The Wanderer (37 page)

It was perhaps this sharper fear that launched his winging vision on its second exploration of the Wanderer. He no longer stuck to corridors, but flashed without flinching through wall after wall, aware of the thickest of them only as a fleeting blink in his seeing as he sped through room after room. And now when he paused, it was always near living beings. These living beings were not of one sort, but many.

Although felinoids or cat-people like his conductor formed a large minority of the Wanderer's crew, especially near the planet's surface, there were beings that seemed an end product of almost every line of terrestrial evolution, and unearthly lines, too: great-headed horses with organs of manipulation nesting in their hooves; giant, tranquil-eyed spiders pulsing at their joints with a strongly pumped arterial blood-flow; serpents with large and small grasping tentacles; glintingly scaled and gorgeously crested humanoid lizards; beings shaped and moving like thick wheels with a counter-rotating central brain and sensorium; land-dwelling squid that stood proudly on three or six tentacles; and beings seemingly inspired by such creatures of myth as the basilisk and the harpy. These last Don found deep in the planet, winging about in a room like a gigantic aviary. This room, so big that it occupied many floors—an interior world—was grown over with slim, multibranching trees with tiny leaves, and lighted by a dozen great floating lamps like suns.

Some of the turquoise lakes he had glimpsed from the Baba Yaga were as deep as they were wide, and in them dwelt great-eyed and presumably vast-brained whales with arms like cables fingered at the ends with filaments. And beside the whales swam other seemingly intelligent, mobile-visaged sea beings.

Don wanted to stop and study all of these beings, observe their actions in detail, but always the urge to see some yet more mysterious or wonderful life form was greater, with the result that his pauses were hardly longer than when he had been hurtling along the empty avenues. In no case did the beings he observed appear to be aware of his presence.

None of the life forms seemed to keep racial privacy: there had been a few cat-people engaged in apparently amicable converse with the smaller harpies in their aviary-world, and there had been giant spiders arm-oaring in translucent diving suits through one of the deep lakes of the whales.

It began to seem incredible to him that the variety and numbers of the beings he was spying on could be held by an Earth-size planet, but then it occurred to him that with her decks the Wanderer had about 15,000 times the surface area of Earth.

Despite their numbers and variety, most of the beings he watched so briefly appeared to be urgently busy. Even the motionless ones seemed to be rapt in work—crucial cogitations. There was an omnipresent sense of crisis.

Occasionally, as if by a failure of flight pattern, or perhaps for relief, Don would pause in a room without living occupants: great tanks filling up with moon rock; halls of silent glowing machinery and pipes coursing with fluids of many colors; rooms of strange vegetation sunlit by lamps—only these might be intelligent plants; rooms of smoothly geometric structures that seemed on the verge of life, like those on the Wanderer's surface; spherical rooms filled with pure, raw, fiery sun-stuff, although it neither burned nor blinded him.

Occasionally he saw physical work being done by artificial-seeming protoplasmic beings like giant amoebas whose manipulatory columns and sense organs varied with the task being performed. Elsewhere there labored metal robots counterfeiting spiders, wheel-beings, and many other life forms—though some of these robots seemed truly alive, as did certain large structures like gigantic electronic brains. Their transparent walls showed dark jellies glinting with tangled silvery lines finer than hairs, as if they grew nerves and thought-cells as needed.

The greater the variety of intelligent life Don saw, the more he became sensitive to its presence. Now, when he paused in the star-specked central globe, it seemed to swim with faint violet mist-beings of everchanging shape and multi-armed: cold creatures of the darkness beyond the stars. And once when he soared briefly to the upper deck, he glimpsed one of the great colored abstract forms split like an egg and spill out a horde of beings.

Yet the more sensitive he became to the presence of intelligent life, the more he was racked by the conviction that there were all around him invisible forms of it beyond his sensing—as if the Wanderer had more ghosts aboard than all her crew members.

He paused in a profoundly still room of many balconies and almost an infinitude of cases of tiny drawers, like the card catalogue room of a library. Filament-like tracks led from the drawers to viewing instruments suggesting great microscopes, and it seemed to Don that there was travel along the multiplicity of cobwebs, and he had the thought that here servile microbes and viruses were sorting and ordering for inspection molecules on which were etched the total knowledge of races and the histories of worlds. All Earth's thought and culture, he told himself, would easily fit into just one of the tiny drawers. It was almost as if he brushed here the universal, all-encompassing viewpoint of eternity which is sometimes called God.

From that room he flashed into a busier one crowded with command tables, maps, charts, screens and tanks for three-dimensional viewing. On and in the latter were everchanging scenes of catastrophe: landscapes and cities riven by earthquake, seared by fire, inundated by great waves and silent rises of water. He peered excitedly for a while, then it came to him with horror that this was his own planet Earth suffering tidal mutilation in the grip of the Wanderer's mass—the Wanderer, which could turn gravity on and off as suited its purposes.

