The Wanderer (39 page)

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."

Hunter stopped for one last look down the slope before walking ahead past the truck to the Corvette and taking his place behind the wheel. Rama Joan and Margo stood beside him. All the rest were already aboard: Ann and Wanda in the Corvette, the Hixons and Ida in the cab of the truck, the remaining five men crowded in the back of the truck with Ray Hanks. Hunter didn't like the arrangement, but nothing felt right since Doc's death: everything was cold and hard and clumsy and uncomfortable, like his own insides.

He hadn't wanted to take command, he'd tried to wish it on Doddsy, but Hixon had just looked at him steadily and said: "I think Doc would have picked you," and that had settled it.

He hated making final decisions, like turning down Hixon's suggestion they use the momentum pistol to move some boulders to block the road; he'd answered that one by pointing out there was a bare one-eighth charge left in the gun, if the violet scale meant what they thought it did. Or ruling whether they should take Mulholland or backtrack all the way to Vandenberg Two; he'd tabled that one until they came to that particular crossroad—and then had to suffer the private criticism of Margo, who'd taken it for granted they'd continue their pursuit of Morton Opperly, especially now that they had his note saying he was going to Vandenberg Two. Margo told Hunter he should have smothered dissension, by making this clear to everyone from the start.

Hardly a word had been spoken about Doc, though that only underlined the gloom.

Hunter had quietly asked Wojtowicz what last thing Doc had said that they'd laughed at, and Wojtowicz had replied: "I was just asking him again to take the hat off, that it was bad luck, and he said to me, "Wojtowicz, when you're as bald as I am and aren't allowed to hide it any more, you'll know that's worse luck!'"

The Ramrod had overheard and said, shaking his head sadly: "I warned him about that hat, too," and then added something that sounded like, "The sin of pride."

Wojtowicz had called the Ramrod on that, and Doddsy had tried to smooth things out by saying: I'm sure Charles Fulby was referring to
hubris
—the sort of high optimism some of the great Greek heroes had that made the gods jealous, so that they destroyed them."

Wojtowicz had flared back: "Greeks or not, I don't care, nobody's going to say anything against Doc!"

Now Hunter looked down at that same black hat, which he'd been carrying crumpled up all this time, and he thought of Doc down there with the three murderers, all the same meat to the buzzards.

"God," he muttered bitterly, "we're not leaving him as much of a monument as he did Doddsy's big stupid mutt."

He thought of sticking the hat up somewhere, but that was all wrong. He smoothed out the brim and, when a lull came in the breeze, skimmed it down the slope. For a moment he thought it was going to land on the rim, and how horribly inept that would make him out, but it sailed over and out of sight

Rama Joan gripped his upper arm tight and Margo's on the other side. Her face and reddish hair were still blackly streaked, her limp, dirty, chopped-off evening clothes a tramp clown's costume.

"God knows it's not any monument," she said in a low voice, huskily, "but Doc laid me here last night."

Hunter's eyes filled up. He said chokily: "The fornicating old buzzard!"

Off in the distance, very faintly, he heard the whine of a motor. It seemed to come from the direction of the freeway.

"Do you hear that, Mr. Hunter?" young McHeath called, crouching in the back end of the truck, his rifle ready. Hunter remembered Doc saying how "those murdering drunken kids" would be coming.

The three of them ran for the Corvette. As Hunter piled behind the wheel, Margo in back, Rama Joan in front, on the other side of Ann, he thought,
Doc would have walked. Or
would he? At least he'd have said something.

He started the motor, then faced around, holding up his right arm.

"If cars come up behind us, you pass me," he shouted to Hixon. "That way we'll be able to use the momentum pistol. If they start pointing guns, fire on 'em! O.K., everybody, here we go!"

It wasn't good,
he thought as he shifted into gear,
but it would have to do.

Richard Hillary made the acquaintance of Vera Carlisle at a moment when the girl was sitting in the mud in Tewkesbury and crying quietly.

