Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

But the roaring grew louder; the going got easier because the sands were sloping down again; a last mist-veil faded; and suddenly his way was blocked by a rapid, turbid river more than a hundred yards wide, humping into foam-crested ridges and eating greedily at the sandy banks to either side.

He stopped in stupefaction. It had simply never occurred to him that, no matter how low the tide went, the Severn was a river and would keep flowing. And now he knew he couldn’t have come a quarter of the way across the Channel.

Upstream he could see an angry white humping and jetting where — to be sure! — the Avon came crashing into the bigger river.

Far downstream loomed the canted stern of a steamer aground. The ’copter hovered over it. There were faint hootings.

He leaped back as a long stretch of bank caved in almost at his feet. Nevertheless he bravely stripped off his coat, since swimming seemed in order, stopping midway to get out the bottle. Through the near water a splintered black beam with laths nailed across it went slashing downstream like a great, hook-bladed knife. He put the bottle to his lips. It was empty.

He shivered and shook. Suddenly he saw himself as an ant with the ambitions of a Napoleon. Fear closed in.

He looked behind him. His footprints had smoothed to barely distinguishable hollows and bumps. And there was a glisten of water all over the sands that hadn’t been there before. The tide had turned.

He threw away the bottle and began to run back along his footprints before they faded altogether. His feet sank in deeper than they had in coming.

Jake Lesher thumbed a light switch back and forth, although he’d had proof enough that the electricity was gone. He studied the elevator in the dimness of the living room. The cage had dropped six inches in the last quake and now tilted a little. Its aluminum looked rippled in the shadows. He thought he saw black threads curling out of it, and he retreated from them into the murky sunshine of the patio.

“There’s more smoke coming out now, and I can see some flames,” Sally Harris called to him from where she was craning over the balustrade. “The flames are coming up the building, and people are watching them from the windows across, but the water’s coming up faster — I think. It’s a race. Gee, Jake, this is a flood like in the Bible, and Hugo’s penthouse is our Noah’s Ark. That’s the idea we’ll build our play around. We’ll use the fire, too.”

He grabbed and shook her. “This is all for real, you little moron! We’re the ones that’ll be fried.”

“But Jake,” she protested, “you always got to have a real situation to make a play. I read that somewhere.”

All over Earth the senses and minds of very many people were locked against the change in the tides. Those inland were inclined to doubt or minimize what they could not see with their own eyes, and many of them had never seen an ocean. Men at sea, beyond sight of land, cannot perceive the tidal bulge beneath them — they can hardly perceive the vastly shorter earthquake waves — and so they could not note if that tidal bulge in which their ship moved were a few feet or a few dozen feet higher than it should be, or the tidal hollow, correspondingly lower.

The insurgents who had seized the “Prince Charles” had so much to do what with running the internal business of the great atomic liner, dealing with passengers, and heading off attempts on the part of the crew to turn the tables, that they found it necessary to elect four of themselves captain, with equal powers. It was hours before this revolutionary board of directors got the ship’s course shaped toward Cape St. Roque, for Rio, where their leaders were supposed to have overthrown the government last night — something which could not be confirmed because of the choking-off of radio communication. The imprisoned Captain Sithwise’s urgent plea that they atom-steam for the tidal node by the Windward Isles was laughed at as an obvious ruse to bring them nearer ships of the British Navy.

Wolf Loner watched the great cloudbank close down around the “Endurance” until the dory was almost running through fog. In that tiny, ship-centered cosmos of water and blurry whiteness, the old fancies occurred to him that all the rest of the world might have vanished except for this one spot, or that there might be an atomic war now, with cities vanishing like coals that pop in a fire, or that a plague of virulent, artificially cultured germs might be sweeping all the continents and he be the only man alive when he stepped ashore in Boston. He smiled unanxiously. “Brace yourself against your atoms,” he said.

But many minds were locked to facts that came pounding at the door. In the Tidal Institute at Hamburg, Fritz Scher explained away to his own satisfaction, and almost to that of Hans Opfel, every shockingly divergent tidal reading that came in. Either there was a precedent for the new reading — such a tide had occurred at the same spot forty or four hundred years ago — or the waters were being bulked by a storm the purblind weather men had missed; or someone of known carelessness had misread instruments; or someone of known instability had gone crazy; or someone of known Communist sympathies had lied.

“Just you wait,” Fritz smilingly told Hans Opfel when the latter indicated the growing pile of reports of the Wanderer and of the moon’s destruction. “Just you wait. When night comes, the jolly old moon will be up there all by himself — and laughing down at you!” He leaned lightly against the smooth case of the tide-predicting machine and patted it affectionately, almost hugged it. “ You know what fools they are, don’t you?” he murmured infatuatedly.

Other minds accepted the situation.

Barbara Katz swabbed up some last fragments of egg and sausage with a section of buttermilk pancake soaking in one hundred percent maple syrup, pushed her coffee cup across the big kitchen table to Hester, and sighed her appreciation and gratitude. Outside the birds were warbling in the sunlight. The big old pendulum wall-clock said eight-thirty in Roman numerals. A big calendar showing a view of the Everglades hung below the clock.

Hester smiled broadly at Barbara as she poured out more of the wonderfully strong coffee, and said: “Seems more natural and wholesome-like, now old KKK got himself a real fancy girl instead of that doll.”

Helen, the younger colored woman, giggled and then looked away in mischief and embarrassment, but Barbara took it in her stride.

“I believe those are called Barbie dolls,” she remarked. “Well, my name happens to be Barbara, too — Barbara Katz.”

Hester laughed heartily at that, and Helen smothered more giggles.

“Why do you call him old KKK?” Barbara asked.

“Middle name Kelsey,” Hester explained. “Knolls Kelsey Kettering III. You Katz the fourth K.” And she started laughing again.

There was a long, soft creaking. “Shut the screen door, Benjy,” Hester said sharply out of her laughter, but the tall Negro didn’t move. He stood halfway through the door in his white shirt and his silver-gray trousers which had stripes of dark gray tape running down the seams. There was a big tuft of cotton in the top of the screen — a modern white fetish against flies.

“There’s the most monstrous low tide ever,” he informed them earnestly. “People walking straight out like they could get to Grand Bahama without wetting the ankle. Picking up fresh fish by the basket, some of them!”

Barbara sat straight up, set down her coffee cup and snapped her fingers.

“Other folk say TV ain’t working either — or radio,” Benjy added, looking at her, as did Hester and Helen.

“Do you know when low tide is, exactly?” Barbara asked intently.