The Wanderer

Chapter Sixteen

Doc grunted happily and said, “I could do with another sandwich.”

“We thought we’d better hold back half,” the thin woman told him apologetically from the other side of the long table.

“It was my idea,” young Harry McHeath said, embarrassed.

“And probably a good one,” Doc allowed. “Straight out of Swiss Family Robinson. Anyone care for a taste of Scotch?” He fished a half-pint bottle out of his lefthand coat pocket. The fat woman humphed.

“Better save that for emergencies, Rudy,” Ross Hunter said quietly.

Doc sighed and tucked it away. “I suppose all second cups of coffee have been interdicted by the Committee of Public Safety, too,” he growled.

Harry McHeath shook his head nervously and hastened to pour one for Doc and then for several of the others.

Rama Joan said: “Rudolf, ages ago you were wondering what makes the colors of the Wanderer.”

She had had Ann stretch out on two chairs beside her, wrapped in the coat someone had left behind, with the girl’s head pillowed on her mother’s thigh. Rama Joan was looking at the Wanderer. The eastern yellow spot now had purple all around it, destroying the illusion of the jaws. The two polar yellow spots were shrinking as they rotated out of sight. In fact, the effect was almost that of a purple target with a great yellow bull’s eye. Meanwhile the faintly crack-webbed moon, perceptibly lozenge-shaped, had almost finished a second westward crossing of the Wanderer’s face.

Rama Joan said: “I don’t think it’s natural features at all. I think it’s simply…decor.” She paused. “If beings are able to drive their planet through hyperspace, they’d surely be able to give it an appearance, they considered artistic and distinctive. Cavemen didn’t paint the outside of their homes, but we do.”

“You know, I like that,” Doc said, smacking his lips. “A two-tone planet. Impress the neighbors in the next galaxy.”

Wojtowicz and Harry McHeath laughed uneasily. The Ramrod thought: Unwillingly they grow toward comprehension of Ispan’s glory. Hunter, his voice low but jerky with tension, said: “If you were that advanced, I don’t suppose you’d use natural planets at all. You’d design and build them from scratch. Gosh, this seems crazy!” he finished rapidly.

“Not at all,” Doc assured him. “Be damned efficient to use all of a planet’s volume. You could have storerooms and dormitories and field generators down to the very core. Of course that would require some pretty tremendous beams and bracing—”

“Not if you had antigravity,” said Rama Joan.

“Wow,” Wojtowicz said tonelessly.

“You’re clever, Mommy,” Ann observed sleepily.

Hunter said: “If you cancelled the gravity of a rotating planet, you’d have to have it pretty well tied together, or centrifugal force would tear it apart.”

“Nope,” Doc told him. “Mass and momentum would disappear together.”

Paul cleared his throat. He was sitting beside Margo and he’d taken off his coat and put it around her. He’d meant to put his arm around her too, if only for the practical purpose of getting some of his body-heat back, but somehow he hadn’t yet. He said: “If beings were that advanced, wouldn’t they also be careful not to injure or even disturb any inhabited planets they came near?” He added uncertainly: “I suppose I’m assuming a benign Galactic Federation, or whatever you’d call it…”

“Cosmic Welfare State,” Doc suggested in faintly sardonic tones.

“No, you’re absolutely right, young man,” the fat woman said authoritatively, while the thin woman nodded, her mouth pursed. The first law of the Saucerians is to harm no life, but to nurture and protect all.”

“But is it the first law of General Motors?” Hunter wanted to know. “Or General Mao?”

Rama Joan smiled quizzically and asked Paul: “When you make an automobile trip, what special precautions do you take against running over cats and dogs? Are the anthills all marked in your garden?”

“Still hot on your devil-theory, aren’t you?” Doc observed.

Rama Joan shrugged. “Devils may be nothing but beings intent on their purpose, which now happens to collide with yours.”

“Then evil’s just an auto accident?”

“Perhaps. Remember, there are careless drivers, and even drivers who use a car to express themselves.”

Paul asked: “Even if the car’s a planet?”

Rama Joan nodded.

“Hmm. I just use naked me to express myself,” Doc asserted, chuckling wickedly.

Margo, whose hands were curved around Miaow asleep on her lap, interjected sharply: “When I drive I can see a cat on the sidewalk three blocks ahead. Cats are people. That’s why I could never have gone into Vandenberg, even if they’d been more decent about the rest of it”

“But are people always people?” Hunter asked her with a smile.

“I’m not so sure of that,” she admitted, wrinkling her nose.

