Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

Behind them the Wanderer touched the ocean’s rim. The curving moon-lozenge was crossing its front again. The planet itself was showing once more its yin-yang face, though seemingly tilted over — Doc, gasping, thought, Why, this is where we came in. The thing’s completed one rotation — it’s got a six-hour day. Then something black and square and lace-sided reared up and blocked off the Wanderer from him.

It was the platform where they’d held their saucer symposium, upended by the second of the big combers.

Then he heard the roar.

The others had started to run again and he pounded after them, tiny needles teasing his heart.

Then…well, it was as if in one terrible, instantaneous swoop the Wanderer had leaped a quarter of a million miles out of the heavens and poised itself just above them, shutting off all of the sky except a circular gray horizon-border.

It was enough to stop them in their tracks, despite the pale, wreckage-fisted horrors roaring at them up the beach.

Hunter was the first to get distances and dimensions right, and he thought, Why, it’s simply (my God, simply!) a flying saucer forty feet across, antigravitically poised a dozen feet above us and painted with a violet-gold yin-yang. Then he started running again.

The first and least of the big combers plastered them with spume and surged around them knee-high. Although most of their minds and senses were still glued to the thing above them, their bodies responded to the material assault. They grabbed at each for support; hands clutched slippery hands or wet waists or soggy coats. Wanda went under, and Wojtowicz ducked for her.

Margo’s nails dug into Paul’s neck and she screamed in his ear: “Miaow! Get Miaow!” and she jabbed her other hand beyond him. He glimpsed a tiny cat tail and ears disappearing in the dirty spume and he crazily dove after them, clutching ahead. So Paul missed what happened next.

A pink port five feet across flashed open in the saucer’s center, and there swung out of it, hanging just above their heads by two clawed limbs and a pointed prehensile tail, a green-and-violet-furred -

“Devil!” Ida screamed. “ She said there’d be devils!”

“Tiger!” yelled Harry McHeath. Doc heard and his mind threw out, as uncontrollably as a pair of honest dice, the thought: My God, the second Buck Rogers Sunday page! The Tiger Men of Mars!

“Empress!” the Ramrod cried, his cold knees buckling, and in his nostrils, framed by the sea’s mucky stink, the breath of a heavenly perfume…

Big, black-centered violet eyes scanned them all very rapidly, yet with an impression of leisurely spectator disdain.

The second huge comber wasn’t thirty yards away, the platform riding it like a surfboard, scattered chairs bobbing all around, and behind it the half-exploded beach house coming on, too.

A green paw shot out, pointed a taper-snouted gray pistol seaward, and fanned it back and forth.

There was no flash or glow or sign, but the great wave sank, shriveled, dissolved. The platform slipped back over it and to the side. The broken beach house veered toward Vandenberg. All spume shot away, vanished. Confused loomings and shrinkings. The water was hardly thigh-deep and it lacked the punch of the first comber when it struck them at last.

The gray pistol kept on fanning back and forth over their heads.

A great gust of wind whipped past them from the land. Doc, caught off balance, started to fall. Rama Joan heaved back on him.

Paul’s head and shoulders emerged from the foam. He was clutching a rat-wet Miaow to his shoulder.

The wind kept blowing.

The being hanging from the rim of the pink port seemed to lengthen out, almost impossibly, becoming a violet-barred green curve stretching toward Paul.

The gray pistol dropped, and Margo caught it.

Violet-gray claws dug into Paul’s shoulder, and he and Miaow were swept up, by more than any mere human muscular force, into the pink port. Margo and Doc and Rama Joan, clinging together for support, saw that much very clearly.

The green and violet being whipped back into the saucer after Paul and the cat.

Then, without visible transition, the saucer was hundreds of yards overhead, no bigger than the moon, the port a big, pale dot.

Margo shoved the gray pistol inside her jacket.

The wind from the land faded.

The dot winked out, and the saucer vanished.

Then they were all struggling hand in hand up the beach, through knee-deep water sucking back seawards.

Bagong Bung, steering the “Machan Lumpur” out of the tide-swollen inlet south of Do-Son after a successful though unpleasantly delayed delivery of a cargo of assorted contraband, saw the Wanderer rising out of the cloud-edged Gulf of Tonkin in the young night just as — almost half a planet away — the saucer students, escaped from the tsunami, were watching the last sliver of it sink into the Pacific. To Bagong hung the yin-yang was a familiar Chinese symbol which he liked to think of as the Two Whales, but the deformed moon — at which he swiftly directed his brass spyglass — was now, to him, like a huge bag of faintly yellowed diamonds.

So to Bagong Bung, the Wanderer rising where the moon should have risen alone was not so much a staggering intrusion as a promise of good luck, a supernatural encouragement. Diamonds made him think of the lost treasure ships hidden under the shallow seas around him. He instantly and irrevocably decided that when tomorrow dawned, and with it the low tide came, he would spare time for at least one dive at the new location he’d guessed for the wreck of the “Sumatra Queen"!

“Come up, Cobber-Hume,” he called through the rusty speaking tube to his Australian engineer. “Great good fortune for us. No, I must not tell you. Come up, then you’ll see. Oh, you’ll see!”

Paul Hagbolt was plunged into a breathable sea of warmth, sweet spicy odors, and gay pastel colors dominated by pink — though here and there were bright green swatches.

For a few moments he hadn’t been at all certain that he’d been snatched inside a vehicle. It seemed more like nearly instantaneous translation to another plane of existence, another spot in the universe — a jungly, bedroomy spot.

He’d hardly seen the saucer. Most of the time it was hovering, he’d been floundering and choking in the gritty salt water clutching Miaow. When he’d been whisked up, his first thought had been that he and Miaow had been spun aloft by the next comber and were riding its top.

Then had come three fleeting yet shockingly vivid flashes: first, a huge, tapering, greenish-purplish cat face; second, two staring eyes with incredible five-petaled irises around the black five-spiked stars of the pupils; third, a long, slim, hand-sized paw with narrow indigo pads and four cruel curving claws of translucent, violet-gray horn — he had the impression that they’d just been buried in the scruff of his coat, and maybe his neck, too, hastening him.

The next instant he was floating with a slow twist in the warm, sugary-flowery, green-flecked, pink sea.

A dark hole in that sea swung into view, and through it he saw Margo thigh-deep in dirty, foamed water holding something gray-gleaming and staring up at him, and beside her Doc, spume-patched, and Rama Joan, sand-streaked, with red-gold hair clinging wet and twisty. Then they were shrinking with incredible swiftness, as if a wrong-ended telescope had been interposed. Nevertheless, it was then that Paul began to believe that he was in the saucer he’d disjointedly seen — the saucer that now must be soaring faster than any mortar shell, though with no sensation of acceleration. Then the hole closed upon jumbly pinkness — in fact, yes, to strange pink flowers.