The Wanderer (45 page)

"Have you two beings been well treated here and during your contacts with my people? Donald Merriam?"

He stared at her, thinking how much she resembled, except for the coloring of her fur, the felinoid he had seen catch a great topaz bird and drink its blood with the air of a ballerina nibbling at an after-theater snack.

He said: "After I escaped from the moon—wholly by my own efforts as far as I know—I was picked up by two of your ships, escorted to the Wanderer, kept in a comfortable room there for two days, apparently, then brought here. Nobody talked to me much. I think my mind was turned inside out and inspected. In a dreamlike vision I was shown many things. That's about it."

"Thank you. Now you, Paul Hagbolt, have you been well treated?"

"Well…" he began, smiling at her questioningly.

"A simple yes or no will do!" she snapped.

"Then—yes."

"Thank you. Question two: Have you seen evidence of your Earth people being given aid in their tidal troubles?"

Paul said: There were those things you showed me over Los Angeles and San Francisco and Leningrad: fires put out by rain, tides being driven back by some sort of repulsion field."

Don said:
"
I think I saw television pictures of the same sort of thing in one huge room of the Wanderer during my vision or dream."

"It was a true vision," she assured him. "Question—"

"Tigerishka," Paul interrupted, "does all this have something to do with the two star photographs that don't match the Wanderer's false exits from hyperspace? Are you people afraid the pursuit will catch up with you, and are you preparing a defense of your actions here?"

Don looked at him in surprise—Paul had as yet told him nothing of Tigerishka's story—but she said simply, "Stop chattering, monkey—I mean, being. Yes, that is possible. But question three: So far as you know, have your companions suffered by reason of the Wanderer?"

Don said harshly: "My three companions at Moonbase were killed when Luna broke up."

She nodded curtly and said: "One of them may have survived—it's being checked.

Paul Hagbolt?"

He said, "I was just telling Don about that, Tigerishka. Margo and the saucer people were O.K. when I last saw them—I mean at least they were alive, though in the wash of some earthquake waves which you'd done something to make smaller. But that was two days ago."

"They're still alive," Tigerishka asserted. Her violet eyes twinkled and she shaped her lips in a thin, humanoid smile as she added: "I've been keeping an eye on them—you mortals never realize how much the gods worry about you: all you see are the floods and the earthquakes. However I won't ask either of you to accept my word for that, I'll show you! Stand up, please, both of you. I am going to send you down to Earth to see for yourselves."

"You mean in the Baba Yaga?" Don asked as they complied. "As I'm sure you know, it's linked to this saucer now by a space tube and I was given the idea that I—I mean that we now, Paul and myself—would be able to use it to return to Earth. Which the Baba Yaga can manage, I think, if we are released above the atmosphere with no orbital speed to—"

"No, no, no," she interrupted.
"Later
you'll do that—in an hour or two, say, and at your Vandenberg Two space field—which is just five hundred miles below us now, by the way—but
now
I send you there a much quicker way. Face the control panel! Stand close together!"

Don commented with a somewhat grim chuckle, "It's as if you were going to take a snapshot of us."

Tigerishka said, "That's just about what I am going to do."

The sunlight in the saucer began to dim. Miaow, as if scenting excitement, came scampering out of the flowers and rubbed around their ankles. On a sudden impulse Paul scooped up the little cat.

Margo and Hunter had dressed and folded the blankets and started down the hillside arm in arm, at one with each other and the cosmos in the afterglow of their lovemaking, when they heard a voice calling faintly: "Margo! Margo!"

Below them at the foot of the slope lay the camp around the two cars. No one was stirring. The Wanderer-light streaming down from the serpent-egg face showed only wrapped, recumbent figures. The pool of shadow by the truck had grown smaller as the Wanderer mounted the sky, yet it was still there.

But the voice did not seem to come from the camp, but from the air.

They looked toward the sea and it had sunk ten yards or more, leaving a wide band of hillside darkly stained where the high tide had been. What water now lay between them and Vandenberg Two was more like a wide river, with islets showing in it here and there. Their gaze mounted from the point, and against the dark gray sky they saw two faintly luminous figures of men descending the air, erect yet with unmoving feet.

