Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

Paul said to Doc: “I wonder why there weren’t any other cars trapped in that stretch of the highway? Seems unnatural.”

“They probably got out past the first, smaller slides,” Doc opined. “The same slides would have turned back any cars trying to come into that stretch. And still, despite all she says, I think some may have escaped over Monica Mountainway.”

Hunter called up: “Come on down, the rest of you guys, and bring the cot. We’ve got to get Ray out of the truck, so some of us can go back in it to our cars.”

Trembling and breathless and a little teeter-gaited from their wild run past the mausoleum-like General Grant Houses, Arab and Pepe and High started east along 125th Street with an initial feeling of reassurance at having entered the hallway to their friendly, familiar Afro-Latin home.

But the sidewalks, packed two hours ago, were empty now. Only a scattering of crushed paper cups and bags, empty pop bottles, and half-pint flasks testified to the vanished multitude. No cars moved along the street, though here and there were empty ones parked higgledy-piggledy, two with their motors’ exhaust streaming blue from their tail pipes.

The weed-brothers had to squint against the sun when they scanned east, but as far as they could tell the same desertion prevailed all along the crosstown street that led through the heart of Harlem.

The only sounds, at first, besides their own footsteps and the motor chugging, were the sepulchral mouthings of unseen radios, sounding horribly important, by their tone; but the words were uncatchable by reason of static and distance — and drowned out by the excited, equally unintelligible calling to each other of distant sirens and horns.

“Where’s everybody?” High whispered.

“Atomic attack,” Pepe affirmed. “Russia’s sent the super-doops. Everybody crouchin’ down below in the basements. We gotta get to ours.” Then, a ghost of the wolf-wail returning to his voice: “Fireball risin’ from the river!”

“No!” Arab contradicted, softly. “While we at the river, Resurrection come and go. Old Preacher-dads right after all. Everybody snatched — no time to turn off their cars or their radios. We the only ones left”

They took hold of each other and tiptoed, to kill the sound of their footsteps as they went fearfully on.

Sally Harris and Jake Lesher tiptoed out of the tiny aluminum-lined box that had lifted them the last three stories. Before their eyes was dimness, with gleams highlighting a grand piano. Under their feet was thick carpet, sponge-based.

Sally yoohooed softly. With a whispered sigh the door behind them slid sideways, but Sally caught it and blocked it with a tiny table holding a silver tray.

“What are you trying to do?” Jake asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll hear the buzzer if anybody else wants in. Come on.”

“Wait a minute,” Jake said. “You’re sure Hasseltine’s not home?”

Sally shrugged. “I’ll have a look while you raid the icebox. Just leave the sterling alone. Come on, haven’t you a bagel-size hole in your gut?”

Like a mouse with a friend, she led him to the kitchen.

Dai Davies listened with wicked amusement to the weird reports of the Wanderer coming over the wireless to the tiny Severn-shore pub near Portishead, where he’d gone after a two-hour snooze to do his late morning drinking. From time to time he embroidered the reports fancifully for the edification and jollification of his unappreciative fellow-topers: “Purple and sickly amber, eh? ’Tis a great star-written American advertisement, lads, for grape juice and denatured beer!” and, “It’s a saintly Soviet super-balloon, boys, set to pop over lawless Chicago and strew the Yankee heartland with begemmed copies of Marx’s holy Manifesto!”

The reports were coming over an Atlantic cable, the derisive announcer said — extraordinary severe magnetic storms had disordered the radio sky to the west. Dai greatly wished that Dick Hillary were still with him — this lovely nonsense was just the thing to make that hater of spaceflight and space fiction squirm; besides, he’d be a better audience for a Welsh poet’s rare wit than these Somerset sobersides.

But when, two mighty drinks later, the wireless reports began to include mention of a cracked and captured moon — the announcer growing still more derisive, yet now with a nervous note in his voice, almost hysterical — Dai’s mood changed abruptly, and there was much more drunken emotion than wit in his cry: “Steal our moon-bach, would they, those damned Yanks! Don’t they know Mona belongs to Wales? And they hurt her, we’ll swim across and gut Manhattan Isle from the Battery to Hellgate, will we not, my hearties?”

This met with, “Shut up, you sot, he’s saying more,” “Wild jabbering Welshman,” “Bolshy, I’d think,” “No more for you, you’re drunk” — this last from the host.

“Cowardly Somersets!” Dai retorted loudly, grabbing up a mug and brandishing it like a knuckleduster. “And you follow me not I’ll fight you myself, all up and down the Mendip Hills!”

The diamond-paned door was thrown open and a white-eyed scarecrow figure in dungarees and wide-brimmed rainhat faced them against the light fog outside.

“Is there aught on the wireless or the telly of the tide?” this apparition called to the host. “Two hours yet till low, and the Channel’s ebbing as I’ve never seen it, even at the equinoctial springs with an east gale blowing. Come, look for yourselves. At this progress a man’ll be able to walk on all the Welsh Grounds by noon and an hour after that the Channel’ll be near dry!”

“Good!” Dai cried loudly, letting the host take away the mug and leaning hunch-shouldered on the bar as the others made a tentative move toward the door. “Then I’ll walk the five miles back to Wales straight across the Severn sands and be shut of you lily-livered Somersets. By God, I will!”

“And good riddance,” someone muttered loudly, while a hairsplitting jokester pointed out: “If that’s your aim you must walk east aslant, using the Grounds and Usk Patch for stepping stones if you like — and more than twice five miles. Straight across here, man, it’s Monmouth, not Wales.”

“Monmouth’s still Welsh to me and be damned to the Union of 1535,” Dai retorted, slumping his chin onto the bar. “Oh, go gawk at this watery prodigy, all of you. It’s my guess the Yanks, having broken and chained the moon, are stealing the ocean, too.”

General Spike Stevens snapped: “Get Christmas Relay, Jimmy! Tell ’em their picture’s starting to swim, too.”

The watchers in the underground room were grouped in front of the righthand screen, ignoring the other, which for more than an hour had been nothing but a churning rectangle of visual static.

The picture from the satellite above Christmas Island showed the Wanderer in her target face with Luna swinging behind her, but both planet and moon were bulging and rippling as electronic distortion invaded the screen.

“I’ve been trying, General, but I can’t raise them,” Captain James Kidley responded. “Radio and shortwave are gone. Ultrashort’s going — every kind of communication that isn’t by buried wire or wave guide. And even those—”

“But we’re a headquarters!”

“I’m sorry, General, but—”

“Get me HQ One!”

“General, they don’t—”

There was a strong vibration from the floor and a sharp crackling sound. The lights flickered, went out, came on again. The buried room rocked. Plaster fell. Once more the lights went out — all except the pale glow of the Christmas Island screen.

Abruptly the wavering astronomic picture on the screen was replaced by the silhouette of a large feline head with pricked ears and grinning jaws. It was as if, out on that unmanned satellite 23,000 miles above the Pacific, a black tiger had peered into the telescope. For a moment the picture held. Then it swam, and the screen blacked out.