Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

The ’copter sped off seaward.

Doc climbed in the red Corvette, yelled: “Clear the road!” and drove it across the dip with only a small sideways lurch, just as the two buzzards winged rapidly across the road, hardly fifty feet up, and disappeared over the ridge.

Doc stopped the Corvette just beyond the sedan. “Clear everyone out of the bus and bring her across!” he shouted back. Then to Hunter, Margo, and Rama Joan, who’d come after him: “I’ll lead off in the Corvette. Then the order’ll be: sedan, bus, truck. You come with me, Joan, but Ann had better ride in the bus. You drive the sedan, Ross. Better get her turned around now. Margo, you keep the momentum pistol and ride with him. You’re our heavy artillery, if we get into trouble, but wait for orders from me. Doddsy, we ought to have a rear-guard rifle in the back of the truck, but your hand’s still bad.”

“Harry McHeath knows how to use the gun,” the Little Man said, “and he’s responsible.”

Doc nodded. “Go tell him he’s promoted,” he said. “Hixon can keep the other rifle.”

The driver, Pop, came up to demur at taking the bus across the dip. “Back tires are old,” he explained. “Worn slick. She’ll be apt to take a sideways slip when she drops into that hole…”

Doc was already striding back. He climbed aboard the bus and brought her across without a great deal more sideways lurch than the Corvette.

Hixon brought the truck over. Ray Hanks was carried across then in his cot and, at his feverish insistence, loaded once more into the back of the truck, rather than the bus. He was joined there by Ida and young McHeath, stern-faced with his rifle.

As the bus loaded up, Doc said to Clarence Dodd: “You command her — and ride herd on Pop.”

Walking ahead to the Corvette, he found Ann sitting in the middle of the front seat beside her mother. He planted his fists on his hips, then grinned and shrugged and climbed behind the wheel. “Hi, sweetheart,” he said, tousling her hair. She shrank away from him toward her mother, just a little.

Doc started the motor, then stood up and faced back.

“Listen to this!” he shouted toward sedan, bus, and truck. “Follow at twenty-yard intervals! — I’ll be taking it easy. Three horn blasts from me means slow! Four means stop! Five — from one of you — means you’re in trouble. Got that?

“O.K.! We roll!”

The people of Earth responded to the Wanderer catastrophes as necessity constrained them, or did not constrain them.

A skeletal new New York of refugees and tents and emergency hospitals and airlift terminals grew in Putnam and Dutchess Counties and across the river in the southern reaches of the Catskills.

In Chicago a few people walked down to Lake Michigan to marvel mildly at the four-foot tide, and to tell each other they’d never known there’d always been a three-inch one. They briefly lifted their eyes to watch a string of light planes flying east from Meigs Field to join in some airlift. Behind them traffic roared along the Outer Drive unheedingly, about as heavy as any other day.

In Siberia tidal waters invading an atomic bomb plant contributed to a great fizzle-explosion which scattered deadly fallout on trudging refugees.

From foundering Pacific atolls long canoes took off on enforced voyages of discovery, echoing those of their adventurous forefathers.

Wolf Loner sailed confidently on toward Boston by dead reckoning. He wondered placidly why twice last night the moonlight had glowed very brightly through the clouds with a faint violet tinge.

The “Prince Charles” hugged the Brazilian coast as it atom-steamed south. The four insurgent captains commanding it ignored the warnings of Captain Sithwise to swing wide around the mouth of the Amazon.

Paul Hagbolt surveyed northern Europe from five hundred miles up. It was sunlit and clear, except that a wide white cloudbank was creeping across the Atlantic toward Ireland.

Immediately below him was the North Sea, about as big as the page of an atlas when you study it, and dull gray except where the sun made an irritating highlight in the Dover Strait corner.

The British Isles, the southern half of Scandinavia, and North Germany and the Lowlands made three more atlas pages placed to the left, the right, and below.

Scotland and Norway looked about as they should, but the pendant of southern Sweden was laced by the encroaching gray of the Baltic.

Below a skeletal Denmark, a wide scimitar of water, the cutting edge of the blade faced south, lay across the Netherlands and northern Germany. Paul thought, Oh well, this isn’t the first time Holland’s been flooded.

England now: it was gray-laced, too, and something had taken a big bite out of the east coast. The Thames? The…Humber? Paul felt guiltily that his mind ought to be able to pop out the correct answer at once, but geography had never been his strong point Why didn’t Tigerishka look into his unconscious mind and tell him? he asked himself pettishly, glancing to where she was serenely grooming herself with a silver comb and her dagger tongue.

Paul’s accusations and her fierce reactions to them had ended in pure anticlimax. She had lowered her threatening claws, turned her back on him, and spent the next hour at the control panel, sometimes manipulating the silver excrescences but mostly sitting still. Then she had begun a new series of maneuvers and observations.

Midway she had broken off to release him, without comment, from his last ankle fetter and the sanitary connections. Then she had explained to him tersely and impersonally, but in monkey-English again, the basic rules for manipulating one’s body in null gravity and for using the Waste and Food Panels. Finally she had gone back to her business, leaving Paul with the feeling of being an interloper in a very fancy office. He had hurriedly eaten a meal of tiny protein cookies, swallowing them down in plain water, almost like so many pills. They still sat heavy in his stomach.

The observations had been frantically exciting at first, then had swiftly grown wearisome.

He tried to think of Margo around the world in Southern California and of Don the other side of the earth on the crushed moon — or escaped from it in a moon ship — but his imagination was tired out.

He pulled his attention back to the observations with an effort — away from the troublingly delightful sight of Tigerishka titivating herself and back to the live atlas outspread below the saucer’s transparent floor with its scattered invisible handholds through two of which he now had a toe and finger hooked.

Lets see, that bite in England might be something they called the Wash, which was connected with something they called the Fenlands… He sighed.

“You feeling bad ’bout your planet, Paul?” Tigerishka called over to him. “Peoples suffering and all?”

He shrugged and shook his head. “It’s too big,” he said. “I’ve lost my feelings.”

“Like see things closer?” she asked, pushing off and drifting slowly toward him.

“What would be the use?” he asked.

“Then you feeling bad ’bout something smaller, Paul, something nearer you,” she told him. “Girl? You worry ’bout her?”

He grimaced. “I don’t know. Margo’s not my girl, really.”

“Then you feeling bad ’bout nearest thing of all: you-self,” Tigerishka informed him, checking her drift beside him. She laid a velvet paw on his bare shoulder. “Poor Paul,” she purred. “All mixed up. Poor, poor Paul.”

He angrily twisted his shoulder away from the thrilling touch, flipping air toward her with a short sweep of his hands to keep a few inches back. “Don’t treat me like a pet that’s out of sorts,” he demanded angrily. “Don’t treat me like a sick monkey. Treat me like a man!”