The Wanderer (20 page)

The next instant he was grabbed from behind and slammed flat on his back against a hard, satin-smooth surface that had somehow been somewhere in the omni-surrounding flowers. The thing that terrified him most was that the limb that snaked around his neck—a sleek, spring-strong, green-furred limb, barred with violet—had two elbows.

With a whirling speed that did not allow his seeing it clearly, the green and violet tiger-thing worked at his out-flung wrists and ankles. Paws with claws of violet-gray pinched without stabbing; once he felt the grip of something more like a snake. Then the thing kicked off from his side and dived into the flowerbank after Miaow. A long green violet-ringed tail, smoothly furred and tapering, vanished in a larger explosion of petals.

He tried to push himself up from the surface under him and discovered he could budge only his head. Though still in null gravity, he was somehow gyved tautly to that same surface—as was next brought home to him most graphically when he looked straight up and saw not ten feet above him (or below, or out to the side—he didn't know how to feel about it in null gravity) a spread-eagled, wet-sand-specked, pale, wildly staring reflection of himself, backed by a dozen dimming reflections of reflections of the same ridiculous, poignant picture.

The inner shape and decor of the saucer began to come clear to him. More than half the flowers he'd seen had been reflections. Ceiling and floor were round, flat mirrors facing each other, about nine feet apart and twenty feet in diameter. He was spread-eagled near the center of one of them. The rim between the mirrors was luxuriant with exotic, thick-petaled flowers, large and small—pale yellow, pale blue, violet, magenta, but mostly pink and pinkish red. Seemingly live flowers, for there were leaves shaped like sickles and swords and spears, and there were glimpses of twisting branches—probably their hydroponic or whatever underpinnings filled much of the saucer's tapered outside rim.

But the triangularly cross-sectioned doughnut of the rim couldn't be entirely filled with vegetation, for bowered in it beyond his fettered feet he now made out a silvery gray control panel—at any rate some sort of flat surface with smooth silvery excrescences and geometrical shapes limned on it. Straining his head around, he could see similar panels beyond each of his spread and outstretched arms, the three panels being situated relative to each other at the apices of an equilateral triangle incribed in the saucer, but each of them half hidden by the embowering flowers—very much as crassly functional objects such as heater and sink and phone and hi-fi might be masked in the small apartment of a modish and esthetically-minded woman.

The whole was bathed in bright, warm, beachy light coming from…he couldn't see where. An invisible indoor sun—most eerie.

Eerier still and infinitely closer to home was the feeling that next came to him: that his mind was being invaded and his memories and knowledge riffled through like so many decks of cards. He tritely recalled how a drowning man is supposed to relive his life in a few seconds, and he wondered if it applied when you drowned in flowers—or were crucified by a tiger preparatory to being torn apart and devoured.

The sensations in his mind flashed so fast he could see and hear only blurs. They were his own private mental possessions, yet he was unable to note them as they flashed and faded—an ultimate humiliation! A few images he was able to catch toward the end of this mental "customs search" showed an odd preoccupation with zoos and ballets.

He looked around but could catch no glimpse of the tiger-thing or of Miaow. The invisible sun radiated on. The flowerbanks were deathly still, exuding their perfumes.

Donald Merriam was midway in his third passage through the Wanderer's shadow. To his right was the strange planet's green-spotted night side, which still made him think of a spider's underbelly. Ahead lay the sheaf of stars, and to his left the black, ever-lengthening ellipsoid of the moon with the cobwebby black threads looping up from its nose against the thickly glittering background. He was beginning to feel tired and cold, and he'd quit working the radio.

A dim, yellowish point appeared against the Wanderer's face, ahead, near the star-sheaf. It rapidly became a yellowish dash, horizontal to him, then a double dash with a little black stretch in the middle like the popular new fluorescent auto headlights, then two yellowish spindles that grew in size.

Only then did Don realize that this wasn't some sort of surface appearance on the Wanderer, but a material something—or two things—headed straight at the Baba Yaga.

