The Wanderer

The Wanderer Page 39

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 with 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.

"Well, whatever you think, there were two other twist-fields represented, two other false exits." At this point he felt her entering his mind. Nevertheless he went on: "They were the second and fourth in the series, and they involved Jupiter and Luna."

Her answer rather surprised him. She said curtly: "You're right. I'll have to check with the Wanderer at once. It could be...what we're afraid of." She turned sharply to the control panel. She was standing on her hind legs now in the same gravity that gripped Paul. "You, welcome our visitor!"

A port like a manhole opened in the center of the pink floor and, facing away from Paul, a man in the uniform of the U.S. Space Force pushed up through it. He lurched his elbows heavily against the rim as the artificial-gravity field took hold of him, but evidently this didn't startle him particularly, for he quickly boosted the rest of his body into the saucer.

Paul, barely into his shirt, stood up quickly too, getting a glimpse of the interior of a wide, corrugated-looking metal tube as the port closed.

The newcomer, having stared at Tigerishka, looked around.

"Don!"

"Paul!"

"I thought you were lost with the moon. How - "

"And I thought you were  -  I don't know what. But how - "

They were both clumsily silent, waiting for the other to begin. Then Paul realized that Don was looking him up and down curiously. He hurriedly zipped his pants and buttoned his shirt.

Don looked at Tigerishka, looked at her for quite some time. Then he looked at the flowers and the other furnishings. Then his gaze came back to Paul and he raised his eyebrows and spread his hands helplessly and grinned with the air of one who means, "I don't care if the solar system's falling apart and we're in an impossible gravity field in an impossible flying saucer in the midst of space  -  This is as funny as a bedroom farce!"

Paul realized he was blushing. He felt enraged at himself.

Tigerishka looked around at them from the control panel just long enough to say rapidly: "Greetings, Donald Barnard Merriam! Please excuse the monkey, he's ashamed of his nakedness. But I suppose you're ashamed, too. Really, you should both try fur!"