The Wanderer (22 page)

The two violet-and-yellow, bulge-centered saucers still hung enigmatically a dozen feet above the pavement, just as when he'd last turned his back on them, and the Baba Yaga stood midway between them, exactly as he'd left it. This was what had happened so far: when the voice had called to him in its faintly slurred, oddly thrilling English, he had unsuited obediently, almost eagerly, and quickly climbed down out of the Baba Yaga, but there had been no one there. After waiting for minutes at the foot of the ladder, he had walked over to the pit and been enthralled.

Now he began to wonder if the voice mightn't have been pure illusion. It was unreasonable to think of an alien being able to speak English without any preliminary parleying. Or was it?
Their
powers…

He took a deep breath. At least the air seemed real enough.

The silence was profound, except that when he held still and relaxed and closed his eyes and let out his breath softly, he thought he could hear the faintest, muted, deep-throated rumbling. The blood of this strange planet, coursing? Or only his own blood? Or the rumbling might come from the pillar of moon rock hurtling into the other pit, no farther beyond the Baba Yaga and the invisibly suspended saucers than he was standing in front of them.

The gray pillar, occupying a full third of his horizon but tapering swiftly almost to a point at the top of the sky, looked at first glance like a solid mountain, except that he knew it was plunging steadily downward at a speed great enough to make its component particles and fragments individually invisible—presumably the same ten miles a second at which he'd judged it to be moving above the sky-film that roofed the atmosphere.

As he watched the pillar, he began to see slow changes in its contours—bulgings and channelings that formed slowly and held their shape for many seconds and then shifted into other smooth forms. It reminded him of the grotesque bulgings and groovings that a stream from a faucet will hold—sometimes so persistently that the shape seems to be one of solid crystal rather than rushing water.

But how could the thing be moving at such a supersonic velocity—two seconds from the sky to the floor!—through the palpable air—the air he knew had to be there because he was breathing it—without creating a fierce and tumultuous dust storm of eddies in that air, without a roar like that of a dozen first-stage rockets or a score of Niagaras?

They
must, somehow, perhaps using an unheard-of field, have created a wall-less vacuum channel, just as surely as they must have created—now he came to think of it—similar wall-less tubular vacua for the Baba Yaga and its escorts to travel through after they burst the sky-film…and, even before that, through the thin plasma and micro-meteorites of space.

He continued to stare up the weirdly foreshortened gray pillar. How long could this monstrous transfer go on? How long would the moon last, even as an ellipsoid of pale gravel spreading into a ring, at this rate of depletion? How long would there be any moon-stuff left outside the Wanderer?

From the sector of his brain schooled in engineering and solid geometry sprang almost at once the first-approximation answer, that it would take eight thousand days for one such rock stream, moving ten miles a second, to transport the moon's entire substance. He had seen only a dozen of the rock streams.

But
they
might speed up the streams, and there might be another set at the Wanderer's south pole, and others being brought into existence. Looking aside from the pillar, he now did see three more in the distance: they looked like great gray waterspouts twisting up toward the sky.

The sky was now all dark blues and greens and browns, slowly swirling in a great edge-blended river, austere and menacing. He looked down toward the paler structures ringing the empty silver pavement except where the pits were; he let his gaze travel around the pillar-broken circle of those smoothly monstrous, multiform, pastel-shaded solidities, and it seemed to him that some of the more distant ones had changed position and shape—
and in some cases crept closer—
since he'd last studied them.

The idea of great buildings—or whatever they were—moving about when there were no other signs of life disturbed him greatly and he turned back to the silver-railed pit behind him to scan its topmost levels, almost desperately, for indications of some smaller-scale activity. He tried to look at the top floors immediately below him, or close to either side, but the silver lip on which he was standing overlapped the pit itself for several yards like a roof and cut off his view. So he peered across at the topmost windows and balconies, and after a while he began to think he could see small figures moving in them, but at a mile or even a half mile it wasn't easy to be sure of that, and anyway his eyes were beginning to swim and prickle. He was wondering whether he dared return to the cabin for the binoculars—when a voice, sweet-toned yet commanding, spoke from behind him. "Come!"

