Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

While the Wanderer caused numerous panics and outbursts of mania, its sudden appearance and the catastrophes attendant on it acted in other instances as a sort of shock therapy. There were literal outbursts of sanity in the violent wards of mental hospitals. Seeing the impossible made real, and even nurses and doctors terrified by it, satisfied some deep need in psychotics. And private neuroses and psychoses became trivial to their possessors in the face of a cosmic derangement.

On others the Wanderer bestowed a last-minute ability to look on the truth, if not to struggle against it. As Fritz Scher, now waist-deep in salt water, looked out of the window in the Tidal Institute at Hamburg toward dawn, the clouds lifted a little in the west like a curtain half drawn up, and from beneath them the Wanderer glared at him full in the face. Things at last came clear in his mind as a powerful new surge of water toppled him and carried him back from the window. As he clutched futilely at the sleek sides of the tide-predicting machine while the tide carried him along it, he used his last breaths to cry out over and over: “Multiply everything by eighty!”

Barbara Katz felt the bed under her move a little on its casters, as the dark, third-floor hotel room rocked with the building holding it She mastered the impulse to jump up and she pressed closer to old KKK, then reached her hand across him to Helen on his other side. An hour ago the old man had shaken with a chill. This afternoon it had been the heat that had troubled him, but now with the icy waters of the Atlantic washing across Florida, it was the cold.

Benjy, standing at the window, his face ghostly in the Wanderer-light, reported: “Water over first-floor windows and pressing us hard. Here come a summer bouse. Hear it bang us? Sort of crunchy.”

“Get in you cot, Benjy, and get some rest.” Hester called from the corner. “If this place go, it go. Water knock to come in, you cain’t tell it, ‘Stay out!’ ”

“I ain’t got your calm, Hes,” he told her. “I should’ve stayed with the car, make sure they leave it on top the mound. Water be pretty close to it by now, though.”

“They’d better not have moved it!” Barbara called softly but feelingfully over her shoulder. “That parking place was part of the five thousand we’re paying for this room.”

From the other side of old KKK Helen called with just a ghost of her giggle: “I wonder those skinflints remember to bring the cash box upstairs. Else she be washed away sho!”

“Quiet,” Hester called. “Benjy, get in you cot.”

“Where’s the attraction?” he asked pensively from the window. “Helen got to sleep with the Old Man, help keep him warm. And that pancake makeup and powder Miss Barbara put on my face itch it.”

“Quit bellyachin’, darkie,” Hester told him. “Helen and I get by as nurses, but you need a little lightening. Don’t make you pass, but it justify you. Show you trying to please. With that and a thousand-dollar bill, you get anywhere.”

Benjy said, the pale light in his eyes now as he lifted them: “Old Wanderer got the monster on him once again. He spin fast.”

The room rocked. Timbers creaked. Benjy announced: “Water up another band’s width. Seem to me the angles is shifting.”

Helen raised up. “You think we should—” she began in a tight, breathy voice.

“Quiet!” Hester commanded heavily. “Everybody got to be quiet now, and lie down. We enjoyin’ five thousand dollars. Benjy, you tell me when that water up to you neck — and not before! Good night.”

In the dark Barbara thought of the Sebring race course a mile off, and all those fine-tuned motors in their pits under the salt sea, the oil washed away. Or had they been smart and roared north to safety in a red-blue-green-yellow-silver pack? She pictured outboards racing the Sebring course. She pictured the drowned rockets a hundred miles beyond at Cape Kennedy.

Old KKK groaned faintly and mumbled something. Barbara stroked his papery, furrowed cheek, but he kept on muttering. His fingers, which he kept close to his chest as one praying, were working a little. She reached down the bed and found the fashion doll in its black lace underwear and laid it in them. He quieted. She smiled.

The room rocked.

Sally Harris had put on a pearl-encrusted evening sheath from the very interesting wardrobe in the bedroom adjoining Mr. Hasseltine’s. Jake Lesher had draped his frame in a dark blue serge suit that was a little long for him everywhere, making it zooty looking. They sat at the grand piano, which was topped by flat wine glasses and two champagne bottles.

The room was lit by twenty-three candles — all Sally had been able to find — and two flashlights. Dark drapes hid the windows and even the stalled elevator, and especially the French doors to the patio.

Silence was seeping in through the dark drapes, freezing the candle flames, pressing on their throats and hearts. But then Jake’s fingers came down on the keyboard and drove the silence back with the rippling burst of an introduction. Sally stood up, weaving a little, and sang loudly and quite clearly:

Oh, I am the Girl in Noah’s Ark And you are my old Flood King. Our love’s not just big as the ocean free, As Mount Ararat or a beanstalk tree — You found me a penthouse in the sea! Our love is a very big thing.

As Jake played the vamp with his left hand, he reached over and handed Sally a sheet of paper.

“Try the second stanza,” he said.

She scanned it owlishly. “Gee, it’s got some crazy words. And how do I sing inkblots?”

“I found what you call crazy words in a fancy ‘list of outstanding celestial objects,’ in one of your intellectual boy friend’s big books. We got to keep up the astronomical motif to go with the new planet.”

“Planet-shplanet. If it weren’t for Hugo, you’d be in the drink. I wonder where Hugo is now? Okay, Jake, play it” And she sang, with the sheet to her nose:

Oh, I am the Girl in Noah’s Ark And you are my old Storm King. Our love is not merely as big as the sun, Orion or Messier-31 — You launched me a private skyscraper, Hon! Our love is a very big thing.

Jake beamed at her. “We got us a hit, baby! A real blazer!”

“That’s very good,” Sally told him, thrusting a hand out for her glass, “Because the chances are we’ll be putting it on in a very damp theater.”

Richard Hillary felt a weird exhilaration as he tramped along springily beside a salt-reeking road leading west a distance south of Islip. Stranded on the mud-filmed, tide-combed grass within his view of the moment were two silvery fish and a small green lobster feebly crawling across a long sodden twist of black cloth that might well be a college gown. Looking south, he could see some of the gray towers of Oxford and clearly distinguish the brown tide-mark halfway up them. He held his breath, his hands moved upward, and his next step was almost turned to a leap as in imagination he frantically swam up through the waters of the North or Irish Sea that had been here some five or six hours ago.

He turned his leap back to a step with a snickering laugh, maintaining his exhilaration. Sometimes, of course, the weirdness of the contrasts constantly presented by the stranded flotsam got a bit too much, especially when they involved sodden human bodies, or even the bodies of horses and dogs. Here his rule, and apparently that of the people tramping with him, was, “If they don’t stir, look away from them quickly.” He’d had to invoke that rule several times in the past mile. Thus far, none of the sprawled wet forms had stirred.

Richard had been lucky in that he had got a lift almost all the way from the field where he’d slept on the far edge of the Chiltern Hills. He had set out at night, immediately after seeing the flooded east behind him, and had been picked up by a couple in a Bentley, come from Letchworth in the East Anglian Heights. They’d been nervously intent on picking up their son at Oxford. They hadn’t seen much of the flood and were inclined to minimize it. They’d given him a sandwich. After a bit, a good many other cars had turned up, and the going had got slow, and when they had finally driven slippingly down after dawn onto the sodden Oxford plain into the midst of a muddy traffic tie-up, Richard had thanked them and left. The tie-up looked like a lasting one, and he couldn’t bear the stunned, hurt, planless expressions on their faces.