The Wanderer (44 page)

Paul Hagbolt woke with a start Tigerishka was snarling at him: "Wake up! Get dressed.

We've got a visitor!"

The start carried him a yard away from the window against which he'd been resting, so for the moment all he could do was grope around impotently in null gravity while he tried to get the sleep out of his eyes and mind.

The inner sun had been switched on again, and the windows were solid pink once more, creating with the flowers the effect of a combination conservatory and boudoir.

Tigerishka was jerking some flappy objects out of a door in the Waste Panel. She proceeded to throw them at him.

"Get dressed, monkey!"

One of them got hooked on her claws and she ripped it loose in a fury and hurled it after the others.

Paul, or rather his body, intercepted the objects without difficulty, since they were well aimed. They were his clothes, nicely laundered and smelling freshly of cotton and other fabrics, though there were no creases in the pants. He fumbled at them, saying in a voice still squeaky with sleep: "But, Tigerishka—"

"I'll help you, you stupid ape!"

She coasted to him quickly and, grabbing the shirt, started to ram his foot into the arm of it.

"What's happened, Tigerishka?" he demanded, not helping her. "After last night—"

"Don't ever mention last night to me, monkey!" she snarled. The shirt ripped, and she tried to shove his foot into the next garment she grabbed, which happened to be his coat.

"But you're acting as if you were angry and ashamed about what happened," he protested, still ignoring her attempts to dress him.

She stopped what she was doing and grabbed him by the shoulders as they floated there and glared her violet-irised eyes into his.

"Ashamed!" she repeated vibrantly. Then, very coldly: "Paul, have you ever masturbated a lower animal?"

He just stared back at her stupidly, feeling his muscles tighten, especially around the neck.

"Don't act so shocked!" she commanded irritably. "It happens all the time on your planet. One way or another, you do it to get seed from bulls and stallions for artificial insemination…and so on!"

He said quietly: "You mean that what happened last night wasn't a real embrace?"

She hissed at that, just like a cat, then said harshly: "A real embrace would have shredded your flimsy anthropoid genitals! I was silly, I was bored, I felt sorry for you.

That was all."

For a moment Paul saw clearly how a superbeast would at its level have neuroses just like those of a talking anthropoid, how it would suffer from attacks of irrealism, do the wrong thing, get bored, fritter away time and feelings. For a moment he realized how lonely and confused he himself would have to be to pretend to love a cat as if it were a girl, to fantasize an erotic passion for Miaow…

But just then Tigerishka slapped him with her pads and snarled: "Don't dream, monkey. Get dressed!"

The fragile bridge of understanding which his intuition had been building crashed, though this was not instantly apparent on the surface, for he continued as quietly as before: "You mean that was the whole experience, that was all that last night meant to you? Just being 'nice' to a pet?"

She said firmly: "Last night my feelings were fully ninety per cent pity for you and boredom with myself."

"And the other ten per cent?** he persisted.

She dropped her great eyes from his. "I don't know, Paul. I just don't know," she said very tautly, grabbing his coat again. Then, "Oh, get dressed yourself," she hissed exasperatedly and pushed off for the control panel. "But be quick about it. Our visitor's almost at the door."

Paul ignored that. A hot maliciousness was flooding up into his cold misery. He slowly pulled his coat sleeve off his foot. He said evenly: "It seems to me that last night began with me treating
you
like a pet, scratching you under the neck and stroking your fur, and you were lapping it up, you were responding just like—"

The pink floor jumped up and bumped him, jarred his spine. She called: "I've switched on earth-normal gravity so you'll be able to get dressed! Oh, if you had any idea of what it means to be cooped up this way with a repulsive bald body and with an utterly inferior mind and to have to wear out one's throat with the nonsense of sound-making…"

Now at last he did begin to attend to his clothes, though without haste, locating his shorts and his pants and laying them out for pulling on. But at the same time his maliciousness was searching for something—anything, it didn't matter what—to hurl back at her. Rather quickly he found it.

