’s something we’ve got to watch out for.”

  “That’s right, Doddsy, we got to keep our heads,” Wojtowicz agreed loudly, almost skipping around in his little circle now, his voice quite gay. “They keep throwing surprises at us, and all we can do is keep taking them. Whee-yoo! It’s like the front line—it’s like sitting out a bombardment.”

  As if the word “bombardment” had pulled a trigger, there came a dull roaring from all around them and then a vibration, and then the road under their feet began to rock. The springs of the Corvette and the truck whined and groaned. Ray Hanks whimpered with pain, and McHeath, still standing over him, had to grab at the truck’s side to keep from being pitched out.

  To a floating observer, everyone would have seemed to be joining Wojtowicz in his eerie circular dance and making it a staggering one. One of the women screamed, but Mrs. Hixon cursed obscenely, and Ann cried: “Mommy, the rocks are skipping!”

  Margo heard that and looked up the slope where she and Hunter had been, and saw boulders descending it in fantastic bounds—among them, she thought, the giant’s coffin on which they’d spread the blanket. Unslowed by the weird gust of guilt that went through her, she pulled the momentum pistol out of her jacket and thrust out with her other hand to steady herself against the Corvette, but there was no steadiness there, only a greater rocking. The boulders came on. Hunter saw what she was doing and sprang to her and shouted: “Is the arrow pointing toward the muzzle?”

  She shouted, “Yes!” And as the boulders converged like bounding gray beasts, she pointed the momentum pistol into their midst and, herself fighting to keep on her feet, clamped down her finger on the trigger-button.

  As the earthquake shocks themselves lessened and damped out, the boulders coincidentally slowed in their wild, smashing descent, seemed almost to change to great gray pillows, slowly rolled instead of bounding, rolled slower yet, and stopped moving beside the road, almost at Margo’s feet, the giant’s coffin lying where the edge of the truck’s shadow had been.

  Hunter pulled her finger off the button and looked at the scale on the grip. There was no more violet.

  He looked down the quarter mile of mountain road to the Coast Highway and for a wonder it looked free of new slides and with the water all gone—though it was sloshing wildly in the farther distance. Just across the highway brightly gleamed the mesh fence that guarded the foot of Vandenberg, while across from the mouth of the mountain road loomed the big gate.

  Overhead shone the Wanderer and the Stranger, the former trending into the three-spot—the half-hour stage between the serpent-egg and the mandala—the latter as coldly serene as if its gravity had nothing whatever to do with the earthquake just triggered.

  In the resounding silence Ida was moaning: “Oh, my ankle.”

  Wojtowicz asked in a snickering voice: “What do we do now? What’s next on the show?”

  Mrs. Hixon was snarling at him: “There’s nothing to do, you clown! It’s the end!”

  Hunter pushed Margo into the Corvette and got in himself, then stood up behind the wheel and honked the horn for attention. He said loudly: “Get into the cars, everybody! Throw our stuff into the back of the truck if anybody wants to, but be quick about it We’re driving into Vandenberg.”

  THE STRANGER gave many who saw it the feeling which Wanda and Mrs. Hixon had voiced—“This is too much. This is the end.” The more scientifically minded of these pessimists noted that the Stranger was near enough to the Wanderer—only about forty thousand miles away if it were the same distance from Earth—so that its gravity would largely augment rather than oppose the great tides the Wanderer had been raising.

  But many others were naïvely delighted by the steely new planet and the exciting rays it shot. For a while, at least, the astronomical spectacle took their minds off their troubles, worries, and even life-or-death problems. In the stormlashed sea somewhere near Florida (horizontally or vertically), Barbara Katz cried out from the cockpit of the “Albatross” to the spirit of old KKK: “Thrilling Wonder Stories! Oh, but it’s beautiful,” and Benjy shouted to her solemnly: “Sure is a wonder, Miss Barbara.”

  “Boy, this second act was a long time coming,” Jake Lesher complained to Sally Harris as they sat once more side by side on the patio, each damp-blanket-wrapped and warmed with a “Hunter’s Friend” and wearing patented hand-warmers for skiers that they’d found among Mr. Hasseltine’s things. “If our play doesn’t move faster, it’ll die in Philadelphia.”

  In an untoppled astronomical observatory in the Andes, the seventy-year-old French astronomer Pierre Rambouillet-Lacepède rubbed together his ivory-dark fingers with delight and snatched for pencil and paper. At last, a really challenging instance of the Three Body Problem!

  Still others on the night side of Earth didn’t see the Stranger at all because of clouds or other hindrances
. Some of them had not even yet seen the Wanderer. Wolf Loner spied a faint yellow light through the overcast that had settled into fog. Sailing closer, he saw it was a kerosene lantern set a few feet above the water in a tall stone window with a round top. When the “Endurance” had come closer still, he saw the narrow wall of yellowish stone and the dark steeple rising above it, and he recognized the place because he had climbed to it more than once, but he could not believe his eyes. He swung the tiller and let go the mainsheet, and the “Endurance” gently bumped the narrow roof below the window. The sail flapped idly, there was no current in the water around the stone structure. He took up the mooring line and stepped out on the roof and through the window, carefully setting aside the lantern, and looked around. Then he could no longer doubt: he was in the belfry of the Old North Church. Standing across from him, backed against the wall as if she were trying to disappear into it, was a dark-haired, Italian-looking girl of perhaps twelve who stared at him, her teeth chattering. She did not respond to his questions, even when he phrased them in scraps of Italian and Spanish, except to shake her head, and that might only have been a kind of shivering. So after a time, still holding the mooring line, he went close to her, and although she shrank from him he took her up gently but firmly and carried her out the window, carefully replacing the lantern on the sill, and stepped with her into the “Endurance” and set her down halfway into the narrow cabin and put a blanket around her. He noticed the water was moving a little now in the direction from which the sailing dory had come. So with one thoughtful headshake downward, toward where Copps Burying Ground would be, he brought the “Endurance” about and, taking advantage of the outgoing tide, set sail out of Boston’s North End for the open sea.

  With unintended diabolic precision the four insurgent captains atom-steamed the “Prince Charles” into the Pororoca. This tidal bore of the Amazon is normally a mile-long waterfall five yards high, which travels upstream at fifteen miles an hour with a roar that can be heard ten miles away. Now it was a great seething slope half as high as the “Prince Charles” was long and carrying that great city of a ship—a smaller Manhattan Island—canted forward at an angle of twenty degrees, up the mightiest of rivers, now Wanderer-swollen and Stranger-swollen, too. All around, the hurricane roared with the Pororoca and its waves augmented the bore. To the east the storm completely masked the dawn. Ahead to the west was a wilderness of darkness and torn clouds. At this moment Captain Sithwise reached the bridge—a counter-coup having met no opposition whatever in the period of cataclysm—and he took the wheel and began to send orders to the atomic engine rooms. At first he guided the ship by the slant and gleam of the Pororoca, but then—since they hung to starboard brightly and firmly, through the whirling cloud wraiths—he began to depend somewhat on the beacon globes of the Stranger above and the Wanderer below.