The figures descended at a slant, floating swiftly and weightlessly, and vanished into the hillside midway between them and the camp.

Hunter and Margo held each other tight, their skin chilling and prickling, for both remembered the figure they had seen in the shadow of the truck, and both had the thought that one of the weightless figures was Doc—and the whole sight another, though bolder, ghostly manifestation, or a continuation of the first When nothing more happened they went a few steps farther down the hill, and then Margo looked down and gasped with horror and retreated a sudden two steps as if from a snake, dragging him back with her.

From the ground in front of them rose two heads of men, their figures earth-encumbered to the shoulders. The features of the heads were blurred, though one misty face seemed namelessly familiar to Hunter. Necks and shoulders identified one as a uniformed spaceman, one—the familiar one—as a civilian. The thought flashed through Hunter's mind of how much this was like Ulysses' encounter with the spirits of the dead in the Underworld, these two spirits summoned not by the hot shed blood of the bull, but by the pounding blood of his and Margo's lovemaking.

Then the two figures rose out of the ground, not by their own efforts, for they moved neither hand nor foot, but drawn up by a power outside them until their feet touched the surface of the ground, yet not quite as if they stood but rather floated there, facing Hunter and Margo six feet away. Then what was blurred came into focus and Margo gasped: "Don! Paul!" although she clutched more tightly at Hunter as she did so, and as he, too, recognized the second figure.

The Paul-figure smiled and opened its lips, and a voice which synchronized perfectly with the lip movements yet did not come from the throat said: "Hello, Margo and Professor…Excuse my poor memory. We're not ghosts. This is merely an advanced form of communication."

In similar fashion the Don-figure said: "Paul and I are talking to you from a small saucer out in space, between you and the Wanderer, but nearer the earth. It's wonderful to see you, Margo, dear."

"That's right," Paul chimed in. "I mean about being in the saucer. It's the same one that picked me up. See—" he lifted something in his hands. "Here's Miaow!"

The little cat rested quietly for a moment, then its lips writhed back, there was a synchronized spitting hiss and it vanished into the darkness in a whirl of its own little limbs.

The Paul-figure scowled and momentarily raised a hand to his lips and sucked at it, then explained: "She got excited. It's all a little too weird for her."

Margo let go of Hunter and put his arms away from her and stepped forward, reaching a hand toward Paul but raising the other to Don's cheek and lifting her face to kiss him.

The hand went through the cheek, however, and with a little nervous gasp—not so much of fear as of exasperation at her own nervousness—Margo retreated back to Hunter.

"We're only three-dimensional images," Paul explained with a quirking smile.

"Touch doesn't transmit on this system. We're seeing
your
two images up here in the saucer, except they aren't always together
in
the saucer, especially when they were moving into focus. It's really pretty weird, if you'll excuse my saying so, Professor…"

"My name's Ross Hunter," he said, at last managing to speak.

Don said to Margo: "I'm sorry I'm too insubstantial to kiss, dear. I'll make up for that when I really see you. Incidentally, I've actually been on the Wanderer."

"And I've been talking to one of their beings," Paul put in. "She's quite a person—you'd have to see her. She wants us to—"

Hunter interrupted, "You've been on the Wanderer, you've talked with them—
Who
are they? What are they doing? What do they want?"

Paul said: "We haven't time to try to answer any questions like that. As I was about to say, our…well, captress…wants us to assure ourselves that you survived the tidal waves and that you're all safe. That's half the reason for this…call."

"We're safe," Margo said faintly, "as far as anyone on Earth is."

"Our whole party's survived so far," Beardy amplified, "except for Rudolph Brecht, who was killed in a mountain accident."

"Brecht?" Paul questioned him doubtfully, frowning.

"You remember; we called him Doc," Margo explained.

"Of course," Paul said, "and we called that funny old crackpot the Ramrod and Professor Hunter Beardy. Excuse me. Professor."

"Of course," Hunter said impatiently. "What's the other reason for the call?"