Sitting in the mud was getting to be quite the way to meet people, Richard reflected, and truth to tell it was at least a great deal better than finding them lying face down in it.

She was crouched so mouselike in the little side street and crying so quietly that he might well have missed her had not the night been still so light two hours after sunset.

She was carrying nothing but a small transistor wireless, which she hugged like a baby.

During the past thirty-six hours Richard had witnessed several rescues and reunions and numerous befriendments, and now he realized that he wanted very much to befriend someone himself. He was acutely anxious that no one but he should hear this girl's soft sobs, or come upon them before her sobs had been stilled and at least the first gestures of comradeship made.

As he approached her he had the thought of how chilly it was getting and the memory of how warmly the couples had seemed to be sleeping last night under the straw, and also the thought of how this was the end of the world, or at least a very good imitation; yet at the same time it seemed to him that those thoughts did not fully describe his present motives.

He offered her fresh bread he had saved from a thrifty scatter of little loaves dropped near Cleeve from a helicopter, but it turned out that Vera's chief discomfort was that she was thirsty. Getting water in the new tidal areas was no simple matter, with all the reservoirs and wells and springs salt-drowned. Some pipes held fresh water, but that was chancy.

He remembered a pub being looted two squares back, and as they went toward it past the watermarked, half-timbered houses and a hotel named the Royal Hop Pole, he discovered another of her griefs: she had lost a heel and in any case her tight, pointed slippers weren't the best for walking.

There was quite a line of looters at the pub.
Oh, we law-abiding Britons,
Richard thought,
we queue up even for looting.
He remembered a shoe store just beyond it and broke into it determinedly—which was quite easy, since the tide had done that before him—and managed to find in the wet, reeking drawers a pair of tennis shoes for Vera and some heavy socks for both of them. All the articles were sopping, of course, but that was of no consequence.

By that time the queue was shorter, and soon he and Vera had received a bottle of beer apiece and one small flask of rum between them, under the fierce watchful eye of a brawny man who might even have been the actual proprietor, though he did not say so.

Outside, a fat man was pointing down the street and saying: "Ah, there's the bastid now!"

It was the Wanderer, rising in its bloated-X face and ringed ahnost symmetrically by the white shards of the moon.

Vera glanced at it for a moment, then pressed her lips together and looked away.

Richard felt a surge of approval at her reaction. She held her elbow out toward him just a little. He took it firmly and escorted her down the street in the way he'd originally been going, setting an easy pace at first as they drank their beer and munched some bread. He told her nothing about his Malvern Hills plan. Time enough for that when they'd crossed the roaring Severn by Telford's old iron bridge—if it hadn't been torn away.

Vera turned on her transistor wireless, and they listened all the way around the dial to a sound like bacon frying. Richard wanted to tell her to throw it away, but instead he asked her how her new shoes fitted, and she smiled at him and said: "They're heavenly."

Only an hour ago Richard had been tramping lonely in the midst of a mob, and thinking of all the millions or scores of millions of new dead there must be all over the world, and wondering if it really mattered at all.

He had thought,
Does the world need so many people? Take the crowd around me now
—

winnowed by the flood, yet most of them still stupid stereotypes the world could well do without.

How many people does it take to sustain a reasonably rich culture? Aren't more than that a waste?

And aren't millions of stereotypes an overly high price to pay for a few exceptions? Isn't there
something utterly gross about the concept of an endlessly, planlessly multiplied humanity, perhaps
eventually swarming like rats to the stars? Did having so many people ever matter, except to the
people? The world needs and deserves this winnowing!

But now his thought was that if just one more person had been taken, that person might have been Vera. In theory there were tens of thousands of Veras, he supposed, but only one where this Richard Hillary could have found her. He gripped her arm a little more snugly.

Paul Hagbolt stared down into the bottomless dark as if the circular window on which he rested were the top of a great aquarium, the stars and the tiny semicircles of Earth and Wanderer a mysterious marine luminescence, or as if the round were that of a glass slide under a microscope, and the stars, diamond infusoria.

