The Wanderer (47 page)

Paul and Don stared up at the blank Stranger and the moon-girdled Wanderer through the transparent ceiling of Tigerishka's saucer, poised five hundred miles above Vandenberg Two.

The artificial gravity field was still on, so they were sprawled on the floor of the saucer. This was transparent also. Through it they could see, by sunlight reflected from the two planets that had erupted from hyperspace, the dark expanse of Southern California, here and there invaded by the dim silver of the sea, and for the other half of the floor-picture the relatively bright expanse of the Pacific itself, though both sea and land were somewhat blurred by the layers of Earth's atmosphere.

There was one obstruction in this lower picture. From the now-invisible port in the center of the transparent floor, the thick worm of the space tube stretched off to the side, where presumably the Baba Yaga hung out of view. The reflected light from the Stranger and the Wanderer, striking through the two rigid transparencies, gleamed on the ridged metal of the tube outside and in, showing the first two of the inner handholds by which a being in free fall could pull himself through the tube.

Both Paul and Don avoided looking down. The artificial gravity field, although Tigerishka had assured them it extended only inside the saucer, made the depths below distinctly uncomfortable.

They had the same view as did those approaching Vandenberg of the Stranger and the Wanderer, except that for Paul and Don the two planets were much brighter, and were backgrounded not by slate-gray sky but by the star-spangled black of space.

The sight was weird, arresting, even "glorious," yet because of their knowledge of the underlying situation, however partial and fragmentary, Paul and Don felt chiefly an ever-mounting tension. There above them hung the Pursued and the Pursuer, Rebellion and Authority, Adventure and Restraint—hung in the stasis of an uncertain truce, while the two orbs watched and measured each other.

The bulge-sided yellow triangle in the purple needle-eye face of the Wanderer and the bright solar highlight in the vaster, gibbous, gunmetal round of the Stranger were two great eyes staring each other down.

The tension was deadly, shriveling. It made Don and Paul, despite the support of each other's presence, want to shrink out of sight, want to sink down, down, down through the layers of Earth's atmosphere and rocky, maternal flesh to some lightless womb. Even the eagerness of any eye to watch such wonders hardly balanced in them with this urge.

Paul asked in an almost childish voice: "Tigerishka, why haven't you gone back to the Wanderer? It's been a long while since the Red Recall flashed. All the other ships must have gone."

From the embowering darkness by the control panel, where not a ray of Wanderer-light or Stranger-light touched her, Tigerishka replied: "It's not time yet."

In nearly querulous tones, Don said: "Hadn't Paul and I better get aboard the Baba Yaga? I can manage the braking drop through the atmosphere, since there's no orbital speed to kill, but it'll be tricky, and if we have to wait much longer—"

"Not time yet for that, either!" Tigerishka called. "There is something I must demand of you first. You were saved from space and the waves. You owe a debt to the Wanderer."

She leaned forward out of the dark so that her violet and green muzzle and breast, vertically shadowed at eye and cheek and neck, showed in the planet's light

"In the same way I sent you to Earth," she began softly yet piercingly, "I am now sending you to the Stranger to testify in behalf of the Wanderer. Stand in the center side by side and face me."

"You mean you want us to plead for you?" Paul asked as he and Don complied almost automatically. "Say that your ships did everything possible to save humans and their homes? Remember, I've seen a lot of catastrophes that weren't averted, too—more than I've seen of rescues, in fact."

"You will simply tell your stories—the truth as you know it," Tigerishka said, throwing back her head so that her violet eyes gleamed. "Grip hands now and don't move. I am blacking out the saucer entirely. The beams that scan you will be black. This will be a realer trip for you than the one to Earth. Your bodies won't leave the saucer, but they will seem to. Hold still!"

The stars darkened, the Earth went black, the twin violet sparks of Tigerishka's eyes winked out. Then it was as if a whirlwind ripped a great doorway in the dark, and Don and Paul were whirled across space almost swift as thought—one second, two—then they were standing hand-in-hand in the center of a vast, seemingly limitless plain, flat as the salt desert by Great Salt Lake, only all glaringly silver gray and torrid with a heat they could not feel.

