Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

Tied together! Wound wound! Here he was thinking of them as actual threads, as though the Wanderer and the moon were two Christmas tree ornaments.

Still, the white threads had to be something actual.

He followed them back along their course to the nose of the moon. The Baba Yaga was ahead of the moon now, but still in its shadow because they were both starting to swing behind the Wanderer again — its black sunset line that he had first seen through the moon-chasm was already in sight once more, chopping off the violet horizon.

So the nose of the moon was in shadow, its surface bronze-dim and churning. He took from the rack a pair of binoculars with big objective lenses and carefully focused them.

In the churning nose of the moon were a dozen huge, conical pits, their inner surfaces spinning rapidly clockwise, as though they were maelstroms in the fracturing rock.

Each sleek white thread, turning bronze-dark as it entered the moon’s shadow, led to the bottom of one of the whirlpool pits and kept swinging around in a tiny circuit, in pace with its whirling. The threads thickened somewhat down toward their restless roots. They resembled waterspouts or tornado-funnels.

Around each pit were three or four bright violet or lemon dots. He had seen one or two other such dots along the strands. It struck Don that they might be big spaceships, presumably from the Wanderer, and possibly generating gravitational or momentum fields of some kind.

For the inference to be made from the whirlpool pits and the entering strands was clear: Somehow, the substance of the moon, in the form of dust and gravel and perhaps larger rocks, was being sucked out and carried looping through space toward the north pole of the Wanderer.

Arab and Pepe and High stood over the Hudson, sharing a stick, ready to shred it into the pale, oil-filmed water if anyone should come.

But no one did. The city was strangely still, even for six in the morning. So High flipped away the half-inch butt, and Arab lit another reefer, and they passed it around.

Their arrival at the river, after slanting north past the General Grant Houses, and under the Henry Hudson Parkway, had been anticlimatic. There had been simply nothing, over to the west, but pale sky and distant piers and Edgewater and the southern end of the Palisades.

“She disappear somehow,” High decided. “Maybe just set.” He laughed. His gaze switched south to Grant’s Tomb. “What you think, General?”

“River look high, Admiral,” Arab adjudged, frowning, as he lit a third reefer for them.

“Sure do,” High agreed. “See it washin’ over that dock!”

“That no dock,” Arab protested scornfully. “That a sunken barge.”

“Just the same, water’s ten feet higher’n when we come.”

“You crazy!”

“I know where she disappear to,” Pepe cried suddenly. “That big purple’n golden thing a amphi-whamf — a balloon-submarine combo! She submerge. That why river high — she bulk it up. She lurkin’ down there, glowin’ in the wet-wet dark.”

As the others quivered at the delicious horror of the thought, Pepe threw up his spread-fingered hands beside his cheeks and cried again, piling it on: “No, wait! She not that. She a frozen atomic blast. They start the blast, then freeze the fireball. She float around like a ball lightning, first over the river, then under. When she unfreeze, city go whish! Look there!”

Red sun was glinting from banks of windows across the river, so low they looked like part of the water. Suddenly the pretended horror became appallingly real to all of them — the sudden fear against which no weed-smoker can wholly ensure himself.

“Come on!” Arab screamed in a whisper.

They turned and ran back toward Harlem.

Jake Lesher curled his lip at the thinning crowd. With the sinking of the Wanderer and the seeping in of gray morning light, the excitement had drained out of Times Square. The earthquake litter now looked merely untidy and gritty — one more Manhattan demolition project.

Incredulously, as if they were something from a musical extravaganza, he remembered Sal’s song and the stamping crowd under the vast purple-and-amber floodlight. Then his lip relaxed and his eyes widened a little but stopped watching, as he felt brushing against the edges of his imagination the first tendrils of a dream — or of a scheme, for the two were very close in Jake’s universe.

Sally Harris suddenly snaked her arm through his from behind. As she pulled him around, she whispered rapidly in his ear: “Come on, let’s get out of here before those other wolves find me. It’s only four blocks.”

“You shouldn’t startle me that way, Sal,” Jake complained. “I was getting a money-making thought. Where to?”

“You were just saying nothing could startle you any more. Ha! I’m taking us to breakfast at Hugo Hasseltine’s penthouse — me and my little key. After that quake, the higher I get, the safer I’ll feel.”

“You’ll have farther to fall,” Jake pointed out.

“Yeah, but things won’t fall on me. Come on, you’ll scheme better on a full stomach.”

Way up, a little pink was showing in the sky.

Doc grunted happily and said, “I could do with another sandwich.”

“We thought we’d better hold back half,” the thin woman told him apologetically from the other side of the long table.

“It was my idea,” young Harry McHeath said, embarrassed.

“And probably a good one,” Doc allowed. “Straight out of Swiss Family Robinson. Anyone care for a taste of Scotch?” He fished a half-pint bottle out of his lefthand coat pocket. The fat woman humphed.

“Better save that for emergencies, Rudy,” Ross Hunter said quietly.

Doc sighed and tucked it away. “I suppose all second cups of coffee have been interdicted by the Committee of Public Safety, too,” he growled.

Harry McHeath shook his head nervously and hastened to pour one for Doc and then for several of the others.

Rama Joan said: “Rudolf, ages ago you were wondering what makes the colors of the Wanderer.”

She had had Ann stretch out on two chairs beside her, wrapped in the coat someone had left behind, with the girl’s head pillowed on her mother’s thigh. Rama Joan was looking at the Wanderer. The eastern yellow spot now had purple all around it, destroying the illusion of the jaws. The two polar yellow spots were shrinking as they rotated out of sight. In fact, the effect was almost that of a purple target with a great yellow bull’s eye. Meanwhile the faintly crack-webbed moon, perceptibly lozenge-shaped, had almost finished a second westward crossing of the Wanderer’s face.

Rama Joan said: “I don’t think it’s natural features at all. I think it’s simply…decor.” She paused. “If beings are able to drive their planet through hyperspace, they’d surely be able to give it an appearance, they considered artistic and distinctive. Cavemen didn’t paint the outside of their homes, but we do.”

“You know, I like that,” Doc said, smacking his lips. “A two-tone planet. Impress the neighbors in the next galaxy.”

Wojtowicz and Harry McHeath laughed uneasily. The Ramrod thought: Unwillingly they grow toward comprehension of Ispan’s glory. Hunter, his voice low but jerky with tension, said: “If you were that advanced, I don’t suppose you’d use natural planets at all. You’d design and build them from scratch. Gosh, this seems crazy!” he finished rapidly.

“Not at all,” Doc assured him. “Be damned efficient to use all of a planet’s volume. You could have storerooms and dormitories and field generators down to the very core. Of course that would require some pretty tremendous beams and bracing—”