The Wanderer

The Wanderer Page 41

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," Wojtowkz 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 dont 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 naively 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-Lacepede 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.

Paul and Don stared up at the blank Stranger and the moon-girdled Wanderer through the transparent ceiling of Tigerishka's saucer, poised five hundred miles above Vandenberg Two.

The artificial gravity field was still on, so they were sprawled on the floor of the saucer. This was transparent also. Through it they could see, by sunlight reflected from the two planets that had erupted from hyperspace, the dark expanse of Southern California, here and there invaded by the dim silver of the sea, and for the other half of the floor-picture the relatively bright expanse of the Pacific itself, though both sea and land were somewhat blurred by the layers of Earth's atmosphere.

There was one obstruction in this lower picture. From the now-invisible port in the center of the transparent floor, the thick worm of the space tube stretched off to the side, where presumably the Baba Yaga hung out of view. The reflected light from the Stranger and the Wanderer, striking through the two rigid transparencies, gleamed on the ridged metal of the tube outside and in, showing the first two of the inner handholds by which a being in free fall could pull himself through the tube.

Both Paul and Don avoided looking down. The artificial gravity field, although Tigerishka had assured them it extended only inside the saucer, made the depths below distinctly uncomfortable.

They had the same view as did those approaching Vandenberg of the Stranger and the Wanderer, except that for Paul and Don the two planets were much brighter, and were backgrounded not by slate-gray sky but by the star-spangled black of space.

The sight was weird, arresting, even "glorious," yet because of their knowledge of the underlying situation, however partial and fragmentary, Paul and Don felt chiefly an ever-mounting tension. There above them hung the Pursued and the Pursuer, Rebellion and Authority, Adventure and Restraint  -  hung in the stasis of an uncertain truce, while the two orbs watched and measured each other.

The bulge-sided yellow triangle in the purple needle-eye face of the Wanderer and the bright solar highlight in the vaster, gibbous, gunmetal round of the Stranger were two great eyes staring each other down.

The tension was deadly, shriveling. It made Don and Paul, despite the support of each other's presence, want to shrink out of sight, want to sink down, down, down through the layers of Earth's atmosphere and rocky, maternal flesh to some lightless womb. Even the eagerness of any eye to watch such wonders hardly balanced in them with this urge.

Paul asked in an almost childish voice: "Tigerishka, why haven't you gone back to the Wanderer? It's been a long while since the Red Recall flashed. All the other ships must have gone."

From the embowering darkness by the control panel, where not a ray of Wanderer-light or Stranger-light touched her, Tigerishka replied: "It's not time yet."

In nearly querulous tones, Don said: "Hadn't Paul and I better get aboard the Baba Yaga? I can manage the braking drop through the atmosphere, since there's no orbital speed to kill, but it'll be tricky, and if we have to wait much longer - "

"Not time yet for that, either!" Tigerishka called. "There is something I must demand of you first. You were saved from space and the waves. You owe a debt to the Wanderer."

She leaned forward out of the dark so that her violet and green muzzle and breast, vertically shadowed at eye and cheek and neck, showed in the planet's light.

"In the same way I sent you to Earth," she began softly yet piercingly, "I am now sending you to the Stranger to testify in behalf of the Wanderer. Stand in the center side by side and face me."

"You mean you want us to plead for you?" Paul asked as he and Don complied almost automatically. "Say that your ships did everything possible to save humans and their homes? Remember, I've seen a lot of catastrophes that weren't averted, too  -  more than I've seen of rescues, in fact."

"You will simply tell your stories  -  the truth as you know it," Tigerishka said, throwing back her head so that her violet eyes gleamed. "Grip hands now and don't move. I am blacking out the saucer entirely. The beams that scan you will be black. This will be a realer trip for you than the one to Earth. Your bodies won't leave the saucer, but they will seem to. Hold still!"

The stars darkened, the Earth went black, the twin violet sparks of Tigerishka's eyes winked out. Then it was as if a whirlwind ripped a great doorway in the dark, and Don and Paul were whirled across space almost swift as thought  -  one second, two  -  then they were standing hand-in-hand in the center of a vast, seemingly limitless plain, flat as the salt desert by Great Salt Lake, only all glaringly silver gray and torrid with a heat they could not feel.

"I'd thought it would seem rounded," Paul said, telling himself he still stood inside the saucer, but not believing it.

The Pursuit Planet is bigger than Earth, remember," Don replied, "and you can't see Earth's curvature when you're on its surface." He was recalling the moon's close horizon, but chiefly thinking how indistinguishable this experience was from his dream trip through the Wanderer, and wondering if it could have been managed the same way.

The heavens were a star-pricked hemisphere topped by the shaggy-margined glare of the sun. A few diameters from the sun Earth stood out darkly, edged by a bluish crescent. On the gunmetal horizon stood the Wanderer, half risen, five times as wide as Earth now, enormous, but the great yellow eye cut in two by the silver horizon line, so that it seemed to peer more fiercely, almost to narrow its lids.

"I thought we'd be projected inside," Paul said, indicating the glaring metal ground at their feet.

"Looks like they stop even images for customs inspection," Don replied.

Paul said: "Well, if we're radio waves, they're carrying our consciousness, too."

Don said: "You forget  -  we're still in the saucer."

"But then what instrument sees this out here and transmits the picture to the saucer?" Paul wanted to know. Don shook his head.