Don turned around very slowly. Standing a little taller than himself, not twenty feet away, with the erect grace and pride of a matador, was a lean, silky, red-splotched black biped of shape midway between feline and anthropoid. It looked like a high-foreheaded cheetah a little bigger than a mountain lion and standing as a man stands, or like a slim, black-furred, red-pied tiger wearing a black turban and a narrow red mask—the turban being the unfeline frontal and temporal bulge. Its tail rose like a red spear behind its back. Its ears were pointed. Its serene eyes were large, with something flowerlike about the pupils.

Hardly shifting its close-set, narrow feet, yet with movements like those of a dancer, it extended a four-fingered arm in a gesture of invitation, and opened the thin lips in the black lower mask, showing the needle-tips of white fangs, and softly repeated: "Come."

Slowly, as if in a dream, Don moved toward the being. When he had come close, it nodded, and then the section of pavement on which they were both standing—a circular silver section about eight feet across—began very slowly to sink into the body of the Wanderer. The being moved its extended arm until it rested lightly across Don's shoulders. Don thought of Faust and Mephistopheles descending to Hell. Faust had wanted all knowledge. With his magic mirrors Mephistopheles had given Faust a glimpse of everything. But what magic device can give understanding?

They had sunk barely knee-deep in the pavement when there was a flash in the sky.

Suddenly beyond the Baba Yaga there hung a third saucer, and a ship so like the Baba Yaga that Don's throat tightened, and he thought of Dufresne. But then he saw the small differences in structure and the red Soviet star on it

His view of it was cut off by the silver curve of the pavement as the platform continued to descend.

While a very few human beings made thrilling and terrifying direct contact with the Wanderer and its denizens, and while a number more studied it with the magnifying and mensurating eyes of science, most of mankind knew the newcomer planet only by its naked-eye visage and by the destruction it did. The first installment of destruction was volcanic and diastrophic. The tides, or tidal strains, set up in Earth's solid crust delivered their effects more swiftly than those in the ocean layer.

Within six hours after the Wanderer's appearance, there had been major activity all along the great earthquake belts circumscribing the Pacific Ocean and stretching along the northern shore of the Mediterranean into the heart of Asia. Land was riven; cities were shaken and shattered. Volcanoes glowed, spouted, and gushed redly. A few exploded. Shocks originated as far apart as Alaska and the Antarctic, many of them occurring undersea. Great tsunami ranged across the oceans, monstrous long swells turning to giant, watery fists on reaching the shallows. Hundreds of thousands died.

Nevertheless there were many areas, even near the sea, where all this wrecking and reaving was only a rumor or a newspaper headline, or perhaps a voice on the radio during those hours of grace before the Wanderer peered over the horizon and poisoned the radio sky.

Richard Hillary had dozed through much of Berks, with no memory of Reading at all, and was only now beginning slowly to wake as the bus first crossed the Thames a little beyond Maidenhead. He told himself it wasn't so much last night's walking that had tired him—he was a great walker—as Dai Davies' literary ranting.

Now it was about noon, and the bus was approaching the tideway of the Thames and the dark, smoky loom of London. Richard drew up the shade at last and began a melancholy but not unpleasant rumination about the curses of industrialism, overpopulation, and overconstruction.

"You've been missing it, mate," said a short man in a bowler hat, who had taken the seat beside him.

On Richard's polite though tepid inquiry, he gladly summarized. During the last quarter of a day there had been a considerable number of earthquakes throughout the world—apparently a seismologist had counted squiggles on a drum and decreed:

"Utterly unprecedented!"—and as a result earthquake waves were a possibility even along British shores: small craft warnings had been posted and a few low coastal areas were being evacuated. Several scientists, presumably sensation-mongering, had issued statements about "giant tides" in prospect, but such exaggerations had been sternly repudiated by responsible authorities. People with proofreader minds joyously pointed out that to confuse tsunami with tides was an ancient popular error.

At least the earthquake hullabaloo had knocked the giant American saucer out of the news. Though, to balance that gain, Russia was making bomb-rattling protestations about a mysterious assault, successfully beaten off, on her precious lunar base.

