The Wanderer

Doc tootled the horn four times and stopped the Corvette just short of the rock slope where they'd camped last night. Hixon was back driving his truck now. In the Corvette, Ann was riding between Doc and her mother, while Margo and Hunter sat behind them.

All these five had been chattering in high spirits, despite or more likely because of their faces being blackly smeared and their clothes damp and dirty from the weird warm black rain, which had just now stopped and which they'd decided might well be from volcanic ash blowing up from Mexico and points south.

"Or sea-muck uncovered by low tides and whirlwinded up," Doc had second-guessed. "It tastes a touch salty."

The sky was wild masses of dark low clouds trapping bright silver light.

"All out," Doc ordered gaily. "Ross, run ahead and check for water in the dip. I want to take her across before I get goosy."

Hunter obeyed. Margo went with him.

The truck pulled up behind the Corvette, and behind the truck the school bus, its yellow streaked more blackly than ever.

Doc shouted to Hixon in the truck: "Tell your passengers to get out before we take the vehicles across, just like this morning. McHeath!  -  pass the word back to Doddsy, and tell him to shoo his folks out of the bus fast. We don't want to waste any more time here than we have to. Then post yourself by the bus and watch the road behind us."

Ann snuggled up against Doc. She said excitedly: "Let me stay in the car with you. I'm not scared of us slipping off."

"That'd be great, sweetheart, but your Ma would say I was tempting Kali," Doc said, ducking his head and rubbing his smeary cheek against hers. Rama Joan smiled fondly at him as she pulled her daughter out giggling.

"No water in the dip," Hunter called back. At that moment his legs went out from under him and he sat down. "But it's damn slippery," he qualified as he scrambled to his feet, Margo grinning at him unfeelingly. "This film of wet ash is treacherous."

Rama Joan's smile faded. From beside the Corvette she whispered urgently to Doc, "Can't we fill the dip with stones and earth, or at least clean it off?"

He leaned toward her and answered in a low, fast voice: "Look, darling, those murdering drunken kids are bound to get some cars on this road soon and come whooping for the beach. A lot of them have been doing it all their lives. Second nature to them. We really haven't a minute to lose."

He sat back, honked the horn once and roared the motor. "Here I come!" he warned.

He drove fast and the Corvette jounced through the dip with no sideslip at all. He parked it well ahead, then came jog-trotting back to where Rama Joan, Margo and Hunter were standing above the dip. Ann was back by the bus, chattering to McHeath and admiring his rifle.

"That was a rousing anticlimax," Doc said. "I guess I'm getting chicken in my old age." Hunter and Margo laughed. Rama Joan smiled uncertainly.

Ida called thinly from beside the truck: "Mr. Brecht! Ray Hanks doesn't want to be lifted out again."

Doc looked around at the others, shrugged, said: "It'll save time," and yelled: "O.K., let him chance it! Bring it over, Hixon!"

The truck got off to a fast start, too. Only as it jounced by them safely did they see that Mrs. Hixon was in back, braced over Hanks and holding on to the side across the cot.

The school-bus passengers came trudging across: the Ramrod, Wanda  -  and Ida with them  -  but not Wojtowicz, who'd stopped by McHeath and Ann; finally Clarence Dodd and Pop arguing together, the latter protesting.

Doc pulled his doubly black hat down on his forehead and headed toward them briskly. "I know, I know!" he said as Pop opened his ill-toothed mouth at him. "The back tires are slicker than ever...and so forth. Leave it to Hotrod Rudy."

"One cylinder's missing, too," Pop called after him, but Doc just kept on going toward the bus.

Clarence Dodd took note of Margo's and the others' blackened faces. "That shower would have delighted Charles Fort," he said, smiling. "You look as if you were all getting ready for an Indian funeral."

Margo thought for the first time since last night of the tortured girl in her tomb up the slope.

