The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber Read Free Book Online

fruit picker this side of Mars," he told himself judicially. "And even at that I'm finishing this job too fast to suit Union Czar Gompert, the Slow-Down King."
    He looked back up at the black earth inside the bronze ring. "Ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent of them," he told himself, "would agree I'm featherbedding. They think all space exploration is the biggest featherbed since the Pyramids. Or the railroads, anyhow. Air-clams! Troposphere-barnacles!" He grinned. "They've heard about space but they still don't believe in it. They haven't been out here to see for themselves that there isn't any giant elephant under the earth, holding it up, and a giant tortoise holding up the elephant. If I say 'planet' and 'spaceship' to them, they still think "horoscope' and
    'flying saucer'."
    As he turned toward the next cannister-bearing reed, his boot scuffed the crystal film, and a faint creaky whir traveled up the leg of his suit. It was an echo, from across the years, of his galoshes singing against the crusty Minnesota snow on a zero day.
     
    Barbara Katz said, "Hey, check me, Mr. Kettering—I see a white light flashing near Copernicus."
    Knolls Kettering III, creaking a bit at the joints, took her place at the eyepiece.
    "You're right, Miss Katz," he said. 'The Soviets must be testing signal flares, I imagine."
    "Thanks," she said. "I never trust myself on moon-stuff—I keep seeing the lights of Luna City and Leyport and all the other science-fiction places."
    "Confidentially, Miss Katz, so do I! Now there's a red flare."
    "Oh, could I see it?—But I hate making you get up and down. I could sit on your lap, if you wouldn't mind—and if the stool would stand it."
    Knolls Kettering III chuckled regretfully. "I wouldn't mind, and the stool might stand it, but I'm afraid the bone-plastic splice in my hip mightn't."
    "Oh, gee, I'm sorry."
    "Forget it, Miss Katz—we're fellow lensmen. And don't feel sorry for me."
    "I won't," she assured him. "Why, I think it's romantic being patched up that way, just like the old soldiers that run the space academies in the Heinlein and E. E. Smith stories."
     
    Don Guillermo Walker finally had to admit to himself that the black glisten ahead was water—and the little lake, rather than the big one, for there at last were the lights of Managua twinkling no more than ten miles away. A new worry struck him: that he had cut his timing too fine. What if the moon came out of eclipse right now, pinpointing him for el presidente's jets and AA guns, like a premature spotlight catching a stagehand in overalls making a dark-stage scenery change? He wished he were back doing second-rate summer stock near Chicago, or haranguing a "guns-south" Birch splinter group; or ten years old and putting on a backyard circus in Milwaukee, defying death by sliding down a slanting rusty wire from a height of nineteen feet.
    That second memory gave him courage. Dead for a backyard circus…dead for a greaser city bombed! He revved the motor to its top speed, and the prop behind him drummed the lukewarm air a shade less feebly. "Guil- ler -mo ge- ron -imo!" Don Guillermo yelled. "La Loma, here I come!"

Chapter Seven
    Paul Hagbolt was paying only half attention to the speakers on the platform. The coincidence of the star photos and Doc's notion about planets traveling through hyperspace had distracted him and set his imagination drifting. As if a big clock, that only he could hear, had just now begun to tick (once a second, not five times like wrist watches and many spring clocks), he found himself becoming acutely aware of time and of everything around him—the huddled group of people, the level sand, the faint rattle of the toppling wavelets just beyond the speakers, the old, boarded-up beach houses, the hooded and red-blinking installations of Vandenberg Two thrusting up behind him, the dirt cliffs beyond the sea-grass, above all the mild night pressing in from the ends of space and making tiny everything but the