"I'd thought it would seem rounded," Paul said, telling himself he still stood inside the saucer, but not believing it.

The Pursuit Planet is bigger than Earth, remember," Don replied, "and you can't see Earth's curvature when you're on its surface." He was recalling the moon's close horizon, but chiefly thinking how indistinguishable this experience was from his dream trip through the Wanderer, and wondering if it could have been managed the same way.

The heavens were a star-pricked hemisphere topped by the shaggy-margined glare of the sun. A few diameters from the sun Earth stood out darkly, edged by a bluish crescent. On the gunmetal horizon stood the Wanderer, half risen, five times as wide as Earth now, enormous, but the great yellow eye cut in two by the silver horizon line, so that it seemed to peer more fiercely, almost to narrow its lids.

"I thought we'd be projected inside," Paul said, indicating the glaring metal ground at their feet.

"Looks like they stop even images for customs inspection," Don replied.

Paul said: "Well, if we're radio waves, they're carrying our consciousness, too."

Don said: "You forget—we're still in the saucer."

"But then what instrument sees this out here and transmits the picture to the saucer?" Paul wanted to know. Don shook his head.

A white flash exploded from the metal plain between them and the violet-and-yellow hemisphere of the Wanderer. It vanished instantly, then there were two more flashes, farther off.

Paul thought,
The fight's begun.

Don said: "Meteorites! There's no atmosphere to stop them."

At that instant they dropped down through the gunmetal ground into darkness.

Only a black flash of that, however—barely an instant—and then they were hanging in the center of a huge, dim, spherical room everywhere walled with great inward-peering eyes.

That was the first impression. The second was that the patterned lozenges were not actual eyes, but dark, circular portholes, widely ringed with different colors. Yet now there was the uneasy impression that eyes of all sorts were peering through those pupil-like ports.

Both Don and Paul had essentially identical memory flashes of being sent to the principal's office in grade school.

Don and Paul were not alone in the vast chamber. Hanging clumped with them there at the center of the sphere were at least a hundred other human beings or their three-dimensional images—an incredible clot of humanity. There were people of all races, uniforms of African and Asiatic countries, two of the Russian Space Force, a glowingly brown Maori, a white-hooded Arab, a nearly naked coolie, a woman in furs, and many others of whom only patches could be seen because of the intervening figures.

A silver beam of light thin as a needle shot out from beside one of the black portholes and probed at the other side of the clot—the ports meanwhile twinkling as if with peering eyes—and suddenly someone began to speak rapidly though quite calmly from, it seemed, the point in the clot where the silver needle touched. At the sound of the voice Don felt an instant thrill, for he recognized it.

"My name is Gilbert Dufresne, Lieutenant, United States Space Force. Stationed on the moon, I left it in a one-man ship to scout the alien planet just as the moonquakes began. As far as I know, my three comrades died in the break-up.

"I began to orbit the moon east-west and soon sighted three huge, wheel-shaped spaceships. Tractor beams of some sort, as far as I can judge, took hold of me and my vessel then and drew us inside one of the ships. There I met a variety of alien beings. I was questioned, I think, by some form of mind-scanning, and my physical wants were attended to. Later I was taken to the bridge or control bulge of the ship, where I was permitted to observe its operations.

"It had dropped from the moon and was hovering over the City of London, which was flooded by a high tide. Beams or some sort of force-field from our ship drove the water back. I was asked to enter a small ship with three alien beings. This ship descended and hovered near the top of a building which I recognized as the British Museum. I entered an upper story with one of the beings. There I saw him revive five men I was certain were dead. We re-entered the small ship and after several similar episodes we returned into the huge ship.

"From London we moved south to Portugal, where the city of Lisbon had been thrown down by a severe earthquake. There I saw…"

As Dufresne continued to speak, Paul (who had never met him, though he knew of him) began to have the feeling that, no matter how true the words might be, they were nevertheless pointless, useless—the merest chattering on the margin of great events that were relentlessly moving their own way. The peering ports seemed to leer cynically, or filmed with a cold, reptilian boredom. The grade school principal was listening to the painfully honest story without hearing it.

