Fritz Leiber: The Wanderer

Ignoring the chuckles, Doc continued, “Are those planets off at the edge of nowhere — the planets of another star, many light years away?” His voice was gentle now. His thick glasses seemed to beam benignly.

“No, they’re not that,” the Ramrod said. “Why, I visited Arietta just a week ago and the trip only took two days.”

Doc was not to be diverted. “Are they little tiny planets that are hiding behind the sun or the moon or perhaps Jupiter, in a sort of permanent eclipse, like people hiding behind trees in a forest?”

“No, they’re not that either,” the Ramrod asserted, squaring his shoulders afresh, but nevertheless beginning to sound a shade defensive. “They don’t hide behind anybody’s skirts — not them. They’re just…out there. And they’re big, you can bet — as big as Earth. I’ve visited six of them.”

“Humph,” Doc grunted. “Are they by any chance planets that are concealed in hyperspace and that pop out conveniently once in a blue moon — say, when you come visiting?”

Now it was Doc who was getting the chuckles, though he ignored those, too.

“You’re being negativistic,” the Ramrod said accusingly, “and a darn sight too theoretical. Those other planets are just out there, I tell you.”

“Well, if they’re just out there,” Doc roared softly, “why can’t we just see them?” His head was thrown back in triumph, or perhaps it was only that his glasses had slipped down his nose a bit.

There was quite a pause. Then: “Black-negativistic,” the Ramrod amended loftily. “Be a waste of time to tell you how some planets have invisibility screens to make starlight curve around them. I don’t care to talk to you any longer.**

“Let me make my position clear,” Doc said hotly, addressing the whole audience. “I am willing to consider any idea whatsoever — even that there’s an alien planet lurking in our solar system. But I want some hint of a rational explanation, even if it’s that the planet exists in hyperspace. I give Charles Fulby — (he waved toward the Ramrod) — a fractional plus score for his screens notion.”

He subsided, breathing victoriously. The Little Man took this opportunity to pop up from beside the big dog Ragnarok at the end of the front row and say: “Only ten minutes left I know this argument is interesting, but keep watching, please. Remember, we’re first and foremost saucer students. Flying planets are exciting, but just one little saucer, witnessed by a whole symposium, would be a real triumph for us. Thank you.”

Asa Holcomb had been blinking his flashlight toward town from the mesa top near the Superstition Mountains. After all, he was supposed to try to save his own life. But now, growing tired of that duty, he looked up again at the stars, diamond-bright during the full eclipse, and he named them without effort, and then lost himself once more in the earth-shadowed moon, standing there in the foreground like some great Hopi emblem hammered out of age-blackened silver. There was always something new to be seen in the unchanging night sky. He could easily lie here and watch all night without a moment of boredom. But the weakness and the strangeness were growing greater, and the rock beneath him had become very cold.

Pepe Martinez and High Bundy rose from their cushions and drifted like leaves toward the grimed brick wall of the roof in Harlem. Pepe said, waving toward the moon: “One more puff and then — poof! I’ll be there, just like John Carter.”

High said: “Don’t forget your spacesuit.”

Pepe said: “I’ll take a big lungful of pot and live on that.” He waved toward the stars. “What’s all that black billboard of jewelry advertising say, High?”

High said: “Billboard! That’s motorsickles, man, every one of them with a diamond headlight, going every way there is.”

Arab, still on his cushion before the tent, and now trickling down his gullet a few drops of muscatel from a thin liqueur glass, called: “What of the night, oh my sons?”

Pepe called back: “Beautiful as a silken serpent, oh my Daddy-o.”

The moon continued to swing through Earth’s cold silent shadow at her sedate pace of forty miles a minute, as irrevocably as the blood leaking into Asa Holcomb’s chest, or the spermatozoa lashing their tails in Jake Lesher’s loins, or the hormones streaming from Don Guillermo’s adrenal glands, or the atoms splitting to heat the boilers of the “Prince Charles,” or the wavicles carrying their coded pictures to Spike Stevens’ cave, or Wolf Loner’s unconscious mind opening and shutting its windows in the rhythm he called sanity. Luna had been doing it a billion years ago; she would be doing it a billion years hence. Some day, astronomers said, obscure tidal forces would draw her so close to earth that racking internal tides would shatter her, turning her into something like the rings of Saturn. But that, astronomers said, was still a hundred billion years away.

Paul Hagbolt nervously nudged Margo Gelhorn, warning her to stop giggling as a woman in the second row called to Doc: “What’s that hyperspace you were saying planets could come out of?”

“Yes, why not give us a run-down?” Beardy suggested like a veteran panelist, turning to Doc.

“It’s a notion that’s turned up in theoretical physics and any number of science-fiction stories.” Doc launched out, adjusting his glasses and then running his hands back across his bald head.

“As you all know, the speed of light is generally accepted as the fastest possible. One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second sounds like a lot, but it’s snail slow when it conies to the vast -distances between the stars and within the galaxies — a dismal prospect for space travelers.

“However,” Doc continued, “it’s theoretically possible that space-time may be so warped or crumpled that distant parts of our cosmos touch in a higher dimension — in hyperspace, which is where the word comes in. Or even that every part touches every other part. If that is the case, then faster-than-light travel would be theoretically possible by somehow blasting out of our universe into hyperspace and then back in again at the desired point. Of course, hyperspace travel has been suggested only for spaceships, but I don’t know why a properly equipped planet couldn’t manage it, too — theoretically. Professional scientists like Bernal and philosophers such as Stapledon have theorized about traveling planets, not to mention authors like Stuart and Smith.”

“Theory!” the Ramrod snorted, adding sotto voce: “Hot air!”

“How about that?” Beardy asked Doc, bringing the question onto the platform with a fine impartiality. “Is there any concrete evidence for the existence of hyperspace or hyperspace travel?”

From beyond Doc, the She-Turban glanced toward him and Beardy curiously.

“Not one shred,” Doc said, with a grin. “I’ve tried to goose my astronomer friends into hunting for clues, but they don’t take me very seriously.”

“You interest me,” Beardy said. “Just what form might such clues take?”

“I’ve thought about that,” Doc admitted with relish. “One idea I’ve come up with is that the thrust necessary to get a ship into and out of hyperspace might involve the creation of momentary artificial gravitational fields — fields so intense that they would visibly distort the starlight passing through that volume of space. So I’ve suggested to my astronomer friends that they watch for the stars to waver on clear nights of good seeing — and especially from satellite ’scopes — and that they hunt through short-exposure star photographs for evidence of the same thing happening — stars blanking-out briefly or moving twistedly.”