The fat woman made a pshaw-sound. Rama Joan said sweetly to Margo: “I hope that when things get…well…rougher, you never regret passing up Vandenberg and throwing in with us. You had your chance, you know.”

Wojtowicz jumped up. “Look at that!” he said.

He was pointing across the sand to where a pair of headlights were bobbing up and down. And now there came plainly to their ears the swelling growl of an engine.

Hunter said: “Paul, looks like Major Humphreys has changed his mind and sent to fetch you.”

Doc said: “It’s coming from the wrong direction.”

Wojtowicz said: “Yeah, it’s from the highway, come around the slide.”

The headlights slewed around, hesitated, then came on bright. Their glare made it hard to see the car, despite the twilight.

Margo said: “They’ll get stuck, whoever they are.”

“Not if they keep up speed they won’t,” said Wojtowicz.

The car came on as if it were going to ram the platform and then careened to a stop fifty feet away and doused its headlights.

“It’s Hixon’s panel truck!” the Little Man said.

“And there’s Mrs. Hixon,” Doc said, as a figure in pak slacks and sweater dropped from the back of the truck and ran toward them.

Wojtowicz, Ross Hunter, and Harry McHeath hurried toward the truck. As Mrs. Hixon passed them, she cried: “Help Bill look after Ray Hanks. Ray’s got a broken leg.” Then she was on the platform.

Earlier in the evening Mrs. Hixon had been a handsome-looking woman, but now her hands, face, slacks, and sweater were smeared with dirt, her hair had come unpinned and hung down in strands, her lips were pulled back from her teeth, and her eyes stared. There was blood on her chin. As soon as she stopped moving she started to shake.

“The highway’s blocked both ways,” she gasped. “We lost the others. I think they’re dead. I think the whole world’s smashed. My God, have you got something to drink?”

Doc said: “You called it,” to Hunter as he pulled out his half pint, poured a double shot in an empty coffee cup, and started to add water. She clutched it before he could and sucked it down greedily, then shuddered over her shaking. Doc put his arms around her shoulders, hard. “Now tell us point by point,” he said, “from the beginning.”

She nodded, closed her eyes a moment. Then: “We dug out three cars. Rivis’, our truck, Wentcher’s microbus. The rest were too deep, but that was enough to hold us easy. Just Bill and Ray and me in the truck. When we got to the highway there was no traffic. That should have warned us, but we thought it was great. Christ! Rivis turned north. We headed for L.A., following the microbus. The car radio got two stations through the static. Just snatches. Nothing but the big L.A. quake — do this, do that, don’t do it. We had to keep swinging around little falls and rocks. Still no cars. The microbus was way ahead. We were where there was no beach, just a drop into the sea.

“The road heaved — just like that, without warning, my God! It rocked the car like a boat. The door jerked open and Ray Hanks pitched out. I hung on to Bill. He was rammed against the back of the car seat, braking. The cliffs came down. A rock big as a room hit ahead of us and cut a slice out of the road ten feet wide. I remember I bit my tongue. Ray got the car stopped. The road stopped heaving, too. Then I was choking on dust, but then through the dust came a big splash of water where the rock hit the sea. I was tasting salt and blood and dust, and I could still feel my brains shaking.

“It got awful quiet. The road ahead was all blocked, dirt piled against the bumper. I don’t know if we could have climbed the fall, but we were going to try, because we didn’t know if the microbus got buried, or got away, or what. Just then an after-slide came. A boulder as big as a lion missed me by that. Another just exploded. Bill made me get back in the car, while he walked through the new falls, telling me how to cut the wheels as I backed it around rocks and over ridges and angles. In between, he was coughing and cursing that new planet.

“Someone was screaming curses too — at us. It was Ray. We’d forgot him. His leg was broken above the knee, but we got him in the back on a canvas. I stayed beside him. Bill could turn the car now, and we headed back.

“The little slides were bigger but we got around them. We wanted to meet cars now, but there still weren’t any. Bill stopped at a roadside phone, but it was dead, and the light in the booth died while he was trying to get a dial tone. The radio was nothing but static now. The only word that ever seemed to get through was fire! Ray and I kept yelling at Bill to go slower and faster.

“We passed the turnoff here, but after a quarter of a mile the road was blocked by another slide — not a soul in sight, not a light — except that godawful thing up there. We came back here. There wasn’t anywhere else.”

She breathed deeply. Doc asked: “What about the little roads back across the Santa Monica mountains? Specifically, what about Monica Mountainway?”