Rama Joan suddenly started back toward the school bus after Doc. Ann waved to her from beside him. "Hi, Mommy!" Rama Joan stopped and waved back uncertainly.

Ann giggled, and McHeath and Wojtowicz laughed at something Doc said as he climbed aboard the bus. The motor coughed into life and it came on, gathering speed but then hesitating.

Pop muttered: "She sometimes balks shifting into second."

The bus entered the dip very slowly. Its front wheels hesitated coming out, and then its rear end began to slide swiftly sideways. Doc gunned the motor. The back tires wailed against the black-slimed stone. Doc cut the wheels and braked. The bus slid backward down the slope.

McHeath shoved his rifle into Wojtowicz's hands and ran down across the rock toward the bus, his feet hitting potholes and tiny ridges.

The bus hesitated, then paused on the verge of the five-hundred-foot drop with one front wheel against a small rock in a pothole. They could all see Doc pulling himself out of the backward-tilted seat, bracing himself on the slanted floor, and grabbing for the lever that opened the front door.

Hunter suddenly grabbed Margo by the shoulder, thrust his hand in her jacket, and pulled out the momentum pistol.

McHeath was almost to the bus and near the verge himself. Wojtowicz wondered what the kid thought he could do: maybe, he guessed, brace himself and offer a hand to steady Doc when he jumped down onto the slippery slope.

Doc got the door open and his head out of it. Then the little rock popped out of the pothole and the back wheels of the bus slid over the edge, the floor slanting still more against Doc's escape effort, and the underbody grated harshly on the rock lip as it slowly slid over.

Hunter squeezed the tiny recessed lever on top of the grip of the gray pistol between his finger and thumb and twisted it around so that the arrow pointed not toward the muzzle but away from it.

Doc had his upper body out of the door when the bus overbalanced, setting him back on his heels in the door. As the bus swung out and down with him in it, he looked at his friends up the slope and took off the black hat and waved it.

Hunter pointed the momentum pistol at him and pressed the button.

Doc's face dropped out of sight and his upstretched hand too, but the black hat came sailing back over the lip, and a chill breeze with it.

McHeath threw himself down on the verge, gripping a rock ridge with foot, knee, elbow, and hand, and peered over.

The slope vibrated faintly underfoot and the big crash came hollowly.

The chill breeze quickened. The black hat sailed straight at Hunter and hung itself on the muzzle of the momentum pistol. A small boulder started to roll uphill after it. Hunter nipped his finger off the button and bowed his head. The small boulder reversed course and rolled down the slope, clinking.

McHeath called hoarsely, his voice cracking halfway through: "He's gone. He was thrown out. I saw him hit. Then the bus rolled over him."

Hunter said: "Just one second sooner..."

Clarence Dodd said to him: "You switched the arrow one hundred and eighty degrees, and it reversed the momentum?" And when Hunter nodded heavily, the Little Man commented: "Well, that's logical."

Hunter snatched the black hat off the muzzle and swung it up as if to throw it down and stamp on it. Then he just looked at it in his hand.

There was a faint hollow crack as the small boulder hit five hundred feet below and the sound came up.

On the sunbeaten mesa in Arizona, as if it were a Parsi Tower of Silence, vultures tore away the last shreds of the flesh of Asa Holcomb's face, laying wholly bare the beautiful grinning red bone.

Paul Hagbolt rested lightly against the warm, smooth, trusty window that half spanned Tigerishka's saucer. He gazed down at Earth's northern ice cap breaking up, the white crust of frozen water lifted and collapsed by the great tides that had been moving in and out through the Greenland Sea, Baffin Bay, and the Bering Strait. Almost the whole Arctic zone was out of shadow, as Earth's summering northern hemisphere tilted toward the sun.

The interior of the saucer was dark, but some light was reflected into it by the snow-freighted ice, which twinkled with highlights wherever ice-tables tilted to reflect the sun directly  -  stars in a white sky.

