Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

For the saucer students it was a quarter past dinosaur, as Ann would have said, except she was asleep. By that token the Wanderer was about an hour and fifteen minutes higher in the sky than it had been when the Corvette and the truck had first drawn up side by side on the saddle to look at the high tide. Now late supper had been eaten, scrapes and scratches gotten rock-moving had been cleaned and bandaged, and more than half the saucer students were asleep in and around the two vehicles, wrapped, despite the relative mildness of the night, in coats, blankets, and the edges of the big tarpaulin.

Three figures still cozied up around the primus stove where they’d boiled water for coffee: Pop, curled up on his side like a pillbug and fingering his bad teeth through his parchmenty cheeks as solemnly and sourly as if God were a dentist and Pop preparing to sue him for malpractice; the Ramrod, sitting cross-legged in the easiest variant of the lotus position — right ankle atop left knee, right knee atop left ankle — and staring up at the dinosaur rotating east on the Wanderer as if that now rather phallic-looking golden beast were the navel of the cosmos; and the Little Man, squatting on his hams and writing up the events and observations of the day in his notebook by Wanderer-light.

Hunter, holding Margo’s hand in his, she walking beside him, stepped up to the Little Man and touched him on the shoulder and said quietly, “Doddsy, Miss Gelhorn and I are going up to the crest across the road. If there’s a serious emergency: five horn blasts.”

The Little Man looked up and nodded.

From beyond the primus, Pop glanced at the blanket Margo was carrying and then turned his eyes away and blew through his lips a small, ugly, contemptuous sound, half cynicism, half angry disapproval.

The Ramrod withdrew from his contemplation to look down at Pop. “Shut up,” he said softly and calmly. Then he looked at Hunter and Margo, and above them at the Wanderer, and a smile came to his fanatical, abstracted face, and while his right forefinger traced tiny Isis-loops on his right knee he said, “Ispan shower blessings on your love.”

The Little Man bent his head to his note-jotting. His lips were compressed, as to hide a grin and perhaps suppress a chuckle.

Hunter and Margo crossed the road. Ann and her mother were lying blanket-wrapped just beyond the shadow of the truck and it seemed to Hunter that Rama Joan was smiling at them open-eyed, but as he came closer he saw that her eyes were closed. Just then he became aware, from the corner of his eye, of a tall dark figure standing back in the shadow of the truck. Even its face was dark, shadowed by a black hat with brim turned down.

A shiver mounted Hunter’s spine, because he was certain it was Doc. He wanted Doc to speak and show his face, but the figure only raised its hands to its hat and pulled it further down and drew back into the shadow.

At that instant Hunter felt Margo’s fingers tighten hard on his, and he looked directly into the shadow of the truck. There was no longer a figure there.

They walked on, saying nothing to each other about it. Wild grass crunched faintly under their feet as they mounted the slope in the gray midnight noon of the Wanderer. They were strongly aware of the sea invading the hills — the high tide at its stand fifty yards away, its waves creaming the hillside — and of the Wanderer invading the sky, or rather invading Earth’s space and bringing its own dark, pearly sky with it, and of strangeness invading the life of all mankind, of all Terra.

They stepped onto a low stone ledge and from that to another, and there before them was a flat-topped rectangular gray rock big as a giant’s coffin. Margo spread the blanket on it and they kneeled on it facing each other. They stared at each other intently, unsmilingly, or if their lips smiled at all they smiled cruelly, devouringly. The hushes between the surges of the surf were filled with the rhythmic poundings of their blood, louder than the steady sigh-crash of the sea itself. The hills seemed to echo those poundings and almost to move yielding with them, and the sky to resound. Margo zipped down her jacket, laying the momentum pistol beside it, and lifted her hands to her throat and began to unbutton her blouse, but Hunter took that work away from her, and she ran the fingers of her right hand up into his beard and made a fist of it, trapping the wiry hairs, and dug her knuckles into his chin. Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried. The sea and the rocks and the hills and the sky and the cool enfolding air and the wide rich planet overhead all came alive in their ways, becoming fixtures of the room that is the mind, or — truer — the mind reaching out to embrace them. The more Hunter and Margo became aware of each other’s bodies and each other, the more, not the less, intensely they became aware of everything around them, the largest and the least, even the tiny violet dash, scarcely an eighth of an inch long, in the scale on the grip of the momentum pistol — and aware of things unseen as well as things seen, the dead as well as the living. Their bodies and the heavens were one, the engorged sun wooed the dark moon-crescent and was at last received by it. The driving, punishing surf was in them, and the sea with all its swell and storm and certainty of calm. Time stretched out, passing with silent tread, for once not humming a death-spell but seamlessly joining death with life. Overhead the golden lingam beast swinging east through the dark purple became the back of the golden serpent coiled round the broken egg in the next hour-face of the Wanderer — the female serpent contending with and constricting about and finally crushing the male seed-bringer — while around about the great intruding planet the moon-fragments glittered and danced like the million sperm dance supplicatingly, vyingly, fiercely, about the ovum.

Don Merriam had given Paul Hagbolt a brief account of his experiences in space and aboard the Wanderer. It seemed to confirm the background of much that Tigerishka had told Paul and it revived in him something of the mood that she had induced in him by her story, though he was still shaken and hurt by the subsequent change in her feelings. Now he was telling Don what had happened to him and Margo on the night of the Wanderer’s appearance — at the flying saucer symposium and by the gate of Vandenberg and in the earthquake waves — when Tigerishka interrupted sharply.

“Stop chattering, please! I have some questions for you.”

She was standing at the pinkly embowered control panel — had presumably been in silent contact with her superiors. Paul and Don were sitting on the pink floor, across which Miaow made periodic scampering sorties from the flower banks — evidently much intrigued or at least stimulated by the simulated terrestrial gravity.

“Have you two beings been well treated here and during your contacts with my people? Donald Merriam?”

He stared at her, thinking how much she resembled, except for the coloring of her fur, the felinoid he had seen catch a great topaz bird and drink its blood with the air of a ballerina nibbling at an after-theater snack.

He said: “After I escaped from the moon — wholly by my own efforts as far as I know — I was picked up by two of your ships, escorted to the Wanderer, kept in a comfortable room there for two days, apparently, then brought here. Nobody talked to me much. I think my mind was turned inside out and inspected. In a dreamlike vision I was shown many things. That’s about it.”

“Thank you. Now you, Paul Hagbolt, have you been well treated?”