Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

“Mr. Brecht can’t put his hands on the new planet, Mommy.”

“No, dear, but now he can put his thoughts there.”

Oxyhelium mix gradually filled the cabin of the Baba Yaga from the tank Don Merriam had valved open. Its pressure sealed the inner hatch and opened two doors in Don’s helmet. Little fans went on around the cabin, keeping the new air moving in spite of it being in free fall. It pushed into Don’s helmet, replacing the foul air there. His features twitched and he shuddered a little. His breathing strengthened and he went into a deep, healthy sleep.

The Baba Yaga reached the top of its trajectory, poised there, then began to fall back toward the moon. As it fell, it tumbled slowly. Every thirty seconds, about, its spacescreen looked at the moon, and fifteen seconds later at Earth. As it tumbled, the dust-filmed spacesuit with Don inside began to move across the floor, rolling very slowly.

The Little Man called ahead to Paul: “I don’t mean to impugn your veracity, Mr. Hagbolt, but the Vandenberg Two beach gate seems to be a lot farther away than you led us to believe. Easy, Ragnarok!”

“It’s right in front of the blinking red light,” Paul told him, wishing he were inwardly as sure of that as he tried to make his voice sound. He added, “I have to admit I underestimated the distance of the light”

“Don’t worry, Doddsy. Paul will get us there,” Doc pronounced confidently.

The three of them were preparing to relieve Hunter, the Ramrod, and one of the two other men at the three corners of the fat woman’s stretcher.

“How are you feeling, Wanda?” the thin woman asked, kneeling by the cot in the sand. “You can have another digitalis.”

“A little better,” the fat woman murmured, fluttering her eyes open. They rested on the Wanderer. “Oh, my God,” she groaned, turning her head away.

The strange orb, inexorably rotating, presented a new aspect. The remains of the dinosaur, or penguin, made a huge yellow C around the lefthand rim of the planet, while the solid yellow D had swung to the center, so that the effect was of D-in-C. The Little Man did another quick sketch, labeling it simply, “Two Hours.”

Ann said, “I think the C is a straw basket on its side and the D a piece of cake with lemon frosting. And the moon is a honeydew melon!”

“I know who’s hungry,” her mother said.

“Or you can think of the D as the eye of a giant purple needle,” Ann quickly pointed out.

The Golden Serpent coils around the Broken Egg, the Ramrod thought. Chaos is hatched.

The moon and its shadow had moved all the way across the planet. There was a feeling of relief when a thread of night-sky appeared between the two orbs.

The man at the fourth corner of the cot, a heavy-faced welder named Ignace Wojtowicz, perhaps just wanting to prolong the rest period, said: “There’s one thing I don’t get at all. If that’s a real planet out there big as Earth, how come we don’t feel its gravity pulling at us — sort of making us feel lighter, at least.”

“For the same reason we don’t feel the gravity of the moon or the sun,” Hunter answered quickly. “Then, too, although we know the size of the new planet, we have no idea of its mass. Of course,” he added, “if it did appear out of hyperspace, there must have been an instant when its gravity field didn’t exist for us and then an instant when it did — I’m assuming the front of a newly-created gravity field moves out at the speed of light — but apparently there were no transition effects.”

“That we noticed,” Doc amended. “Incidentally, Ross, what’s this casting doubt on my emergence-from-hyperspace theory? Where else could the thing have come from?”

“It might have approached the solar system camouflaged or somehow blacked-out,” Hunter asserted. “We should consider all the improbabilities. Your own philosophy back at you, Rudy.”

“Humph,” Doc commented. “No, I think what Paul told us about twist fields in the star photos tips the scales toward Brecht’s Hyperspace Hypothesis. And it would have had to have its gravity blacked out too, I’d think, by your theory. Incidentally, I imagine we already can deduce something about the planet’s mass. It’s now seven minutes past one, Pacific Standard Time,” he said, glancing at his wrist “About two hours since the new planet appeared.”

’Two hours and five minutes,” the Little Man inserted.

“You’re a pearl, Doddsy. Everybody engrave that eleven-oh-two P.S.T. on their memories — some day your grandchildren may ask you to tell them the exact time you saw Mrs. Monster pop out of hyperspace. But anyway, at one a.m. the full moon ought to be past her highest in the sky, an hour toward setting. I judge she’s definitely east of that point, still near her highest. About three or four degrees east, I’d say — six or eight moon diameters. Which would mean that the gravitational pull of the emergent planet has speeded up the moon in her orbit Ergo, the newcomer is no lightweight.”

“Wow,” Wojtowicz said appreciatively. “Just how much speed-up is that, Doc, figuring like the moon’s a rocket?”

“Why, from two-thirds of a mile to a second to…” Doc hesitated, then said, as if incredulous of his own figures: “to four or more miles a second.”

He and Hunter looked at each other.

“Wow,” Wojtowicz repeated. “But now I take it, Doc, the moon keeps on in her old orbit, just speeded up a lot? Maybe a month every week, huh?” The black isthmus between moon and planet had widened a little while they’d been speaking.

“I think we’d better be getting a move on, ourselves,” Doc said in an oddly distant way, stooping for his corner of the cot.

“Right,” Hunter seconded brusquely.

Great rotary pumps surged, moving water to the port side of the “Prince Charles” to compensate for the weight of the passengers and crewmen lining the starboard rails and crowding the starboard portholes to watch the Wanderer and the moon set in the Atlantic, while dawn paled the sky behind them unnoticed. The thickness of Earth’s atmosphere had turned the purple of the planet red and its gold orange. Its wake across the calm sea was spectacular.

The radio engineer of the atom-liner reported to Captain Sithwise a very unusual and growing amount of static.

Don Guillermo Walker managed to land his airplane on the south end of Lake Nicaragua near the mouth of the San Juan River, despite the broken left aileron and the half-dozen holes struck or burnt through the wings by chunks of red-hot pumice. What the devil, the big rock had missed him!

The volcano on Ometepe was now joined by its brother peak, Madera, and they were sending twin ruddy pillars skyward almost fifty miles northwest. And now, passing all expectation on such a crazy opening night, he saw wink on, scarcely a mile away, the twin red flares the Araiza brothers had promised would guide him to the launch. Caramba, que fidelidadl He’d never accuse another Latin American of frivolity or faithlessness.

Suddenly the reflection of the Wanderer in the black lake shattered toward him. He saw the sinister water formations, like low wide steps, approaching him. Barely in time, he headed the plane around into them. The old Seabee mounted the first successfully, though with a great heave and splash. Earthquake or landslide waves!

Doc puffed out rapidly: “I don’t care how near we are to the gate, I got to rest.” He lowered his corner of the cot to the sand and knelt there, arm on knee and with bald head bent, panting.