The Wanderer

The Wanderer Page 7

Paul Hagbolt was paying only half attention to the speakers on the platform. The coincidence of the star photos and Doc's notion about planets traveling through hyperspace had distracted him and set his imagination drifting. As if a big clock, that only he could hear, had just now begun to tick (once a second, not five times like wrist watches and many spring clocks), he found himself becoming acutely aware of time and of everything around him  -  the huddled group of people, the level sand, the faint rattle of the toppling wavelets just beyond the speakers, the old, boarded-up beach houses, the hooded and red-blinking installations of Vandenberg Two thrusting up behind him, the dirt cliffs beyond the sea-grass, above all the mild night pressing in from the ends of space and making tiny everything but the globe of Earth and the dark moon and the glittering stars.

Someone addressed a question to Rama Joan. She smiled with her teeth at Beardy and then looked down at her audience, her gaze moving to each member in turn. The bulging green turban hid her hair, though she had the same pale complexion as Ann, and it emphasized the tapering of her thin face. She looked like a half-starved child herself.

Still without speaking, she gazed across the heavens and above her shoulder at the dark moon, then back at her audience.

Then she said very quietly, yet harshly: "What do any of us really know about what is out there? Far less than a man imprisoned from birth in a cell under the city would know of the millions in Calcutta or Hong Kong or Moscow or New York. I know some of you think advanced races will love and cherish us, but I judge the attitude of more advanced races toward man on the basis of man's attitude toward the ant. On that basis I can tell you this much: there are devils out there. Devils."

There was a low, grinding sound like steel clockwork being wound. Miaow stiffened in Margo's arms, and the short hairs rose along her spine. Ragnarok had growled.

Rama Joan continued: "Among the stars, out there, there may be Hindus who won't kill a cow and even Jains who whisk off whatever they sit on for fear of crushing an ant and who wear gauze over their lips to keep from swallowing a gnat, but those will be at most the rare exceptions. The rest will not strain at gnats. To us, they will be devils."

Weirdness engulfed Paul. Everything around him seemed much too real, yet on the verge of dissolution  -  frozen, phantasmal. He looked toward the stars and the moon for support, telling himself that the heavens were the one thing that hadn't changed through all history, but then a demon voice deep in his mind said: "But what if the stars should move? They moved, in the photographs."

Sally Harris led Jake Lesher across the worn wood platform to the fifth and last car of the Rocket train. The only other passengers this trip were a rather timid-looking Puerto Rican couple, sitting in the first car and already gripping the safety bar with all four hands.

"My God, Sal, the waits I put up with," Jake said. "And the sidetracks I go down  -  I mean up!  -  to humor you. Hasseltine's penthouse - "

"Shh, this ain't no sidetrack, lover boy," she whispered as the launcher hurried past, making the last quick check. "Now listen hard: as soon as we start to climb, slide forward about a foot and grab onto the back of the seat for all you're worth with your left hand, because with your other arm you're going to be holding me."

"But that's the arm away from you, Sal."

"Now it is," she told him and touched him intimately.

He goggled at her, then smirked incredulously.

"Just you follow directions," she told him. With a creak and a clicking the train started its steep climb. A dozen yards from the top, she stood up lightly, swung her leg in a gleaming arc and straddled his waist. One hand gripped his neck, the other swiftly fitted things.

"Jesus, Sal," he gasped, "I bet we make the earth move like in For Whom the Bell."

"Earth, hell!" she told him, grinning bare-fanged down at him like a Valkyrie, as the train poised for its swoop and the tow let go. "I'll make the stars move!"

Rama Joan said: "Oh, the star people would be awesomely beautiful to us, I imagine, and as endlessly fascinating as a hunter is to a wild animal that hasn't yet been shot at. I'm dreadfully interested in speculating about them myself  -  but to us they would still be as cruel and distant as ninety-nine per cent of our own gods. And what are man's gods except his imaginings of a more advanced race? Take the testimony of ten thousand years, if you won't take mine, and you will realize that out there...up there...there are devils."

Ragnarok growled again. Miaow flattened herself against Margo's shoulder, digging in with her claws.

The Little Man said: "End of totality."