“Little roads?” Mrs. Hixon looked up at him wonderingly, then started to laugh and sob together. “You goddamn fool idiot, those mountains have been stirred like stew!” Her laughter went out of control. Doc clapped his hand over her mouth. She struggled wildly for a moment, then let her head slump. Wanda and the thin woman took over for Doc, walking her away down the platform. Rama Joan followed them, after asking Margo to take her place as a pillow for Ann, who was watchful as a mouse.

Paul said to Doc: “I wonder why there weren’t any other cars trapped in that stretch of the highway? Seems unnatural.”

“They probably got out past the first, smaller slides,” Doc opined. “The same slides would have turned back any cars trying to come into that stretch. And still, despite all she says, I think some may have escaped over Monica Mountainway.”

Hunter called up: “Come on down, the rest of you guys, and bring the cot. We’ve got to get Ray out of the truck, so some of us can go back in it to our cars.”

Trembling and breathless and a little teeter-gaited from their wild run past the mausoleum-like General Grant Houses, Arab and Pepe and High started east along 125th Street with an initial feeling of reassurance at having entered the hallway to their friendly, familiar Afro-Latin home.

But the sidewalks, packed two hours ago, were empty now. Only a scattering of crushed paper cups and bags, empty pop bottles, and half-pint flasks testified to the vanished multitude. No cars moved along the street, though here and there were empty ones parked higgledy-piggledy, two with their motors’ exhaust streaming blue from their tail pipes.

The weed-brothers had to squint against the sun when they scanned east, but as far as they could tell the same desertion prevailed all along the crosstown street that led through the heart of Harlem.

The only sounds, at first, besides their own footsteps and the motor chugging, were the sepulchral mouthings of unseen radios, sounding horribly important, by their tone; but the words were uncatchable by reason of static and distance — and drowned out by the excited, equally unintelligible calling to each other of distant sirens and horns.

“Where’s everybody?” High whispered.

“Atomic attack,” Pepe affirmed. “Russia’s sent the super-doops. Everybody crouchin’ down below in the basements. We gotta get to ours.” Then, a ghost of the wolf-wail returning to his voice: “Fireball risin’ from the river!”

“No!” Arab contradicted, softly. “While we at the river, Resurrection come and go. Old Preacher-dads right after all. Everybody snatched — no time to turn off their cars or their radios. We the only ones left”

They took hold of each other and tiptoed, to kill the sound of their footsteps as they went fearfully on.

Sally Harris and Jake Lesher tiptoed out of the tiny aluminum-lined box that had lifted them the last three stories. Before their eyes was dimness, with gleams highlighting a grand piano. Under their feet was thick carpet, sponge-based.

Sally yoohooed softly. With a whispered sigh the door behind them slid sideways, but Sally caught it and blocked it with a tiny table holding a silver tray.

“What are you trying to do?” Jake asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll hear the buzzer if anybody else wants in. Come on.”

“Wait a minute,” Jake said. “You’re sure Hasseltine’s not home?”

Sally shrugged. “I’ll have a look while you raid the icebox. Just leave the sterling alone. Come on, haven’t you a bagel-size hole in your gut?”

Like a mouse with a friend, she led him to the kitchen.

Dai Davies listened with wicked amusement to the weird reports of the Wanderer coming over the wireless to the tiny Severn-shore pub near Portishead, where he’d gone after a two-hour snooze to do his late morning drinking. From time to time he embroidered the reports fancifully for the edification and jollification of his unappreciative fellow-topers: “Purple and sickly amber, eh? ’Tis a great star-written American advertisement, lads, for grape juice and denatured beer!” and, “It’s a saintly Soviet super-balloon, boys, set to pop over lawless Chicago and strew the Yankee heartland with begemmed copies of Marx’s holy Manifesto!”

The reports were coming over an Atlantic cable, the derisive announcer said — extraordinary severe magnetic storms had disordered the radio sky to the west. Dai greatly wished that Dick Hillary were still with him — this lovely nonsense was just the thing to make that hater of spaceflight and space fiction squirm; besides, he’d be a better audience for a Welsh poet’s rare wit than these Somerset sobersides.

But when, two mighty drinks later, the wireless reports began to include mention of a cracked and captured moon — the announcer growing still more derisive, yet now with a nervous note in his voice, almost hysterical — Dai’s mood changed abruptly, and there was much more drunken emotion than wit in his cry: “Steal our moon-bach, would they, those damned Yanks! Don’t they know Mona belongs to Wales? And they hurt her, we’ll swim across and gut Manhattan Isle from the Battery to Hellgate, will we not, my hearties?”

This met with, “Shut up, you sot, he’s saying more,” “Wild jabbering Welshman,” “Bolshy, I’d think,” “No more for you, you’re drunk” — this last from the host.