Apparently this feeling of Paul's was a valid intuition, for without another shred of warning the whole scene vanished, and was instantly replaced by the small, brightly-lit interior of the familiar saucer, green of floor and ceiling now, and Tigerishka calling from the flowerbanked, silvery control panel: "It's no use. Our plea is rejected. Get in your ship and drop to your planet. Hurry! I'll cut loose from you as soon as you're in the Baba Yaga. Thanks for your help. Goodbye and good luck, Don Merriam. Goodbye, Paul Hagbolt."

A circle of green floor lifted. Without a word Don lowered himself headfirst through the port and began to pull himself through the tube.

Paul looked at Tigerishka.

"Hurry," she repeated.

Miaow came waltzing up warily. Paul stooped, and when the little cat glanced toward Tigerishka, grabbed it up with a sudden snatch. As he stepped toward the port he smoothed the ruffled gray fur. His hand slowed in the middle of the stroke and he turned around.

"I'm not going," he said.

"You have to, Paul," Tigerishka said. "Earth's your home. Hurry."

"I give up Earth and my race," he replied. "I want to stay with you." Miaow squirmed in his hands, trying to get away, but he tightened his grip.

"Please go at once, Paul," Tigerishka said, at last looking and moving toward him.

Her eyes stared straight at his. "There can never be any further relationship between us."

"But I'm going to stay with you, do you hear?" His voice was suddenly so loud and angry that Miaow became panicky and clawed at his hands to get loose. He held her firmly and went on: "Even as your pet, if it has to be that way. But I'm staying."

Tigerishka stood face to face with him. "Not even as my pet," she said. "There's not
quite
enough gap between our minds for that.—Oh, get out, you fool!"

"Tigerishka," he said harshly, staring into her violet eyes, "ninety per cent of what you felt last night was pity and boredom. What was the other ten per cent?"

She glared at him as if in a frenzy of exasperation. Suddenly, moving with almost blinding speed, she snatched Miaow from him and slapped him hard across the face.

The three pale violet claws of that forepaw showed bright red the first half inch as they came away.

"That!" she snarled, her fangs bared.

He took a backward step, then another, then he was in the tube. The artificial gravity above squeezed him down into it in free fall. Looking up, he could see Tigerishka's snarling mask. Blood streamed from his cheek and hung in red globules against the ridged silver inside the tube. Then the green port closed.

The saucer students entered Vandenberg Two without hindrance or fanfare and altogether unromantically—like workers on the graveyard shift arriving at their factory.

There was no one at the mesh fence that had so lately been many yards under salt water, no one at the big gate now sagging open—nothing at all of note, in fact, except six inches of stinking mud—so they just drove through, most of them out of the cars to lighten them, and they started up the ramp to the plateau.

Hunter drove the Corvette. Occupying all of the small back seat and overlapping it a bit, lay Wanda, breathing heavily. Not even Wojtowicz had been able to bully her out of this heart attack.

Mrs. Hixon was driving the truck because Bill Hixon wanted to watch the sky, where the Wanderer in mandala face and the Stranger now bracketed the zenith—and because she didn't give a damn, as she said more than once. She was alone in the cab—Pop had wanted to stay, but she'd told him right out he smelled worse than the mud, and it was Bill's truck, and she wouldn't take it.

In the back of the truck were Ray Hanks and Ida, she nursing both his broken leg and her own swollen ankle. She didn't believe in sleeping pills and was feeding both herself and the feebly protesting Ray large quantities of aspirin.

"Chew them," she told him. "The bitterness takes your mind off things."

The rest were walking. Three times already some of them had had to heave at the truck to get it through bad places, and twice the truck had had to nudge the Corvette out of spots in which its tires just spun. Everybody was smeared with mud, their shoes globbed with it; and the truck tires were so muddied that their chains didn't chink.

There was a blue surge in the almost shadowless, mixed planet-light bathing the mucky landscape. Harry McHeath, by his youth better able than most of them to keep an eye on two things at once, called out: "It's started again! They're both doing it!"

Four ruler-straight, string-narrow, bright blue beams stretched across the gray sky from the Stranger to the Wanderer. But now instead of shooting past her they converged.