Not for the first time, Richard reflected that this age's vaunted "communications industry" had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.

He did not inform his seatmate of this insight, but instead turned to the window as the bus slowed for Brentford, surveying that town with his novelist's eyes, and was rewarded almost at once by a human phenomenon describable as "a scurry of plumbers": he counted three small cars with the insignia of that trade and five men with toolbags or big wrenches, hurrying places. He smiled, thinking how overbuilding invariably brings its digestive troubles.

The bus stopped, not far from the market and the confluence of the canalized Brent with the Thames. Two women climbed in, the one saying loudly to the other: "Yes, I just rang up Mother at Kew and she's dreadfully upset She says the lawn is afloat."

It happened quite suddenly then: an up-pooling of brown water from the drains in the street, and a runneling of equally dirty water from the entries of several buildings.

The event struck Richard with peculiar horror because, at a level almost below conscious thought, he saw it as sick, overfed houses discharging, quite independently of the human beings involved with them, the product of their sickness. Architectural diarrhea. He wasn't thinking at all of how the first sign of a flood is often the backing up of the sewers.

And then there was a scamper of people, and at their heels a curb-to-curb rush of cleaner water, perhaps six inches deep, down the street, washing away the dirty.

It pretty well had to be coming from the Thames. The tidy Thames, Spenser's

"Sweete Themmes."

The second and larger installment of destruction was delivered by the Wanderer through the seas covering almost three-quarters of Earth's surface. This watery film may be cosmically trivial, but it has always been a sort of infinity, of distance and of depth and of power, to the dwellers of Earth. And it has always had its gods: Dagon, Nun, Nodens, Ran, Rigi, Neptune, Poseidon. And the music of the seas is the tides.

The harp of the seas, which Diana the moon goddess strums with rapt solemnity, is strung with bands of salt water miles thick, hundreds of miles wide, thousands of miles long.

Across the great reaches of the Pacific and Indian Oceans stretch the bass strings: from the Philippines to Chile, from Alaska to Colombia, Antarctica to California, Arabia to Australia, Basutoland to Tasmania. Here the deeper notes are sounded, some vibrations lasting a full day.

The Atlantic provides the middle voice,
cantabile.
Here the tempo is quicker and more regular, and the half-day the measure: the familiar, semidaily tides of Western history. Major vibrating bands link Newfoundland to Brazil, Greenland to Spain, South Africa to the Antarctic.

Where the strings cross they may damp each other out, as at the tidal nodes near Norway and the Windward Islands and at Tahiti, where the sun alone controls the little tides—far-distant Apollo plucking feebler than Diana, forever bringing highs at noon and midnight, lows at sunset and dawn.

The treble of the ocean harp is provided by tidal echoes and re-echoes in bays, estuaries, straits, and seas half landlocked. These shortest strings are often loudest and fiercest, as a violin will dominate a bass viol: the high-mounting tides of Fundy and the Severn Estuary, of Northern France and the Strait of Magellan, of the Arabian and Irish Seas.

Touched by the soft fingers of the moon, the water bands vibrate gently—a foot or two up and down, five feet, ten, rarely twenty, most rarely more.

But now the harp of the seas had been torn from Diana's and Apollo's hands and was being twanged by fingers eighty times stronger. During the first day after the Wanderer's appearance the tides rose and fell five to fifteen times higher and lower than normally and, during the second day, ten to twenty-five, the water's response swiftly building to the Wanderer's wild harping. Tides of six feet became sixty; tides of thirty, three hundred—and more.

The giant tides generally followed the old patterns—a different harpist, but the same harp. Tahiti was only one of the many areas on Earth—not all of them far inland—unruffled by the presence of the Wanderer, hardly aware of it except as a showy astronomic spectacle.

The coasts contain the seas with walls which the tides themselves help bite out. In few places are the seas faced with long sweeps of flat land where the tide each day can take miles-long strides landward and back: the Netherlands and Northern Germany, a few other beaches and salt marshes, Northwest Africa.