"Tigerishka," he said slowly, feeling unaccustomedly heavy but quite comfortable as be sat on the pink velvet floor and pulled on his shorts and reached for his trousers,

"you boast that you never miss a mental trick. Certainly your mind works much faster than mine. Presumably you have eidetic memory for everything that happens around you—including what you spy on in my mind. Yet last night when I mentioned the four crucial stellar photographs I'd seen—photographs of a planet making a false exit from hyperspace, I realize now—you assured me there could have been only two twist-fields involved, the first near Pluto, the second near Venus.

"Well, whatever you think, there
were
two other twist-fields represented, two other false exits." At this point he felt her entering his mind. Nevertheless he went on: "They were the second and fourth in the series, and they involved Jupiter and Luna."

Her answer rather surprised him. She said curtly: "You're right. I'll have to check with the Wanderer at once. It could be…what we're afraid of." She turned sharply to the control panel. She was standing on her hind legs now in the same gravity that gripped Paul. "You, welcome our visitor!"

A port like a manhole opened in the center of the pink floor and, facing away from Paul, a man in the uniform of the U.S. Space Force pushed up through it. He lurched his elbows heavily against the rim as the artificial-gravity field took hold of him, but evidently this didn't startle him particularly, for he quickly boosted the rest of his body into the saucer.

Paul, barely into his shirt, stood up quickly too, getting a glimpse of the interior of a wide, corrugated-looking metal tube as the port closed.

The newcomer, having stared at Tigerishka, looked around.

"Don!"

"Paul!"

"I thought you were lost with the moon. How—"

"And I thought you were—I don't know what. But how—"

They were both clumsily silent, waiting for the other to begin. Then Paul realized that Don was looking him up and down curiously. He hurriedly zipped his pants and buttoned his shirt.

Don looked at Tigerishka, looked at her for quite some time. Then he looked at the flowers and the other furnishings. Then his gaze came back to Paul and he raised his eyebrows and spread his hands helplessly and grinned with the air of one who means, "I don't care if the solar system's falling apart and we're in an impossible gravity field in an impossible flying saucer in the midst of space—
This is as funny as a bedroom farce!"

Paul realized he was blushing. He felt enraged at himself.

Tigerishka looked around at them from the control panel just long enough to say rapidly: "Greetings, Donald Barnard Merriam! Please excuse the monkey, he's ashamed of his nakedness. But I suppose you're ashamed, too. Really, you should both try fur!"

For the saucer students it was a quarter past dinosaur, as Ann would have said, except she was asleep. By that token the Wanderer was about an hour and fifteen minutes higher in the sky than it had been when the Corvette and the truck had first drawn up side by side on the saddle to look at the high tide. Now late supper had been eaten, scrapes and scratches gotten rock-moving had been cleaned and bandaged, and more than half the saucer students were asleep in and around the two vehicles, wrapped, despite the relative mildness of the night, in coats, blankets, and the edges of the big tarpaulin.

Three figures still cozied up around the primus stove where they'd boiled water for coffee: Pop, curled up on his side like a pillbug and fingering his bad teeth through his parchmenty cheeks as solemnly and sourly as if God were a dentist and Pop preparing to sue him for malpractice; the Ramrod, sitting cross-legged in the easiest variant of the lotus position—right ankle atop left knee, right knee atop left ankle—and staring up at the dinosaur rotating east on the Wanderer as if that now rather phallic-looking golden beast were the navel of the cosmos; and the Little Man, squatting on his hams and writing up the events and observations of the day in his notebook by Wanderer-light.

Hunter, holding Margo's hand in his, she walking beside him, stepped up to the Little Man and touched him on the shoulder and said quietly, "Doddsy, Miss Gelhorn and I are going up to the crest across the road. If there's a serious emergency: five horn blasts."

The Little Man looked up and nodded.

From beyond the primus, Pop glanced at the blanket Margo was carrying and then turned his eyes away and blew through his lips a small, ugly, contemptuous sound, half cynicism, half angry disapproval.

The Ramrod withdrew from his contemplation to look down at Pop. "Shut up," he said softly and calmly. Then he looked at Hunter and Margo, and above them at the Wanderer, and a smile came to his fanatical, abstracted face, and while his right forefinger traced tiny Isis-loops on his right knee he said, "Ispan shower blessings on your love."

