Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

The Corvette lurched to a stop in front of the door. Rama Joan stood up beside the driver and pointed a gray-tipped hand at the teenagers. Dust and gravel blew up in their wild faces, they went staggering, lurching, sprawling backwards as if struck by a gale; the fence sagged inward.

Doc stood up beside her and yelled toward Margo and the two men: “Come on! Make it fast!”

They ran through the gate and piled into the tiny back of the Corvette. Doc cut the wheels sharp and turned it.

They saw the second police car, escaped from Vandenberg Three, bouncing back around the burned car-crush.

But the third police car was coming straight at them up Monica Mountainway along the fence.

Rama Joan pointed the momentum pistol at it.

Hixon cried: “Don’t do it They’re police.”

The police car seemed to brake to a stop, except that its occupants were not thrown forward but back. The whole car started to skid back. Rama Joan quit pointing the pistol.

The Corvette roared uphill. Hunter protested: “Not so fast, Doc.”

Doc retorted: “This is nothing. Didn’t you see me coming down?” But he did slow a bit.

Hixon chortled: “I’ll say we did! You sure swung it, Captain!”

Behind them the car Rama Joan had stopped had turned back, and both police vehicles were headed north along the flat outside the freeway fence. The flames of the abandoned laager waved and twisted higher. The fire had spread to other cars.

Hunter snorted and said: “That was the last useless, heroic nonsense I’ll ever go in for.” He scowled at Margo.

Thunder roared. A big drop or two of rain spattered.

Margo fished a small ball of paper from her bosom and uncrumpled it. “Useless?” she grinned at Hunter, holding the paper forward between Doc and Rama Joan, but so Hunter could see it, too.

The big-scrawled message was: “Van Bruster, Comstock, rest of you! We’re being lifted out to Vandenberg Two. Join us by Monica Mountainway. Luck!”

It was signed: “Opperly.”

A big raindrop hit the paper. The rain was black.

Don Guillermo Walker and the Araiza brothers were halfway up Lake Nicaragua. The launch would soon head around the island of Ometepe. From the island’s two volcanoes rose thick black smoke plumes that glared red toward the base even in the bright sunlight.

The sunlight came through a wide break in the curtain of steam to the west. The break should have showed the towns of La Virgin and Rivas on the Isthmus of Rivas between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific, but instead there was only water stretching endlessly.

The Araizas had supplied the information that the normal tides along the Pacific coast by Brito and San Juan del Sur across the isthmus were about fifteen feet.

The inference was incredible, yet inescapable. The Wanderer-multiplied tides were flowing over the isthmus, joining the Pacific to Lake Nicaragua. That was why the lake had gone up and why its waters now tasted of salt. Where once the white and sky-blue coaches of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Accessory Transit Company had carried the gold-dreaming Forty-niners and their baggage from ocean to ocean, from Virgin Bay to San Juan del Sur, there now stretched the blue waters of the Peaceful Sea. The Nicaraguan Canal, of which so many men had dreamed, had become a twice-daily reality.

A red glare appeared halfway up the thickly vegetated cone of Madera. Almost immediately pale smoke puffed from around it. Then the red glare began to lengthen downward, the smoke following. Red-hot lava must have broken through a crack and be flowing toward the lake.

The launch kept on. Don Guillermo wondered that the waters around them were so calm. He did not think particularly of the stupendous pressure they must be exerting on this whole stretch of coast, nor did he see anything ominous in the absence of the steam curtain, though if he had thought about it he would have guessed that steam was still generating far below.

There was no definable stimulus, but suddenly the three men looked at each other.

Don Guillermo slapped a mosquito on his neck.

A thick button of water swelled up like a gray pimple from the placid surface in the direction of the inundated Isthmus of Rivas and without a sound grew in three seconds to a mushroom of water a half mile high and a mile wide.

Something that turned the surface of the water from bright to dull was traveling from the mushroom to the launch.

The three men stared unbelievingly.

The blast wave from the explosion broke their eardrums and knocked them down in the launch.

Don Guillermo glimpsed the great vertical hillside of steam-driven water an instant before it engulfed him and his comrades in the launch. It seemed to be everywhere thickly covered with a water-vegetation of lacy, dull gray fronds. He thought, The blasted heath. There to meet with Macbeth. I come, Graymalkin.

The Isthmus of Rivas vanished, too. The Nicaraguan Canal became a permanent reality.

Don Merriam had eaten and slept once more in his tiny cabin aboard the Wanderer, when he woke with a feeling of great inner clarity. He gazed tranquilly at the neutral-colored ceiling as it lightened.

He did not feel the bed under him and was barely aware of his body — the little nerve messages of touch and tension were at a minimum. Insofar as he could tell at all, he was stretched on his back with his arms straight and relaxed at his sides.

Suddenly he was filled with a boundless curiosity about the great ship on which he was an involuntary passenger. His whole being was suffused with the yearning to know, or if that were impossible, at least to see. This feeling was most intense, yet he felt no impulse to work it out in grimacings and gestures and muscular strainings.

Without warning, the ceiling swiftly descended toward him.

He tried to throw himself off the bed, but the only result was that he turned over, very smoothly, and saw by the bottom of the wall and the pattering shower area that he was about six feet above them.

The ceiling had not moved. He was floating in the air, first on his back, now on his face, two feet below the ceiling.

His chin was tipped forward and his head bent back, though without any sensation of strain, so that his vision was directed straight ahead, like the point of a spear. He couldn’t look down at any part of the bed beneath him, although he tried to, because he wanted to know whether he would see his body lying there — whether a real body or a body in a dream.

Nor could he bring his hands in front of his face to look at them. Either he was unable to feel and move his arms, or else he had none.

He couldn’t tell whether he had a real body up here, or even a dream body, or whether he was only a levitating viewpoint with an imagined body behind it.

One bit of evidence for the last: he couldn’t seem to see in the periphery of his vision the dim edges of nose and brow and cheek that one normally sees and ignores. But perhaps that was only because his vision was directed so fiercely forward.

All at once he began to move swiftly in that direction, straight toward the wall. He flinched his eyes shut — he could do that, at least, or somehow momentarily turn off his vision — and when he opened them, although there had been no blow, not the least sensation of resistance, he was flying rapidly along a silver corridor etched with arabesques and hieroglyphs. It opened almost at once into one of the great pits or wells, and with a sudden rush of exultation he plunged down.

In this way there began for Don Merriam an experience that might be pure vivid dream, or a dream induced in him by his captor-hosts, or a clairvoyant extrasensory experience presented to him in the form of a flying dream, or even — and this was how it felt — that his body had been made perfectly permeable to all walls and airs and other barriers by an alien physics and chemistry, and immune to gravity and all other ordinary forces, and whirled and swooped about, half involuntarily yet guided to a degree by its mind’s raging curiosities, on a wonderful nightmare journey.