Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

“Well…” he began, smiling at her questioningly.

“A simple yes or no will do!” she snapped.

“Then — yes.”

“Thank you. Question two: Have you seen evidence of your Earth people being given aid in their tidal troubles?”

Paul said: There were those things you showed me over Los Angeles and San Francisco and Leningrad: fires put out by rain, tides being driven back by some sort of repulsion field.”

Don said: “I think I saw television pictures of the same sort of thing in one huge room of the Wanderer during my vision or dream.”

“It was a true vision,” she assured him. “Question—”

“Tigerishka,” Paul interrupted, “does all this have something to do with the two star photographs that don’t match the Wanderer’s false exits from hyperspace? Are you people afraid the pursuit will catch up with you, and are you preparing a defense of your actions here?”

Don looked at him in surprise — Paul had as yet told him nothing of Tigerishka’s story — but she said simply, “Stop chattering, monkey — I mean, being. Yes, that is possible. But question three: So far as you know, have your companions suffered by reason of the Wanderer?”

Don said harshly: “My three companions at Moonbase were killed when Luna broke up.”

She nodded curtly and said: “One of them may have survived — it’s being checked. Paul Hagbolt?”

He said, “I was just telling Don about that, Tigerishka. Margo and the saucer people were O.K. when I last saw them — I mean at least they were alive, though in the wash of some earthquake waves which you’d done something to make smaller. But that was two days ago.”

“They’re still alive,” Tigerishka asserted. Her violet eyes twinkled and she shaped her lips in a thin, humanoid smile as she added: “I’ve been keeping an eye on them — you mortals never realize how much the gods worry about you: all you see are the floods and the earthquakes. However I won’t ask either of you to accept my word for that, I’ll show you! Stand up, please, both of you. I am going to send you down to Earth to see for yourselves.”

“You mean in the Baba Yaga?” Don asked as they complied. “As I’m sure you know, it’s linked to this saucer now by a space tube and I was given the idea that I — I mean that we now, Paul and myself — would be able to use it to return to Earth. Which the Baba Yaga can manage, I think, if we are released above the atmosphere with no orbital speed to—”

“No, no, no,” she interrupted. “ Later you’ll do that — in an hour or two, say, and at your Vandenberg Two space field — which is just five hundred miles below us now, by the way — but now I send you there a much quicker way. Face the control panel! Stand close together!”

Don commented with a somewhat grim chuckle, “It’s as if you were going to take a snapshot of us.”

Tigerishka said, “That’s just about what I am going to do.”

The sunlight in the saucer began to dim. Miaow, as if scenting excitement, came scampering out of the flowers and rubbed around their ankles. On a sudden impulse Paul scooped up the little cat.

Margo and Hunter had dressed and folded the blankets and started down the hillside arm in arm, at one with each other and the cosmos in the afterglow of their lovemaking, when they heard a voice calling faintly: “Margo! Margo!”

Below them at the foot of the slope lay the camp around the two cars. No one was stirring. The Wanderer-light streaming down from the serpent-egg face showed only wrapped, recumbent figures. The pool of shadow by the truck had grown smaller as the Wanderer mounted the sky, yet it was still there.

But the voice did not seem to come from the camp, but from the air.

They looked toward the sea and it had sunk ten yards or more, leaving a wide band of hillside darkly stained where the high tide had been. What water now lay between them and Vandenberg Two was more like a wide river, with islets showing in it here and there. Their gaze mounted from the point, and against the dark gray sky they saw two faintly luminous figures of men descending the air, erect yet with unmoving feet. The figures descended at a slant, floating swiftly and weightlessly, and vanished into the hillside midway between them and the camp.

Hunter and Margo held each other tight, their skin chilling and prickling, for both remembered the figure they had seen in the shadow of the truck, and both had the thought that one of the weightless figures was Doc — and the whole sight another, though bolder, ghostly manifestation, or a continuation of the first.

When nothing more happened they went a few steps farther down the hill, and then Margo looked down and gasped with horror and retreated a sudden two steps as if from a snake, dragging him back with her.

From the ground in front of them rose two heads of men, their figures earth-encumbered to the shoulders. The features of the heads were blurred, though one misty face seemed namelessly familiar to Hunter. Necks and shoulders identified one as a uniformed spaceman, one — the familiar one — as a civilian. The thought flashed through Hunter’s mind of how much this was like Ulysses’ encounter with the spirits of the dead in the Underworld, these two spirits summoned not by the hot shed blood of the bull, but by the pounding blood of his and Margo’s lovemaking.

Then the two figures rose out of the ground, not by their own efforts, for they moved neither hand nor foot, but drawn up by a power outside them until their feet touched the surface of the ground, yet not quite as if they stood but rather floated there, facing Hunter and Margo six feet away. Then what was blurred came into focus and Margo gasped: “Don! Paul!” although she clutched more tightly at Hunter as she did so, and as he, too, recognized the second figure.

The Paul-figure smiled and opened its lips, and a voice which synchronized perfectly with the lip movements yet did not come from the throat said: “Hello, Margo and Professor…Excuse my poor memory. We’re not ghosts. This is merely an advanced form of communication.”

In similar fashion the Don-figure said: “Paul and I are talking to you from a small saucer out in space, between you and the Wanderer, but nearer the earth. It’s wonderful to see you, Margo, dear.”

“That’s right,” Paul chimed in. “I mean about being in the saucer. It’s the same one that picked me up. See—” he lifted something in his hands. “Here’s Miaow!”

The little cat rested quietly for a moment, then its lips writhed back, there was a synchronized spitting hiss and it vanished into the darkness in a whirl of its own little limbs.

The Paul-figure scowled and momentarily raised a hand to his lips and sucked at it, then explained: “She got excited. It’s all a little too weird for her.”

Margo let go of Hunter and put his arms away from her and stepped forward, reaching a hand toward Paul but raising the other to Don’s cheek and lifting her face to kiss him.

The hand went through the cheek, however, and with a little nervous gasp — not so much of fear as of exasperation at her own nervousness — Margo retreated back to Hunter.

“We’re only three-dimensional images,” Paul explained with a quirking smile.

“Touch doesn’t transmit on this system. We’re seeing your two images up here in the saucer, except they aren’t always together in the saucer, especially when they were moving into focus. It’s really pretty weird, if you’ll excuse my saying so, Professor…”

“My name’s Ross Hunter,” he said, at last managing to speak.

Don said to Margo: “I’m sorry I’m too insubstantial to kiss, dear. I’ll make up for that when I really see you. Incidentally, I’ve actually been on the Wanderer.”