Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

Rama Joan pressed her daughter’s head against her waist, but kept her eyes on the new planet as she said ringingly: “I think the gods are at war. The stranger devil has come to fight the devil we know.”

The Little Man, already jotting notes, said eagerly: “Let’s call it the Stranger — that’s a good enough name.”

Young Harry McHeath thought, Or you could call it Wolf — no, that might confuse it with the Jaws.

Mrs. Hixon snarled at them: “Oh, for Christ’s sake, spare us the poetry! A new planet means more tides, more quakes, more God knows what.”

Through it all Ray Hanks was calling querulously from the truck: “What is it you’re talking about? I can’t see it from here. Somebody tell me. What is it?” Young Harry McHeath was thinking how glad he was to be here and alive, how wonderful it was to have been born to these sights, how miserable for those who missed them. So it was natural that Ray Hanks’ cry came through to him. He vaulted up on the back of the truck, laid his hand on a mirror, and held it so that Hanks could see the reflection of the Stranger in it.

Wanda and Ida and the Ramrod had been standing together. Now Wanda simply sat down on the ground where she was and put her face in her hands and moaned loudly: “This is too much. I think I’m going to have another heart attack.”

But Ida pounded on the Ramrod’s shoulder, demanding, “What is it, Charlie? What’s its real name? Explain it!”

The Ramrod stared at the Stranger with a tortured expression and finally said, in a voice that, though defeated-sounding, had a strange undertone of relief and of opening doors: “I don’t know, Ida. I just don’t know. The universe is bigger than my mind.”

At that instant two bright lines sprang out from the sides of the Stranger and traveled to the Wanderer, in the tick of a wrist watch, and passed it one in front and one behind, and then went on seemingly more slowly across the gray heavens as straight as if drawn with a ruler and a penful of luminous blue ink. But where the blue line passed in front of the Wanderer there was an eruption of white coruscations almost blindingly bright.

One of the lines came from the dark side of the Stranger, touching faintly the black crescent with blue, revealing its shape and the sphericity of the entire body.

“Jesus, it is war.” Again Wojtowicz was the quickest to respond vocally.

“Lasers,” said the Little Man. “Beams of solid light. But so big — it’s almost incredible.’’

“And we’re just seeing the sides,” Hunter put in awestruck, “the leakage. Suppose you had to look one of those in the face. A million suns!”

“A hundred, anyway,” said the Little Man. “If one of those beams should point even for a moment at Earth…”

Blue and steel touched off an intuition in Hixon’s mind. “I tell you what,” he said excitedly, “the new planet’s police! It’s come to arrest the Wanderer for disturbing us.”

“Bill, you’re nuts,” Mrs. Hixon yelled across at him. “Next you’ll be saying angels.”

“I hope they fight! I hope they kill each other!” Pop yelled shrilly, his whole body trembling as he shook his clenched fists at them. “I hope they burn each other’s guts out!”

“I sure don’t,” Wojtowicz told him, walking around in an odd little circle as he stared at the sky. “What’s to keep us from getting hit, then? You like having a battle fought across your back yard? You like being a sitting duck for stray shots?”

Hunter said rapidly: “I don’t think the near beam’s hitting the Wanderer. I think it’s hitting the moon-ring and disintegrating the fragments it touches.”

“That’s right,” the Little Man said coolly. Those beams bracketing the Wanderer look more to me like a shot over the bows.”

Hixon heard that. “Like I said, arrest,” he pointed out eagerly. “You know — ‘Don’t move or we’ll shoot to kill!’ ”

The bright blue beams were extinguished at their source and died along their length as swiftly as they had first shot out. They left behind two yellow afterimages drawn on the gray sky, but moving with the eyes that saw. Yet the two original blue beams, though rapidly growing shorter and fainter, could still be seen crawling away beyond the Wanderer like straight blue worms into the gray infinity.

Hixon said: “My God, I thought they’d never quit. They must have fired for two minutes.”

“Seventeen seconds,” the Little Man informed him, looking up from his wrist watch. “It’s a proven fact that in a crisis time estimates vary wildly, and witnesses are apt to disagree on almost everything. That’s something we’ve got to watch out for.”

“That’s right, Doddsy, we got to keep our heads,” Wojtowicz agreed loudly, almost skipping around in his little circle now, his voice quite gay. “They keep throwing surprises at us, and all we can do is keep taking them. Whee-yoo! It’s like the front line — it’s like sitting out a bombardment.”

As if the word “bombardment” had pulled a trigger, there came a dull roaring from all around them and then a vibration, and then the road under their feet began to rock. The springs of the Corvette and the truck whined and groaned. Ray Hanks whimpered with pain, and McHeath, still standing over him, had to grab at the truck’s side to keep from being pitched out.

To a floating observer, everyone would have seemed to be joining Wojtowicz in his eerie circular dance and making it a staggering one. One of the women screamed, but Mrs. Hixon cursed obscenely, and Ann cried: “Mommy, the rocks are skipping!”

Margo heard that and looked up the slope where she and Hunter had been, and saw boulders descending it in fantastic bounds — among them, she thought, the giant’s coffin on which they’d spread the blanket. Unslowed by the weird gust of guilt that went through her, she pulled the momentum pistol out of her jacket and thrust out with her other hand to steady herself against the Corvette, but there was no steadiness there, only a greater rocking. The boulders came on. Hunter saw what she was doing and sprang to her and shouted: “Is the arrow pointing toward the muzzle?”

She shouted, “Yes!” And as the boulders converged like bounding gray beasts, she pointed the momentum pistol into their midst and, herself fighting to keep on her feet, clamped down her finger on the trigger-button.

As the earthquake shocks themselves lessened and damped out, the boulders coincidentally slowed in their wild, smashing descent, seemed almost to change to great gray pillows, slowly rolled instead of bounding, rolled slower yet, and stopped moving beside the road, almost at Margo’s feet, the giant’s coffin lying where the edge of the truck’s shadow had been.

Hunter pulled her finger off the button and looked at the scale on the grip. There was no more violet.

He looked down the quarter mile of mountain road to the Coast Highway and for a wonder it looked free of new slides and with the water all gone — though it was sloshing wildly in the farther distance. Just across the highway brightly gleamed the mesh fence that guarded the foot of Vandenberg, while across from the mouth of the mountain road loomed the big gate.

Overhead shone the Wanderer and the Stranger, the former trending into the three-spot — the half-hour stage between the serpent-egg and the mandala — the latter as coldly serene as if its gravity had nothing whatever to do with the earthquake just triggered.

In the resounding silence Ida was moaning: “Oh, my ankle.”

Wojtowicz asked in a snickering voice: “What do we do now? What’s next on the show?”

Mrs. Hixon was snarling at him: “There’s nothing to do, you clown! It’s the end!”