Doc said: "Really, Rama Joan, you surprise me."

Margo said: "Miaow, it's all right."

Paul looked up and saw the eastern rim of the moon lighten, and it was like a reprieve from prison. He suddenly knew that his incomprehensible fears would lift with the ending of the eclipse.

A half-dozen moon-diameters east of the moon, a squad of stars spun in tight little curlicues, like ghostly white fireworks erupting, squibs and pinwheels...and then blacked out.

From his lonely mesa, Asa Holcomb saw the stars near the moon shake, as if a fanfare were being blown through the cosmos. Then a great golden and purple gateway four times as wide as the moon opened in the heavens there, pushing the blackness aside; and Asa strained eagerly toward it, and his heart swelled with the wonder and majesty of it, and his aorta tore all the way, and he died.

Sally Harris saw the stars squiggle just as she and Jake, momentarily shedding thirty pounds of weight apiece, started to come atop the sixth summit of the Ten-Stage Rocket at Coney Island. In the blind egoistic world of sexual fulfillment that lies exactly on the boundary between the conscious and unconscious regions of the mind, she knew that the stars were a provincial district of herself  -  the Marches of Sally Harris  -  and so she merely chortled throatily: "I did it, Christ! I said I'd do it and I did it!"

And even when atop the next summit, after a choking, pulsing plunge to the nadir and back up, she saw the squiggling stars replaced by a yellow and purplish disk twenty times the size of the moon and bright enough to show up the pinstripe in the shoulders of Jake's suit as his face pressed between her breasts, she leaned back, like a Valkyrie, the safety bar cold across her rump, and cried triumphantly to the heavens: "Jesus, a bonus!"

High Bundy said: "Oh, what a kick! Listen, Pepe, there's this crazy old Chinarqan, bigger than King Kong, on the other side of the world kicking his legs up at us, and he's painting golden plates with grenadine so they look like two raindrops making love, and he's skimming them off to the moon with a reverse twist as he finishes them, and one of them sticks there."

"Reet-reet," Pepe cooed. "It's lighting all New York. Plate lightning."

"I'm getting it, too," Arab said, floating up behind them. "Man, what great tea!"

Knolls Kettering III, eye glued to the eyepiece in the Palm Beach dark, was saying a bit stuffily: "The noun "planet', Miss Katz, is derived from the Greek verb planasthai, to wander. Originally it meant simply 'Wanderer': a body that roves here and there amongst the fixed stars." His voice tightened. "Hello, the moon is lightening, and not just along the limb coming out of eclipse. Yes, definitely. And there are colors."

A hand curved over his shoulder protectively, and just about the littlest voice he'd ever heard  -  it was as if Barbara Katz had turned into a grasshopper  -  said, "Dad, please don't look away from the eyepiece now. You've got to prepare yourself for a big shock."

"A shock? What is it, Miss Katz?" he asked nervously, though following instructions.

"I'm not quite sure," the microscopic voice continued. "It looks like an old Amazing cover. Dad, I think your Wanderer's roved this way  -  only the Greeks didn't grow 'em this big. I think it's a planet."

Paul, flinching, had shut his eyes for at most two seconds.

When he opened them, the Wanderer was there, streaming with bloody and golden light east of the moon in the sky, sixteen times the moon's area, wavily split by one ragged, reverse-S curve into golden and maroon halves, looking softer than velvet yet with a clear-cut, unhazed rim.

That much Paul saw as a visual pattern, saw in a flash without analysis. The next moment he had thrown himself to the floor, shoulders hunched and head down, away from the Wanderer. For the first, dominating impression was of something gigantic and flaming overhead, something intimidatingly massive, about to crash to earth and crush him.

Margo, clutching Miaow, was on the floor beside him.

Purely by happenstance, Paul's eyes were directed at the program he was holding. He automatically read a line: "Our bearded panelist is Ross Hunter, Professor of Sociology, Reed College, Portland, Oregon"  -  before he realized he was reading easily by the light of the Wanderer.