Don said: "To let you know that if everything works out right, we'll be landing at Vandenberg Two in a few hours, probably in my moon ship."

"At least Don will," Paul added. "We have to stay up here in space now. The Wanderer may be in danger, there's an emergency developing."

"The Wanderer,
in danger?" Margo repeated incredulously, almost sardonically.

"Emergency
developing?
What do you call what's been happening the last two days?"

Hunter said to Don: "We're in sight of Vandenberg Two, as you know, and we're planning to go there as soon as we can."

"We're trying to find Morton Opperly,** Margo put in automatically.

Don said to Hunter: "That's good. If you bring them the news about me, it'll be easier for you to get in. Tell Oppie the Wanderer has linear accelerators eight thousand miles long and a cyclotron of that diameter. That should convince him of something! It'll help me if they're informed ahead of time about my intended landing." He looked toward Margo. "Then I'll be able to kiss you properly, dear."

Margo looked back at him and said: "And I'll kiss you, Don. But I want you to know that things have changed. I've changed," and she pressed more closely to Hunter to show what she meant.

Hunter frowned and pressed his lips against his teeth, but then he tightened his arm around her and nodded and said curtly: "That's right."

Before Don could say anything, if he'd been going to, the ground suddenly turned bright red, faded, turned red again. The same thing was happening to the whole landscape: it was lightening redly, then darkening, then reddening again, as if from soundless red lightning flashes coming in a steady rhythm. Hunter and Margo looked up and instantly flinched their eyes away from the blinding red pinpoint flares winking on and off at the north and south poles of the Wanderer, rhythmically reddening its own polar caps as well as the Earth's whole sky. Never in their whole lives had they seen anything like such bright sources of monochromatic light.

"The emergency's arrived," said the Paul-image, the red light striking weirdly through it, making it doubly unreal. "We're going to have to cut this short."

The Don-image said: "The Wanderer is recalling its ships."

Hunter said strongly: "We'll tell them at Vandenberg. We'll see you there. Oppie: eight-thousand-mile linear accelerators and a cyclotron of that diameter. Good luck!"

But in that instant the two images were gone. They didn't fade or drift, just winked out

Hunter and Margo looked down the red-lit hillside. Even the surf was red, the foaming of a lava sea. The camp was astir; there were small figures moving about, clustering, pointing.

But one was nearer. From behind a boulder not twenty feet away the Ramrod stared at them wonderingly, enviously, in his eyes an unappeasable hunger as the red light rhythmically bathed his face.

Fifty million miles starward of Earth, spacemen Tigran Biryuzov could see the Red Recall plainly as he and his five comrades orbited Mars in the three ships of the First Soviet People's Expedition. For Tigran, Earth and the Wanderer were two bright planets about as far apart as adjoining stars in the Pleiades. Even in airless space, their crescent shapes were not quite apparent to the Communist spaceman's unaided eye.

Radio communications from home had stopped with the Wanderer's appearance, and for two days the six men had been in a frenzy of wonder about what was going on in the next orbit sunward. The projected surface landing on Mars, scheduled for ten hours ago, had been postponed.

Their telescopes showed them the astronomic situation clearly enough—the capture and destruction of the moon, the weird surface patterns of the Wanderer—but that was all.

Not only was the Red Recall plainly visible to Tigran, but also its dark red visual echoes from the night side of Earth. He started to note down,
"Krasniya molniya
—" and then broke off to beat his cheeks with his knuckles in a fury of frustrated curiosity and to think,
Red lightning! Mother of Lenin! Blood of Marx! What next? What next?

The saucer students had many questions to ask about the tantalizingly limited conversation with Paul and Don. When Hunter and Margo had finished answering them, the Red Recall had stopped flashing, and the swiftly-sinking tide had uncovered more of the road to Vandenberg, even a stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway.

Hixon summed it up, jerking a thumb at the Wanderer. "So they got saucers, which we knew. And they got energy guns'll shoot rays that can chop up mountains and puncture planets probably. And they got three-D TV a lot better than ours, which makes sense. But they're supposed to be in danger, which doesn't! Why should
they
be in danger?"