Fritz Leiber: The Wanderer

Her eyes lit up when she saw Miaow. “Oh, you’ve got a cat,” she whispered. “I don’t think Ragnarok will mind.”

After Margo and Paul had each taken a sheet, she led them to a central step going up to the floor and gestured that they should sit down in front. When Margo and Paul, smiling but shaking their heads, sat down in the back row instead, she shrugged and started to go away.

Margo felt Miaow stiffen. The cat was staring at something lying across two end chairs in the front row.

Ragnarok was a large German police dog.

The moment of first crisis passed. Miaow relaxed a little, though continuing to stare unblinkingly with ears laid back.

The little girl came behind them. “I’m Ann,” she whispered. “The one with the turban is my mother. We’re from New York.”

Then she went back to her vigil beside the green lantern.

General Spike Stevens and three of his staff sat close-crowded in a dimmed room of the Reserve Headquarters of the U.S. Space Force. They were watching two large television screens set side by side. Each screen showed the same area of darkened moon, an area which took in Plato. The image on the righthand screen was relayed from an unmanned communication-and-observation satellite hanging 23,000 miles above Christmas Island, 20 degrees south of Hawaii, while the one on the lefthand screen came from a similar equatorial satellite over a point in the Atlantic off the coast of Brazil where the “Prince Charles” was atom-steaming south.

The four viewers crossed their eyes with practiced skill, fusing the images which had originated 30,000 miles apart out in space. The effect was exaggeratedly three-dimensional, with the moon section bumping out solidly. “We can give the new electroamplif a limited O.K.,” the general said. “I’d say that’s adequate crater definition now Christmas has got rid of its herringbone. Jimmy, let’s have an unmagnified view of the whole moonward space sector.”

Colonel Mabel Wallingford studied the General covertly, knitting together her long, strong fingers. Someone had once told her that she had a strangler’s hands, and she never looked at the General without remembering that. It gave her a bitter satisfaction that Spike should sound as casually confident as might Odin surveying the Nine Worlds from Hlithskjalf tower in Asgard, yet that he knew no more of where they now were than did she: that they were within fifty miles of the White House and at least 200 feet underground. They had all been driven here, and had entered the elevator hooded, and they had not met the staff they had relieved.

Arab Jones and High Bundy and Pepe Martinez sipped at their fourth stick of tea, passing the potent thin reefer from fingers to fingers and holding the piney smoke long in their lungs. They sat on cushions and a carpet in front of a little tent with strings of wooden beads for a door, pitched on a rooftop in Harlem, not far from Lenox and 125th Street. Their eyes sought each other’s with the friendly watchfulness of weed-brothers, then moved together toward the eclipsed moon.

“Man, I bet she on pot too,” High said. “See that bronzy smoke? Those lunar spacemen gonna get high.”

Pepe said, “We’re gonna be way out there ourselves. You planning to eclipse, Arab?”

Arab said, “The astronomical kick is the most”

Paul Hagbolt and Margo Gelhorn began to listen to what the man with the beard was saying: “A human being’s hopes and fears, his deepest agitations, will always color what he sees in the skies — whether it’s a plane or a planet or a ship from another world, or only a corpuscle of his own blood. Put it this way: every saucer is also a sign.”

Beardy’s voice was mellow yet youthfully intense. Doc — the big bald man with thick glasses — and the She-Turban listened inscrutably. (It hadn’t taken Margo two minutes to nickname all three panelists and several members of the audience.)

Beardy continued: “The late Dr. Jung has explored this aspect of saucer sightings thoroughly in his book, Ein Moderner My thus von Dingen die am Himmel gesehen werden.” His German was authentically gargled. He immediately translated: “ A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.”

“Who is Beardy?” Margo demanded of Paul. He started to study his program, but that was useless in the back-row darkness.

Beardy went on, “Dr. Jung was particularly interested in saucers with the appearance of a circle divided into four parts. He relates such shapes to what Mahayana Buddhism calls mandalas. A mandala is a symbol of psychic unity — the individual mind embattled against insanity. It is apt to appear at times of great stress and danger, as today, when the individual is torn and shaken by his horror of atomic destruction, his dread of being depersonalized, made into one more soldier-slave or consumer-robot in a totalitarian horde, and his fear of completely losing touch with his own culture as it goes chasing off into ten thousand difficult yet crucial specializations.”

Paul found himself going through one of his usual guilt spasms. Not five minutes ago he’d been calling these people saucer maniacs, and here was the first one he heard sounding sensible and civilized.

A little man, sitting at the same end of the first row as the dog Ragnarok, now stood up.

“Excuse me, Professor,” the Little Man said, “but according to my watch there are only fifteen minutes of full eclipse left. I want to remind everyone to keep up the watch, while paying attention of course to what our interesting speakers have to say. Rama Joan has told us of cosmic beings able to attend to a dozen lines of thought at once. Surely we can manage two! After all, we did hold this meeting because of the unusual opportunity for sightings, especially of the less bold saucers that shun the light. Let’s not lose what’s left of this precious opportunity to see Bashful Saucers, as Ann calls them.”

Several heads in the front row dutifully swiveled this way and that, showing profiles with uplifted chins.

Margo nudged Paul. “Do your duty,” she whispered gruffly, peering about fiercely.

“Good hunting, everybody,” the Little Man said. “Excuse me, Professor.” He sat down.

But before Beardy could continue, he was challenged by a man with high shoulders and folded arms who sat tall in his seat — Margo tagged him the Ramrod.

“Professor, you’ve given us a lot of fancy double talk,” the Ramrod began, “but it still seems to me to be about saucers that people imagine. I’m not interested in those, even if Mr. Jung was. I’m only interested in real saucers, like the one I talked to and travelled in.”

Paul felt his spirits lift. Now these people were starting to behave as saucer maniacs should!

Beardy seemed somewhat flustered by the challenge. He said, “I’m very sorry if I gave that impression. I thought I made it clear that—”

Doc lifted his bald head and cut short Beardy’s defense by laying a hand on his arm, as if to say, “Let me handle this character.” The She-Turban glanced at him with a faint smile and touched the tie of her evening clothes.

Doc leaned forward and bent his gleaming dome and glittering glasses down toward the Ramrod, as if the latter were some sort of insect.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said with an edge to his voice, “but I believe you also claim to have visited other planets by flying saucer — planets unrecognized by astronomy.”

“That’s right,” the Ramrod replied, sitting an inch taller.

“Just where are those other planets?”

“Oh, they’re…places,” the Ramrod replied, winning a few chuckles by adding: “Real planets don’t let themselves be bossed around by a pack of astronomers.”