To Don Guillermo, approaching the hill with its huddle of official buildings, his eyes on "the Palace," his left hand gripping the cross-stick handle on the bomb-release wire, the Wanderer was a Nicaraguan loyalist jet materialized on his tail and erupting a volcano of silent tracer bullets. He ducked in his seat, squinted his eyes, and tightened his neck and shoulders against the slugs. They didn't come and they didn't come  -  the bastard must be a sadist, prolonging the agony.

He banked left toward the big lake, according to plan, then made himself look up and back. Why, the damn thing was just a big barrage balloon, somehow suddenly illuminated. To think they'd tricked him with a carnival gadget like that into not dropping his egg. He'd swing back and show 'em!

At that moment a dazzling pink volcano erupted from La Loma, and he saw that his left hand gripped the cross-stick mat was now trailing a length of broken wire. The next second, a blast boxed his ears and shuddered the plane. He righted it and automatically kept on toward Lake Nicaragua.

But, he asked himself, how was a balloon like that keeping exact pace with his old crate? And why was the whole landscape glowing, as if the embers had come up in the universal theater?

Bagong Bung, the sun baking his brains as he leaned on the paintless rail of the bridge, but with his brains visualizing a weed-veiled, gold-hearted wreck not twenty leagues away, was utterly unaware and felt not one iota of strangeness as the gravitational front of an unknown body struck upward through him from below, locking onto every atom of him. Since it clutched with proportional force at the "Machan Lumpur," the Gulf of Tonkin, and the whole planet, the gust of cosmic power did not so much as jostle one of Bagong Bung's cool green thoughts.

If Bagong hung had been looking at the compass of the "Machan Lumpur," he would have seen its needle swing wildly and then come tremblingly to rest in a new direction a shade east of north, but the little Malay seldom looked into the binnacle  -  he knew these shallow seas too well. And he had dealt so long with turncoats and time-servers on both communist and capitalist sides, that even if he had seen the compass veer, he might merely have felt that it was, at last, showing its own natural degree of political unreliability.

Wolf Loner frowned in his chilly sleep as, halfway around the world, the tiny compass of the "Endurance" swung and resettled in an identical manner as the "Machan Lumpur's," and as a blue finger of St. Elmo's fire flickered briefly at the top of the dory's mast. He stirred and almost woke, then slept again.

General Spike Stevens snapped: "Jimmy, get that big burn out of there before we lose a screen."

"Yes, sir," Captain James Kidley responded. "But which screen is it? I keep seeing it in both."

"It is in both screens," Colonel Willard Griswold cut in hoarsely. "Uncross your eyes, Spike. It's out there  -  as big as the Earth."

"Excuse me, Spike," Colonel Mabel Wallingford put in, her blood racing, "but mightn't it be a problem? HQ One can switch our input-output to test conditions any time they want."

"Right," the General said, snatching at the out she'd handed him; and this made her smile fiercely: Spike had been scared. He continued: "If it is a problem  -  and I think it is  -  they've thrown us a doozie. In five seconds our communications will be jumping with simulated crisis data. O.K., then, everybody, we pretend it's a problem."

Forcing himself to squint upward, Paul saw that the Wanderer, so far as he could estimate, was not moving or changing. Helping Margo at the same time, he scrambled to his feet, though still hunched away from the Wanderer, as a man would hunch under a hanging block of concrete or away from a lifted fist.

Apparently the hit-the-dirt reaction had been universal. Chairs were scattered; the people in the front rows and the panelists were out of sight.

Not quite universal, though. The Ramrod was standing up straight and saying in a strangely even, high-pitched voice: "Don't panic, folks. Can't you see it's just a big fire balloon? Manufactured in Japan, I'll bet from that design."

A woman brayed from the floor: "I saw it rise up from Vandenberg! Why's it stopped? It's still firing! Why doesn't it keep on going?"

From under the table came a still louder bellow from Doc. "Stay down, you fools! Don't you know the atomic fireball's a sphere in outer space?" Then, not quite as loudly: "Find my glasses, Rama Joan."

Ragnarok, tail between his legs, came circling back to almost the exact center of the floor, stopped there among the empty chairs, lifted his muzzle toward the Wanderer and began to howl. Paul and Margo, moving forward toward the others, veered around him.

Ann came up behind them. "Why's everybody scared?" she asked Paul, gaily. "That must be the biggest saucer ever." She switched off her chest lamp. "I won't need this."

