The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber Read Free Book Online Page A

globe of Earth and the dark moon and the glittering stars.
    Someone addressed a question to Rama Joan. She smiled with her teeth at Beardy and then looked down at her audience, her gaze moving to each member in turn. The bulging green turban hid her hair, though she had the same pale complexion as Ann, and it emphasized the tapering of her thin face. She looked like a half-starved child herself.
    Still without speaking, she gazed across the heavens and above her shoulder at the dark moon, then back at her audience.
    Then she said very quietly, yet harshly: "What do any of us really know about what is out there? Far less than a man imprisoned from birth in a cell under the city would know of the millions in Calcutta or Hong Kong or Moscow or New York. I know some of you think advanced races will love and cherish us, but I judge the attitude of more advanced races toward man on the basis of man's attitude toward the ant. On that basis I can tell you this much: there are devils out there. Devils."
    There was a low, grinding sound like steel clockwork being wound. Miaow stiffened in Margo's arms, and the short hairs rose along her spine. Ragnarok had growled.
    Rama Joan continued: "Among the stars, out there, there may be Hindus who won't kill a cow and even Jains who whisk off whatever they sit on for fear of crushing an ant and who wear gauze over their lips to keep from swallowing a gnat, but those will be at most the rare exceptions. The rest will not strain at gnats. To us, they will be devils."
    Weirdness engulfed Paul. Everything around him seemed much too real, yet on the verge of dissolution—frozen, phantasmal. He looked toward the stars and the moon for support, telling himself that the heavens were the one thing that hadn't changed through all history, but then a demon voice deep in his mind said: "But what if the stars should move? They moved, in the photographs."
     
    Sally Harris led Jake Lesher across the worn wood platform to the fifth and last car of the Rocket train. The only other passengers this trip were a rather timid-looking Puerto Rican couple, sitting in the first car and already gripping the safety bar with all four hands.
    "My God, Sal, the waits I put up with," Jake said. "And the sidetracks I go down—I mean up!—to humor you. Hasseltine's penthouse—"
    "Shh, this ain't no sidetrack, lover boy," she whispered as the launcher hurried past, making the last quick check. "Now listen hard: as soon as we start to climb, slide forward about a foot and grab onto the back of the seat for all you're worth with your left hand, because with your other arm you're going to be holding me."
    "But that's the arm away from you, Sal."
    "Now it is," she told him and touched him intimately.
    He goggled at her, then smirked incredulously.
    "Just you follow directions," she told him. With a creak and a clicking the train started its steep climb. A dozen yards from the top, she stood up lightly, swung her leg in a gleaming arc and straddled his waist. One hand gripped his neck, the other swiftly fitted things.
    "Jesus, Sal," he gasped, "I bet we make the earth move like in For Whom the Bell."
    "Earth, hell!" she told him, grinning bare-fanged down at him like a Valkyrie, as the train poised for its swoop and the tow let go. "I'll make the stars move!"
     
    Rama Joan said: "Oh, the star people would be awesomely beautiful to us, I imagine, and as endlessly fascinating as a hunter is to a wild animal that hasn't yet been shot at.
    I'm dreadfully interested in speculating about them myself—but to us they would still be as cruel and distant as ninety-nine per cent of our own gods. And what are man's gods except his imaginings of a more advanced race? Take the testimony of ten thousand years, if you won't take mine, and you will realize that out there…up there…there are devils."
    Ragnarok growled again. Miaow flattened herself against Margo's shoulder, digging in with her claws.
    The Little Man said: "End of