Tigerishka was stretched out against the window, too, a few feet from Paul. She was caressing Miaow, but now the little cat drew away from the velvet-padded, three-fingered hand and bent her hind legs against the violet-barred, green-furred shoulder, and sprang off across Paul into the flowerbank beyond him  -  presumably to re-explore it by the mysterious ice-sent twilight. Miaow had adapted quickly to free fall and delighted in worming her way through the plants along the thick vines, her tiny face cat-smiling out between the leaves and flowers from time to time.

Tigerishka made a quick, soft singing sound that was rather like a sigh. It occurred to Paul that she might have brought them here to escape the reproachful thought of people dying as they looked down at Earth. He almost started to tell her that there was, or yesterday had been, a Russian weather station at the North Pole, but decided she could read that in his thoughts if she wanted to.

Without warning the saucer began to mount very swiftly. First the ice cap, then the whole Earth, shrank rapidly.

Paul repressed his reactions. Excited emoting was not admired feline behavior and he already knew that Tigerishka could work the control panel without touching or even looking at it.

Stars came out everywhere. As Terra continued to shrink, the Wanderer came sliding into view. It too had a polar cap of sorts, a lopsided yellow one against the violet background, but with a yellow neck going down from it  -  the neck of the dinosaur. From here the yellow shape was like a battle axe.

They were mounting at right angles to the sunlight: none came directly into the saucer. The two planets below began to show half phases, the Wanderer with the crescent of moon fragments out to its sunward side.

It grew dark in the saucer as the ice light faded. When the planets finally stopped shrinking, they were two small, almost indistinguishable half moons, not very far apart, against the starfields, largely unfamiliar to Paul, which one sees from the southern hemisphere.

With no great amazement he realized that the saucer had mounted several million miles in less than a minute  -  something not too far below the speed of light.

The effect was as if he and Tigerishka, walking through a city, had retreated into a big unlit park and were now seeing the lights of the city across several acres of dark lawn and trees. After a bit, it did begin to feel very lonely.

Tigerishka said quietly: "You feel like God? The Earth your footstool?"

Paul said: "I don't know. Could I change the past? If someone were dead, could I bring him to life?"

Tigerishka did not answer, though it seemed to Paul in the darkness that she slowly shook her head.

There was a time of silence. Then Tigerishka made again the short melodic sound that was a little like a sigh. Then, softly: "Paul?"

"Yes?" he asked quietly.

She said, softer still, but rapidly: "We are wicked. We hurt your planet terribly. We are afraid."

She went on, this time not quite so like a little girl confessing naughtiness: "Your lost generation, your Hungarian refugees, your anarchists, your Satanists, your beats, your fallen angels, your parole-jumpers, your juvenile delinquents  -  we're like those. Running, running, running. Every step, pounding the hollow planetary pavement under the cold streetlights of the stars: a billion light-years."

He knew she was picking the words, concepts, and images out of his mind, yet his mind did not feel it at all.

She continued: "The Wanderer is our getaway car, our escape wagon  -  a very hip and handsome Dunkirk ship! Fifty thousand decks for fun and games! Skies to suit every taste  -  sunsets to order! Hot and cold running gravity in every stateroom  -  pro or anti, take your pick! The Star of the Rejected. Satan's Ark!"

And now it was the voice of a rather bigger girl, covering guilt with bravado and with lurid images chosen with a deliberate facetiousness.

She went on: "Oh, what a stylish Planet of the Damned! We paint our air on top for privacy. That shocked them in the solar slum we swung in. Those drab conformists thought we must have naughty things to hide behind our two-toned glamor. Well, we did!"

"The Painted Planet," Paul murmured, trying to match her mood  -  and use at least one image before she did.

She flashed back: "Like your Desert, yes. And your wild painted women, no? Violet and yellow, like a desert dawn. We even paint the Wanderer's boats to match  -  launches bigger than liners, dinghies like this. Oh, we're the top of the mode, we are, we passengers on Satan's Ark, we devil host, we angels going bump!"