He flinched and blinked his eyes, and the next instant, without any gradual deceleration that he could note, the two yellow spindles had come to a dead stop to either side of the Baba Yaga and so close that the frame of the spacescreen chopped off the outer dagger-end of each spindle.

They looked to him now like two saucer-shaped spacecraft between thirty and fifty feet across and three or four yards thick. At least, he rather hoped they were spacecraft—and not, well, animals.

His estimate of their shape was confirmed when, without any visible flash of vernier jets, they tilted toward him and became two yellow circles, one with a violet triangle inscribed in it, the other with a violet
V,
the legs of which stretched from center to rim.

Then he felt his spacesuited body pushed gently backward as the Baba Yaga was drawn forward between its escorts—that was how he began to think of them—until only the forward edges of their rims showed in the spacescreen. They held position very precisely thereafter, as if they had locked onto his little moonship—and somehow onto his body too, a very strange sensation.

The next thing he noticed was that the pale green spots were crawling down the Wanderer's black rotundity as if they were so many phosphorescent sow-bugs!

Then he saw that the sheaf of stars was widening as the black ellipsoid of the moon dropped away.

From all indications the Baba Yaga was being drawn upward by its escorts at about one hundred miles a second. Yet he had not felt an atom of the G-forces that ought to have been crushing him against his ship's wall—or smashing him through it!

At no time in the past few hours, not even during his passage through the moon, had Don thought,
This must be an hallucination.
He thought it now. Acceleration and the price you paid for it in fuel and G-strains were the core of his professional knowledge.

What was happening to his body and to the Baba Yaga now was not merely a monstrous intrusion of the unknown, it flatly contradicted everything he knew about spaceflight and its iron limitations. From five miles a second, Wanderer-relative, to one hundred at right angles to the first course, yet without feeling it, without even the hint of the firing of some main jet hotter than a blue star—that was not merely weird, it was impossible!

Yet the green spots continued to scuttle out of sight below and the star-sheaf to widen above, and suddenly the Baba Yaga burst into sunlight above the Wanderer.

Reflected glare stabbed at his eyes from the lefthand side of the spacescreen frame and the yellow rim of his port escort. He squeezed his eyelids together, fumbled for the polarizing goggles, got them on, then opened his eyes and looked.

The Baba Yaga, locked to its escorts, was still mounting up around the Wanderer at a fantastic velocity. The spacescreen swung a little to the right and, looking over the top of the planet, Don could see Earth, mostly Pacific Ocean now, and the glaring white sun which could sting his eyes even through the goggles.

The planetary surface below him was night side, then a crescent of the day side, mostly yellow but with the far edge violet.

Looping over and around him against star-speckled space were the white threads that came from the moon's nose. Two of them were thicker now—not threads, cords.

Ahead they converged and curved down toward the Wanderer's north pole. There, close together but still separate, they seemed simply to join the planet's velvet surface, some on the day side, some on the night side, a dozen or so of them in all. They looked now like weird, leafless vines sprouting from the top of the Wanderer. The Baba Yaga and its escorts were cannoning across the same spot.

Then, just as it seemed that in the next second they must flash past the thickening stalks or crash into them, Don's strongest convictions about spaceflight were once again battered as the Baba Yaga and its escorts lost most of their velocity in a tranquil instant and simultaneously headed straight down toward the black-and-yellow rooting place of the stalks.

Either his escorts had the inertialess drive at which everyone but science-fiction writers scoffed, and were carrying the Baba Yaga in their null-G field, or he was hallucinating, or—

He turned to the control panel and tried for a radar fix on the surface below. Rather to his surprise he got an instant echo.

They were 320 miles above the surface and closing with it at ten miles a second.

Automatically, he chorded the verniers to reverse the Baba Yaga's altitude so as to be able to brake with what little main-jet fuel he had left.

The vernier jets didn't budge the Baba Yaga. Its spacescreen continued to face the planet below. And only now did he notice that they were plummeting down closely parallel to the day side of one of the threads that had become cords, then stalks. It looked enormous here, maybe a mile thick, its pale expanse filling a quarter of the spacescreen.