There was a faint rustling and then a little cry—Miaow crawling weightless through the flowers and calling some discovery to Tigerishka.

From beside Paul, the larger cat said: "Because mankind is young, you think the universe is, too. But it is old, old, old. Tomorrow and tomorrow…petty pace…last syllable of time…tale told by an idiot…yes!

"You think that space is empty, but it's full. Your own solar system is one of the few primeval spots left, like a small, weed-grown lot overlooked by builders in the heart of a vast and ancient city that has overgrown all the countryside.

"In the galaxy where the Wanderer grew in orbit, the planets are so thick around each sun they shroud its light and make a slum of space, a teeming city of a galaxy. It is the boast of our engineers, 'Wherever a sunbeam escapes, we place a planet' Or they moor a field, to turn the sunlight back.

"Tens of thousands of planets around each sun, troubling each other with ten thousand tides, so that tidal harmonizing is half our civil engineering. Planets following each other so closely in the same orbit that they make elliptical necklaces, each pearl a world. You know those filigree nests of balls your Chinese carve of ivory, so that you peer and peer to find the center, and end with the feeling that there's a little of infinity locked in there? That's how solar systems look, most places.

"You haven't yet heard this news, simply because of the snaily slowness with which light travels. If you could wait a billion years, you'd see the galaxies grow dim, not by the death of stars, but by the masking and miserly hoarding of their light by the stars'

owners.

"All but a tiny remainder of the star-shrouding planets are artificial. Billions of trillions of dead suns and cold moons and planetary gas giants have been mined to get the matter to make them—your Egyptian pyramids multiplied by infinity. Throughout the universe, natural planets are as rare as young thoughts.

"Your own galaxy of the Milky Way is no exception. Planet-choked suns chiefly make the great dark central cloud which puzzles your astronomers.

"A pond can fill with infusoria almost as quickly as a ditch-water puddle. A continent can fill with rabbits almost as swiftly as a single field. And intelligent life can spread to the ends of the universe—those ends which are everywhere—as swiftly as it grows to maturity on a single planet.

"The planets of a trillion suns can fill with spaceship-builders as quickly as those of one. Ten million trillion galaxies can become infected with the itch of thought—that great pandemic!—as readily as one.

"Intelligent life spreads faster than the plague. And science grows more uncontrollably than cancer. On every undisturbed natural planet, life crawls and flutters for billions of years, then overnight comes the blossoming, the swift explosion across the great black distances of seeds that grow like weeds wherever they fall, and then the explosion of
their
seeds on, on, to the incurving ends of the universe.

"There is the drama of meeting other life forms—shocks, moments of poignant wonder. And then, much too soon, comes the ennui.

"The ditch-water puddle, where yesterday a few amoebas swam, is thick with writhing life—and the pond, too. The algae gleam like jewels. Then soon the pool grows clouded." She pointed a claw toward the thick stars. "Those diamonds you see out there are lies. The suns that sent that bright light now are masked."

Tigerishka turned her tapering muzzle from the star-spangled window and spoke to Paul directly.

"The universe is full, Paul. Intelligent life is everywhere, its planets darkening the stars, its engineers recklessly spending the power of the suns to make mind's environment—burning matter to energy everywhere to make more form, more structure, more mind. The Word—to call mind that—goes forth, and soon there is nothing but the Word. The universe with all its great reaches and magnificent privacies becomes a slum, begins to die of too much mind—though
they
can never see that—just as a shallow sunlit bay can die of too much life.

"Immortality is achieved, breaking down the individual mind's limits future ward.

Your world, Paul, is one of the few islands of death left in the sea of life everlasting.

"With hyperspatial travel and psionic communication, the ends of the universe are closer together than the planets of your solar system. The far-flung galaxies are more centralized than the countries of your world, than even your country's fifty-one states.