He wanted to stay and watch, or thought he did, but instead he was irresistibly hurried off through several walls into a chamber that was one great dark viewing tank with alien faces all around it, some with two eyes, some with three and some with eight.

In the tank hung models of Earth and the Wanderer and a looping, swelling quarter-ring that was the remnants of Luna. Here and there, mostly clustering close to the two planets, were points of violet and yellow light which he guessed were spaceships.

The larger globes were the right distance apart—some thirty times their diameter—and Don could not tell whether they were replicas or three-dimensional projections. The illusion was so good that he felt he was drifting in space, with the weird alien faces replacing the constellations.

Then without warning other planets, green, gray, gold, some as strangely figured as the Wanderer, began to appear by ones and twos. Bright bolts of light that traveled with a curious slowness shot between them—radiation moving 186,000 miles a second, but slowed down to scale. There were miniscule explosions. Light-point spaceships moved in warring fleets. Then all the planets but Earth began to move about swiftly as if maneuvering in a battle.

But he never saw the outcome of the engagement, for the forces moving him through, the Wanderer began to work on him with greater urgency, as if he were nearing the end of his trip. For the first time he felt a pang of weariness.

The next three rooms he was hurried through were all viewing tanks with backgrounds velvet black except for the alien faces of the viewers. The first showed a swirled lens of bright points and clusters of light—a galaxy, certainly, probably the Milky Way.

The second room held a great swarm of tiny, soft, spherical and disk-shaped puffs of light spaced rather more than their own diameters apart There was something strange about the space in this tank—it seemed to curve back upon itself mysteriously, so that as he moved about everything changed more than it ought. Just before he was whirled on, Don guessed he was seeing the entire cosmos of star-islands: the totality, the universe.

His imagination began to wander sleepily, independently of his viewing. Phrases drifted through his mind:
This artificial planet…the umbilicus of the cosmos…the central
brain…the eternal eye…the book of the past…the womb and zygote of the future…transcendent as
God, yet not God…

He returned to himself, or to his winging viewpoint, with a start, to realize that he was gazing into a great black viewing tank in which the cosmos he had just seen—it was recognizable by its mysteriously twisted shape—was only one small, pale puff of light floating alone. Then ghostlier light-puffs of other shapes and hues began to appear and vanish, some swiftly as a firefly's flash, some lingering a while. Don wondered dreamily if these were other universes known to the beings of the Wanderer. Or perhaps only universes guessed at…sought…there was something hypothetical about their ghostliness and their swift vanishing…and stars and galaxies and universes are truly such unreal things, no more than the dim points of light that swim before one's eyes before one sleeps…

Then the one bright cosmos began to dip and dart about like a leaf in a whirlwind, and he worried dreamily why that should be, since surely the universe is firm-based…and then the ghost cosmoses began to swirl too, hypothetically…

The last room Don traversed shocked him briefly awake as no other sight might have, and there seemed to be a moral to it, though his weary mind was unable to put it into words. It was a huge, worldlike room, similar to that of the harpies, with a furnace-red sky arching above a veldt dotted with rocks and tree clumps. Small hoofed animals more delicate than deer and armed with a single slim horn grazed fastidiously.

Birds with ruby and topaz and emerald plumage and with elaborate combs and wattles flew low, frequently settling into the tall grass and the tree clumps as if in search of seeds and fruit.

Suddenly three birds whirred up at once from the grass, and the nearest group of unicorns held tremblingly still, sniffing the air and peering about fearfully, then took off with great bounds. Simultaneously there sprang from behind a rock a gray-barred tan felinoid otherwise resembling Don's conductor. He raced after the unicorns, his long legs flashing, hurled himself on the last, brought it crashing down from mid-bound, grasped it by chest and chin, and dipped his jaws toward its throat.

A topaz bird winged past the nearest tree-clump and from it there sprang a green-furred felinoid, female by her smaller size and slightly different contours. She leaped with the soaring grace and almost incredible elevation of a ballet dancer executing a
grand jeté.
Her long arm flashed and barely brushed the bird, but three long talons deeply pricked its breast. Grasping it by the comb with her other hand, she carried it to her lips and bit expertly into its ruffling neck.

There was a redness on her dull olive lips and on the one long white fang showing as she looked across the yellow feathers straight at Don with her large and flowerlike, jade-irised eyes. It may have been coincidence, but he felt that she saw him. And as she sucked the blood, with the blood-red sky behind her, she smiled.

Then a swooning tiredness came, and things grew dim and neutral-hued, and Don realized he was floating once more in his tiny cabin. He tried to look down at the bed, but was again unable to. The next instant he was lying on it. He felt its soothing touch from toe to head as all vision faded and his sense of rocketing, swooping movement gyrated down to darkness and to rest.

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.