The Ramrod took up again in an emotionless, squeaky monotone. "The Jap fire balloon is moving very slowly, folks. It's passing close overhead, but don't worry, it's going to miss us."

The Little Man walked over to the Ramrod, reached up and shook his arm.

"Would a fire balloon dim the stars down to a half dozen?" he demanded. "Would it show up the colors of our cars over there? Would it turn Vandenberg green and light up the Pacific out to the Santa Barbara Islands? God damn it, answer me, Charley Fulby!"

The Ramrod looked around. Then the pupils of his eyes rolled up out of sight, he slowly crumpled against a chair and slid limply to the floor. The Little Man looked down at him thoughtfully, and said: "Whatever it is, it's not Arietta."

Simultaneously, Doc's shining dome and gleaming glasses and the shaggy face of Hunter  -  the Reed College professor they'd thought of as Beardy  -  rose from behind the table. For a moment the impression was of two stalwart dwarfs. Then, "That's no atomic fireball," he announced, "or it would keep on expanding. And it would have been one hell of a lot brighter to start with." He helped Rama Joan to her feet. A green edge dangled loose from her turban. Her white shirt was crumpled.

Hunter stood up too.

Ann reached up and touched Miaow. "Your cat's purring and she's looking at the big saucer," the little red-headed girl told Margo. "I think she wants to stroke it."

The Wanderer continued to hang in the heavens, velvet soft yet sharply defined, incontrovertible, its maroon and golden markings raggedly approximating the yin-yang symbol of bright and dark, male and female, good and evil.

While the others stared and imagined, the Little Man took a small notebook from his breast pocket and made a neat diagrammatic sketch on one of the unruled pages, smoothing the ragged boundary line on the new heavenly body and indicating the purple with a shading of parallel lines.

The Wanderer

Don Merriam harvested the last cannister and started back to the Hut. He looked up at the eclipse. The ring was very bright to the right now. In a matter of seconds the sun's disk would begin to emerge, bringing hot day back to the moon and softening Earth's inky disk with moon-reflected sunlight.

Then he stopped in his tracks. The sun's disk still hadn't showed, but earth's disk, inky a second ago, was now glowing twenty times more brightly than he'd ever seen it by moonlight. He could readily make out both Americas, and upon the righthand rim the tiny soft gleam of the Greenland icecap.

"Look at Earth, Don." Johannsen's voice was crisp in his ear.

"I'm doing that, Yo. What is it?"

"We don't know. One guess: there's a terrific burst somewhere else on the moon. Total flame-out at Soviet base  -  all their rocket fuel going."

"Wouldn't make that much light, Yo. Still, maybe Ambartsumian has invented a twenty-moon-power flare."

"Atomic limelight?" Johannsen laughed bleakly. "Dufresne's just made Guess Three: All the stars back of us have novaed."

"That might do it," Don agreed. "But, Yo, what's that spot in the Atlantic?"

The spot he referred to was a bright yellow and purple highlight on the pallid waters.

Richard Hillary pulled the shade beside his seat against the low, stabbing morning sun and settled back comfortably as the London clipper gathered speed on the way to Bath. It was a pleasant contrast to the ratty little bus that had carried him from Portishead to Bristol. At last he felt his sickishness begin to moderate, as though his guts, madly convulsed an hour ago, were settling into a smooth coil.

And see what only one night with a beery Welsh poet does to one's mental images, he thought wryly. Snakes in my belly indeed! No more of that for a long while now.

Dai Davies had been particularly boisterous at parting, loudly chanting fragments of a "Farewell to Mona" he'd been alcoholically extemporizing. The fragments had been full of horrid neologisms such as "moondark" and "manshine," and, to cap that, "girl glow"; and Richard's relief at getting rid of Dai was genuine and profound. It didn't even bother him, at least for the moment, that the bus driver had the wireless turned on softly, inflicting the half dozen passengers with American neojazz, pretentious as the Republican Party.

He gave a silent but heartfelt sigh. Yes, no more Dai for a while now, no more science fiction, no more moon. Yes, particularly no more moon.

The wireless said, "We interrupt this program to relay to you a puzzling news flash from the United States."