But in fantastic perspective, like some exaggerated Frank Lloyd Wright pillar, thick toward the roof, thin toward the floor, it narrowed almost to a point where it met the planet's night side very close to the daylight line.

And looking at the pillar's surface this close by, he could see that it wasn't all smooth, but smooth stuff filled with jagged chunks—surely the mixture of moon rock and moon dust he'd guessed was being sucked up from the whirlpool-pits in the moon's nose.

The chunks moved slowly downward past him, like a train moving just a little faster along a parallel railway track.

But that meant the whole pillar was hurtling downward at the same speed as the Baba Yaga—ten miles a second. Why wasn't it exploding in a tremendous rock-spatter where it hit the Wanderer?

Suddenly the rocks in the pillar began to flash downward past him, then the whole pillar was blurred smooth—as if the train on the next track had become an express.

Either the pillar had speeded up, or—

He radar-checked again. The altitude of the Baba Yaga and its escorts had shrunk to thirty miles, but now they were closing at only a mile a second.

His second guess had hit it: they'd slowed up.

But they weren't slowing any more than that, the radar showed. He used the last twenty seconds in scanning the surface below for detail. There wasn't any—no lights on the night side, nothing but lemon velvet plain on the day side. The plunging rock-dust pillar kept its massive width beside them.

Don was running out of seconds as they plunged into the Wanderer's shadow. He whipped off his goggles. The leading rims of his escorts showed up with the same lemon phosphorescence they'd shown behind the planet. For an instant he thought he saw them dully reflected in the black surface below. He nerved himself for the crash, and extinction.

Then all at once the black surface wasn't there, and, as if the Baba Yaga and its escorts had burst hurtlessly through the ceiling of a gigantic lamplit room, he was staring down at another surface far below.

It had to be far below, because the down-rushing pillar of moon rock, still bulking vast to the side, narrowed almost to a point where it touched it and was changed by this fantastic foreshortening from a pillar to a moonrock triangle.

One inference seemed clear. All the surface of the Wanderer he'd seen up to this moment—the surface that had reflected sunlight and radar so truly—the surface that had been yellow and violet on the day side, black with phosphorescent green spots on the night side—was nothing more than a film, a film so thin and insubstantial that a frail spaceship like the Baba Yaga could burst through it at a mile a second without suffering the least shock or damage, a film roofing and concealing all the artificial daylight and true life of the Wanderer, a film stretched out everywhere about twenty miles above the true surface of the planet—if what he was gazing down at now was true surface and not some fresh illusion.

It was true surface if complexity and every appearance of solidity were criteria.

Below him, filling the spacescreen, stretched a vast, softly-lighted plain gleaming with lakes, or at least with smooth turquoise patches of some sort, a plain dotted with dusky, deep-twinkling circular pits a mile or more across, a plain that was otherwise crowded with all sorts of huge objects of every color and solidly geometric shape imaginable—cones, cubes, cylinders, coils, hemispheres, ziggurats, multilobed rondures—not one object of which Don recognized except as an abstraction.

Giant buildings, machines, vehicles, pure artistic forms? They might have been any or all of those.

Several comparisons flashed through his mind. The Japanese art of rock arrangement on a gigantic scale. Science-fiction book covers of the sort that show an endless floor covered with abstract sculptures looking half alive.

Then his thoughts went dipping far back into the mixed memories and pseudomemories of very early childhood, and he remembered being taken to visit his grandmother in Minneapolis, and the sour, dry smell of her great-ceilinged living room, and being lifted to look at—not to touch—the doors of a whatnot covered with what he had later assumed must have been cowrie shells, Chinese coins, paperweights, polished rock specimens, flowers in plastic—chaste knickknacks of many sorts, which had been utterly strange and meaningless though most fascinating to the baby Don Merriam.

Now he was a baby again.

Here and there between him and the plain, though not directly below, floated irregularly shaped, small dark clouds, each holding, as if it were a nest for rainbow eggs, a clutch of great glowing globes which shot upward light of all hues.