“Cowardly Somersets!” Dai retorted loudly, grabbing up a mug and brandishing it like a knuckleduster. “And you follow me not I’ll fight you myself, all up and down the Mendip Hills!”

The diamond-paned door was thrown open and a white-eyed scarecrow figure in dungarees and wide-brimmed rainhat faced them against the light fog outside.

“Is there aught on the wireless or the telly of the tide?” this apparition called to the host. “Two hours yet till low, and the Channel’s ebbing as I’ve never seen it, even at the equinoctial springs with an east gale blowing. Come, look for yourselves. At this progress a man’ll be able to walk on all the Welsh Grounds by noon and an hour after that the Channel’ll be near dry!”

“Good!” Dai cried loudly, letting the host take away the mug and leaning hunch-shouldered on the bar as the others made a tentative move toward the door. “Then I’ll walk the five miles back to Wales straight across the Severn sands and be shut of you lily-livered Somersets. By God, I will!”

“And good riddance,” someone muttered loudly, while a hairsplitting jokester pointed out: “If that’s your aim you must walk east aslant, using the Grounds and Usk Patch for stepping stones if you like — and more than twice five miles. Straight across here, man, it’s Monmouth, not Wales.”

“Monmouth’s still Welsh to me and be damned to the Union of 1535,” Dai retorted, slumping his chin onto the bar. “Oh, go gawk at this watery prodigy, all of you. It’s my guess the Yanks, having broken and chained the moon, are stealing the ocean, too.”

General Spike Stevens snapped: “Get Christmas Relay, Jimmy! Tell ’em their picture’s starting to swim, too.”

The watchers in the underground room were grouped in front of the righthand screen, ignoring the other, which for more than an hour had been nothing but a churning rectangle of visual static.

The picture from the satellite above Christmas Island showed the Wanderer in her target face with Luna swinging behind her, but both planet and moon were bulging and rippling as electronic distortion invaded the screen.

“I’ve been trying, General, but I can’t raise them,” Captain James Kidley responded. “Radio and shortwave are gone. Ultrashort’s going — every kind of communication that isn’t by buried wire or wave guide. And even those—”

“But we’re a headquarters!”

“I’m sorry, General, but—”

“Get me HQ One!”

“General, they don’t—”

There was a strong vibration from the floor and a sharp crackling sound. The lights flickered, went out, came on again. The buried room rocked. Plaster fell. Once more the lights went out — all except the pale glow of the Christmas Island screen.

Abruptly the wavering astronomic picture on the screen was replaced by the silhouette of a large feline head with pricked ears and grinning jaws. It was as if, out on that unmanned satellite 23,000 miles above the Pacific, a black tiger had peered into the telescope. For a moment the picture held. Then it swam, and the screen blacked out.

“My Christ, what was that?” the General yelled in the dark.

“You saw it, too?” Colonel Mabel Wallingford demanded. A laugh, half hysterical, half exultant, rimmed her question.

“Shut up, you stupid bitch!” the General shrilled. “Jimmy?”

“It was a chance distortion.” The younger man’s voice came shakily through the blackness. “Inkblot effect It couldn’t have been—”

“Quiet!” Colonel Willard Griswold yelled at all three of them. “Listen!”

They all heard it: the sound of water gushing and splashing.

Aboard the “Prince Charles” they were especially conscious of the choking radioways.

Both the insurgents now controlling the luxury liner, and also the loyal crew members, using a ham sender, tried unsuccessfully to get off messages of the great coup, the one group to their revolutionary leaders, the other to the British Navy. And Wolf Loner, three thousand miles north, was thinking how good it was to be without newspapers and radio — he rather wished he and his dory weren’t reaching Boston quite so soon.

The Wanderer’s magnetic field, far stronger than Earth’s, sprang out through space as swiftly as its gravitational field, almost instantly affecting instruments sensitive to it But besides this all-pervasive magnetic influence, there were stranger straight-line influences streaming down from the Wanderer and striking the side of the earth facing it. They ripped the van Allen belts and dumped a cloudburst of protons and electrons on Earth.

These powerful straight-line influences were greatly intensified when Luna went into orbit around the Wanderer and began to break up. They produced ionization and other, subtler effects, the chief perceptible result of which was swiftly to unfit Earth’s stratosphere and also her lower atmosphere for any sort of electromagnetic communications.

As the First Night of the Wanderer traveled west around the world, or, rather, as the world spun eastward into it, this poisoning of the radio sky spread to the whole globe, greatly contributing to the fog of catastrophe that was cutting off country from country, city from city, and, ultimately, mind from mind.