The Little Man bent his head to his note-jotting. His lips were compressed, as to hide a grin and perhaps suppress a chuckle.

Hunter and Margo crossed the road. Ann and her mother were lying blanket-wrapped just beyond the shadow of the truck and it seemed to Hunter that Rama Joan was smiling at them open-eyed, but as he came closer he saw that her eyes were closed. Just then he became aware, from the corner of his eye, of a tall dark figure standing back in the shadow of the truck. Even its face was dark, shadowed by a black hat with brim turned down.

A shiver mounted Hunter's spine, because he was certain it was Doc. He wanted Doc to speak and show his face, but the figure only raised its hands to its hat and pulled it further down and drew back into the shadow.

At that instant Hunter felt Margo's fingers tighten hard on his, and he looked directly into the shadow of the truck. There was no longer a figure there.

They walked on, saying nothing to each other about it. Wild grass crunched faintly under their feet as they mounted the slope in the gray midnight noon of the Wanderer.

They were strongly aware of the sea invading the hills—the high tide at its stand fifty yards away, its waves creaming the hillside—and of the Wanderer invading the sky, or rather invading Earth's space and bringing its own dark, pearly sky with it, and of strangeness invading the life of all mankind, of all Terra.

They stepped onto a low stone ledge and from that to another, and there before them was a flat-topped rectangular gray rock big as a giant's coffin. Margo spread the blanket on it and they kneeled on it facing each other. They stared at each other intently, unsmilingly, or if their lips smiled at all they smiled cruelly, devouringly. The hushes between the surges of the surf were filled with the rhythmic poundings of their blood, louder than the steady sigh-crash of the sea itself. The hills seemed to echo those poundings and almost to move yielding with them, and the sky to resound. Margo zipped down her jacket, laying the momentum pistol beside it, and lifted her hands to her throat and began to unbutton her blouse, but Hunter took that work away from her, and she ran the fingers of her right hand up into his beard and made a fist of it, trapping the wiry hairs, and dug her knuckles into his chin. Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried. The sea and the rocks and the hills and the sky and the cool enfolding air and the wide rich planet overhead all came alive in their ways, becoming fixtures of the room that is the mind, or—truer—the mind reaching out to embrace them. The more Hunter and Margo became aware of each other's bodies and each other, the more, not the less, intensely they became aware of everything around them, the largest and the least, even the tiny violet dash, scarcely an eighth of an inch long, in the scale on the grip of the momentum pistol—and aware of things unseen as well as things seen, the dead as well as the living. Their bodies and the heavens were one, the engorged sun wooed the dark moon-crescent and was at last received by it. The driving, punishing surf was in them, and the sea with all its swell and storm and certainty of calm. Time stretched out, passing with silent tread, for once not humming a death-spell but seamlessly joining death with life. Overhead the golden lingam beast swinging east through the dark purple became the back of the golden serpent coiled round the broken egg in the next hour-face of the Wanderer—the female serpent contending with and constricting about and finally crushing the male seed-bringer—while around about the great intruding planet the moon-fragments glittered and danced like the million sperm dance supplicatingly, vyingly, fiercely, about the ovum.

Don Merriam had given Paul Hagbolt a brief account of his experiences in space and aboard the Wanderer. It seemed to confirm the background of much that Tigerishka had told Paul and it revived in him something of the mood that she had induced in him by her story, though he was still shaken and hurt by the subsequent change in her feelings.

Now he was telling Don what had happened to him and Margo on the night of the Wanderer's appearance—at the flying saucer symposium and by the gate of Vandenberg and in the earthquake waves—when Tigerishka interrupted sharply.

"Stop chattering, please! I have some questions for you."

She was standing at the pinkly embowered control panel—had presumably been in silent contact with her superiors. Paul and Don were sitting on the pink floor, across which Miaow made periodic scampering sorties from the flower banks—evidently much intrigued or at least stimulated by the simulated terrestrial gravity.