A white flash exploded from the metal plain between them and the violet-and-yellow hemisphere of the Wanderer. It vanished instantly, then there were two more flashes, farther off.

Paul thought, The fight's begun.

Don said: "Meteorites! There's no atmosphere to stop them."

At that instant they dropped down through the gunmetal ground into darkness. Only a black flash of that, however  -  barely an instant  -  and then they were hanging in the center of a huge, dim, spherical room everywhere walled with great inward-peering eyes.

That was the first impression. The second was that the patterned lozenges were not actual eyes, but dark, circular portholes, widely ringed with different colors. Yet now there was the uneasy impression that eyes of all sorts were peering through those pupil-like ports.

Both Don and Paul had essentially identical memory flashes of being sent to the principal's office in grade school.

Don and Paul were not alone in the vast chamber. Hanging clumped with them there at the center of the sphere were at least a hundred other human beings or their three-dimensional images  -  an incredible clot of humanity. There were people of all races, uniforms of African and Asiatic countries, two of the Russian Space Force, a glowingly brown Maori, a white-hooded Arab, a nearly naked coolie, a woman in furs, and many others of whom only patches could be seen because of the intervening figures.

A silver beam of light thin as a needle shot out from beside one of the black portholes and probed at the other side of the clot  -  the ports meanwhile twinkling as if with peering eyes  -  and suddenly someone began to speak rapidly though quite calmly from, it seemed, the point in the clot where the silver needle touched. At the sound of the voice Don felt an instant thrill, for he recognized it.

"My name is Gilbert Dufresne, Lieutenant, United States Space Force. Stationed on the moon, I left it in a one-man ship to scout the alien planet just as the moonquakes began. As far as I know, my three comrades died in the break-up.

"I began to orbit the moon east-west and soon sighted three huge, wheel-shaped spaceships. Tractor beams of some sort, as far as I can judge, took hold of me and my vessel then and drew us inside one of the ships. There I met a variety of alien beings. I was questioned, I think, by some form of mind-scanning, and my physical wants were attended to. Later I was taken to the bridge or control bulge of the ship, where I was permitted to observe its operations.

"It had dropped from the moon and was hovering over the City of London, which was flooded by a high tide. Beams or some sort of force-field from our ship drove the water back. I was asked to enter a small ship with three alien beings. This ship descended and hovered near the top of a building which I recognized as the British Museum. I entered an upper story with one of the beings. There I saw him revive five men I was certain were dead. We re-entered the small ship and after several similar episodes we returned into the huge ship.

"From London we moved south to Portugal, where the city of Lisbon had been thrown down by a severe earthquake. There I saw..."

As Dufresne continued to speak, Paul (who had never met him, though he knew of him) began to have the feeling that, no matter how true the words might be, they were nevertheless pointless, useless  -  the merest chattering on the margin of great events that were relentlessly moving their own way. The peering ports seemed to leer cynically, or filmed with a cold, reptilian boredom. The grade school principal was listening to the painfully honest story without hearing it.

Apparently this feeling of Paul's was a valid intuition, for without another shred of warning the whole scene vanished, and was instantly replaced by the small, brightly-lit interior of the familiar saucer, green of floor and ceiling now, and Tigerishka calling from the flower-banked, silvery control panel: "It's no use. Our plea is rejected. Get in your ship and drop to your planet. Hurry! I'll cut loose from you as soon as you're in the Baba Yaga. Thanks for your help. Goodbye and good luck, Don Merriam. Goodbye, Paul Hagbolt."

A circle of green floor lifted. Without a word Don lowered himself headfirst through the port and began to pull himself through the tube.

Paul looked at Tigerishka.

"Hurry," she repeated.

Miaow came waltzing up warily. Paul stooped, and when the little cat glanced toward Tigerishka, grabbed it up with a sudden snatch. As he stepped toward the port he smoothed the ruffled gray fur. His hand slowed in the middle of the stroke and he turned around.

"I'm not going," he said.

"You have to, Paul," Tigerishka said. "Earth's your home. Hurry."

"I give up Earth and my race," he replied. "I want to stay with you." Miaow squirmed in his hands, trying to get away, but he tightened his grip.

"Please go at once, Paul," Tigerishka said, at last looking and moving toward him. Her eyes stared straight at his. "There can never be any further relationship between us."

"But I'm going to stay with you, do you hear?" His voice was suddenly so loud and angry that Miaow became panicky and clawed at his hands to get loose. He held her firmly and went on: "Even as your pet, if it has to be that way. But I'm staying."

Tigerishka stood face to face with him. "Not even as my pet," she said. "There's not quite enough gap between our minds for that.  -  Oh, get out, you fool!"

"Tigerishka," he said harshly, staring into her violet eyes, "ninety per cent of what you felt last night was pity and boredom. What was the other ten per cent?"

She glared at him as if in a frenzy of exasperation. Suddenly, moving with almost blinding speed, she snatched Miaow from him and slapped him hard across the face. The three pale violet claws of that forepaw showed bright red the first half inch as they came away.

"That!" she snarled, her fangs bared.

He took a backward step, then another, then he was in the tube. The artificial gravity above squeezed him down into it in free fall. Looking up, he could see Tigerishka's snarling mask. Blood streamed from his cheek and hung in red globules against the ridged silver inside the tube. Then the green port closed.