She grinned swiftly at him, wrinkling her muzzle, but then she looked out again at the stars and down again at the two half moons, and her voice grew a little graver, though not entirely grave.

"The Wanderer sails the true void: hyper space. You want a rugged roadway, a cruel sea, a storm that makes a hurricane seem a breeze, a nova-front, a match-flash? Try the void! Formless as chaos, hostile to all life. No light, no atoms, even, no energy we superbeasts can tap  -  as yet! It is like quicksand you must tunnel through, or like a killing desert, waterless, which you must cross to reach a star with palms. A black, malignant seething that's to space as the unconscious is to consciousness. Alleys to which the streetlight never gets, mouthless and twisted, full of dirty death  -  or dark, cold, oily water under docks, roiled by great waves. The Sargasso of the Starships! The Graveyard of Lost Planets! Oh, a most charming sea for Satan's Ark, giving his angels nausea and nightmares  -  the flaming, freezing, formless Sea of Hell!

"This whole star-marqueed universe of ours  -  the cosmos you think rock-based, firm as God  -  rides in the endless hyperspatial storm just as a paper scrap might ride the whirlwind's gust And...the Wanderer sails only in the fist of wind that holds the scrap. We're timid sailors; we always hug the coast"

Paul stared out at the randomly scattered, lonely stars and wondered why he had always so easily accepted that they represented order.

"The power of a billion fission piles," Tigerishka went on, "are what you need to burst into the void  -  and still more power, fantastic subtlest skill, and luck, too, to burst out. The Wanderer eats moons for breakfast and asteroids for snacks! Or rather, they are eaten by the void the Wanderer sails through, that gobbler of neutrinos  -  food tossed to hyper-spatial wolves to buy our way.

"It takes no time to travel hyperspace, except the launching and the landfall times," Tigerishka continued, "but oh, the wit it takes to spy your port, the waits before you burst back to the world!  -  like threading an unknown coast in thickest fog. In hyperspace there are signs of our space here  -  shadows of suns, of planets and of moons, of dust and gases and of emptiness  -  but they are far more difficult to read than radar in a sky chockful of foil, than unknown, drip-worn, lime-brushed hieroglyphs within a cavern half as old as time.

"We ended this last trip battered and strained, starving for mass and sunlight. Our insulation from raw hyperspace had shrunk to zero; we almost lost our sky and atmosphere; no one could venture on our upper deck except the inorganic giants which dwell there  -  the crystal minds which are like colored hills.

"At that we made two false exits in your system, each gobbling up some cubic leagues of fuel we could not spare, but each time had to cancel because the signs weren't right or else the vectors wrong, the exit spots not near enough your sun or to a moon that wholly suited us."

Paul interposed automatically: "Only two false exits? There were four photos of twisting starfields."

"Four photos, but only two false exits  -  one near Pluto, one near Venus," she asserted sharply. "Don't interrupt me, Paul. We finally managed our exit near your moon, the eclipse line-up making a perfect shadow. We surfaced from the sea of hyperspace. But we were almost powerless by then. Why, if we'd had to do battle we could barely have thrown the Wanderer into null gravity for maneuvering."

"Tigerishka!" Paul protested. "You mean you could have nullified the Wanderer's gravity field, so that it wouldn't have caused quakes and huge tides on Earth  -  and you didn't?"

"I'm not the Wanderer's captain!" she snarled at him. "Besides, we had to have full gravity to catch and crush your moon, don't you see? Full gravity augmented by local churn-fields and torque-volumes. And even in the worst emergencies we must maintain a general fuel reserve for battle  -  that's obvious, surely!"

Paul said, "But Tigerishka, compared to the Wanderer's, the world's space forces and atomic weapons are a joke. What conceivable battle - "

"Paul, I told you once we were afraid." There was a dark violet flash from her petaled irises as she turned her head away from him. "The Wanderer's not the only far-ranging planet in the universe."